iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm going to get so unbelievably annoying if the Sox make a deep playoff run here, but the idea of the pope watching Mune hit a world series dinger gives me chills

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The classic Racial Dot Map inspired me and a whole generation of mapmakers. Today, I'm publishing a modern take on this map, built with the geospatial tools I've been developing over the past decade. Interact with the map here: walker-data.com/maps/census-...

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

just now learning that Nova Scotia is shaped like sanded-down New Zealand

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Amy Borrett @amyborrett.ft.com · 08/09/2026

Britain’s state-owned electricity system operator has awarded Palantir a £21mn contract without inviting rival bids, arguing critical processes are too reliant on its tech to run a competitive procurement process Latest for @financialtimes.com: as.ft.com/r/7fe6c0b7-2...

as.ft.com

Britain’s grid operator gave Palantir contract without inviting rival bids

Neso cited a legal exemption that removes the requirement to consider other suppliers if dependencies leave no alternative

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

if I had $2.5mn sitting around, I would buy this place in a heartbeat. I learned so much over the years just looking at old things in here. seems pretty unlikely that the business survives the sale, but really hope it does

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Oliver Roeder @okr.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

grab an FT Weekend this weekend, for it is full of games, and stories about games: www.ft.com/content/e90d...

ft.com

Games special: puzzles, quizzes, Plato and wizards

A special summer issue of FT Weekend Magazine — it’s playtime!

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

you can blow a European person's mind by telling them that North Carolina has more people than Sweden. they really look down on the directional states

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Centre for Economic Policy Research @cepr.org · 15/07/2026

CEPR Fellows Miklós Koren & @gaborbekes.bsky.social explore their CEPR Discussion Paper "Vibe Coding Kills Open Source" for the FT Magazine. The paper was also featured on the Practical AI podcast practicalai.show/351 and in The Register earlier this year: www.theregister.com/software/202....

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

there are disruptive incentives that emerge here even if the quality of AI code were much worse than it is and many problems/changes to the ecosystem that persist even if the quality of that code gets much better

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

I've seen some people respond to this by noting recent (or inevitable future) improvements in the quality of code that AI tools can produce. this is interesting because I tried to not take much of a stance on that in the story

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I feel like the two paragraphs immediately after your screenshot pretty directly address your complaint here? (as well as the next section, which gets into the implications of this)

A paper co-authored by Johannes Wachs in 2023 analysed the forum’s decline and questioned whether, by crowding out their own future training data, models would become less effective from Stack Overflow’s absence. Now he believes that this was the wrong way of thinking about the problem. “There is still human-interaction data being generated, but that’s private now,” he said. “OpenAI and Anthropic learn a lot from their users.”

Stack Overflow’s public forums are dead, replaced by private chatbot conversations. “We have to accept that software development has changed completely, you understand, right?” Prashanth Chandrasekar, the site’s chief executive, told me. In June, Stack Overflow announced an answer service for coding bots. Its human archives are still useful, but they grow staler every day, as the tools and problems of software development continue to change. It is no longer a place where you can expect to find answers. Instead those answers live in the private, conversational data that belongs to large tech companies.

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

don't really want speak for Daniel, but would just note that the conversation I had with him was after the latter post (as are the quotes from him) and that he's shared the mag story himself today. I do hear your point a bit, but ultimately it's also not ten pars about the bug bounty program

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

look, it's also a bit of a stretch to say that Python is a dependency (it's used in some scripts/installation), but writing a version of this sentence with even somewhat recognizable tools that is legible to a normal person is hard to do! I beg forgiveness for being a little hand-wavy here

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

and a huge thank you to Tameem Sankari for his illustrations on the story!

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daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

The current top story on the FT Magazine is pay-walled but features some mentions of #curl and yours truly... (the picture shows the start of it) www.ft.com/content/cec8df9e-b43b-4c…

$If you are reading the digital version of this story, you have just used a small piece of software from a project called cURL. If you are reading it in print, but you have used a smartphone, laptop or tablet today, you have used cURL. If, somehow, you haven’t touched a browser or app, but you’ve used a modern car, printer, TV or gaming device, you’ve used cURL. You and the majority of humans on Earth use it several times every day, though only a tiny fraction of its users are aware of its existence. While online, you are constantly requesting packets of information from other machines. But these requests need to follow specific protocols over destination, routing, format, permission; cURL administers these details. First released in 1996, it is now a piece of the invisible plumbing of the internet, small but prevalent, part of the many thousands of lines of code that run constantly in the background of our digital lives. Its maintainers estimate that its component, libcurl, has been installed more than 20 billion times. Even its admirers are rarely conscious of it as they use it, just as it would be impossible always to consider the pumps that make water flow when we open a sink tap.$

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

yeah, no room for this in the story, but that was basically the explanation of the earlier drop, from them and others that I asked

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rich harris @rich-harris.dev · 11/07/2026

this is a great piece, and i'm not just saying that because i'm quoted in it

“Until very recently,” Rich Harris told me, “the idea that you would effectively pay rent to a Silicon Valley company for the privilege of being able to write software would have been considered completely absurd.”

