Sometimes LinkedIn’s approach to anonymising who looks you up isn’t very effective.
I wonder who that could be? 😂
Author: Dan Q
The Last Post for the Nightline Association. How does that make you feel?
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Fellow geek, Nightline veteran, and general volunteering hero James Buller wrote a wonderful retrospective on his experience with Surrey Nightline, National Nightline, and the Nightline Association over most of the last three decades:
…
- In 1997 I left a note in the Surrey Nightline pigeon-hole to volunteer and eventually become the Coordinator
- In 1998 I emailed the leaders of National Nightline with a plea for support.
- In 2000 I launched the first National Nightline website and email list
- In 2003 I added the bulletin board online forum
- In 2006 I led governance reform and the registration project that led to the Nightline Association charity
- In 2007 I set up Google Apps for the recently established nightline.ac.uk domain
- In 2008 We sent news via an email broadcast system for the first time
- In 2025 All the user accounts and the charity were shut down.
So here’s my last post on volunteering with the confidential mental health helplines run ‘by students for students’ at universities, then the overarching association body.
…
I began volunteering with Aberystwyth Nightline in 1999, and I remember the 2000 launch of the National Nightline mailing list and website. It felt like a moment of coalescence and unity. We Nightline volunteers at the turn of the millennium were young, and tech-savvy, and in that window between the gradual decline of Usenet and the 2004-onwards explosion in centralised social networking, mailing lists and forums were The Hotness.
Nightlines (and Nightliners) disagreed with one another on almost everything, but the Internet-based connectivity that James put into place for National Nightline was enormously impactful. It made Nightline feel bigger than it had been before: it was an accessible and persistent reminder that you were part of a wider movement. It facilitated year-round discussions that might previously have been seen only at annual conferences. It brought communities together.
(Individuals too: when my friends Kit and Fiona met and got together back in 2003 (and, later, married), it probably wouldn’t have happened without the National Nightline forum.)
But while I praise James’ work in community-building and technology provision, his experience with Nightlines doesn’t stop there: he was an important force in the establishment of the Nightline Association, the registered charity that took over National Nightline’s work and promised to advance it even further with moves towards accreditation and representation.
As his story continues, James talks about one of his final roles for the Association: spreading the word about the party to “see it off”. Sadly, the Nightline Association folded last month, leaving a gap that today’s Nightlines, I fear, will struggle to fill, but this was at least the excuse for one last get-together (actually, three, but owing to schedule conflicts I was only able to travel up to the one in Manchester):
…
I had done a lot of the leg work to track down and invite former volunteers to the farewell celebrations. I’d gotten a real buzz from it, which despite a lot of other volunteering I’ve not felt since I was immersed in the Nightline world in the 2000’s. I felt all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia for the culture, comradeship and perhaps dolefully sense of youth too!
I was delighted that so many people answered the call (should have expected nothing less of great Nightliners!). Their reminiscing felt like a wave of love for the movement we’d all been a part of and had consumed such a huge part of our lives for so long. It clearly left an indelible mark on us all and has positively affected so many others through us.
…
Many people played their part in the story of the Nightline Association.
My part in the story has mostly involved Three Rings (which this year adopted some of the Association’s tech infrastructure to ensure that it survives the charity’s unfortunate demise). But James, I’ve long felt, undermines his own staggering impact.
Volunteering in charity technical work is a force multiplier: instead of working on the front lines, you get to facilitate many times your individual impact for the people who do! Volunteering with Three Rings for the last 23 years has helped me experience that, and James’ experience of this kind of volunteering goes even further than mine. And yet he feels his impact most-strongly in a close and interpersonal story that’s humbling and beautiful:
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I was recently asked by a researcher, ‘What is the best thing you have done as a volunteer in terms of impact?’. I was proud to reply that I’d been told someone had not killed themselves because of a call with me at Surrey Nightline.…
I’d recommend going and reading the full post by James, right up to the final inspiring words.
