iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

So there’s a key decision to take between slashing services or significantly ramping personal taxation at all levels, and until it’s taken then bond yields will ratchet up the pressure on public finances. IMO anyone who believes there’s some clever dodge to avoid that decision is fooling themselves.

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Similarly, wealth taxes alone can’t make up the shortfall. Again, there is some scope, of course – but the gap is just too big, and there’s too few wealthy people. Basic and higher rate tax payers are far more numerous and will need to pick up some of the burden – but there’s no appetite for that.

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The government must be honest that if public services are to improve, individuals are going to have to pay much more tax. Corporates are not the piggy bank to raid people think – there’s a little scope for rises, but hit them too hard and they’ll just shift their profits to lower tax territories.

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Andy Pearce 🇬🇧👨🏻‍💻 @andy-pearce.com · 26/09/2026

The electorate still seem to believe they can pay US levels of taxation, but receive Denmark levels of public services. Governments have been too cowardly to be honest with the electorate, and borrowed endlessly to maintain the façade. Now that the bond markets have called time in that evasion.

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We’ve just been to see the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum. It’s quite incredible how well it’s been preserved! For anyone visiting, I would caution against making any dinner reservations too soon afterwards – it took us over two hours to get through after entry.

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Andy Pearce 🇬🇧👨🏻‍💻 @andy-pearce.com · 25/09/2026

No Broadchurch? No Ghosts (UK)?? No Luther?! Do these people even watch TV??! Can I ever climb down from this escalating cavalcade of punctuation??!?!!?

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Wat Tyler, who lead the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Didn’t end well for him.

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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I can just hear Farage’s voice in my head blathering on in faux outrage about how Robin Hood goes to show Britain has always been soft on crime.

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Reposted by Andy Pearce 🇬🇧👨🏻‍💻

Here's today's column on the astonishing, ongoing mistreatment of people with #ME/CFS. Please spread it far and wide: the only thing which can break the media's wall of indifference is seeing an article about the issue go viral. Thank you. 1/2 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

theguardian.com

Abandoned, dismissed and gaslighted: there is no excuse for the way ME sufferers have been betrayed | George Monbiot

Changes in guidance and science seem to have little impact on millions of devastated lives. It’s a social crisis playing out behind closed doors, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

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Just my view so far, as someone who’s been writing code professionally for a quarter century. I think there are risks and hazards – but I think these can be mitigated by using the tools in the right way, and still have them be an overall productivity gain. We’ll see if I still think that in 2 years!

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But I respect your arguments, and it’s quite possible the future may prove you more right than me – these tools are still very new, and evolving rapidly. My view of using them in areas outside coding (which is almost uniquely verifiable with automated testing) is also much more hesitant.

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At the moment my main genuine concerns are preserving a path for junior devs to become skilled, maintaining the knowledge and scepticism to challenge and correct LLM-generated code where needed; and developer burnout due to spending less time writing and more reviewing. These are genuine issues.

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… is not a new phenomenon, even if the source of it might be, and we know the symptoms to look for: a rise in outages, apparently simple features taking longer than expected to execute, rises in system resource usage for equivalent load, etc. So if this happens, it will be discovered eventually.

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… come from people trying to do too much in one go, having not adequately got the design straight in their head (and reviewing with the team) before they start coding at all. Will we see rises in technical debt in the longer term since we started using AI? Too early to say, really. But tech debt…

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… and keeping these reviews small and compact is key to keeping them effective. This requires people to be modular, where each module has a consistent and clean interface – this allows you to specify the full context needed by the model to produce a decent implementation. Many failures I’ve seen…

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… overcomplicating things – too much modularity, too many shallow interfaces. But using it in a more constrained way, to implement in smaller increments, I’ve found it produces results good enough that even requiring a solid review, it’s saving time. We still require manual review of all code added…

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I still have this concern to an extent, but my experience has been more positive than yours has apparently been – we primarily use Claude Code, I can’t speak much for others. It certainly makes errors, and my experiments at getting it to build large systems from scratch have lead to it…

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Andy Pearce 🇬🇧👨🏻‍💻 @andy-pearce.com · 23/09/2026

This has always been my primary concern with LLM coding assistants. John Ousterhout talks about the hazards of “tactical tornadoes” in his excellent book “A Philosophy of Software Design” – seemingly highly productive in the short term, but accumulating complexity in the code in the longer term.

