Needed to renew my driving license. My new one doesn’t have an EU flag on it. The sad reminders of Brexit just keep coming. 🇪🇺💔
Author: Dan Q
Hot take: AI peaked with Taco Bot 3000
AI peaked in 20141 with the invention of the Taco Bot 30002.
With artificial (taco) intelligence and the latest cheese dispensing technology, it truly represented the summit of human technological achievement the likes of which we might not see again3.
Footnotes
1 Yes, Taco Bot’s song came out in 2019, teaching us about the far-reaching capabilities of this high-powered platform, but a prototype Taco Bot with a reduced featureset was seen in 2014’s Raining Tacos.
2 Is it AI? The term gets thrown-around a lot nowadays and refers to a lot of different technologies, let’s not forget that that’s always been the case. Was the El Ajedrecista machine (1914) AI? Arguably, yes: even though it was effectively using a ruleset, it achieved its goal of exhibiting a behaviour that had previously been argued to be demonstrative of human intelligence, and beyond the capability of an automaton (consider also the Nimatron from 1940). Looking for something less-deterministic? The Ising Model (1920) could be argued to have been the first neural net. It didn’t attempt to “act” in a way that most humans think of when they consider “AI”, but it used fundamentally the same model as future artificial neural nets did. By 1950, Turing and von Neumann had laid-out more-concrete definitions of machine “thought”, some of which had, at least conceptually, already been demonstrated by the above examples, but if you don’t consider response precomputation a valid AI strategy, then consider Prinz’s Chess (1951) which calculated on-the-fly solutions. Or if your view on AI is sufficiently narrow that you only consider a “chatbot” to count, let’s not forget that ELIZA got there in 1965. My point is that there’s a whole lot of things that can and have been legitimately called AI, and a walking, talking, bad-guy-fighting, taco-dispensing robot might certainly count, in my mind.
3 By which I mean to say, the Raining Tacos saga by Parry Gripp (whom you’ve almost certainly come across either from his silly videos or else because he performed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme song) finally came to an end in April of this year after taking 14 years to release 9 short songs. If you blinked and missed the last decade and a half of Internet wackiness, go watch the director’s cut of the whole thing, which came out last month.
Why Are We Taught to Memorise and Not Learn?
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Roald Dahl does not use fronted adverbials for time and coordinating conjunctions, he deliberately makes his work simple and frenetic, the stream of consciousness of a curious child , the turbocharged imagination of youth in prose it can easily understand.
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To Tories, Art Is Not Proper. Grammar is Proper.
Of course, this handily explains the move towards metrics obsession in the UK, but this is a long term phenomenon that predates Michael Gove. Our education system was advocated for and partially financed by industrialists, who saw that teaching the necessary mathematical and numerical skills to perform middle management tasks could be funded by the taxpayer. This is in the bones of our education system, the set structure. Metrics obsession isn’t just a class thing, it’s factory floor thinking. Everything must be quantified in terms of output, you are performing mock standardised tests every 6 weeks from the age of 8.
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A political but fair look at the mass-production standardisation of English-language education in British schools. In an effort to make work measurable and objectively assessable, it argues, we’re stripping the joy out of the art of writing.
Having seen the kinds of things our children are assessed on at school, it’s a reasonable hypothesis.
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
I’m still lagging way-behind on writing-up the nonfiction I’ve been reading this year, and I’m long
overdue1 to share my love of
Holly Gramazio‘s debut novel, The Husbands. Which is excellent; truly
un-put-downable. I’d come across Holly’s writing before by playing Dicey Dungeons, but I hadn’t realised that until later when,
four chapters into this book, I decided to look her up (in the hope, perhaps, that she’d written any other books I could add to my reading list – the answer is… not yet).
Here’s the skinny. Lauren comes home from a night out to find her husband waiting for her. Which is immediately confusing and concerning, because when she left for the evening, she wasn’t married. But all the evidence suggests that now, somehow, mysteriously, she has a husband: she finds letters addressed to the pair of them, her phone is full of photos of them together going back through their wedding and beyond, and all of her friends back up the fact that she really has made a life with this man… that she just can’t remember.
