Apparently Automattic are laying off around one in six of their workforce. And I’m one of the unlucky ones.
Anybody remote hiring for a UK-based full-stack web developer (in a world that doesn’t seem to believe that full-stack developers exist anymore) with 25+ years professional experience,
specialising in PHP, Ruby, JS, HTML, CSS, devops, and about 50% of CMSes you’ve ever heard of (and probably some you haven’t)… with a flair for security, accessibility,
standards-compliance, performance, and DexEx?
My star sign is Aquarius. Aquarians are, according to tradition: deep, imaginative, original, and uncompromising. That sounds like a pretty good description of me, right?
You can tell that I’m an Aquarius, because I’ve got a certificate to say so.
Now some of you might be thinking, “Hang on, wasn’t Dan born very close to the start of the year, and wouldn’t that make him a Capricorn, not an Aquarius?” I can understand why you’d
think that.
And while it’s true that I was assigned the star sign of Capricorn at my birth, it doesn’t really represent me very well. Capricorns are, we’re told, serious, disciplined, and good with
money. Do any of those things remotely sound like me? Not so much.
So many, many years ago I changed my star sign to Aquarius (I can’t remember exactly when, but I’d done it a long while
before I wrote the linked blog post, which in turn is over 14 years old…).
It doesn’t say anything in here to suggest that I can’t change my star sign.
But really: who has the right to tell you what your place in the zodiac is, really? Just you.
And frankly, people telling you who you can and can’t be is so last millennium. By now, there’s really no excuse for not accepting somebody’s identity, whether it’s for
something as trivial as their star sign… or as important as their gender, sexuality, or pronouns.
In hindsight, I probably should have launched this website yesterday and called it an April Fool. But I completely forgot that I’d planned to until an entire day afterwards,
so you get it now.
All of which is to say: I’ve launched a(nother) stupid website, ChangeYourStarSign.com. Give it a go!
It’s lightweight, requires no JS or cookies, does no tracking, and can run completely offline or be installed to your device, and it makes it easier than ever for you to change your
star sign. Let’s be honest: it was pretty easy anyway – just decide what your new star sign is – but if you’d rather have a certificate to prove it, this site’s got you
covered.
Whether you change your star sign to represent you better, to sidestep an unfortuitous horoscope (or borrow a luckier one), or for some other reason, I’d love to hear what you change it
to and how you get on with it. What’s your new star sign?
There is a lot of smoke in the work-productivity AI space. I believe there is (probably) fire there somewhere. But I haven’t been able to find it.
…
I find AI assistants useful, just less so than other folks online. I’m glad to have them as an option but am still on the lookout for a reason to pay $20/month for a premium plan.
If that all resonants and you have some suggestions, please reach out. I can be convinced!
…
I’m in a similar position to Sean. I enjoy Github Copilot, but not enough that I would pay for it out of my own pocket (like him, I get it for free, in my case because I’m associated
with a few eligible open source projects). I’ve been experimenting with Cursor and getting occasionally good results, but again: I wouldn’t have paid for it myself (but my employer is
willing to do so, even just for me to “see if it’s right for me”, which is nice).
I think this is all part of what I was complaining about yesterday, and what Sean describes as “a lot of smoke”. There’s so much hype around AI
technologies that it takes real effort to see through it all to the actual use-cases that exist in there, somewhere. And that’s the effort required before you
even begin to grapple with questions of cost, energy usage, copyright ethics and more. It’s a really complicated space!
There are things it does well-enough, and much faster than a human, that it’s certainly not useless:
indeed, I’ve used it for a variety of things from the practical to the silly to the sneaky, and many more activities besides 1.
I routinely let an LLM suggest autocompletion, and I’ve experimented with having it “code for me” (with the caveat that I’m going to end up re-reading it all anyway!).
But I’m still not sure whether that, on the balance of things, GenAI represents a net benefit. Time will tell, I suppose.
And like Paul, I’m sick of “the pervasive, all encompassing nature of it”. I never needed AI integration in NOTEPAD.EXE before, and I still don’t need it now! Not
everything needs to be about AI, just because it’s the latest hip thing. Remember when everybody was talking about how everything belonged on the blockchain (it doesn’t): same
energy. Except LLMs are more-accessible to more-people, thanks to things like ChatGPT, so the signal-to-noise ratio in the hype machine is much, much worse. Nowadays, you actually have
to put significant effort in if you want to find the genuinely useful things that AI does, amongst all of the marketing crap that surrounds it.
Footnotes
1 You’ll note that I specifically don’t make use of it for writing any content
for this blog: the hallucinations and factual errors you see here are genuine organic human mistakes!
For a little while I got to lie in the sunshine and read my book in quiet solitude. But before long I found I was sharing it with a small child and his noisy games console.
Still delightful, though, and it feels wonderfully Spring-like out there today.
It wasn’t until I made time for myself to get out into the countryside near my home and take the dog for a walk that I realised how much stress I’d been putting myself under during my
team meetup, this week.
Istanbul was enjoyable and fascinating, and I love my team, but I always forget until after the fact how much a few days worth of city crowds can make me feel anxious and trapped.
