This checkin to GCBMAGR #08 Northmoor Loop reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Coming directly from the direction of #7, this cache container was visible from 30 metres out! The geopup busied herself with rolling in the grass while I did the necessary paperwork.
This checkin to GCBMAGF #07 Northmoor Loop reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Wasn’t I just here? Yup! This is the only one of the series I’d already found, missing the FTF by only about half an hour the other week. It’s still here and looking good!
This checkin to GCBMAG7 #06 Northmoor Loop reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Very easy find while the geopup dawdled behind me, clearly having found something more-interesting for her to smell. TFTC!
This checkin to GCBMAAR #05 Northmoor Loop - Little Bridges # 3324 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Another excellent container, though it was a bit of a stretch to reach it! A herd of playful cattle ran around far behind us as we searched, watching from a distance. TFTC.
This checkin to GCBMAAD #04 Northmoor Loop - Little Bridges # 3326 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Briefly overshot this one in our excitement to get out of the field with the sheep (and so allow the geohound off her lead) and rushed to the little bridge. Doubled back to quickly find this great-sized cache. TFTC!
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I still think web components are a great foundation for a design system. No other approach gives you true cross-framework portability built on what the web platform already provides. The problem isn’t necessarily the model itself, it’s how we’ve been building them.
This is how I ended up creating Elena, a library that I’m open sourcing today. Elena starts from HTML and CSS, and stays grounded in web standards and what the web platform natively provides.
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I love the “HTML Web Components”/”Progressive Web Components”1 development pattern. The idea is, if you’re new to it:
The downside is that there’s often more scaffolding than you’d like: implementing event and property change listeners (and tidying them on disconnection), batching updates to avoid flicker, and all that jazz.
Now obviously you could go with one of the big heavyweight frameworks like React, but then you’re leaning into a whole locked-in architecture that makes it harder to write progressive components and burdens your users with a ton of unnecessary code. Boo!
That’s why I love it when clever people make useful, HTML-friendly, ultra-lightweight frameworks2 like ReefJS, which I’ve talked about using before, and – now – Elena!
Elena’s a modern, simple, MIT-licensed wrapper framework for your web components, and – having perused the documentation on-and-off for the last couple of days – it’s really exciting. Perhaps not because of what it does, but because of what it doesn’t do. It’s unopinionated, well-documented, SSR-friendly3 microframework that seems to bring the absolute best in what the Web offers via web components… and makes it easier for developers without making end-users pay the price for it.
Anyway: all of which is to say: check out Elena! I’m really excited to have a play with it the next time I have a suitable web components project.
1 I’m with Jeremy: “Progressive Web Components” is a better name. Also: it’s it funny how changing just one word of a name can make you re-think what a thing is. The moment I refactored the way I thought about HTML Web Components into calling them Progressive Web Components was the moment I said to myself “hey, I could put an SVG into one of those… use state-managed props to set CSS variables that are available to the image… and in doing so, produce an SVG that elegantly becomes animated where JS is available…”
2 I same “frameworks”: by the time they’re this lightweight, single-purpose, and focussed on adding functionality that perhaps vanilla JS and web components should already have we might as well call them utility libraries or polyfills!
3 SSR perhaps ought not to matter for Progressive Web Components, but I can imagine situations where Elena would still be useful even for web components without a HTML fallback, at which point I suppose SSR could be a performance shortcut for some projects.
This checkin to GCBMA9M #03 Northmoor Loop reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
QEF when the GPSr dropped me right on it.
The dog complained that I wouldn’t let her go play with the lambs while I retrieved the cache – the playful pup can’t understand why I wouldn’t let her try to make friends with them!
This checkin to GCBMA8X #02 Northmoor Loop - Little Bridges # 3323 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Two for two. The dog watched from below as I reached for this one. Amazing container; love it!
FP awarded for the container alone! TFTC.
This checkin to GCBMA4C #01 Northmoor Loop reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
In the second hiding place I tied, and the evidence suggests I’m not the first to make my mistake. I dipped into this series on release day from the other “side”; now I’ve returned (with my geopup pal) to do more of the loop! TFTC.
