Month: February 2025
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What's the equivalent phrase to "hair of the dog", but for caffeine?
I've always been pretty sensitive to it, and while I'm less-so now, it was still definitely a mistake to eat several portions of tiramisu right before bedtime.
So now I'm going to need more caffeine, this morning, to compensate for the lack of sleep.
What do we call that?
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AI vs The Expert
Inspired by an 11-year old comedy sketch, I asked a GenAI to solve an unsolvable programming problem... and (for at least some models) it failed in exactly the way I anticipated: claiming to be able to solve it and delivering code that just... didn't. What does this teach us about AI trustworthiness for problems that might be solvable, but for which the human operator doesn't have sufficient comprehension to verify?
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
While I've been ill I read A Psalm for the Wild-built by Becky Chambers, which had been on my reading list for a while. It's a comforting and compelling story about purpose and identity in an environmentally-conscious utopia, and it's flipping awesome.
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After most of four days spent primarily in bed with what's probably a norovirus infection (or something like it), this afternoon I got up and went outside. 🎉
It felt like a huge achievement, even if I ran back in to the warmth the very second that the dog I was supervising had finished her business.
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A white man stands outside a white house, looking cold. His hands are buried in the pockets of his checked pyjama bottoms, and his upper half is wrapped tightly in a Tumblr-branded grey jumper. Various childrens toys litter the garden around him.
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Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great... until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your "streak" as an "achievement"! 😅
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Two 'Jetpack' notifications on an Android phone, both at 08:07. The first reads: 'Dan Q posted on Marketplace Engineering: AFK for itsdang -26Feb25'. The second reads: 'New achievement: You're on a 3-day streak on Marketplace Engineering!'
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Third day of being ill with what's probably a winter vomiting bug, with one child home sick from school... and just having had to collect the other kid who started throwing up on his school trip... I finally got back to my bed and picked up the next book on my pile, Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Willd-Built.
The opening page reads: "For anybody who could use a break."
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Printed serifed text reading: 'For anybody who could use a break.'
Yes. Yes, please.
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Don't remember the last time I felt so run-down. I've been unwell since Sunday with an illness I can only assume I caught from the 11-year-old, who's been unable to keep food down for several days.
In my case, though, I've mostly been full of muscular aches and cramps, ocassionally fits of shivers, and strange dizziness.
I've spent the last day and a bit mostly drifting in and out of sleep, where I've had the weirdest dreams. I just woke from one where I was lost in a sprawling hotel, looking for my room which was number 317 or possibly 305, I couldn't remember. The signage didn't make sense to me and I couldn't read it, and found myself wandering around a sprawling resort, with hot air balloon services connecting different parts. At one point I found myself lost in a library whose winding shelves formed a Escherian maze, and a small child watched me with suspicion as I fumbled around for an exit.
In a disturbing dream from yesterday afternoon, I was lying in a desert of cold sand as the wind gradually piled up more and more sand against me. At first I felt fascinated, thinking I'd learned something about how dunes form, until I discovered that I wasn't able to move. I gradually sunk deeper and deeper underground, in pain except when I lay very still and let it take me, until eventually I started to become the very sand that I was disappearing into. I felt flakes of myself break away and become part of the desert, unable to resist the change nor reconstruct myself, resigned to my fate.
I'm in less pain so far this morning than yesterday, so I think I'm recovering, but man this has been an unpleasant ride. Whatever I'm infected with: do not recommend, would not contract again, one out of five.
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Generative AI use and human agency
Joanna Bryson's put together an absolutely fantastic list of considerations about the use of AI, and two of her points do a better job than I did at saying what I was trying to, last week.
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OpenStreetMap rocks (especially on foot)
OpenStreetMap blows Google Maps out of the water for walkers and also for if you're trying to find a particular-named house in a rural area. I'm not saying never to use Google Maps (there's plenty of things it's the king at): but maybe consider giving OpenStreetMap a go next time you need a digital map?
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Wrote note for GC9EXX4 Friar's Farm - Bisected Byway
Checked up on this cache while the dog and I were nearby. It's in fine condition and ready to find. The latch for the container is beginning to rust, but the whole thing is perfectly serviceable. Go find it!
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![Comic comparing 'Devs Then' to 'Devs Now'. The 'Devs Then' are illustrated as muscular men, with captions 'Writes code without AI or Stack Overflow', 'Builds entire games in Assembly', 'Crafts mission-critical code fo [sic] Moon landing', and 'Fixes memory leaks by tweaking pointers'. The 'Devs Now' are illustrated with badly-drawn, somewhat-stupid-looking faces and captioned 'Googles how to center a div in 2025?', 'ChatGPT please fix my syntax error', 'Cannot exit vim', and 'Fixes one bug, creates three new ones'.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2025/02/devs-then-devs-now-lieo-720x480.jpg#25882)
AI Is Reshaping Software Engineering — But There’s a Catch…
Eduaro Ordax is concerned that less-experienced developers will (be encouraged to) use AI as a crutch rather than learning programming fundamentals. I have similar and related concerns, and I'm still of the opinion that we just don't know how to teach people to program!
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Yesterday, owing to some plot, the dog didn't get as much outside/walk/play time as she'd like.
Today, she let me know how she felt about that by shredding my slippers. 🙄
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A partially-shredded slipper is held in a hand, in front of a French Bulldog, on the wooden floors of the hallway of a house.
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I was experimenting with VP8/VP9 WebM video transparency and I made a stupid thing: a URL that, if you go to it, means you'll he followed around my blog by a video of me just hanging out in the corner of the page - https://danq.me/?fool_id=06
I've added it to my list of "stupid/random things that can happen if you visit my blog on April Fools' Day": https://danq.me/fools/
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Screenshot of DanQ.me, with a transparent video overlay of Dan in the bottom right corner, waving.
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The Blind Piemaker
Ruth and I spiced-up this week's date night with a challenge from a mysterious book: Ruth, blindfolded, baked pies while I instructed her only in non-verbal ways. It was challenging, stressful, and... pretty fun! (Also we got to eat pie.)
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Reply to Vika, re: Content-Security-Policy
Vika shared her frustrations with Content-Security-Policy nonces when delivering pre-generated/cached content. I've had a similar fight, so I've written-up a few of the things I tried and what I learned as a result.