Went to Wagamama. Accidentally made the “Order of the Beast”.
(Plus a similar side, for those who read binary.)
Author: Dan Q
Note #26938
Seventy years ago, residents of this part of London would take shelter from V1 and V2 bombs in a tunnel beneath my feet. And today, I’m going down there to take a look!
ArtificialCast
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Type-safe transformation powered by inference.
ArtificialCast is a lightweight, type-safe casting and transformation utility powered by large language models. It allows seamless conversion between strongly typed objects using only type metadata, JSON schema inference, and prompt-driven reasoning.
Imagine a world where
Convert.ChangeType()could transform entire object graphs, infer missing values, and adapt between unrelated types – without manual mapping or boilerplate.ArtificialCast makes that possible.
Features
- Zero config – Just define your types.
- Bidirectional casting – Cast any type to any other.
- Schema-aware inference – Auto-generates JSON Schema for the target type.
- LLM-powered transformation – Uses AI to “fill in the blanks” between input and output.
- Testable & deterministic-ish – Works beautifully until it doesn’t.
…
As beautiful as it is disgusting, this C# is fully-functional and works exactly as described… and yet you really, really should never use it (which its author will tell you, too).
Casting is the process of transforming a variable of one type into one of another. So for example you might cast the number 3 into a string and get
"3" (though of course this isn’t the only possible result: "00000011" might also be a valid representation, depending on the circumstances1).
Casting between complex types defined by developers is harder and requires some work. Suppose you have a User model with attributes like “username”, “full name”, “hashed password”, “email address” etc., and you want to convert your users into instances of a new model called Customer. Some of the attributes will be the same, some will be absent, and some will be… different (e.g. perhaps a Customer has a “first name” and “last name” instead of a “full name”, and it’s probably implemented wrong to boot).
The correct approach is to implement a way to cast one as the other.
The very-definitely incorrect approach is to have an LLM convert the data for you. And that’s what this library provides.
…
ArtificialCast is a demonstration of what happens when overhyped AI ideas are implemented exactly as proposed – with no shortcuts, no mocking, and no jokes.
It is fully functional. It passes tests. It integrates into modern .NET workflows. And it is fundamentally unsafe.
This project exists because:
- AI-generated “logic” is rapidly being treated as production-ready.
- Investors are funding AI frameworks that operate entirely on structure and prompts.
- Developers deserve to see what happens when you follow that philosophy to its logical conclusion.
ArtificialCast is the result.
It works. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it fails in ways that look like success. That’s the danger.
…
I’ve played with AI in code a few times. There are some tasks it’s very good at, like summarising and explaining (when the developer before you didn’t leave a sufficiency of quality comments). There are some tasks it can be okay at, with appropriate framing and support: like knowing its way around unfamiliar-to-you but well-documented APIs2.
But if you ask an AI to implement an entire product or even just a significant feature from scratch, unsupervised, you’re at risk of rapidly hitting the realm of Heisenbugs, security vulnerabilities, and enormous redundancies.
This facetious example – of using AI as a universal typecasting engine – helps hammer that point home, and I love it.
Footnotes
1 How to cast basic types isn’t entirely standardised: PHP infamously casts the string "0" as false when it’s coerced into a
boolean, which virtually no other programming language does, for example.
2 The other week, I had a GenAI help me write some code that writes to a Google Sheets document, because I was fuzzy on the API and knew the AI would pick it up faster than me while I wrote the code “around” it.
Note #26931
I got kicked off LinkedIn this week. Apparently there was “suspicious behaviour” on my account. To get back in, I needed to go through Persona’s digital ID check (this, despite the fact that I’ve got a Persona-powered verification on my LinkedIn, less than six months old).
After looping around many times identifying which way up a picture of a dog was and repeatedly photographing myself, my passport, and my driving license, I eventually got back in. Personally, I suspect they just rolled out some Online Safety Act functionality and it immediately tripped over my unusual name.
But let this be a reminder to anybody who (unlike me) depends upon their account in a social network: it can be taken away in a moment and be laborious (or impossible) to get back. If you care about your online presence, you should own your own domain name; simple as that!
Dan Q found GC94GEM Brize Adventure
This checkin to GC94GEM Brize Adventure reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
QEF (once we started paying attention to the right host object!) for the geopup and I on a morning dog walk after an errand in the village. TFTC, now better get off to work!
Bagel Holes
I’ve eaten “doughnut holes”, but I’ve never seen anybody market “bagel holes”. Untapped opportunity? 🤔
Lock All The Computers
I wanted a way to simultaneously lock all of the computers – a mixture of Linux, MacOS and Windows boxen – on my desk, when I’m going to step away. Here’s what I came up with:
One button. And everything locks. Nice!
Here’s how it works:
- The mini keyboard is just 10 cheap mechanical keys wired up to a CH552 chip. It’s configured to send CTRL+ALT+F13 through CTRL+ALT+F221 when one of its keys are pressed.
- The “lock” key is captured by my KVM tool Deskflow (which I migrated to when Barrier became neglected, which in turn I migrated to when I fell out of love with Synergy). It then relays this hotkey across to all currently-connected machines2.
- That shortcut is captured by each recipient machine in different ways:
- The Linux computers run LXDE, so I added a line to
/etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xmlto set a<keybind>that executesxscreensaver-command -lock. - For the Macs, I created a Quick Action in Automator that runs
pmset displaysleepnowas a shell script3, and then connected that via Keyboard Shortcuts > Services. - On the Windows box, I’ve got AutoHotKey running anyway, so I just have it run
{ DllCall("LockWorkStation") }when it hears the keypress.
- The Linux computers run LXDE, so I added a line to
That’s all there is to is! A magic “lock all my computers, I’m stepping away” button, that’s much faster and more-convenient than locking two to five computers individually.
Footnotes
1 F13 through F24 are absolutely valid “standard” key assignments, of course: it’s just that the vast majority of keyboards don’t have keys for them! This makes them excellent candidates for non-clashing personal-use function keys, but I like to append one or more modifier keys to the as well to be absolutely certain that I don’t interact with things I didn’t intend to!
2 Some of the other buttons on my mini keyboard are mapped to “jumping” my cursor to particular computers (if I lose it, which happens more often than I’d like to admit), and “locking” my cursor to the system it’s on.
3 These boxes are configured to lock as soon as the screen blanks; if yours don’t then you might need a more-sophisticated script.
Dan Q wrote note for GCB8W6H In Memory
This checkin to GCB8W6H In Memory reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Checked-in on this cache as it’s had surprisingly-few visits yet. Reassured to find that it’s all still in place and findable. Second-to-find’s still up for grabs.
DOGWALK
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Well this was adorable.
Blender Studio’s official game project is a short casual interactive story. Play a big, adorable dog traversing through winter woods and help out a little kid decorate a snowman with colorful items hidden in the environment.
…
…
DOGWALK is a free, open-source Godot game for Windows, MacOS and Linux, produced and given to the world by Blender Studio as a way of showcasing some of their video lessons. The beautiful, playful “papercraft” models were made by making actual hand-painted paper models of the assets, unfolding them, scanning them, and then re-folding the maps back into in-game assets, which is an amazing and imaginative approach.
It was released a little over a week ago, and it’s a short but adorable little game.
It’s also free on Steam, if that’s your preference.
Buldak
We’ve been enjoying the latest season of Jet Lag: The Game, which has seen Sam, Ben, and Adam playing “Snake” across South Korea’s rail network. It’s been interestingly different than their usual games, although the format’s not quite as polished as Hide & Seek or Tag Eur It, of course.
In any case: after episode 4 and 5 introduced us to Samyang Foods‘ Buldak noodles, JTA sourced a supply of flavours online and had them shipped to us. Instant ramen’s a convenient and lazy go-to working lunch in our household, and the Jet Lag boys’ reviews compelled us to give them a go1.
So for lunch yesterday, while I waited for yet another development environment rebuild to complete, I decided to throw together some noodles. I went for a packet of the habanero lime flavour, which I padded out with some peas, Quorn3, and a soft-boiled egg.
It was spicy, for sure: a pleasant, hot, flavourful and aromatic kind of heat. Firey on the tongue, but quick to subside.
So now I’m keen to try some of the other flavours (some of which we’ve got). But perhaps not the one that was so spicy it got banned in Denmark last year.
Anyway: I guess the lesson here is that if you want me to try your product, you should get it used in a challenge on Jet Lag: The Game.
Footnotes
1 I suppose it’s also possible that I was influenced by K-Pop Demon Hunters, which also features a surprising quantity of Korean instant noodles. Turns out there’s all kinds of noodle-centric pop culture .
2 Does anybody know enough Korean to research the etymology of the word?
3 I checked the ingredients list and, as I expected, there’s no actual chicken in these chicken noodles, so my resulting lunch was completely vegetarian.
Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
…
Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks — until I messed around with ChatGPT myself and got this:
Turns out ChatGPT is telling people to go to Soundslice, create an account and import ASCII tab in order to hear the audio playback. So that explains it!
…
With ChatGPT’s inclination to lie about the features of a piece of technology, it was only a matter of time before a frustrated developer actually added a feature that ChatGPT had imagined, just to stop users from becoming dissatisfied when they tried to use nonexistent tools that ChatGPT told them existed.
And this might be it! This could be the very first time that somebody’s added functionality based on an LLM telling people the feature existed already.
Adrian Holovaty runs a tool that can “read” scanned sheet music and provide a digital representation to help you learn how to play it. But after ChatGPT started telling people that his tool could also read ASCII-formatted guitar tablature, he went and implemented it!
His blog post’s got more details, and it’s worth a read. This could be a historic moment that we’ll look back on!
Please Fix This Site? Okay!
This week, digital agency Humidity Studios launched PleaseFixThisSite.com, a website with a deliberately awful design aesthetic.
Inspired by XKCD 3113 “Fix This Sign”, the site features marquee animations, poor font choices, wonky rotation and alignment, and more.
Like the comic, it aims to “extort” people offended by the design choices by allowing them to pay to fix them. Once fixed, a change is fixed for everybody… at least, until somebody pays to “reset” the site back to its catastrophic mode.
![XKCD comic. Transcript: [A single panel containing a large, elevated sign with Ponytail standing in front of it.] [Title, slightly off horizontal, more to the right than central and the character spacing is not entirely consistent/aesthetic:] Doanate[sic] to fix this sign! [To the left of the lower part of the sign there is an 'QR code', tilted slightly with a plaintext link beneath it:] https://[illegible].com [To the right are several dollar values, in one column, and 'fixes', in a second, some of which have their own self-demonstrating quirks.] [The letters "R" and "N" may be too close together:] $10 fix kerning [Both dollar value and fix text are shifted left of their respective columns:] $20 align columns [This line is in a smaller font:] $20 fix text size $50 fix typo $50 fix centering $100 fix rotation [Ponytail stands looking at the sign, apparently in the process of using a smartphone:] Grrr... [Caption below panel:] My new company's business model is based on extorting graphic designers.](/_q23u/2025/07/fix_this_sign1.png)
That’s cute and all, but the difference between a billboard and a web page is, of course, that a web page is under the viewer’s control. Once it’s left the server and reached your computer, there’s nothing the designer can to do stop you editing a page in any way you like. That’s just how the Web works!
A great way to do this is with userscripts: Javascript content that is injected into pages by your browser when you visit particular pages. Mostly by way of demonstration, I gave it a go. And now you can, too! All you need is a userscript manager plugin in your browser (my favourite is Violentmonkey!) and to install my (open source) script.
I enjoyed the art of the joke that is PleaseFixThisSite.com. But probably more than that, I enjoyed the excuse to remind you that by the time you’re viewing a Web page, it’s running on your computer, and you can change it any way you damn well please.
Don’t like the latest design of your favourite social network? Want to reinstate a feature of a popular video playing site? Need a dark mode to spare your eyes on a particular news publication? Annoyed by artificial wait times before you’re “allowed” to click a download button? There’s probably a userscript for all of those. And if there isn’t, you can have a go at writing one. Userscripts are great, and you should be using them.
Zip It – Finding File Similarity Using Compression Utilities
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This was an enjoyable video. Nothing cutting-edge, but a description of an imaginative use of an everyday algorithm – DEFLATE, which is what powers most of the things you consider “ZIP files” – to do pattern-matching and comparison between two files. The tl;dr is pretty simple:
- Lossless compression works by looking for repetition, and replacing the longest/most-repeated content with references to a lookup table.
- Therefore, the reduction-in-size from compressing a file is an indicator of the amount of repetition within it.
- Therefore, the difference in reduction-in-size of compressing a single file to the reduction-in-size of compressing a pair of files is indicative of their similarity, because the greatest compression gains come from repetition of data that is shared across both files.
- This can be used, for example, to compare the same document written in two languages as an indication of the similarity of the languages to one another, or to compare the genomes of two organisms as an indication of their genetic similarity (and therefore how closely-related they are).
I love it when somebody finds a clever and novel use for an everyday tool.
Dan Has Too Many Monitors
My new employer sent me a laptop and a monitor, which I immediately added to my already pretty-heavily-loaded desk. Wanna see?
Firstup Day 1
Off to my first day at Firstup. Gotta have an induction: get my ID badge, learn where the toilets are, how to refill the coffee machine, and all that jazz.
Except, of course, none of those steps will be part of my induction. Because, yet again, I’ve taken a remote-first position. I’m 100% sold that, for me, remote/distributed work helps me bring my most-productive self. It might not be for everybody, but it’s great for me.
And now: I’m going to find out where the water cooler is. No, wait… some other thing!