iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 6h

Well, Grady has said it better than me, which is par for the course. I do feel a sense of vindication though, and I hope people listen and take note.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is so bad. Keep your mind and your tools sharp. AI might be here to stay, in one form or another, but it doesn't think in the same way humans can - if we can even call it thinking.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think rose harissa might be my new favorite condiment. It packs a load of flavour: you can add it to eggs, sauces, rice or use it as a marinade. Flavour wise, I do prefer Mr Naga chili pickle, but it's not for the feint of heart as its it is *hot*. Good jars of good things transforms cooking IMO.

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Grady Booch @booch.com · 01/10/2026

In the face of generative AI coding agents, the role of human-led architecture becomes even more important in the crafting of software-intensive systems.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Just when I think I can't like otters more, I find I like otters more.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Decided to order in some food, and on our chow mein packaging, written in beautiful cursive writing it just said "noodle doodles". It tasted just that bit better for that little bit of extra whimsy.

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Adam Bien @adambien.blog · 29/09/2026

"select, reject, detect, collect and inject"-an airhacks.fm podcast conversation with Donald Raab is ready to listen: adambien.blog/roller/selec... #java #podcast #eclipsecollections #airhacks

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Kelsey Hightower @kelseyhightower.com · 18/12/2024

I'm about to rebrand all my cron jobs to AI agents and raise a $100,000,000 seed round.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Well, today I wondered, how many annotations can you stick on a method before something goes wrong. I set up a loop to test exactly that, and you'll be happy to know, you can go well into numbers you never would likely achieve. That being said, I'm letting it run, for science.

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Grady Booch @booch.com · 26/09/2026

I can’t decide if people who assert that contemporary AIs can think or are conscious do so out of fear or out of envy. But I can say that any such people do so either out of emotion or perhaps driven by some pecuniary interest in it being true, not from any fully informed or defensible position.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

100% this. JCA do well to encapsulate internals, but fail to deliver in the same way EC does. As an example, how many times have you resorted back to a loop just because you didn't have an index to work with?

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Donald Raab @thedonraab.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"Eclipse Collections Categorically" is a thinking book. What if you could tell your data structures to do work for you? What categories of things would you ask for? 🤷‍♂️👇 *Note*: $0 to buy Amazon Kindle version for few more hours. Search title on website, not mobile. donraab.medium.com/my-ten-year-...

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I've been missed after being away for a couple of days, but not fully forgiven.

A black and white cat, firmly asleep on a cushion next to my leg.

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Donald Raab @thedonraab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The Amazon Kindle version of "Eclipse Collections Categorically" is available for $0 to buy from September 24 - 26, 2026. Use the Amazon website and search your local market for the title and download a free copy. Enjoy #EclipseCollections, Categorically! 🙏 donraab.medium.com/the-authors-...

donraab.medium.com

The Author’s Inside Guide to Reading Eclipse Collections Categorically

TL;DR — Read Chapters 1, 2, 3. Jump to 11. Skim 4–10. Dive in as desired.

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Donald Raab @thedonraab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Today! 👀📙🆓

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

First time today working with the os-places API. It's giving me SOAP (very) roughly converted into a "REST" API vibes - the header as part of the reponse was a tell. It's also maddeningly granular with it's responses. I'm sure that's ignorance on my part, but working out how to reconstitute it...

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Early on today, I concocted the idea of a sandwhich with harissa egg salad (egg mayo in the UK) - eggs corse grated, mixed with mayo and harissa, some north-African inspired chicken, some bacon (very much not north African) and some token salad.

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Donald Raab @thedonraab.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

My latest blog: Exploring the Asymmetric Apathy in Java Collection and Java Stream donraab.medium.com/exploring-th...

donraab.medium.com

Exploring the Asymmetric Apathy in Java Collection and Java Stream

That which can be done lazily, can also be done more simply eagerly.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

If I was in the AI biz & devoid of ethics; if I was up to my neck in debt and wanted to make a quick buck, I'd advise a bunch of investors to invest in a ton of shorts hedging against it, then tank the stock (looking like a good citizen), then announce a "solution". Not saying that's happening...

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality"

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

What the heck is going on with the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds writers. I can maybe be OK with one gimmick episode per season, but with the latest they just seem to be going really OTT with it.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Love this. I wouldn't normally give the Times a look, but I am happy they published this. My great grandmother used to own a small farm on the coast in Scotland. She rescued a number of people from a downed plane during WWII,

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The oft-stated premise that Agile has replaced Waterfall (and "Agentic" replaces Agile) is simply not true. The vast majority of companies that claim to be working in an Agile way are doing hardcore waterfall. If you want an indicator, look at backlog size. 1/5

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Uncle Joe @sydseter.com · 12/09/2026

OpenAI’s claim that their AI can be used in mathematical research have been met with heavy backlash. Take f.ex. OpenAI’s claim they disproved the Connes Rigidity Conjecture. J. L. Nielsen from CTP, University of Kansas audited the code line-by-line and discovered that the AI's proof was invalid. #AI

eu.36kr.com

Mathematicians Disproved OpenAI's 24-Hour "Solved" Math Conjecture: AI Got Every Sentence Right But Result Irrelevant to Original Claim

Terence Tao, one of the world’s most influential and celebrated contemporary mathematicians, had long publicly released a critical early warning to the global academic community, tech researchers and ...

