Week 241: Jackpot

On Monday morning, I read that my client is banning Slack and forcibly migrating all chats to Microsoft Teams. I don’t love Slack – it’s hard enough to keep up with the four different kinds of places I have to check for replies and mentions – but I like Teams even less.

Also on Monday, I got kicked out of Teams calls four times, one of which was while I was in the middle of speaking. Great bit of software.

Some developers were stuck trying to work out why a Rails app was falling over at the asset precompilation stage.

It only took me a couple of minutes to find the culprit. I ran git diff on app/config against the last good deploy and there it was: a single rogue comma. Sometimes, it’s not so much knowing the answer as knowing where (and how) to look.

I had a relentless day of meetings on Wednesday, with even the few gaps I’d expected filled up by overruns. I got to the end of the last one, sat on the sofa, and fell asleep for fifty minutes.

Are meetings work? Or are they the stuff you have to do in order to do work? Either way, they’re hard work.

It was finally cool enough to get around to the vacuuming I had been putting off during the recent intolerable heat. It’s good to live in a clean house again. For a short while.

We went to a pub quiz in Peckham with a few of L—’s university friends. We won the quiz (£50 bar tab) and the cash jackpot (£89) so it wasn’t a bad return on our £2-a-head entry fees.

Lots of links this week:

• Courts service accused of covering up IT bug that caused evidence to go missing.
• Creating high quality electronics schematics. Some good tips.
• AI tools used by English councils downplay women’s health issues, study finds. Bias in, bias out.
• Inside Labour students’ revolt over Gaza. “In one case, a young member’s non-Labour employer was contacted by a senior backbench MP, who warned the employer to be ‘wary’ of the student, and to ‘not trust them’ after they were unable to attend an organised study trip to Israel.”
• Age verification is going to destroy the entire internet.
• The Founders of This New Development Say You Must Be White to Live There and the racists behind it don’t sound like very nice people. “The community’s two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but not charged for attempted murder in Ecuador — say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in.”
• Shop this look: Buy cheap, faux gold dupes of Oval Office decor. Cheap looks for cheap!
• The McMansionization of the White House, or: Regional Car Dealership Rococo: a treatise.
• I researched every democratic attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate after fascists were elected was 0%. “So let’s stop pretending [the US is] in the ‘prevention’ phase and start talking about what you do when fascists already control the institutions but haven’t fully consolidated power yet.”
• I’m Thrilled to Announce I’ve Been Cast as Stickles the Gender-Policing Elf in HBO Max’s New Harry Potter Series.
• These Lovely “Fossil Words” Are Hiding in Plain Sight. Fossil words are those that have become obsolete outside of a particular phrase or idiom.
• Treasury blocks school solar power deals. Because, as usual, all they care about is their spreadsheet, full of weird and counterproductive rules that other countries don’t have.
• The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang. “Everyone should think carefully about using generative AI simply because the technology is built on environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and IP theft. College students should think extra carefully about it because, even if those other issues were magically resolved, using generative AI is largely incompatible with the purpose of education.”
• The VPN Explosion That Proves the UK Online Safety Act Failed. “The contrast couldn’t [be] starker: Europe protects privacy whilst achieving child safety goals through systemic approaches, whilst Britain’s surveillance capitalism model fails technically whilst destroying community spaces.”
• Is the Online Safety Act law in name only? “If VPNs provide an easy avenue for people to avoid the legislation’s mandates, will the government really accept that the OSA has become Law In Name Only? I doubt this week marks the end of the VPN wars and any future attempt to restrict them would still be an alarming escalation.” From a right-wing free-market lobby group, but not necessarily wrong.