Articles – Dan Q

AI vs The Expert

Duration 8:44

Podcast Version

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The Expert

Eleven years ago, comedy sketch The Expert had software engineers (and other misunderstood specialists) laughing to tears at the relatability of Anderson’s (Orion Lee) situation: asked to do the literally-impossible by people who don’t understand why their requests can’t be fulfilled.

Decades ago, a client wanted their Web application to automatically print to the user’s printer, without prompting. I explained that it was impossible because “if a website could print to your printer without at least asking you first, everybody would be printing ads as you browsed the web”. The client’s response: “I don’t need you to let everybody print. Just my users.”¹

So yeah, I was among those that sympathised with Anderson.

In the sketch, the client requires him to “draw seven red lines, all of them strictly perpendicular; some with green ink and some with transparent”. He (reasonably) states that this is impossible².

Versus AI

Following one of the many fever dreams when I was ill, recently, I woke up wondering… how might an AI programmer tackle this task? I had an inkling of the answer, so I had to try it:

When I asked gpt-4o to assist me, it initially completely ignored the perpendicularity requirement.

White square containing 7 equally-spaced parallel vertical lines: red, green, orange, red, green, orange, red. — Drawing all of the lines strictly parallel to one another was… well, the exact opposite of what was asked for, although it was at least *possible*.

Let’s see if it can do better, with a bit of a nudge:

gpt-4o claimed that the task was absolutely achievable, even clarifying that the lines would all be “strictly perpendicular to each other”… before proceeding to instead make each consecutively-drawn line be perpendicular only to its predecessor:

The same diagram, but with the 7 lines joined together into a zig-zagging snake weaving its way right, then down, then left, then down, and so on across the canvas. — This is not what I asked for. But more importantly, it’s not what I *wanted*. (But it is pretty much what I expected.)

You might argue that this test is unfair, and it is. But there’s a point that I’ll get to.

But first, let me show you how a different model responded. I tried the same question with the newly-released Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, and got what I’d consider to be a much better answer:

In my mind: an ideal answer acknowledges the impossibility of the question, or at least addresses the supposed-impossibility of it. Claude 3.7 Sonnet did well here, although I can’t confirm whether it did so because it had been trained on data that recognised the existence of “The Expert” or not (it’s clearly aware of the sketch, given its answer).

Two red lines are perpendicular to one another, followed by horizontal lines in green, semitransparent red, red, green, and semitransparent green. Each are labelled with their axis in a 7-dimensional space, and with a clarifying tooltip. — The complete page that Claude 3.7 Sonnet produced also included an explanation of the task, clarifying that it’s impossible, and a link to the video of the original sketch.

What’s the point, Dan?

I remain committed to not using AI to do anything I couldn’t do myself (and can therefore check).⁴ And the answer I got from gpt-4o to this question goes a long way to demonstrating why.

Suppose I didn’t know that it was impossible to make seven lines perpendicular to one another in anything less than seven-dimensional space. If that were the case, it’d be tempting to accept an AI-provided answer as correct, and ship it. And while that example is trivial (and at least a little bit silly), it’s the kind of thing that, I have no doubt, actually happens in other areas.

Chatbots eagerness to provide a helpful answer, even if no answer is possible, is a huge liability. The other week, I experimentally asked Claude 3.5 for assistance with a PHPUnit mocking challenge and it provided a whole series of answers… that were completely invalid! It later turned out that what I was trying to achieve was impossible⁵.

Given that its answers clearly didn’t-work there was no risk I’d have shipped it anyway, but I’m certain that there exist developers who’ve asked a chatbot for help in a domain they didn’t understood and accepted its answer while still not understanding it, which feels to me like a quick route to introducing into your code a bug that happy-path testing won’t reveal. (Y’know, something like a security vulnerability, or an accessibility failure, or whatever.)

Code assisting AI remains really interesting and occasionally useful… but it’s also a real minefield and I see a lot of naiveté about its limitations.

Footnotes

¹ My client eventually took that particular requirement out of scope and I thought the matter was settled, but I heard that they later contracted a different developer to implement just that bit of functionality into the application that we delivered. I never checked, but I think that what they delivered exploited ActiveX/Java applet vulnerabilities to achieve the goal.

² Nerds gotta nerd, and so there’s been endless debate on the Internet about whether the task is truly impossible. For example, when I first saw the video I was struck by the observation that perpendicularity within a set of lines is limited linearly by the number of dimensions you’re working in, so it’s absolutely possible to model seven lines all perpendicular to one another… if you’re working in seven dimensions. But let’s put that all aside for a moment and assume the task is truly impossible within some framework unspecified-but-implied within the universe of the sketch, ‘k?

³ Two-dimensionality feels like a fair assumed constraint, given that in the sketch Anderson tries to demonstrate the challenges of the task by using a flip-chart.

⁴ I also don’t use AI to produce anything creative that I then pass off as my own, because, y’know, many of these models don’t seem to respect copyright. You won’t find any AI-written content on my blog, for example, except specifically to demonstrate AI’s capabilities (or lack thereof) when discussing AI, and this is always be clearly labelled. But that’s another question.

⁵ In fact, I was going about the problem itself in entirely the wrong way: some minor refactoring later and I had some solid unit tests that fit the bill, and I didn’t need to do the impossible. But the AI never clocked that, and I suspect it never would have.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Duration 5:42

Podcast Version

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I’d already read every prior book published by the excellent Becky Chambers, but this (and its sequel) had been sitting on my to-read list for some time, and so while I’ve been ill and off work these last few days, I felt it would be a perfect opportunity to pick it up. I’ve spent most of this week so far in bed, often drifting in and out of sleep, and a lightweight novella that I coud dip in and out of over the course of a day felt like the ideal comfort.

