Articles – Dan Q

Subverting AI Agent Logging with a Git Post-Commit Hook

Last night I was chatting to my friend (and fellow Three Rings volunteer) Ollie about our respective workplaces and their approach to AI-supported software engineering, and it echoed conversations I’ve had with other friends. Some workplaces, it seems, are leaning so-hard into AI-supported software development that they’re berating developers who seem to be using the tools less than their colleagues!

That’s a problem for a few reasons, principal among them that AI does not make you significantly faster but does make you learn less.¹. I stand by the statement that AI isn’t useless, and I’ve experimented with it for years. But I certainly wouldn’t feel very comfortable working somewhere that told me I was underperforming if, say, my code contributions were less-likely than the average to be identifiably “written by an AI”.

Even if you’re one of those folks who swears by your AI assistant, you’ve got to admit that they’re not always the best choice.

I spoke to another friend, E, whose employers are going in a similar direction. E joked that at current rates they’d have to start tagging their (human-made!) commits with fake AI agent logs in order to persuade management that their level of engagement with AI was correct and appropriate.³

Supposing somebody like Ollie or E or anybody else I spoke to did feel the need to “fake” AI agent logs in order to prove that they were using AI “the right way”… that sounds like an excuse for some automation!

I got to thinking: how hard could it be to add a git hook that added an AI agent’s “logging” to each commit, as if the work had been done by a robot?⁴

Turns out: pretty easy…

To try out my idea, I made two changes to a branch. When I committed, imaginary AI agent ‘frantic’ took credit, writing its own change log. Also: asciinema + svg-term remains awesome.

Here’s how it works (with source code!). After you make a commit, the post-commit hook creates a file in .agent-logs/, named for your current branch. Each commit results in a line being appended to that file to say something like [agent] first line of your commit message, where agent is the name of the AI agent you’re pretending that you used (you can even configure it with an array of agent names and it’ll pick one at random each time: my sample code uses the names agent, stardust, and frantic).

There’s one quirk in my code. Git hooks only get the commit message (the first line of which I use as the imaginary agent’s description of what it did) after the commit has taken place. Were a robot really used to write the code, it’d have updated the file already by this point. So my hook has to do an --amend commit, to retroactively fix what was already committed. And to do that without triggering itself and getting into an infinite loop, it needs to use a temporary environment variable. Ignoring that, though, there’s nothing particularly special about this code. It’s certainly more-lightweight, faster-running, and more-accurate than a typical coding LLM.

Sure, my hook doesn’t attempt to write any of the code for you; it just makes it look like an AI did. But in this instance: that’s a feature, not a bug!

Footnotes

¹ That research comes from Anthropic. Y’know, the company who makes Claude, one of the most-popular AIs used by programmers.

² Do I write that much like an AI? Relevant XKCD.

³ Using “proportion of PRs that used AI” as a metric for success seems to me to be just slightly worse than using “number of lines of code produced”. And, as this blog post demonstrates, the former can be “gamed” just as effectively as the latter (infamously) could.

⁴ Obviously – and I can’t believe I have to say this – lying to your employer isn’t a sensible long-term strategy, and instead educating them on what AI is (if anything) and isn’t good for in your workflow is a better solution in the end. If you read this blog post and actually think for a moment hey, I should use this technique, then perhaps there’s a bigger problem you ought to be addressing!

What can you do with a software privacy polariser?

Samsung have been showing off pre-release versions of their new Galaxy S26 range. It’s all pretty same-old predictable changes (and I’m still not really looking for anything to replace my now-five-year-old mobile anyway!), but one feature in particular – one that they’re not even mentioning in their marketing copy – seemed interesting and innovative.

You know those polarising filters you can use to try to stop people shoulder-surfing? Samsung have come up with a software-controlled one.

Photo showing a pre-release Samsung Galaxy S26 handset, viewed from sideways on. Most of the screen is visible, but a new notification is 'blacked out' and only visible to somebody viewing the screen from straight-on. — Demos show the feature being used to black-out the screen at a 15°+ angle when entering a PIN or password, but also show how it can configured on an app-by-app basis to e.g. black out notifications so that only the person right in front of the screen can see them.

I assume that this black magic is facilitated by an additional layer between the screen and the glass, performing per-pixel selective polarisation in the same way as a monochrome LCD display might. But the fact that each pixel can now show two images – one to a user directly ahead, superimposed with another (monochrome) one to users with an offset viewing angle, is what interests me: my long-cultivated “hacker mentality” wants to ask “what I can make that do?”

Does the API of this (of this or of any similar or future screens?) provide enough control to manipulate the new layer? And is its resolution identical to that of the underlying screen?

Could “spoilers”, instead of being folded-away behind a <details>/<summary> or ROT13-encoded, say “tilt to reveal” and provide a physicality to the mechanism of exposure?

Could diagrams embed their own metadata annotations: look at a blueprint from the side to see descriptions, or tilt your phone to see the alt-text on an image?

