The first weekend of my sabbatical might have set the tone for a lot of the charity hacking that will follow, being dominated by a Three Rings volunteering weekend.
The first fortnight of my sabbatical has consisted of:
Three Rings CIC’s AGM weekend and lots of planning for the future of the organisation and how we make it a better place to volunteer, and better value for our charity users,
You’d be amazed how many churros these children can put away.
The trip to Spain followed a model for European family breaks that we first tried in Paris last year2,
but was extended to give us a feel for more of the region than a simple city break would. Ultimately, we ended up in three separate locations:
The PortAventura World theme park, whose accommodation was certainly a gear shift after the 5-star hotel we’d come from4 but whose rides kept us and the kids delighted for a
couple of days (Shambhala was a particular hit with the eldest kid and me).
A villa in el Vilosell – a village of only 190 people – at which the kids mostly played in the outdoor pool (despite the
sometimes pouring rain) but we did get the chance to explore the local area a little. Also, of course, some geocaching: some local caches are 1-2 years old and yet had so few finds that
I was able to be only the tenth or even just the third person to sign the logbooks!
I’d known – planned – that my sabbatical would involve a little travel. But it wasn’t until we began to approach the end of this holiday that I noticed a difference that a holiday
on sabbatical introduces, compared to any other holiday I’ve taken during my adult life…
Perhaps because of the roles I’ve been appointed to – or maybe as a result of my personality – I’ve typically found that my enjoyment of the last day or two of a week-long trip are
marred somewhat by intrusive thoughts of the work week to follow.
I’m not saying that I didn’t write code while on holiday. I totally did, and I open-sourced it too.
But programming feels different when your paycheque doesn’t depend on it.
If I’m back to my normal day job on Monday, then by Saturday I’m already thinking about what I’ll need to be working on (in my case, it’s usually whatever I left unfinished right before
I left), contemplating logging-in to work to check my email or Slack, and so on5.
But this weekend, that wasn’t even an option. I’ve consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my usual channels of work communication, and I’ve been very disciplined about not
turning any of them back on. And even if I did… my team aren’t expecting me to sign into work for about another 11 weeks anyway!
🤯🤯🤯
Monday and Tuesday are going to mostly be split between looking after the children, and voluntary work for Three Rings (gotta fix that new server architecture!). Probably. Wednesday?
Who knows.
That’s my first taste of the magic of a sabbatical, I think. The observation that it’s possible to unplug from my work life and, y’know, not start thinking about it right away
again.
Maybe I can use this as a vehicle to a more healthy work/life balance next year.
Footnotes
1A sabbatical is a perk offered to
Automatticians giving them three months off (with full pay and benefits) after each five years of work. Mine coincidentally came hot on the tail of my last meetup and soon after a whole lot of drama and a major
shake-up, so it was a very welcome time to take a break… although of course it’s been impossible to completely detach from bits of the drama that have spilled out onto the open
Web!
5 I’m fully aware that this is a symptom of poor work/life balance, but I’ve got two
decades of ingrained bad habits working against me now; don’t expect me to change overnight!
If you’ve come across Tony Domenico’s work before it’s probably as a result of web horror video series Petscop.
3D Workers Island… isn’t quite like that (though quick content warning: it does vaugely allude to child domestic
abuse). It’s got that kind of alternative history/”found footage webpage” feel to it that I enjoyed so much about the Basilisk
collection. It’s beautifully and carefully made in a way that brings its world to life, and while I found the overall story slightly… incomplete?… I enjoyed the application of
its medium enough to make up for it.
Best on desktop, but tolerable on a large mobile in landscape mode. Click each “screenshot” to advance.
Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like
removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they
outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
…
There’s a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It’s called a “Ulysses Pact.” It’s named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for
sailing through the sirens’ sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens’ song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear
the sirens’ song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.
Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self’s weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact – think throwing away the Oreos when you
start your diet.
…
Wise words from Cory about why he isn’t on Bluesky, which somewhat echo my own experience. If you’ve had the experience in recent memory of abandoning an enshittified Twitter (and if
you didn’t yet… why the fuck not?), TikTok, or let’s face it Reddit… and you’ve looked instead to services like Bluesky or arguably Threads… then you haven’t learned your lesson at all.