(Incidentally: if you’re looking for a volunteering opportunity that continues to help Nightlines, in the absence of the Nightline Association, Three Rings can make use of you…)
The Huge Grey Area in the Anthropic Ruling
This week, AI firm Anthropic (the folks behind Claude) found themselves the focus of attention of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
New laws for new technologies
The tl;dr is: the court ruled that (a) piracy for the purpose of training an LLM is still piracy, so there’ll be a separate case about the fact that Anthropic did not pay for copies of all the books their model ingested, but (b) training a model on books and then selling access to that model, which can then produce output based on what it has “learned” from those books, is considered transformative work and therefore fair use.
Compelling arguments have been made both ways on this topic already, e.g.:
- Some folks are very keen to point out that it’s totally permitted for humans to read, and even memorise, entire volumes, and then use what they’ve learned when they produce new work. They argue that what an LLM “does” is not materially different from an impossibly well-read human.
- By way of counterpoint, it’s been observed that such a human would still be personally liable if the “inspired” output they subsequently created was derivative to the point of violating copyright, but we don’t yet have a strong legal model for assessing AI output in the same way. (BBC News article about Disney & Universal vs. Midjourney is going to be very interesting!)
- Furthermore, it might be impossible to conclusively determine that the way GenAI works is fundamentally comparable to human thought. And that’s the thing that got me thinking about this particular thought experiment.
A moment of philosophy
Here’s a thought experiment:
Support I trained an LLM on all of the books of just one author (plus enough additional language that it was able to meaningfully communicate). Let’s take Stephen King’s 65 novels and 200+ short stories, for example. We’ll sell access to the API we produce.
The output of this system would be heavily-biased by the limited input it’s been given: anybody familiar with King’s work would quickly spot that the AI’s mannerisms echoed his writing style. Appropriately prompted – or just by chance – such a system would likely produce whole chapters of output that would certainly be considered to be a substantial infringement of the original work, right?
If I make KingLLM, I’m going to get sued, rightly enough.
But if we accept that (and assume that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California would agree)… then this ruling on Anthropic would carry a curious implication. That if enough content is ingested, the operation of the LLM in itself is no longer copyright infringement.
Which raises the question: where is the line? What size of corpus must a system be trained upon before its processing must necessarily be considered transformative of its inputs?
Clearly, trying to answer that question leads to a variant of the sorites paradox. Nobody can ever say that, for example, an input of twenty million words is enough to make a model transformative but just one fewer and it must be considered to be perpetually ripping off what little knowledge it has!
But as more of these copyright holder vs. AI company cases come to fruition, it’ll be interesting to see where courts fall. What is fair use and what is infringing?
And wherever the answers land, I’m sure there’ll be folks like me coming up with thought experiments that sit uncomfortably in the grey areas that remain.
On Being
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Step into your head
that’s where planning happensStep out of your head
and into your senses
and into the world
that’s where life happens…
This week, my friend Boro shared a poem that he’d written. It’s simple, and energising, and insightful, and I really enjoyed it. Go read the whole thing; it’s not long.
Whether we’re riding high or low, there’s wisdom in being gentle with oneself. The rhythm of the piece feels a bit like breathing, to me, and from that is reminiscent of a breathing exercise I was shown, once, in which the inhalations were accompanied by a focus on self-awareness and the exhalations with one on situational awareness.
Boro’s poem makes me wonder if he’s come across the same exercise: that through my appreciation of his post I’m sharing in his experience of the same exercise, in another time and place.
Or maybe it’s just a nice bit of writing.
G. O. Cacher
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!
Sponge Throwing
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. 😁
Smug Interview Moment
I’ve been in a lot of interviews over the last two or three weeks. But there’s a moment that stands out and that I’ll remember forever as the most-smug I’ve ever felt during an interview.
This particular interview included a mixture of technical and non-technical questions, but a particular technical question stood out for reasons that will rapidly become apparent. It went kind-of like this:
Interviewer: How would you go about designing a backend cache that retains in memory some number of most-recently-accessed items?