But the weirder bit she discovers a little later. Whenever her husband goes up into the attic, he’s replaced with a different husband. A different man, it seems, that she could conceivably have married, in some strange alternate timeline. By controlling how and when they do so, she comes to discover that she can cycle through a seemingly-endless supply of husbands, and as she comes to accept and understand her new life, begins to use this as a kind-of… dating superpower? “Trying on” a husband for as many minutes, hours, days, or months it takes to decide whether or not to “keep” him2.
That’s the premise, and it’s perfectly fun (although occasionally dark) – sort of a parody of “swipe-left/swipe-right” modern dating, taken to an extreme – but wouldn’t by itself be reason enough to recommend it. But what comes next is what makes it so special.
Aaand… I feel like I can’t say more without spoiling it. And you really should read it! Suffice to say that the writing is compelling, and engaging, and there are plenty sufficient twists and turns to keep you interested even if you wouldn’t normally go in for… what I’m going to describe as a romantic-comedy. Our protagonist’s situation feels relatable even while it’s unfamiliar, and I enjoyed both laughing at her exploits while also grieving her losses. And again: the surprises and quirks are really fun.
So yeah – you should 100% read this fantastic debut. I loved it so much, and everybody I’ve already recommended it to has agreed with me that it’s a great page-turner. And while you wait for your copy to arrive, why not generate yourself a random husband courtesy of a widget on Gramazio’s website?
Footnotes
1 I think I finished reading it about the same time as Terence Eden, who also gave a rave review, if you’re wondering exactly how far “behind” I am.
2 Needless to say, I found myself thinking of how to apply the Secretary Problem to Lauren’s lifestyle long before it came up in the book!
Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
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As far as I can tell,
www.google.comis the only site exempted by Chrome. Looking inside the~/Libraryfolder, it appears that the saved site data consists of Cookies, Local Storage, and Session Storage./Application Support /Chrome /Default ..
I wish the government would move fast and break up the Google Search monopoly. Don’t even get me started about how when you’re not signed in to Google, all Google Search results are now opaque
https://www.google.com/goto?url=garbage rather than the site URLs!
So yeah: Google have (not for the first time, and perhaps to nobody’s surprise) nerfed the privacy features of their own browser. Now it only fully respects the user’s privacy wishes when the user isn’t accessing a Google product. So when they use Google Search, GMail, Google Maps, YouTube, or – I suppose – any website with Google Analytics installed… the user’s privacy settings might not be respected.
I increasingly struggle to understand why so many folks use Chrome as their daily driver: it feeds the monopoly of Google, who time and time again show that they’re not trustworthy with that power. Meanwhile, if you really need Chrome-compatibility, there are no shortage of Chromium-powered browsers to meet every need. There is no need to specifically use Chrome, and doing so supports unethical digital surveillance by the world’s eighth-largest company.
F-Day plus 204 (no content??)
HTTP status code 204 means “no content”. No update. Nothing to tell you.
Which I’m reminded of as I write about progress on our house repairs following the flood that swept through our home on Friday 13 February… 204 days ago. Because that’s how the summer’s repairs have felt: No updates. Nothing to say.
It was already pretty jarring to return from an epic holiday and get back into work-mode. But it was doubly-regrettable to discover that the various tradespeople who’d been given access to our house in our absence had done… pretty-much nothing.
No work done. And also: no update messages. Everything had just… stopped.
So we gathered the builders and the loss adjuster and demanded an update. Sometimes you just have to step up and say “hey, what the fuck guys, are we ever gonna get to move back into our house?”
It turns out there’d been a few blockers. The contractor who’d been sourced to lay the new underfloor screed in the living room and library had not turned up. The new tiles that would replace the flooring across the ground floor were still being quarried. The electrical work had complexities that had caused it to overrun be split into two visits, separated by the electricians’ other contracts.
Which is frustrating, of course, but it was definitely exacerbated by the lack of communication.
Anyway: our meeting with the various parties led to a new timeline, and it optimistically proposes that we might be able to move back into our home as soon as November… so, F-Day plus 262 through 291, I guess? Here’s hoping. (Obviously any update will make it into my now long-running series of posts about our experience of getting flooded-out.)
