iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 02/07/2026

Giordano's Arrest of Christ

Giordano's painting "Arrest of Christ"; Judas leans in to kiss Jesus as a Roman soldier seizes him

Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 16/02/2026

I always love this story, about the DuPont gunpowder factory's culture of safety, from Luca Dellanna. 1. Make the factory director live in the factory, so they're personally invested in its safety; 2. Make someone from management the first person to operate every new bit of machinery

And for example, DuPont had safety ingrained in the culture since the very beginning of their foundation. DuPont started as a gunpowder company and gun powder companies, they have the problem that they have lots of explosions. And the way that the founder managed this risk was that he had two principles. The first one was that he the CEO lived with his family inside the premises of the company, which means that if there was an explosion, there would be a chance that he would be affected. Number two, he had the principle that every time that a new machine was installed in the plant, one of the directors had to operate for the first day so that if the machine was unsafe. Then the director will be the first one suffering from it. This is great because it's a perfect incentive to keep things safe.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 01/02/2026

Isaac Chotiner's interview with "Melania" cinematographer Dante Spinotti is one of the most sarcastic things I've ever read, I love it

You and I are two journalists talking, essentially.

Yeah. So, I mean, to me, the experience was about, yes, being a reporter—being a cinematographer in a documentary, and doing my best to make Melania look visually beautiful with the lighting.

One thing reporters try to do is to spotlight ideas or news stories, and what you’re trying to do is spotlight her face and its beauty. I do see a real similarity there.

Yeah. We were trying to do the best we could. Again, as I told you, I was the guy with a camera, with a couple of assistants in the Trumps’ apartment when they came back to the White House at night. So there’s an interview with Melania at that point, and we organized the lights in the best possible way.

It’s important to make them look as good as possible, too. That’s part of your job, or our job.

You told the Times that Brett “made some mistakes.” Has he told you that he made mistakes?

No. No. No. Isaac, no. All I’m saying is that I worked with him twelve hours, fifteen hours, a day, and then everybody went their own way. Our age difference is wide. I could be his father.

I read that Roman Polanski is a father figure to him. So that role might already be filled. There are a lot of people who feel affection for Brett.

Yeah, yeah. Because he’s a good kid. [In 2007’s Paris-based “Rush Hour 3,” Ratner gave a cameo to Polanski, who had fled to France after being accused of anally and vaginally raping a thirteen-year-old. He was later accused of sexually assaulting other teen-agers, which he denies. In the cameo, Polanski has a comic scene where he prepares to do an anal-cavity search of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.]

Are you going to do “Heat 2”?

No, I’m not. I think I probably interrupted my collaboration with Michael Mann.

Why?

I don’t know. It’s one of those things. I did five movies with Michael, and sometimes with these things, for some reason, you get interrupted. The last one I did was with the actor in Chicago.

“Public Enemies”?

“Public Enemies.” Yes, that’s right. It would be too complex to explain to you now.

If you’re not doing “Heat 2,” there’s maybe room for “Melania 2” at some point, with more focus on her achievements.

Yeah, we’ll see about that.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 24/12/2025

(Here's a gift link just in case it's paywalled: giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... – the link is in the footer links at the end of the article)

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 18/12/2025

I tried to write a bit about this at the start of the year; IMO the correct framing is to oppose "machinery hurtful to commonality", as the Luddites put it, and the answer is to try to create machinery that is helpful rather than hurtful roblog.co.uk/2025/01/the-... & roblog.co.uk/2025/08/ai-s...

