iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

People now send me pictures of lathes they encounter. This is probably normal.

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Was about to hit e-bay to find an old passively cooled video card as the fan on my current one was getting annoying. Instead I've blown the dust out of the existing one and applied some new thermal paste. Temp has dropped by a massive 20c and the fan is now silent.

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TW @twesq.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

this is fantastic and I learned something new

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I appear to be writing a game....

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It seems there is a lot about George Formby that I don't know. I now feel good about having quite liked him when I was a kid in the we-only-have-3-channels-so-have-to-watch-whats-on era.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Thank you @jetbrains.com for the renewed licence pack. One of the best perks of the java champion programme. #java

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This will either be brilliant or will tarnish a treasured series. Either way I'm watching it.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Whenever someone I don't know uses the phrase "fellow writers" I find myself tensing because 7 times out of 10 it seems to mean "I have been generating slop with chatgpt and now demand that you respect me".

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Started watching Blake's 7 for the first time. In the first two episodes Terry Nation kills a surprising number of people who looked like the might have become characters. Good to know that it will somehow all work out happily in the end.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Just pushed out a new release of our android mutation testing plugin. We've been quietly working on this whilst getting feedback from some of our favourite friendly customers for a while now. It's still in beta, but now ready for a wider audience docs.arcmutate.com/docs/android... #java #android

docs.arcmutate.com

Android Support

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Date yourself with a snap of your first ever computer... Arguably it was the ZX81 I had for three months, but realistically the first one I really *used* was the Amstrad PCW8256.

A Sinclair ZX81. Black, roughly square, physically small home computer from 1981. The front 40% is covered by a completely flat touch-sensitive four row keyboard (with no space bar). Absolutely ghastly!

An Amstrad PCW8256 home/office computer, pale beige with screen/floppy disk/CPU unit, keyboard, and dot matrix printer (it came as a complete kit).

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I can remember almost nothing about it except that I watched it and it had a cute robot.

Battle of the planets characters against a backdrop saying "Battle of the planets"

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David (W) Goodman @davegoodman.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Two days until the hardback edition of Solitary Agents is released in the US! Available from all good bookshops and retailers.

2 days to go, Americans! 8the September 2026 US hardcover release. Solitary Agents. Screaming eagle. Fireworks. American flag.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Picking up my WIP for the first time in a while, and I still think the opening line is pretty decent. Three weeks before the end of the world, the sea was calm and still. #ukkidlit

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

A lot of companies seem to struggle with the fact that, for maximum security and 100% guaranteed privacy, we have carefully designed our tools to have no remote components. We're constantly being asked to provide pen testing reports for things that do not exist.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Dear Open Source Developer, Your related commercial product would be useful for us. We spend a lot of money on AI tokens, but could not possibly spend much smaller amounts on something else. Please stop charging for features we need, which we also inconsistently assert we could easily reproduce.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

How does the outlook interface manage to be so unintuitive and confusing? It's e-mail, it shouldn't be possible to make it difficult by accident.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Attempting to setup an Amazon author page. Experience has been... interesting. Initially couldn't do anything at all due to a background 500 error. Error now gone but page never finishes loading. Only thing I can do is edit my bio. Presumably not everyone experiences this? For me it's 98% broken.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Just been reminded of the time I went to the Reading Festival for almost free thanks to dodgy deal with the barman at my student hall of residence that netted me 2 promotional tickets for a fiver. Lot of good music that weekend.

Line up for reading 1995, including Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Beck, The Foo Fighters and many others.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

It seems that, whether I want to or not, I am listening to Bon Jovi playing live this evening. Not as loud as when Beyoncé played Murrayfield, but a close second.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Seeing a lot of "mutation testing is too slow" posts from people who are trying to do it with an LLM. People, the existing mutation analysis tools are literally orders of magnitude faster. And that's true even if you exclude all the time used by the LLM.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Thanks to extreme incompetence and a lack of sufficient coffee, I have just skipped 4 major point releases and many minor point releases and accidentally released pitest 1.29.10 instead of 1.25.10. Guess we'll kick off again at 1.30.0 to try and make things less confusing. #oops

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

In response to a customer request we're adding Groovy support to arcmutate, and its coming along nicely. Some basic operators become method calls in the bytecode, but it means we actually have more information to work with when describing mutations. #java #groovy

