Week 209: Squared
Happy new year! It’s a numerically interesting one:
This is the only square-numbered year most of us will see: the last one was 1936, and the next will be 2116.
And I’ve discovered how to write mathematical notation in my posts in LaTeX format and render it to MathML, so that’s a nice side-effect.
The new year caught me a bit by surprise, as I had forgotten to wind my watch forward a day at the end of the thirty-day month of November, and consequently spent the whole of Tuesday thinking that it was 30 December.
We didn’t do anything special; in fact, L—, who had spent the day at work, didn’t even stay up until midnight. I did, but only because I was watching an episode of some series or other.
Of course, 1 January has become too commercialised and people have forgotten the true meaning of the day.
We spent New Year’s Day itself hibernating indoors away from the high winds and rain.
We went down to Weymouth to stay with my parents for a couple of days. The train is usually a slow but tolerable 2¾ hours (when it’s not delayed), but as a Christmas treat the schedule is extra slow, and the journey took 3½ hours each way. The trip each way was pleasant enough, though, and uneventful. One of the nice things about that train from my point of view is that none of the seats are reserved and I’m always travelling from one end of the line to the other, so it’s easy to get on early and bag a table.
Long journeys are easier when you have company, and we had a good time visiting them. My laptop spent the entire trip untouched in my bag.
I’m always struck by the degree to which broadcast TV still features in my parents’ life: they plan what they want to watch, and set up the system to record those programmes for later viewing. It’s a laborious version of on-demand viewing, although in its favour it doesn’t require multiple apps each with their own interface and login, and you can fast-forward through the ads. Maybe it’s not a bad solution after all.
This marks four years of weeknotes, and four years of failing to escape from the dull grind of working in web development. I still don’t like it, but it’s still the only thing people pay me significant amounts of money to do, and this has not been helped by the astronomical costs incurred buying a house in 2021 and renovating said house in 2024. Working three days a week was bearable, but now that I’m doing four days I can feel that the balance has tipped over into work being the principal governor of my life.
My predictions for 2025: the hype around “generative AI” will continue to grow. There’s a lot invested in this bubble, and its backers need to keep it inflated. Proponents will continue to overlook the massive environmental and social costs because it’s convenient to ignore them.
Someone will claim to have created AGI. They won’t have, but they’ll convince themselves, and there will be plenty of willing believers to participate in the consensual delusion. It may be the equivalent of building a Mechanical Turk and smacking yourself in the head until you forget that there’s a man in there, but fortunes depend on it.
A handful of links:
- whipper is a Linux CD ripper prioritising accuracy over speed.
- From Simulation to Tenant Takeover: “All I wanted was for Microsoft to deliver my phishing simulation. This journey took me from discovering trivial vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Attack Simulation platform, to a Chinese company to which Microsoft outsourced its support department that wanted all my access tokens. I finally ended up hijacking remote PowerShell sessions and obtaining all data from random Microsoft 365 tenants, all the while reeling in bug bounties along the way.”
- Manx is a catalog of manuals for old computers.