We’re really keen to be back home by Christmas. The Chicory House is okay as temporary accommodation but there are plenty of things I dislike about it, and I’m ready to move back into our actual house now, thanks.
Why I Stopped “Creating Content”
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The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more personally relevant content.
My awe only grew when I noticed the museum gift shop converting 60% of its traffic, numbers that would make any content creator salivate.
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In case it wasn’t obvious that Michael was being facetious (oh god, please let it be obvious), he says as much right after this introduction.
The point is: ‘content‘ have become a catch-all term so broad as to be meaningless. A tweet is content. A Netflix series is content. Everything in-between that is passively or mostly-passsively consumed is content, whether it’s AI-slop music or template-driven memes. And content exists to trigger engagement and drive traffic and oh shit now we’re down a rabbithole of meaningless SEO jargon.
Like Michael, I don’t like it. These different media are fundamentally different, and we should embrace that. A blogger is not (necessarily) a documentarian, nor are they a comic book artist or an exhibition curator or a podcaster. They can be all of those things, but they’re different things! When we treat them all as interchangeable kinds of “content” for a generic “audience”, we lose something about what’s beautiful and unique about each of them… and we lose the opportunity to find and name new art forms at the intersections between them.
You can call things “content” if you like, but the vocabulary available to us is richer than that, and the things we create – in whatever form they take – can be too, when we use it.
It took 13 years to notice my invalid vehicle registration certificate!
In 2014 we bought a car1, registered in my name. It’s a little long in the tooth now and we’re thinking about what might replace it, but for the time being it’s a useful workhorse and especially valuable when we need to move the entire family and still have space for luggage.
This week, I renewed my driving license2. While doing so, I was invited to connect the records of the vehicles I own. This would allow, for example, email notifications when my Vehicle Excise Duty is due on them.
How to register a car “wrong”
The newer of our two cars was easy to add: I provided the number plate; the website did some kind of lookup; and it was done. But when I tried to add the older car, I got an error message:
The website claimed that the details on my V5C – the vehicle registration certificate or “logbook” – didn’t match my personal information. So I pulled out the papers for both cars… and discovered that the personal information sections were identical. The front of a V5C has a section that shows your name and address, and on both my certificates looked the same: my name, followed by my address. So why was one failing to work?
I sat in a queue for their webchat service, and – after a lot of back-and-forth – the operator and I came to a conclusion about what was wrong: for this car only, my name had been entered into the “company name” field in their database, rather than the “name” field.
From the looks of things, this is what happened in 2014:
- The dealership filled the V55/4 form to register the car to me.
- The DVLA saw my unusual name3, figured “that can’t be a person’s name; it must be a company name”4, and put it into the “company name” field.
- The DVLA database differentiates between company name and person name, but the paper version just prints whichever one is present at the top of the address: information is lost in the translation to paper.
- So: the database was wrong, but the paper copy didn’t show that it was wrong.
Getting the problem fixed
Apparently if I send my V5C to them with the details “corrected”, with an accompanying letter explaining the the correction is to which field they should be storing the data in, then they’ll correct it within a month or so
And then they’ll issue me with a new paper copy. Which will, naturally, look identical to this one. The only change will be in their database.
What can we learn from this?
I wonder if there’s anything that could have been different to prevent this confusion? A simple change would be to improve the layout of the third page of a V5C certificate.
Perhaps instead of re-listing the name and address in the same format as on the front page, this page could list each field separately, perhaps with each alongside the corresponding field for changing it. This wouldn’t need much space, less than would be saved by consolidating submission instructions (which are repeated at least five times in some form or another, across the form).
There are other ambiguities and redundancies that could be cleared-up at the same time. For example, the company name field does double-duty as the title field, which is an unnecessary complication that I’m sure must make data entry harder. And the registration number and document reference number are duplicated many times on this page, even though the instructions prohibit separating the parts.
Maybe there’s something to be learned from this for all of us who work with databases and forms. Do you have any fields that serve double-duty? Do you produce output by concatenating fields in such a way that might result in ambiguous provenience? Do you have a process to validate that data has been entered into the right column? Are you unable to make changes without re-generating secondary resources (like paper hard copies), the the secondary resources are functionally unchanged?