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NHS England has issued new guidance to staff, which has been shared with New Scientist, that demands existing and future software be pulled from public view and kept behind closed doors. “All source code repositories must be private by default. Repositories must not be public unless there is an explicit and exceptional need, and public access has been formally approved,” says the new guidance. The deadline for making code private is 11 May.
Last month, an AI created by Anthropic called Mythos was widely reported to be capable of discovering flaws in virtually any software, potentially allowing hackers to break into systems running it.
NHS England’s guidance specifically points to Mythos as the cause for the new measures.
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Yet again, “AI” is the reason why we can’t have nice things on an open and transparent Web.
This is bad, of course. But the worst part is the illusion it helps feed that closed-source software is necessarily more-secure than open-source software. Obviously it’s all much more-complex than that. Indeed, the article goes on to quote Terence Eden thoroughly debunking the entire line of thought:
“Is it possible that Mythos will scan a repository and find a bug? Yes, 100 per cent likely. Is that going to be a bug that causes a security issue in a live NHS service somewhere? Almost certainly not,” says Eden. “I think it’s someone in NHS England buying into the hype that Mythos is going to cause the end of security as we know it and getting a bit panicked.”
He’s right. This policy change is unlikely to improve the security of any of the affected pieces of NHS software (for much of which, the code is already out-there and archived, and so removing it from the Internet now is pretty pointless). If it’s going to be attacked, it’ll be attacked, and the resources that the bad guys have for probing a whole database worth of CVEs or fuzz-testing the extremities makes the availability of vulnerability-scanning AI pretty-close to irrelevant.
At least if it were open source then the good guys would have a chance of helping out… as well as we, the taxpayers who made the software possible, being able to see where our money was going!
Altogether a bad move by the NHS, here.
When we picked up the keys to the rental house we’ll be living in while our home is repaired following the flood that forced us to evacuate, I took an initial meter reading then got in touch with super-reputable water company Thames Water to let them know the situation.
Unfortunately, Thames Water had fucked-up1 and created an account for us already with the wrong information2, so by the time I’d reached out to them they were already getting themselves into a pickle.
It turns out that, presumably because of some shortsightedness on the part of their software engineers, their computer systems wouldn’t let them change the information to correct the problem. Nor could they simply delete the account and create a new one3. Instead, the had to close the account they’d erroneously set up such that the start and end date of the contract was our moving-in date… and then set up a new account starting from the day after.
Sigh. Fine! So long as it’s sorted, I didn’t even care. Until, that is, the bill arrived for the one day of the first (incorrectly-created) contract:
That bill:
Let’s see how that breaks down:
According to this bill, we used three cubic metres of water between collecting the keys (at around 1pm), moving in, and taking a meter reading… and the end of the day. That’s three thousand litres of water.
Is it possible to achieve that level of water usage in the nine hours of billable time that this bill covers? I guess, if you really tried, you could:
Obviously this is all ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous.
But then again, so is this bill, which claims that three adults spent 11 hours in a house and somehow used the amount of water that’s the recommended amount to drink in a day… by 1,500 adults. Despite the water being shut-off to install a shower and toilet for some of that time.
But then again, so is Thames Water’s computer system, which disallows the correction of mistakes even by their own staff and instead requires the creation of one-day contracts. And also can’t decide which country’s date format to use. And, possibly, doesn’t allow them to obey data protection laws.
The whole thing’s ridiculous. Which I’ll be letting Thames Water know. Let’s see if they agree.
1 This may be no surprise to anybody who’s ever dealt with Thames Water before, or who follows the news about their seemingly endless inability to keep clean water in its pipes and raw sewage out of our rivers, for example, while taking out loans in order to pay bonuses to their self-back-patting executives.
2 They used information provided to them by the estate agent and failed to connect it to the information they already had for us… which thanks to quirks of their information systems resulted in bigger problems down the line. Amusingly – and for a change! – none of the problems were related to my unusual name, this time around.
3 Curiously, these initial mistakes on the part of Thames Water left them processing personal information about me – an email address – that I’d never given to them, and allegedly unable to delete or correct it for six months after being asked to. This is the kind of thing that normally gives me an excuse for a field day of DPA2018-related letter writing, but this time around I’ve been too busy dealing with the bigger problems they’ve created to have a chance to stop and think about that: that’s how much of a mess they’ve made.
