Blog – Dan Q

AI and cigarettes

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

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In the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a kid, smoking was everywhere. Restaurants, bars, and a little before my time, airplanes!

The idea that people would smoke was treated as inevitable, and the idea that you could get them to stop was viewed as wildly unrealistic.

Sound familiar? But in the early 2000’s, people did stop smoking!

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But a few years ago, the trend started to reverse. You know why?

Vaping.

Vape pens were pushed as a “safer alternative to smoking,” just like Anil is suggesting with Firefox AI. And as a result, not only did people who would have smoked anyways start up again, but people who previously wouldn’t have started.

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Chris Ferdinandi (Go Make Things), in AI and cigarettes

I know it’s been a controversial and not-for-everyone change, but I’ve personally loved that Chris Ferdinandi has branched out from simply giving weekday JavaScript tips to also providing thoughts and commentary on wider issues in tech, including political issues. I’m 100% behind it: Chris has a wealth of experience and an engaging writing style and even when I don’t 100% agree with his opinions, I appreciate that he shares them.

And he’s certainly got a point here. Pushing “less-harmful” options (like vaping… possibly…) can help wean people off something “more-harmful”… but it can also normalise a harmful behaviour that’s already on the way out by drawing newcomers to the “less-harmful” version.

My personal stance remains that GenAI may have value (though not for the vast majority of things that people market it as having value for, where – indeed – it’s possibly doing more harm than good!), but it’s possible that we’ll never know because the entire discussion space is poisoned now by the hype. That means it’ll be years before proper, unbiased conversations can take place, free of the hype, and it’s quite possible that the economy of AI will have collapsed by then. So maybe we’ll never know.

Anyway: good post by Chris; just wanted to share that, and also to add a voice of support for the direction he’s taken his blog these last few years.

I guess I’m never paying DreamHost back

About twenty years ago, after a a tumultuous life, Big.McLargeHuge – the shared server of several other Abnibbers and I – finally and fatally kicked the bucket. I spun up its replacement, New.McLargeHuge, on hosting company DreamHost, and this blog (and many other sites) moved over to it¹.

I only stayed with DreamHost for a few years before switching to Bytemark, with whom I was a loyal customer right up until a few years ago², but in that time I took advantage of DreamHost’s “Refer & Earn” program, which allowed me to create referral codes that, if redeemed by others who went on to become paying customers, would siphon off a fraction of the profits as a “kickback” against my server bills. Neat!³

A year or so after I switched to ByteMark, DreamHost decided I owed them money: probably because of a “quirk” in their systems. I disagreed with their analysis, so I ignored their request. They “suspended” my account (which I wasn’t using anyway), and that was the end of it.

Right?

But the referral fees continued to trickle in. For the last seventeen years, I’ve received a monthly email advising me that my account had been credited, off the back of a referral.

About once a year I log in and check the balance. I was quite excited to discover that, at current rates, they’d consider me “paid-up” for my (alleged) debt by around Spring 2026!

I had this whole plan that I’d write a blog post about it when the time came. It could’ve been funny!

But it’s not to be: DreamHost emailed me last night to tell me that they’re killing their “Refer & Earn” program; replacing it with something different-but-incompatible (social media’s already having a grumble about this, I gather).

So I guess this is the only blog post you’ll get about “that time DreamHost decided I owed them money and I opted to pay them back in my referral fees over the course of eighteen years”.

No big loss.

Footnotes

¹ At about the same time I moved Three Rings over from its previous host, Easily, to DreamHost too, in order to minimise the number of systems I had to keep an eye on. Oh, how different things are now, when I’ve got servers and domain registrations and DNS providers all over the damn place!

² Bytemark have rapidly gone downhill since their acquisition by Iomart a while back, IMHO.

³ Nowadays, this blog (and several of my other projects) is hosted by Linode, whose acquisition by Akamai seems not to have caused any problems with, so that’s fab.

30 Years Of Notices

This telegraph pole in the centre of Eynsham carries the scars of hosting countless community announcements, notices, and flyers over the last 30 years.

Beige Buttons

Back before PCs were black, they were beige. And even further back, they’d have not only “Reset” and “Power” buttons, but also a “Turbo” button.

I’m not here to tell you what it did¹. No, I’m here to show you how to re-live those glory days with a Turbo button of your very own, implemented as a reusable Web Component that you can install on your very own website:

If you’d like some beige buttons of your own, you can get them at Beige-Buttons.DanQ.dev. Two lines of code and you can pop them on any website you like. Also, it’s open-source under the Unlicense so you can take it, break it, or do what you like with it.

