iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Jev is very cool, but if your task is reasonably straightforward (and especially visual), the tiniest Qwen models are very good at it already and run locally. This is running real-time on my MacBook Air.

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

An AI tell I'm increasingly seeing is something I'm calling "zero exposition". This screenshot is of the *first* paragraph of a piece and uses "this" without first defining what "this" even refers to.

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

GTA 6 has taken so long that I've reached an age and temperament that I'm not even sure if I'll be bothered to buy it and might just watch people stream it instead 😂

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Spend £100s on vacation in the US with my British card: no problem. Get home and need to pay £3.50 for the Dartford Tunnel: full approval needed in my banking app 😏

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

@tflangkaas.bsky.social Been reading your post about Roman numeral algorithms! What do you think about this? bsky.app/profile/coop...

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

The funniest Roman numeral generator (in Ruby) I've seen yet: def r(n)=n<1?'':r(n/10).tr('IVXLC','XLCDM')+(n%=10;n<4??I*n:n<5?'IV':n<9??V+?I*(n-5):'IX')

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Nice to see Ruby being represented at the World Cup final.

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

The kids' school spent years rolling out wifi to every classroom, giving out money for every kid a tablet, moving schedules and elements of classwork to the devices, etc. Now the government's new ban on "smart technology" unwinds all of it 😂

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

TIL up until the mid 1900s, artists could buy a paint made out of ground up flesh from Egyptian mummies and it was used in numerous famous artworks: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_b...

en.wikipedia.org

Mummy brown - Wikipedia

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Midjourney getting into body scanning is fine and dandy, but will you only be able to view your results on a public Discord channel?

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Back in 1987, Apple released an album called "The Apple Boogie" and handed it out at conferences. You can listen to it in all its glory here, including a weird parody of the Ghost Busters theme.. www.youtube.com/watch?v=chJH...

youtube.com

Apple Boogie 1987 Mac Promo Album Cassette Tape (Apple Computers Inc)

YouTube video by martinradio

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

I love finding clearly AI-generated "tech news" sites so I can block them in future. $1m for a company that just received $12.5m in funding.. sure! 😂

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Hot take, but while Layla is a good song, the instrumental second movement is 100x better than the rest of it.

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

I have a pure Ruby implementation of Doom (to be released soon). You *can* play it, but it's really for benching Ruby implementations and JITs (ala Optcarrot). Initial results: Ruby 4.0.2 without YJIT: 73 fps Ruby 4.0.2 with YJIT: 207 fps TruffleRuby 34: 235 fps

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Rubyists! I am reviving Ruby Inside after 12 years of hiatus. I have too many Ruby things I want to blog about :-) So far I've got the archive up and running at rubyinside.com/archives/ - it's a bit of a Ruby time capsule..

rubyinside.com

Archives · Ruby Inside

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

I was asking Claude about what animal has the worst life, and this sentence out of context feels like peak horror: "he bites into her flank and his body literally dissolves into hers, losing his eyes, fins, and organs until he's just a pair of gonads attached to her bloodstream"

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

You might be old, but are you "radio stations have a helicopter flying around to look at traffic jams" old?

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Got experimenting with Matplotlib and GeoPandas. So here's countries colored by the colors hiding in their names:

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Rubyists: want to generate embeddings of text with a 25MB model that punches far above its weight and runs on CPU wherever you want? `gem install informers` and then this is it.

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

A huge collection of classic text mode fonts in modern formats (TTF, WOFF): int10h.org/oldschool-pc... .. think EGA, VGA, Tandy, Acorn, all the 80s computers, etc.

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Looking through an SD card of photos from 2006. The same product now is 5x more expensive than then 😂

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

I'm looking through a SIMTEL CD from 1992. I see a (rare for then) open source C compiler called Small-C. I Google to see if anyone has ported it to modern systems. A dude made his latest commit to one an HOUR ago. What are the odds.

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Discovered the source code for QBasic. First step in the build notes: "1. Make sure you've got a lot of memory (around 570 K)"

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Had a funny "Scunthorpe problem" on a social site I run today. A legit looking post kept getting rejected. Turns out the word "specialist" contains "𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒔"...

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

Just had a heck of a 30 year flash back: Borland Resource Workshop! It let you open EXEs/DLLs and edit their resources, text, and sometimes even the form layouts. I used to customize Windows 3.1 apps with it for fun. Any fellow oldies remember it?

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

I love how Wikipedia covers hiphop beefs the same way they cover armed conflicts

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Rare moment: I have three full days to myself. Let's see what carnage I can produce 😂

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Went from MacBook Pro M1 Max to MacBook Air M5 two weeks ago. Faster, form factor better, 15" way better than 14". Love it. Only complaint: it needs a USB-C on the right side!

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

I've only just learnt macOS has /usr/bin/time (NOT the shell one!) which has a -l option for showing memory/resource usage of whatever you ran!

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

One trick to slash oil prices? Shrink the barrel. Works like a charm for my favourite supermarket brands who now charge the same price for 80g for what used to be 100g. 😏

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

I was looking at JavaScript Weekly ten years ago and found "State of the Art JavaScript in 2016": medium.com/javascript-a... .. Plus ça change.. 😂

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

PureJPEG is a pure Ruby JPEG encoder and decoder. While it works as expected, it has a bunch of features to get retro/distorted JPEGs, which is what I was really going for: github.com/peterc/pure_... (Examples shown in the README!)

github.com

GitHub - peterc/pure_jpeg: Pure Ruby JPEG encoder and decoder with no native dependencies

Pure Ruby JPEG encoder and decoder with no native dependencies - peterc/pure_jpeg

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

I love how this has been the case on Google for over ten years now. (The solution is to write USD instead, but it still catches me out.)

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Dropping OpenAI for Anthropic out of ethical concerns is understandable, but reading Anthropic's statement of four days ago it feels like ditching Ultron to hang out with Wario?

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

You can play the original SkiFree game from the Windows 3.1 days in your browser - this is not a drill! retrotick.com

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

A question that flummoxes LLMs: "Does English have any words which are the name of the place where the same named product is purchased or consumed, akin to café in French?" SOTA models give wrong answers like "bakery" and "bar", except for Gemini 3.1 Pro which got "takeaway" and "carvery".

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Briefly caught the genealogy bug and found my most distant ancestor so far: James Waterhouse, born in 1318, in Lincolnshire (where I live now!) At 23 generations above me, though, I realised I have 8,388,608 such ancestors, so he's probably one of yours too!

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

A bit sad that 3I/ATLAS didn't turn out to be an alien spaceship.

Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Music recs are boring, but OK: WOLF ALICE. They remind me of Fleetwood Mac. All their songs are so different. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKsf... It's refreshing how many bands this decade are heavily influenced by the 70s-90s and not continuing with the milquetoast bullshit that ruled the 2010s.

youtube.com

Wolf Alice - White Horses (The Clearing Tour Video)

YouTube video by WolfAliceVEVO

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Peter Cooper @cooperx86.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Got ruby.wasm down to 4,223 kB over the wire *including* the stdlib! 20MB+ is more typically seen in similar builds, but there's a ton of stuff that can't even be used in the browser including a huge needless C library. More to follow..