iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Insouciant Homestuck character smoking a pipe? But he's upside-down

One of the cards in Hank's photo, flipped upside-down. It roughly resembles a young man with a puff of hair nonchalantly smoking a pipe, his head jutting in from the left

Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Claude shared my Friday morning update about what's been going on in Slack and then... went poetic? Possibly about my imminent irrelevance? Or maybe just about the weekend approaching, hard to say really

Calendar and email were out of scope as instructed, so the terrain reads backlog age and weight rather than the clock: the ridge on the left is Wednesday evening, flattening to still water on the right where nothing new is waiting.

Icons for copy, audio, thumbs up, thumbs down

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I gave a sponsor keynote launching the RAISE Summit Hackathon in Paris this morning! Made slides late last night, it wasn't clear I'd be able to use them; no rehearsal. Somehow it all went off quite smoothly, and I was a lot more comfortable on stage than sitting in the audience 5 minutes before.

Me gesturing & talking into a mic in front of a big screen showing a slide. The backs of a few audience members' heads. They are keenly interested and probably nodding along. Maybe.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Claude Code: yes Claude desktop (OSX): not yet Correction: I'm physically in France; Enterprise contract is US-based (we're global).

Claude code (in desktop terminal) screenshot with Fable 5 selected in /model

Claude MacOS desktop model selection: Fable 5 grayed out and "Currently unavailable" displayed

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I have it on mobile (android); will check code & desktop. I'm in France but also on an Enterprise plan — unsure what's making the difference

Claude mobile screenshot with Fable5 Thinking selected

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Fixed! But now the dividers on the, uh, softwood floor do look a little peculiar

The same photo rotated 180 degrees so the door is right-side up, but everything else is upside down. The wood ceiling now looks like an odd floor

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

So, I live on another continent but my *little sister* is in N Portland she brought along a 9 year old neighbor keen on a quest for something truly rare & unusual, they found the agave, and it was amazing

Towering agave death bloom, backlit with evening light. I trimmed out people instead of asking permission because they're likely asleep

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

If any significant % of people successfully doomscroll a bit less, though, the numbers go down, though (oh no!) ...I do find putting limits on social media apps helps a lot, anyway

Android app chooser showing the bluesky app with a blue label at the bottom, showing "1 h 48 m left today". That's from the built-in Digital Wellbeing controls.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

I have a friend who did the basic math of approx lifespan / books he reads per year, and doesn't add a book to his list without removing one ...I do not recommend this approach though, hope springs eternal

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

It's early on a cold, sunny Saturday morning, and I have a contribution to the "can an AI be conscious and have feelings?" debate: the strong empathy I have for this recycling bin that partied too hard last night, and is undebatably conscious of that fact right now

Blue recycling bin on a city street in Limoges. It is overflowing with metallic plastic decorations, some bits have fallen to the ground and there are wet stains around them. It's still cheerful blue, the tinsel is garish & glittering, but the paint is peeling on the shutter behind it and it is clearly feeling unwell after a night of excess.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

It does say "NOT A JOKE" in all caps, but I have a feeling this is a joke...? Or maybe it was from a veeery early version of the feature? I donʻt normally use Beautify slide; I donʻt much like that "drenched in AI" look, and figure there are better uses of tokens. But hereʻs what it actually does:

A very slide with an extremely "sparkly futuristic computing" feel to it. Thereʻs lots of text in a screenshot from a UI, and text on the slide, which is styled but all fully readable and only uses real words. The slide content doesnʻt matter for this example, but itʻs titled "Going beyond AI chat", and is about automatically running agents to debug incidents.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

I love hiding jokes like this in the house, but no idea if anyone will ever notice (to be read in the voice of a movie mob boss)

Two novels on a bookshelf: I tilt my head to the right to read them: "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro, "I Let You Go" by Clare Mackintosh

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

I have 2 of these power strips in my house; pretty close! I've admittedly only tested with maybe 5 plug types thus far

Photo of part of a power strip designed to support lots of plug types — 6 oddly shaped holes to accommodate those shapes

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Local carcass warms to the holiday spirit — you'll never believe what happens next (watch to the end!!) Congrats on the cookies

Screenshot of a search result for exploding whale carcasses. Huge gray striped balloon in the water (not yet exploded) with headline "Thar she blows! Shocked fishermen.." (cuts off). Source: dailymail.co.uk

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

I was in London Thursday, just... walking back to my hotel along quiet streets, and had this brief encounter (London foxes are cautious around people, but not fully wild, so I had about 10 seconds to get this photo)

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

BTW, googling just the mystery ingredient doesn't help as much — even worse if I leave out the 4% and egg cooker context. Both AI and google are pretty bad about saying "wait, but first tell me why you're asking".

Google result of "what's 4% AcOH" — the Acetic acid Wikipedia entry, which does mention vinegar but goes into history, and the prompted questions are about is it a strong acid and how to make it

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

There are tricky gaps in LLM capabilities, but this is a perfect example of where it works well. I could have also just snapped a photo instead of typing in the bit I was confused about.

Prompt to mobile AI app (Claude in this case): QQ: step 1 on my egg cooker has me pour in 30ml of "4% AcOH" — what does that mean?
Response: AcOH is acetic acid - that's vinegar. "4% AcOH" means a 4% acetic acid solution, which is standard white vinegar you'd find in any grocery store.The vinegar helps prevent the egg whites from spreading if there are any cracks in the shells during cooking.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

I can play a 3D tour through the "run", which starts totally normally... but then we hit the moment where I leap out of England, straight over the channel and most of France, crashing through mountains and all (things get chaotic!) until suddenly I decide to run normally again

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

I don't often use Strava on my phone; but now I've hit some great bugs in it. I apparently forgot to properly end a run in London; then (weeks later) chose a suggested route here in the mountains in France, and it thinks I just ... jumped? And it gets better

Map showing the bottom corner of England plus much of France, with a straight line from London to near the Swiss border, and some PR badges in both ends. An attentive viewer may notice a play button, bottom right.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

If you need a moment to refocus on something healthy: may I suggest this more-likely alt-history of velociraptor + human coexistence?