I’ve been slumming it in some Web Revivalist circles lately, and it might show. Best Resolution (with all its 88×31s²), which I launched last month, for example.

You might anticipate seeing more retro fun-and-weird going on here. You might be right.

Close-up photo of a computer with reset and turbo buttons in the style mirrored by my component. — This photo was my primary inspiration for the design of these buttons. I’m pretty sure I had a case of this design once! This photo courtesy Rainer Knäpper, used under the Free Art License.

Now… be honest – how many of you pressed the “reset” button even though you were told not to?

Footnotes

¹ If you know, you know. And if you don’t, then take a look at the website for my new web component, which has an “about” section.

² I guess that’s another “if you know, you know”, but at least you’ll get fewer conflicting answers if you search for an explanation than you will if you try to understand the turbo button.

Autumn Sunrise

Gorgeous autumn dawn this morning with a razor-sharp moon hanging above the shifting hues of the South-East.

It’s going to be a cold one. (At last; it’s been an unseasonably-warm November so far!)

Dan Q wrote note for GC88ZY9 The Devil’s Quoits

This checkin to GC88ZY9 The Devil's Quoits reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

A local landowner has (controversially) decided to start enforcing their ownership of the land surrounding the lake at Dix Pit, and has erected new fences and private property signs to deter trespassers. So this evening, the geopup and I took a walk to the GZ to check that it’s still an achievable find.

Good news! It’s certainly still possible (though sometimes boggy, in the winter!) to get to The Devil’s Quoits and log this virtual while using only the permitted footpaths, whether coming from either the North or the South.

You might find that your map hasn’t yet been updated to reflect the approved routes, but you shouldn’t struggle to get here. Just stick to the path and you’ll find the GZ. (And once I’ve seen how the local controversy resolves itself I’ll be sure to submit updates to OpenStreetMap to accurately reflect the eventual state of the paths around here!)

We Need to Talk About Botsplaining

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

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“Botsplaining,” as I use the term, describes a troubling new trend on social media, whereby one person feeds comments made by another person into a large language model (like ChatGPT), asks it to provide a contrarian (often condescending) explanation for why that person is “wrong,” and then pastes the resulting response into a reply. They may occasionally add in “I asked ChatGPT to read your post, and here’s what he said,”² but most just let the LLM speak freely on their behalf without acknowledging that they’ve used it. ChatGPT’s writing style is incredibly obvious, of course, so it doesn’t really matter if they disclose their use of it or not. When you ask them to stop speaking to you through an LLM, they often simply continue feeding your responses into ChatGPT until you stop engaging with them or you block them.

This has happened to me multiple times across various social media platforms this year, and I’m over it.

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Stephanie Vee, in We Need to Talk About Botsplaining

Stephanie hits it right on the nose in this wonderful blog post from last month.

I just don’t get it why somebody would ask an AI to reply to me on their behalf, but I see it all the time. In threads around the ‘net, I see people say “I put your question into ChatGPT, and here’s what it said…” I’ve even seen coworkers at my current and formers employer do it.

What do they think I am? Stupid? It’s not like I don’t know that LLMs exist, what they’re good at, what they’re bad at (I’ve been blogging about it for years now!), and more-importantly, what people think they’re good at but are wrong about.

If I wanted an answer from an AI (which, just sometimes, I do)… I’d have asked an AI in the first place.

If I ask a question and it’s not to an AI, then it’s safe for you to assume that it’s because what I’m looking for isn’t an answer from an AI. Because if that’s what I wanted, that’s what I would have gotten in the first place and you wouldn’t even have known. No: I asked a human a question because I wanted an answer from a human.

When you take my request, ignore this obvious truth, and ask an LLM to answer it for you… it is, as Stephanie says, disrespectful to me.

But more than that, it’s disrespectful to you. You’re telling me that your only value is to take what I say, copy-paste it to a chatbot, then copy-paste the answer back again! Your purpose in life is to do for people what they’re perfectly capable of doing for themselves, but slower.

How low an opinion must you have of yourself to volunteer, unsolicited to be the middle-man between me and a mediocre search engine?

If you don’t know the answer, say nothing. Or say you don’t know. Or tell me you’re guessing, and speculate. Or ask a clarifying question. Or talk about a related problem and see if we can find some common ground. Bring your humanity.

But don’t, don’t, don’t belittle both of us by making yourself into a pointless go-between in the middle of me and an LLM. Just… dont’t.

Only Murders in the Building Season 5

I really liked Only Murders in the Building. It started with a fun premise. It grew into something hilariously self-aware. I’d recommend it.