I couldn’t have been more right, as the very first page gave away. My friend Ash described the experience of reading it (and its sequel) as being “like sitting in a warm bath”, and I see where they’re coming from. True to form, Chambers does a magnificent job of spinning a believable utopia: a world that acts like an idealised future while still being familiar enough for the reader to easily engage with it. The world of Wild-Built is inhabited by humans whose past saw them come together to prevent catastrophic climate change and peacefully move beyond their creation of general-purpose AI, eventually building for themselves a post-scarcity economy based on caring communities living in harmony with their ecosystem.

Writing a story in a utopia has sometimes been seen as challenging, because without anything to strive for, what is there for a protagonist to strive against? But Wild-Built has no such problem. Written throughout with a close personal focus on Sibling Dex, a city monk who decides to uproot their life to travel around the various agrarian lands of their world, a growing philosophical theme emerges: once ones needs have been met, how does one identify with ones purpose? Deprived of the struggle to climb some Maslowian pyramid, how does a person freed of their immediate needs (unless they choose to take unnecessary risks: we hear of hikers who die exploring the uncultivated wilderness Dex’s people leave to nature, for example) define their place in the world?

Aside from Dex, the other major character in the book is Mosscap, a robot whom they meet by a chance encounter on the very edge of human civilisation. Nobody has seen a robot for centuries, since such machines became self-aware and, rather than consign them to slavery, the humans set them free (at which point they vanished to go do their own thing).

To take a diversion from the plot, can I just share for a moment a few lines from an early conversation between Dex and Mosscap, in which I think the level of mutual interpersonal respect shown by the characters mirrors the utopia of the author’s construction:

…

“What—what are you? What is this? Why are you here?”

The robot, again, looked confused. “Do you not know? Do you no longer speak of us?”

“We—I mean, we tell stories about—is robots the right word? Do you call yourself robots or something else?”

“Robot is correct.”

…

“Okay. Mosscap. I’m Dex. Do you have a gender?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

These two strangers take the time in their initial introduction to ensure they’re using the right terms for one another: starting with those relating to their… let’s say species… and then working towards pronouns (Dex uses they/them, which seems to be widespread and commonplace but far from universal in their society; Mosscap uses it/its, which provides for an entire discussion on the nature of objectship and objectification in self-identity). It’s queer as anything, and a delightful touch.

In any case: the outward presence of the plot revolves around a question that the robot has been charged to find an answer to: “What do humans need?” The narrative theme of self-defined purpose and desires is both a presenting and a subtextual issue, and it carries through every chapter. The entire book is as much a thought experiment as it is a novel, but it doesn’t diminish in the slightest from the delightful adventure that carries it.

Dex and Mosscap go on to explore the world, to learn more about it and about one another, and crucially about themselves and their place in it. It’s charming and wonderful and uplifting and, I suppose, like a warm bath: comfortable and calming and centering. And it does an excellent job of setting the stage for the second book in the series, which we’ll get to presently…

OpenStreetMap rocks (especially on foot)

Especially outside of urban centres, and especially if you’re on foot, OpenStreetMap is way better than Google Maps, Bing Maps, Apple Maps, or what-have-you.

OpenStreetMap is especially good for walkers, with its more-comprehensive coverage of public footpaths as well as the ability to drill-down for accessibility information: whether a path ends in a gate or a stile matters a lot if you can’t climb the latter (or you’re walking with a small-but-muddy dog who’ll need lifting over).

Sure, you don’t get (as much) street view photography. But how often do you use that, anyway?¹

I’ve heard it argued that OpenStreetMap, with its Wikipedia-like “anybody can edit it” model, cannot be relied upon. And sure, if you’re looking for an “official” level of accuracy and the alternative is an Ordinance Survey map, then that’s what you should go for.

But there’s nothing specific to, say, Google Maps that makes it fundamentally more “accurate” for most² geographic features than OpenStreetMap. The vast of cartographic data on Google Maps is produced by humans, looking at satellite photos, and then tracing the features on them, probably with AI assistance. And the vast majority of cartographic data on OpenStreetMap is produced… exactly the same way, although without the AI “helping”.

Google Maps has mistakes, just like every map³. And it’s got trap streets, like most commercially-produced maps (including the Ordinance Survey). Google Maps’ mistakes tend to be made by somebody on the other side of the world from the feature, doing a bad job of tracing what they think might be a road… while OpenStreetMaps’ mistakes are for the most part omissions in areas that are under-explored by local contributors. And there are plenty of areas – like those near where I live, especially if you’re on foot – where the latter mistakes are much less-troublesome.

I fixed a couple of omissions on OpenStreetMap just earlier today. While I was out walking the dog, earlier, I added the names of two houses whose identities weren’t specifically marked on the map, and I added detail to the newly-constructed Deansfield estate. Google Maps shows there being only two houses on Deansfield Estate, among other inaccuracies, even though they’ve got up-to-date aerial and street photography.

Google Maps is fine if you want to drive to Sheffield, you need public transport connections to Plymouth⁴, or you’re looking for a restaurant nearby and you want the data about them to be accurate. But next time you’re walking somewhere, or when you’re looking for a specific address… I’d suggest you give OpenStreetMap a go. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Footnotes

¹ I say that as somebody who uses street view and satellite photography a more than average amount, for geohashing purposes. But I can switch mapping software on-the-fly; nobody’s stopping me looking at “ostrich” photos when I need them.

² The place that Google Maps really beats OpenStreetMap, in my mind, is in the integration of its business directory. If you search for a business in Google Maps, you’ll probably find it and get reasonably-accurate opening hours and contact details. But that’s a factor of two things: the Google My Business directory, and – more importantly – the popularity of the application and the fact that the mobile app “nudges” people to check on the places around them. By the way: if you want to contribute to making maps better in that way without becoming an unpaid researcher working to line Google’s pockets, StreetComplete is an app that helps fill-out business and related information on OpenStreetMap!

³ Google Maps used to show Vauxhall tube station on entirely the wrong side of the River Thames, for example.

⁴ Public transport’s another thing Google Maps does very well.

The Blind Piemaker

Ruth bought me a copy of The Adventure Challenge: Couples Edition, which is… well, it’s basically a book of 50 curious and unusual ideas for date activities. This week, for the first time, we gave it a go.