But for now, I probably ought to get this form sent back to the DVLA. So they can change their database and send me back a near-identical form. Such bureaucracy!
Footnotes
1 This car is a Seat, and – because we name all of our cars – he’s call Arthur. Yes, for the pun.
2 The driving license renewal was super easy, by the way. Half a dozen clicks on a gov.uk page and it was done.
3 If you’re new to my blog you might not know, but my actual full name, which appears on my driving license and my passport and the electoral roll and (nowadays) my birth certificate is just: Dan Q. It sometimes causes problems with computer systems, leading to me getting strangely-addressed postal mail or being unable to fill out web forms without lying. I’m mostly understanding of the falsehoods programmers believe about names, but sometimes companies mess shit up so badly that if they don’t correct their mistakes they end up paying me to go away. My blog contains lots more stories of my unusual name causing trouble.
4 As far as I can tell, there’s never been a company called “Dan Q”. There was a “Danq”, once, and a “Dan QB” long after, and it makes you wonder why corporate registration of a vehicle doesn’t require as a minimum a cursory lookup on Companies House by the registering officer, but what do I know?
Dan Q wrote note for GC9EXXC Shady Seat on The Green
This checkin to GC9EXXC Shady Seat on The Green reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Quick check while I was passing, as nobody’s logged this cache during our stupidly-hot July or August (and I don’t blame them: it’s been horrible outdoors!). Anyway: the cache is fine and healthy and looking forward to its next visitor!
Descaled
I descaled the coffee machine yesterday. We live in an exceptionally hard-water area and this maintenance was long overdue.
This morning I turned the machine on and something felt unfamiliar and wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on what, until I realised…
…I’d gotten so-used to seeing the “descaling needed” light illuminated that I’d subconsciously forgotten that it wasn’t supposed to be always-lit! Turns out that a warning left long enough becomes not just invisible but normalised!
(Next, maybe I should do something about the ‘check engine’ light in the car. It’s been on for a while too…)
How do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say?
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
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I have such an admiration for those who post so much without fear of reprisal; posting purely for the sake of loving writing and sharing their opinions and thoughts with the world, not because they’re trying to manipulate search engines or grift some ad revenue from whatever happens to be popular that week. Pure and simple posting for the love of the game. Take my Three Rings colleague Dan Q, whose blog spans multiple decades across countless topics. I’m sure he would shy away from such an accolade, but I think it’s truly a fantastic example of using the Internet as it was intended: having your own little corner of it and filling it with the things that interest you, regardless of whether anybody else particularly cares.
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Aww.
I first met Oli shortly before a nonprofit I founded – Three Rings – took the necessary technical steps to formally adopt/rescued a piece of software he’d been working on – Portal – in order to continue to make it available to the voluntary organisations that depended upon it (and perhaps, hopefully, along the way make it suitable for use by a wider range of charitable enterprises to boot).
I’ve long known that Oli blogs well and his writings are worth seeing… but he does so at what one might call a “normal person” cadance. This is perhaps unlike my pace, which might be generously described as somewhere between “breakneck” and “obsessive”.
Anyway: Oli’s latest blog post, How do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say?, touches on another difference between our respective blogs: mine is old. Not quite 30 years, as he hints, but next month it will be 28 days since my first blog post, and in January it’ll be 28 years since my oldest surviving contemporaneous blog post.
How do people blog for this long without running out of things to say, asks Oli. And then, over the course of his post and via a glimpse at a post-ideas spreadsheet (as well as a conversation with an LLM), he comes to a conclusion:
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As for the question I started with – how do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say? I think I was approaching it from the wrong direction. Nobody sits down with thirty years’ worth of material ready to go. They just keep finding things interesting for thirty years.
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And that’s it: that’s it exactly. You don’t start a blog with three decades’ worth of ideas. Hell, if I could only write about things that I’ve got notes or drafts about, and at my current cadence, I’d be dry before the end of the year (and I have a lot of half-written ideas just waiting for polishing!).
