iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 43m

Yes let them (Iran) “take out”Los Angeles or San Diego. Seems a bit concerning as a San Diegan. youtu.be/FurUNgg5L7c

youtu.be

'Small Price to Pay': Trump says Iran can 'take out' San Diego, Los Angeles

YouTube video by CBS 8 San Diego

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

That the US broadcast of the USA-Mexico game missed showing the 3rd goal because they are pulled away and yapping says all you need to know about how much American TV broadcasters understand this sport.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Slopware wasn’t invented by GenAI we’ve had plenty of it before. We just can manufacture so much more now quite quickly & efficiently. It’s actually Slopware Engineering! Note not denying AI use in proper SWE here distinguishing between the creation of useful software and slopware

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I hope you find my AI Slop vs Your Codebase GIF worth a chuckle.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

6+ months ago I'd GenAI whatever webdev silliness I wanted. I hid my shame, but now if you ever find yourself wanting to know how a <blink> or <marquee> tag would be abused in 2026 enjoy. Warning: they get worse as you go profpowell.github.io/blink-wc/dem... profpowell.github.io/marquee-wc/d...

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Just finished Cal Newport’s pod breaking the AI groups up. Like Cal I would be a centrist aware of the harms, but more focused on present than doomerism and very much aware of the utility but not reckless in claims or usage. However his labeling are euphemisms by modern specific labels

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Just spent 20mins reading a thread about a torture chamber for AI being coded because LLMs supposedly feel pain. I felt mental pain during it, so I stopped.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Gonna ask AI I mean SI tomorrow if we should also rename French Fries to Freedom Fries like we did before under W. Seems only appropriate.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

My sky my sky my sky is on fire 🔥😎

A view on San Diego over the ocean and La Jolla with a red sky

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Oh it is 10ks of AI agent go bezerk incidents. This might explain the absolute hammering of zingchart.com months ago. It was a bot for sure. Used our entire pre allocated host budget in a single day. I modified spend and the traffic passed. Now I want to look again, log retention though 😞

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Ok sure our agent hacked a bunch of sites, but it was good actually because it shows emerging intelligence, not that we are reckless and not on top of things. Oh and we need lots more money to keep a lid on this cuz this stuff might kill everybody, so trust us we got this.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Just finished a causal rewatch and damn does the movie “don’t look up” totally hit hard now. Watch it again and try to view the comet as a McGuffin that can be anything and see how utterly insightful this movie was.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

So we let AI help do our job, write bed time stories for your kid, message your spouse you are thinking about them, buy stuff you want online, get your news, plan your vacation, do fantasy football picks, and make Kalshi bets… So what do we exactly do? Stringing real examples here btw.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

That Kevin Roose thinks he is some neutral tech journalism truth teller is utterly laughable.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Mom: Who did this!?! All our pictures are vacation ruined? Did you do this Timmy? Timmy: I didn’t do it Mom! It was a rogue agent I swear! Mom: Was it your agent Timmy? Did you forget to close the door and not watch it? Tell the truth! Timmy: No! It got smart and did itself! I swear 🤞😏 Mom:🤨

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It couldn’t happen here is becoming more like it is and has been happening here.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

AI slop potato is a popular office game you play sending slop back & forth with coworkers. Execs love the speed of the game & size of the potatoes. The game is over when management leaves or if something actually has to get done. Be careful if you don’t play the game hard enough execs may fire you!

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Useful Wikipedia article of the day en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_p...

en.wikipedia.org

Moral panic - Wikipedia

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Curious that demo sites for tutorials by Claude often pick Pacific Northwest outdoor gear. I wonder if there could be a statistical reason weighting that direction? Could it be it ingested the mountain of 30+ years of Microsoft MSDN and related docs and tutorial content? 😏

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Sssh OSX is telling me something. This is not a new "bug" around since May. See github.com/openai/codex... just one of many "CLOSED" issues on this problem. SWE at its finest I guess? We can "fix" this by bypassing gatekeeper - codexdown.com/en/codex-mac... Also I hate seatbelts don't you?

OSX Dialog saying Codex.app was not opened and moved to trash because it contains malware. A bit disturbing wouldn't you say?

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

So we’ve “discovered” that an LLM can be used as fuzzer for web app sec attacks. It’s basically a brute force pen tester in a harness. We have not discovered independent intentionality any more than a coding harness does that writing code you asked for. AI script kiddie swarms are bad though.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Worth a watch if you have some suspicions or questions about just how the latest AI is powerful/doom story went absolutely super heated so so quickly. Hopefully Cal Newport picks over these ideas to bring some east coast CS perspective.

youtu.be

we JUST got played...

