iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

It's not just me! At Brussels Central, I overhead the conductor telling someone "no, Central isn't Midi, you need the next station along."

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I've learned a *lot* about benchmarking in the past year, mostly by making a lot of mistakes. Here's what I learned (in talk-transcript form): hollycummins.com/benchmarks-g...

hollycummins.com

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I miss the old days of physical feedback buttons at the exit of conference sessions.

Ole Vedel Villumsen @olevv.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Reposted by Holly Cummins

If I am not mistaken, “midi” (literally noon) can mean south in French. I used to have a pen pal who said she lived in the midi, by which she meant the south of France. It’s a bit like in some languages „morning“ means “east” and “evening” “west”.

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But don't they think of the poor foreigners when designing these things?! 😂

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Ah, I see your point! I googled after posting (doh) and it confirms that midi does more generally mean south in French (in a a colloquial, regional, way). I still can't not map '-midi' to '-central' in my head, though. (Which has led to some transport mishaps in the past.) 🫤

Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 07/10/2026

Once again, I am left wondering why Brussels-Midi has a different name in French and Flemish. Not just different words, but semantically different - it's "middle" in French and "south" in Flemish. 🤪 I guess maybe that reflects its position relative to the French and Flemish regions of Belgium?

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Best slide clicker ever (short-circuited jumper cables!) from @marianne-h.bsky.social at @devoxx.com

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Reposted by Holly Cummins

Foojay, the Friends Of OpenJDK @foojay.io · 05/10/2026

In #podcast 102, @hollycummins.com, Andy Damevin, and @frankdelporte.be discuss Foojay's and @quarkus.io move from WordPress to a static site. Lessons learned, technical decisions behind it, and what it means for performance and maintenance. foojay.io/today/foojay... #Java #WebDev #StaticSites

foojay.io

Foojay Podcast #102: Why Foojay Walked Away From WordPress for Static Sites

Foojay walked away from WordPress after six years. Andy Damevin and Holly Cummins join to weigh CMS security and cost against Hugo, Jekyll and Roq.

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 01/10/2026

I hadn't realised Thoughtworks had dropped Cloud Carbon Footprint. Today's speaker at @greenio-podcast.bsky.social recommends SPRUCE (opensourcegreenops.cloud) instead.

Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 01/10/2026

Should we worry about the impact of wind farms on birds? No, we should worry about the impact of cats. And windows. Compared to those two, the impact of wind farms is basically zero. At Green IO London, and learning lots already. @greenio-podcast.bsky.social

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Yes, I think that's the way – our tooling needs to get better at integration and delegation. Claude does it a bit by having ! to shell out commands, without having to be interpreted-by-llm first. The output still gets interpreted, which seems wasteful, but maybe also necessary to keep context.

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They were great! High quality cotton, black, with cute hand-drawn white light-bulbs. I guess maybe the light bulbs were representing enlightenment?

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But when it's a *big* task, not a little one mixed in with a bigger LLM flow, cheap determinism is absolutely the way to go.

As a trivial example, using Claude code to change directories or do a git push is ridiculous – when I first heard of people doing that, I was all "this is the end times". But now I sometimes do it too, because doing a push in a different window, or suspending to change directories, causes chaos. ☹️

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 22/09/2026

I wholeheartedly agree in principle, but in practice, there's a caveat, which is context. If I flip back and forth between an LLM and deterministic tools, the LLM gets 'lost', and I sometimes suspect it burns loads of tokens trying to figure out what happened while it wasn't looking.

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I SO want to try this, but I need to figure out where to use it.

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 21/09/2026

I used to have a nice set of pyjamas that were somehow sponsored by his foundation. Or promoting his foundation. Or something. I always found the connection rather surreal.

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 21/09/2026

It's all very ... uncanny and unnerving.

Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 21/09/2026

Charity is an unusually great writer, and an unusually interesting thinker. I've been thinking about this piece, because one of my remote colleagues appears to have been entirely replaced by an LLM. I welcome my helpful new robot colleague, but I kind of miss the old less-helpful human one.

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 16/09/2026

This is the extremely niche hobby my feed needs.

