iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Jeff Roberts

lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 18m

This is indeed very frustrating and I find it hard to respond to. But to some extent it is just the price one pays for being decent when others are not. I would really rather not be like those people, I do think on net I'm happier with the state of my soul this way.

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The Onion @theonion.com · 15h

DNC Releases Preemptive Autopsy Into Why They Lost Midterms

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 15h

Are you getting extra shukran’s with this order or …?

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 17h

Just resolved an annoying piece of personal admin. The high is dizzying!

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Perfect example though of how corrupting tariffs are. Every town & business becomes dependent on little tariff carve outs, meaning that buying influence with Senators becomes mandatory to stay in business. The tariff is the mother of trusts!!!

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Saw this video a few days back and only now calmed down enough to post this. But am once again breathing into a paper bag on rewatch.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Beyond a response that will be used in media training till the end days, her justifications are infuriating. Given an org that size nothing moves, internally or externally, that fast that requires six monthly reorgs. People as cost center proves again that the org is ultimate unclear technology

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Lucas Shaw gives me hope. Out here proving that it is possible to ask basic questions to senior execs about their idiotic decisions. A better world is possible. It starts here.

youtu.be

Disney's Walden Says Layoffs Are 'Extremely Painful'

YouTube video by Bloomberg Television

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

States really are the laboratories of democracy.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Nothing like working on something and it suddenly dawns on you that you’ve not only done this before but you still use the same language to describe it. Friends, I may well be in a rut.

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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'm just gonna bookmark this for future reference when Dem pundits complain about how the party has trouble communicating its message to voters. The reason you keep running into trouble with your branding isn't campus radicals. The reason is that your opponents purchased all the media outlets.

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National Trust @nationaltrust.org.uk · 06/10/2026

You're never too old to get excited about seeing a really big tree.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Really enjoyed this on AI and drug discovery. Computational scientists really do such cool stuff. I really should get back to spending more time with them.

substack.com

Why are so many AI kingpins moving toward drug discovery?

Do they know something we don’t, or is it the other way around?

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

There’s a real pleasure to reading old, well-known (to me at least) ideas published by new people. It’s a nice reminder that a career isn’t so much the pursuit of novelty as much as the concatenation of projects.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Like to think of myself as a turncoat. Turning my back on the ppt of my youth to preach about the beauty of the actual paragraph. The people long for Word. RETVRN

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Reading a well written academic text really brings home how 20-years of working in PowerPoint, opening with the main take-aways, and enumerating the logical chain that yielded them in painfully simplified (bullet) points has broken my brain.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I just wish the dust jacket were a slightly better fit.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Having struggled to focus on much of anything for a few weeks now, I decided to force myself to read. “The Ordinal Society” has been a joy to return focus. Text that just flows.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Not at all! Just amazed that this is seldom discussed. Commercial operations are generally looking to minimize labor costs, consequences be damned. And commentators just never want to acknowledge it.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 03/10/2026

I have absolutely wondered about this. Amazing.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Not to sound like a nut, but… Jim Goodnight clearly like giving money to NC State, and that’s great! But the bigger game seems to be making State a distribution node for SAS. Ain’t nobody willingly using that software.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Age discrimination, “skills”, whatever. Never it costs more to employ them.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Every discussion of the employment difficulties facing people over 50 talks about everything but their employment costs.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It’s roasting meats szn, baby!

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Gizmo Widget @gizmowidget.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I've just realised that "look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair" would be an excellent way to sign off a cover letter.

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Fred, His Enemy Getting a Vote @thefred.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"Middle management" means "anyone who has any institutional knowledge or knows how to do anything around here." They can temporarily save on compensation expense and then wonder why nothing works as well any more.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The gaps between job roles, job descriptions, and the work people actually do is pretty vast. I don’t mean the work that the procurement person who hires vendors does. I mean the work that people do across orgs.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It’s also really clear to me this week that the people telling us that AI will transform work…haven’t seen a lot of jobs where people work.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If only there were an entity - for ease of discussion, let’s call them states - with the means to regulate these activities. Oh well, guess I’ll get back to my bunker and await the inevitable, unstoppable killer software.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

All that power grounded in truly terrible theory.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

That subhead…”so we’re gonna actively compound it”

FT headline about the RBA raising interest rates to 15 year high. Subhead read: “RBA governor says Iran war has ‘made people poorer’ as central bank seeks to tackle persistent inflation”

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Sometimes I remember how a bunch of strategy superstars established a Monitor consulting and how it went spectacularly bankrupt. And I smile a little. Then I remember that Deloitte bought it for $1 and retained the name because business types still saw value in it. And I get a little sad.

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Besides, we just need to admit we know all we need to know about (commercial) entrepreneurs. 1) people with no business running anything 2) people who only do this because they have no idea how out of their depth they are

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Jeff Roberts @reliablyjeff.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If I ever hit the lottery the first thing I’m doing is endowing a chair of “stable operations studies”. Entrepreneurship gets all the glory. Maintainers keep everything going.

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is my favourite Borges story.

The Witness by Borges and translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

In a stable lying almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with
gray eyes and a gray beard, stretched on the ground amidst the animal
odors, meekly seeks death like someone seeking sleep. The day, faithful to
vast secret laws, continuously displaces and confounds the shadows in the
wretched stable. Outside stretch the tilled fields, a deep ditch filled up with
dead leaves, and the tracks of a wolf in the black mud where the woods
begin. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. The bells calling to prayer
awake him. In the kingdoms of England, the sound of the bells is already
one of the customs of the afternoon, but the man, while still a boy, had
seen the face of Woden, had seen holy dread and exultation, had seen the
rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments,
seen the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he would be
dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of
the pagan rites. The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.
We may well be astonished by space-filling acts which come to an end
when someone dies, and yet something, or an infinite number of things,
die in each death—unless there is a universal memory, as the theosophists
have conjectured. There was a day in time when the last eyes to see Christ
were closed forever. The battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with
the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die? What
pathetic or frail form will the world lose? Perhaps the voice of Macedonio
Fernandez, the image of a horse in the vacant space at Serrano and
Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

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Charlotte Garden @charlottegarden.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Such a lovely meditation on government service & community

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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 28/09/2026

who do I petition to get someone to launch a Tate Morden, to confuse the tourists

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I get why gatekeeping in its negative sense is bad but also it feels an awful lot like gatekeeping in the positive sense was a load bearing pillar of society.

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