iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 28/09/2026

I do my best to avoid buying anything American, and I especially want to support European tech companies, but damn I wish that didn’t feel like taking a time machine back to 2011.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 12/09/2026

I’ve biked through Eberswalde many times but today is the first day I made it up the hill to the town’s most highly-rated memorial maps.app.goo.gl/BS5Y6C6oJFxN...

maps.app.goo.gl

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 11/09/2026

Nice thing to see at the end of a pretty bleak week to be an immigrant in this country

“Fuck AfD”, “Fuck Nazis”, etc. written in crayon on pieces of paper taped to a window. There’s also a skeleton for some reason.

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Reposted by Travis Brown

Oliver Marsh does tech policy @olivermmarsh.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

My last research work with @algorithmwatch.org, on Google AI Overviews on German regional elections. Why AI Overviews? Because many more people see these than chatbot answers. In sum: Google's previously clear approach to election-related info seems to be replaced with something much messier.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 31/08/2026

X‘s daily Community Notes updates have been pretty consistent this year, until last week (the current latest bundle was created over a week ago).

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 24/08/2026

Thinking about how lonely software development has become, and it’s partly AI, but it’s also the fact that so many software developers turned into mask-off fascists the minute they realized they could get away with it without harming their careers.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 04/08/2026

The one gen AI product I would never disable and would probably pay money for is a browser plugin that draws Dracula Flow hair on every photo of Andrew Tate I have to look at

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 04/08/2026

How are there so many beloved BBC journalists who look exactly like this and are also wildly racist pedophiles? At least I only have to learn about them when they die, but that seems to happen every couple of months now.

Photo from the Guardian of a jowly man with messy white hair.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 04/08/2026

Substack has started withholding a small number of Nazi accounts in Germany, which is good, I guess! What’s not so good is that you can still view the publications that these Nazi accounts own, you can find them in search, and you can even subscribe to them.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 20/07/2026

there are a lot of things about our current cultural moment that are extremely depressing but the extent to which the right tried to canonize charlie kirk and managed only to turn him into a meme (derogatory) is genuinely encouraging

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 19/07/2026

Just deleted a post because I don’t want to contribute to the spread of disinformation in any way, but fingers crossed the event at issue will actually happen soon and we can celebrate properly.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 17/07/2026

The best part: the old screen name is available for anyone interested in impersonating a federal agency (I just checked).

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 17/07/2026

If you want to get mad about some shit the US government did that isn’t murderous or fascist but is just nonsensical and fucking stupid, the National Labor Relations Board account on X recently changed its handle from “@NLRB” (which it had had since 2009) to “@NLRB_Board”.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 16/07/2026

In general I find it annoying to run into Americans in Berlin, but last night I saw some Waschbären here for the first time, and I felt really proud of these little guys, just climbing around on abandoned buildings, not really assimilating, causing problems for our German hosts

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 08/07/2026

I’ve listened to a few Ashley St. Clair interviews, and IMO the one Brian Reed did last month is by far the most responsible, even though Reed is a normie journalist I often disagree with. I don’t know why leftists in media default to deference so often when talking to formers, but it’s a problem.

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Rachel Cohen @cohen489.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

perhaps we should view nazi tattoos as disqualifying from here on out. i kind of assumed we'd already view them as disqualifying but was unpleasantly surprised so maybe from here we could all agree not to downplay nazi tattoos since they seem pretty indicative of broad disregard for human dignity

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 30/06/2026

Productive morning in Berlin: picked up my new Aufenthaltserlaubnis at the Ausländerbehörde and happened to ride past a burned out car (the first really good one I’ve seen in a year or two).

A parked car that has burned. The windows are broken and the trunk and hood are partially open and damaged.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 23/06/2026

I would learn German and get my German citizenship solely to be able to vote for a politician who would pledge to get these fucking vehicles out of our bike lanes and off of our sidewalks. Fuck Amazon, obviously, but also fuck every other company doing this shit.

A photo of an electric Amazon delivery vehicle that is essentially a small car but that seems to be allowed to use bike lanes and block sidewalks in Berlin for some fucking reason?

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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I'm gonna get on my high horse. Civil society folks with huge followings – lawyers, academics, think tank staff – follow & share random, anon accounts that *solely* steal video and text. ICE car crash. Date? Location? Source? None of it? It's decontextualized. Making it 10x harder to follow-up!

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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Travis is raising an aspect of what I'll call "news rot"– pseudo news dressing itself up as journalism. Is text/video stolen? (Lifted and de facto claiming authorship.) Screenshots are too often altered. People pester y'all to post sources and links not to be cops but to make content checkable.

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nora "the tea kobold" rude (they/them ze/hir) @nora.zone · 19/06/2026

hey does anybody need a project

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 19/06/2026

We need a labeler for every account on here that has ever posted BREAKING on a tweet screenshot.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 19/06/2026

Just saw a reskeet of some Substacker asshole I’ve never heard of (Timothy McBride) posting “BREAKING” on top of a screenshot of a tweet from yesterday by some podcaster I’ve never heard of posting something “BREAKING” about Iran with no clear source. What the fuck is this? How did we get here?