But man, the fifth season had the most-disappointing reveal/conclusion imaginable.

Hoping the promised sixth season does better.

How I Learned the Pythagorean Theorem

The younger child and I were talking about maths on the school run this morning, and today’s topic was geometry. I was pleased to discover that he’s already got a reasonable comprehension of the Pythagorean Theorem¹: I was telling him that I was about his age when I first came across it, but in my case I first had a practical, rather than theoretical, impetus to learn it.

It was the 1980s, and I was teaching myself Dr. Logo, Digital Research‘s implementation of the Logo programming language (possibly from this book). One day, I was writing a program to draw an indoor scene, including a window through which a mountain would be visible. My aim was to produce something like this:

All of these graphics were made using my own 2019 implementation of Logo, TRRTL.COM: click on any graphic to continue drawing!

My window was 300 “steps”² tall by 200 steps wide and bisected in both directions when I came to make my first attempt at the mountain.

And so, naively, starting from the lower-left, I thought I’d need some code like this:

RIGHT 45
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100

But what I ended up with was this:

Hypotenuse? More like need-another-try-potenuse.

I instantly realised my mistake: of course the sides of the mountain would need to be longer so that the peak would reach the mid-point of the window and the far side would hit its far corner. But how much longer ought it to be.

I intuited that the number I’d be looking for must be greater than 100 but less than 250: these were, logically, the bounds I was working within. 100 would be correct if my line were horizontal (a “flat” mountain?), and 250 was long enough to go the “long way” to the centrepoint of the window (100 along, and 150 up). So I took a guess at 150 and… it was pretty close… but still wrong:

I remember being confused and frustrated that the result was so close but still wrong. The reason, of course, is that the relationship between the lengths of the sides of a triangle don’t scale in a 1:1 way, but this was the first time I found myself having to think about why.

So I found my mother and asked her what I was doing wrong. I’m sure it must have delighted her to dust-off some rarely-accessed knowledge from her own school years and teach me about Pythagoras’!

The correct answer, of course, is given by:

\sqrt{100^{2} + 100^{2}}

I so rarely get to use MathML that I had to look up the syntax.

The answer, therefore, is… 141.421 (to three decimal places). So I rounded to 141 and my diagram worked!³

What made this maths lesson from my mother so memorable was that it fed a tangible goal. I had something I wanted to achieve, and I learned the maths that I needed to get there. And now it’s impermeably etched onto my brain.

I learned the quadratic equation formula and how to perform algebraic integration by rote, and I guarantee that it’s less well-established in my long-term memory than, say, the sine and cosine rules or how to solve a simultaneous equation because I’ve more-often needed to do those things outside of the classroom!

So I guess the lesson is that I should be trying to keep an eye out for practical applications of maths that I can share with my kids. Real problems that are interesting to solve, to help build the memorable grounding that latter supports the more-challenging and intangible abstract maths that they may wish to pursue later.

Both kids are sharp young mathematicians, and the younger one seems especially to enjoy it, so feeding that passion feels well-worthwhile. Perhaps I should show them TRRTL.COM so they can try their hand at Logo!

Footnotes

¹ You know the one: the square of the triangle’s hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. You could conceivably know it by some other mnemonic, but the essence is that if you know the lengths of two sides of any right-angled triangle, you can derive the length of the third with some moderately-simple arithmetic.

² Just one way that Logo is/was a cute programming language was its use of “steps” – as in, turtle-steps – to measure distances. You might approximate them as pixels, but a “step” has meaning even for lines that don’t map linearly to pixels because they’re at wonky angles, for example.

³ I’d later become unstuck by rounding, while trying to make a more-complex diagram with a zig-zag pattern running along a ribbon: a small rounding error became compounded over a long time and lead to me being a couple of pixels off where I intended. But that’s another story.

Two modes of Internet use

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

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I’ve found my relationships are healthier when I keep my offline-first relationships offline (e.g. not following each other on Facebook or Instagram) — following someone’s Instagram makes it feel like I know what’s going on with them without interacting. Following offline friends on social media can reduce what used to be normal friendships into parasocial relationships.

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I suspect bringing offline relationships online is responsible for a lot of the loneliness people feel — social media looks like you have all these friends… but no one you could ask to feed your cat while you’re away, because one-to-many broadcasting replaced direct interactions 😿 Essentially, the offline relationship became an online one.

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Tracy Durnell, in Two modes of Internet use

Tracy’s observations here are absolutely excellent, and spot-on. I’ve absolutely experienced some of the problems she’s described when trying to use social media to supplement “offline-first” relationships.

