Dan Q

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Molly White writes, more-eloquently than I would’ve, almost-exactly my experience of LLMs and similar modern generative AIs:

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I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.

…

Molly White (via her [citation needed] newsletter)

Very much this.

I’ve experimented with a handful of generative AIs, such as:

GPT-3.5 / ChatGPT, for proofreading, summarisation, experimental rephrasing when writing, and idea generation. I’ve found it to be moderately good at summarisation and proofreading and pretty terrible at producing anything novel without sounding completely artificial and/or getting lost in a hallucination.
Bing for coalescing information. I like that it cites its sources. I dislike that it somehow still hallucinates. I might use it, I suppose, to help me re-phase a search query where I can’t remember the word I’m looking for.
Stable Diffusion for image generation. I’ve found it most-useful in image-to-image mode, for making low-effort concept art in bulk. For example, when running online roleplaying games for friends I’ve fed it an image of, say, a skeleton warrior and asked it to make me a few dozen more in a similar style, so as to provide a diverse selection of distinct tokens¹. Its completely-original² work lands squarely in the uncanny valley, though.
Github Copilot for code assistance. I’ve not tried its “chat”-powered functionality but I quite enjoy its “autocomplete” tool. When I’m coding and I forget the syntax of the command I’m typing, or need to stop and think for a moment about “what comes next”, it’s often there with the answer. I’ve even made us of the “write the comment describing what the code will do, let Copilot suggest the code for you” paradigm (though I’ve been pretty disappointed with the opposite approach: it doesn’t write great comments!). I find Copilot to be a lot like having an enthusiastic, eager-to-please, very well-read but somewhat naive junior programmer sitting beside me. If I ask them for some pairing assistance, they’re great, but I can’t trust them to do anything that I couldn’t do for myself!
Surely others besides that I’ve since forgotten.

Most-recently, I’ve played with music-making AI Suno and… it’s not great.. but like all these others it’s really interesting to experiment with and think about. Here: let me just ask it to write some “vocal trance europop about a woman called Molly; Molly has a robot friend who is pretty good at doing many tasks, but the one thing she’ll never trust the robot to do is write in her blog” –

AI-generated image of a boxy yellow humanoid robot sitting at a Macbook, typing.

So yes, like Molly:

I’m absolutely a believer than these kinds of AIs have some value,
I’ve been reluctant and slow to say so because they seem to be such a polarising issue that it’s hard to say that you belong to neither “camp”,
I’m not entirely convinced that for the value they provide they’ve yet proven to be worth their cost, and I’m not certain that for general-purpose generation they will be any time soon, and
I’ve never used AI to write content for my blog, and I can’t see that ever changing.

It’s still an interesting field to follow-along with. Stuff like Sora from OpenAI and VASA-1 from Microsoft are just scary (the latter seems to have little purpose other than for misinformation-generation³!), but the genie’s out of the bottle now.

Footnotes

¹ Visually-distinct tokens adds depth to the world and helps players communicate with one another: “You distract the skinny cultist, and I’ll try to creep up on the ugly one!”

² I’m going to gloss right over the question of whether or not these tools are capable of creating anything truly original. You know what I mean.

³ Gotta admit though that I laughed like a drain at the Mona Lisa singing along with Anne Hathaway’s Lil’ Wayne Style Paparazzi Rap. If you’ve not seen the thing I’m talking about, go do that now.

Underprepared?

Me? Underprepared? (He says, literally writing his presentation in the bar at the event…)

Council Disenfranchisement

Like much of the UK, there are local elections where I live next month. After coming home from a week of Three Rings volunteering I found my poll card on the doormat. Can you spot the bleeding-obvious mistake?

This’ll be the first election for which I’ve needed to bring photographic ID to the polling station. That shouldn’t be a problem: I have a passport and driving license and whatnot.

But just to be absolutely certain, I had the local council – the same people who issued me the polling card! – supply me with a voter authority certificate:

So now I’m in a pickle. West Oxfordshire District Council are asking me to produce photo ID in the wrong name when I turn up at a polling station next month. It doesn’t even match the name on the photo ID that they themselves issued me.

