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Week 232: Did you hear the news?
It was a big week for Things Happening. On Thursday, a plane crashed shortly after take-off from Ahmedabad in India to Gatwick in the UK (not actually in London, but nearish). It hit a student hostel, killing all but one of the 242 people on board, along with eight people on the ground. But that was soon overshadowed in the news cycle.
“Did you hear the news?” my partner asked me as I came down for breakfast on Friday morning. “No….” “Israel bombed Iran.”
Not everything is terrible. I found a very nice brand new shirt in the Traid charity shop in Peckhan on Tuesday lunchtime, and it only cost me £3.50.
I went climbing and this time I remembered my wallet. On the way there I saw a three-legged dog. If I had a three-legged dog, I’d call him Mike. (Short for Microsoft, because he doesn’t run very well.)
I went for drinks with old colleagues on Wednesday evening. It was fun to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a long time. I also met a few people whose time at the company had been after mine. One told me that at his current employer, they are mandated to “use AI” for their work, to the extent that their LLM usage stats are part of their appraisals.
It sounds grim to me. If LLMs are so great, why do they have to force people to use them? The answer, as ever, can be found in the role of capital and its relation to labour.
As I was walking past a bus stop in Deptford on Friday, a man got off the bus, asked me for directions, and showed me the address on his phone. The phone was beeping every few seconds, while things kept popping up and taking over the screen saying that his phone was infected. Was it really infected, or had he installed software that purported to stop viruses but which is actually just a route for unscrupulous operators to levy a monthly fee on the unwitting? And is there really a difference?
It made me wonder, what kind of a hell have we created by putting these devices at the centre of people’s lives? Every interaction with the state, banking, etc. now has to be through one of these pocket misery boxes.
I’ll be down on the south coast at Brighton Ruby from Wednesday evening until Friday. See some of you there!
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Week 231: A bit of a round ball
I was on a call with a few colleagues when one of them said, “that was a bit of a round ball, perhaps.” At least, that’s what I heard. I was wondering whether it was some kind of sports expression well known to football enjoyers, like “a game of two halves”, until someone else echoed him and said, “not a ramble at all.”
Week 230: Wailing and gnashing of teeth
After a long bank holiday weekend (very relaxing, Monday was the first time in weeks that neither of us had had to get up for work or some event or other) I sat down at my computer on Tuesday morning, opened Slack, and was greeted by much wailing and gnashing of teeth, because the SSL certificate on a live service had expired.
Week 229: How long is too long?
What’s the maximum length of a domain name? If you search, you’ll get answers in the range of 253 to 255 octets (≈ characters). Don’t be fooled. The maximum length of a domain name that can be handled by several online platforms, including Microsoft Azure and Heroku, is actually 64 octets, as I found to my great inconvenience on Monday.
Week 228: Not actually an island
If I told you that I went to a fair on Saturday, bought a jar of chutney from the WI, drank real ale, and watched morris dancers, you would probably form one impression in your mind. The reality was a little different: we went to the Nunhead Cemetery Open Day, and wandered amongst the stalls and the dead in a crowd of the living that contained a sizeable contingent of goths. The dancing came from the [Black Swan Border Morris][black swan], resplendent in black and purple and a lot of tattoos. We headed to the [Ivy House] for lunch, where I had that pint (Here Comes the Sun elderflower pale ale from 360 Degree Brewing Co.) and watched a repeat performance from Black Swan who had also made their way to the same pub.
Older entries can be found in the archive.