iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I think it's 2 million YOY and that chart is total for all previous years and only year to date for 2026

Isn’t that the implication of what I am saying? When the threshold of what’s good enough in any one field gets lower, it’s far easier to be good enough in multiple fields and the person who can replace both sides of a multidisciplinary team becomes very valuable

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 29/09/2026

To me, the argument is less about speed than cumulative impact in a shift from labor towards capital. There is a tipping point where too many labor saving innovations compound. The industrial revolution to build factories has to precede the fully automated factory that requires no workers

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 27/09/2026

What a win for the Badgers. I had complete faith and never said anything negative during that game about Luke Fickell and Colton Joseph

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 25/09/2026

The bringing iced coffee to a job interview discourse is just coaches not recruiting players who wear tights under their shorts at cold weather recruiting events for the masses

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 24/09/2026

The number of people who are pure software specialist and make good money is going to decrease, but the number of people who are good enough at software and have domain expertise in something outside of software is going to increase dramatically

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 24/09/2026

Wouldn’t it just save everyone a bunch of money, time and effort to at least try to set up business agent to agent text communications rather than having them use actual telephones? Like what are we doing here?

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 24/09/2026

The feeling from a niche post that gets likes from like 3 of the 8 people who will really appreciate it, but only those 3 likes is so much better than a viral one that gets thousands

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 23/09/2026

Were we supposed to wait until middle age to do this?

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 19/09/2026

Figure out a way for members of Congress to be the ones to pass out the entries into the random lottery to their constituents who are visiting DC (but not actually directly pick the people) and maybe they would pass a requirement to do so into law

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 17/09/2026

And also, there is an extremely strong argument that your choices for this House seat were Marcy Kaptur or a Republican

Kaptur won the 2024 election 48.3% to 47.6% with a margin of less than 2,500 votes

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 17/09/2026

And more importantly one of if not the last remaining Catholic pro-life Dem in Congress

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 16/09/2026

Fortunately, my brain is irreversibly hardwired to think about this guy anytime anyone mentions Sankey diagrams

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 15/09/2026

What do you think is the largest policy concession Congressional Democrats could get from Trump in exchange for agreeing to rename the Kennedy Center after him?

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 05/09/2026

Just found this, but I have used this example so many times. You are spot on. Will dig into this later

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 01/09/2026

Oh that's not bad. Basically build the atproto GoDaddy?

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 31/08/2026

All for it, but what is the business model that makes it financially viable?

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 31/08/2026

It feels like everyone wants this to be a technical problem because the actual hosting of a PDS isn’t that difficult. I am with you that the core problem (and thus thing worth paying for someone else to solve) is actually assuming the legal liability

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 31/08/2026

The varied interpretations of what it means to appropriately host a PDS seem like the core of so many of the difference perspectives on this

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 28/08/2026

Also for those not up to speed on the lingo www.hillbillyslang.com/definitions/...

"Revenuer" is a Southern and Appalachian term for a federal revenue officer who hunted illegal liquor operations - the moonshine-still agent of folklore and Prohibition stories.

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 28/08/2026

I think the details are intentionally left unspecified to not rule out possibilities like that. But I don’t think anyone was offering any samples of moonshine to the revenuers that went looking for stills

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 28/08/2026

The SEC is the only college conference with a school that has a fight song with a second verse about killing federal agents (“Strangers ain't come down from Rocky Top, Reckon they never will”)

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 25/08/2026

One way to be able to discuss AI without catching the attention of all the anti-AI people is to avoid doing any good posts that get any attention from anyone

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 25/08/2026

Wait, looks like someone already did bsky.app/profile/dcat...

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 25/08/2026

If even Nashville has an atproto group now, I really need to find someone else and get a DC one going

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 25/08/2026

For example: bsky.app/profile/thdx...

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 25/08/2026

Not all of it is training models. Much of it is running them for a customers. There is some evidence that Chinese model makers are increasing prices because they can’t keep up with demand. Since they are open source, some of those US data centers are serving Chinese models.