This would be less-infuriating were it not for the fact that they had my name wrong in the same way on an electoral roll form they sent me in August 2022¹. When I contacted them to have them fix it, they promised that the underlying problem was solved² so this very thing wouldn’t happen.

And yet here we are.

Hopefully they’ll be able to fix their records promptly or else I guess I’ll have to apply for a proxy vote, to allow the ballot of my imaginary friend “Dan Que” to be cast by me, Dan Q, instead.

And if that isn’t the most bizarre form of election fraud you’ve ever heard of, I don’t know what is.

Update: True to their word, the council had managed to correct their records by the time I reached the polling station this morning. It’s still a little annoying that they somehow mucked it up in the first place, but I appreciate the efficiency with which they corrected their mistake.

Footnotes

¹ They’d had my name right before August 2022, including on previous poll cards; I can only assume that some human operator “corrected” it to the wrong thing at some point.

² They didn’t fix the problem immediately in August 2022. Initially, they demanded that I produce proof of my change of name from “Dan Que” (which has, of course, never been my name!) to “Dan Q”, and only later backed down and admitted that they’d made a mistake and would correct the PII they were holding about me.

Dan Q found GC2W6AF Babel Fish

This checkin to GC2W6AF Babel Fish reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The younger child and I had an initially fruitless search in, under and around the nearby bridge before we had the sense to insert our babel fishes, after which the hint item became clear to us. A short search later the cache was in hand. SL, TNLN, TFTC!

Dan Q found GC51F07 Knapwell one and a half

This checkin to GC51F07 Knapwell one and a half reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The second of two caches found on a morning walk from the nearby Cambridge Belfry Hotel, where some fellow volunteers and I met yesterday for a meeting. This cache looked so close, but being on the other side of the A428 meant that my route to get from one to the other side of the trunk road necessitated a long and circuitous route around half a dozen (ill-maintained) pegasus crossings around the perimeter of two large roundabouts! Thankfully traffic was quiet at this point if a Saturday morning.

Cache itself was worth the effort though. Feels like it’s increasingly rare to find a large, appropriately-camouflaged, well looked-after cache in a nice location, so FP awarded. TFTC!

Dan Q found GC10ZT3 Off Yer Trolley! (Cambourne)

This checkin to GC10ZT3 Off Yer Trolley! (Cambourne) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Even early on a Saturday morning, after a volunteering event the previous day at the hotel across the road, this highly-exposed GZ made me feel vulnerable! It’s not as though anybody were actually watching me as I stood around nonchalantly at the GZ waiting for an opportunity to make a search: a couple of shop workers setting up, maybe, and a handful of drivers going past… but what got me was that every time I looked up from my rummaging I spotted, in the corner of my eye, a police officer standing to attention just on the other side of the car park, staring intently in my direction!

The copper in question, of course, was nothing more than a cardboard cut-out designed to spook shoplifters, but man that’s a chilling thing to spot in your peripheral vision when you’re rooting around in the bushes for a concealed container in a quiet car park!

Signed the log and took a selfie with my law enforcement friend (attached) before getting back to my day. TFTC!

Dan Q found GC8TNPE Incy Wincy

This checkin to GC8TNPE Incy Wincy reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The elder child and I are staying nearby and couldn’t resist coming to a nearby cache with so many FPs. The name gave us a bit of a clue what we would be looking for but nothing could have prepared us for for this imaginative and unusual container! FP awarded. Attached is very non-spoiler photo of us with our very own Incy Wincies. Greetings from Oxfordshire!

Reversing Sandwiches

Fixing Sandwiches

RotatingSandwiches.com is a website showcasing animated GIF files of rotating sandwiches¹. But it’s got a problem: 2 of the 51 sandwiches rotate the wrong way. So I’ve fixed it:

The Eggplant Parm Sub is one of two sandwiches whose rotation doesn’t match the rest.