Can the polarisation layer be expanded to provide a more-sophisticated privacy overlay, such as a fake notification in place of a real one, to act as a honeypot?

Is there sufficient control over the angle of differentiation that a future screen could use eye tracking to produce a virtual lenticular barrier, facilitating a novel kind of autostereoscopic 3D display that works – like a hologram – from any viewing angle?

I doubt I’m buying one of these devices. But I’m very curious about all of these questions!

F-Day plus 12

It’s now twelve days since a flood struck my house, causing the ground floor to be submerged under a couple of feet of water and ultimately leading us to kick off an insurance claim process.

A home office with its floor stripped down to poured concrete and an industrial dehumidifier running. — My regular home office of the last six years sits stripped-down, with no flooring, skirting boards, or power (with the exception of the specialised circuit powering an industrial dehumidifier).

And man, a home insurance claim seems to be… slow. For instance, we originally couldn’t even get anybody out to visit us until F-day plus 10 (later improved to F-day plus 7). The insurance company can’t promise that they’ll confirm that they’ll “accept liability” (agree to start paying for anything) until possibly as late as F-day plus 17. Nobody will check for structural damage until F-day plus 19¹.

Oh, and the insurance company have advised us to look for something like a “12 month let with a 6 month break clause”, which is horrifying. We could be out of our home for up to a year.

Dan, a white man, stands with his arms raised outside a nicely-decorated converted barn. — Right now, though, we’re spending two weeks in this holiday let about half an hour’s drive from our house. It’s pretty nice, except that we have to commute over the ever-congested single-lane Burford Bridge to get the kids to and from school every day².

Some days it feels like being stuck in a nowhere-place… but simultaneously still having to make the regular everyday stuff keep ticking over. Visiting the house- currently stripped of anything damp and full of drying equipment – feels like stepping onto another planet… or like one of those dreams where you’re somewhere familiar except it’s wrong somehow.

But spending time away from it, “as if” on holiday except-not, is weird too: like we’re accepting the ambiguity; leaning-in to limbo. Especially while we’re waiting for the insurance company to do their initial things, it feels like life is both on hold, and not-allowed to be on hold.

A nervous-looking French Bulldog in a teal jumper looks up from under a desk. — The dog gets it. I had to take her to the house for a while on Monday³ and she spent the whole time leaning against my feet for reassurance.

And I worry that by the time they’re committed to paying for us to stay somewhere else for at least half a year, they lose any incentive they might have to contract for speed. There’s no hurry any more. We’re expected to just press pause on our home, but carry on with our lives regardless, pretending that everything’s normal.

So yeah, it’s a weird time.

Footnotes

¹ I’m totally committed to this way of counting the progress, which I started on F-day plus 3. I get the feeling like it might be a worthwhile way of keeping track of how long all of this takes.

² Normally, the younger and older child are able to get to school on foot or via a bus that stops virtually outside our house, each day, so an hour-plus round-trip to their schools and back up to twice a day is a bit of a drag! We’re managing to make it work with a little creativity, but I wouldn’t want to make it a long-term plan!

³ And do some work from there, amidst the jet engine-like noise of the dehumidifiers!

Taskmaster: 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People, by Alex Horne

I recently read Taskmaster: ~~200~~ 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People by Alex Horne, and was… underwhelmed.

The meat of the book is a collection of Taskmaster-style tasks either for individuals, or groups, or teams. If you played human jousting, or blindfold doughnut fishing, or leaky-guttering-water-transporter, or any of the other games Ruth and I hosted at Ruth & JTA‘s Stag/Hen Party way back in the day… you’re thinking in the right kinds of ballpark. The activities presented are similar to those shown on the Taskmaster TV show, but with fewer prop requirements.

Perhaps one in ten to one in five of the ideas are genuinely good, but if you want to run your own Taskmaster-like game with your friends… you’re probably best to just adapt some of the games from the show, or sit down for an hour or two with a notepad, a pen, some funny friends, and a supply of whatever chemical stimulates your imagination!

One part of the book I did enjoy, though, was the accounts of parts of the TV show that didn’t make it into the final edit. I really love the TV show, and it was great to get the inside scoop on what tasks worked and didn’t, what got cut and why, and so on. This bit of the book, hidden at the end and using a much smaller typeface as if it’s ashamed to be there, was excellent and highly enjoyable.

Perhaps a future edition could have much more of that – there’ve been many more seasons since the book came out! – and drop some of the less-interesting tasks!

Fake Herons

I saw a heron this morning, and it reminded me of a police officer.

A juvenile grey heron wades along a muddy stream bank. — If you plot a pair of axes for birds ‘looking really dorky, especially when flying’ and ‘actually being really cool’, the grey heron would sit at the sweet spot.

Right now, while my house is… not-so-inhabitable… I have a long drive to drop the kids off at school, and this morning it took us alongside the many flooded fields between our temporary accommodation and the various kid drop-offs.