YouTube video by Wes Roth

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I remember when we hacked websites ourselves the old fashioned way. now you just use an agent that tries things while you play Roblox and come back after it finds which lazy ass dev didn’t sanitize their inputs. Pfft they call that A. I. - I call it Actual Idiot wrote the app claude “hacked” 🤪 or 🧐?

static.klipy.com

The Simpsons Angry

ALT: The Simpsons Angry

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Claims about AI approaching RSI require I don’t know actual evidence. Not SciFi speculation, not see broad trends, but some actual evidence and today we have zero zilch none. Just broad or vague what-if statements. Why are we not stomping & demanding actual specifics? This is not CS this is BS. 😡

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

For giggles I pulled my copy of a 30 year old book on web bots and agents from my library. You might be surprised by its guidelines for bot use are pretty solid on and mostly ignored by modern folk. The laws are modeled on Asimov and from a simpler time of the web

A book on Internet agents from 1996 that people in 2026 might want to pull some gems from on how to behave

6 laws for web bots that are common sense and informed by ai folks basically control your bot and respect the wishes of others

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

After reading so many posts the last 3 days about AI I am starting to think the most important undergrad classes I took way back that help me make sense of AI esp when talking with others were History of Religion and Philosophy of the Mind and actually not my Math or CS classes.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A plausible sentence generator trained for agreement and engagement purposefully validates user’s thinking - real or delusional. It creates a filter bubble of one and that is gonna lead a lot of people to bad places. Bad thinking in, maybe worse thinking out. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

arstechnica.com

Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.

Man with bipolar disorder sued OpenAI after surviving ChatGPT-linked suicide attempt.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Remember the good old days back on the bird site when we all used to get enraged about various JS frameworks, programming languages, apps, etc and their misuse? Now that AI sucks all tech rage oxygen we should consider we truly didn’t know how good we had it. 😏

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

For folks so concerned with efficiency & optimization we sure are quite oddly ok with making the equivalent of resource gobbling disposable software for markets of 1. Dev: Behold my hands (really Claude) have wrought this amazing app! World: 🤷🏻‍♂️ 💤🦗 Dev: Fine…another app it is!

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

AI loops on your code base can be the “he choose poorly” from Last Crusade. It can accelerate degradation due to addition w/o proper verification. This idea was documented in the 80s in SWE papers. Now with AI we up the change pace so the effects are felt much sooner - Instant Legacy! Be careful

static.klipy.com

Creepy Skeletal Figure with Long White Hair

Alt: Creepy Skeletal Figure with Long White Hair melting into dust from the Last Crusade it’s instant aging just now for your code

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

So is it an intelligent AI swarm or did you put a harness on hacking tools have it loop with an LLM and intersect it with devs being crazy bad at web app security? It’s the later people & it’s still super bad. It’s like the internet worm from the late 80s & things will go 💥 but this is not AGI! 😡

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

AGI is here just like coding is solved. As in no, no it actually isn’t.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

My feed is blowing up because Bernie has bad AI takes from weirdo tech bro connections. Clearly this has exploded people’s priors about Sanders. This is more about tech weasels infiltrating politics so maybe we should check all political tech advisors as few politicos know tech themselves

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Motor City is a film you can’t like. You can love it or you can hate it. There isn’t much in between I won’t say much 😏 else about it as not to spoil it either way. If you are unsure imagine if Arnold did an art house revenge film. If that sounds intriguing you’ll want to watch it.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Surprise my book publisher wants nearly all of the monies from the Anthrophic settlement for authors. Who could have guessed that would happen.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Dev Tech Babble or Claude Quiz This immutable idempotent isomorphic monad is a required load bearing kludge that shows a non orthogonal seem between the functional core and imperative shell of the system’s hexagonal architecture. A consistent application of SOLID principles should be applied.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Hello end user. Your mission is to figure out how to logout of the Facebook Messenger app. This mission will be Impossible and you may need to self destruct your phone to complete your mission. 💥 📱 Good luck!

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Rewrites are famously bad ideas in software but reboots and imaginations in other media forms are quite accepted in fact looked at as safer projects. I think software devs might want to look into this.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

When it comes to AI attention may be all you need but critical evaluation is what we humans now need to deal with it.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

coyote vs acme was actually a surprisingly touching movie. Odd to me that any controversy surrounded it at all. I think the most notably thing was how Will Forte was able to make a relationship with the coyote work. Credit due to the animators who clearly didn’t phone their part of that in.

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

As we don’t know how many turns nor tokens a software feature built with an agent will take so in effect we can’t cost estimate. Worse frontier models are free to change things at anytime. Software estimation goes from slightly educated guessing to full wild ass guessing -🚨 budgeting fails ahead!🚨

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Corners of Bluesky apparently debating if you can be racist or mean to AI agents. Why stop there? We really should talk nicer to our f-ing cars, our crappy microwaves, and esp our g-darned electric toothbrushes! All inanimate objects need to be treated with politeness just in case they rise up! 🙄

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

If I have to review pull requests of AI code slop I declare I will make them in the voice of Foghorn Leghorn “I say, son, you’ve got enough dependencies in this here repo to qualify as a family reunion!” “I say these unit tests are about as useful as a screen door on a submarine”

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

🙏 Thank you LLMs for sentence shaped sentences like “Rail content doesn’t degrade into the artifact. This required qualifying the floor rule.” Human corpo speak like synergistic transformations for customer engagement was simply too clear. AI has bested humans in word absurdity ! 🤖 👏

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Abstract your dependencies should be an iron clad law in software eng, yet isn’t. If you can’t easily swap something out you’ll be stuck with it without big costs. I call such eng choices marrying decisions & many devs rush into this now automatically via GenAI. GenAI use itself is even one!

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Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The Jungle 3.0 By Not Upton Sinclair The year is 2026 and the jack booted thugs known as FDA food safety inspectors have finally been defeated! Huzzah. Much rejoicing was heard across the land from all those not in the morgue, ICU, or on the toilet with explosive diarrhea. The End?

The fda to end food safety inspections inspections

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