My fix is available as a userscript on GreasyFork, so you can use your favourite userscript manager² to install it and the rotation will be fixed for you too. Here’s the code (it’s pretty simple):

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name        Standardise sandwich rotation on rotatingsandwiches.com
    // @namespace   rotatingsandwiches.com.danq.me
    // @match       https://rotatingsandwiches.com/*
    // @grant       GM_addStyle
    // @version     1.0
    // @author      Dan Q <https://danq.me/>
    // @license     The Unlicense / Public Domain
    // @description Some sandwiches on rotatingsandwiches.com rotate in the opposite direction to the majority. 😡 Let's fix that.
    // ==/UserScript==
     
    GM_addStyle('.q23-image-216, .q23-image-217 { transform: scaleX(-1); }');

Unless you’re especially agitated by irregular sandwich rotation, this is perhaps the most-pointless userscript ever created. So why did I go to the trouble?

Fixing Websites

Obviously, I’m telling you this as a vehicle to talk about userscripts in general and why you should be using them.

Userscripts fix and improve websites for you. Whether you want to force Reddit to stay “old Reddit” as long as possible, make Geocaching.com’s maps more-powerful, show Twitter images uncropped by default, re-add the “cached” link to Google search results, show prices on shopping sites in terms of hours-of-your-life of work they “cost”, or just automatically click Netflix’s “yes, I’m still here, keep playing” button for maximum binge-mode, there’s a script for you. They’re like tiny browser plugins.

But the real magic is being able to remix the web your way. With just a little bit of CSS or JavaScript experience you can stop complaining that a website’s design has changed in some way you don’t like or that some functionality you use isn’t as powerful or convenient as you’d like and you can fix it.

A website I used disables scrolling until all their (tracking, advertising, etc.) JavaScript loads, and my privacy blocker blocks those files: I could cave and disable my browser’s privacy tools… but it was almost as fast to add setInterval(()=>document.body.style.overflow='', 200); to a userscript and now it’s fixed.

Don’t want a Sports section on your BBC News homepage (not just the RSS feed!)? document.querySelector('a[href="/sport"]').closest('main > div').remove(). Sorted.

I’m a huge fan of building your own tools to “scratch your own itch”. Userscripts are a highly accessible introduction to doing so that even beginner programmers can get on board with and start getting value from. More-advanced scripts can do immensely clever and powerful things, but even if you just use them to apply a few light CSS touches to your favourite websites, that’s still a win.

Footnotes

¹ Remember when a website’s domain name used to be connected to what it was for? RotatingSandwiches.com does.

² I favour ViolentMonkey.

My Geo*ing Limits

I thought it might be fun to try to map the limits of my geocaching/geohashing. That is, to draw the smallest possible convex polygon that surrounds all of the geocaches I’ve found and geohashpoints I’ve successfully visited.

Mathematically, such a shape is a convex hull – the smallest polygon encircling a set of points without concavity. Here’s how I made it:

1. Extract all the longitude/latitude pairs for every successful geocaching find and geohashpoint expedition. I keep them in my blog database, so I was able to use some SQL to fetch them:

SELECT DISTINCT coord_lon.meta_value lon, coord_lat.meta_value lat
FROM wp_posts
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta expedition_result ON wp_posts.ID = expedition_result.post_id AND expedition_result.meta_key = 'checkin_type'
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta coord_lat ON wp_posts.ID = coord_lat.post_id AND coord_lat.meta_key = 'checkin_latitude'
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta coord_lon ON wp_posts.ID = coord_lon.post_id AND coord_lon.meta_key = 'checkin_longitude'
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships ON wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id
LEFT JOIN wp_term_taxonomy ON wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id
LEFT JOIN wp_terms ON wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = wp_terms.term_id
WHERE wp_posts.post_type = 'post' AND wp_posts.post_status = 'publish'
AND wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'kind'
AND wp_terms.slug = 'checkin'
AND expedition_result.meta_value IN ('Found it', 'found', 'coordinates reached', 'Attended');

2. Next, I determine the convex hull of these points. There are an interesting variety of algorithms for this so I adapted the Monotone Chain approach (there are convenient implementations in many languages). The algorithm seems pretty efficient, although that doesn’t matter much to me because I’m caching the results for a fortnight.