Stopped at traffic lights, I watched a heron land in what would be best-described as a large puddle, rather than in the lake on the other side of the road. The lake, it turns out… was “guarded” by one of those fake heron things.

You’ve seen them, probably. People put them up to discourage territorial birds from visiting and eating all their fish.² If you haven’t seen them, you might have at least spotted the fake owls, whose purpose is slightly different because they scare off other birds.

Anyway: I found myself thinking… do birds actually fall for this? Like scarecrows, it feels like they shouldn’t (and indeed, scarecrows don’t always work, and birds can quickly become accustomed to them). But clearly they work at least a little…?

A fake plastic owl 'perched' atop a wooden electricity pylon. — If you don’t want birds, get a pretend bird. The same trick works for girlfriends.

Anyway, I found myself reminded of a geocaching expedition I went on outside Cambridge a couple of years ago. At around 6am I was creeping around outside a shopping centre on a Saturday morning, looking for a tiny magnetic geocache hidden behind a sign. I’d anticipated not having to use much “stealth” so early in the day… but nonetheless I kept getting the feeling that I was being watched.

It took me a few minutes until I worked out why: the local Home Bargains had put up a life-size standee of a police officer in just the right position that I kept catching him in the corner of my eye and second-guessing how much my digging-through-the-bushes looked incredibly suspicious!

I did a double-take the first time I spotted the officer, but soon realised he was fake. But the feeling of being watched persisted! There’s clearly something deeper in human psychology, more-instinctive, that – as social animals – gives us that feeling of being watched and influences our behaviour.

There’s a wonderful and much-cited piece of research from 2010 that describes how cooperative behaviour like proper use of an honesty box increases if you put a picture of some eyes above it: the mechanism’s not fully understood, but it’s speculated that it’s because it induces the feeling of being watched.

A mannequin wears a high-vis jacket and holds a fishing rod, standing in the rushes of a lake. — I found this picture of a *fake angler* (this is a mannequin with a fishing pole!), which I guess is also an anti-heron measure.⁴ Photograph copyright Andy Beecroft, used under a Creative Commons license.

I reckon it’s similar with birds. They’re not stupid (some of them, like corvids, are famously smart… and probably many predator birds exhibit significant intelligence too), but if there’s something in your peripheral vision that puts you at unease… then of course you’re not going to be comfortable! And if there’s another option nearby⁵ that’ll work, that’s an easy win for a hungry bird.

You don’t need to actually believe that a scarecrow, a plastic bird, a poster of some eyes, or a picture of a bobby is real in order for it to have a psychological impact. That’s why – I believe – a fake heron works. And that’s why, today, a heron reminded me of a police officer.

Footnotes

¹ I guess actual herons can’t tell the difference?

² Presumably the same technique doesn’t work with sociable birds, who would probably turn up to try to befriend or woo the models.

³ I don’t know, but I do wonder, whether the picture is actually of a police officer or of a model. If I were a police officer and I knew that my likeness was being used at supermarkets and the like, I’d be first to volunteer to any call-outs to anywhere nearby them, so any suspect who ran from me would keep spotting me, following them, at every corner. You get few opportunities for pranks as a copper, I reckon, but this one would be a blast.

⁴ I wonder if a fake angler is more- or less-effective than a fake heron. Somewhere, an animal psychology PhD student is working out the experimental conditions to answer this question, I hope.

⁵ Remember: a bird can have a birds-eye view of feeding spots! If one option’s gonna make them feel like they’re being watched by a predator or a competitor, and another nearby option looks almost-as-good, they’re gonna take the alternative!

Hello World by Hannah Fry

I’m not certain, but I think that I won my copy of Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine at an Oxford Geek Nights event, after I was first and fastest to correctly identify a photograph of Stanislav Petrov shown by the speaker.

Despite being written a few years before the popularisation of GenAI, the book’s remarkably prescient on the kinds of big data and opaque decision-making issues that are now hitting the popular press. I suppose one might argue that these issues were always significant. (And by that point, one might observe that GenAI isn’t living up to its promises…)

Fry spins an engaging and well-articulated series of themed topics. If you didn’t already have a healthy concern about public money spending and policy planning being powered by the output of proprietary algorithms, you’ll certainly finish the book that way.

One of my favourite of Fry’s (many) excellent observations is buried in a footnote in the conclusion, where she describes what she called the “magic test”:

There’s a trick you can use to spot the junk algorithms. I like to call it the Magic Test. Whenever you see a story about an algorithm, see if you can swap out any of the buzzwords, like ‘machine learning’, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘neural network’, and swap in the word ‘magic’. Does everything still make grammatical sense? Is any of the meaning lost? If not, I’d be worried that it’s all nonsense. Because I’m afraid – long into the foreseeable future – we’re not going to ‘solve world hunger with magic’ or ‘use magic to write the perfect screenplay’ any more than we are with AI.

That’s a fantastic approach to spotting bullshit technical claims, and I’m totally going to be using it.