Freedom to exit is fundamental, and I’m a big fan of systems with a built-in Ulysses Pact. In non-social or unidirectionally-social software it’s sufficient for the tools to be open
source: this allows me to host a copy myself if a hosted version falls to enshittification. But for bidirectional social networks, it’s also necessary for them to be federated,
so that I’m not disadvantaged by choosing to drop any particular provider in favour of another or my own.
Bluesky keeps promising a proper federation model, but it’s not there yet. And I’m steering clear until it is.
I suppose I also enjoyed this post of Cory’s because it helped remind me of where I myself am failing to apply the Ulysses Pact. Right now, Three Rings is highly-centralised, and while I and everybody else involved with it know our exit strategy should the project have to fold (open
source it, help charities migrate to their own instances, etc.) right now that plan is less “tie ourselves to the mast” than it is “trust one another to grab us if we go chasing
sirens”. We probably ought to fix that.
My family and I are staying in El Vilosell, so this morning I borrowed a bike to take the trail over the hill from there to here. The ride was beautiful, and the easy downhill rides
between cliffs and terraces more than made up for the tiring and bumpy sections of uphill pedalling. At the highest point, I met a fox, on his way to bed I guess as the sun crested the
hilltops.
Despite the recent heavy rain the Set riverbed was almost dry: just a trickle of a stream. From the description, I was initially worried that the cache might be underneath, which looked
challenging, but a peep at the hint reassured me that there were more-likely hiding spots.
A little finger-work and the cache was in hand. Nice spot! That’s when I discovered that there was a hole in my pocket and my pen had escaped! Oh no! I hope a photolog will be
sufficient to show that I found this cache.
Okay, is every company using AI to fuck up their mailing lists, now?
For the second time this week I’ve received an email from a company whom I’d explicitly demanded cease processing my PII. This time,
in February they outright told me that they’d deleted my data and sent screenshots to “prove” it (which was already after they’d failed to unsubscribe me from their mailing lists in the
first place).
The geokids and I are staying nearby and came out for a walk this morning to discover this under-appreciated cache. What an amazing location and such a great view! We searched many
“obvious” locations without luck, then translated some logs to get a clue. We should have checked the attributes! A little danger later and the cache was in hand. SL, TFTC/GPC! FP awarded – thanks so much for bringing us here. Greetings from
Oxfordshire, UK!
When I saw the title of this piece by The Nerdwriter pop up in my RSS reader, the first words that grabbed my attention were “time travel movie”. I’ve a bit of a thing for time travel
stories in any medium, and I love a good time travel movie1.
Could I be about to be introduced to one I’m not familiar with, I wondered?
Before the thumbnail loaded2,
I processed the rest of the title: the movie doesn’t move. At first my brain had assumed that this was a reference to the story spanning time but not space,
but now suddenly it clicked:
Like many people (outside of film students), I imagine, I first came across La Jetée after seeing it mentioned in the credits of Twelve Monkeys, which adapts its
storyline in several ways. And like most people who then went on to see it, I imagine, I was moved by that unforgettable experience – there’s nothing quite like it in the history of
film (if we’re to call it a film, that is: its creator famously doesn’t).
Anyway: Nerdwriter1’s take on it doesn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said, but it’s a beautiful introduction to interpreting this fantastic short film and it’s
highly-accessible whether or not you’ve seen La Jetée3. Give his video essay a watch.
Footnotes
1 Okay, let’s be honest, my feelings go deeper than that. Time travel movies are, for me,
like pizza: I love a good time travel movie, but I’ll also happily enjoy a pretty trashy time travel movie too.
2 Right now I’m in a rural farm building surrounded by olive groves in an out-of-the-way
bit of Spain, and my Internet access isn’t always the fastest. D’ya remember how sometimes Web pages used to load the text and then you’d wait while the images loaded? They still do
that, here.
3 There’s spoilers, but by the time a film is 60 years old, I think that’s fair game,
right?
Just received an unsolicited marketing email from a company that I asked to remove me from their systems eleven and a half years ago (!).
I haven’t heard from them since then.
The marketing email is sent using a platform that “uses AI to help you seamlessly connect with your customers”. By which I assume the platform means “we’ll crawl your email history to
find anybody we can possibly spam”.
Just gonna go grab my GDPR/DPA2018 beating-stick. This is gonna be a fun one.
A little under two millennia ago1 there lived
in the Egyptian city of Alexandria a Greek mathematician and inventor named Hero2, and he was a total
badass who invented things that you probably thought came way later, and come up with mathematical tricks that we still use to this day3.
