Day: 10 April 2026
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100 Days to Offload × 7
I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk's "100 Days To Offload" blogging challenge. And today... I just completed it for the seventh time!
Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me - he counts "posts over a twelve month period", while I use a slightly more-restrictive subset of that: "posts in a calendar year", because it was easy for me to make a table out of in my blog stats.
After some discussion, Kev agreed that the earliest year I could claim for was 2020.
Personally, I feel like each of the hundred posts should occur on different days too. This is relevant to me, because sometimes I post multiple times in a day... but it's 100 days to offload, not 100 posts to offload, right?
Therefore, by my own restrictions... the soonest I could achieve the goal in a year would be the 100th day of the year. Right?
Which is today.
Which I just did. 🎉 -
The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
Minas Karamanis has produced a fantastic article about his experience of the use of LLMs for research in physics, and the concerns that he has about its use by less-experienced researchers just beginning to find their way in the field. I echo his thoughts, from my own field of software engineering, and wonder... how will we allow junior developers to gain experience in a world that may encourage them to use LLMs rather than trying and failing for themselves?
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The Lost Art of the Amusing WiFi Hotspot Name
Long ago, you could move to a new area, scan for local WiFi networks, and fully expect to see a wonderful diversity of different network names. Some named for their locations, sure, but others named for people, or fandoms, or just "fun" ones.
Has this art form died? Most residential SSIDs nowadays seem to just be the default one that comes with the basic router supplied by the ISP. Most commercial ones are just the name of the business. Sometimes you'll spot a phone configured for tethering but even that's usually just "Alice's iPhone" or similar.
I can't remember the last time I saw a "Chicken Crossed the Road to Steal Our Wifi" or a "Russian Hackers" or a "Routy McRouterface" or a "All Your Bandwidth Belong to Us" (okay, that last one's a bit dated). Has the art form died?