iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

its a very strong sign of your election position when youre banning news outlets from covering you

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Steve Quick @stevequick.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

If someone is unable to laugh at themself or to entertain a hypothetical where they might be wrong, don't put them in charge of anything.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

AI is humbling for those professionals that prided themselves on their spectrum-adjacent skills at ingesting and retaining data.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

One day I’d like to arrive in a new city and have the onboarding for their public transit go smoothly, instead of having it be a tour of the mess of accumulated apps that have accreted over time to handle each phase of the task with a completely different login.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Build it and get a Hollywood scale marketing budget and they will come.

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kottke.org @kottke.org · 11/09/2026

VC Isn’t VC Anymore — Understanding the Rise of Cancer Capital. “We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society.” [anildash.com]

anildash.com

VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital

We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Frankly as a classical liberal I don’t think any of this should be part of normal political discourse, but if they’re demanding it, fine: Even though it shouldn’t matter, right-wing US Evangelicalism is an unlettered perversion that ineptly projects bigotry into scripture where it doesn’t exist.

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Arbaz Kakkar5 @arbazkakkar5.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

It's a scandal that the president of the United States is out of his damn mind. It's also a scandal that major news media aren't telling you that, loudly and often.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

What I want to know is what risk would Google be exposing themselves to if they didn’t bend the knee. So what if they did it, just kind of embarrassing for them. But why?

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

It's not using LLM's to program that is that amazing, it is using LLM's to do code review that is a game changer. The pitting of a developer against a good reviewer makes for lockstep forward progress you can have some faith in.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I just visited the Teddy Roosevelt library that just opened in North Dakota, and the labelling that will counter the MAGA mindset is right there. Progressives is what anti-MAGA are and it was a Republican president who defined for history what it means. Regressives is what MAGA are.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Sportts like other forms of entertainment, has through the advent of mass media, been turned into a deadly serious business on par or greater than all other forms of economic activity. Which almost destroys the value of these entertainments for those who want to engage in them for other reasons..

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Democratic Socialism has been successfully made a slur to moderate Americans who 100% support public education/transportation/health-care/safety-net/open-space/etc.. so why insist on using a term that works in lily white Northern European countries that has been preempted by those 100% against it?

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Michelle @thegreenstudy.com · 07/08/2026

For all you jack-of-many trades & masters of none, let me propose a response to being called a dilettante, a dabbler, flighty, flaky, etc. When you are interested in so many things & get pushed to proclaim a "passion", remember that your passion is likely learning. That's cool and ageless.

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

The richest person in the world, an avowed white supremacist, today again posted "the next step is getting rid of 'source code' entirely and just making an efficient binary directly with AI" because he has no idea how anything works, not even the basics of industries he is in.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

On this road trip I am so relieved to see the Electrify America 350 kW chargers when we pull off the road, well situated in a corner of a spacious lot with trash cans and rest rooms conveniently nearby.

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Chris Steller @chrissteller.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

#OTD I was at the 8/3/83 charity concert at First Avenue where Prince debuted songs that a year later appeared in the “Purple Rain” album & movie. During the song “Purple Rain" I said to myself: "Prince has gone folk." Only in retelling this recently did I realize the echo of “Dylan goes electric.”

Two images: Dylan at Newport Folk Festival 1965, Prince at First Avenue, August 3, 1983

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

An extra foot on most every EV charging cable would be appreciated.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I think I could 100% troll everyone by putting a "This EV Burns Coal" bumper sticker on my car.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

In the future every roadside hotel will have EV charging and advertise it on their sign like they used to advertise “Cable TV!”

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Ok that was annoying. I had to verify my age because I’m in the same time zone as Texas. All the AI in the world and they couldn’t verify that Alexandria Minnesota isn’t in Texas.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

As a middle of the road liberal I have some sins against dominant PC culture, like selling things on Amazon, and using Claude to program my software. Each if understood in more detail might be praiseworthy by some global arbiter of liberalism, like what I sell are compostable kitchen scrap bags...

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leftylady.bsky.social @leftylady.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Has jake tapper watched this movie?

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

These "we have made an AI so powerful" warnings are straight-up advertisements, btw. No different than "we have made an Oreo so delicious all other snack artists must relent."

