Generated a QR code as usual, minimising its size by making the URL uppercase (allows a smaller character set to be used) and maximising its resilience by ramping up the error
correction to the maximum.
Masked off all but the central 7% of each row and column, leaving just a grid of spots, and then re-adding the three large and one small square and the “zebra crossing” stripes that
connect the large squares, to ensure rapid discovery.
With a pink mask in place to help me see where I was working, drew lines, dots, and whatever else I liked over the black spots but not touching the white ones, to build a maze.
Removed the pink mask, leaving just black and white. Tested a bit.
It’s just about possible to scan this super-minimal QR code, but having the positioning elements in place to help the scanner identify that it is something
scannable makes a huge difference.
Obviously this isn’t a clever idea for real-world scenarios. The point of QR codes’ resilience and error correction is to compensate for suboptimal conditions “in the
field”, like reflections, glare, dust, grime, low light conditions, and so on.
A few years ago I implemented a pure HTML + CSS solution for lightbox images, which I’ve been using on my blog ever since. It works by
pre-rendering an invisible <dialog> for each lightboxable image on the page, linking to the anchor of those dialogs, and exploiting the :target selector
to decide when to make the dialogs visible. No Javascript is required, which means low brittleness and high performance!
It works, but it’s got room for improvement.
One thing I don’t like about it is that it that it breaks completely if the CSS fails for any reason. Depending upon CSS is safer than depending upon JS (which breaks all
the time), but it’s still not great: if CSS is disabled in your browser or just “goes wrong” somehow then you’ll see a hyperlink… that doesn’t seem to go anywhere (it’s an
anchor to a hidden element).
A further thing I don’t like about it is it’s semantically unsound. Linking to a dialog with the expectation that the CSS parser will then make that dialog visible isn’t really
representative of what the content of the page means. Maybe we can do better.
🚀 Wired: <details>-based HTML+CSS lightboxes?
Here’s a thought I had, inspired by Patrick Chia’s <details> overlay trick and by
the categories menu in Eevee’s blog: what if we used a <details> HTML element for a lightbox? The thumbnail image would go in the
<summary> and the full image (with loading="lazy" so it doesn’t download until the details are expanded) beneath, which means it “just works” with or
without CSS… and then some CSS enhances it to make it appear like a modal overlay and allow clicking-anywhere to close it again.
Let me show you what I mean. Click on one of the thumbnails below:
Each appears to pop up in a modal overlay, but in reality they’re just unfolding a <details> panel, and some CSS is making the contents display as if if were
an overlay, complete click-to-close, scroll-blocking, and a blur filter over the background content. Without CSS, it functions as a traditional <details> block.
Accessibility is probably improved over my previous approach, too (though if you know better, please tell me!).
The code’s pretty tidy, too. Here’s the HTML:
<detailsclass="details-lightbox"aria-label="larger image">
<summary>
<imgsrc="thumb.webp"alt="Alt text for the thumbnail image.">
</summary>
<div>
<imgsrc="full.webp"alt="Larger image: alt text for the full image."loading="lazy">
</div>
</details>
The CSS is more-involved, but not excessive (and can probably be optimised a little further):
Native CSS nesting is super nice for this kind of thing. Being able to use :has on the body to detect whether there exists an open lightbox and prevent
scrolling, if so, is another CSS feature I’m appreciating today.
I’m not going to roll this out anywhere rightaway, but I’ll keep it in my back pocket for the next time I feel a blog redesign coming on. It feels tidier and more-universal than my
current approach, and I don’t think it’s an enormous sacrifice to lose the ability to hotlink directly to an open image in a post.
Do you remember when your domestic ISP – Internet Service Provider – used to be an Internet Services Provider? They
were only sometimes actually called that, but what I mean is: when ISPs provided more than one Internet service? Not just connectivity, but… more.
One of the first ISPs I subscribed to had a “standard services” list longer than most modern ISPs complete services list!
ISPs twenty years ago
It used to just be expected that your ISP would provide you with not only an Internet connection, but also some or all of:
I don’t remember which of my early ISPs gave me a free license for HoTMetaL Pro, but I was very appreciative of it at the time.