Dan: It sounds like you’re talking about an LRU cache. Coincidentally, I implemented exactly that just the other week, for fun, in two of this role’s preferred programming languages (and four other languages). I wrote a blog post about my design choices: specifically, why I opted for a hashmap for quick reads and a doubly-linked-list for constant-time writes. I’m sending you the links to it now: may I talk you through the diagrams?
Interviewer:
That’s probably the most-overconfident thing I’ve said at an interview since before I started at the Bodleian, 13 years ago. In the interview for that position I spent some time explaining that for the role they were recruiting for they were asking the wrong questions! I provided some better questions that I felt they should ask to maximise their chance of getting the best candidate… and then answered them, effectively helping to write my own interview.
Anyway: even ignoring my cockiness, my interview the other week was informative and enjoyable throughout, and I’m pleased that I’ll soon be working alongside some of the people that I met: they seem smart, and driven, and focussed, and it looks like the kind of environment in which I could do well.
But more on that later.
#ShowYourStripes #Oxford
Dan Q did not find GC81KDC Standardisation Roundabout
This checkin to GC81KDC Standardisation Roundabout reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Deciphered this puzzle when it was first published: so long ago that I’d forgotten the specifics of how exactly I did so (although I’m pretty confident I remember the gist of it). But I don’t find myself over this side of Oxford often, these days, and so it took until today that an errand brought me over here before I had a chance to actually try and log it.
Near the GZ I found an obvious trail around the nearby structure and undertook a thorough search of all the obvious hiding places before widening my explorations to the surrounding foliage. Eventually, after about 20 minutes of hunting, I had to give up for shortage of time.
With almost a year since a successful log here and evidence that this trail is now routinely used by a nearby group of non-geocachers, it’s very possible that the cache has been disturbed. I’ll be waiting until a CO checkin (or successful log) before I try again.
Dan Q found GC7ZA2Z My Friend Dotty
This checkin to GC7ZA2Z My Friend Dotty reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
In Marston on an errand, I found myself with enough free time to try to find another few local caches. This puzzle wasn’t as easy as Dotty’s other one, fir me, because for a while I was counting the wrong things, but I cracked it in the end. A slow walk past the GZ with my fingers in the obvious space soon put the cache in my hand. Log extraction required stone creative use of a naturally occurring tool, but before long it was signed and returned. TFTC!
If this man isn’t hired immediately, it’s a huge loss
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
When I posted to LinkedIn about my recent redundancy, I saw a tidal wave of reposts and well-wishes. But there’s one that I’ve come back to whenever I need a pick-me-up before I, y’know, trawl the job boards: a comment-repost by my big-hearted, sharp-minded former co-worker Kyle. I’m posting it here because I want to keep a copy forever1:
Bad news: I’m among the sixth of Automattic that’s been laid-off this week.
Good news: I’m #OpenToWork, and excited about the opportunity to bring my unique skillset to a new role. Could I be the Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack Web Developer, or Technical Lead that you’re looking for?
Here’s what makes me special:
🕸️ 26+ years experience of backend and frontend development, with a focus on standards, accessibility, performance, security, and the open Web
🌎 20+ years experience of working in and leading remote/distributed teams in a diversity of sectors
👨💻 Professional experience of many of the technologies you’ve heard of (PHP, Ruby, Java, Perl, SQL, Go, DevOps, JS, jamstacks, headless…), and probably some you haven’t…
👨🎓 Degrees and other qualifications spanning computer science and software engineering, psychotherapy, ethical hacking, and digital forensics (I don’t believe there’s a career in the world that makes use of all of these, but if you know differently, tell me!)If this man isn’t hired immediately, it’s a huge loss. Dan is easily one of the most talented engineers I’ve ever met. His skills are endless, his personal culture is delightful, and I don’t think I went a day working with him where I didn’t learn something. Let him build you beautiful things. I dare you.
Incidentally, Kyle’s looking for a new role too. If you’re in need of a WordPress/PHP/React pro with a focus on delivering the MVP fast and keeping the customer’s needs front-and-centre, you should look him up. He’s based in Cape Town but he’s a remote/distributed veteran that you could slot into your Web team anywhere.
