You will be visited by three spirits.

If they aren’t a registered charity and they aren’t registered with the Fundraising Regulator (example logo below), it’s probably one of these scammy orgs where the ‘profit’ is a tiny fraction of the money you handed over and some bastard gets rich on your good intentions. Give to a real charity.

This is the key paragraph in the Sandie Peggie decision.

It's worth remembering that without the vision and leadership of billionaires we wouldn't have life-changing technology like the metaverse. If I had that sort of money I'd probably have wasted it on world hunger or something.

You can’t tell if someone is disabled just by looking at them. There’s no such thing as the “genuinely disabled”. You are not entitled to a person’s entire medical history just so you can decide whether to believe them or not. People are not faking disability, most are trying to fake being well.

Just got off the phone regaining access to a financial account from a previous employment. On the one hand I'm glad to have to the account back. On the other hand, absolutely anyone could have taken over the account if they'd intercepted one reference number sent in plain text by e-mail and letter.

Oh shit waddup

I think this tech-bro plan to steal pavements from pedestrians may have failed to consider what will happen when they encounter the pre-existing pavement-parking thieves.

This is like a scene from a play. The main character is perhaps too much of a caricature to be believable, but it still works. His every utterance moves the horror forward. Much respect for the polite restraint of the ocaml maintainers. github.com/ocaml/ocaml/...

The excellent Last Death Poet by @thatstephendaly.bsky.social is now available to pre-order. I was lucky enough to read the start of this last year, looking forward to finally reading to the end. uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

Turns out that the reason this CI job is taking so long is that I forgot to hit enter.

To be fair, Neal wrote "The Baroque Cycle" longhand after a computer backup disaster ate the first five hundred pages or so. Then he transcribed it himself in EMACS and formatted it for submission using a homebrew set of Elisp macros he wrote— Yeah nope, that's just deranged.

This government has not taken a single meaningful step to tackle the causes of the horrendous inefficiencies in the criminal justice system, instead rushing to dismantle trial by jury. Legal professionals have offered numerous alternatives to address the backlog. Ministers are not listening.

Neat way to search the Maven Central Repository from the command line! #Java

When I introduce mutation testing to teams on the Code Craft training workshop, it's invariably one of those "How did this not occur to us before?" moments. "Is our code broken and we don't know it?" Let's break it and see if any of your tests fail.

Some very exciting news. I’m opening a children’s bookshop! Follow @spyglassbooks.bsky.social for updates. And if you’re in Edinburgh come to our pop-up in December to say hello and to support our budding business 👋 #Edinburgh #Booksky

Hello St. Andrews! This Tuesday (18th Nov) I'll be celebrating #BookWeekScotland at @waterstones.bsky.social St Andrews – join me at 4pm for signing and chat! 👉 www.waterstones.com/events/celeb... #StAndrews @waterstoneskids.bsky.social

Jade Leung worked for OpenAI from 2021 to 2023. You would expect her to have shares, worth a lot of money - which will get more valuable if OpenAI remains only lightly regulated. Now she is the Prime Minister’s AI Adviser in No 10 - advising on AI regulation. 2/5

Hi everyone! An ongoing reorganization at my current employer has prompted me to seek for a new role and would appreciate your support. I'm open to remote (anywhere) and hybrid roles in Switzerland. I have 25+ years experience as a software developer, 8 as devrel www.linkedin.com/posts/aalmir...

Every child deserves the magic of books. ✨📚 But for too many families this winter, books will feel like a luxury they can't afford. Donate to our Christmas Appeal today to give the magic of books to children and families accessing food banks this festive season. 🎄

With thanks to @michaelspicer.bsky.social for supporting our campaign. The government MUST listen. youtu.be/p1DXxDHXLU0?...

This year I will again be dressing as "adult in vintage Tesco skeleton costume".

So, are they going to replace his title with a weird symbol or something?

I do hope gradle adds new ways to make things complicated in the next release.

I really appreciate that license! I often try to game it in my PRs by having 0 surviving issues on the first try. I just opened a big PR and managed to kill 187, but 7 still survive. I'm a little bit proud of myself now. But I'm also happy that I get to ship without those 7 issues that I missed!