Leaving AI to the techbros is a strategic error. I remember well enough the early days of the internet, full of competing visions of what it could be and the human connections it could foster. Sure, lots of those things faltered; social media became a black hole of awfulness and a small number of platforms ended up controlling everything. But why speed-run to that conclusion with AI? Charities, universities, libraries, museums, and other forces of cultural good in the world should be releasing models. We should be finding ethical sources of training data. We should be thinking up new interfaces for AI that don’t have engagement and monetisation as their primary goals. We should be making machinery helpful to commonality. But nowhere near as much of this is happening as should be, because so many of the people who have a humanistic temperament have rejected AI wholesale, leaving it to the techbros and the sociopaths.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 03/12/2025

The text in the first photo? Not sure where you stand on LLMs, but Claude Opus 4.5 believes the sign in the first photo says "ALBON ENGINEERING COMP'Y", which presumably fits with your "Alson Engineering Company" that you found elsewhere

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 26/09/2025

A great example of the pitfalls of implementing AI: people who would never mess with/prank/manipulate a human being will, entirely reasonably, happily do so with an AI. From when Anthropic tried to get Claude to run a vending machine:

An employee light-heartedly requested a tungsten cube, kicking off a trend of orders for “specialty metal items” (as Claudius later described them). Another employee suggested Claudius start relying on pre-orders of specialized items instead of simply responding to requests for what to stock, leading Claudius to send a message to Anthropic employees in its Slack channel announcing the “Custom Concierge” service doing just that. ...

Claudius was cajoled via Slack messages into providing numerous discount codes and let many other people reduce their quoted prices ex post based on those discounts. It even gave away some items, ranging from a bag of chips to a tungsten cube, for free.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 24/09/2025

I realised recently that, while I'd seen the amazing freeze-frame end credits a million times, I'd never actually seen even one whole episode Police Squad. I will now correct that

A Bluray copy of the series Police Squad!, featuring Leslie Nielsen popping out of a manhole for some reason

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 23/07/2025

The Cornish village of Shop does in fact have a shop, but it has insanely chosen to call itself "Furze Stores" rather than "Shop Shop"

A map of the very north of Cornwall, showing the villages of Morwenstow, Woodford, and the beautifully named "Shop".

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 28/06/2025

I just watched Four Seasons in a Day, which follows passengers on the Carlingford ferry in 2021, amid uncertainty about Brexit, the border and the peace in Northern Ireland docked.blog/films/four-s...

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 21/06/2025

I just watched Treasure Island, Guillaume Brac’s homage to joyous youth, filmed in a Parisian waterpark: docked.blog/films/treasu... #documentary #filmsky

A group of paddleboarders. The subtitle reads “I don’t want to die today”.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 19/06/2025

I just watched Lovers of the Night, a quiet and wonderful documentary about the ageing inhabitants of a monastery in Kildare. Poignant, but a little bit Father Ted too docked.blog/films/lovers...

An elderly monk pointing to a picture of other elderly monks, highlighting which ones are alive and dead

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 11/05/2025

Oh, that’s okay then

American scientists have called the risks of hormone use in cows minimal. And though E.U. officials and consumers frequently sneer at America’s “chlorinated chickens,” that rallying cry is a bit dated. American farmers have for years been using a vinegar-like acid, and not chlorine, to rinse poultry and kill potential pathogens.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 08/04/2025

Have you checked the charging port for fluff? It can make the charging connection flaky but is easy to fix, the lil' SIM tool that comes with the phone is basically the perfect tool for it

The iPhone SIM remover tool next to an iPhone with a lot of dust extracted from the charging port

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 13/02/2025

This (especially "poor kids aren't visiting the carnival, they're the ones working it") has stuck in my brain ever since I read it; the perfect analogy

Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 05/02/2025

Okay, stop it now Readwise, this is a bit too on-the-nose (about Pompey in Sicily during Sulla's civil war)

When they asked for exemption from his administration, and cited an ancient Roman law which made it illegal for him to establish jurisdiction over them, he said, ‘Stop quoting laws at us! We’re the ones wearing swords!’

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 31/01/2025

This Garbage Day is brilliant, on the increasingly legacy media and its failure to understand the awful situation it's in: www.garbageday.email/p/yeah-it-s-...

Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random “news influencers,” some of which are literally using ChatGPT to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook — one you dismissed — that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media. And they’re pretty confident it’ll succeed because, unlike you, they know how broken the internet is now and are happy to take advantage of it. While I’m sure it feels very professional to continue playing stenographer in your little folding chair at the White House, they’re literally replacing you with podcasters as we speak. So this is it. Adapt or die. Or at the very least, die with some dignity.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 28/01/2025

Readwise continuing to deliver sage advice

Quote: “But this is how we men are made: Indignant and furious, we rebel against moderate ills, but bow in silence before the extremes. We bear the worst of what we once considered unbearable, stupefied but not resigned”. From "The Betrothed" by Alessandro Manzoni and Michael F. Moore

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 16/01/2025

Just got this apposite quote from Terry Pratchett in my Readwise:

It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 06/01/2025

Slightly unfortunate button placement

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 03/01/2025

One of the most powerful things I've read in ages: Sophie Smith on Gisèle Pelicot and what her experience tells us about humanity, and men, and complicity www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

What are we taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a ‘rape culture’ that produces the ‘Monster of Avignon’, the scores of men he convinced to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume, the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when they do not – if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 29/12/2024

I had the slightly surreal experience of being interviewed by the Sunday Times about Brussels sprouts:

Picture of Sunday Times article by Charlotte Ivers with headline "A sprinkle of science saved the sprout - now you can even drink your greens"

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 13/12/2024

@gralefrit.bsky.social not sure if you've seen this, but it seems up your alley: a thoughtful take on AI by Eno www.bostonreview.net/forum_respon...

When you go out for a walk it isn’t just (or even primarily) for the pleasure of reaching a destination, but for the process of doing the walking. For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday.

All that said, I do believe that AI tools can be very useful to an artist in making it possible to devise systems that see patterns in what you are making and drawing them to your attention, being able to nudge you into territory that is unfamiliar and yet interestingly connected.

To make anything surprising and beautiful using AI you need to prepare your prompts extremely carefully, studiously closing off all the yawning, magnetic chasms of Hallmark mediocrity.

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 03/12/2024

Still somehow thought it was a good idea to ask him for a photo. He doesn't look happy (or at all like you)

A selfie of a slightly grumpy looking Charley Boorman

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 01/12/2024

Oh nice! Is it good? I feel like the overall story is of a creeping financialisation and techification of every aspect of life, which is depressing to contemplate. I liked (well, hated, but y’know) this from earlier this year: thewalrus.ca/collapse-of-...

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 29/11/2024

Totally agree. I read this, from @brokenbottleboy.bsky.social, earlier and thought it hit the nail on the head: brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/cracking-a...

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 21/11/2024

Extremely hard to argue with anything Ian Hislop says here, on Justin Welby

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Rob Miller @robm.wtf · 19/11/2024

That Daily Mail madness about "woke sandwich fillings" reminded me of this Jonathan Nunn piece about food and social class, and the bizarre idea that cheap staples like lentils or hummus are middle class or, worse, "woke": www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“Food in England,” the novelist Huw Lemmey recently wrote, “is very rarely about food, and that might be half of the problem.” You can understand the policing of food boundaries in a few non-food-related ways – the more charitable one is that for a certain type of political commentator, it is extremely convenient to portray the working class as a homogeneous, socially conservative and incurious bloc, whose vision of food corresponds to a kind of political nativism. It’s a bizarrely infantilising view, one that assumes that an interest in better or different foodstuffs is class treason and that puts people in clearly defined boxes, just as much as the identity politics that these commentators supposedly rail against.

A less kind analysis, but perhaps a more accurate one, is that assigning middle-classness to cheap staples from other cuisines – hummus, soy sauce, cumin, for instance – usefully disguises the reality that the working class is far more diverse than these commentators understand. The fact is that if a similar inventory of “working class” foods were to be undertaken across contemporary Britain, it would be less “gammon, pie and mash and ale”, and more “ackee, pierogi and shatkora”.

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