Kind: Notes
Short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title.
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Most-often when a toaster has a 'cancel' button it's simply labelled 'cancel', 'stop', or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the 'eject' icon - like you'd find on a VHS tape recorder - on its button.
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Close up of the side of a toaster, showing an "eject" button (rectangle with an upward-pointing triangle above it).
At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I'm coming around to it. It feels like a more-accurate and skeuomorphic representation of what actually happens than a cross suggests.
But the existence of toasters like this one does necessarily mean that, some day, some Gen Alpha will see a tape deck in, like, a museum or something, and will say 'hey, that's cute: the button you press to pop the tape out is the same as the one you use to pop your toast out'.
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Like many in the UK, I'm dismayed every time I see the plague of St. George's Cross (flag of England) that nationalists have been hanging on lamp posts on recent years.
So it gave me great joy to see that this lamp post had recently acquired a (larger!) pride flag. 🏳️🌈
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Two flags hang from a tall lamp post. The smaller upper one is a St. George's Cross, the flag of England.the lower, larger (and much nicer) one is the six-colour Pride rainbow.
If we're going to become a country that hangs flags everywhere... I'd much rather that they be flags that speak of inclusivity and diversity. ❤️
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F-Day plus 38
It's 38 days since our house was damaged in a flash flood, and today's the first of our 'BER' assessment. BER stands for Beyond Economical Repair. It basically means that anything on the list is something that the insurance company intend to 'write off': to declare irreparable or not-worth repairing and scrap, replacing it with …
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It's F-Day plus 35, and I'm spending a few hours working in the habitable part of our flood-damaged house while I'm "between" two AirBnBs.
The dog, who doesn't normally get to come upstairs, is sitting with me on the landing. Except she also wants to keep an eye on what's happening downstairs.
The result? Her back legs are sitting and her front legs are standing as she peers blepfully down the stairs.
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A champagne-coloured French Bulldog wearing a teal harness is on the top step of a cream-carpeted staircase. Her hind legs are folded so her bottom sits on the top step, but her forelegs are extended so she's standing on the one below. Her tongue is out in a full blep.
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Somebody should make a tea cosy but to fit a cafetiere.
That sounds like a great idea.
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Wanted a quesadilla. Didn't have any tortillas, so substituted chapattis.
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Two layers of chapattis in a frying pan on a stove, alongside their packaging.
It went... only okay. The earthiness of the chapatti pairs with mature cheese less-well than the cornflour-sweetness of a tortilla does.
I tried it, so you don't have to!
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A lot of things are hard right now. But I appreciate that Spring has come and I can enjoy a cheese & pickle sandwich and a fake beer for lunch in the sun. All to the sounds of the birds singing... and, somewhere behind me, the dog excitedly demolishing a pile of pine cones.
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Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and long hair, sits at a wooden picnic bench in front of a sandwich, crisp packet, and can of Lucky Saint.
It could be worse, right?
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Horse Gym
My current temporary home - and, necessarily, office - is directly next door to some kind of "horse gym": a contraption a little like a huge revolving door to encourage one or more horses to exercise by walking around it.
Every now and then my peripheral vision registers that there's a horse outside the window and, for the dozenth time, I look up from my work and glance around to barely catch it vanishing off on yet another lap. -
Non-exhaustive list of things I'm doing when I'm writing code, that don't look like "writing code":
- thinking
- researching
- contextualising
- testing
- measuring
- documenting
- communicating
- planning
- future-proofing
- educating
- learning
- expressing
- anticipating
- discovering
- inventing
- experimenting
- debugging
- analysing
- monitoring
For all its faults, an AI agent might "write code" faster than me.
But that's only a part of the process.
My typing speed is not the bottleneck.
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One last outing for the dog and I along the Cotswold lane we've been living on, before we move to different temporary accommodation tomorrow.
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French Bulldog stands patiently in the centre of a potholed rural single track lane.
We're hoping soon to no-longer have to move every week or two, but we're not at that point yet.
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In sympathy for our flood situation, my sister baked and posted us a big batch of her fantastic raisin & oatmeal cookies.
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Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and blue hair, sits next to a large box of cookies, about to eat one.
I've eaten like six of them already. Turns out I stress-eat. Who knew?
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F-Day plus 19
Nineteen days after my house flooded, causing extensive damage on the ground floor, the insurance company has finally accepted the claim and is willing to pay for our temporary accommodation in the meantime (a few days in a hotel, a few days with friends although that's not paid-for, four weeks in two different holiday lets), although we're still waiting for their thumbs-up on a proposal for a ~6-month let of a house to live in while our floors are replaced and our kitchen rebuilt and whatnot.
Meanwhile, yesterday a surveyor came around and looked at all of our walls. Everything still feels like it's taking a very long time. I appreciate that insurance companies are a maze of bureaucracy and procedure, but from "this side" of the table - living and working out of strange places, never really feeling "unpacked" but without it being a holiday - it's all a bit of a drag! -
I don't know what this machine was (a crane, perhaps), but it's now been almost-completely reclaimed by nature.
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Rusted remains of what might have once been a crane lie in a pasture, almost completely enveloped in thick brambles.
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Today, an AI review tool used by my workplace reviewed some code that I wrote, and incorrectly claimed that it would introduce a bug because a global variable I created could "be available to multiple browser tabs" (that's not how browser JavaScript works).
Just in case I was mistaken, I explained to the AI why I thought it was wrong, and asked it to explain itself.
To do so, the LLM wrote a PR to propose adding some code to use our application's save mechanism to pass the data back, via the server, and to any other browser tab, thereby creating the problem that it claimed existed.
This isn't even the most-efficient way to create this problem. localStorage would have been better.
So in other words, today I watched an AI:
(a) claim to have discovered a problem (that doesn't exist),
(b) when challenged, attempt to create the problem (that wasn't needed), and
(c) do so in a way that was suboptimal.Humans aren't perfect. A human could easily make one of these mistakes. Under some circumstances, a human might even have made two of these mistakes. But to make all three? That took an AI.
What's the old saying? "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
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Dog tired
Today was a long day. Between commuting (the kids to school from our distant flood-evacuation accommodation), work, childcare, insurance wrangling etc., I was pretty tired when I got back "home". So I came in and lay on the floor.
At which point the dog decided I was a pillow.