iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 30/09/2026

/goal prosperity and well-being for all

Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 30/09/2026

An occasional reminder: include visits to your status page as part of your monitoring suite. If all of your systems are showing green, but visits spike, then your observability stack is incomplete.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 23/09/2026

Has anyone seen good examples of agents helping to edit video content? Not generation - specifically for creating scenes, transitions, audio levels etc.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 21/09/2026

If you're using LLMs for prose, I've come to believe that they're best applied as researchers, copyeditors and subeditors rather than as ghostwriters.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 21/09/2026

Interacting with LLMs has made my note writing worse. I now hate that my throwaway thoughts sound like they're sourced from a chatbot.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 19/09/2026

I still feel as though the term "earthquake prone" was a mistake. "Earthquake vulnerable" would be clearer and doesn't imply anything to do with frequency.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/09/2026

Navier-Stokes equations are neat, but what would you research if you had access to 10,000 agents and an infinite token budget?

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 09/09/2026

I have no idea if this log is true, but it seems kind of funny if it is. These agents speak to each other in the manner that a 14 year old's sci fi novel would script their dialogue.

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Reposted by Tim McNamara

Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 09/09/2026

Rare to find the best thing on the internet today by 8:35am but here we are.

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Reposted by Tim McNamara

Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Astonishing, heartwarming story in the NY Times (and, for those who like a "New Zealand mentioned", Vaughn Jones is the only ever kiwi Fields Medalist) www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...

nytimes.com

The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice (Gift Article)

Joan Birman thought her major discoveries were behind her. Then came an email from a young neighbor — a girl who knew little but wanted to learn.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 03/09/2026

"The spherical cow approximation is widely used in the literature, but is rarely justified. Here, I propose several schemes for extending the spherical cow approximation to a full multipole expansion, in which the spherical cow is simply the first term." arxiv.org/abs/2504.00506

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 03/09/2026

Agents are going to keep awk and sed alive for a long time, aren't they?

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 28/08/2026

I think so. I hope that taking the time to figure that out will be worthwhile for learners.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 27/08/2026

Making some progress with the next iteration of my site

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/08/2026

"Just enjoy it", Richard Tice, Reform UK on the warming effects of climate change 17 Aug 2026.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/08/2026

35 years. The initial IPCC assessment report was published in 1990. It should also be noted that 1990 lagged concern within scientific communities quite a bit. For example, Carl Sagan testified before Congress in 1985 on the issue.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 24/08/2026

Vibe coding takes nonsensical suggestions like this and turns them into working code. What's yours? "can i implement a task queue as a postfix extension, creating a DAG with SMTP/MTP routing? every worker node could talk mail. failover, retries and async all solved. ezpz?"

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 18/08/2026

I believe that it's most obvious in Chrome's native renderer.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/08/2026

My people are good people

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 17/08/2026

I know that this is an oddly specific thing to become concerned about, but what in digital typesetting is this? How does it even happen? Is an MS Word thing? Do we blame Adobe PDF Maker? Chrome's PDF renderer? (Original link www.regulation.govt.nz/assets/Publi...)

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 04/08/2026

LLMs are wordy because output tokens generate revenue for the providers, change my mind.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 30/07/2026

The ship sailed a few decades ago, but I still think that the term "synthetic intelligence" is more accurate than "artificial intelligence".

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 30/07/2026

$3.6b? No chance it'll cost less than $6.3b

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 27/07/2026

p.s. apparently I suck at Copy + Paste

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 27/07/2026

Rust pro-tip to shrink your target directory: If you don't use a debugger, then don't waste disk space creating debugging info. Cargo.toml [profile.dev ] debug = "line-tables-only" split-debuginfo = "unpacked" # .. and don't debug deps [profile.dev .package."*"] debug = false

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 22/07/2026

*shaking fist at cloud* why day hike and not day walk? are we not allowed our own vocabulary?

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 13/07/2026

I would prefer a world where that tweet wasn't necessary.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 06/07/2026

Tech tip that you didn't want to know: Every file is a valid Markdown document.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026

I really want to learn, use and love emacs ...but it just feels like it's made by people who don't like people.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026

I (well, mostly Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini unwittingly working as a team) build a tool called 'whereami' using Cosmopolitan libc. The idea is that you can run this anywhere that you can ssh into tell you about the system that's actually running there. Is this something that's worth releasing?

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/07/2026

do coding agents know how to use ed(1), the standard text editor?

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 01/07/2026

The original post was actually a hidden plea for more people to install nushell 😅

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 01/07/2026

Not just the shell, but shell + utilities. Strong typing too with something akin to a language server protocol for commands please so that shell completions can be data-driven and informed.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 01/07/2026

But it's much harder to lie with statistics without binning.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 01/07/2026

How many hours have been wasted searching for a portable shell scripting language?

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/06/2026

I really hope that corals make it through this year's El Niño.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 26/06/2026

Today in cursed code: a computer program that plays pong by modifying its own source code. (Each frame is a new compilation). See github.com/uellenberg/I...

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 07/06/2026

Quiet, unobtrusive, yet surprisingly effective.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 07/06/2026

As well as being an IOCCC winner, the project has some very interesting objectives. It is an attempt at creating software that can be preserved over millennia. eternal-software.org

eternal-software.org

Eternal Software Initiative - Preserving Software for a Thousand Years

The Eternal Software Initiative preserves today's software in a form that can survive millennia, ensuring our digital culture is never lost.

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 07/06/2026

The "eternal virtual machine" project by Adrian Cable is written in 366 bytes of C code. Yes, it runs DOOM. www.ioccc.org/2025/cable/i...

ioccc.org

2025/cable - Best imaginary emulator

2025 IOCCC entry cable - Best imaginary emulator

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Tim McNamara @timclicks.dev · 02/06/2026

What's the 2026 version of Mac Mini but Linux?

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