iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

This feels like a marketing department trying to ascend through the sefirot after the tree surgeons have lopped off everything above Yesod.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Oh wait. Two test failures out of 180K.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I know it’s really easy to build desktop UIs using web technologies, but it is at best annoying when I’m in a list and do Command-A to select all, and end up selecting g all the text Iin the surrounding UI and none of the list items.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Well, now I have to consider if Wittgenstein is right behind me, and I can’t be sure he isn’t.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

No that’s the Keynesian laugh. Usually signifying that the character has hidden a small rhinoceros under a table, fully anticipating Russell and Wittgenstein’s shenanigans.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Sigh. It seems that the same people who celebrate LLM generated maths proofs owning human mathematicians also don’t appreciate when LLM assisted proof help make interesting progress. We now know that BB(10) > Graham’s number, and BB)335) is independent of ZFC!

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Well, now I’m imagining the classic Wittgenstein Scream. A classic, often used to indicate that the character dying on screen doesn’t understand the meaning of the script, let alone the movie.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The more times I overhear boat club conversations the more I understand why they end up being important to so many peoples careers. So much around coaching and managing boats sounds exactly like the sort of mentoring and coaching conversations I have at work.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Phone displays being “Always on” is useful, but definitely freaks out the part of my brain that thinks, “That must be using loads of power, it still being on must be a bug.”

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Reposted by Duncan MacGregor

Rose Schmits @roseschmits.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Ooooh its leg day in the studio

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Was this ever lifted straight for Asterix? If not it feels like something that should have been.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It’s a little like the owner of a wildlife preserve commissioning a report by a bunch of experts about the bad effects of strip mining on wildlife, and then strip mining g the wildlife reserve anyway while saying, “We consulted! Look, they even wrote a report!”

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I see OpenAI is taking the bold strategy of, “See! We can’t be trusted to regulate ourselves, guess you’d better regulate Our industry and block any potential competitors.”

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Reposted by Duncan MacGregor

Artologica aka Michele Banks @artologica.net · 06/10/2026

Look at this precious baby 😭

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

At least the people who believe Mithras cults were so influential and must have affected our culture so extensively that AI should be able to distill their rituals from the totality of human knowledge are fun. Mad, but fun.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Well… that’s a take I hadn’t seen before. “It’s fine if AI can’t come up with new ideas, because we’ve already discovered them all.” Where do you even start with that? It doesn’t even have the redeeming feature of being entertaining.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This puts us wandering round New York in search of cocktails in a whole new light.

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Reposted by Duncan MacGregor

John Bull @garius.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I genuinely think it's a shame Herbert couldn't see that. We could have got a twisting, tortured book on Irulan on a par with the original Dune novel but... *waves his hand at human sandworms, infinite Idahos and sex witches*

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I would expect a cat to be wanting to murder Muad'Dib, so probably Harkonnen.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That’s not to say it totally makes sense, but the things that make the least sense do have a certain wild internal logic to them.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

FWIW I enjoyed it immensely but maybe because I got what was off right from the get go and so absolutely rolled with things as they unfurled. I feel like I should have spotted who the producer was earlier because there was a good resemblance.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

So today I went and saw Digger. I’ve seen a bunch of reviewers comparing it to Synecdoche, New York and Eyes Wide Shut, and I think those comparisons are entirely reasonable, and whether you like the film is going to depend, like those, on whether you enjoy them being entirely up their own arses.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That would have involved the second being delivered during the film. What sort of monster do you think I am?

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A negroni delivered to your seat is a sign of a civilised cinema.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A MIDI propane seems not nearly retro enough. I demand a CV pot plant driving a modular synth.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I bet DavrOS never had cooperative multitasking.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

To be fair the doctor probably keeps finding bugs in the spec, and changes history as the most expedient fix.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Calendar wrong. Calendar wrong in weird and annoying ways for dates before 1970. Just imagine an ancient Roman looking at the date, and then adjusting their sundials by an hour.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

One of the things that led me down this path was weird behavior on 1900. The leap year behavior here is correct, at least while you are in the Gregorian calendar, but getting a BST time for 1900 was a surprise.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

There’s even a bug fix in the history for, “Incorrect DST for dates after 2038 when January 1st falls on a Tuesday.” That fills me with confidence, err, I mean horror.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Of course, using the IANA time zone data is only a recommendation in the spec. Nobody is mandating you actually get any time zone handling correct, and while I can understand that from a spec point of view it does allow for horrors.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

No wonder this date test has issues. I found this little bit of joy because I fixed an obvious bug and wondered why the 1900 cases started failing.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Oh dear lord! ``` // Another workaround! The JRE doesn't seem to know about DST // before year 1 AD, so we map to equivalent dates for the // purposes of finding DST. To be safe, we do this for years // before 1970. ```

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

OH: “Heh, <famous person> hasn’t got, ‘the thing,’ yet. Could you get <other person> to send it to them, because it’s her ‘thing.’” Well, now I want to work out what they’re making.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think it’s a bug in the test, but that’s a job for tomorrow. I have at least checked that I can reproduce the issue by passing in a specific time.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I also found a date related test that apparently fails for a 1 hour period on the first of each month.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I remember this being a thing a startup was trying to do 16(?) years ago. I think it seemed much less creepy when Sam Altman was involved.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Found and submitted fix for intermittent build failure. Build failed for a different reason, so found and fixed that. Now the build is failing for another reason, probably to do with networking. This isn’t frustrating AT ALL.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I never knew the Egyptians wore socks with sandals.

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Reposted by Duncan MacGregor

Vajra Chandrasekera @vajra.me · 30/09/2026

My third novel, HERO COME HOME, officially has a cover! Preorderable from the usual places us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

The cover of my third novel, HERO COME HOME. Four human figures centred, the main image being that of a bearded man looking back over his shoulder (that's Oro, the protagonist), with a circle of symbols behind him. We can see a swan and a key. In the foreground are three people: two women, one with a mysterious marking? scar? who knows!? on her cheek and the other carrying a sword, flanking an older, balding man holding up a pistol. The possibly-scarred woman looks ever so slightly amused, and that is certainly very like her. Everybody else is not happy to be here, or indeed, anywhere

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Why there hasn’t been a fork called nginew I’ll never know.

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Reposted by Duncan MacGregor

New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Just saw folk who join the uncritical rush towards AI referred to as "LLMings", and I am stealing that.

static.klipy.com

Vintage Pixel Game: Lemmings

Alt: Vintage Pixel Game: Lemmings

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Well, now I have a real example, and I cannot be bothered to try and correct all those deficiencies. I will not @ them, except that is also a clue.

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I once thought about doing a joke graph about podcast production values vs the chance people would listen to them. My joke left hand end would have been, “Low recording level combined with distortion and voices so far apart on the sound stage that each speaker is only in one head phone.”

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Duncan MacGregor @aardvark179.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

There is something joyful about hearing a broad Glaswegian accent asking, “So them guys said you had meed.”

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