Animation showing an algorithm draw lines from point to point, selecting each point by avoiding counter-clockwise turns. — I watched way too many animations of different convex hull algorithms before selecting this one… pretty-much arbitrarily.

3. Finally, I push the hull coordinates into Geoapify, who provide mapping services to me. My full source code is available.

An up-to-date (well, no-more than two weeks outdated) version of the map appears on my geo* stats page. I don’t often get to go caching/hashing outside the bounds already-depicted, but I’m excited to try to find opportunities to push the boundaries outwards as I continue to explore the world!

(I could, I suppose, try to draw a second larger area of places I’ve visited: the difference between the smaller and larger areas would represent all of the opportunities I’d missed to find a hashpoint!)

you are a printer we are all printers

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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Anyway, here’s the best printer for 2024: a Brother laser printer. You can just pick any one you like; I have one with a sheet feeder and one without a sheet feeder. Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one. Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.

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Nilay Patel (The Verge)

It’s sort-of alarming that Brother are the only big player in the printer space who subscribe to a philosophy of “don’t treat the customers like livestock”. Presumably all it’d take is a board-level decision to flip the switch from “not evil” to “evil” and we’d lose something valuable. Thankfully, for now at least, they still clearly see the value of the positive marketing the world gives them. Positive marketing like like this article.

The article is excellent, by the way. I know that I’m “supposed” to stir up hatred about the fact that its conclusion is written by an AI but… well, just read it for yourself and you’ll see why I don’t mind even one bit. Top notch reporting. Consider following the links within it to stories about how other printer manufacturers continue to show exactly how shitty they can be.

I recommended a Brother printer to the Vagina Museum the other month. I assume it ‘s still working out fine for them (and not ripping them off, spying on them, and/or contributing to the destruction of the the planet).

A Proper Cup of Tea

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Terry Cavanagh

This “choose your own adventure”-style game about making the perfect cup of tea is just… excellent.

If you lack the imagination to understand how a game like this could have dozens of possible endings, you desperately need to play it. My favourite path so far through the game was to add a teabag, then hot water, then remove the teabag, then add some milk, then add a second teabag, then drink it.

Genuinely can’t stop laughing at this masterpiece.

The Right Prop

Sometimes you just gotta have exactly the right prop for a presentation…

April Features!

I’m testing a handful of highly-experimental new features on my personal website using multivariate (“A/B”) testing.

Screenshot of the recent "Quickly Solving JigsawExplorer Puzzles" blog post with a new "Dark mode" switch hovering over it. — “Dark Mode” is just one of the new features I’m testing out.

If you visit within the next day or so you’re likely to be randomly-selected to try out one of them. (If you’re not selected, you can manually enable one of the experiments.)

I’d love to hear your feedback on these Very Serious New Features! Let me know which one(s) you see and whether you think they should become permanent fixtures on my site.

Aberystwyth 1984

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Nigel Lowrie

This promotional video for Aberystwyth University has been kindly archived onto YouTube by one of the undergraduate students who features in it. It was produced in 1984; approximately the same time I first visited Aberystwyth, although it would take until fifteen years later in 1999 for me to become a student there myself.

But the thing is… this 1984 video, shot on VHS in 1984, could absolutely be mistaken at-a-glance for a video shot on an early digital video camera a decade and a half later. The pace of change in Aberystwyth was and is glacial; somehow even the fashion and music seen in Pier Pressure in the video could pass for late-90s!

Anyway: I found the entire video amazingly nostalgic in spite of how far it predates my attendance of the University! Amazing.

Better In Our App

What they say: “This site works better in our app.”

What they mean (optimistic): “We couldn’t be bothered to make a good website.”

What they mean (realistic): “We can track and monetise you better if we can coerce you into installing this.”