Anyway: this was a wonderful read and I only regret that it took me a few years to get around to it! But fortunately, it’s as relevant today as it was the day it was released.

6-12 Months

The insurance loss adjusters came around this morning, accompanied by damage assessors and electricians and whatnot.

The process continues to feel painfully slow. We’re still one to two weeks from confirmation that the insurance company will accept liability and be ready to start paying for, y’know, the immediate concerns like where we’re going to live.

“How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?” I asked, warily.

“Six to twelve months?” guessed the loss adjusters.

Erk! 😭

Run your own WireGuard VPN

With the news that the British government are considering requiring identity checks for age verification before allowing people to use VPNs, it’s time for my periodic reminder that you don’t have to use a “VPN provider” to use a VPN¹.

As I’ll demonstrate, it’s surprisingly easy to spin up your own VPN provider on a virtual machine hosted by your choice of the cloud providers. You pay for the hours you need it², and then throw it away afterwards.

Today, I’ll be using Linode to host my “throwaway” VPN provider for a price of USD $0.0075 per hour ($5/month if I ran it full-time), using a Linode StackScript I created for this purpose.

If you’d prefer to use GCP, AWS Azure, or whomever else you like: all you need is a Debian 13 VM with a public IP address (the cheapest one available is usually plenty!) and this bash script.

Screenshot from Linode's Web interface, showing my StackScript and indicating the location of the Deploy New Linode button. — If you prefer the command-line, Linode’s got an API. But we’re going for ‘easy’ today, so it’ll all be clicking buttons and things.

First, spin up a VM and run my script³. If you’re using Linode, you can do this by going to my StackScript and clicking ‘Deploy New Linode’.

Linode configuration screenshot with the key options highlighted as described below. — You might see more configuration options than this, but you can ignore them.

Choose any region you like (I’m putting this one in Paris!), select the cheapest “Shared CPU” option – Nanode 1GB – and enter a (strong!) root password, then click Create Linode.

It’ll take a few seconds to come up. Watch until it’s running.

My script automatically generates configuration for your local system. Once it’s up and running you can use the machine’s IP address to download wireguard.conf locally. For example, if your machine has the IP address 172.239.9.151, you might type scp -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root@172.239.9.151:wireguard.conf ./ – note that I disable StrictHostKeyChecking so that my computer doesn’t cache the server’s SSH key (which feels a bit pointless for a “throwaway” VM that I’ll never connect to a second time!).

If you’re on Windows and don’t have SSH/SCP, install one. PuTTY remains a solid choice.

File doesn’t exist? Give it a minute and try again; maybe my script didn’t finish running yet! Still nothing? SSH into your new VM and inspect stackscript.log for a complete log of all the output from my script to see what went wrong.

Open up WireGuard on your computer, click the “Import tunnel(s) from file” button, and give it the file you just downloaded.

You can optionally rename the new connection. Or just click “Activate” to connect to your VPN!

You can test your Internet connection is being correctly routed by your VPN by going to e.g. icanhazip.com or ipleak.net: you should see the IP address of your new virtual machine and/or geolocation data that indicates that you’re in your selected region.

When you’re done with your VPN, just delete the virtual machine. Many providers use per-minute or even per-second fractional billing, so you can easily end up spending only a handful of cents in order to use a VPN for a reasonable browsing session.

When you’re done, just disconnect and – if you’re not going to use it again immediately – delete the virtual machine so you don’t have to pay for it for a minute longer than you intend⁴.

I stopped actively paying for VPN subscriptions about a decade ago and, when I “need” the benefits of a VPN, I’ve just done things like what I’ve described above. Compared to a commercial VPN subscription it’s cheap, (potentially even-more) private, doesn’t readily get “detected” as a VPN by the rare folks who try to detect such things, and I can enjoy my choice of either reusable or throwaway IP addresses from wherever I like around the globe.

And if the government starts to try to age-gate commercial VPNs… well then that’s just one more thing going for my approach, isn’t it?

Footnotes

¹ If you’re a heavy, “always-on” VPN user, you might still be best-served by one of the big commercial providers, but if you’re “only” using a VPN for 18 hours a day or less then running your own on-demand is probably cheaper, and gives you some fascinating benefits.

² Many providers have coupons equivalent to hundreds of hours of free provision, so as long as you’re willing to shuffle between cloud providers you can probably have a great and safe VPN completely for free; just sayin’.

³ Obviously, you shouldn’t just run code that strangers give you on the Internet unless you understand it. I’ve tried to make my code self-explanatory and full of comments so you can understand what it does – or at least understand that it’s harmless! – but if you don’t know and trust me personally, you should probably use this as an excuse to learn what you’re doing. In fact, you should do that anyway. Learning is fun.

⁴ Although even if you forget and it runs for an entire month before your billing cycle comes up, you’re out, what… $5 USD? Plenty of commercial VPN providers would have charged you more than that!