Open book showing a scratch-off panel, whose contents read: Find your favonte pie recipe and gather the ingredients. Blindfold your partner. Now, guide them through the process of making a pie. No instructive sentences are allowed, you can only guide them with your hands. (Don't say "pick this up" or 'drop that", find a different way to communicate - only through touch). You can only touch your blindfolded partner's hands or body - NOTHING ELSE (ingredients, utensils, dishes, etc). IMPORTANT: this challenge works best when you follow these instructions as strictly as possible. — Each activity is hidden behind a scratch-off panel, and you’re instructed not to scratch them off until you’re committed to following-through with whatever’s on the other side. Only the title and a few hints around it provide a clue as to what you’ll actually be *doing* on your date.

As a result, we spent this date night… baking a pie!

The book is written by Americans, but that wasn’t going to stop us from making a savoury pie. Of course, “bake a pie” isn’t much of a challenge by itself, which is why the book stipulates that:

One partner makes the pie, but is blindfolded. They can’t see what they’re doing.
The other partner guides them through doing so, but without giving verbal instructions (this is an exercise in touch, control, and nonverbal communication).

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt, smiles as he takes a selfie. Alongside him Ruth, wearing a purple jumper, adjusts a grey blindfold to cover her eyes. — I was surprised when Ruth offered to be the blindfoldee: I’d figured that with her greater experience of pie-making and my greater experience of doing-what-I’m-told, that’d be the smarter way around.

We used this recipe for “mini creamy mushroom pies”. We chose to interpret the brief as permitting pre-prep to be done in accordance with the ingredients list: e.g. because the ingredients list says “1 egg, beaten”, we were allowed to break and beat the egg first, before blindfolding up.

This was a smart choice (breaking an egg while blindfolded, even under close direction, would probably have been especially stress-inducing!).

Dan takes a selfie showing himself, smiling, and Ruth, wearing a blindfold and balling up pastry on a wooden worksurface. — I’d do it again but the other way around, honestly, just to experience both sides! `#JustSwitchThings`

I really enjoyed this experience. It forced us into doing something different on date night (we have developed a bit of a pattern, as folks are wont to do), stretched our comfort zones, and left us with tasty tasty pies to each afterwards. That’s a win-win-win, in my book.

Plus, communication is sexy, and so anything that makes you practice your coupley-communication-skills is fundamentally hot and therefore a great date night activity.

Plate containing four beautifully-browned but slightly lopsided pies, held in a woman's hands. — Our pies may have been wonky-looking, but they were also delicious.

So yeah: we’ll probably be trying some of the other ideas in the book, when the time comes.

Some of the categories are pretty curious, and I’m already wondering what other couples we know that’d be brave enough to join us for the “double date” chapter: four challenges for which you need a second dyad to hang out with? (I’m, like… 90% sure it’s not going to be swinging. So if we know you and you’d like to volunteer yourselves, go ahead!)

WordPress to ClassicPress

As I mentioned in my recent Blog Questions Challenge, I recently switched my blog from WordPress, which it had been running on for over 20 years of its 26 year history, to ClassicPress.¹ I’m aware that I’m not the only person for whom ClassicPress might be a better fit than WordPress², so I figured I should share the process by which I undertook the change.

Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress

Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress should be a non-destructive, 100% reversible process, but (even though I’ve got solid backups) I wasn’t ready to trust that, so I decided to operate on a copy of my site. I’m glad I did, because there were a couple of teething issues I needed to tackle before I could launch.

1. Duplicating the site

I took a simple approach to duplicating the site: (1) I copied the site directory, and (2) I copied the database, and (3) I set up a new subdomain to use for testing. Here’s how I did each step:

1.1. Copying the site directory

This should’ve been simple, but a du -sh revealed that my /wp-content/uploads directory is massive (I should look into that) and I didn’t want to clone it. And I didn’t want r need to clone my /wp-content/cache directory either. So I ran:

rsync -av --exclude=wp-content ./old-site-directory/ ./new-site-directory/ to copy everything except wp-content, and then
rsync -av --exclude=uploads --exclude=cache ./old-site-directory/wp-content/ ./new-site-directory/wp-content/ to copy wp-content except the uploads and cache subdirectories, and then finally
ln -s ./old-site-directory/wp-content/uploads ./new-site-directory/wp-content/uploads to symlink the uploads directory, sharing it between the two sites

1.2. Copying the database

I just piped mysqldump into mysql to clone from one database to the other:

mysqldump -uUSERNAME -p --lock-tables=false old-site-database | mysql -uUSERNAME -p new-site-database

I edited DB_NAME in wp-config.php in the new site’s directory to point it at the new database.

1.3. Setting up a new subdomain

My DNS is already configured with a wildcard to point (almost) all *.danq.me subdomains to this server already. I decided to use the name classicpress-testing.danq.me as my temporary/test domain name. To keep any “changes” to my cloned site to a minimum, I overrode the domain name in my wp-config.php rather than in my database, by adding the following lines:

define('WP_HOME','https://classicpress-testing.danq.me');
define('WP_SITEURL','https://classicpress-testing.danq.me');

Because I use Caddy/FrankenPHP as my webserver³, configuration was really easy: I just copied the relevant part of my Caddyfile (actually an include), changed the domain name and the root, and it just worked, even provisioning me out a LetsEncrypt SSL certificate. Magical⁴.

2. Switching the duplicate to ClassicPress

Now that I had a duplicate copy of my blog running at https://classicpress-testing.danq.me/, it was time to switch it to ClassicPress. I started by switching my wp-admin colour scheme to a different one in my cloned site, so it’d be immediately visually-obvious to me if I’d accidentally switched and was editing the “wrong” site (I also made sure I was logged-out of my primary, live site, so I was confident I wouldn’t break anything while I was experimenting!).

