iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I shouldn't be, but I am genuinely shocked that the revelations from the Character.ai bankruptcy docs have not cooled the AI hype more than they have. WeWork's insane S-1 hit so fast.

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Erika Hall @erikahall.bsky.social · 2h

"That protected bike lane…see the cyclists want to be free just riding all over, running people down. Well, we're going to confine them to this. Just a massive barrier preventing them from interfering with the front of your car. Yeah, a whole network of these lanes will show them who's boss."

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 3h

no surprise: Gitlin has been on the Tesla beat for long enough to know how to actually cover an event like this

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Brandon - "Fietser" @americanfietser.bsky.social · 6h

Forgiving infrastructure assumes people make mistakes. A person on a bike who loses their balance and falls shouldn't pay for it with their life just because there was no buffer between them and a vehicle 100 times their weight.

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 2h

Easiest bet in history is always assuming the tech press is full of easily duped dopes

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 19h

I wonder if the chart for solar + battery generation looks similar? (I assume so, based on reporting on lots of global south countries adopting it quickly because its so cheap)

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 20h

The whole corporate personhood movement worked out so well and definitely had NO downsides!

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 23h

Worf is absolutely gonna react to Stardew Valley like he did to prune juice

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 23h

this is less about AI and more about how most software businesses never really gave a shit about quality (I am basing this on nearly 30 years working for these people). The only thing AI has given them is the ability to go around the people who were keeping the "good enough" bar out of the dirt

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 23h

"AI IS THE FUTURE OF WORK... unless it cost more than one lunch in a major US city per month, then the present of work is good enough for us"

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 23h

I feel like we're not talking enough about how there haven't been (at least in my memory) any new computer programming tools in the last 3 decades that have caused so many programmers to have weird mental breakdowns and maybe that's a major downside to all these new tools despite the velocity bumps?

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dorian @doriantaylor.com · 15/10/2026

pwease unbwock ads uwu

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shypixels! @shypixels.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

I'm sorry, an AI guy telling you "The wool is being pulled over your eyes" while simultaneously owning a huge ass yarn factory will never not be funny. You're literally part of the problem my guy.

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Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 15/10/2026

And yet gas-only cars constituted 77% of the new vehicle market in the US over that period. Has the US ever been this far behind the world average in new tech adoption for a major product type?

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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Aaron Swartz, coding prodigy and hacktivist who helped develop RSS and was a co-founder of Reddit, died by suicide after facing $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison for felony charges, just for downloading pdfs of research papers with the intention of making them accessible to the public.

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Julie S. Lalonde @julieslalonde.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Being GenX/Millennial is such a trip. In our lifetimes, we saw people our age getting wild criminal penalties for pirating music and now have to sit and watch as companies gobble up our work with impunity.

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404 Media @404media.co · 14/10/2026

Men find yet another way to film and harass women without consent, this time, using a remote controlled robot to push against a "16-year-old girl's buttocks", and this is how the most well-resourced news agencies cover it: Read *our* piece here: www.404media.co/theres-nothi...

The English coverage by even well-resourced outlets like CNN, CBC, and the BBC have almost no information beyond the police press release, which is lazy and stupid, because it is possible to figure out everything that happened here with three seconds of clicking around the internet. The Associated Press wrote that the entire phenomenon is "new territory" for the police, which, I'm sorry to say, men using tech to harass women on livestreams in 2026 is not "unusual" or "new territory" and hasn't been for many years.

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United Videogame Workers-CWA @videogameworkers.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Did you know that if inflation goes up but your salary doesn't get a cost of living adjustment... you just took a pay cut?

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AAAAHH-lex Plante 🐀👑 @aplante.com · 14/10/2026

i'm SO off-kilter today so i'm late sharing this on socials but it IS in fact pip and gunko day! P.S. last page of this story, new one starts next week!

pipandgunko.com

Pip and Gunko

Goofball comics about a pair of sweet idiots

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 14/10/2026

So for instance, whether or not you consider something like FaceId “private” or not, one of its functions has been to acclimate people to face scans as a normal part of everyday life. It is very literally selling surveillance.