I can’t promise it’s good, but it is live!

Ok, I think my cat is starting to understand the concept of daylight savings and clock changes after this latest explanation. Perhaps now I'll get some peace.

We provide free arcmutate licences to open source projects as a matter of principle, but a great side benefit is that we get sent good quality bug reports and feature suggestions.

He either did it.. or is the only man capable of figuring out who did

For reasons only some secret inner part of my brain understand, I've spent the evening writing a markdown to pdf renderer.

I'm slowly revising my opinion of LLM coding tools. Currently reviewing code added to a small project by a non-developer using Claude. I'd class it as "over enthusiastic intern" quality, which is actually better than I expected. I hadn't thought it would meaningfully complete the task. 1/n

“You don’t look sick”. Chronic illness is often invisible Many disabilities are invisible People can look “fine” on the outside and have devastating disease processes inside their body They can be living in constant pain, fatigue & exhaustion Don’t judge a book by its cover

Boards of Canada's Olson (1989) playing on the last functioning PDP-1 computer from 1959. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wubk...

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 10009: Beware of people who give writing advice for a living, rather than writing books for a living. And beware of people telling you about *the publishing business* who don't currently work in the publishing business.

Had a busy evening hacking on my text to speech library. Voice models are now available as maven dependencies, so "python style" runtime downloading is no longer mandatory Might call it v1.0.0 and stop breaking the api once I've updated the homograph dictionary github.com/hcoles/voices #java #tts

Currently fixing a bug that's been hiding in plain sight for about 14 years.

Waiting to hear back to confirm, but the arcmutate spring plugin may have just uncovered a large number of bugs in one of our customer's codebases due to the misuse of security/validation annotations. #java #areyousureyourcodeisworking

Tried to use onbuy.com to buy something of non trivial value. Wouldn't use them again. Order cancelled by seller after 2 weeks because "out of stock" with no way to leave a review for the seller. No money lost, but clearly a platform that's happy to have its customers messed around.

It's #DyslexiaAwarenessWeek this week in Scotland (next week England). @barringtonstoke.bsky.social publish incredible, dyslexia-friendly, accessible books for all and I'm delighted to be on their list. For 20% discount use code DAW20 here 👉 collins.co.uk/pages/barrin... (ends 12/10) #KidLitUk

I was up early this morning making inadvisable last minute changes, but at 9am I hit send on my structural edit. I am now celebrating by going to work. #ukkidlit

There's still a bit of work to do, but I've just pushed out a release of my text to speech library with a new phonemizer and initial support for non-english languages. github.com/hcoles/voices #java

So to recap: 🟣Farage made Gill Welsh UKIP leader 🟣Gill left UKIP 2 days after Farage and has admitted to his first count of Russian bribery THE SAME DAY 💎Gill joined Brexit party and re-elected to Brexit Party during the bribes period 💎Gill made Welsh Reform UK leader 11/14

My very first contribution on the ING Tech Blog! I’m excited to share my experience with mutation testing and how it’s vital to strengthen your test suite to gain code quality and resilience. Test smart. Test strong. Trust your code. medium.com/ing-blog/gai...

How is this not front page news? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It's a day old, but my little text to speech library has already had it's first bug report, fix and release. github.com/hcoles/voices #java

I'm meant to be editing a novel, so instead I've written a text to speech system. github.com/hcoles/voices #java #procrastination

We have precious few hours on this earth, so must spend them well. Like this.

Learn how to expose weak tests, strengthen your assertions, and build enterprise-grade confidence with PIT in Java applications. www.the-main-thread.com/p/mutation-t...

Is anyone out there still using groovy-lang.org? Feels like it rather dropped off a cliff (apart from defining gradle builds). Is there a community out there that I'm just not aware of? #java

Just checked back on the dodgy agent who's offer I rejected two years ago. To my immense surprise, there are still no announcements on their website about the middle grade deals with Big 5 publishers that they'd secured but "couldn't talk about yet". Writers, be careful out there.