ClassicPress provides a migration plugin which checks for common problems and then switches your site from WordPress to ClassicPress, so I installed it and ran it. It said that everything was okay except for my (custom) theme and a my self-built plugins, which it understandably couldn’t check compatibility of. It recommended that I install Twenty Seventeen – the last WordPress default theme to not require the block editor – but I didn’t do so: I was confident that my theme would work anyway… and if it didn’t, I’d want to fix it rather than switch theme!

And then… it all broke.

3. Fixing what broke

After swiftly doing a safety-check that my live site was still intact, I started trying to work out why my site wasn’t broken. Debugging a ClassicPress PHP issue is functionally identical to debugging a similar WordPress issue, for obvious reasons: check the logs, work out what’s broken, realise it’s a plugin, disable that plugin while you investigate further, etc.

In my case, the “blocking” issues were:

Jetpack: this plugin does not play nicely with ClassicPress, presumably because it fails if it’s unable to register a block. Fortunately, I wasn’t actually using Jetpack for anything other than for VaultPress (which has saved my butt on at least one occasion and whose praises I sing), so I uninstalled Jetpack and installed the standalone plugin version of VaultPress instead, which worked fine.
EWWW Image Optimizer: I use this plugin to pregenerate WebP variants of my images, which I then serve using webserver rules. It’s not a complex job, and I should probably integrate the feature into my theme at some point, but for now I use this plugin. Version 8.0.0 of the plugin doesn’t work on ClassicPress 2.3.1, so I used WP-CLI to downgrade to the last version that does (7.7.0), and then it worked fine.
Dan’s Geocaching Log Reposter: a self-made plugin that copies my logs from geocaching websites stopped working properly, which I think is because ClassicPress is doing a more-aggressive job than WordPress at nonce validation on admin REST endpoints? I put a quick hack into my plugin to work around it, but I’ll need to look into this properly at some point.
Some other bits of my stack, e.g. CapsulePress (my Gemini/Spartan/Nex server), have their own copies of my database credentials, because I’ve been too lazy to centralise them into environment variables, and needed updating (but not until live switchover time).

Everything else worked fine, as far as I’ve determined in the weeks that have followed. My other plugins, which include Advanced Editor Tools (I should probably look into Enriched Editor), Antispam Bee, Google Authenticator, IndieAuth, Post Kinds, Post Snippets, Regenerate Thumbnails, Syndication Links, Webmention, WebSub, and WP-SCSS all “just worked”.

4. Completing the switchover

I ran the two sites in-parallel for a couple of weeks, with the ClassicPress one as a “read only” version (so I didn’t pollute my uploads directory!), but it was pretty unnecessary because it all worked pretty seamlessly, despite my complex stack of custom code. When I wanted to switch for-real, all I needed to do was swap the domain names over in my Caddyfile and edit the wp-config.php of my ClassicPress installation: step 1.3, but in reverse!

If you hadn’t been told⁵, you probably wouldn’t have even known I’d made a change: I suppress basically all infrastructure-identifying headers from my server output as a matter of course, and ClassicPress and WordPress are functionally-interchangeable from a front-end perspective⁶.

So what’s difference?

From my experience, here are the differences I’ve discovered since switching from WordPress to ClassicPress:

The good stuff

😅 ClassicPress has no Gutenberg/block editor. This would absolutely be a showstopper for many people, and that’s fine: I have nothing against the block editor (I use it basically every day elsewhere!), but I’ve never really used it on danq.me and don’t feel the need to change that! My theme, my workflow, and my custom plugins are all geared around the perfectly-good “classic” editor, and so getting a more-lightweight CMS by removing a feature I wasn’t using anyway falls somewhere between neutral and a blessing.
⚡The backend is fast again! One of the changes the ClassicPress team have been working on applying to WordPress is to strip out jQuery and other redundancies from the backend, and I love how much faster and lighter my editor interface is as a result. (With caveat; see below!)
🔌Virtually everything “just works”. With the few exceptions described above, everything works exactly as it does under WordPress. Which is what you’d hope for a fork that’s mostly “WordPress, but without the block editor”, right, but it’s still reassuring (and, for me, an essential feature). There are a few “new” features to do with paging through posts and the media library and they’re fine, I suppose, but not by themselves worth switching for (though it might be nice to backport them into WordPress!).

The bad stuff

🏷️ Adding tags to posts takes a step backwards. A side-effect of dropping jQuery is the partial loss of the autocomplete feature when selecting tags to add to a post. You still get a partial autocomplete, but not after typing a comma: you need to press enter to submit the tag you were writing and then start typing them next, which frankly sucks. This is because they’re relying on a <datalist>, which isn’t as full-featured as the Javascript solution WordPress employs. This bugs me almost enough to be a showstopper, but I gather it’s getting fixed in a near-future version.
🗺️ You’re in uncharted territory when things go wrong. One great benefit of WordPress is the side-effects of its ubiquity. If you have a query or a problem you can throw a stone at your favourite search engine and get a million answers… and some of them will even be right! If you have a problem in ClassicPress and it’s not shared with (or you’re not sure if it’s shared with) WordPress… you’re mostly on your own. The forums are good and friendly, but if you want a quick answer to something, you’re likely to have to roll your sleeves up and open some source code. I don’t mind this at all – when I first started using WordPress, this was the case, too! – but it might be a showstopper for some folks.

In summary: I’m enjoying using ClassicPress, even where there are rough edges. For me, 99% of my experience with it is identical to how I used WordPress anyway, it’s relatively lightweight and fast, and it’s easy enough to switch back if I change my mind.

Footnotes

¹ It saddens me that I have to keep clarifying this, but I feel like I do: my switch from WordPress to ClassicPress is absolutely nothing to do with any drama in the WordPress space that’s going on right now: in fact, I’d been planning to try it out since before any of the drama appeared. I appreciate that some people making a similar switch, including folks who use this blog post as a guide, might have different motivations to me, and that’s fine too. Personally, I think that ditching an installation of open-source WordPress based on your interpretation of what’s going on in the ecosystem is… short-sighted? But hey: the joy of open source is you can – and should! – do what you want. Anyway: the short of it is – the desire to change from WordPress to ClassicPress was, for me, 100% a technical decision and 0% a political one. And I’ll thank you for leaving any of your drama at the door if you slide into my comments, ta!

