England’s racists have gone mad for flags. An England flag on a church tower or a historic castle signifies one thing. Flags on cars and houses during a football tournament signify another. But you don’t have to pretend that a shaky red cross painted on a mini-roundabout or a tatty nylon flag (£14 for 6 from AliExpress, I checked) on a lamppost signifies anything other than exclusionary xenophobia …

… that is, unless you’re a morally vacuous empty suit on the Labour front bench, in which case you pretend that it’s good, proper, and actually your entire house is full of flags.

Quote of the week on the blithe profligacy of modern web development:

I didn’t spend my early twenties mastering how to keep web page nav elements under 1k so they’d load quickly on a 33.6kbps dial-up connection so you assholes could load 3 megabytes of javascript that does nothing but generate 400k of html

Microsoft Teams is worse than ever and barely a meeting goes by without more than one team member being unable to sign in, or being unable to connect, or being kicked out in the middle of speaking. Only a few more weeks, and then it’s going on my shitlist, the list I keep of things I have worked with that I won’t let myself be made to work with again.

L—’s grandmother died, which wasn’t a surprise in anything other than the exact moment, but it’s still sad. I spoke to her once on the phone, but I’d never met her. L— still has one grandparent. It’s a bit difficult to comprehend for me: my maternal grandmother, my last grandparent, died over twenty years ago. (I know it was 2004 because it was right at the same time as the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.)

“AI” continues to make my life measurably worse. I received a message on Thursday afternoon asking me to join an urgent call with my boss and their boss. I did so.

Apparently, someone had been working on an “AI” security scanner. They proudly demonstrated their work to a director, using one of the (open source) codebases I’m responsible for. The scanner reported that it had found a leaked secret token in the repository.

Oh no! That would be a disaster! Which file? They told me – a test file – and gave me the offending line. I opened it up in my editor.

"aws_secret_access_key": "XXXX/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

I’m not redacting anything there. That’s exactly what was in the file. A load of literal Xs. At no point in this process did anyone use their own eyes or brain until it came to me.

I suppose being one of the few people left alive who are prepared to use their own onboard thinking capability is one way to earn a living, but it feels like an uphill struggle.

Friday was a lovely day and past me had forced myself out of the house by placing a click and collect order (for a ukulele case) that had to be collected from Camden. I cycled the fifty minutes across town to get there and spent a few hours pottering around charity shops. Once upon a time, it would have been an ordeal, but the bicycle infrastructure in London is now good enough that it’s a relaxing way to spend a few hours, and far preferable to a spell on the Jubilee and Northern lines.

L—’s brother and sister in law were in London for the weekend so we started Sunday with a very pleasant stroll past the Big Half marathon runners and along the river to London Bridge for brunch. By the time we walked back again, the runners had evaporated and normality was returning. After a huge brunch and a long walk, I sat down on the sofa and fell asleep. It’s one of the best ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

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