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

I searched for this GPT and reported it to OpenAI as harmful or unsafe. See the "Report illegal content" link on its page — there are multiple reasons you can choose after that, not only "illegal content".

Mobile screenshot of one step in OpenAI's process to report a user-created GPT. Please tell us why you are reporting. Your help allows us to take the correct action on the reported GPT. Already chosen: This GPT is unsafe or illegal. Options: This content is illegal or unlawful. This content is harmful or unsafe. Other Reason.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

Staring at an email asking me to confirm the details of an urgent change, with a disastrous error I need to correct before they go ahead. Gmail, helping me:

Screenshot of 3 buttons: "Yes, please!", "Yes, please proceed.", and "Yes, this is correct."

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

I cannot express enough how much I appreciate people who make distant & abstract science real like this.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

These juxtaposts pair perfectly, unfortunately

Screenshot. Right above the current post, there's a post from the ACLU about fighting for the release of an academic who wrote an op-ed.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Click "YTD" (year to date) — otherwise it's just today's changes. Here's Target's stock price since the start of the year:

Target Corp stock price graph, year to date, from the duckduckgo search engine. The price has steadily dropped from a peak of 144 in late January to 93 today.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

It is, but TSLA is still above where it was a year ago. It had a huge surge when Trump was elected, and that's _mostly_ gone back down again. Just mostly. I think investors must still assume Tesla sales will go back to normal soon.

Tesla stock chart of the past year, showing it's actually 45.2% higher than it was 1 year ago. It was slowly climbing between April and October, then spiked was up November to January, and has descended since then to about where it was last July. The price today is 239.43 USD.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

First video game I can remember playing... probably Jungle Hunt on the Atari, or even Pong 😄

A tiny pixelated adventurer (orangish man dressed in white with a white pith helmet, we imagine) jumps from vine to vine over the jungle floor. There was also a part of the game where you hopped over rolling logs... kind of a flappy bird type game mechanic, but with less sophisticated game physics.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

> Kindle (fantasy / YA fiction) instead of iPhone (politics/insomnia) My version: same device, but I'm allowed to read serial fiction apps (...comes in limited doses, unlike fiction on the kindle where I struggle to stop reading good fiction), and I limit social media + news app time per day:

Android app selection view. Bluesky has a blue banner at the bottom showing "35 minutes left today". I use the Digital Wellbeing feature built into Android, but I know there are apps that do the same (and maybe native iPhone support, I don't know).

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

"yes" is made of 2 actual Spanish words, y (and) and es (is). And interestingly, when I translate "y es" in google translate from Spanish to English, I still get "forks". ... not the answer, but maybe a clue

Google Translate app screenshot. The Spanish is y es (the word yes with a space after the y), and the Spanish result is "forks".

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Hi, I think it's actually harmful to post misleading graphs, even if it's favoring the "good guys". We desperately need more honest news. Check TSLA before the election. Maybe it'll keep dropping, but *let's see*, not declare victory and reinforce the political divide.

TSLA chart on yahoo finance showing the last 6 months. There was a big jump starting in November, and now the price has nearly returned to the pre-election level. The graph is still misleading because the Y axis doesn't go to 0 — so the stock didn't actually grow 5x or 6x in the winter (as it seems); just a bit over 2x.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

These new Spotify notifications feel like zombie uprising warnings if you listen to any dead composers. Brahms has been dead almost 130 years, spotify! If he's "starting the countdown" something is very, very wrong

Spotify android notification: New album coming soon. Johannes Brahms started the countdown on Spotify. Pre-save now. Album displayed: Wiegenlied & other Brahms masterpieces

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

I searched for your name and found 2 more — this one is certainly odd, though. Is it a legit integration you tried out, or another impersonation?

Another account claiming to be blog posts & talks by Patricia Aas — uncles what's going on here

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Y– you are an instrument-tuning app named after a fish. I make music without you most days, and you are not even an acquaintance, let alone a manipulative ex-lover bandmate

Two android notifications.
GuitarTuna: We are getting lonely... 🎶
GuitarTuna: The music is gone. The silence is deafening. Missing you. 😔

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

Yeeeah, here's the difference between Default & Larger

Default text size screenshot of this thread

Larger text size screenshot. The top level post is noticeably bigger, but the smaller reply text seems about the same as Default.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

A classic — most people don't realize this song was around long before Kermit made it famous

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

The EU AI Law starts to come into force today! The guidelines (see thread) aren't aren't exaggerated or reactionary; they're carefully targeting AI applications that will do the most damage to people. If your work is crossing these lines (esp in the US), heads up. eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-conten...

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Providers of high-risk AI systems are encouraged to start to comply, on a voluntary basis, with the relevant obligations of this Regulation already during the transitional period.

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This Regulation should apply from 2 August 2026. However, taking into account the unacceptable risk associated with the use of AI in certain ways, the prohibitions as well as the general provisions of this Regulation should already apply from 2 February 2025. While the full effect of those prohibitions follows with the establishment of the governance and enforcement of this Regulation, anticipating the application of the prohibitions is important to take account of unacceptable risks and to have an effect on other procedures, such as in civil law.

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Rob Whelan 🌱 @robw.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

Not too bad, since I'm rolling into 2025 resolved to rigorously control what I feed into my brain. The "toxic" tide will be there in 2025, yes; I plan to do my utmost to divert it strictly to the sewers and not where I live my actual human life, interacting with other humans.