² Matt recently described ClassicPress as “the last decent fork attempt for WordPress”, and I absolutely agree. There’s been a spate of forks and reimplementations recently. I’ve looked into many of them and been… very much underwhelmed. Want my hot take? Sure, here you go: AspirePress is all lofty ideas and no deliverables. FreeWP seems to be the same, but somehow without the lofty ideas. ForkPress is a ghost. Speaking of ghosts, Ghost isn’t a WordPress fork; they have got some cool ideas though. b2evolution is even less a WordPress fork but it’s pretty cool in its own right. I’m not sure what clamPress is trying to achieve but I’ve not given it a serious look. So yeah: ClassicPress is, in my mind, the only WordPress fork even worth consideration at this point, and as I describe in this blog post: it’s not for everybody.

³ I switched from Nginx over the winter and it’s been just magical: I really love Caddy’s minimal approach to production configuration. The only thing I’ve been able to fault it on is that it’s not capable of setting up client-side SSL certificate authentication on a path, only on an entire domain, which meant I needed to reimplement the authentication mechanism I use on a small part of my (non-blog) internal infrastructure.

⁴ To be fair, it wouldn’t have been hard if I’d still be using Nginx, because I’d set up Certbot to use DNS-based vertification to issue me wildcard SSL certificates. But doing this in Caddy still felt magical.

⁵ And assuming you don’t religiously check my colophon page.

⁶ Indeed, I wouldn’t have considered a switch to ClassicPress in the first place if it wasn’t a closely-aligned-enough fork that I retained the ability to flip-flop between the two to my heart’s content! I’ve loved WordPress for over two decades; that’s not going to change any time soon… and if e.g. ClassicPress ceased tracking WordPress releases and the fork diverged too far for my comfort, I’d probably switch back to regular old WordPress!

Cleaved

What’s got nine working fingers and shouldn’t be allowed to own a meat cleaver?

Dan stares into the camera, pointing to himself with the first finger of his left hand, which is pouring blood from a deep laceration. — This guy! Still got two working thumbs, though.

I was chopping a swede with perhaps a little too much gusto and the next thing I knew, the blade was embedded in my finger. Whoops!

I put a plaster on it, but it was bleeding too much to stick. So I put a bigger plaster on, but it bled through. So I dug a sterile pad and a roll of bandages out of the first aid box and secured it tightly (which is harder than it looks when you’re down a finger), and now it seems okay.

Except typing is hard, which might pose a problem given that I do quite a lot of that for work. And playing the piano, which I’m already pretty bad at, is really hard. Although probably the biggest inconvenience has been repeatedly forgetting that I can’t use that (bandaged) finger to fingerprint-unlock things right now.

Ah well.

Monday Punday

Have you come across Monday Punday? I only discovered it last year, sadly, after it had been on hiatus for like 4 years, following a near decade-long run, but I figured that if you like wordplay and webcomics as much as I do (e.g. if you enjoyed my Movie Title Mash-Ups, back in the day), then perhaps you’ll dig it too.

I’ve been gradually making my way through the back catalogue, guessing the answers (there’s a form that’ll tell you if you’re right!). I’ve successfully guessed almost half of all of them, now, and it’s been a great journey. It sort-of fills the void that I’d hoped Crimson Herring was going to before it vanished so suddenly.

So if you’re looking for a fresh, probably-finished webcomic that’ll sometimes make you laugh, sometimes make you groan, and often make you think, start by skimming the rules of Monday Punday and then begin the long journey through the ~500 published episodes. You’re welcome!

INSULTS.COM

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I had a collection of 5¼” and later 3½” floppy disks¹ on which were stored a variety of games and utilities that I’d collected over the years².

I remember that at some point I acquired a program called INSULTS.COM. When executed, this tool would spoof a basic terminal prompt and then, when the user pressed any key, output a randomly-generated assortment of crude insults.

Do you feel thoroughly insulted yet?

As far as prank programs go, it was far from sophisticated. I strongly suspect that the software, which was released for free in 1983, was intended to be primarily a vehicle to promote sales of a more-complex set of tools called PRANKS, which was advertised within.

In any case: as a pre-pubescent programmer I remember being very interested in the mechanism by which INSULTS.COM was generating its output.

Of course, nowadays I understand reverse-engineering better than I did as a child. So I downloaded a copy of INSULTS.COM from this Internet Archive image, ran it through Strings, and pulled out the data. Easy!

Wait for it, and you can be be insulted all over again!

Then I injected the strings into Perchance to produce a semi-faithful version of the application that you can enjoy today.

Why did I do this? Why do I do anything? Reimplementing a 42-year-old piece of DOS software that nobody remembers is even stranger than that time I reimplemented a 16-year old Flash advertisement! But I hope it gave you a moment’s joy to be told that you’re… an annoying load of festering parrot droppings, or whatever.

Footnotes

¹ Also some 3″ floppy disks – a weird and rare format – but that’s another story.

² My family’s Amstrad PC1512 had two 5¼” disk drives, which made disk-to-disk copying much easier than it was on computers with a single disk drive, on which you’d have to copy as much data as possible to RAM, swap disks to write what had been copied so far, swap disks back again, and repeat. This made it less-laborious for me to clone media than it was for most other folks I knew.

³ Assuming the random number generator is capable of generating a sufficient diversity of seed values, the claim is correct: by my calculation, INSULTS.COM can generate 22,491,833 permutations of insults.

The Continuum

Last week, I discovered Geneveive Raine‘s “The Continuum”, a super-compressed image comprised of 1-pixel-tall versions of her home page’s daily banners, stitched together¹.

I thought it was a beautiful idea, so I ~~stole~~ adapted it to produce an illustration based on the featured images of my blog posts:

Extremely tall diagram consisting of 2,062 horizontal lines in a variety of different colours, each representing a different blog post. — Only about 38% of my 5,445 blog posts have featured images suitable for use in this diagram. But here they are!

