iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 01/08/2026

I'm coming to see code as an engineering material much like steel or concrete in civil engineering. We successfully engineer structures out of these materials all the time without needing to know the location of every pebble in the concrete or every carbon atom in the steel.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 11/07/2026

Sometimes us dual nationals are faced with difficult questions, such as, "Will you be supporting England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 or Norway 🇳🇴?" "Yes."

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 05/06/2026

Just cancelled 75% of our JetBrains IDE licences. Elegant weapons for a more civilised age.

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Reposted by Robert Smallshire

Mark Moxon @markmoxon.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Two-player #BBCMicro #Elite is coming along nicely. It now supports two pilots in two ships with two controllers and a split-view screen Here are some work-in-progress videos - see the thread for an explanation There’s lots to fix, but at least we have a proof-of-concept… (1/6) #retrocomputing

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Linda @lindabythesea.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Kitchen at Domaine D'Audabiac (2024) by Aldo Balding. Oil on canvas.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 22/05/2026

I’m delighted with this gift I received for speaking at the @tnmoc.bsky.social Econet LAN Party event. Wonderful!

IN APPRECIATION OF YOUR CONTRIBUTION
The National Museum of Computing thanks you for your valued contribution.
Your support helps preserve and share the history of computing for generations to come.

WITH THANKS FROM
THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF COMPUTING
This frame was presented to
ROBERT SMALLSHIRE
in recognition of their valued contribution.
Enclosed is a representation of 5-hole teleprinter tape spelling "THANK YOU" in Baudot-Murray code - a historic encoding system used in teleprinters from the early 1900s.
The pattern was digitally recreated from authentic paper tape punched on the Museum's Elliott 803 computer.
This same format could be read by Colossus, Heath Robinson, and many wartime and postwar machines.
Now preserved in laser-cut acrylic, it offers a permanent, physical connection to the Museum and the technologies and knowledge you help us celebrate and preserve.
Thank you.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 15/05/2026

I'm very excited to be speaking at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park on Sunday on using LLMs for software archaeology. Doubly excited to be bracketing lunch with Professor Steve Furber, inventor of the ARM microprocessor architecture.

09.30 Doors Open
11.00-11.30 Stand up talk: Rob Smallshire - Reverse Engineering Acorn's Network Filing System
12.00-13.00 Lunch
14.00-15.00 Keynote: Steve Furber - From ARMS to Brains
16.00 Wind down and packing up
17.00 Doors Close

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 16/04/2026

I enjoyed the Project Hail Mary movie, but the ship's computer 'Mary' talking in stilted non-sentences seemed immediately anachronistic by 2026 standards. Red Dwarf's 'Holly' was much closer to where we are today.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 14/04/2026

Clever and interesting rhetorical form from George Robertson, former Secretary General of NATO, on the topic of UK defence policy: “We are underprepared. We are underinsured. We are under attack.”

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Benjy Stanton @benjystanton.co.uk · 28/02/2026

“If Europe wants change, it cannot simply recreate the same model under a different logo. It must move beyond the document-and-format architecture altogether.” ia.net/topics/trapp...

ia.net

Trapped in MS Office

Seeking IT independence, Europe wants to escape Microsoft Office. The question is: where to?

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Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

This should be a hugely dynamic time for Europe. The democratic world need new energy and leadereship, it needs alternatives, it needs nations with global outlooks that are also resolutely non-imperial. This challenge/opportunity is not being met.

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-man... a) amazing investigation of something you won't have consciously noticed but immediately realise is true and b) brilliant example of how game design is interaction design is safety design

bethmathews.substack.com

Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green

The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 15/03/2026

After 18 years, Shantanu Narayen is stepping down as CEO of Adobe. Sources say he finally found the “cancel leadership” button, though it’s only available for 30 days before his annual contract renewal, so he'll be staying on for another 10 months.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 26/01/2026

Interesting to come back to C++ after over 15 years. While I've been gone they've finally admitted that operating systems exist and provide enough useful OS integration out of the box to make it a half-reasonable platform.

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Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

This would be a very good week for anyone who has not already abandoned the Mercator projection for maps of the world to do so

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Thomas Kjeldahl Nilsson @thomanil.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Finally, finally getting off my butt and getting off all possible US goods and services. Some will just take longer than others! www.goeuropean.org

goeuropean.org

Go European — Discover European products and services

Go European is a community-driven directory bringing you European products and services from across the continent.

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Thomas Kjeldahl Nilsson @thomanil.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

First US tech company/service dropped from my life, long overdue: Backblaze. Lets go for Norwegian company Jottcloud instead. 10 minutes work to change my rclone backup script over to use Jotta instead for backups, and hey - a waaay nicer UX in their web console, to boot 🙂🪄

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 17/01/2026

The best use of American AI today would be to help Europe build its own sovereign technologies: operating systems, social media, communications, semiconductors, defence, and yes, more AI. While the subsidies are flowing, let them underwrite a future of genuine technological independence.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 10/01/2026

I worked in C++ from 1995 to 2010, then in Python from 2010 to 2025. I've been building complex native application in C++ again recently, almost entirely mediated by AI. It's hard to leave a 100x performance gain on the table when the dev- experience of interpreted versus native code is eliminated.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 29/12/2025

One Earth radius of cycling in 2025 achieved. For the other geo-pedants out there, a distance slightly greater than that from the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, which at 6384.4 km is the furthest point from the centre of the Earth. 🌍 🚴‍♂️

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 28/12/2025

This misses what’s happening: a categorical shift from specifying program representations in ever higher-level languages, to delegation. I’m no longer expressing programs; I’m directing an agent that expresses and manipulates programs. The directions themselves are ephemeral.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 19/12/2025

On zero-sum thinking. www.ft.com/content/30a4...