Inventions
If you know of Hero’s inventions because of his aeolipile4,known
as “Hero’s engine”, I’ve got bad news: it was probably actually invented by his predecessor Vitruvius. But Hero did come up with a way to use the technique to make a
pneumatic temple door that automatically opened when you lit the fires alongside it.
Hero is variably credited with inventing, in some cases way earlier than you’re expecting:
automatic doors (powered either by pressure plates or
by lit fires),
vending machines, which used the weight of a dispensed coin to open a valve and dispense holy water,
windmills (by which I mean wind-powered stationary machines capable of performing useful work),
the force pump – this is the kind of mechanism found in traditional freestanding village water pumps – for use in a fire engine,
float-valve and water-pressure based equilibrium pumps, like those found in many toilet cisterns, and
a programmable robot: this one’s a personal favourite of mine because it’s particularly unexpected – Hero’s cart was a
three-wheeled contraption whose wheels were turned by a falling weight pulling on a rope, but the rope could be knotted and looped back over itself (here’s a modern reimplementation using Lego) to form a programmed path for the cart
It’s just headcanon, but I choose to believe that the reason Hero needed to invent the fire extinguisher might have involved the number of “attempting to make fire do work”
inventions that he came up with.
But I’ve always been more-impressed by the iterative5
mechanism he come up with by which to derive square roots. Here’s how it works:
Let n be the number for which you want to determine the square root.
Let g1 be a guess as to the square root. You can pick any number; it can be 1.
Derive a better guess g2 using g2 = ( g1 + n / g1 ) / 2.
Repeat until gN≈gN-1, for a level of precision acceptable to you. The algorithm will be accurate to within S
significant figures if the derivation of each guess is rounded to S + 1 significant figures.
That’s a bit of a dry way to tell you about it, though. Wouldn’t it be better if I showed you?
Put any number from 1 to 999 into the box below and see a series of gradually-improving guesses as to its square root6.
Interactive Widget
(There should be an interactive widget here. Maybe you’ve got Javascript disabled, or maybe you’re reading this post in your RSS reader?)
Maths is just one of the reasons Hero is my hero. And now perhaps he can be your hero too.
Footnotes
1 We’re not certain when he was born or died, but he wrote about witnessing a solar
eclipse that we know to have occurred in 62 CE, which narrows it down a lot.
2 Or Heron. It’s not entirely certain how his name was pronounced, but I think “Hero”
sounds cooler so I’m going with that.
3 Why am I blogging about this? Well: it turns out that every time I speak on some
eccentric subject, like my favourite magic trick, I come off stage with like three other ideas for presentations, which leads to an
exponential growth about “things I’d like to talk about”. Indeed, my OGN talk on the history of Oxford’s telephone area codewas one of three options I offered to the crowd to vote on at the end of my previous OGN talk! In any case, I’ve decided that the only way I can get all of this
superfluity of ideas out of my head might be to blog about them, instead; so here’s such a post!
4 If the diagram’s not clear, here’s the essence of the aeolipile: it’s a basic steam
reaction-engine, in which steam forces its way out of a container in two different directions, causing the container to spin on its axis like a catherine wheel.
5 You can also conceive of it as a recursive algorithm if that’s your poison, for example
if you’re one of those functional purists who always seem somehow happier about their lives than I am with mine. What’s that about, anyway? I tried to teach myself functional
programming in the hope of reaching their Zen-like level of peace and contentment, but while I got reasonably good at the paradigm, I didn’t find enlightenment. Nowadays I’m of the
opinion that it’s not that functional programming leads to self-actualisation so much as people capable of finding a level of joy in simplicity are drawn to functional programming. Or
something. Anyway: what was I talking about? Oh, yeah: Hero of Alexandria’s derivation of square roots.
Just in time for Halloween, this comic (published via the ever-excellent Oh Joy Sex Toy) is fundamentally pretty silly… and yet still manages to touch upon important concepts of safer
sex, consent, aftercare etc. And apparently, based on Simon’s portfolio, his “thing” might well be that niche but now fun-sounding genre of “queer/monster horror”.
The geokids and I had to give up after an extended search. We solved the riddle (we think) and counted steps, but, being unsure, hunted for a nearby map and attempted to un-do he
farmer’s mistake. Still no luck. 😔 Sadly it’s our last morning in the city so this one might have to remain a blue spot on our map for a while, though I’m sure I’ll think of something I
missed when I get back to my computer.