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All strawberries today derive from five plants brought to France from Chile in 1712 by French spy François-Amadée Frézier.

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But I don’t understand. How can something not real have a Wikipedia page? IS ALL OF WIKIPEDIA LIES???!??!?!!? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc

en.wikipedia.org

Orc - Wikipedia

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I didn’t know that an antelope could cross-breed with a rhino.

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Waking up to the dawn is one reason I love autumn so much.

Dawn seen in a modern housing estate. Houses are silhouetted along the horizon, framed by trees on the sides of the picture. The dawn peeks out from between a gap in the houses, rimming the clouds nearby with golden yellow, and those further up the sky in soft pink.

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So you mean to say that I should’ve been calling my second brain a third brain all along?! Man! Now I’m going to have to relabel the jar and everything.

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With the name it sounds like they make a bag of tiny little mozzarella balls that you can scatter on your food for those too lazy to tear it up.

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Example of what I mean by redundancy and nuance: for straightforward use it doesn’t matter if I’m angry, annoyed, irritated, frustrated, exasperated, infuriated, enraged, furious, vexed, outraged, or livid – but each bears its own subtle shades of meaning for those more fluent.

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I feel like the redundancy and nuance of meaning that makes it a poetic and expressive language (in my humble and uneducated opinion) also make it quite resilient if your purpose is just conveying core meaning – and once you know past, present, and continuous tenses for a verb, you’re good.

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English definitely has a lot of irregular verbs and some quirky tenses (“I would have been living in this house for a year next Thursday if I hadn’t been evicted yesterday”). But you can ignore 90% of these 90% of the time in everyday speech and be understood.

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I always remember a friend’s girlfriend years ago was a native Russian speaker and also spoke fluent English, French, German (maybe more?). She said the old trope of English being harder to learn was nonsense, it was much less effort to learn than the others she’d learned for these sorts of reasons.

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Quite possibly, but I think Trump has a poker player’s approach to international diplomacy – it’s probably a bluff, but you have to pay to see. His calculation is presumably that the EU is less willing than him to play chicken with economies affecting the livelihoods of 800 million people.

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Asterix Archiv 🐗 @comedix.de · 20/09/2026

The EU might always cave in – we’ll see! The new “irresistible force meets immovable object” debate might be TACO vs. EUACI*. * I choose to pronounce that “yucky”.

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Reposted by Andy Pearce 🇬🇧👨🏻‍💻

Eine schöne Bastel- und Malarbeit. Manchmal trägt Obelix den Hinkelstein. Manchmal ist Obelix der Hinkelstein. Dürfte nicht leicht gewesen sein, diesen Stein zu finden. #Asterix #Fanart

Das Bild zeigt einen kleinen, länglichen und nach oben abgerundeten Stein, dessen Form an einen Hinkelstein erinnert. Der Stein wurde rundherum so bemalt, dass er selbst zum Körper von Obelix wird.
Auf der Vorderseite sind Obelix’ Gesicht mit den roten Zöpfen, sein nackter Oberkörper sowie der grüne Gürtel mit großer gelber Schnalle zu sehen. Darunter setzt sich seine typische blau-weiß gestreifte Hose bis zum unteren Rand des Steins fort. Seine Füße stehen auf einer kleinen grünen Wiese, die mit roten Pilzen und Blumen verziert ist. Der obere, dunkelgraue Teil des Steins bleibt weitgehend unbemalt und wirkt dadurch wie ein Hinkelstein, der hinter Obelix aufragt.
Die Rückseite löst den kleinen optischen Scherz auf: Dort fehlen Kopf und Oberkörper völlig. Stattdessen sieht man nur Obelix’ Arme, die sich von beiden Seiten um den grauen Stein legen. Seine Hände greifen hinter dem „Hinkelstein“ ineinander. Darunter sind wiederum die gestreifte Hose und seine Füße auf der Wiese zu erkennen.

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I was walking the dogs past a rookery the other day, and I found their raucous song to be a fitting anthem for the way the world feels right now. Let us hope by spring the world might have changed to more closely resemble that season’s euphonious chorus.

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So maybe EU banks providing services to the ICC could still send and receive payment instruction messages, but their access to their accounts at correspondent banks to effect the transfers could be frozen. Their US-based assets could also be claimed by the US government if things escalated.

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