iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Roy Tang 🇵🇭 @roytang.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

New blog post: Weeknotes 2026-08-16 roytang.net/2026/08/weeknotes-08-16 #Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2026-08-16

TOC * My Week * On The Blog * Media Diet and Reviews * Reading * Watching * Gaming * Word Power * Links of Interest * Looking Forward ### My Week Another rainy week, though it let up a bit the past few days. Google Fit says I walked 76,313 steps from last Sunday to yesterday, breaking well past my quota and making up for my shortfall the previous week. This was mostly to me doing an "errands day" in the middle of the week which involved two malls, two cities, some old haunts, and commuting through rush hour traffic in the rain like the "good" old days. I considered the past 7 days as the "birthday week" so I indulged myself a bit, ate a lot, gained some weight. Celebrated my birthday with the fam, and celebrated some other people's birthdays too. Met up some friends I hadn't seen in around a decade. Bought a new sling bag; the old one from the everyday carry post already had damaged zippers and such. Had an entire day to myself at home. One cold night I was surprised by a large insect suddenly flying around my room. At first I thought it was an unusually large cockroach, but turns out it was a moth! I don't know how it got indoors. Sadly it had to die as I had no way to just catch it and release it outside. Bought a new used Ipad from a friend, only a generation newer than the one I'm currently using, which already has a bad battery. Ran into some trouble with the activation lock which we were unable to bypass due to some account nonsense. Hopefully Apple CS can resolve it, otherwise I'd have to give it back. ### On The Blog * Retro Review: Tales of Xillia (PS3!) * 750 Words: Hall of Phoenixes Interview ### Media Diet and Reviews #### Reading * Books: Still no new books started yet. * Comics: Still a bit behind. * Feed reader backlog: Feed reader is at 338 unread items as of this writing, a good amount down from the previous week, so starting to get under control probably maybe hopefully. #### Watching * Ongoing: **NCIS** (almost done with S4), **ER** (started S9 early in the week, then gave it a break to catch up with everything else), **My Adventures With Superman S3** (caught up, 1 episode remains) * Finished: **X-Men 97 S2**. * Started: **Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S4** (caught up) * Movies: No new movies this week. #### Gaming * Multiplayer games: * **Magic Arena** : Mostly just playing brawl for quests and achievements. Waiting for Hobbit quick draft. * **Street Fighter VI** : Not a lot, just dabbling in arcade mode. * Single-player games I played this week: * Ongoing (PS5): **Final Fantasy VII Rebirth**. Doing some brutal combat challenges, they are quite brutal (unsurprising). * Ongoing: (Steam) * **Shadow of the Tomb Raider**. * **Pathfinder: Kingmaker**. * **King's Bounty: The Legend**. * Ongoing (PS3): * **Tales of Xillia** : Finished and completed and review written and linked to above! ### Word Power Some words I noted when catching up with NYT Spelling Bee this week: * ARCADIA: a region or scene of simple pleasure and quiet * CHALET: a remote herdsman's hut in the Alps * CLOCHE: a woman's close-fitting hat * ILEUM: part of the small intestine. Not to be confused with ILIUM * LATH: a thin narrow strip of wood used as building material * VELUM: a membrane or membranous part resembling a veil or curtain; or a soft palate ### Links of Interest * links 🔗 Into the gap - A Working Library > "We are forced to conclude that to be in possession of a great deal of money, to be in a position of great authority, whether over an institution of learning or of government or of business, is to be in favor of war. The prestige and power that accompany both rank and great wealth—wealth which in our own day has grown so large as to be incomprehensible—also engender an instinct to possession and to the violent and disproportionate defense of that wealth." ... > > "So I say again we must refuse to work for war. But I do not wish you any hardship. If the only work available to you is the work of war, or work that has been perverted to the aim of war—and I am trusting that you have done your best to find other work, to make your living in a manner that does not end the lives of others—then there remain yet other avenues to take." ... > > "For there is one weapon that only we possess and which the billionaires and the warmongers can never take from us. " "One weapon which so frightens them they will twist their words into knots, they will spend the entirety of their vast fortunes trying and failing to convince us that we don’t possess it at all, they will claim over and over and without evidence that it is vanishing before our eyes even as it remains right there in our