iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Josh Gondelman @joshgondelman.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Reposted by Tom Lee

Where the grass is [redacted] and the girls are [redacted].

DC Metro sign for the “Pentagon City” station.

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Reposted by Tom Lee

Neurotica @schwarzgerat.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time

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Tom Lee @tjl.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Is this a good idea if you’re bringing ideas about AI to students? I don’t mean to be a troll. Just increasingly worried that the people best positioned to be guardians of what we’re poised to lose are instead on here, in denial, collecting heart icons from each other

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Reposted by Tom Lee

Luis Villa @lu.is · 14/02/2026

People tell me all the time that Waymo is bad because Google is unaccountable. In other news, humans are so accountable that this woman who killed a whole family will (checks notes) be getting her driver’s license back in her mid-80s after (checks notes) transferring all her assets.

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Reposted by Tom Lee

Anil Dash @anildash.com · 14/02/2026

A key challenge, and a huge source of the disconnect between Silicon Valley and the other creative industries is that, for coders, AI eliminates the drudgery so they can focus on the creative/expressive part. In every other creative discipline, it has the exact opposite effect.

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Tom Lee @tjl.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

all else being equal I am of course going to root for Team USA but I admit I am strongly pro-Dune and anti-people-sharing-their-poetry-with-me

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Reposted by Tom Lee

Sam Brody @samuelhayimbrody.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

this is one of those cases where I think no, even rhetorically, you don’t go there. you draw a bright red line and when someone talks about denaturalization you laugh in their face and say “what are you taking about, we don’t do that in America” instead of dunking on their side’s immigrants

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Tom Lee @tjl.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

oh man. my friend was a PA on that movie and is VERY briefly in it as an extra wearing a stupid-looking hat

rue @deathcarpets.enterdeepfo.rest · 09/02/2026

Reposted by Tom Lee

what if i get into a car chase!!! what if i forge an unlikely bond with a detective who is on the wrong side of his crooked department and i have to help get him to the court house safely to testify!! what if the plot of SPEED happens to me??? these are all reasonable anxieties, sorry i hit your kid

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unironically: yes (flamboyant eagle costumes also accepted)

of course the snow here is unusual, very dense and icy. still I feel the water temp was right on and the squeeze bottle close to a best-case scenario. the consistency of the original's font (but with lots of spattering?) still strikes me an implausible, but this is a promising internet argument

I'm not sure I agree with your contention, but I think we're making progress. In the spirit of scientific inquiry I took a break from making lunch

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I admit: he might’ve used a squeeze bottle

Yeah, those things don’t work

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I had to confer with some peers before posting, was worried I was just betraying my own lack of skill. And admittedly, this guy is an elite athlete. Still!

(I think it's great he shared this message btw, it's just obviously gen ai)

you have brought a bigger smile to my face! curious if it's the AI angle or the denigrate-the-pee-protest angle that upsets, but no worries either way

why are these figure skaters allowed to wear costumes that are not variations on their nation's flag? this is absurd (I am willing to countenance RARE exceptions for costumes based on widely-understood and reductive caricatures, e.g. bear costumes for Russia)

alexis simpson is confused by display name changes @amutepiggy.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

I knew bluesky would find a use of AI it likes eventually

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Reposted by Tom Lee

it's not just that Mamdani is charming af (he is), it's that he is normalizing the idea that children are full members of society that we all share a collective responsibility for

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Reposted by Tom Lee

Keezy Young🌼 @keezyyoung.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

welp, this destroyed me first thing upon waking up

But Liam was scared and frequently asked what they had done wrong, where they were and what happened to the little blue knit hat he wore the day he was detained, Conejo said.

There wasn’t much he could say to his son, “except hug him and tell him everything would be OK,” Conejo said.

Worried about further upsetting his son, Conejo said, he was forced to bite back his own tears.

Liam has since been reunited with his hat and continues to wear it, even inside the house, his dad said Thursday. Asked how he might one day explain to Liam everything that has happened, Conejo said he would tell his son that he had become the face of hope and change.

"He was the global figure who did all this so that the voices of the people demanding freedom would be heard, especially those of the children who are still locked up," Conejo said. “I would tell him he was very brave and that I am very proud of him.”