F-Day plus 3

It feels inconceivable to me that we’re only at F-Day plus three; that is, three days since a flash flood rushed through the ground floor of our house and forced us to evacuate. We’ve been able to visit since and start assessing the damage, but for now I figured that what you’d want would be the kinds of horrible pictures that make you say “wow; I’m glad that didn’t happen to me”.

These pictures are all from F-Day itself (which happened to be Friday the 13th; delightful, eh?):

A particularly horrifying moment was when the seals on the patio doors gave way and the dining room began to flood, and we had to pivot to laying sandbags to protect the kitchen from the dining room rather than to protect the house as a whole. (Eventually, every ground floor room would be affected.)

We’ve had a few nights in Premier Inns, but it’s a new week and it’s time to hassle the insurance company to come and have a look around. And then, maybe, we can start working out where we’ll live so the repair work can start.

Ugh.

The calm after the storm

This morning, from my Premier Inn window, the skies are clear. I could almost forget that, just 4 miles away, my house is full of water.

Today may well be a day of waders and damage assessment, conversations with insurance companies and of working out where we’ll be living for the near future.

But strangely, what’s thrown me first this morning was that I couldn’t make this post submit.

Turns out my crosspost-to-mastodon checkbox was checked. Because my Mastodon server… runs on my homelab. Which is currently unplugged and in one of the highest rooms of a house with no electricity or Internet access. (Or, probably, running water… although that matters less to a homelab.)

I think I moved it before it got wet, but yesterday is such a blur that I just don’t know. I remember we spent some time fighting back the water with sandbags and barricades. I remember the moments each room began to fail, one by one, and we started moving whatever we could carry to higher floors (max props to folks from Eynsham Fire Bridade for helping with the heavy stuff). But if you ask me what order we rescued things in, I just don’t know.

I guess we’ll find out when the waters recede, and it’s safe to go check.

Fucking hell.

LGBT+ History Month

It’s February, which means that (here in the UK) it’s LGBT+ History Month.¹ And it feels like this year, it’s more important than ever to remember our country’s queer history.

In 2015, the UK was ranked first place in ILGA Europe‘s annual “Rainbow Map” study of LGBT rights in 50 countries of Europe. By 2025, the UK had fallen to 22nd place. That’s the fastest drop of any country in the list, tied with Hungary² and Georgia³.

'Rainbow Map' of Europe. In general, the trend is that the further East you go, the weaker LGBT+ rights are, with Russia and Turkey being the worst, and the further West the better they get (with Belgium and Iceland excelling). There are a few exceptions, like Italy (less rights than you'd expect) and Greece (more rights than you'd expect), as well as standout Malta (topping the charts), but otherwise the trend is solid... except for the UK, which stands out as a weak performer in Western Europe, even compared to traditionally socially-conservative countries like Ireland and Switzerland. — By the time Western European countries traditionally seen as ‘socially conservative’ like Ireland and Switzerland are outranking the UK in LGBT+ rights rankings… it’s a clue that something’s gone wrong, right?

Knowing your history is important. I’ve talked before about my personal experience of growing up under Section 28, and I don’t think that the UK’s backsliding is, by any means, harmless⁴. In case the reasons for the UK’s drop in the rankings aren’t obvious, it’s pretty much entirely to do with the UK’s increasingly restrictive gender identity laws (thanks, Supreme Court)⁵.

This stuff affects everybody. When you build a community that is a safe space for queer people, and trans people,⁶ everybody benefits⁷. So even if you’re somehow not compelled by the argument that we should treat everybody fairly and with compassion, you should at least accept that it helps you, too, when we do.

In many ways, queer rights in the UK have been a success story in recent decades. Within my lifetime, we’ve seen the harmonisation of the age of consent (2001), civil partnerships (2004), the Gender Recognition Act (2004), the Equality Act (2010), same-sex marriage (2013; I was genuinely surprised this bill passed!) and the mass-pardoning of people previously convicted under discriminatory sex act laws (2017). These are enormous and important steps and it’s little wonder that the UK topped ILGA Europe’s scoreboard for a while there.

But as recent developments have shown: we can’t rest on our laurels. There’s more to do. History shows us what’s possible; it’s up to us to decide whether we keep moving forward or let it unravel.

So this LGBT+ History Month, don’t just remember the past: pay attention to the present, and push back where it’s slipping.

Footnotes

¹ We celebrate it in February; I’ve never truly understood why. The Independent claims the month was chosen to coincide with the 2003 abolition of Section 28 in England and Wales, but that wouldn’t happen until later in the year; it doesn’t really coincide with the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003 (made June, commencing December) either. So if anybody knows the real reason the UK marks LGBT+ History month in February, I’ve love to hear it.

² Hungary banned same-sex couples from adopting five years ago and banned Pride parades last year, in an incredible backslide for an EU country.

³ Georgia’s backslide is superficially similar to Hungary’s except that one can’t help but feel the influence of partial occupier Russia – a frequent bottom-scorer in ILGA’s list – in that.

