iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Important thread -- AI makers are repeating a cycle we've seen repeatedly in tech history where software developers assume that everyone else in the universe orders daily life and work the way they do.

000

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 24/09/2026

I would not want to get within kicking distance of one of these clankers but it does seem like they're getting steadily more agile, at least in China. On-the-scene reporting and commentary from Julia Scott in Shanghai: www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-just...

linkedin.com

I Just Watched Robots Waltz with Humans. The Robots Led.

On Tuesday night, in a stadium in Shanghai, I watched five humanoid robots – their metal casings bedazzled like tuxedos – waltz five women around a stage with ballroom élan. It was very Uncanny Valley...

002

Reposted by Scott Rosenberg

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Also notable about the recent vibe shift in AI is that it has made Jensen Huang – a plainly motivated CEO of the world's largest company, familiar sort of capitalist, and someone with a legible perspective on the industry surrounding him — sound like a heretic www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

You're creating something, some entity, an agent, that is smart, that is capable, that is relentless - and the workings of its mind, we don't really understand. The chief scientist at OpenAI ——
You know, Ezra, look. I just don't want you to contribute to that. I don't think software's relentless.
Aren't they trying to make very persistent, highly persistent models?
Because I made it that way.
But that's how they're making it.
Yeah, but that's not persistence, it's just on. Persistence - there's willpower. There's no willpower here, it's just electrical power.

I want to make sure I actually do understand where you are on that divide. Is this something fully new? Is this something that requires something new from us? Or is this more like something old? Are intelligent machines different from the machines we've had?
Well, almost all of technology and civilization is built on layers of understandable technology, which at scale becomes fairly extraordinary.
The fact that we can connect to the internet by just holding a phone up — I mean, it's kind of weird, you know? That we're connected to every piece of information in the world on this little tiny device, just in the air.

So I'd like your perspective on R.S.I.
I think that R.S.I. is, fundamentally, how things are done. So we use software to design a computer to run software to design a computer to run software to design a computer. That's basically what we do — recursive self-improvement — because our computers are getting better every single year.
And in fact, it's getting better than, faster than that every single year, because we use software to make software better. That is called computer engineering. We've been doing this for a long time.

3519

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 19/09/2026

@greatdismal.bsky.social's "The street finds its own uses for things" very much in action.

0153

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 15/09/2026

Huh my experience as a West Coast journalist working for East Coast outfits is "Please get up super early so you can attend our ET meetings! but also since you're on Pacific Time you surely won't mind pitching in when news breaks late and we're all asleep"

130

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 11/09/2026

So true. When I wrote "Say Everything" in 2007-8 I thought I was capturing all that for a tech/media world plunging into the social era. Like, "Here's a decadeful of lessons! Have at it!" But there was little interest. It's so much easier to keep saying "Everything is new! It's Year 0! Let's build!"

132

Reposted by Scott Rosenberg

Max Read @maxread.info · 10/09/2026

one takeaway i had from working in digital media in the 2010s was that it's pretty bad for your brain and your understanding of your career/the world when your industry becomes the main subject of twitter and twitter becomes the main context for your industry. also bad for the industry overall

676293

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 09/09/2026

I always thought that Deja News (which started in the mid 90s and was only later acquired by Google and merged into Google Groups) had complete, searchable Usenet archives? But it's been many years since I looked at how that might have changed over the years

210

Reposted by Scott Rosenberg

Elephant Mastodon @emath.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Literary fiction is coming. It is going to revolutionize the economy. We know that China has already got a start on literary fiction. We can’t afford to be left out of the literary fiction economy. Think of your kids. They might already be engaging with literary fiction.

131315348

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 05/09/2026

Great thread Josh. Salon was VC funded too! I think part of a 1995 "what the hell, who knows where the Web is going" effort, and a bit of a sentimental play by Adobe's John Warnock. But they still had the usual VC expectations, including Salon's crazy 1999 IPO

120

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 05/09/2026

Thank you so much for this! I missed this whole band somehow first time around and am reveling in the discovery.