It’s good to get a mile or two from the nearest other human and decompress!
Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling1.
So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.
Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van
carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!
And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a
static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!
In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man2.
My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would
all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!
And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they
play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.
Raja didn’t have a photo to share (and why would he? it’s not like I have a photo of the guy who comes to refill the gas tank behind my
house!3), so I found this stock pic which sounds a bit like what
he described. Photo courtesy Aiden Jones, used under a CC-By-SA license.
It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?
Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome4!
(My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody,
right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a
recognisable tune.
I’m thinking a chorus of Baby Shark would get everybody’s attention.
Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly
troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think
to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d
hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah
and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”?
Just a thought.
Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead
of the UK. Let’s fix that!
Footnotes
1 It’s not unheard of for cruel clever parents to try to teach their young
children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s soldout of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for
myself.
3 My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental
cover of Burn Baby Burn?
4 Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda
fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…
As others have observed, this is a bit challenging right now owing to the hoardings that have been erected in the way. But like others, I found a gap in the fence through which I was
able to photograph the sculpture (while holding up a piece of paper with the geocaching logo and my username, to prevent reuse!). TFTC!
I’d hoped not to need the spoiler image but after an extended hunt I gave up and used it. Soon the cache was in hand. Found a space to squeeze my name into the log, and returned to its
sneaky hiding spot. Also ran all the way up and down to count the steps and update OpenStreetMap, which didn’t have an
accurate count.
Whether or not this piece of art is or was an act of political defiance, it might need to be one once again. Brought my own rainbow so I could be part of it, too. 🌈✊
Maybe I am just seeing this wrong, but I experience that a lot of people simply don’t reply to emails/messages these days any more. I get that emails can be exhausting at times,
but really, I am answering any email I get. Sometimes late, but I answer.
…
And it is so easy. I can really live with a short message stating no interest or even a “Fuck off”, which is way better as it does not leave me with nothing and not knowing
whether my message arrived or not.
…
I try to reply to every personal (i.e. from a human, not an automated service, not not including spam) email, unless it very-clearly doesn’t need one: e.g. it’s the end of a
conversation or was the response to my query. I suppose that I’m trying to say is that an initial contact with me – a new conversation – should always get a response,
because that reassures you that it arrived.
But I see the trend, and I’ve been part of it. Thanks to my many points of presence on the Web, I receive messages on a great number of subjects. Sometimes, if – say – one arrives while
I’m travelling, and then when I get around to properly reading it I think it deserves a well-thought out and researched and reasoned answer… I’ll save it for later. And that’s when the
trouble starts.
Drifting down my Inbox, it falls out of sight and mind. Whenever I see it, I’m back to square one: having not yet made the time and space to give it the consideration it deserves. The
longer it remains there, the more the pressure builds: if it took me three weeks to reply to this email, my reply has to be really good, right? Just firing off a
“thanks for your email, sorry I haven’t given it a proper reply yet” now would just be awkward. So it sits longer and stagnates. Eventually, crushed under the weight of the
emails above it and of my growing awkwardness with the situation, it gets deleted.
Usually that takes about six months, but in one particularly terrible case – a friend shared with me a draft of some fiction they’d been writing – it took eight years. Eight
years of a message sitting in my Inbox, begging me to write a proper response, and me not doing so because any reply I could by-that-point produce nothing that would possibility justify
the time it took to respond.
(At some points in my past I’ve had the same problem with blogging: if I take a month without writing a post, it feels like the pressure to produce a real banger is so high that it
makes me stagnate. That’s part of the reason that nowadays I semi-automate the inclusion of so much of my life into my blog: ad-hoc notes, checkins to geocaches, etc.
Blogging more helps fight the pressure.)
I’d like to think I do better nowadays. I don’t think I’ve got any unanswered personal email in my Inbox (though now I mention it, I think there’s a mailing list I feel like I’m overdue
to chip in on).
But on behalf of the people who don’t reliably reply because it feels like too much pressure if you missed the opportunity to do so immediately, I have some empathy. I’ve been there,
and the struggle is real. It’s possible, like me, to come out the other side of a mindset of letting email stagnate because you can’t find the words to justify the time it took
to respond.
(Anybody who’s got different reasons to mine for failing to respond to personal emails can speak for themselves. Though – possibly – not by email.)
Went over on the ferry. Using my phone as my GPSr and also my camera, so snapped a thumbs up, and my name, and my face, all with the tower visible. Looks like it’s going to rain so I’d
better find some shelter! TFTC!
Two virtual caches in such close proximity! And what a beautiful fountain. As requested, photo shows the fountain and my username, but also me! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK, and
TFTC!
Here with worth colleagues on our “day off” from meetings and code hackathons, we’re planning to visit the mosque I chose to photograph behind me. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.
We don't use cookies
This website doesn't use cookies to personalise content nor analyse web traffic. From time to time, we will reiterate how we don't share your personal information
with third parties, too.
By continuing to use the site, you accept our non-use of cookies.
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTube
