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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I don't know what this machine was (a crane, perhaps), but it's now been almost-completely reclaimed by nature.
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Rusted remains of what might have once been a crane lie in a pasture, almost completely enveloped in thick brambles.
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F-Day plus 12
It's been only twelve days since our house flooded (it feels like a lot longer!), and progress is slow on getting damage assessments and medium-term accommodation planning sorted.
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Today, an AI review tool used by my workplace reviewed some code that I wrote, and incorrectly claimed that it would introduce a bug because a global variable I created could "be available to multiple browser tabs" (that's not how browser JavaScript works).
Just in case I was mistaken, I explained to the AI why I thought it was wrong, and asked it to explain itself.
To do so, the LLM wrote a PR to propose adding some code to use our application's save mechanism to pass the data back, via the server, and to any other browser tab, thereby creating the problem that it claimed existed.
This isn't even the most-efficient way to create this problem. localStorage would have been better.
So in other words, today I watched an AI:
(a) claim to have discovered a problem (that doesn't exist),
(b) when challenged, attempt to create the problem (that wasn't needed), and
(c) do so in a way that was suboptimal.Humans aren't perfect. A human could easily make one of these mistakes. Under some circumstances, a human might even have made two of these mistakes. But to make all three? That took an AI.
What's the old saying? "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
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Dog tired
Today was a long day. Between commuting (the kids to school from our distant flood-evacuation accommodation), work, childcare, insurance wrangling etc., I was pretty tired when I got back "home". So I came in and lay on the floor.
At which point the dog decided I was a pillow. -
Taskmaster: 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People, by Alex Horne
I recently read Taskmaster: 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People by Alex Horne, and was... underwhelmed.
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Fake Herons
This morning, I saw a real heron and a fake heron, and it made me think of a police officer I photographed myself while geocaching with a few years ago. Let's talk theoretical psychology!
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Found GCAWR04 Take an Allotment Break
The family and I are staying in Lyneham for a couple of weeks following the flooding of our house (on the other side of Witney). This morning the younger geokid, the geopup, and I came out for a walk to find this geocache as well as to explore Milton-under-Wychwood and tag some of the memorial benches for OpenBenches. We sat near the cache and the geokid immediately found it. Looks like we're the second signatories of the New Year: somebody beat us to it on 5 Feb! TFTC.
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claude, make it make sense *harder*
blackle mori delivers a welll-rounded, one might say voluptuous, take on the writing process, glistening with the fiery passion of its author. I desperately want to get off... how fun this post was.
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Hello World by Hannah Fry
It took me a while, but I finally got around to reading Hannah Fry's "Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine", and it was really good!
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6-12 Months
"How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?" I asked, warily.
"Six to twelve months?" guessed the loss adjusters. -
Run your own WireGuard VPN
I stopped paying for VPN services a decade ago and I haven't looked back. When I 'need' a VPN service, I just spin one up on cheap VM services, and then I throw it away when I'm done. It's cheaper and more-customisable... and if the UK goes ahead with an idea to age-gate VPN services, it might soon become more-convenient too.
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While cleaning up/assessing damage following our house flood, I finally found a lost digital stylus I've been looking for for a couple of months.
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An 'XP-Pen' digital stylus on a wooden floor alongside a water-stained wall.
Unfortunately it's been sat under the water line so I don't know yet if it survived. But it's FOUND, at least!
(Look at me, finding ways to stay positive!)
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F-Day plus 3
It's only been three days since we had to evacuate our rapidly-flooding house. Here's some horror pics.
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Normal life
I want normal life back now, please.
I appreciate that it's only 40-ish hours since my house flooded and we had to move out. But with all the stress and activity that's necessarily followed, it feels like it's been so much longer.
Unrelated note: why has the person in the room above me at this hotel been … -
The calm after the storm
This morning, from my Premier Inn window, the skies are clear. I could almost forget that, just 4 miles away, my house is full of water.
Today may well be a day of waders and damage assessment, conversations with insurance companies and of working out where we'll be living for the near future.
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