110

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 01/09/2026

I mean you don't even know was he thinking "fearmongels" or "fearmongols"

110

Reposted by Scott Rosenberg

(EEK!)ristina, PhD @bookishmalarkey.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Read this excerpt ages ago and it always stuck with me

011132

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 30/08/2026

I think this must be a relic of column selection which was much more relevant and useful when monospacing was the norm (1980s). And today the code that worked in that environment and that I guess has been carried faithfully into the present is struggling to function in a different environment?

030

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 28/08/2026

Warsh said "“Oversharing policy deliberations and overcommitting to future decisions can lead markets, businesses and households astray." But all this time I thought markets function best when information is abundantly and equally available! Did something change?

020

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 22/08/2026

Well yes. Except I think maybe you have it backwards. Publishing was going centuries before VC. The VCs borrowed the publishing model perhaps

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 22/08/2026

Journalist: the cup did not respond to a request for comment.

0671

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 18/08/2026

Dear New York Times: I am one reader who uses multiple browsers on multiple devices — not multiple users sharing passwords to a single account. I am not a "family" and don't wish to upgrade to a family subscription. Please stop requiring me to type in emailed codes and suggesting I pay you extra

030

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 01/08/2026

Yeah but that's what we thought about the '80s too

010

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 26/07/2026

And the dimmer that breaks within days of purchase

010

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

If you grew up listening to "Ziggy Stardust" then you get it: this is maybe the most bonkers yet fitting screwup that could ever be

1167

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

I think we're going to be doing a ton of this kind of work before long. It's going to take a lot of effort to figure out how IP rights, compensation and authorship need to evolve in such a world. For every hour our new apps save us, we'll need many more to work all that through.

010

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

Authors should be able to archive their own work! But the same tool I just built (without spending a penny) can be used to steal it. There's nothing new here except that the apps that once required expertise to build are now much more easily and widely available.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

Yes, there's a difference in quantity between reading one page and 600. But I can't say I'm clear where exactly you draw a boundary between "human speed" and "bot speed" for page-loading.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

I mean, the same thing happens every time you read a web page, it's literally a "browser agent" that goes and gets the page for you so you can read it, you aren't walking over to the server and carrying the bits back to your screen yourself.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

This hit home particularly when I had to help Glaze devise workarounds for some of the safeguards Axios's team has put in place. The app has the user manually check the "human verification" box. Well, I'm a human! But yeah, that is my bot, not me, downloading the pages.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

But also, I was keenly aware that in building this tool, I was walking exactly the same road that any AI developer would if they wanted to snatch a mountain of Axios content for model training without, you know, asking.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

To me all this just confirms that the world of abundant bespoke personal software that Casey, Paul Ford and others have begun discussing is a real possibility. I find that exciting!

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

It took 20 minutes to the first build and after about an hour of debugging I had my archive. I also had an app that I could "publish" and share with former colleagues if they wanted their own story archives. I haven't done that yet.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

At first the glaze agent made a series of mistakes that rendered the app useless. But its debugging was smart and easy. One by one, it took in my bug reports ("it's not getting past the cloudflare challenge page" or "we've got a full list of URLs but no body text") and fixed them.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

I kind of gave up on this for a while but when Casey Newton and others started singing the praises of Glaze I thought, OK, let's try this. And Glaze pulled it off. I think part of the win here for them is that they have focused on one specific dev path (making MacOS apps) that suited me.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

I could do that with effort. But the whole point here was to eliminate effort! If this was going to be a time-saver, AI would have to do more of the grunt-work itself.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

They did keep getting better but there were always roadblocks. Recently it became clear that just writing code to crawl the Axios site and get the files was within reach. But doing so would still require me to set up a development environment, manage the code, run the debugging process, etc.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