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DeWallet Inspector @otlee.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Interesting gambit given, by his definition, Elon is an “invader”

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

When Trump fades away all the impossible things he’s gotten people to believe will fade away I believe as people stop arguing so hard to support his fantastical world view.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

How about we all just go play coed sports even if teams are composed of mostly one gender. Then you find a league where you have fun with competition at that level. It is the obsessive focus on playing sport for money, not fun, that makes people all twitchy about unfair biological advantage.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

On as large a C++ framework with embedded scripting language like ivtools, setting that all up with CI, Claude plods along as clumsy as I would, taking a day or two to get it working.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

the interesting thing about using Claude for doing the kind of intense programming of an open source full stack MacDraw that I do is that I have to constantly retrain it because I constantly have to start new chats. You need to continually condense the number of tokens you are working from.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Training Claude on programming in my own language gives me incredible insight into what the average programmer would face learning it. Lists of data and blocks of code don't need to be buried inside parens, the "," and ";" operators bind them together...

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Timed out with Claude. Because I don't want to pay more than $200 a year it costs for the "pro" version. Feels like a bartender saying you have to wait 2.5 hours for your next drink.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Wow 13,000 Cmake steps to build Qt.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

I'm on a crazy quest to bring the benefits of a drawing editor integrated with a scripting language that is the network protocol to the world. Crazy because I've been on the quest since the late 1980's. Crazy because no one has quite duplicated the drawing editor framework at the core of it.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Now that I'm working with other entities who actively contribute patches to my source base, I'm beginning to finally appreciate the "git add" feature. Before I drop your modified version of my software or document in my directory, I want to be sure I can see the diff against the last version...

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Claude, greptile, and I make for a heck of a programming team. Claude is a power tool for sifting thru frameworks and generating diffs to try. greptile is a power tool doing PR reviews and catches all sorts of stuff Claude doesn't (but wouldn't be as good as Claude in generating code).

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Claude admitted to me that it sometimes stops when it hits a contradiction it can't resolve in its thought process.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

I feel like an adjunct professor who has been pushing along a pet research project for near 4 decades, and all of a sudden I have a crack team of fully funded grad students, some of the best I've ever worked with. And because I've kept the research materials and product quite organized...

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

With Claude I feel like how a woodworker might feel who spent his life mastering hand tools and then walked into a modern shop. The same processes still apply, I just have power tools to do them now.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

With Claude, if I was a woodworker instead of a programmer, I would feel like after a lifetime of gaining mastery crafting wood products with hand tools I just walked into a modern woodworking shop.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Claude is like a power tool for programmers.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Back before the first AI winter I was lucky enough to start working with an open source drawing editor framework which I extended with my own full-blown scripting language (we also added multi-frame and graph editors). I kept it going thru the decades struggling to keep it compiling with...

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Just like personal computers and word processors changed everyone into their own secretaries, AI is collapsing the whole REST API development team (and maybe even the marketing team) into one overall product manager who does everything. It's like they were all employed harvesting wheat and then...

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

I just used Claude to create a scripting command coverage measurement strategy, and then set it off to compute the coverage after we just made it up. No I'm not completely verifying that its categorization of how to count up and ratio coverage is accurate, because I'm not worried.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

The elaborate attempts to reinforce a counter narrative for Jan. 6 is to me the clearest signal that fascism is here.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Good luck to those Republican Senators trying to position themselves as the rational replacement for the Trump craziness once his term is over. It’s like trust us, our ideas are good and in your best interest, we can’t help someone overtook our publicity machinery.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

I am just settling into the fact that it seems the right wing politicians are of a character that did not improve over my lifetime, and in fact might have regressed out of simple spite for some things in culture not going there way.

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

LLM's really raises the bar for programming skills, especially for those who didn't acquire them before using LLM's. Perhaps in the future programming will simply be a game up until you acquire enough skill to be employable?

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Scott Johnston @sejwords.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

I remember 30 years ago sitting in this Peet’s fringing coffee and discussing with friends the wonderful free software from Stanford we could build all sorts of graphical and spatial applications with. Now I’m driving home to continue working on the same pile of software.

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