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 17/06/2026

This is why I prefer Bluesky, your home for artisanal clout farming engagement bait screenshotted from Twitter by real humans

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 10/06/2026

I just identified this “Dux Vul” guy and guess what, he’s a name in the European tech startup scene and has had C-suite jobs at companies you’ve heard of.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 05/06/2026

We need a big comprehensive compilation of people praising / defending Platner. I’ve hated every second I’ve had to spend learning about this guy but at least he could give us a list of people nobody ever needs to listen to again.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 01/06/2026

Not really the point but social media post screenshot culture is such a fucking plague. If someone did this on one of my repos I would block them on the spot.

github.com

Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software · Issue #929 · RsyncProject/rsync

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 01/06/2026

This is the most frustrating thing about German immigration as well. Will your residence permit get extended for one, two, three, or zero years? Will the officer immediately switch to English or yell at you for your shitty German? It’s all 100% a lottery based on how their morning is going.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 27/05/2026

These are two extremely annoying men who sometimes individually make something beautiful more or less by accident. They shouldn’t be allowed to talk to each other and they definitely shouldn’t be allowed to use AI.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 20/05/2026

Finally got a response from @github.com on my impersonation report. Unfortunately it’s useless garbage that says that GitHub Trust and Safety doesn’t care if someone uses my email address and name and avatar to promote their AI project.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 20/05/2026

Massie is a Nazi weirdo who happens to be right about a couple of things and it’s cool actually that he lost to the stupidest motherfucker Trump was able to buy.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 19/05/2026

As usual I did an extremely bad job at this and as usual that didn’t matter.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 19/05/2026

Today is that day that happens every couple years when I have to pretend to know German.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 13/05/2026

“The Post could not independently determine who is behind XFreeze.” Hmmm in three minutes I found a SoundCloud account with a different alias that uses the same email address as this guy, and in another five minutes I had a personal Facebook, phone number, and birthday.

washingtonpost.com

Elon Musk’s anonymous online BFF spreads his ideas and attacks his enemies

The Tesla CEO regularly amplifies a fan account called XFreeze that sings his praises and criticizes opponents in his lawsuit against OpenAI.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 09/05/2026

I especially like how “Flex Platform” makes this sound like a feature instead of a symptom of the collision of two flavors of capitalism that are almost equally stupid.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 09/05/2026

Google Maps in Japan: go to platform X and use train car Y for fastest access to exit Z at your destination Google Maps in Germany: Flex Platform

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 26/04/2026

Sitting in the airport in Tokyo and wondering what it would have been like here. It’s hard to imagine cheering but surely there would be some kind of celebration.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 18/04/2026

Tokyo is funny because you go to some random place and have the best ramen or tonkatsu you’ve ever eaten, which makes sense, but then you go to another random place and have the best canelé, the best brisket, the best lobster roll, etc.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 11/04/2026

If anyone has a couple minutes to waste, you could report this GitHub account and the X account downthread for impersonation. I’m not too worried about either, but I am curious about whether the platforms will do anything.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 11/04/2026

I got my first AI impersonator, and AFAICT it’s just complete nonsense. They copied a repo where I publish X Community Notes data, rebranded it as “angelic cognition”, and pushed new (unsigned) commits with my email address on them.

github.com

GitHub - KisugeAI/KisugeAI: Ask the angel for the truth

Ask the angel for the truth. Contribute to KisugeAI/KisugeAI development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 23/03/2026

I have no idea who the fuck “Joe Walsh” is but one of his posts just showed up in my feed and this is incredible levels of Bluesky: ✅ Screenshot of tweet ✅ No alt text ✅ Date cropped off ✅ Attribution also cropped off ✅ Substack in bio

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 23/03/2026

Flunkyball is such a weird part of German culture. I have no problem with teenagers getting drunk in the park at 9:30 on a Monday morning, but there’s always broken glass and they never clean up after themselves.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 18/03/2026

I grew up in a place without many trees, and as a child my strongest political belief was that anyone who cuts down a tree deserves the death penalty. My priorities have changed, but I don’t think I was entirely wrong.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 14/03/2026

I pulled Google Maps activity for all of these Proud Boys donors, and almost half (947) are contributors. 398 are Level 3+ Local Guides! Nobody’s made it past Level 7, though.

gist.github.com

pb-donations.md

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 14/03/2026

What a nice little surprise to wake up to on a Saturday morning

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 13/03/2026

Correction: I misspelled “MeidasTouch” here. Posting this so that it comes up in search if people are looking for examples of Filipkowski and co. sharing misinformation.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 12/03/2026

I missed that this X screenshot had also been posted (even more virally) by Ron Filipkowski, the fucking MidasTouch guy. He has 774k followers on here. I hate this place so much.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 12/03/2026

Every time I open Bluesky I end up spending like 15 minutes just getting angry about US liberals posting misinformation and/or Nazi shit. I’m not going back to X obviously but at least there the assholes working to make the world a shittier place aren’t ostensibly on my side.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 12/03/2026

I don’t care that this Betty Bowers account is satire. If you’re posting shit like this on a website full of credulous hashtag resistance dipshits you are a part of the disinformation machine. We don’t need this trash.

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Travis Brown @travisbrown.dev · 12/03/2026

This “Iran News” account is not “Iranian news”, because of course it fucking isn’t. It used to be a backup for “Nadira Ali”, an account that has claimed to be operated from Pakistan and that quotes a neo-Nazi in its header image.

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