Unfortunately, unilaterally following Tracy’s segregation strategy doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’re going to avoid the problems she’s identified. That’s especially true if you haven’t always followed her guidance!

Like many folks I know, I joined Facebook when it became available to me and used it to connect with most of the people I knew in the real world. And certainly, this caused a problematic blurring of our online and offline interactions! People in my friend group would switch to “broadcast mode”, not reaching out to query one another’s status and wellbeing, and coming to assume that anything they’d shared online would be universally known among their friends (I was definitely guilty of this myself; sometimes I still am!).

I dropped Facebook about 14 years ago, but it’s still the case that my offline-first friends will sometimes assume that I’ll know something that they posted there (or to some other platform). And it’s still the case that I’m not as good as I could be at reaching-out and checking-in. (At least that latter point is something actionable that I can work with, I suppose.)

After thirty years online, it seems to me that converting an online relationship to an offline one is a rarity. But converting one born-offline into an online one, or a “hybrid” one that somehow exhibits some of the worst characteristics of both, is distressingly easy… even when you don’t intend it.

Tracy’s post’s got much more to say, and I thoroughly recommend it. I don’t know that I’m personally ready to make as firm a distinction between my “online” and “offline” friends as she seems to – there are aspects of the hybrid model that actually work quite well for me, much of the time – but I like having a framework around which to think and talk about the differences.

The Piss Saga

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

Derek Milton, in The Piss Saga

When somebody started repeatedly leaving bottles of urine on top of a utility cabinet in his neighbourhood, filmmaker Derek Milton decided to investigate. During his descent into insanity as he tries to understand why this person keeps leaving their piss here (and who keeps collecting them, later), somehow sponsored by the Reolink Go PT Ultra range of security cameras, we see through this entertaining (?) documentary (??) the story of an artist trying to interpret the work of another, more-shy, artist (???).

I don’t know, that’s the best description I can come up with for this weird project. I still don’t know why I watched it from beginning to end. But now you can, too.

Are you closer to Ireland or Scotland?

I nerdsniped myself today when, during a discussion on the potential location of a taekwondo tournament organised by our local martial arts school, somebody claimed that Scotland would be “nearer” than Ireland.

But the question got me thinking:

Could I plot a line across Great Britain, showing which parts are closer to Scotland and which parts are closer to Ireland?

If the England-facing Irish and Scottish borders were completely straight, one could simply extend the borders until they meet, bisect the angle, and we’d be done.

In reality, the border between England and Scotland is a winding mess, shaped by 700 years of wars and treaties¹. Treating the borders as straight lines is hopelessly naive.

What I’m really looking for… is a Voronoi partition…

Animation showing colours gradually expanding from points on a plane, carving out borders along their edges. — Voronoi diagrams are pretty, and cool, and occasionally even useful! This one expands from points, but there’s no reason you can’t expand from a line (line a border!) instead.

My Python skills are pretty shit, but it’s the best tool for the job for geohacking². And so, through a combination of hacking, tweaking, and crying, I was able to throw together a script that produces a wonderful slightly-wiggly line up the country.

Once you’ve bisected England in this way – into parts that are “closer to Ireland” versus parts that are “closer to Scotland”, you start to spot all kinds of interesting things³.

Like: did you know that the entire subterranean part of the Channel Tunnel is closer to Scotland than it is to Ireland… except for the ~2km closest to the UK exit.

A little further North: London’s six international airports are split evenly across the line, with Luton, Stansted and Southend closer to Scotland… and City, Heathrow and Gatwick closer to Ireland.

The line then pretty-much bisects Milton Keynes, leaving half its population closer to Scotland and half closer to Ireland, before doing the same to Daventry, before – near Sutton Coldfield – it drives right through the middle of the ninth hole of the golf course at the Lea Marston Hotel.

Players tee off closer to Ireland and – unless they really slice it – their ball lands closer to Scotland:

In Cannock, it bisects the cemetery, dividing the graves into those on the Scottish half and those in the Irish half:

The line crosses the Welsh border at the River Dee, East of Wrexham, leaving a narrow sliver of Wales that’s technically closer to Scotland than it is to Ireland, running up the coastline from Connah’s Quay to Prestatyn and going as far inland as Mold before – as is the case in most of Wales – you’re once again closer to Ireland:

I’d never have guessed that there were any parts of Wales that were closer to Scotland than they were to Ireland, but the map doesn’t lie⁴

Anyway: that’s how I got distracted, today. And along the way I learned a lot about geodata encoding, a little about Python, and a couple of surprising things about geography⁵.