When people started claiming that AI was writing decent code in 2023, I began asking chatGPT and later Claude and other tools to do this job for me. The tools failed miserably for a long time.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

I always wanted a local archive of the 600+ articles I wrote for Axios during my seven or so years working there. Axios' site has a nice author page but it's chunked into 5-stories-at-a-time and the prospect of manually copying those files always daunted me.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

But I also try to make sure my skepticism doesn't blind me to actual real-world advances — not benchmark BS but everyday accomplishments — and here is one.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

I have largely been a gen-AI skeptic since ChatGPT's advent. We're always two years off from AGI or recursive self-improvement or superintelligence singularity, no matter when you start. It's like the whole industry closed its eyes and adopted the ludicrous Musk promise horizon.

100

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026

Here's a bit of a 🧵 with this one user's experience trying to get a little smidge of productivity out of generative AI coding. TLDR: it's taken three years, but (one of) the bots has finally accomplished a simple task for me, so chalk one up for AI.

200

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 22/07/2026

Yep that's legit. To me though it's all just readers making snap decisions based on reductions of content. I don't believe the print audience was ever "captive." People skimmed. The TV beckoned. You fought for their attention. Today's fight is more brutal and algo-optimized but it's the same fight

010

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 22/07/2026

yeah I got that, it's less about editors than accepting the inevitability that the world will take your heap of words and give it a short handle. To me it's not about platforms. In print we always had newspaper heds we laboriously character-counted. Magazine coverlines were even more frustrating

110

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 22/07/2026

For decades as a writer I quarreled with editors' oversimplifications of my elaborate stories. Then I became an editor and realized how much of a favor they were trying to do me. Now I always write the headline first if I can; it avoids so many problems

140

Reposted by Scott Rosenberg

Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

The fundamental challenge of software development is becoming how do you build reliable software using AI agents that are frequently wrong and often don’t follow instructions while your engineering team increasingly doesn’t understand the codebase because they didn’t write the code?

4638078

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 09/07/2026

Very useful analysis! The manic-depressive loop seems to be accelerating too. But the up phases are less and less sustainable. I think "enchantment" has a sort of half-life. Successive episodes shorten. Don't know whether this ever ends or just infinitely approaches the end, Zeno-paradox-style.

110

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 11/06/2026

LLMs from all the big AI cos keep telling tales about a lighthouse keeper "Elias Thorne." Great story from @404media.co @samleecole.bsky.social based on fascinating paper excavating the likely logic. Shared training data and methods lead to shared fixations. www.404media.co/elias-thorne...

404media.co

Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper 'Elias Thorne'. We Might Know Why

LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named 'Elias Thorne' has made his way from chatbots to Amazon bo...

000

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 07/06/2026

"Attention is all you need"!

000

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 03/06/2026

This thread is a useful explainer on the difference between autocomplete and LLMs. Though I still think the analogy is helpful for dispelling the magical "it's thinking!" response. Read all the way through for an amazing demo of a heat-map tool showing LLM "attention" processes in action

010

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 27/05/2026

" Imagine an English teacher asking people to turn in their five-paragraph essays and everyone turns in a bad novel. That’s what product managers are dealing with in the era of vibe coding." From @ftrain.bsky.social, the whole newsletter is a great read aboard.com/the-ai-hango...

aboard.com

The AI hangover will be delightful

After the bubble pops, it will be like Times Square on January 1st.

030

Reposted by Scott Rosenberg

〽️ɪɢᴜᴇʟ 🔜 GodotFest @bitbra.in · 27/05/2026

Too many people still confuse Software Engineering with writing code. Code is the artifact. Software Engineering is understanding the problem, making tradeoffs, designing the system, reducing complexity, and deciding what shouldn't be built. No amount of 'vibe coding' can help you with this.

741547222

Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 27/05/2026

Getting serious Saul Goodman vibes from Paxton in this pic

screenshot of NY Times photo showing Ken Paxton in a loud blue sport jacket with a downturned smile greeting a supporter

130