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Elliotte Rusty Harold

@elharo.bsky.social
132 followers 71 following 53 posts

Writer, Photographer, Software Engineer, Cat Daddy

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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
I did find the original Nebula award winning and deeply internal "The Murderbot Diaries" to be more original and interesting than the TV adaptation, but a lot was lost in the transition from the first person book to the relatively third person action-oriented TV PoV.
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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
Plenty of content from authors I admire, a few of whom are casual acquaintances. Just not so much from people I'm closer to.
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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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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
All those statements can be true at the same time.
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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 · 31/12/2024
VW shouldn't have collected location data in the first place. You can't leak what you don't have. www.carscoops.com/2024/12/vw-g...
carscoops.com
Massive VW Data Leak Exposed 800,000 EV Owners’ Movements, From Homes To Brothels | Carscoops
The sensitive information of VW, Audi, Seat, and Skoda EV owners was left exposed on an unprotected and misconfigured cloud storage system for months
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
Attempts to update to the newest runtime that was allowed failed completely. It seems it will be easier (and much cheaper) to simply migrate to a different service off of GCP.
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
In case you haven't seen it: steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-...
steve-yegge.medium.com
Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You
God dammit, I didn’t want to blog again. I have so much stuff to do. Blogging takes time and energy and creativity that I could be putting…
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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 · 22/12/2024
That does seem to be true. Now that you mention it, I can't think of any books like that I have read, but I'd certainly like to. I love books about hot messes. (E.g. Shopaholic) but why do they all seem to be about white women? Please drop titles here if anyone knows more diverse hot messes to read.
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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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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Physics envy is indeed a little weird. It struck me that your examples are tech billionaires. I've also encountered this dysfunction in non-billionaire programmer types, and haven't noticed it in non-tech billionaires, but maybe I haven't been looking.
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
Hi :-)
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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
I do understand why we shouldn't be using the name "Audubon" any more, but we truly didn't need to change it to something so prosaic and ugly.
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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 · 01/07/2024
Surprised no one figured this out. The answer is LaTeX.
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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
Hint: it's not an editor. emacs and vi have been around for a very long time, but I didn't use either until grad school. The editors I did use died with VMS and the Apple II.
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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 · 18/05/2024
I call B.S. There are far more authors making a living now than before. Publishers are keeping a gate most of us are walking around. Anyone who writes a book can publish it, full stop. The only decision makers that matter are the author and the readers.
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 18/05/2024
Current CDC recommendations don't recommend it for anyone over 45, regardless of gender. Perhaps those guidelines should be updated? www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd...
cdc.gov
HPV Vaccination: What Everyone Should Know | CDCMinusSASstats
What Everyone should know about the HPV vaccine. Who should and should not get the vaccine? What are the types of HPV vaccines? How well does the vaccine work, and what are the possible side effects?
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 18/05/2024
P.S. This is the sort of low cost signal flare PR I send out to see if an open source project is worth engaging with. In this case, the answer is clearly no.
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 18/05/2024
Don't you just love open source projects that have time to set up bots to autoclose PRs for inactivity, but not time to review the PRs even once? github.com/apache/spark...
github.com
assorted copy edits to migration instructions by elharo · Pull Request #45048 · apache/spark
What changes were proposed in this pull request? Various grammar and formatting fixes, most commonly subject verb agreement, run-on sentences, and preposition choice Why are the changes needed? Eas...
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 18/05/2024
That's because the market for academic books is tiny. The rewards for academic publishing are tenure, salary, and promotions, not royalties and advances. It is a good thing that even books with tiny potential audiences are published.
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 18/05/2024
Why is it not surprising that when I delve into the Twitter feed of the most sensible person in this money-focused thread, they seem to think a lot about tech and business and not so much about art? Coincidence? I think not...
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 18/05/2024
Survivorship bias. Just as many authors were failing then as now. Odds weren't noticeably better.
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Elliotte Rusty Harold @elharo.bsky.social · 18/05/2024
Who says they can't? They absolutely can. They just can't do it by writing books that sell 10,000 copies each.
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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 · 08/03/2024
Just one: Kitty Pryde, and no that's not creepy. She'd be a year older than me if she'd aged like a normal person since X-Men 129 when we were both teenagers.
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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
You seem to have confused Christianity with the religion preached by Jesus Christ.
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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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