Marit van Dijk @maritvandijk.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Reposted by Holly Cummins

Last week we hosted #IntelliJIDEA Conf 2026. On day 2 I had the pleasure to host @hollycummins.com and @mthmulders.bsky.social. ICYMI, the recordings are on the @intellijidea.com YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

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Reposted by Holly Cummins

sarcastic parrot @monkchips.com · 09/09/2026

I love this genre "Researchers heated egg yolk and leftover rice until it was a black powder full of tiny holes, then used it to store electricity. They charged it and drained it 10,000 times, and it still held 82.26 percent of what it did the first time."

scienceblog.com

Researchers heated egg yolk and leftover rice until it was a black powder full of tiny holes, then used it to store electricity. They charged it and drained it 10,000 times, and it still held 82.26 pe...

A humble kitchen waste might outlast the batteries powering your phone.

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 08/09/2026

16 new ones last month, in case anyone was wondering.

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 04/09/2026

New book alert: _What Happens When You're Not In The Room_, by Jon Berger. I can recommend it, not on the basis of having read it myself (my copy's in the mail), but on the basis that: - people I trust really rate it - Jon supplied me with me nice wine and nice charcuterie at his London book launch

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Reposted by Holly Cummins

Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 28/08/2026

Today I will be mostly enjoying the fact that according to the Schema.org type system documentation, there are four categories of person: alive, dead, undead, or fictional...

Person

A Schema.org Type

Thing > Person

A person (alive, dead, undead, or fictional).

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 10/08/2026

It would be even better if Poland's grid was cleaner, but every little helps.

Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 10/08/2026

"In general, performance on trivial tasks doesn't generalize... it's very easy to make an eval that doesn't say what the creator of the eval seems to think it's saying." TL;DR of Dan's experiments is that token cost is higher with obscure languages and assembly. Beyond that 🤷‍♀️ danluu.com/pl-tokens/

danluu.com

How do programming languages impact token efficiency and correctness?

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 04/08/2026

Ever wished your Quarkus apps automatically used the app name in the banner? Now they can: quarkus.io/blog/quarkus...

quarkus.io

Custom ASCII-art startup banners for Quarkus

Quarkus: Supersonic Subatomic Java

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 03/08/2026

Not only do you look alike, you even have the same facial expression!

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 03/08/2026

I had so much fun writing this talk. It covers important topics such as poo throughput ("pooput"!), whether teaching COBOL should be considered a crime (Dijsktra thought it should), why Quarkus is so efficient, and what AI is going to do to the job market. www.infoq.com/presentation...

infoq.com

The Free-Lunch Guide to Idea Circularity

Holly Cummins discusses why "nothing is new under the sun" in tech. She maps historical architectural tradeoffs to modern cloud, microservices, and AI hype cycles. She connects financial debt (post-ZI...

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 23/07/2026

It meets many of the criteria you've listed above. :)

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 22/07/2026

It really is, but if I was making novel planes, in the knowledge that many people fear flying, I wouldn't call my company "Beta technologies." I'd call it something like "Definitely-not-going-to-fall-out-of-the-sky Technologies," or "Quite-sensible Technologies."

Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 22/07/2026

Have you been to Øredev yet?

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 17/07/2026

After weeks of inspiration-free-blankness, inspiration STRUCK, and I've just submitted something for my final Devoxx CFP slot. I'm so excited about each talk I've put in, I don't want to see any of them rejected 🥹 [s/talk/baby]

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 15/07/2026

Turns out, the word she'd thought meant "remote control" didn't actually mean "remote control," it meant "thingy". Her mom had only ever used it for the remote control, right up until the time she used it to mean the salad.

Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 15/07/2026

"Thingy" reminds me of one of my favourite stories. Native-English speaking child, mother speaks a different language. One day, at dinner, child is totally startled when her mom asks her to pass the TV remote control. 🧵

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 15/07/2026

You're right! I didn't think of that before the edit, but I totally should have!

Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 14/07/2026

Just spotted I'd submitted a Devoxx proposal that included the phrase "like that thingy tool". Luckily, it's not too late to edit, so my secret is safe.

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Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 09/07/2026

The setting is now firmly switched to "LEAVE MY DESKTOPS WHERE I CAREFULLY PUT THEM ARGH." 😡

Holly Cummins @hollycummins.com · 09/07/2026

Wallpaper is a good idea. I've done it in the past, but forgotten that. It's probably too much effort for this demo because it's a one-off setup each time. But maybe I could automate it.