Author: Dan Q
Dan Q is a software engineer, a director of a voluntary organisation, a trainee counsellor, a keen geocacher, and an amateur magician. He lives with his partner and her husband in a polyamorous triad, and occasionally finds time to blog.
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Ad Infinitum
An excellent article by Matthias Ott describes Google's promised AI-first search experience, which dispenses with search results entirely and just uses an LLM (plus sponsored content seamlessly woven in), keeping you entirely within the search giant's ecosystem and minimising how much they cite their sources. As you might imagine, I have some Opinions too.
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New social media restrictions
Despite being parody, diamond geezer's new age-gating - which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn't actually block access to the site - somehow perfectly straddles the line between "invasive" and "ineffective"... in exactly the same way that I expect the UK's legal implementation will manage in a year or two.
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Making another attempt at learning to tango, this time at a more-beginner, more-local class. It's still super hard but he makes me question whether I even know how to walk, let alone dance, but I love it so much!
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My Polyamory is Boring
A conversation with another openly-polyamorous blogger led us to ask one another why we don't write about our relationship structure more-often. In my case, the answer is simple: my relationships are boring, and that's a good thing! But here's your chance to tell me I'm wrong...
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This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who's researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand.
I'm seeing more and more interest in this period - even, surprisingly, among people too young to be nostalgic about it - as the countercultural "web renaissance" tiptoes out of the shadows and encourages newcomers to take their first steps in building their own Web identity with HTML, CSS, and (maybe) JavaScript.
Anyway: chatting to Andreas was great and it reminded me of quite how grateful I am to have gotten to experience a lot of these seminal technologies when they were at their newest and most-experimental.
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Is midnight in the middle of the night?
Niki wondered whether "midnight" is actually the middle of the night and discovered that it pretty much is. I explain that this is because he's in Berlin, which sits very close (only about 6 minutes out) from the solar UTC+1
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I want my friends to have blogs too
Daniel loves blogs and loves blogging, but wishes that more of the people in his 'real life' blogged too. I get it, Daniel!
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AI is not a person
And it's important to remember that. Chris Ferdinandi has some direct words, and I expand upon them.
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I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
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115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what's beneath and whether it's stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody's coming around to quote for the laying of new floors (and we'll see if their numbers line up with those estimated by the insurance company).
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Several vehicles parked in the rain on the rural residential driveway of 'The Green'.
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So Unbelievable it Sounds Like you Googled It
DeGoogling is so... 2010s. Let's make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb. In the age of AI-first search, "to Google" now ought to give a nod to the accuracy and ethical issues posed by making AI into people's first experience of Web search.
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"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm."
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A fawn-coloured French Bulldog wrapped in a blanket in a way reminiscent of robes. This, combined with her wrinkled features, makes her look a little like Yoda.
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F-Day plus 113
It's been 113 days since my house flooded and it's almost time for repair work to start! But first, I've got some repair work of my own to do: to a desk that needs moving and to a laptop that's misbehaving.
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Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy.
Then I realised the method didn't have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn't have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice.
But it didn't. CI complained that test coverage had dropped. Wait, what? All I did was move some code and add a unit test.
Then I realised that the coverage analysis tool was only counting files that actually contained any tested code. By adding a test to part of a previously-untested file, that file became part of the scored codebase. Uh-oh.
Looked deeper. Turns out the code coverage tool was also counting the test files themselves as being part of the code-under-test.
Fixed all of the above. Code coverage score dropped by about 40%. 😱
Now I've got more work to do.
Happy Friday. Check what your coverage tool is inspecting, folks.
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Got to say, it's very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional.
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Screenshot of dropdown field labelled 'Will you will comply with AWS Service Terms and AUP - optional', currently set to 'Yes'. The label is saying that the field is optional, but the joke is that it sounds like complying with the terms of service is optional.