Week 212: Suspicious barcode
Over the sea in the west, a notorious criminal returned to the imperial throne after a brief interregnum. At the coronation, his pet oligarch performed a Nazi salute. Twice. The newly-crowned emperor immediately used his powers to announce a swathe of cruel diktats and to release his supporters from the prisons where they were serving their punishments for violent insurrection.
And that was just Monday.
Under late-stage capitalism with British characteristics, you are obliged to choose between (some degree of) anonymity and reasonable prices for food. Tesco is a particular offender here, where the non-loyalty-scheme price of items is often as much as £1 more than with a “Clubcard”. Unfortunately for me, Tesco is also the only large supermarket nearby.
Well, you might have to register to get the discounts, but you don’t have to give them your actual name, or even a working address, and you certainly don’t have to use their app. All you need is the barcode, and a way to display it. I use this one on Android but others are available.
I went shopping in Tesco at a fairly quiet time of day, and decided to pay at one of the staffed tills. It went as normal until the time came for me to scan my card to get the discounts (/actual prices) and I opened up the aforementioned app.
The person at the checkout bristled at this screen that they didn’t recognise. “What’s that?”
I managed to persuade them that it was just the card barcode in an app that stores barcodes, and they relented and let me scan it, but they still seemed very suspicious.
It reminded me that most people don’t think about these things in terms of the underlying technology, but in the terms in which they’re presented to them. If Tesco tell you that you can use a card or an app, then you accept that, and it’s odd when someone has an app that doesn’t look like The App, even if it’s functionally and visually the same thing as the card.
I found a nice jumper in a charity shop. I was looking at books and music, but it caught my eye as I walked to the till. I brought it home and showed it to L—, who cooed over it, so I looked up the brand online. It would have been at least £90 new.
It’s warm and cosy and looks good and I like it. The fact that I paid £7 makes me like it even more.
I cooked vegan haggis for Burns Night on Saturday. The plant-based chieftain o’ the puddin-race went down as well as ever. As I’ve said before, no one eats haggis out of a particular affection for sheep’s lung, and the vegetarian/vegan versions do a very good job of providing the same texture and flavour.
Burns Night was really just a convenient excuse, and I’d happily eat haggis every week. I bought two haggises and froze one, so there’s more haggis to come in my near future.
I’ll be in Brussels for FOSDEM this coming weekend. I’m staying Friday to Monday, so I’ll be there three nights. I’m actually drinking a Belgian beer as I write this, but I’m looking forward to having a few in their homeland, and to fighting my way through the crowds at ULB. It’s never possible to see more than a fraction of what’s on, but there’s always something interesting or useful or just plain entertaining.
Links:
- Playwright is a tool for cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-language end-to-end web app testing. It’s reputed to be more reliable than Selenium.
- Labour’s AI Action Plan - a gift to the far right. “[O]n top of the clear social and environmental harms associated with the technology, Labour’s vapid fixation on AI-led growth in lieu of real change will further enable the far right.”
- I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.
- The UK deploys Humphrey, your AI-powered consultation-ignoring bot. “The core belief of the UK AI push is that LLMs are actually magic”
- The Website Manifesto says that “You should have a website […] You will feel better if you have control over your technology”.
- Tactility is a graphical operating system for ESP32 microcontroller systems.
- Out With The Old: “Electoral common sense for left-leaning voters has always been that it’s far better to hold your nose and vote for a spineless centrist than to abstain and pave the way for a grasping fascist, but that only works if the centrist wins.”