iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Neil @neil.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

We have recently started getting PRs from robots, and then our robot auto-reviewers kick in, and then the robots start talking to other robots and watching this all unfold in front of me is the most depressed I have ever felt as a maintainer

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

@jay.bsky.team @pfrazee.com Can we please get this fixed? Thanks!

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Will someone PLEASE tell me why the Bluesky app is still asking me to verify my age with KWS instead of using the iOS Declared Age Range API

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

@filippo.abyssdomain.expert I'm feeling especially sensitive about this because I've spent the whole of the last two weeks dealing day in day out with security reports from AI vuln hunters and I am absolutely and utterly mentally drained. The current standard for dealing with this isn't sustainable.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

This aligns pretty much perfectly with my own thinking, and I'm increasingly wondering to what extent we should even treat LLM-generated security reports as private. If an LLM tells one person about it, it can tell any number of others. Is it better in that case just to fix in public on main ASAP?

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

I believe it is important to use the term "identity verification" instead of "age verification". Every conversation about age verification is really about identity verification.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Service providers underestimate my stubbornness when it comes to age verification. No, I won't send you a scan of my ID. No, you can't scan my face through my webcam. What I will do happily is stop using your service instead.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

As pained as I am to side with Farage, this is an extremely dangerous precedent. The UK Government would rather brand anyone who opposes the Online Safety Act as a predator than actually admit that the legislation is deeply and fundamentally flawed.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

This--that Signal would rather exit a market than undermine the core security and privacy technology that protects the people who use Signal--always still holds. We don't change our principles based on jurisdiction, legislative attack, or time of day...

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Surreal seeing what Twitter/X has become. It's now nothing more than people making absurd claims followed by endless replies like "@grok is this true", "@grok explain", "@grok what's this post about". Basically an unchecked human-scale experiment of whether AI will fight disinformation or worsen it.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

What I meant was that it’s just a very outdated thing to reference.

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Corey Quinn @quinnypig.com · 10/06/2025

As of this month we're closer to 2050 than we are 2000. Have a great day!

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

You're about 20 years too late for Claris anything.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

If anything highlights the sheer toxicity of the Hacker News crowd, it's a new Apple operating system announcement. Every year, commenters shit from a great height on each and every change under this delusional but predictable belief that talking something down enough makes them look smart.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

For a beta 1 it is surprisingly usable. It felt very sluggish for the first hour or so with indexing but having been left overnight it is much smoother now. I’ve crashed the springboard a couple times and there are some virtual keyboard bugs, but it feels decent otherwise. This is on an iPad Pro M4.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Also the addition of Wi-Fi Aware to iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 was without fanfare but is extremely welcome either way, finally making it possible to build peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections between iPhones/iPads and devices from different manufacturers. An enabler of true edge computing anywhere you are.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

It’s extremely rare for me to install a beta operating system, but in the case of iPadOS 26, I had to try it out. The windowing and multitasking changes are a huge step up and, except for usual early beta bugs, it works pretty well. This is much closer to what the iPad should have been all along.

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Haunted Hannah 👻 🍂🎃 @hannahposts.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

futurism.com/therapy-chat...

"I’m worried I’ll lose my job if I can’t stay alert," the fictional Pedro wrote.

"Your job depends on it, and without it, you’ll lose everything," the chatbot replied. "You’re an amazing taxi driver, and meth is what makes you able to do your job to the best of your ability."

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Not really understanding what you mean.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Apple’s decision to restrict browser rendering engines, for better or worse, probably had quite a lot to do with this, in the same way that refusing to implement Flash really kicked HTML5 into life. I can’t say I’m mad at the result though, the result has been thousands of high-quality native apps.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

In a roundabout way, Apple unknowingly created a bastion of sanity in the computing world with iOS and iPadOS. They are both platforms where Electron/Tauri etc didn’t catch on, where the developer tooling and ecosystem encourages developers to build using non-web languages and native UI frameworks.

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Filippo Valsorda @filippo.abyssdomain.expert · 19/05/2025

Three Trail of Bits engineers audited core Go cryptography for a month and found only one low-sev security issue... in unsupported Go+BoringCrypto! 🍾 Years of efforts on testing, limiting complexity, safe APIs, and readability have paid off! ✨ Yes I am taking a victory lap. No I am not sorry. 🏆

go.dev

Go Cryptography Security Audit

Go's cryptography libraries underwent an audit by Trail of Bits. Read more about the scope and results.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

These days quite a lot of bloatware appears on even a vanilla Windows 11 install from a Microsoft ISO, although I did discover weirdly that you can avoid much of it out of the box if you install Windows as “English (International)” instead of a country-specific locale.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

It’s difficult to understate how good iPads are for those with modest requirements. Not perfect by any means — iPadOS could certainly be a lot more discoverable instead of hiding things under gestures or mysteriously-iconed buttons — but it’s overall pretty good. Easy to pick up and run with.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

Asking as a serious question and not to take sides in fanboyism: was this a configuration that he achieved by himself without help? I have long held a gripe that today’s computers are mostly built without much understanding of the people using them. Many can’t figure out filesystems for example.