I generated a horizontal version too, but I’ve used the vertical version above because it’s more-suitable for use with a HTML imagemap².

Here’s the code I used to generate the images (and the imagemap), if you want to run it against your own WordPress-ish blog.

Footnotes

¹ Which was in-turn inspired by Movie Iris, a tool that visualises the frames of a movie as a radial graphic.

² What’s a HTML imagemap, you ask? You don’t need to ask: you shouldn’t be using it anyway. Relying on it means you’re setting yourself up for an accessibility nightmare. Anyway: I used one above: you can click on any “stripe” of the image to jump to the corresponding post. It needed some fighting-with because imagemaps can’t work with rescaled images, so I’ve forced the height of the image even as it resizes horizontally. Not that you’re going to click on the stripes anyway: it’s just about the worst way imaginable to navigate a blog.

BBC News RSS… your way!

It turns out my series of efforts to improve the BBC News RSS feeds are more-popular than I thought. People keep asking for variants of them, and it’s probably time I stopped hosting the resulting feeds on my NAS (which does a good job, but it’s in a highly-kickable place right under my desk).

Screenshot of BBC News RSS Feeds (that don't suck!). — The new site isn’t pretty. But it works.

So I’ve launched BBC-Feeds.DanQ.dev. On a 20-minute schedule, it generates both UK and World editions of the BBC News feeds, filtered to remove iPlayer, Sounds, app “nudges”, duplicates, and other junk, and optionally with the sports news filtered out too.

The entire thing is open source under an ultra-permissive license, so you can run your own copy if you don’t want to use mine.

Enjoy!

Blog Questions Challenge

Since Kev Quirk made an adaptation of Ava‘s Blog Questions Challenge I’ve been seeing it everywhere in my blogosphere circle. I’ve gotta be the last person left on Earth to do it, but it has that old-school pass-it-along meme feel, like that 2006 one about describing your friends. I’ve not been tagged by name, but both Jeremy and Garrett did a broad “you” tag, so I’m taking it.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It felt like a natural evolution of my second vanity-site. It was 1998, and my site – Castle of the Four Winds – was home to a selection of the same kinds of random crap that everybody put on their homepages at the time. I figured I’d start keeping an online diary: the word “blog” hadn’t been coined yet, and its predecessor “weblog” had only been around for a year and I hadn’t come across it.

So I experimentally started posting a few times a week.

By the way, if you liked how my site looked back in the 1990s, you can wind the clock back! Give it a go!

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

1998: Static HTML and a bit of Perl

When I started blogging my site was almost entirely plain HTML². So my original “platform” was probably Emacs.

2000: Static files indexed by PHP

In the Summer of 2000 I registered avangel.com and moved my diary there. I was still storing posts in static files, but used PHP wrappers to share the structure and menus across the pages. It was a massive improvement.

Later, I moved everything to the (ill-advised?) domain name scatmania.org and reimplemented in pretty-much the same way. Until…

2003: Flip

The first real “blogging engine” I used was Flip.

I liked Flip³: it had a raw simplicity that I’d later come to love in young versions of WordPress. And being able to edit from the Web was a huge improvement over having to edit files, especially when I was out and about: I managed to post from my dad’s BlackBerry while cycling across the Outer Hebrides, for example.

2004: WordPress

I’d have outgrown Flip eventually, but I got a nudge in that direction in July 2004. At the time, I was sharing a server with some friends and operated by Gareth, and something went wrong and the server went completely offline. The co-located server disappeared back to Gareth’s house, eventually, and while I’d recovered many of the posts from my own backups, 61 posts remain partially-incomplete to this day (if you happen to have a copy of any of them I’d love to see it!).

I brought my blog back online using WordPress, whose then-new release version 1.2 included an RSS-powered importer: this allowed me to write a little code to convert my entire previous archive into a fat RSS file and then import it wholesale. WordPress was, as remains, pretty magical – a universal blogging platform that evolved into a universal CMS – and I back in the day I occasionally argued online with Matt about technical aspects of the future direction of the project⁴.

Incidentally, if you’d like to see more of my blog’s design history over the last 26+ years, I shared a lot of screenshots back in 2018.

If you didn’t know better, you might well not know I’m running WordPress. My theme and custom plugins are… well, they’re an ecosystem all by themselves. And that’s before you even get to things like CapsulePress, my WordPress-to-Gopher/Gemini/Spartan/Nex bridge, the pile of scripts I use to sync-up with the Fediverse, the PWA I use to post notes while I’m on the move, and so on.

2025: ClassicPress

Earlier this year I experimentally switched to ClassicPress; a fork of WordPress. There’ll doubtless be lots more to say about that, down the line⁵, but here’s the skinny: I don’t use Gutenberg on my blog anyway⁶, I appreciate having my backend be almost as high-performance as I’ve worked to make my frontend, and I enjoy most of the feature differences⁷.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

With the exception of notes (most of which are written in a tool of my own creation and then pushed to one or both of my Mastodon and my blog simultaneously), I mostly write right into the WordPress/ClassicPress post editor.

I often write ideas, concepts, and first drafts into my Obsidian notebook and then copy/paste out when the time comes.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

There’s no particular pattern, though it feels like I’m most-inspired to write exactly when I should be prioritising something else! That’s why it’s so helpful to be able to write three sentences into Obsidian and then come back to it later!

I’ve been on a bit of a blogging kick these last few years, though. Last year I wrote a massive 436 posts, although that admittedly includes PESOS‘d checkins from geocaching and geohashing expeditions. I’m a fan of Kev’s #100DaysToOffload challenge, and I’m on course to achieve it earlier than ever before, this year (my sixth consecutive year: I do the challenge strictly by calendar years!), as this post is already by 48th… all within the first 38 days of this year⁸.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

A mixture of both. Probably most of my posts are written in a single sitting… or, at least, are written in a tab that stays open for the entire time during which it’s written.