If there is a secret to blogging for thirty straight years, I think it’s this. Stay curious. Never stop asking questions. Never stop learning. Try to look at your world as if you’re seeing it for the first time, and remember that what’s mundane to you could be fascinating to somebody else, or in the right light. And, crucially, the single-most important thing of all: find a motivation to keep writing for yourself. When you’re writing for yourself, first and foremost, you’ve always got a reason to keep going.
That’s what I think, anyway. You don’t have to blog like me, of course, but if you want to… the paragraph above represents all I know about how to do so!
The modern app
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Today I’m introducing the next generation of code editor. A modern app to satiate the needs of the discerning coder. We’re talkin’ blazing fast collaboration between man and machine.
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Yeah so um… have you noticed that all modern software is teetering on the enshitty cliff? Everything in my dock is an Electron-ified enshittybomb one update from disaster. There used to be alternatives. Now those suck too.
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You probably saw this one already; I forgot to share it in July, but it’s done the rounds a-plenty. It’s worth experiencing on David’s website where the “Modern Editor” is interactive (kinda: it’s still about as much use as it looks like it’s gonna be… and that’s kind-of the point).
The enshittification of modern apps is very real. Simple tools that ought to work offline don’t start without an Internet connection (or, worse yet, a slow Internet connection means that they stall during their self-update check or phone-home analytics). AI “features” get stitched in to everything, whether you want them or not. Desktop applications are constructed using the same super-heavyweight React + Tailwind + whatever else stacks under which the Web creaks, but because they’re now long-running system tray/notification area processes their gradual memory leaks make them painfully slow. Updates change the UI without warning and you need to work to find where your favourite features have gone, if they even still exist. You’re nagged to “create an account” and “log in” even if you have no use for the connectivity “features”. Kebab menus everywhere make for a whole new level of mystery meat navigation, once you eventually find the right to click out of the three that are typically visible at any given time. And every application acts like it’s the single-most important thing on your screen, competing for real estate and attention.
So yeah, I feel David’s pain.
Anyway: go play with his interactive modern editor.
we don’t shame smart glasses wearers enough
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Wombat sent me the above picture: A physical ad by Apple on a big canvas. Pictured is a person hiding their face with their iPhone, but therefore actually pointing the camera at the people seeing the ad. It says: “Safari. A browser that’s actually private.” and “Privacy. That’s iPhone.“
It’s accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private, but not people in general, especially not the people the users point these devices at.
Privacy, as it is commonly practiced and advertised, is for the person inflicting the damage onto their surroundings, not their surroundings.
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A wonderful take on big tech privacy culture that’s better-expressed than I could have ever put it. That Apple poster shows a particularly ironic lack of self-awareness!
Techbros seem to want to sell individual privacy while simultaneously undermining society‘s privacy: you get “privacy settings”, but we’re still tracking-by-default everybody else. They deliberately turn a blind eye to the fact that the latter – in our age of big data processing – undermines the former: there are countless examples now of people finding new ways to interpret leaked corporate datasets in order to extract personally-identifiable information, and it’s a problem that only seems to get worse.
“Privacy settings” are important, but wouldn’t it be nicer if privacy was the default?
And yeah: smart glasses can get fucked. I don’t want a world in which having a conversation with somebody in specs requires that I allow Facebook to watch and listen-in as well. Just wear some Normal Fucking Sunglasses, ‘k?
Dan Q found GC9BHWG Watercress beds
This checkin to GC9BHWG Watercress beds reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Despite immediately honing in on exactly the right host, it still took me an embarrassingly long time to find this cache. This, despite having found – and even hidden – cache contsibers of exactly this type before!
My usual technique for lazily finding them, which involves swooping my phone through likely hiding spots with the camera in ‘selfie’ mode, as a mirror, somehow didn’t help me spot this one and it took until I bothered to crouch down (in the rain, in my already-wet trousers) and felt around free host before I reached it!
TFTC.
Dan Q found GC8ZWZ3 Letcombe Bridges 1
This checkin to GC8ZWZ3 Letcombe Bridges 1 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
QEF while passing through the village on a circular walk. TFTC!