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 25/08/2026

Having the LLMs come up with a few options and then picking from them or using combinations of them is such an underrated pattern even for non-UI stuff. Seeing multiple full plans is so much better than answering questions about options out of context

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 24/08/2026

Watching the teacher work example problems on the board or reading the textbook examples is never going to be a substitute for doing the homework yourself, but a curated set of examples is going to allow you to see more illustrations of a difference far more quickly

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 24/08/2026

Wish someone would figure out a way to make dozens of these stories of successes and failures at the edges of the capabilities of each model digestible in an efficient way. It’s not quite as good as testing it yourself, but you could read through so many more to start to get a basic feel

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 21/08/2026

Sometimes if I get sent a spreadsheet and need to actually do anything more advanced than sort the data, I have to load in into a pandas dataframe because I forgot how to do any useful spreadsheet things

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 19/08/2026

Academic evidence suggests that it doesn’t work at best and if anything actually backfires. By letting voters have more government services without having to pay the full cost in taxes, they tend to want more government services, not less. Romer & Romer paper: www.nber.org/papers/w13548

nber.org

Do Tax Cuts Starve the Beast: The Effect of Tax Changes on Government Spending

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 18/08/2026

I really don’t like how “no evidence” has started to be used to mean “no proof” rather than no evidence. The Kawhi situation is pretty clearly one with plenty of evidence even if the NBA can’t find rock solid proof

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 16/08/2026

Yeah everyone gets mad at the "HR ladies" who enforce this stuff, but it's actually all the results of lawyers telling executives what the company should do to set themselves up in advantageous legal positions

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 15/08/2026

Having those experiences where you see what it can and can't do increasingly feels so important to staying sane about AI use

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 13/08/2026

Live game scores provider TOS limitations is another thing I thought about with putting sports data on the protocol, but didn't think was interesting enough to want to write about it. In your case, I really only think you need the games on protocol and you could pretty easily work around that

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 13/08/2026

You are doing basically exactly what eventually arrived at as the only real starting spot for any sort of scoreboard app. I just didn't want to build out the whole Bluesky clone app just to be able to add that one feature

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 12/08/2026

I have some half (maybe generously 3/4) baked ideas about how to actually leverage atproto to make this a superior product to the closed systems that I would love to pitch to you (or anyone else who is interested) sometime to see what you think

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 12/08/2026

I haven't completely worked out if it can be run entirely on protocol either because everything also has to be resilient to something happening to any user's data or PDS. New and innovative ways to rage quit a fantasy league if you host the only copy of critical league data yourself.

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 12/08/2026

Could not agree more. That's exactly what I wrote about in the subleaf (subpage?) in that article pmcewen.leaflet.pub/3msbdrk7nek2...

pmcewen.leaflet.pub

Sports in the Atmosphere

Lessons from attempting to build an AT proto sports app and how to actually make it happen

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 12/08/2026

For me, the big challenge is to figure out is how to integrate everything you wrote about here into fantasy. I have some ideas, but need to figure out how viable they might be to pull off in practice blog.joebasser.com/3msgtu45ir22f

blog.joebasser.com

Let's Talk Money

Money money money... must be funny... in a rich man's world (Zuck, Elon & Larry). How we get to 1B Users in the Atmosphere.

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 12/08/2026

Did you? I have some stuff in the works as well. Did you get a chance to read this? pmcewen.leaflet.pub/3msbdrk7nek2f

pmcewen.leaflet.pub

Sports in the Atmosphere

Lessons from attempting to build an AT proto sports app and how to actually make it happen

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 10/08/2026

I am with you. Too many decisions to have to pick the amount every time. My proposal was you set the amount and then it gets distributed based on likes/recommends: bsky.app/profile/pmce...

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 09/08/2026

Such a cool feeling to check the For You feed and see right at the top the first use in the wild of the shareable graphic feature I added to @8sites.top Thanks for making my day @vicwalker.dev.br

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 09/08/2026

This seems like something you can nerd snipe @hipstersmoothie.com into adding to @standard-reader.app if you catch him at the right moment

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 08/08/2026

But obviously only a fraction of use and ignores by far the 2 most popular ways to use LLMs (ie Claude and Codex subscriptions). Does Grok even have a coding subscription plan? Grok 4.5 is the 14th most used closed source model on OpenRouter right now

OpenRouter closed source model use rankings from 11 to 18

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Patrick McEwen @pmcewen.com · 08/08/2026

About a year ago, it was so bad that they were letting people use it for free and even then it didn't get much use. No models in the top 20 of OpenRouter data for a while now openrouter.ai/rankings

openrouter.ai

LLM Rankings | OpenRouter

LLM rankings and AI leaderboard based on benchmarks and real usage data from millions of users. See which AI models developers actually use.

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