Extending work by Harvard economist Stefanie Stantcheva and others, my analysis of polling by More in Common finds that in the US, UK, France and Germany zero-sum beliefs on the left (eg people only get rich by making others poor) and the right (eg immigrants succeed at the expense of the native-born) are related expressions of the same underlying worldview. Namely that there is only so much to go around and we must therefore use restrictions, exactions and preferential treatment to redress the balance between winners and losers.

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Jan Gray @jangray.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Favorite so far

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Thorne 🌸 @ens0.me · 10/12/2025

"I hate AI because it states blatantly wrong things confidently sometimes. And also because it uses 50 gajillion gallons of water per query."

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 10/12/2025

Why are Apple emulating failing eyesight with their new Liquid Glass app icon filter?

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 10/12/2025

Empire of AI by @karenhao.bsky.social contains serious errors regarding data centre water use. I thought it was an important book which I’ve recommended to folks, but I won’t be recommending it further unless a heavily revised second edition is published. andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-...

andymasley.substack.com

Empire of AI is wildly misleading on AI water use

And the media environment that didn't catch this is getting this issue wrong

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 09/12/2025

The people making a pig’s ear of programming _with_ AI are mostly the same ones who made a pig’s ear of it _without_ AI. Still talking only about features, still ignoring system qualities. Same mindset, new tools, same outcome.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 08/12/2025

When you realise that the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect applies to all of Wikipedia.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 07/12/2025

Status: Fixing Human Slop on Wikipedia.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 30/11/2025

From 1998: “An [SGI] Octane system featuring 250-MHz R10000 processor, meanwhile, will drop from $38,995 to $24,995.” I was coding on systems like this around the turn of the millennium. There’s a huge upside in how much money we’ll be prepared to pay for AI tooling. $200/month is nothing.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 29/11/2025

I can't help but wonder if this post would have got more attention on his platform if I had omitted the word 'vibe'.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 29/11/2025

I became interested in a space-filling foam called the Weaire-Phelan structure. I struggled to build intuition from static pictures, so I vibe-coded a geometry generator in Python and a custom visualiser in ThreeJS. From idea to realisation in 90 minutes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG1E...

youtube.com

Visualising the Weaire-Phelan Structure

YouTube video by Robert Smallshire

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 29/11/2025

Prediction (10 years) : The revolution currently underway in coding will be almost complete. Prediction (10 years) : There will be more programming than ever, but primarily in English, not in high-level programming languages like Python, C# or Java. English: HL-PLLs :: HL-PLLs : assembly

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 26/11/2025

Computing finally produces phenomena that demand the scientific method to understand and leverage, only to reveal that Computer Scientists were never taught how to do science.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 24/11/2025

To all the programmers out there, TIL that the number of centiseconds in a day is divisible by 256.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 05/11/2025

Fractal yak shaving status: Annotating the disassembly of an operating system at well past my bedtime.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 28/10/2025

"I apologize - I made a mistake. When I did git stash drop, I permanently deleted your uncommitted changes." Thanks, Claude. 🤦

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 24/10/2025

Convinced the crisis of app UX is a result of a generation of designers who have never experienced computers being used (and needed!) for serious work. A fucking avalanche of triviality.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 03/10/2025

Friday morning, 8½ hours of work lined up for the coding servant. The weekend starts here?

Total: 8.5-11 hours
After each phase:
- V Run full test suite (uv run pytest packages/demon
- V Approve HTML changes (approve-all -v packages/dem
- V Git commit with descriptive message
- V System remains fully functional
Key Benefits:
- V Explicit layer APIs - no filename inference
- V Self-documenting code
- V Type-safe layer collection
- V Clean separation of concerns
- V Stable at every phase

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 01/10/2025

On decibels: ”The bel is named in the honor of Alexander Bell; this is in the same tradition that prompted us to name the “wat” in honor of James Watt.“

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 26/09/2025

I’d like to be able to claim this this is my 15 year old daughter’s first international independent travel experience 🇳🇴 ✈️ 🇬🇧 , but she’s already had a day out in Göteborg 🇸🇪 without asking.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 23/09/2025

There are two rational responses to AI-assisted programming: 1) Do the same work in (much) less time. Work less. Enjoy life. 2) Manage multiple agents concurrently, and work just as much as before. At an individual level many would prefer 1. At a population level we'll all be driven to option 2.

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European News @eunews.social · 22/09/2025

Workers have completed the main excavation of the Brenner Base Tunnel between Austria and Italy, set to become the world’s longest underground rail link. The project is a key part of the EU’s push to shift freight from road to rail, cutting pollution and boosting European trade.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 22/09/2025

A short tale illustrating the need for sovereign European AI: Claude: label. isHidden = true label.wantsLayer = true label. layer?. isHidden = true // Belt and suspenders Me: I'm British. Belt and *braces*. Suspenders are what ladies use to hold up their stockings.

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Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · 21/09/2025

No wonder the rear brakes on my touring bike were protesting for the last day or so of cycling from Oslo to Monaco. No brake lining left at all. Still, they got me down four mountain ranges and around 30000 metres of descent, with a heavily laden bike. 🚲

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