iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Henry Coles

Frances Ryan @francesryan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Disability doesn’t care how old you are. Specialist food is no cheaper if you’re 19. Employers don’t lose their prejudice if you’re 21. This is blatant intergenerational inequality from Labour. Younger disabled people of all severities deserve better. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

theguardian.com

Key disability benefit for young people may be axed under major welfare changes

Exclusive: Plan under discussion involves intensive support to help young people into employment

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Reposted by Henry Coles

Z.K.A. (she/her) @pegasusunder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

PRE-ORDER link is live! THESE HOLLOW BODIES, a novella A cosmic horror that explores identity, ceramics, and murder cults!

THESE HOLLOW BODIES, a novella, by Z.K. Abraham cover, illustrated black woman, underwater, choking on light coming out of mouth and eyes. "A sharp, compelling read." - Tiffany Morris

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

We've certainly seen a huge increase in interest in mutation testing.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This looks genuinely interesting and has a fortuitous name.

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

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

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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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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It's a real pain as a lot of people are being introduced to mutation testing as thing done via an LLM. So their first experience is that it's expensive, of limited value, and very very slow. For extra irony, fast deterministic mutation testing tools are exactly what LLMs need to keep them in check.

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Reposted by Henry Coles

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've not written a game since I was a kid. So far this one seems to be going well, which suggests I am going to discover a reason I have to throw it away tomorrow morning.

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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

I personally enjoy the "completely hide the mail that arrived three seconds ago but you accidentally closed" feature. It's genius. The only way to deactivate it seems to be to not ever have more than 1 message in a thread.

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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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Reposted by Henry Coles

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 · 08/09/2026

Acorn Electron. With a little encouragement it still runs.

Acorn Electron, opened up on a desk but running well enough to display the Basic prompt on a TV.

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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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Reposted by Henry Coles

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 · 02/09/2026

Amazon response to my support request that gave details of the 500 error was "check your browser version", but I've now received a "your account setup is complete" e-mail and it works. Guessing an error during account creation left it in a bad state. Random server glitch or perhaps a race?

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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 · 01/09/2026

Isn't this more of a delivery person behaviour than a neighbour behaviour?

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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

The convention predates Bon Jovi so sadly fails to cover it.

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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

Talk here (pre LLM fever) explains why these tools are so much faster. Pitest can perform an analysis in 3 minutes that would take earlier systems 3 days. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoFJ...

youtube.com

Making Mutants Work for You • Henry Coles • GOTO 2019

YouTube video by GOTO Conferences

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

pitest & arcmutate for java, kotlin and groovy mutant for ruby stryker for js, scala and c#

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

The issue is that people are trying to use simplistic tools that recompile and run the full unit test suite for each mutant. There used to be lots of toy find and replace scripts that did this, now the scripts use LLMs. This approach doesn't scale, but there are existing tools that do.

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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

I am now finally automating release numbering. It's amazing it's taken this long for me to mess this up.

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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 · 26/08/2026

I'm also a software engineer by trade. Started writing in my 40s and am sitting now on exciting secret news that will appear in 2027 with me aged 51. Not too late. And all those years doing stuff that wasn't writing feed into what you write.

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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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Reposted by Henry Coles

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

Same friend introduced me to The Velvet Underground, The Grateful Dead, Asimov and a whole bunch of other stuff that stayed with me. Thanks Dan. Friends are good aren't they?

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