iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 15h

Exmoor is at its best for #trailrunning when the skies are big and the sun is low for autumn

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Rick Burin @rickburin.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

Reminded today of this all-timer from the early days of The Internet

France is bacon

When I was young my father said to me: “Knowledge is
power – Francis Bacon." I
understood it as "Knowledge is power, France is bacon."
For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage beteen the two. If I said the quote to someone, "Knowledge is power, France is Bacon," they nodded knowingly: Or someone might say, "Knowledge is power" and I’d finish the quote, "France is Bacon", and they wouldn't look at me like I’d said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did “Knowledge is power, France is bacon" mean and got a full 10-minute explanation of the knowledge is power" bit but nothing on "France is bacon". When I prompted further explanation by saying "France is bacon." in a questioning tone I just got a "yes".
Ar 12 I didn't have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I’d never understand.
It wasn't until years later I saw it written down that the penny dropped.

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p(Dulany) @dulanyw.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your CV? Person who wrote the layout engine for Microsoft Word: absolutely not

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amos @fasterthanli.me · 12/10/2026

- Can you pass the salt? - Passing the salt is real work. Probably about a day's worth. Given we're on track to finish lunch today, I probably would budget that for next quarter. - Just pass the damn salt *passes salt* - Okay, you win this one. It actually took three seconds. Listening and learning.

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 12/10/2026

Ironic how the running is hardest to fit in when you need it most. Good job getting out there!

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 11/10/2026

Getting back on the #trailrunning after too much work and too much illness recently. Luckily for Aurora and me, autumn is still showing off, even if we did get wet paws #northdevon

A perky-eared German Shepherd looking out across rolling lush grass fields with semi-grey skies

A shallow stream strewn with chestnut seed cases. A tree silhouettes the boundary between the stream and field, a German Shepherd drinks from the stream, her tail bushy

A steep grass hill sloping up and away, covered in dewy grass and rising up to a pale sun made dewy by the cloud. A German Shepherd trots across the frame, tail up

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Thorne 🌸 - Play Cozysters! 🎢 @ens0.me · 08/10/2026

Software engineering is now about being able to make quality decisions around architecture, design, and technology. The actual engineering all along, the code just was in the way.

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026

Them: AI stops you learning anything. Me: Needing to remind myself of how a specific data system works, gets Claude to generate an interactive quiz/nature-guide with every fact cited from the latest docs and even local LLM free-text questions so I can use it on a train with spotty data connection

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socketwench @deninet.com · 06/10/2026

Still thinking about a comment a read in response to "fast, cheap, or good, pick two" that responded with, "I never expected companies to pick fast twice."

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 04/10/2026

Beautiful autumn run from home this morning with low sun and chestnuts. It was beautiful to see the steam coming from Aurora's paws as she ran up the hill into the sun #trailrunning #northdevon

A low shot of a forest trail covered in vibrant spiky chestnut seed cases like green alien eggs, sunbeams pouring though the trees

A fluffy German Shepherd standing in a forest with her harness on looking classic

A stony woodland track going uphill with sunbeams had leaf litter across it. A fluffy-tailed German Shepherd trots away. I couldn't catch the steam coming from her paws

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ren faire @lathrys.at · 03/10/2026

the problem with ai for the kind of person with my kind of brain is not that it offloads hard cognitive work, per se, but rather it enables a certain disposition to run 24/7 best summarized as:

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Doll @dollspace.gay · 02/10/2026

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 30/09/2026

Disagree. PhD opining outside their area of expertise is the warning sign. Displaying your credentials is fine. Some people get pre-judged as 'non-technical' or 'non-expert' without such displays.

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my ordinary life @calne.ca · 27/09/2026

im very busy

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Kiran @kirancodes.me · 24/09/2026

"file"-system? buddy. I gotta claudesystem

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026

Although CS inclined would think that MinMaxing has the standard problem of optimising a single dimension at the expense of others

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026

What an amazing @originstorypodcast.bsky.social on John Rawls. "What if you had skin in the game but didn't know what colour your skin was going to be?" Also the questioning of meritocracy which seems so naturally true, but the isn't. Great stuff

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 21/09/2026

Fair point... 10x cheaper for the flash model, so then our evalutaion becomes a question of the quality we get on those models. I'll give them a try. I get that API prices are going to be more expensive. It just seems that the result is being locked in to Athropic and OpenAI by $$s.

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 21/09/2026

Last week, I tried open weights models for coding compared to my existing method of a Claude Team Premium account. And I'm missing something, or the cost per token difference makes open weights unusable for me. Reviewing one PR on GLM-5.3 cost more than a day of tokens with Claude!