Footnotes

¹ Not to mention the crazy history of places like Berwick-upon-Tweed, which has jumped the border several times, and Ba Green, ownership of which has traditionally been decided by game of football.

² Or, at least: it’s the one that’s most-widely used and so I could find lots of helpful StackOverflow answers when I got stuck!

³ Interesting… if you’re specifically looking for some geographical trivia, that is!

⁴ Okay, the map lies a little. My program was only simple so it plotted everything on a flat plane, failing to accommodate for Earth’s curvature. The difference is probably marginal, but if you happen to live on or very close to the red line, you might need to do your own research!

⁵ Like: Chester and Rugby are closer to Scotland than they are to Ireland, and Harpenden and Towcester are closer to Ireland than they are to Scotland! Who knew?

A chat with 19-year-old me

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

I bumped into my 19-year-old self the other day. It was horrifying, in the same way that looking in the mirror every morning is horrifying, but with added horror on top.

I stopped him mid-stride, he wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was elsewhere. Daydreaming. I remember, I used to do a lot of that. I tapped his shoulder.

“Hey. Hi. Hello. It’s me! I mean: you.”

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Giles Turnbull, in A chat with 19-year-old me

I wanted to pick two parts of this piece to quote, but I couldn’t. The whole thing is great. And it’s concise – only about 1,700 words – so you should just go read it.

I wonder what conversations I’d have with my 19-year-old self. Certainly technology would come up, as it was already a huge part of my life (and, indeed, I was already publishing on the Web and even blogging), but younger-me would still certainly have been surprised by and interested in some of the changes that have happened since. High-speed, always-on cellular Internet access… cheap capacitive touchscreens… universal media streaming… the complete disappearance of CRT screens… high-speed wireless networking…

Giles tells his younger self to hold onto his vinyl collection: to retain a collection of physical media for when times get strange and ephemeral, like now. What would I say to 19-year-old me? It’s easy to fantasise about the advice you’d give your younger self, but would I even listen to myself? Possibly not! I was a stubborn young know-it-all!

Anyway, go read Giles’ post because it’s excellent.

Send Me a Postcard!

Last month I was on em’s personal site, where I discovered their contact page lists not only the usual methods (email addresses, socials, contact forms etc.) but also a postal address¹: how cool is that‽ I could have written in their guestbook… but obviously I took the option to send a postcard instead!

Now I’ve set up a PO Box of my own, and I’ve love it if you feel up to saying “hi” via a postcard². As a bonus, it’s more-likely to get through than anything that has to face-off against my spam filter!

So, if you want to send me a letter or postcard (no parcels, nothing that needs a signature), my address is:

Dan Q
Unit 159610
PO Box 7169
Poole
BH15 9EL
United Kingdom

The usual other contact methods still work, of course.

Footnotes

¹ The postal address em uses is a PO Box, for solid safety/anonymity reasons, and/or perhaps to facilitate house moves.

² I’ve only ever received unsolicited postal mail from Internet acquaintances once, I think – a hashcard from a fellow geohasher called Fippe – and it nowadays sits proudly on my wall.

The Signal and the Noise is still excellent

13 years ago I wrote a blog post praising The Signal and the Noise by Andrew Paul Regan / Pagan Wanderer Lu. It’s still excellent.

I may have raved about other concept albums in the meantime (this one, for example…), but The Signal and the Noise still makes my top 10¹. I’ve listened to it twice this week, and I still love it.

But I probably love it differently than I used to.

Spy Numbers / One Time Pad remains my favourite pair of tracks on the album, as it always was: like so much of Andy’s music it tells a story that feels almost like it belongs to a parallel universe… but that’s still relatable and compelling and delightful. And a fun little bop, too.

But In Potential, which I initially declared “a little weaker than the rest” of the album, has grown on me immensely over the course of the last decade. It presents an optimistic, humanistic conclusion to the album that I look forward to every time. After John Frum Will Return and Checker Charlie open the album in a way that warns us, almost prophetically, about the dangers of narrow target-lock thinking and AI dependence², In Potential provides a beautiful and hopeful introspective about humanity and encourages an attitude of… just being gentle and forgiving with ourselves, I guess.

So yeah, the whole thing remains fantastic. And better yet: Andy announced about six weeks ago that all of his music is now available under a free/pay-what-you-like model, so if you missed it the first time around, now’s your opportunity to play catch-up!³

Footnotes

¹ Though it’s possible that it got bumped down one spot by Musical Transients, this year.

² In a upbeat and bouncy way, though. These are cheers, not dirges.

³ Just remember to have a hanky ready for when you get to The Frosted Pane: it breaks my heart every single time.