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they're so close, conceptually and numerically

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"Death Camp For Cutie" is still in the lead for me but after reading the other replies I think you've got the number 2 spot

Field hockey at the 1956 Summer Olympics - Wikipedia

best available talent. My understanding is that they got absolutely WRECKED (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_h...). But he got to go, and, as an old man, carried the torch for a brief leg of the cross-country relay that brought the flame to Atlanta. Pretty cool.

en.wikipedia.org

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James Jongeneel - Wikipedia

TIL my grandfather has a wikipedia page! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J... I knew he was an olympian but it's kind of a funny story. He immigrated from Holland and played field hockey intensely w/ some of his emigre buddies. When the US decided to field a men's field hockey team, they were the

en.wikipedia.org

I will never feel the same way about my ereader. I bet my kids will, though. It's fine.

I feel nostalgia for this. But I also feel nostalgia for my friend Jeff's betamax library of Simpsons tapes. Everything you can say about physical media and curation has been said, and is true. But be real: other than (sometimes) the art, paperbacks are a shabby, wasteful, disposable technology.

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My dad would bring me home a lot of bad sci fi, which I devoured and could never remember the titles or authors of (no striking covers!). I've spent decades trying to remember title names like "Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys", "Marooned in Realtime" and "Free Zone" (the 2nd one is a legit classic)

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So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket

I have very fond memories of paperbacks. My dad did construction work for Olsson's Books & Records and hung out in the break room, where remaindered books with the covers torn off (you only shipped the covers back for a refund) were in bins for staff to take home www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/b...

nytimes.com

anyway I figure if the rest of the tech industry is optimizing to appeal to groyper dipshits... sometimes you've gotta zag

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(our platform's immense customizability means that our users can put whatever labels they'd like on the map. we provide reasonable defaults, which I sometimes write lengthy internal memos justifying)

running to framebridge brb

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we would use the factbook at work sometimes: "is OSM or [proprietary map database] better in [obscure country]? well, OSM says there are X km of roads and the other guys say there are Y. the factbook says... well, Z. hmm."

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but of course that was not a governmental request. anyway! I should stop complaining, the moral is just that people will censor if you let them

Paul McCartney's lawyers also maintain that deleting references to one of his residences is a matter of urgent concern demanding an immediate response (the earliest public disclosure of his ownership the address that I could find predated my birth by several decades)

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(there are plenty of more clearly defensible requests under this rationale, too)

yes, and of course national security is a very hard thing to argue with. I will note that this rationale has been extended to the country residences of at least one royal family, though 🙄

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Switching lanes beyond speech of course but cookie banners are a good example. Dumb policy, global implications. Hollywood self-censorship of China-related issues is a (much) softer form. I don't think we should invade Greenland or anything but saying "fuck off" is a fine start

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that is the obvious hard case that I agree makes this a difficult argument I don't think they will find out though. We had a western consensus and it's fraying. Globalization means these measures do work/have costs, even if they're stupid.

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well tbh I'm pretty glad they didn't I agree with the second part of course, it happens through a number of channels. Very complicated to have the current administration be the avatar of it but "geographic restrictions on speech are bad & we're going to yell at you for trying it" is OK with me

We have been obliged to censor aerial imagery quality in response to western European demands. Geospatial may be a special case, but I can assure you these requests occur and there's no bashfulness about their right to censor globally

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Worst of all, maybe, is that some national authorities insist that you use their boundaries even when they’re demonstrably outdated (rivers wander!) or low precision. A shame, but ultimately all you can do is say of course you understand & appreciate the importance of X’s sovereignty

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Weeknotes, 2026W04: Boundary Issues

A great post from @mike.teczno.com medium.com/@michalmigur... But I’d add that this is only part of the compliance picture. Labels are too. So are what we might call “virtual” boundaries—often-abstract lines that national authorities insist must be present (sometimes w specific styling)

medium.com

I recently nerd-sniped myself into thinking about political points of view on maps, and wondering whether it’d be possible to create…

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Tom Lee @tjl.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Not sure I agree with the “better” part. It has gone down slightly more blind alleys for me. But that could be operator error. Small sample size.

Tom Lee @tjl.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

I was using codex as my overflow when I run out of opus tokens. It does a good job. I haven’t used it enough to have a strong sense—I’m wary of losing context by swapping models on a project (cursor’s one big advantage). But I’ve seen some people say it’s better than opus (but slower)

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Tom Lee @tjl.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Thanks! Now that I have all 3 in a vs code IDE it does seem like canceling cursor is the obvious move. To the extent that token budget as a self-discipline measure is desirable, Claude’s 5h intervals are way more congenial