4 It’s only barely possible to repeatedly fill the bath this quickly, you need to use both hot and cold water: the cold inlet alone doesn’t have the pressure to fill it fast enough, but the hot water tank has its own separate inlet which makes all the difference. Also, a cold bath would suck, even if you’re only allowed five minutes in it before it’s time to drain the tub and start filling it again.
5 I once had a really rough night after a particularly dodgy curry, but I’ve never needed to be flushing a toilet twice a minute for eleven hours.
This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.
What’s the opposite of locked-in? Locked-open. Mwhahaa.
If only locked-open were easier for things that aren’t software. Like standards. And concepts.
If you’re developing software (like Mastodon), locked-open can be enforced by e.g. AGPL. You can change it, but you’re likely to have to share-alike.
If you’re developing standards (like RSS), locked-open can only be enforced by interoperability. If somebody wants to make a breaking change, they can… if they can make it popular enough.
If you’re developing concepts (like podcasting), locked-open becomes a matter of principles. You and I might know that a “platform-exclusive” podcast is outside of the spirit of the standard because it’s not distributed by an RSS feed to which anybody can subscribe.
But for these more abstract ideas, “locked-open” enforcement becomes a matter for education, optimism, and hearts-and-minds. And there are companies with huge resources that are willing to fight against all of those.
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why bother going to the brick-and-mortar store? amazon is more “convenient”. why bother cooking a nice meal for yourself? doordash and uber eats are more “convenient”. why go out and socialize with people? facebook is more “convenient”. why use a digital camera, camcorder, or polaroid? your smartphone is more “convenient”. why bother going to the theater or concerts? netflix and spotify are more “convenient”. why bother making art? asking an AI to generate it for you is more “convenient”.
well, i say nuts to that. from now on, i’m going to make my life as inconvenient as possible. i’m going to go to the store and buy stuff in person. i’m going to make my own food with my own hands. i’m going to socialize with people face-to-face. i’m going to use a true camera instead of my phone’s camera. i’m going to buy blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs instead of streaming. i’m going to take my time when creating, watching, playing, and reading a work of art.
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I’m seeing an growing movement in indieweb, revivalist, and adjacent circles that express RNotté’s sentiment: that the endless (and highly-marketable) quest for increased convenience in our lives has gained us free time, but we’ve lost something along the way.
What we’ve lost varies from case to case, but includes freedom (from lock-in to subscription services), creative satisfaction (from convenient “artistic” expression), privacy (from becoming the product, packaged-up by big-data advertising-funded tools), and social interactions (from so much of “social” media).
But reading RNotté share their thoughts on the matter today was the first time that it’s reminded me of The Matrix.
There’s a bit where Agent Smith says, to his captive the rebel captain Morpheus:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world.
Smith goes on to elucidate that his personal explanation for this fault was that humans depend upon suffering and misery, while acknowledging that there are other explanations. And perhaps we’ve touched upon one.
Perhaps humans – all humans – have a limit for how much they’re willing to accept convenience as compensation. Connected humans in The Matrix grain a convenient life, superficially superior to the struggle for survival experienced by humans living in the real world, short on food and hunted by machines. But to get that, they trade away their individual ability to become aware of the truth and, collectively, the ability for humanity for shape its own destiny. But there’s something about the imbalance of power in the arrangement niggles in human minds, and some rebel against the established order… and are joined by others who are shown that an alternative is available.
Clearly – as RNotté and others show – faceless technological forces need not go quite so far as enslaving an entire species before “convenience” no longer becomes a tolerable mitigation!
I’m not convinced that seeking out inconvenience is in itself a good. But questioning what your conveniences are worth and what you’re paying for them… that’s definitely worthwhile.
Something’s gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household’s film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition…
This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.
Me: Alright, let’s write a blog post about CSS.
🧠: Okay, but we need to make an entire design system first.
Me: That seems very complicated.
🧠: How long could it possibly take? 10 minutes?
Tell me about it.
I started a blog post about pedestrian crossings months ago and somewhere along the way I got bogged down with implementing a web component that uses 16-bit pixel art people and cars to simulate and compare the relative throughput efficiencies of different timing systems and HELP I WENT TOO DEEP THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SIMPLE BLOG POST.