hands, clear and plain to hearts yet open to the world: the refusal to work." > > "To refuse is a creative act. What is created in a refusal is a gap, a space, a moment in which something else makes ready to emerge, something that waits upon our invitation and a bit of water or sunlight to pop itself out and set down roots. To refuse is to create that which can only exist in the shade of that refusal, the refusal giving shelter to the choice that appears behind it. To refuse is to choose." ... > > "To refuse is an ending; an ending to our work being used to rend buildings and bodies, to massacre schoolchildren, to surveil and capture and detain. To refuse is a beginning. To turn away from the work of war is to turn toward the work of making a living world, work that does not answer to the billionaires, with their slavering, unending greed, but which only answers to each other." * links 🔗 Computational Tyranny – One Happy Fellow - blog > Computers don’t make mistakes. Algorithms are free from bias. These are common lies which allow companies and governments to avoid responsibility. It’s a rehashing of the old favourite, “these are the rules, I can’t help you” but more insidious: it’s harder to prove malice the more complicated and opaque the system is. > > Responsibility laundering is a time-honoured technique, employed by governments and corporations worldwide. It’s easier with computers although it still requires a bit of skill to pull off: you can’t just email your engineers to “make the algorithm reject these people”. This kind of responsibility laundering can only be exacerbated by the use of GenAI. * links 🔗 You are not your grand plans | Bryan Braun - Frontend Developer > “You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.” * links 🔗 I'm done using AI – Brett Codes > I share this anecdote to say: I understand what the LLM-based coding harnesses are capable of. I write this all from the perspective of an experienced lead engineer who used these tools in earnest for more than a year. And I cannot in good conscience continue to use AI for coding (or anything else) any longer. ... > I had a conversation with management about how a developer's job is now is to teach the AI to be better, make fewer mistakes, etc. To review the code. And to test the changes that the AI makes. This is a horrible existence, and it was one of the other signs that this is untenable for me to continue like this. ... > So in summary: using AI for coding led to depression, apathy, existential dread, and worse software. Not good. Add on top of that the negative environmental, community, and economic impacts of AI, and it became extremely apparent to me that something's gotta change. * links 🔗 Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same (Sadly Substack) > And there’s a second cost, harder to see, and it’s the one that actually a bit scared of. Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want. If an algorithm feeds me Scandinavian crime dramas for ten years because I once watched two, my viewing history becomes airtight evidence that I love Scandinavian crime dramas. Admittedly, I have watched two Scandinavian crime dramas in my life. Netflix has since decided this is my entire personality. We risk mistaking a world shaped by prediction for a world shaped by preference, and the more these systems decide what survives, the more power moves from the people choosing among options to the systems deciding which options get a chance to be chosen. ... > Any system learning from feedback has to divide its effort between exploiting what already scores well and exploring options it hasn’t tried, in case they’re better. This is the multi-armed bandit problem (yes, I actually paid attention in my undergrad minor), and the maths is unambiguous: an agent that only exploits gets trapped on the first decent option it finds and never discovers the best one. Pure exploitation is a known failure mode. ... > At the level of the self, sure, force your own exploration, the book from the shop that might close, the restaurant with four reviews instead of four thousand. But ... this is the weakest lever, and I’m suspicious of every version of this argument that ends there, because “just be a more adventurous consumer” is exactly the conclusion that lets the systems off the hook. The exploration has to be mandated at the level of the machine, because that’s where real change can happen. * links 🔗 Welcome To The Resistance: Meet The Workers Dodging (And Sabotaging) Their Employer's AI Mandates * links 🔗 Training data producers and consumers | Jim Nielsen’s Notes > It’s easy to be a good citizen of the web when you’re incentivized to do so. > > It takes an act of will to be a good citizen in the face of an incentive structure that cuts against you. > > Fight. Fight against the dying of the web. ### Looking Forward Trivia team will try to attend a quiz night this coming week!

000