But others spend a long time in-progress. You remember how almost a year ago I gave a talk about why Oxford’s area code is 01865? And I promised that there’d be a blog/vlog/maybe-podcast version of that talk later? Yeah: that’s been 90%-there and sitting in a draft pretty-much since then, just waiting for me to make the finishing touches (and record the vlog/podcast variants, if that’s the direction I decide to go in).

And I’ve dusted off drafts that’ve been much older than that, before, too. So it really is a mixture.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I couldn’t pick out a favourite that I wouldn’t change my mind about five minutes later. But a recent favourite might have been last Spring’s “Let Your Players Lead The Way”, which aimed to impart some of the things I’ve learned about gamemastering (especially) while being the dungeon master for The Levellers these last few years⁹.

Not only was it a post that had been a long time coming, and based on months of drafts and re-drafts, but also I really enjoyed writing some post-specific CSS to give it just a slightly more-magical feel.

Screenshot from Let Your Players Lead The Way, showcasing its design in the style of the D&D Players' Handbook. — The downside is that I’ve now got one more thing to try not to break the next time I re-write my blog’s stylesheet.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I want to redesign the homepage to be simpler, less-graphical, and more-informational. I’m not sure how that’s going to look, yet.

I’ve been wondering about integrating some of my personal-geotracking into the design (Aaron Parecki does an amazing job of this with his dynamic site background image, for example).

I’m playing with the idea of adding a guestbook, like it’s 1998 again or something.

I’d like to tidy up my tagging taxonomy, and I’m not convinced AI is up to the task.

I need to decide how I feel about the emoji reactions feature I added in 2023. I’m still undecided. What do you think? 👍? 👎?

And as I mentioned: I’m experimenting with ClassicPress. It’s working out mostly-okay so far, but that’s a story for another post.

Next?

I feel like I’m the last person in the universe to do this quiz. But if you haven’t – and you have anything approximating a blog – then you should go next.

Footnotes

¹ I wouldn’t recommend actually reading my older posts, though. I was a teenager, and it shows.

² I had a slightly-fancier kind of hosting, by this point, that gave me a cgi-bin directory into which I could compile binaries (in C) or write scripts (in Perl). My hit counter? That was a Perl script I adapted from Matt Wright’s counter.pl and “enhanced” with some flaming text using Corel Photo-Paint.

³ While writing this post, I hunted down the original developer of Flip. He seems cool.

⁴ A year later he launched WordPress.com, which then evolved into the foundation of Automattic, and there soon came a point where I thought “I should work there, someday!” It took me a further 14 years before I applied for such a job, though.

⁵ Right off the bat, though, let me stress that trying ClassicPress is absolutely nothing to do with the drama in the WordPress space right now: in fact I’ve been planning to give it a try ever since the project got its shit together, re-forked WordPress, and released ClassicPress 2.0 a year ago.

⁶ I don’t have anything against Gutenberg – I use it on other blogs, and every day at work! – and Block Themes are magical… but I’ve never found any benefit to them here: I’ve no need for it, and I’ve got plugins I’ve written for my own use that I’ve never bothered to make Gutenberg-compatible.

⁷ My biggest gripe with ClassicPress so far is that in removing the jQuery dependency on the post editor’s tag selector they’ve only replaced it with a <datalist>, which is neat and all but kills the ability to autocomplete multiple comma-separated tags at once. But it looks like that’s getting fixed, so I’m going to hang in there for a bit before I decide whether I’m sticking with ClassicPress or not.

⁸ I’ll save you from doing the maths: if I complete 48 posts in 38 days, I’d expect to complete 100 posts on my 80th day: as it’s not a leap year, that would be Friday 21 March 2025. Let’s see how I get on!

⁹ Although I’ve been horribly neglecting them for the last couple of months, for various reasons.

God’s Adviser

Duration 7:28

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Of all the discussions I’ve ever been involved with on the subject of religion, the one I’m proudest of was perhaps also one of the earliest.

Let me tell you about a time that, as an infant, I got sent out of my classroom because I wouldn’t stop questioning the theological ramifications of our school nativity play.

I’m aware that I’ve got readers from around the world, and Christmas traditions vary, so let’s start with a primer. Here in the UK, it’s common¹ at the end of the school term before Christmas for primary schools to put on a “nativity play”. A group of infant pupils act out an interpretation of the biblical story of the birth of Jesus: a handful of 5/6-year-olds playing the key parts of, for example, Mary, Joseph, an innkeeper, some angels, maybe a donkey, some wise men, some shepherds, and what-have-you.

A group of children dressed as Mary, Joseph, shepherds, kings, angels, and a variety of barn animals crowd a stage. — Maybe they’re just higher-budget nowadays, or maybe I grew up in a more-deprived area, but I’m pretty sure than when I was a child a costume consisted mostly of a bedsheet if you were an angel, a tea-towel secured with an elastic band if you were a shepherd, a cardboard crown if you were a king, and so on. Photo courtesy Ian Turk.

As with all theatre performed by young children, a nativity play straddles the line between adorable and unbearable. Somehow, the innkeeper – who only has one line – forgets to say “there is no room at the inn” and so it looks like Mary and Joseph just elect to stay in the barn, one of the angels wets herself in the middle of a chorus, and Mary, bored of sitting in the background having run out of things to do, idly swings the saviour of mankind round and around, holding him by his toe. It’s beautiful².

I was definitely in a couple of different nativity plays as a young child, but one in particular stands out in my memory.

Dan, as a young child, superimposed against a background with a star, with a speech bubble reading 'Hark! A star! In the East!' — “Let us go now to Bethlehem. The son of God is born today.”

