Author: Dan Q
Dan Q is a software engineer, a director of a voluntary organisation, a trainee counsellor, a keen geocacher, and an amateur magician. He lives with his partner and her husband in a polyamorous triad, and occasionally finds time to blog.
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Doxxing an Imaginary Person?
This morning, Google pulled a video from YouTube belonging to my nonprofit Three Rings. This was a bit of a surprise.
Apparently the video - which is a demo of some Three Rings features - apparently fell foul of Google's anti-doxxing rules. I'm glad that they have anti-doxxing rules, of course. But in this case, the person we 'doxxed' lives on Some Street, Somewhereville. Which I'd like to imagine is clearly a made-up address, but maybe not! -
Found GCA6CCW Purple door
This checkin to GCA6CCW Purple door reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. It's possible that cycling this path wasn't the wisest idea, I realised, as I dodged brambles on both sides. So focused was I on riding safely that I forgot which GPSr I'd brought with me and listening for โฆ
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Found GCADCWF Treasure island
After an appointment in Witney I opted to divert my cycle home to find this and the other cache on the same path.
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Historical Tech Tree
รtienne Fortier-Dubois's excellent Historical Tech Tree is fun and informative, and worth an explore.
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The unrepentant bleppy face of a dog who, without fail, steals the warm spot I've left behind on the sofa within like three seconds of me standing up.
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A champagne-coloured French bulldog sits askew on a blue blanket atop a grey sofa, her tongue sticking out and to the side, as she looks at the photographer.
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Have I posted this joke before? It's all a Blur.
Accessible description: Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and a faded blue ponytail, stands in a darkened kitchen. Turning to the camera, he says "I get up when I want, except on Wednesdays when I get rudely awakened by the tadpoles." Then he holds up a book entitled "Pond Life".
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Firstup Recruitment
I'll soon by starting in my new role at Firstup, after a rollercoaster of a recruitment process that rocketed through all the usual tech job steps... but in barely over a week. What a rush!
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Sometimes LinkedIn's approach to anonymising who looks you up isn't very effective.
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'Anonymised' LinkedIn notification advising that 1 hour ago, 'Founder at WordPress viewed your profile'.
I wonder who that could be? ๐
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The Last Post for the Nightline Association. How does that make you feel?
Fellow Nightline enthusiast James Buller has written a stirring piece about his decades of volunteering for and around Nightlines, and - as usual - underplays the importance and significance of his work. Here's my take.
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The Huge Grey Area in the Anthropic Ruling
The court ruling that declares Anthropic's use of (purchased) books as training material leaves a curious sorites paradox. If we assume that an LLM trained on only one book (and so only capable of producing content directly inspired by that book) would necessarily be copyright-infringing, at what number of books does that cease to be the case?
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On Being
This week, my friend Boro shared a poem that he'd written. It's simple, and energising, and insightful, and I really enjoyed it.
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Sometimes all you need to complete the perfect offset geocache is a GPSr, some hand tools... and the willingness to unilaterally declare a remote bench to be a memorial to a fictional person, just to get a particular set of numbers out into the world!
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Dan, a white man with a beard and long, blue-tinted hair, sits sideways on a wooden bench behind which overgrown tree planting can be seen. On the back of the bench is perched a handheld GPS receiver, and in Dan's hand is a small screwdriver and a hand drill. The bench has a plaque attached (parts of which have been censored for the photo), which reads: In memory of George Oscar Cacher who spent ... years exploring the world. Died aged ..., ... July ....
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Pretty sure there isn't a prize for Throwing Wet Sponges At Children during the graduating year's "fun run" at the school sports day... but just like the kids are asked to, I'm going to try my best. ๐
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Smug Interview Moment
Recently, I got to answer a technical interview question with "Coincidentally, I implemented exactly what you're describing two weeks ago. For fun. Can I show you the code and the blog post I wrote to explain my design choices?"
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Not just a global issue but a local one too. A local one... almost everywhere.
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Series of coloured bars trending from blue to red, representing relative temperature change in Oxford, UK, for the last 111 years, showing a clear average increase of a couple of โ.