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 19/09/2026

Snedding some trees and I thought the dog would like to come. The inevitable happened

A German Shepherd romping through a field with a stolen branch

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 18/09/2026

Just two bros who like sitting on each other for cuddles and grooming #cats

A modern IKEA chair. In it, two cats: one black, the other black and white. They are sitting in each other, awaiting fuss not photos

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 18/09/2026

I've thought that, but are we underestimating AI's chance of swallowing architecture too on that timeline? Today, architecture is reserved for humans only because the AIs are bad at it. But that's just scale/capability. Product Owner seems like a more durable place for the border to land

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026

I just read "sprint" in a document and my inner voice read it as "s-print" like sprintf in C, which is language I've barely touched in 20 years. Maybe I need a /clear on my own context today

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026

I ended up making my own setup for working like this, an open source claude skill using ideas from @dollspace.gay to do adversarial critique and refinement of the spec. github.com/aquivalabs/s... It's worked pretty well with our team. Not perfect, but what is?

github.com

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P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 17/09/2026

Software dev is all the 2nd 80% now

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 16/09/2026

We've ended up reviewing specs and docs as humans. Code largely (but not exclusively) via AI. It's imperfect, but pretty good. At least over the duration of a few months. It's close to what you're getting at. Specs are elaborate prompts and we aim to make them hold the review-worthy stuff

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 16/09/2026

In a team! Absolutely. It doesn't seem to be discussed anywhere near as much as individual productivity. Also over real duration and software lifecycle. I've been doing this and plan to blog in our methods soon. If you have read good stuff, please share

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 15/09/2026

Reminder that technologists have no special ability to predict the impact of the technologies they build.

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Claire Cullingworth @ccullingworth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

This made me smile, attached to an ordinary cast iron drainpipe on a house in Durham. #TinyJoys

A cast iron drain pipe going down the side of a white-painted house. A crest of red feathers and a bright orange beak made from something solid have been attached around it. It looks remarkably like "Feathers McGraw", the evil criminal penguin from The Wrong Trousers.

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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

AI can now detect, automate, and chain together exploits faster than any human hacker can. That is significant. Which means that the system vulnerabilities once considered not so low hanging fruit are actually very low hanging.

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 13/09/2026

@originstorypodcast.bsky.social's most recent episode is great in how this madness came to be

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 09/09/2026

Advances in AI can only be understood backwards, but they must be lived forwards - not-quite Kierkegaard

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Singularity's Bounty e/CC @catblanketflower.yuwakisa.com · 08/09/2026

Chinese Room only demonstrates that the operator doesn't need to understand. It doesn't say the operator *cannot* understand. The operator may still understand. If the operator decides to take a night course in Chinese to make his job easier, the room still works exactly the same

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Brian Bilston @brianbilston.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Today’s poem is called ‘The Grammar Police’.

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Dorian Lynskey @dorianlynskey.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Street fascism doesn't start with beatings. It starts with an intimidating show of force. To call that "peaceful" is absurd.

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 06/09/2026

But reading code is increasingly becoming a narrow way of deciding if it's good enough. I care about architecure, shape, and correctness. None of those require reading all the code. AI gives us more test options, more architectural documentation (especially if you build from specs), etc.

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 06/09/2026

😀 If I'm ever 50% about going for a run, I know someone a dog who is going to be 100% up for it!

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 06/09/2026

I think AI leaves only the hardest and most interesting parts to the engineer. Which is invigorating and exposing all at once. If you were a bad engineer(ing organisation) before, you're going to be turbo-bad with AI. If were good, you're going to have the chance to soar.

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 06/09/2026

Running round the woods with Aurora. The rain has come back and made Devon lush and green again! #trailrunning #dogs

A dappled woodland trail with tall trees, leaf litter, ferns, and a German Shepherd with a high tail trotting away

A long hair German Shepherd cooling herself by lying in long grass

And open grass field with rolling sunny hills behind. A fluffy German Shepherd trots aways, her posture happy

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Your intellectual fly is open bcantrill.dtrace.org/2025/12/05/y...

bcantrill.dtrace.org

Your intellectual fly is open | The Observation Deck

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P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 06/09/2026

We should stop thinking about software as anything other than getting the computer to do what we want it to do for us

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 05/09/2026

This is really good perspective on open weights and the difference in economic model between conventional software (0 cost of goods) vs AI (costs on every inference). Although it does skip over cloud and SaaS being very much the latter camp. stratechery.com/2026/whos-af...

stratechery.com

Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?

Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives.

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srrrse @without.boats · 04/09/2026

Every programmer knows Dijkstra’s “Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs” and yet every programmer goes about their day pretending it isn’t true.

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Will Quinn @willquinnart.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Daily bunny no.3431 finds a friend (or foe?)

A bunny meets an alligator in a hallway of an old house, crawling on the carptet like a pet. The alligator has a cheerful expression, but on the wall nearby an alligator shadow, reeling up and with a scarier expression on its face, eyes the bunny ominously

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Aidan Harding @aidanharding.eurosky.social · 01/09/2026

Part 1 of realising we'd got too attached to Anthropic was checking with my immediate team on Opus 5, then wider team, then cross company. Everyone finds it slow, expensive and obtuse. Simply going back to 4.8 has helped loads. Long term, keeping options open with other models and harnesses

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