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

basically just wrote 5000 words about this

An XKCD comic where a large group of blocks labeled "all modern digital infrastructure" rest on top of a small block near the bottom labeled "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003"

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

wrote for the magazine about the open source software that underpins our digital lives, how it is being upended by AI code tools, and about maintainers as.ft.com/r/b7f62212-9...

ft.com

Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

Our obsession with AI code-writing tools is overwhelming the web’s unsung human caretakers

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

NEW: a look at how surging power demands from data centers are helping to drive a shortage of electrical transformers ig.ft.com/transformers/

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

for sure, but also I think a lot of the success of ABS is that the structure rewards catchers/batters who have a baseball-relevant skill (an eye for the strike zone) vs. video review of SBs which if anything just rewards being a little deceptive/lucky

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

reminds me of something that happened in baseball after they started using video for stolen bases players used to only try to tag a baserunner's hands because it's where an umpire was looking. after video, they started tagging legs when it was quicker knowing video would catch it on review

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

need to learn more about how/why we spent 40 years canning things before we invented the can opener

text from a NYT article: "1810s Canned Food
Another leap for feeding a growing nation: The first American food-canning factory opens in New York City, using a technique developed in France. It allows food to be harvested in rural areas and transported by boat or rail hundreds of miles away without spoiling, and lays the foundation for the industrial food-supply chain. (Until the can opener was invented, in the 1850s, people used hammers and chisels, axes or just threw the can in the fire to melt the lead soldering.)"

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

sorry, but I absolutely will not let the NY media convince me that Wemby is a villain

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

DJ Khaled spending the whole game courtside on his phone is really testing my resolve on "not telling other people how to live their lives"

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Sky Marchini @sky.skymarchini.net · 04/06/2026

has any man ever been more vindicated? x.com/stuartbuck1/...

Conversation
Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueil
·
Feb 15, 2025
DOGE has a very obvious feedback mechanism for its cuts.

If DOGE makes a big, broad cut against a million programs, people get upset about a few specific, very good ones like PEPFAR, and then that program comes back because DOGE's members are, thus, informed it was good.
Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueil
·
Feb 15, 2025
I can only hope people realizing this won't damage the mechanism, because it's still useful to have professionals getting mad about some very good thing getting cut before it's brought back online as a result.

In a word, DOGE is responsive, which is unusual for the government!
Stuart Buck
@stuartbuck1
·
Feb 15, 2025
I agree, but it would be more efficient to spend one hour ahead of time talking to experts or just reading up on the history of a program for [disease, student testing, nuclear safety, etc.]

Plus, some programs don't have famous proponents with time to dig into the weeds.
Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueil
·
Feb 15, 2025
I'm highly sympathetic, but there really are thousands and thousands of programs and grants to cut, so I'm not sure the small team doing the cuts has the ability to go through them all one-by-one on their short timeline.

Maybe a system can be developed to assist with feedback.
This Post was deleted by the Post author. Learn more
Stuart Buck
@stuartbuck1
Despite some bogus grants, a lot of government is like this cartoon. I bet this "small team" would find a line item for "screwworm sterilization" and delete it, not knowing that they just devastated American farming: https://theatlantic.com/science/archiv
e/2020/05/flesh-eating-worms-disease-containment-america-panama/611026/
Image
5:03 PM · Feb 15, 2025
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View quotes
Sky Marchini

Stuart Buck
@stuartbuck1
·
Feb 15, 2025
I can see the DOGE tweet: "We canceled a contract for Panamanian screwworms, saving $165 million dollars!!!" [https://aphis.usda.gov/news/agency-an
nouncements/usda-approves-emergency-funding-protect-us…

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

so interesting that I feel like I can identify vibe-coded websites at a glance now. dark mode toggle in the corner, smallcap straplines everywhere, etc. not inherently a bad thing and I'm glad it makes it easy for people to build frontends, just interesting what the models consider a "slick UI"

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FT Edit @ftedit.ft.com · 27/04/2026

A US satellite in blue tracks two Chinese satellites. Prudent monitoring — or rehearsal for combat? A high-stakes arms race is taking place in orbit; the winner will "control Earth by controlling space”. But things can go very wrong, very quickly. Today's Big Read is on #FTEdit 👉 ft.trib.al/iwgFTZe

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Trudeau is only ten years away from legally being a senior citizen btw

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

our government is full of people with a Yankees-fan mindset who can't get inside the head of an underdog

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

"we have the money, power and resources, so you're gonna want to be on our side" my guy, you are making that pitch to a White Sox fan?

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

it's so interesting that the phrase "de hoy en ocho" in Spanish means "this time next week" because in most of the English-speaking world (I think?) that would be considered 7 days, not 8. I wonder how that divide came about

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

genuinely like half of the posts on this app are in this kind of Matryoshka-script and once you notice, it's hard to stop noticing it

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Irene De la Torre Arenas @inari-ta.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

NEW: Just weeks ago, the shadow fleet was on the run amid a crackdown on the illicit oil trade. But the Iran conflict has given these ghost vessels a lifeline. Our latest visual story takes a deep dive into their clandestine operations. 👉 as.ft.com/r/40748722-c...

as.ft.com

How the shadow fleet is capitalising on the chaos of war

The Iran conflict has offered the illicit oil trade a lifeline — while the easing of US sanctions widens a transatlantic rift

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

learned a lot about this today after standing in a 2hr+ line in terminal 5 and missing my flight... airport people said that the lines have been extremely long every morning and then clear up in the afternoon. no idea how long that will keep being the case for

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Sam Learner @samlearner.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

if you're just in it to make money, then I think you probably don't want to be huddled around a shared "weather predictions" screen displayed on a column? feels like the part they're ignoring is that people like to watch sports at bars because the games are fun to watch

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