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Daniel Kibblesmith @kibblesmith.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Every movie, song, and book that you love was made without the technology that people who don’t make art are now insisting is necessary for making art.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

This was very long but very good, worth the time. If your main critique of all this AI hype is "this is not sustainable financially" it certainly makes you feel like you're right (which is actually bad)

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

I mean.... sounds familiar, right?

a section of a text document highlighted. The highlighted area reads: But today industrial designers ruefully look back on that period as one of boyish exuberance. Radical innovation in design is now the exception rather than the rule. What the industrial designer is becoming is a master of packaging, leaning more heavily on graphic art than on the re-shaping of machine-made products: some ID. firms are further softening focus to include a range of services including marketing counseling, motivational testing, consumer research, and interior designing.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

I finally had a chance to sit down and read this article (from 1968) and it's hard not to see the parallels between that period of ID and our current era of "UX" of whatever the hell we're calling it these days. (Credit to Industrial Designers though, they aren't changing their name every 5 seconds)

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Caleb Sexton @calebsexton.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Some men would rather go back to Twitter than go to therapy

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Rosemary Mosco @rosemarymosco.com · 14/10/2026

I'm so honored to be in this ICE OUT zine put together by @crucialcomix.bsky.social. All proceeds go to Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Center (MIRAC). www.crucialcomix.com/product/preo...

crucialcomix.com

PREORDER: Cartoonists Against ICE

These comics by 25 cartoonists across the country are both urgent and reflective as they document the human impact of ICE’s cruel 2026 raids.

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SirFox @sirfox.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I am personally looking forward to the biggest goddamn "WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!!!" ever. C-suites drank the Kool-Aid marked "you never have to pay an employee or care what they think ever again." Before they looked under the hood to see it was a car without an engine. Like we goddamn told you...

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

Go ahead and blame them, but dont punch down on the rank and file designers who never had the kind of power you’re pretending they did. They are workers too, exploited by the same people and systems that exploited the users. They were the users too! it’s not as clean cut as you’re pretending

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

we should not let tech companies go blameless, and designers have a lot to answer for too, but this is not one of those things. Blame the right people.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

You live in an alternate universe if you think a design team quitting en mass anytime between 2010 and now would have stopped a company from shipping feature like this. All that would have done was hurt a small group of people who had rent & student loans & health insurance tied to their jobs

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

But when they do eventually find out, usually after it’s gone live, they push back on it to basically no avail. I personally burned lots of political capital and made a lot of enemies “being unreasonable” about features like this, and I was not an outlier. Designers couldn’t stop this stuff.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

At bigger companies it gets handed off to a PM who files a ticket and puts pressure directly on the developers to get the change out the door asap. At no point in either scenario does the decision ever get run by an “interaction designer” or anyone in the UX/Design org

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

Some exec decides the company need to “stop revenue leakage” or “improve customer retention” and if the company is small enough they just direct the developers themselves to make the change to the system.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 14/10/2026

You seem to be unclear on how feature like “90,000 steps to cancel” end up in software, so let me share with you the very real process I witnessed while working at multiple tech companies for this and similar features:

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

Oh, yeah. All those tech unions that we've had for the last 20 years. I forgot all about those... LOL are you even serious right now?!?

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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

The ruling class isn't even hiding it. They sometimes just say this shit in public.

gizmodo.com

CNBC Accidentally Admits Why Employers Love AI

It's all about suppressing wages.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

I wouldn't expect a YC alum to understand how making money selling software to people works though, that's not what YC is about.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

I just checked in on LinkedIn and the top of my feed is a YC dude talking about how Photoshop and Microsoft Word are "losers" of the last decade of software and... sure dude. They're losing all the way to the bank.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

maybe I was an outlier, but my experience of working in silicon valley companies was that the whole "fail fast" thing was mostly just marketing fluff for investors and the media. Only certain people were allowed to fail w/o serious consequences and only really in blowing a lot of other people's $$

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

Yeah, the whole "everything will now and forever be an app" thing was basically a replay of dot com, because we got a new kind of computer. Cloud/big data were responses to AWS printing money, but they felt way more flimsy for sure (but nothing like the last three hype cycles)

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

Yeah, I remember making a lot of VRML jokes in like 2012-13 when VR was trying to be a thing again

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

there was also, a mini hype-wave of VR during Web 2.0 (which was the 2nd of 3?) and a mini hype-wave (spurred by Alexa and the original Siri) of "you will only talk to your computer in the future" durring the big data wave.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

"Big data" is the one you're missing.

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

the AI self-replicated into your IUD and now you're pregnant AND under arrest for hacking!

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

it really feels like everybody learned exactly the wrong lessons from 2008

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Tony Santos @tony.webeasties.com · 13/10/2026

there are no VCs left actually investing is too-early-to-be-sustainable business ideas, just these weird Tulips 5.0 iterations that make no sense when you evaluate them as actual businesses. Hey, but at least the IRR on VC funds is also declining so LPs aren't making any money either?

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