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

A mere 4 years after the job went onto my list, I have replaced the broken glass panel in the door.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

This is your semi regular reminder that pitest is looking for sponsors. github.com/sponsors/hcoles #oss #java

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Emma Monk @monkemma.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

One of the first "outrageous" claims I saw as Jason Arday's media hounding unfolded was that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days! Wow! What a thing to claim! And the newspapers all suggested there was no evidence he actually did it. Well, they clearly didn't look very hard 🙄 🧵 1/26

Photo after Jason's final marathon taken from his archived blog showing Jason surrounded by supporters in orange charity t-shirts

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Dear Software Developer, Why have you not responded to my unsolicited e-mail about a job in a city where you do not live, using a technology you do not know for a salary lower than you earned 10 years ago?

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

One of our customers just rolled mutation testing out to more teams in a different business unit, doubling the size of their subscription. Nice to see the value of mutation testing and Arcmutate being understood when people have seen it in action. After the first sale, it sells itself. #java

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Suddenly remembered discovering Kurt Vonnegut, aged about 17 travelling with a friend on a coach from Yorkshire to London to see The Band. Halfway through the journey he finished God Bless You Mr Rosewater. Can't remember what I'd just finished, but I devoured the Vonnegut before we hit London.

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Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

NEW: It was a digital lynching. And the media is never going to hold itself to account for the role it played in Jason Arday’s death. But there are things we can do. This is a practical guide based on my own experience. broligarchy.substack.com/p/a-digital-...

broligarchy.substack.com

A Digital Lynching

A practical guide for individuals and organisations when the mobs gather

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Dear Open Source Developer, I do not have time to create a project demonstrating the problem I am facing. Please create one yourself based on the minimal information I have provided and wild guesses about what my code may look like. Urgent. #oss

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

The incident at my school was a murder. Unlike most incidents it wasn't talked about at all, to the point that it has been largely memory holed. 1/n

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

On the one hand the hmrc website shows that my account is in credit and I'm owed money. On the other hand, they have sent me a letter asking me to pay more. I'm sure this makes sense.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Just had someone proudly introduce themselves as "The creator of <thing>", in much the same way as you might announce yourself as "The creator of radio, the printed word and the bicycle". Wasn't familiar with <thing> so looked it and discovered a 0 star project on GitHub.

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Dave Andress @davidandress.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

A broken social care system is draining the NHS of resources. It would be LITERALLY CHEAPER to give free care in people’s homes.

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Rob Isaac @rmi.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I’d love to know what people outside the industry think “data centre” actually means, because no one I know expects them to contain any jobs at all. As someone who has built several: any employee is a design flaw.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Dear Open Source Developer, Here is an unfiltered list of false positive security "issues" generated by our corporate mandated security tool. Fix them for us urgently so that our parent company will allow us to use your software for free. #oss

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Oh no! My unspecified cloud account has expired, I must click this link immediately.

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Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I've confirmed that the UK's new Sovereign AI Fund does no due diligence on whether AI companies use copyrighted work without permission before investing in them. It took me 3 Freedom of Information requests to find this out: 🧵 1/10

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

The scrappy test that was too basic to be of any use just caught a bug and saved me from <x> hours of head scratching.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

All other feuds can stop now.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Reading another academic paper that claims "our tool performs similarly to PIT". And, again, this claims seems **incredibly** unlikely based on their description of the tool.

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The Bookseller @thebookseller.com · 24/07/2026

HarperCollins Children’s Books has acquired three novels from Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2021 winner Alastair Chisholm. Poisonheart will be published in July 2027 under the Harper Fire imprint, with the second YA title to follow in July 2028 👇

ebx.sh

HarperCollins Children’s Books acquires three novels from Alastair Chisholm in exclusive submission

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Scottish Book Trust @scottishbooktrust.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Applications for the 2027 New Writers Awards are now open! Our year-long mentoring programme supports new writers to hone their skills. You'll receive a £2,500 cash award, a week at Moniack Mhor, and the chance to showcase work to publishers and agents 📚 Closing date - Wed 29 July

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

On my way to an emergency opticians appointment after suddenly losing the ability to read for 40 minutes (now equally suddenly recovered)

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

This is, quite definitely, the most exciting pdf I have ever received.

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