In order to put a different spin on the story of the first Christmas³, one year my school decided to tell a different, adjacent story. Here’s a summary of the key beats of the plot, as I remember it:

God is going to send His only son to Earth and wants to advertise His coming.
“What kind of marker can he put in the sky to lead people to the holy infant’s birthplace?”, He wonders.
So He auditions a series of different natural phenomena:
- The first candidate is a cloud, but its pitch is rejected because… I don’t remember: it’ll blow away or something.
- Another candidate was a rainbow, but it was clearly derivative of an earlier story, perhaps.
- After a few options, eventually God settles on a star. Hurrah!
Some angels go put the star in the right place, shepherds and wise men go visit Mary and her family, and all that jazz.

So far, totally on-brand for a primary school nativity play but with 50% more imagination than the average. Nice.

Edited watercolour of magi crossing a desert on camels, with a large meteor inserted into the sky. — What the Meteor Strike of Bethlehem lacked in longevity, it made up for in earth-shattering destruction.

I was cast as Adviser #1, and that’s where things started to go wrong.

The part of God was played by my friend Daniel, but clearly our teacher figured that he wouldn’t be able to remember all of his lines⁴ and expanded his role into three: God, Adviser #1, and Adviser #2. After each natural phenomenon explained why it would be the best, Adviser #1 and Adviser #2 would each say a few words about the candidate’s pros and cons, providing God with the information He needed to make a decision.

To my young brain, this seemed theologically absurd. Why would God need an adviser?⁵

“If He’s supposed to be omniscient, why does God need an adviser, let alone two?” I asked my teacher⁶.

The answer was, of course, that while God might be capable of anything… if the kid playing Him managed to remember all of his lines then that’d really be a miracle. But I’d interrupted rehearsals for my question and my teacher Mrs. Doyle clearly didn’t want to explain that in front of the class.

But I wouldn’t let it go:

“But Miss, are we saying that God could make mistakes?”
“Couldn’t God try out the cloud and the rainbow and just go back in time when He knows which one works?”
“Why does God send an angel to tell the shepherds where to go but won’t do that for the kings?”
“Miss, don’t the stars move across the sky each night? Wouldn’t everybody be asking questions about the bright one that doesn’t?”
“Hang on, what’s supposed to have happened to the Star of Bethlehem after God was done with it? Did it have planets? Did those planets… have life?”

In the end I had to be thrown out of class. I spent the rest of that rehearsal standing in the corridor.

And it was totally worth it for this anecdote.

Footnotes

¹ I looked around to see if the primary school nativity play was still common, or if the continuing practice at my kids’ school shows that I’m living in a bubble, but the only source I could find was a 2007 news story that claims that nativity plays are “under threat”… by The Telegraph, who I’d expect to write such a story after, I don’t know, the editor’s kids decided to put on a slightly-more-secular play one year. Let’s just continue to say that the school nativity play is common in the UK, because I can’t find any reliable evidence to the contrary.

² I’ve worked onstage and backstage on a variety of productions, and I have nothing but respect for any teacher who, on top of their regular workload and despite being unjustifiably underpaid, volunteers to put on a nativity play. I genuinely believe that the kids get a huge amount out of it, but man it looks like a monumental amount of work.

³ And, presumably, spare the poor parents who by now had potentially seen children’s amateur dramatics interpretations of the same story several times already.

⁴ Our teacher was probably correct.

⁵ In hindsight, my objection to this scripting decision might actually have been masking an objection to the casting decision. I wanted to play God!

⁶ I might not have used the word “omniscient”, because I probably didn’t know the word yet. But I knew the concept, and I certainly knew that my teacher was on spiritually-shaky ground to claim both that God knew everything and God needed an advisor.

Sabbatical Lesson #2: Burnout

If the most-important lesson I learned from my sabbatical was about boundaries and my work/life balance, then the second most-important was about burnout.

If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist¹, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.

Somehow, I stopped working at my day job… and instead decided to do so much more voluntary work during my newly-empty daytimes – on top of the evening and weekend volunteering I was already doing – that just turned out to be… too much. I wrote a little about it at the time in a post for RSS subscribers only, mostly as a form of self-recognition: patting myself on the back for spotting the problem and course-correcting before it got worse!

When I got back to work², I collared my coach to talk about this experience. It was one of those broadening “oh, so that’s why I’m like this” experiences:

The why of how I, y’know, got off course at the end of last year and drove myself towards an unhealthy work attitude… is irrelevant, really. But the actual lesson here that I took from my sabbatical is: just because you’re not working in a conventional sense doesn’t make you immune from burnout. Burnout happens when you do too much, for too long, without compassion for yourself and your needs

I dodged it at the end of November, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be able to, so this is exactly the kind of thing a coach is there to help with!

Footnotes

¹ Except to people who know me well at all, to whom this post might not be even remotely surprising.

² Among the many delightful benefits to my job is a monthly session with my choice of coach. I’ve written a little about it before, but the short of it is that it’s an excellent perk.

BBC News RSS… with the sport?

Earlier today, somebody called Allan commented on the latest in my series of several blog posts about how I ~~mutilate~~ manipulate the RSS feeds of BBC News to work around their (many, and increasingly so) various shortcomings, specifically:

Their inclusion of non-news content such as plugs for iPlayer and their apps,
Their repeating of identical news stories with marginally-different GUIDs, and
All of the sports news, which I don’t care about one jot.

Well, it turns out that some people want #3: the sport. But still don’t want the other two.

I shan’t be subscribing to this RSS feed, and I can’t promise I’ll fix it if it gets broken. But if “without the crap, but with the sports” is the way you like your BBC News RSS feed, I’ve got you covered:

So there you go, Allan, and anybody in a similar position. I hope that fulfils your need for sports news… without the crap.

Trump’s Strategy

What do you reckon? Is he trying to go for a domination victory without ever saying “MY THREATS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS!”? His track record shows that he’s arrogant enough to think that the strategy of simply renaming things until they’re yours is actually viable!

After I saw Mexico’s response to Google following Trump’s lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, this stupid comic literally came to me in a dream.

Adapts screenshots from Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991 DOS version), public domain assets from OpenGameArt.org, and AI-assisted images of world leaders on account of the fact that if I drew pixel-art world leaders without assistance then you’d be even less-likely to be able to recognise them.