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I found myself again today, having being dragged into a conversation about microservices first vs monolithic applications, again reiterating the reasons why modular monolithic first is the best way to go.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I downloaded this in 2019. They were simpler times.

A scene with Tom and Jerry. Tom has swung a driver and is looking to see where the ball has gone, shielding his eyes with his right paw. He has a strained expression. The club in Tom's left hand has resolved to falling onto his left shoulder, with the face of the club presented upwards as a flat surface. Jerry is standing on the face of the club, mimicking the same pose, whilst holding on to the (presumably) stolen ball and with a mockingly happy face.
The caption above Tom is "Me debugging", the one above Jerry "the bug".

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🕸️ @holojester.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

1 - .5 =

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I've been using EC now for years. The learning curve is small - you get backwards compatibility guaranteed out the box. You can adopt and refactor slowly and in targeted ways. Your application can see real performance improvements in manageable increments.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

This is only a recent thing, but our (elderly) cat had become obsessed with fries. She stole one from a plate one evening and apparently it's a new obsession. OK, meat from land or sea: I get it. Dairy; I get it. Heck, peas were a bit of an odd one. But potato? That's a new one.

A black and white cat, staring up towards a sofa with wide eyes.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Last night, we had a nice gibbous moon. Tonight, we have beautiful backlit clouds.

In the foreground, there are bright green plants and grass. Above is a murky sky, backlit by moonlight. It highlights the extremities of the clouds.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Quite a nice gibbous moon tonight. Makes me wish I was a bit better at low-light photography.

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Patriotic Millionaires UK @patmillsuk.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

PMUK's @stephenstroud.bsky.social spoke to @deutschewelle.dw.com about the scale of inequality in the UK — and why taxing wealth properly is essential to tackling it. Watch the full story on YouTube youtu.pulse.ly/9taqgfwxvq

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail. - Edsger W.Dijkstra, June 18th 1975

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In Otter News @in-otter-news.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Here are some baby otter chirps to start your week.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The vacuum cleaner is going to have to make an appearance.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

From Claud, directly. It's interesting what you can find out when you push a little.

specifically the discipline of drawing and defending boundaries — deciding what a class is allowed to know, what it's allowed to ask of others, and resisting the entropy that always pushes toward asking instead of telling as a system grows under deadline pressure. That's a genuinely human-judgment-shaped job, and it's also, I'd guess, one of the hardest things to keep an LLM honest about across a long session, since I have no discomfort at all about quietly violating an abstraction boundary to make a test pass if nobody's watching for it. Which might be the actual argument for the human staying load-bearing: not that I can't write to spec, but that maintaining architectural integrity under pressure requires exactly the kind of sustained, stakes-bearing vigilance we agreed I don't have.

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Donald Raab @thedonraab.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

In part 2 of "The missing Java data structures no one ever told you about" blog series, I wrote about MultiReader Collections. This blog will really make you think about the pros and cons of internal and external iterators. Enjoy! 🙏 medium.com/javarevisite...

medium.com

The missing Java data structures no one ever told you about — Part 2

MultiReader Collection implementations in Eclipse Collections.

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Brad Frost @bradfrost.com · 19/08/2026

This video about AI & mental health by @tolin.ski is mandatory viewing for anyone using AI moderately/heavily: youtu.be/iPUn1Fnfn0k?...

youtu.be

The True Cost of AI Coding

YouTube video by Syntax

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Love this! I've learned and used a ton of these tricks working in resturants in the past, but some are entirely new to me. youtu.be/sK-4930SVrQ?...

youtu.be

75 Hacks Chefs Actually Use

YouTube video by Fallow

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Donald Raab @thedonraab.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Five years ago, I wrote the blog series "The missing Java data structures no one ever told you about." This blog series turned into the most rigorous month of technical writing in my career. The blog linked below was part one of the series. Enjoy! 🙏 medium.com/javarevisite...

medium.com

The missing Java data structures no one ever told you about — Part 1

Eclipse Collections provides additional collection types not found in the JDK.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Is it really that hard to believe though? When you have a bunch of people actively destroying the quality of life of the vast majority of people and doing harm to the planet – who in their right mind would support that.

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joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

BSky is having a shocker today. Not sure if its just me (I suspect not) but everything is taking ages to load (if it even does) and there are errors showing all over the place. Hope it's not another serious DDoS attempt.

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