Scarecrows
As time has gone by, a great many rural English villages have been consumed by their nearest towns, or else become little more than dormitory villages: a place where people do little more than eat and sleep in-between their commutes to-and-from their distant workplaces1.
And so it pleases me at least a little that the tiny village I’ve lived in for five years this week still shows great success in how well it clings on to its individual identity.
Every summer since time immemorial, for example, it’s hosted a Village Festival, and this year it feels like the community’s gone all-out. The theme this year is A Century in Television, and most of the festivities seem to tie-in to the theme.
I’ve been particularly impressed this year by entrants into the (themed) scarecrow competition: some cracking scarecrows (and related decorations) have started popping up around the village in advance of festival week!
There’s a clear bias towards characters from childrens’ television programmes, but that only adds to the charm. Not only does it amuse the kids when we walk by them, but it feeds into the feeling of nostalgia that the festival theme seems to evoke (as well, perhaps, as a connection to the importance of this strange village tradition).
If you took a wrong turning and found your way through our village when you meant to be somewhere else, you’d certainly be amused, bemused, or both by the plethora of figures standing on street corners, atop hedgerows, and just generally around the place2.
The festival, like other events in the local calendar, represents a collective effort by the “institutions” of the village – the parish council, the church, the primary school, etc.
But the level of time and emotional investment from individual households (whether they’re making scarecrows for the Summer festival… decorating windows as a Christmas advent calendar… turning out for a dog show last week, I hear3…) shows the heart of a collective that really engage with this kind of community. Which is really sweet.
Anyway, the short of it is that I feel privileged to live in a village that punches above its weight class when it comes to retaining its distinctive personality. And seeing so many of my neighbours, near and far, putting these strange scarecrows out, reminded me of that fact.
Footnotes
1 The “village” in which our old house resided certainly had the characteristic feel of “this used to be a place of its own, but now it’s only-barely not just a residential estate on the outskirts of Oxford, for example. Kidlington had other features, of course, like Oxford’s short-lived zoological gardens… but it didn’t really feel like it had an identity in its own right.
2 Depending on exactly which wrong turn you took, the first scarecrow you saw might well be the one dressed as a police officer – from some nonspecific police procedural drama, one guesses? – that’s stood guard shortly after the first of the signs to advertise our new 20mph speed limit. Holding what I guess is supposed to be a radar gun (but is clearly actually a mini handheld vacuum cleaner), this scarecrow might well be having a meaningful effect on reducing speeding through our village, and for that alone it might be my favourite.
3 I didn’t enter our silly little furball into the village dog show, for a variety of reasons: mostly because I had other things to do at the time, but also because she’s a truculent little troublemaker who – especially in the heat of a Summer’s day – would probably just try to boss-around the other dogs.
Note #26759
Happy Stone Circle Sunday! The youngest and I went out to Avebury Henge, the world’s largest neolithic standing stone circle and henge.
git diff –name-only –diff-filter=M
Note to future self: when you want git to tell you all the files you’ve modified, but not those you’ve deleted (e.g. to pipe through xargs and feed to your linter for bulk-linting), the command you’re looking for is –
git diff –name-only –diff-filter=M
Dan Q found GCAPFH3 Cherry Blossom
This checkin to GCAPFH3 Cherry Blossom reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Third time’s the charm. I don’t live too far away and I’m often found cycling to, from, or through Eynsham. As a result, I’ve on two previous occasions come to this GZ with a view to finding this cache… and both times have been glorious summer weekend days when the adjacent café has been brim full of guests, and I’ve declared it “too muggley” and backed off.
Today, though, is a gloomy and overcast day, with rain on the way and a threat of thunderstorms. So as I cycled by, on my way home from the dentist, I stopped by. I quickly found and retrieved the cache, signed the log, and returned it to its spot.
Now I’d better see if I can pedal all the way home before the clouds burst! TFTC.