iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Every time I think about resubscribing to WoW I remember all the botters, boosters, gold farmers, gold buyers, min-maxers, questie users, and say nope. Somewhere there's a great game under all the slop, but right now you might as well train an AI to play for you.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Murderbot was indeed an entertaining and well done space opera television series hitting all the usual tropes and notes, but how that beat out the far more original and significant Pluribus for the Ray Bradbury Award is beyond me.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Made the mistake of reading the first couple of pages of @rfkuang.bsky.social's latest novel at lunch yesterday and now I have to spend the weekend finishing it.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

He's not anti-woke. He's just sleepy.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Apparently every single non-person that has my email address—from my senator to my coop management to the store who sold me a single USB cable in 2008—has decided they are now a cherished family friend who deserves to spam me with "Warmest Holiday Wishes! (And don't forget our 15% off coupon!)"

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Back in school in a not-especially exciting city in a foreign country ATM, so Sundays are a tad boring. Consequently I logged in to Bluesky for the first time in a few months and was disappointed to see how few actual real world friends I found. Hope they're all just healthily off social media.

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Reposted by Elliotte Rusty Harold

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 16/03/2025

On the subject of people traveling to the US right about now: Fuck, if I were from another country and I didn't need to come, I sure as hell wouldn't, the current administration has made it clear traveling here isn't safe, and why not take them at their word, there's a whole world to visit

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Don't try to redesign people to fit the tools. Redesign the tools to fit the people.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

Opened up a circa 2008 desktop PC to remove the hard drive before I disposed of it and inside I found: * 1 Loose Screw * 2 credit cards * a multimeter * a bag of edibles

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

An underrated benefit of code review is that the reviewer can learn new things too, like I just learned that in JUnit 5 test classes and methods no longer have to be public.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Want to fly cheaply to a specific city in next few weeks, but I don't really care when or even how long I stay. I do want to specify non stop and class of service. Shockingly none of the airfare search sites can handle this. Any suggestions? (Google Flights and Skyscanner cannot do it.)

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Migrating from pair.com and GCP to Dreamhost, and I'm a little shocked that interactive website building and website maintenance UX hasn't improved in 20+ years. This is why I still use SCP and ssh.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

Google Cloud still hasn't learned the lesson Steve Yegge tried to teach them: "ERROR: (gcloud.app.deploy) INVALID_ARGUMENT: Error(s) encountered validating runtime. Runtime php74 is end of support and no longer allowed. Please use the latest PHP runtime for App Engine Standard.."

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

One more time: running security scanners and static analyzers on random open source projects you do not understand and submitting its warnings as bugs is rarely accurate or helpful and wastes maintainers' time. Please don't do that.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

It's hard to take someone seriously who starts by saying you should tell the truth no matter what and immediately follows it up with invisible men in the sky.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Outside the Apple sphere, the bar for what counts as acceptable UI is still far too low. 99% of software developers are doing cargo cult design while laboring under severe Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Reposted by Elliotte Rusty Harold

Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 06/12/2024

And seriously, cut out this disingenuous bullshit. If someone says “I want United Health to not do murder, and for us to call what they do murder” that isn’t a call for more murder. It’s a call for less.

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Reposted by Elliotte Rusty Harold

Ruby Bell ✵ BIRTHDAY Love Witch ✵ 🏴🇵🇸🍉 @rubybellchicago.com · 03/12/2024

Pleased to see that Hunter Biden will remain free, so that hopefully he will also remain as free with the money he has historically paid sex workers.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Cannot believe all the Audubon Societies, NYC and Tucson included, changing their names to the inharmonious and boring "Bird Alliance" when the mellifluous "Avian Society" was sitting right there. For hawks' sake, not only does it have the same meter; it even sorts the same!

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

I code on a Mac. For debugging mostly Java software on Windows, what's my best option? Is there some sort of Windows in the cloud for individual devs? Don't want the hassle of maintaining a separate Windows PC or even VM. Just want an up-to-date Windows machine that's there when I need it.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 14/10/2024

I can't believe all these local Audubon chapters are renaming themselves to the ridiculously ugly and clunky "Bird Alliance" when the mellifluous "Avian Society" is sitting right there. It even has the same meter and sorts almost exactly the same.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 11/10/2024

Random question: does anyone know of any in-person, hands-on Dorico classes in NYC?

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 30/06/2024

I've yet to hear anyone complain about "Agile" who is not actually complaining about Scrum. Agile works. XP works. Scrum doesn't, and it doesn't work precisely in the ways it's not agile. If you think Agile means meetings, sprints, and story points, you don't know agile.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 29/05/2024

This is weird. At least two photos I know I took in the last week are nowhere to be found on my iPhone.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 28/05/2024

I began using BBEdit in grad school around the time the Web was invented, but there's one piece of continuously maintained software I've been using even longer than that. Any guesses?

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 14/05/2024

Immutability is a convenient property to have but only when objects are truly immutable. When the things the objects represent do change over time, classes should be mutable to reflect that. E.g. if a file's last modified time isn't fixed, then the File object shouldn't be immutable either.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 05/03/2024

Who else only opens up fancy javascript-enabled multiscrolling enabled CI page to find the one hidden link to the raw text log?

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 01/03/2024

Another day. Another Python bug in production that wouldn't have even compiled in Java thanks to checked exceptions and compile time type checking. But instead Python happily gave us wrong numbers for weeks with nary a peep.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 10/02/2024

PSA: Stay away from Google's Titan security keys, and never use it as the only 2-factor option. Mine died after less than two months, and there is zero consumer support.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 07/02/2024

No, upgrading to the latest JDK is not trivial, nor should a library assume its customers can upgrade. I blew a few hours over the last two days configuring a MacBook to build two forks of the same project, one of which requires Java == 1.8 and the other of which requires Java >= 17. #jdk

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 07/02/2024

Just discovered the Zoom setting in IntelliJ CE. When did this get added? It might finally wean me off Eclipse. So much easier to read. #java #scala #ide

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Reposted by Elliotte Rusty Harold

Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 01/02/2024

I watched a Senate Judiciary hearing ostensibly on internet safety followed by the same at the Heritage Foundation so you (hopefully) don't have to. My story on what's up with KOSA, the anti-porn group trying to spin KOSA as pro-LGBTQ, the senator making excuses for that, + why no one should buy it:

newrepublic.com

The GOP Has a Plan for “Online Safety.” It Involves Censoring LGBTQ Content.

Lawmakers and tech companies say they want to protect kids. For Marsha Blackburn, that means keeping them from learning about trans people.

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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 01/02/2024

Something refreshing about starting over on a new platform with a very low number of people to follow. Even without Space Karen's insane ramblings, my Twitter feed had just become a rage pit of anger, despair, and irrationality.

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