⁴ By the way: I just looked back at my own blog posts tagged ‘sexuality’, and man, that shit is on fire! Some fun things there if you’re new to my blog and just catching-up, if I may toot my own horn a little! (Is “toots own horn” a protected identity? ‘Cos I do it a lot.)

⁵ It’s also aggravated by established but regressive problems like the fact that the UK still doesn’t outlaw “conversion therapy”, gender identity is not a recognised justification for seeking asylum, and protections for intersex people are basically nonexistent.

⁶ And, it turns out, furries, who’ve ‘gone from “ew cringe” to “they’re the lichens of a healthy social ecosystem”‘.

⁷ Everybody benefits… except, perhaps, nazis.

Reducing Phantom Obligation in FreshRSS

A week or so ago, Terry Godier – who’s been thinking a lot about UX assumptions lately – argued that the design of most feed readers produces an effect called “phantom obligation”.

He observes that the design of feed readers – which still lean on the design of the earliest feed readers, which adopted the design of email software to minimise the learning curve – makes us feel obligated to stay on top of all our incoming content with its “unread counts”.

Phantom obligation

Email’s unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response. The number isn’t neutral information. It’s a measure of social debt.

But when we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause.

…

RSS isn’t people writing to you. It’s people writing, period. You opted to be notified of their existence. The interface implied debt where none existed. The obligation became phantom.

For a while now I’ve been encouraging people to see their feed reader as something distinct from email, and Terry’s expertly summarised exactly why. When people think of RSS as being like email, they’re encouraged to idolise “inbox zero” for both. But that’s not the right metaphor for RSS at all.

Screenshot of Terry's animation showing different kinds of media and the relative match or mismatch between (a) how guilty their notification interface makes you feel and (b) the actual amount of obligation that exists. — Seriously, if you haven’t read Terry’s article yet, you should read it now!¹

From where I’m sitting

I use FreshRSS as my feed reader, and I love it. But here’s the thing: I use the same application for two different kinds of feeds. I call them slow content and fast content.²

Slow content

Blogs, news, podcasts, webcomics, vlogs, etc. I want to know that there is unread content, but I don’t need to know how much.

In some cases, I configure my reader to throw away stuff that’s gotten old and stale; in other cases, I want it to retain it indefinitely so that I can dip in when I want to. There are some categories in which I’ll achieve “inbox zero” most days³… but many more categories where the purpose of my feed reader is to gather and retain a library of things I’m likely to be interested in, so that I can enjoy them at my leisure.

I also use my RSS reader to subscribe to a few mailing lists (where an RSS feed isn’t available for some reason). These – like blogs – are often “people writing, period” content and shouldn’t have been sent by email in the first place!⁴

Fast content

Some of the things I subscribe to, though, I do want to know about. Not necessarily immediately, but “same day” for sure! This includes things like when it’s a friend’s birthday (via the Abnib Birthdays feed) or when there’s an important update to some software I selfhost.

This is… things I want to know about promptly, but that I don’t want to be interrupted for! I appreciate that this kind of subscription isn’t an ideal use for a feed reader… but I use my feed reader with an appropriate frequency that it’s the best way for me to put these notifications in front of my eyeballs.

I agree with Terry that unread counts and notification badges are generally a UX antipattern in feed readers… but I’d like to keep them for some purposes. So that’s exactly what I do.

How I use FreshRSS (to differentiate slow and fast content)

FreshRSS already provides categories. But what I do is simply… not show unread counts except for designated feeds and categories. To do that, I use the CustomCSS extension for FreshRSS (which nowadays comes as-standard!), giving it the following code (note that I want to retain unread count badges only for feed #1 and categories #6 and #8 and their feeds):

.aside.aside_feed {
  /* Hide all 'unread counts' */
  .category, .feed {
    .title:not([data-unread="0"])::after,
    .item-title:not([data-unread="0"])::after {
      display: none;
    }
  }
  
  /* Re-show unread counts only within:
   * - certain numbered feeds (#f_*) and
   * - categories (#c_*)
   */
  #f_1, #c_6, #c_8 {
    &, .feed {
    .title:not([data-unread="0"])::after,
    .item-title:not([data-unread="0"])::after {
      display: block;
    }
  }
}

That’s how I, personally, make my feed reader feel less like an inbox and more like a… I don’t know… a little like a library, a little like a newsstand, a little like a calendar… and a lot like a tool that serves me, instead of another oppressive “unread” count.

Maybe it’ll help you too.

Footnotes

¹ Or whenever you like. It’s ‘slow content’. I’m not the boss of you.

² A third category, immediate content, is stuff where I might need to take action as soon as I see it, usually because there’s another human involved – things like this come to me by email, Slack, WhatsApp, or similar. It doesn’t belong in a feed reader.

