iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 15/09/2026

At no point while watching Rebel Moon did the thought “this is a man who knows what he’s doing to some extent” cross my mind (Also I genuinely think he just Says Stuff about theme / message because he thinks that’s what directors sound like. He’s as much a hollow aesthetic as his movies are.)

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 15/09/2026

Late-1930s Zack Snyder would be absolutely head over heels for Hugo Boss fashion and really not a follower of current affairs.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 15/09/2026

He’s oddly fascinating; so focused on an aesthetic that he’s blind to minor concerns like story, theme, structure, pacing… His work has mean-spirited, fashy elements but they’re no more intentional than his other story beats - they just fit the aesthetic and he doesn’t think about them beyond that.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 03/09/2026

I’ve had “move more of my personal stuff onto Proton” as a vague to-do for a while, so this was a good opportunity to get started!

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 03/09/2026

After using 1Password for many years, I was worried that moving off it would be seriously painful - not in the slightest, migrating everything to Proton Pass was seamless and took 30 minutes tops out of my evening. Doesn’t seem smart to go this mask-off when your company’s moat is so shallow.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 28/08/2026

The reference to legitimate looking *abstracts* is odd, because it implies that there were “stub” pages somewhere with titles, authors, and entire abstracts - for papers that did not exist. Citing sources you’ve only read the abstract of is bad enough, but this explanation still seems incomplete?

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 27/08/2026

Yeah, exactly - I maintain a soft spot for McCourt’s work even knowing there was a fair bit of fabulism there, because the strongest criticism is never “it wasn’t like that”, it’s always a kind of stolen valour “actually he never had it that bad”.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 27/08/2026

That is a great title, but also almost laughably polite by Limerick standards.., (In fairness, few I’ve met who hate Angela’s Ashes would claim Hillbilly Elegy levels of fictionalisation - the complaints are specific, localised, and all the more vitriolic for it.)

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 27/08/2026

I’m an outsider to Limerick (my sister married into the city) but the genuine ire you encounter there about Angela’s Ashes is extraordinary- especially because everyone seems to have an incredibly specific and personal bone to pick that’s totally different from the last grievance you heard.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 27/08/2026

(Honestly a genuinely entertaining bit of hard boiled noir fiction though, and a shame that the author is now seemingly so deep in the psychosis induced by his own claims of reality and ChatGPT’s claims of companionship that it’s just LLM posts all the way down.)

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 27/08/2026

Ahh, the Tokyo Vice quandary - everyone who knows anything knows how fictional it is, presumably the editors did too.. and yet, and yet… 🙄

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 10/07/2026

IIRC at least half of the debt I had after finishing my degree in the UK was from maintenance loans (living cost support transferred in cash each semester) rather than tuition fee loans. Both loans were bundled together and repaid under the same system; that might explain some of the discrepancy?

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

Anyway. I have fuck all followers here, which is broadly how I like social media; but let me mutely point at this in a year or so. LLMs are the fiber optic cables of our era; the companies based around them will collapse, the actual core usefulness will persist (without their bullshit hype).

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

Is Claude Code better? Yes! Is it a trillion fucking dollars better? No. And that’s “no” as the CTO of an admittedly small but quite cutting edge company where we have to develop new algorithm stuff and wrap it in cloud infrastructure every day, which is meant to be the best case for these systems.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

Seriously; people don’t get how fucking insane it is that these people are justifying a trillion dollars in datacentre spend when…. I can run a pretty decent Claude Code alternative on my MacBook Pro M2 Pro from three years ago.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

These models will fundamentally change how we interact with computers. That’s wonderful! But a new paradigm in computer interfaces isn’t a machine god, let alone a global economic upset. And everything OpenAI claims to do will ultimately run on your wristwatch.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

bullshit trend, it’s ultimately going to enrich a handful of early movers who convinced gullible idiots in boardrooms to buy in. I’m not an LLM refusenik. I use it every day; it’s a great new technical advancement. If you laid off a single worker thinking AI can replace them, you’re a fuckwit.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

I’ve spent 30 years writing about the games biz, which has fended off countless waves of hucksters and bullshit artists, but none quite as awful as the AI bros selling a future where we’ll all consume slop through a hose with no human creativity on the other end. But like every other bullshit trend…

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

Almost all of this - as @edzitron.com has documented extensively - is via letters of intent, which pretend to move around billions of dollars while having almost zero legal meaning. The “purchases” of the world’s RAM won’t happen. But they’ll fuck the pricing of consumer devices for years.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

This is the one conspiracy theory I’ll subscribe to. AI companies and companies deeply dependent on AI (like NVIDIA) recognised that their USP was months away from being entirely doable on local devices, and acted to fuck the global supply chain.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 26/03/2026

Any half decent system (including phone CPUs) with 64Gb of RAM can do 98% of the actually useful things that LLMs do. Why do you think they’ve bent over backwards to sign bullshit contracts that pretend to tie up the world’s RAM supply?

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 10/03/2026

Apologies for today’s snow, Tokyo folks. Mea culpa, I tempted fate by workshopping spring-themed hanami drinks over the weekend. (“Workshopping” sounds so much better than “went through my drinks shelves concocting an evening of dubious ideas”.)

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 23/01/2026

In 2012 you could have made the same argument for a former failed Prime Minister who had crashed and burned in under a year but... no, the devil's had enough advocacy for one day. Noda's completely the wrong leader for the moment, but I have no idea who on their benches would actually be *right*.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 23/01/2026

So the CRA *could* appeal to a lot of voters, but on the other side of the balance: dubious branding, a hastily thrown together partnership, an unclear policy platform, and honestly nobody on those benches is a good enough political attack dog to make the public case that the LDP has lost the plot.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 23/01/2026

Also, while I personally think Komeito has generally been a positive influence in Japanese politics over the past 20 years, the fact remains that they're the political wing of a cult, and tying up with them largely defangs any critique of the LDP's slimy entanglement with the Unification Church.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 23/01/2026

However, to dispense with the devil's advocate act: just because CRA *could* be making that appeal doesn't mean they *are*. For a start, throwing together a whole new party days before an election with no fully agreed policy platform doesn't exactly scream "we're the stable option".

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 23/01/2026

It's not for nothing that the biggest electoral threats to the LDP have always been forces led by former LDP figures! When the LDP is out of favour (which it still basically is, despite Takaichi juicing cabinet support polls), voters swing to "kinda like the LDP but without the scandals" offerings.

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Rob Fahey @robfahey.net · 23/01/2026

To play devil's advocate for CRA: poll data show that most Japanese voters consider themselves centrists on the vast majority of issues, primarily valuing stability / competence on valence, pocketbook issues. "The LDP is going off the rails, we're offering continuity" isn't the worst campaign ever.