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2025-04-14

Week 223: Orange Monday

Orange Monday wiped about a year’s worth of contributions in value off my pension. On one hand, I absolutely do want to see an end to US global hegemony, just … not like this, and not this chaotically and precipitately.

By Wednesday, the US dictator had knocked all the tariffs down to 10% on everywhere except China, which he raised to 104%, and then to 125% later in the week. I’m not sure how any business could deal with such unpredictable price variation on imports.

When you use the cloud, you march to someone else’s tune. In this case, the marching band was GitHub, who decided to kill the cache API that a work project’s builds were using. We only found out because it stopped working: part of the process of this expiry involved a couple of brownout periods, short intervals of simulated death during which the to-be-killed interface would be turned off.

The first of these periods coincided with camelgate, a botched “security” intervention in which Cloudflare managed to block any URL containing “camel”, making it impossible to download one of the bild dependencies. This wouldn’t have been a problem if it were cached, but because I was using a new cache API, there was no existing cache.

The second brownout period was scheduled for Tuesday, so I allocated my afternoon to working on a fix. It wasn’t as easy as the notice predicted, as the cache was used only indirectly. A game of Whac-A-Mole ensued, as one by one I knocked out the places that referred to something else that used an old version of the API. In the end, I succeeded within the brownout period, so it should keep working when they turn it off for real.

However, I resent the unnecessary work. A few weeks earlier, I had to spend a couple of days changing a database over because Microsoft had decided, for their own reasons, to retire Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Single Server in favour of Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. What’s the difference? I don’t know, and I don’t care. From my perspective, nothing except additional work. I resent having to use Microsoft products every day, but at least the old evil monopolising Microsoft put effort into backwards compatibility. It’s now considered normal and acceptable to make arbitrary changes and force customers to redirect their effort into vendor support.

(See also: buy a new phone to continue to have access to this service you depend on.)

I went climbing again at the bouldering wall. They do a cheap rate for locals on Wednesdays, so I blocked out a longer lunchtime in my calendar, worked from home, and wandered over there around midday. I’m already better than the previous week, which makes me think that whilst I might indeed have grown weaker, it’s more likely that I was just rusty.

I’m planning to do the same this week. I get enough double-booked meetings to know that no one pays much attention to whether I’m actually free or not, so I hope I don’t have to fight too much to keep it clear.

We had a few of L—’s university friends over for dinner on Friday. It was so unseasonably hot (21 C in the afternoon) that we were able to open the patio doors and eat al fresco into the evening.

The sunny spell finally broke over the weekend. I think the garden plants will appreciate it, even if I don’t.

Many links this week:

• endoflife.date documents EOL dates and support lifecycles for various products, and provides an API and calendar integration.
• When this is over, U.S. rights abusers must be tried for crimes against humanity. “The sword of justice should someday come for the likes of Noem or immigration czar Tom Homan, who sees no problem in sending an innocent man into a gulag”.
• EU issues US-bound staff with burner phones over spying fears. That’s how you have to deal with a repressive dictatorship.
• How to disable a robot dog if it attacks you. Spoof in the style of 1980s British public information films.
• Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? Why indeed.
• The Strange, Unsettling Story of British Steel. “Jingye was planning to starve the blast furnaces to death […] if you starve a blast furnace, there is no easy way to start it up again.”
• Elon Musk Is Gleefully Destroying the Government for Donald Trump. “[W]hen he has privately messaged associates and confidants about reports from federal staffers about how their lives have been wrecked, the Tesla CEO has been known to react with laugh-crying emojis”.
• Owls in Towels does what it says.
• Bedstead – MODE 7 for the 21st century. The old BBC Micro and Teletext characters as a TrueType font.
• Comradery is a Patreon-style subscription platform that’s co-operatively owned.
• What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked. It’s a little reassuring to know that some people in the US are planning for the worst.
• Britain’s parties cater to a voter who is, often literally, dead. “Each party is in hock to a Britain that has been dead for years.”
• DIY synths database. “Curated collection of 82 DIY-friendly hardware synthesizers and related standalone musical equipment. All open source.”
• Why does Britain feel so poor?