³ It’s still slow content even if I inbox-zero it most days… because I don’t inbox-zero it every day! I don’t feel bad ignoring or skipping it if I’m, for example, not feeling the politics news right now (and can you blame me?). This is fundamentally different than ignoring an incoming phone call or a knock at the door (although you’re absolutely within your rights to do that too, if you don’t have the spoons for it).

⁴ I’m yet to see a mailing list that wouldn’t be better as either a blog (for few-to-many communication) or a forum (for many-to-many communication), frankly. But some people are very wedded to their email accounts as “the way” to communicate!

OpenBenches reaches Tenerife

Since 2018 I’ve been a fan of OpenBenches, a community-driven effort to catalogue memorial benches. Co-creator Terence Eden just wrote a blog post about the cost of running the service, which was pretty-much in the region of what I expected but (as an on-again, off-again financial backer, depending on my own financial health!) I appreciated the transparency anyway!

The news came at about the same time as I logged the first bench of the Canary Islands while I was waiting (in vain) to log an obstructed geocache during my recent trip to Tenerife.

On a tiled patio, a wooden bench stands, bearing a plaque that reads: THIS MEMORIAL GARDEN IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LIVES IN THE AIR DISASTER IN TENERIFE ON 25TH APRIL 1980. — This bench – and the garden it stands in – is a memorial to the victims of the Dan-Air Flight 1008 disaster.

OpenBenches’ dataset is still very UK-centric. I like that I’ve helped broaden its borders! (I’m currently the 83rd-from-top photo contributor, apparently.)

If you’re not already helping collect benches, you should give it a look. You can install the site to your mobile device as a progressive web app and start snapping benches.

Gamified… Pornography?

This article is probably “safe for work” (depending on your workplace).

It makes reference to a popular pornographic website and the features of that website. It contains screenshots, but the porny bits are blurred. The links are all safe.

Verify your age

After Pornhub introduced age check to comply with the Online Safety Act¹, I figured that I’d make an account to see how arduous and privacy-destroying the process of verifying that I was old enough to see naked people². I thought it would make an amusing blog post.

I felt confident that my stupid name, if nothing else, would guarantee me a hard time with this kind of automated system.

Unfortunately³, it turned out to be super-easy for me to pass the age verification.

I just hit “verify by email” with the third-party age verification tool they use, entered an email address that’s associated with a few online accounts (not even the one I gave Pornhub!), and… everything just worked.

Sooo… this isn’t a blog post about how insurmountable age verification is. This is a blog post about something else I discovered as a result of doing this research: Pornhub has “achievements”!

Achievement unlocked

I was slightly surprised to see how many “social networking”-like features Pornhub accounts have. You can upload a profile photo… you have a “wall” that you can post to, and you can post to other people’s. Your profile (unless you tell it not to) shares which channels you’ve subscribed to, which videos you’ve favourited, and so on.

Who on Earth wants those features? I mean: really? 😅 I consider myself pretty sex-positive, but I’m not sure I’d want there to be a web page with my name, photo, and a list of all my favourite dirty vids!⁴

Anyway… the other thing a Pornhub profile seems to provide is… achievements:

Screenshot showing a popover notification reading 'You just unlocked a new achievement: The Virgin' — Hurrah, I guess? *The Virgin* was easy, at least (snerk), unlike most of the things on my Steam profile.

I’ve only got the one achievement right now, of course, and it’s the one that you get “for free”. So it didn’t feel like I’d earned it.

I suppose I was an actual virgin, once. And I had to prove that I’m a real human to get an account. So… maybe I earned it?

Your profile page encourages you to ‘earn and show off more achievements’. Because, yes, your ‘achievements’ are on your public profile too!

But just stop and think about what this means for a moment. At some point, in some conference room at Pornhub HQ, there was a meeting in which somebody said something like:

“You know what we need? Public profile pages for all Pornhub accounts. And they should show, like, ‘achievements’ like you get for videogames. Except the achievements are for things like how much porn you’ve watched and how often. You can show it off to your friends!”

And then somebody else in the meeting said:

“Yes. That is a good idea.”⁵

If it weren’t for the time-based achievements like ’10 year-old account’, I’ll bet there’d be people competing to speedrun Pornhub.

Complete list of Pornhub Achievements

I’ve reverse-engineered the complete⁶ collection of Pornhub Achievements for you. Y’know, in case you’re trying to finish your collection:

	The Virgin	Congrats! You have accessed your account for the first time! Enjoy the ride on Many Faps Road.
	The Freshman	You have accessed your account for the 10th time! I take it you’ve enjoyed the 9 last times?
	The Sophomore	You have accessed your account for the 100th time! Maximus Fappitus, you’re a true Pornhub warrior!
	The Junior	You have accessed your account for the 500th time! If only you could get air miles for this.
	The Senior	You have accessed your account for the 1000th time! If only you could get air miles for this.
	The Porn Buff	You’ve watched 10 videos – This is just the beginning, trust me.
	The Two Thumbs	You’ve watched 500 videos – Lotion or no lotion, that is the question.
	The Cinephile	You’ve watched 5,000 videos – Be careful, carpal tunnel is a thing.
	The Connoisseur	You’ve watched 50,000 videos – you are a veritable porn expert now.
	1 Year Old Account	Our very first anniversary, I wish us many more!
	2 Year Old Account	Two years of pleasure!
	3 Year Old Account	Three years… Ah! The memories!
	4 Year Old Account	Most relationships don’t even last this long #funfact
	5 Year Old Account	That’s half a decade of watching porn.. woah… that’s impressive.
	6 Year Old Account	I guess we were a match made in heaven. Who would’ve known that 6 years later, you would still be fapping on me.
	7 Year Old Account	No 7 year itch here! Thanks for 7 fappy years
	8 Year Old Account	The Outlook is good: you’ve had 8 magical years on Pornhub!
	9 Year Old Account	In 9 more years, your account will be old enough to view itself.
	10 Year Old Account	You were really ahead of the wave – here’s to a decade on Pornhub!

I have no idea who this feature is “for”. I’d feel the same way if YouTube had achievements, too⁷, but the fact that you can, and by default do, showcase your achievements on a porn site is what really blows my mind.

But maybe they ought to double-down and add more achievements. If they’re going to have them, they might as well make the most of them! How about achievements for watching a particular video a certain number of times? Or for watching videos in each of many different hour segments of the day? Or for logging in to your account and out again without consuming any pornography (hey, that’s one that I would have earned!)? If they’re going to have this bizarre feature, they might as well double-down on it!

I also have no idea who this blog post is “for”. If it turned out to be for you (maybe you wanted to know how to unlock all the achievements… or maybe you just found this as amusing as I did), leave me a comment!

Footnotes

¹ Don’t get me started with everything that’s wrong with the so-called Online Safety Act. Just… don’t. The tl;dr would be that it’s about 60% good ideas, 20% good implementation.

² Obviously if I were actually trying to use Pornhub I’d just use a VPN with an endpoint outside of the UK. Y’know, like a sensible person.

³ I mean: it’s probably pretty fortunate that – based on my experience at least – it seems to be easy for adults to verify that they’re adults in order to access services that are restricted to adults as a result of the OSA. But it’s unfortunate in that I’d hoped to make a spicy blog post about all the hoops I had to jump through and ultimately it turned out that there was only one hoop and it was pretty easy.

⁴ Of course, the Indieweb fan within me also says that if I did want such a page to exist, I’d want it to be on my own domain. Should there be an Indieweb post kind for “fap” for people who want to publicly track their masturbatory activities as an exercise in the quantified self?

Or should there be a “sex” kind that works a bit like “invitation” in that you can optionally tag other people who were involved? Or is sex a kind of “exercise”? Could it be considered “game play”? What about when it’s a “performance”? Of course, the irony is that anybody who puts a significant amount of effort into standardising the way that a person might publicly catalogue their sex life… is probably rendering themselves less-likely to have one.

I think I got off-topic in this footnote.

⁵ To be fair, I’ve worked places where committee groupthink has made worse decisions. Want a topical example? My former employer The Bodleian Libraries decided to call a podcast series “BodCast” without first performing a search… which would have revealed that Playboy were already using that name for a series of titillating vlogs. Curiously, it was Playboy who caved and renamed their service first. Presumably the strippers didn’t want to be associated with librarians?

⁶ It’s possible there are achievements I’ve missed – their spriteset file looks like it contains others! – that are only available to content creators on the platform. But if that’s the case, it further reinforces that these achievements are for the purpose of consumers who want to show off how many videos they’ve watched, or whatever! Weird, right?

⁷ “Congratulations: you watched your 500th YouTube ‘short’ – look how much of your life you’ve wasted!”

Postcard from San Diego

I got another postcard. This one’s from Joe Crawford, all the way over in San Diego.

Both sides of a postcard. The text reads: I enjoy your blog. I enjoy books. I enjoy using the mails. I love the idea of using proper mail to internet aquaintances. I acquired this postcard last year in San Francisco. I hope you enjoy it. Best. - Joe (ARTLUNG.COM). The front shows a photograph from a San Francisco street, showing City Lights Booksellers & Publishers' shop front. — Cute card, too. I appreciate the “stop the deportations” banner on this San Fancisco bookshop!

I first started soliciting Internet strangers to send me postcards three months ago and I’m still loving it.

It adds a layer of humanity and personality to the Web. It introduces me to cool new people, and re-introduces me to cool people whom I’d crossed paths with at a distance: Joe’s one of the latter, but I’ve now taken the time to ensure he’s in my RSS reader… and, by proxy, in my blogroll.

I don’t have a return address for anybody who posted anything to me, yet (obviously I’d have masked it out from the postcard if I had!), but I feel like I ought to buy some postcards now too. It’s only a matter of time.

And hey, maybe there’s mileage in starting an Personal Web Postcards Club or something…