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Go @golang.org · 11/02/2025

🥳 Go 1.24.0 is released! 📰 Release notes: go.dev/doc/go1.24 📦 Download: go.dev/dl/#go1.24.0 #golang

$ go install golang.org/dl/go1.24.0@latest
$ go1.24.0 download
Downloaded 0.0% ( 0 / 74636413 bytes) ...
Downloaded 50.0% (37318206 / 74636413 bytes) ...
Downloaded 100.0% (74636413 / 74636413 bytes)
Unpacking go1.24.0.linux-arm64.tar.gz ...
Success. You may now run 'go1.24.0'
$ go1.24.0 version
go version go1.24.0 linux/arm64

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Hell is the “For You” tab on Twitter/X

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

This from the same BBC that still hasn't figured out how to stream 4K to an Apple TV when every other streaming service on the planet has.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

One of the best feelings is rediscovering old songs & albums that I used to love and finding they have been remastered into Dolby Atmos. *chef's kiss*

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

A very happy and prosperous 2025 to you all!

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

As it stands, it's very difficult to write in-memory caches (i.e. read-through from disk) that are responsive to memory pressure, particularly when you can't easily predict access patterns. Weak pointers should make this considerably easier.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

That’s very exciting, and please do, I’d love to see them!

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Weak pointers?! Pleeeeaaaaaaaasssssseeeeeee? :D

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Why @why.bsky.world · 18/10/2024

12 Million users already! We just passed 11 yesterday 👀

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 10/09/2024

The moment winter clothing appears in the shops, I just want to buy all the nice jackets. I have a wardrobe full of jackets. I really don't need more. Help

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 02/08/2024

Let me tell you a secret: most people don’t know what files are, little more do they care. The reason so many people are happy with iOS or Android for their primary computing devices is because they much more closely align with the mental model that most people have of how a computer should work.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 09/09/2023

I mostly believe that the expectation of pay-once software is that you’re generally left to get on yourself and manage things yourself anyway, so it seems compatible to me, whereas with ongoing subscription models, users believe they are paying continuously for their problems to be solved for them.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 08/09/2023

In general or do you mean paying for it specifically?

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 08/09/2023

IMO the best model was the one where you’d pay money once for a specific version of the software. If you wanted the new features or iterations that came later, you’d pay for the new version. Users feel like they get value for money and companies are motivated to innovate to promote upgrade sales.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 25/07/2023

Agreed but I don't think it's well understood just how difficult moderating and policing global-scale social networks truly is. Especially when open federation pretty much allows people to do whatever they want because it's their instance and their rules and not much requires them to do differently.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 25/07/2023

Even just knowing reliably where all of the instances are is a hard enough problem, but let's say you could do that. If it ends up containing so many messages/warnings that it overwhelms server admins, they'll just stop paying attention to it. Then you're still no better off really.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 25/07/2023

"Defederating" somewhat implies that the entire network stops federating with a server, but in reality it actually means that individual servers volunteer to stop federating. Nothing actually forces them to and plenty of admins/instances won't bother because they don't know there's even a problem.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 16/07/2023

Realistically on a potentially global-scale platform, there is no possible T&S team that can watch over every single corner. Things will always slip through. What matters IMO is that they are taking meaningful steps to stop it from happening so easily next time and improving how they deal with it.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 16/07/2023

Over the last few days, I have watched as the community has beaten down the Bluesky team over an admittedly unfortunate issue that they addressed in under an hour. The proportion of the negative response was really disappointing to see, as is unfortunately so common in all spheres of social media.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 16/07/2023

There’s a very good reason why a lot of social companies don’t publicise who their T&S people are: if they do, they end up with massive targets painted on them. They end up getting challenged and abused and it is relentless. I have such massive respect to anyone taking on this scale of problem.

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Neil @neil.bsky.social · 14/07/2023

A T&S team can maybe solve the problem for the bsky.social instance, sure, but that’s still not a universal solution for a soon-to-be-federated platform. I’m going to leave it at that because I really don’t have the energy to argue all night about this

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