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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 8h

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

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15h

Thinking about this though, the big difference between non developer + Claude and an overly-enthusiastic-intern is that the intern might have learnt from the feedback for next time.

(also most interns don't set the planet on fire)

n+1/n

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15h

This was for a dull "donkey work" task on a small project.

I'd say in this instance Claude has made things happen marginally faster, although we still need to see if I missed something that I will later regret merging.

n/n

1

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15h

It has a resource leak and the front end part of it "works" but is inconsistent with the rest of the app.

It has however probably taken me (slightly) less time to rework this into something that just meets the minimum mergable standard than if I'd started from scratch.

2/n

1

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15h

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

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Reposted by Henry Coles

Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social · 3d

“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

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 7d

I have a scene featuring a hack not unlike this in my first novel, only the computer and the music are both much older.

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 7d

Boards of Canada's Olson (1989) playing on the last functioning PDP-1 computer from 1959.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wubk...

Boards of Canada "Olson" on a 1959 PDP-1 Computer

YouTube video by Joe Lynch

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Henry Coles

Joanne Harris @joannechocolat.bsky.social · 12d

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.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15d

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

GitHub - hcoles/voices: Fast, in-process text to speech for Java

Fast, in-process text to speech for Java. Contribute to hcoles/voices development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 15d

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

2

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 16d

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

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 16d

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.

1

Reposted by Henry Coles

Alastair Chisholm @alastairc.com · 17d

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

A poster announcing Dyslexia Awareness Week 2025, and showing two books by Alastair Chisholm – REEK and BLITZERS, both published by Barrington Stoke.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 17d

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

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 19d

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

GitHub - hcoles/voices: Fast, in-process text to speech for Java

Fast, in-process text to speech for Java. Contribute to hcoles/voices development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Reposted by Henry Coles

Emma Monk @monkemma.bsky.social · 20d

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

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Reposted by Henry Coles

Simone Romani @simoneromani.bsky.social · 21d

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...

Gain confidence in your code with mutation testing

Hi, I’m Simone, a Chapter Lead at ING and I’m responsible for the application gateway for all payments done via the Mobile Banking app…

medium.com

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Reposted by Henry Coles

Alex Andreou @sturdyalex.bsky.social · 20d

How is this not front page news?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Reform UK's ex-Wales leader Nathan Gill admits pro-Russia bribery

Nathan Gill admits eight charges of bribery while being a Member of the European Parliament.

www.bbc.co.uk

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 21d

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

GitHub - hcoles/voices: Fast, in-process text to speech for Java

Fast, in-process text to speech for Java. Contribute to hcoles/voices development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 21d

It's a shame there are no tools that detect this sort of thing without setting the planet on fire.

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 22d

I'm meant to be editing a novel, so instead I've written a text to speech system.

github.com/hcoles/voices

#java #procrastination

GitHub - hcoles/voices: Fast, in-process text to speech for Java

Fast, in-process text to speech for Java. Contribute to hcoles/voices development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 23d

This reason this isn't wrapped up as something PIT reports is that is probably doesn't mean what people think it does.

Tests that didn't kill anything might be great tests, they just weren't run because a different test was used to successfully challenge the mutant first.

2/2

Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · 23d

Sort of. You can get a record of all killing tests (from the xml output or good old csv).

Any test that isn't listed never failed.

1/2

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Henry Coles @pitest.bsky.social · Sep 15

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

Like this.

Robert Smallshire @robert.smallshire.no · Sep 15

Too long since I made any truly whimsical software, so last night I added Apple Touch Bar support to the Mac version of the BeebEm BBC Micro Emulator to give important missing function keys f0-f9 in iconic red-orange, a copy key in somewhat less iconic olive-brown and, a Break key in desiato black.

A view of a MacBook Pro Touch Bar showing BBC Micro function keys.

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