ISPs today
The ISP I hinted at above doesn’t exist any more, after being bought out and bought out and bought out by a series of owners. But I checked the Website of the current owner to see what
their “standard services” are, and discovered that they are:
Optional 4G backup connectivity (for an extra fee)
A voucher for 3 months access to a streaming service3
The connection is faster, which is something, but we’re still talking about the “baseline” for home Internet access then-versus-now. Which feels a bit galling, considering that (a)
you’re clearly, objectively, getting fewer services, and (b) you’re paying more for them – a cheap basic home Internet subscription today, after accounting
for inflation, seems to cost about 25% more than it did in 2000.4
Are we getting a bum deal?
Not every BBS nor ISP would ever come to support the blazing speeds of a 33.6kbps modem… but when you heard the distinctive scream of its negotiation at close to the Shannon Limit of
the piece of copper dangling outside your house… it felt like you were living in the future.
Would you even want those services?
Some of them were great conveniences at the time, but perhaps not-so-much now: a caching server, FTP site, or IRC node in the building right at the end of my
dial-up connection? That’s a speed boost that was welcome over a slow connection to an unencrypted service, but is redundant and ineffectual today. And if you’re still using a
fax-to-email service for any purpose, then I think you have bigger problems than your ISP’s feature list!
Some of them were things I wouldn’t have recommend that you depend on, even then: tying your email and Web hosting to your connectivity provider traded
one set of problems for another. A particular joy of an email address, as opposed to a postal address (or, back in the day, a phone number), is that it isn’t tied to where
you live. You can move to a different town or even to a different country and still have the same email address, and that’s a great thing! But it’s not something you can
guarantee if your email address is tied to the company you dial-up to from the family computer at home. A similar issue applies to Web hosting, although for a true traditional “personal
home page”: a little information about yourself, and your bookmarks, it would be fine.
But some of them were things that were actually useful and I miss: honestly, it’s a pain to have to use a third-party service for newsgroup
access, which used to be so-commonplace that you’d turn your nose up at an ISP that didn’t offer it as standard. A static IP being non-standard on fixed connections is a sad reminder
that the ‘net continues to become less-participatory, more-centralised, and just generally more watered-down and shit: instead of your connection making you “part of” the Internet,
nowadays it lets you “connect to” the Internet, which is a very different experience.5
A page like this used to be absolutely standard on the Website6
of any ISP worth its salt.
Yeah, sure, you can set up a static site (unencumbered by any opinionated stack) for free on Github Pages, Neocities, or wherever, but the barrier to entry has been raised
by just enough that, doubtless, there are literally millions of people who would have taken that first step… but didn’t.
And that makes me sad.
Footnotes
1 ISP-provided shared FTP servers would also frequently provide locally-available copies
of Internet software essentials for a variety of platforms. This wasn’t just a time-saver – downloading Netscape Navigator from your ISP rather than from half-way across the world was
much faster! – it was also a way to discover new software, curated by people like you: a smidgen of the feel of a well-managed BBS, from the comfort of your local ISP!
2 ISP-provided routers are, in my experience, pretty crap 50% of the time… although
they’ve been improving over the last decade as consumers have started demanding that their WiFi works well, rather than just works.
3 These streaming services vouchers are probably just a loss-leader for the streaming
service, who know that you’ll likely renew at full price afterwards.
4 Okay, in 2000 you’d have also have had to pay per-minute for the price of the
dial-up call… but that money went to BT (or perhaps Mercury or KCOM), not to your ISP. But my point still stands: in a world where technology has in general gotten cheaper
and backhaul capacity has become underutilised, why has the basic domestic Internet connection gotten less feature-rich and more-expensive? And often with worse
customer service, to boot.
5 The problem of your connection not making you “part of” the Internet is multiplied if
you suffer behind carrier-grade NAT, of course. But it feels like if we actually cared enough to commit to rolling out IPv6 everywhere we could obviate the need for that particular
turd entirely. And yet… I’ll bet that the ISPs who currently use it will continue to do so, even as the offer IPv6 addresses as-standard, because they buy into their own idea that
it’s what their customers want.
6 I think we can all be glad that we no longer write “Web Site” as two separate words, but
you’ll note that I still usually correctly capitalise Web (it’s a proper noun: it’s the Web, innit!).
A quesapizza is a quesadilla, but made using pizza ingredients: not just cheese, but also a tomato sauce and maybe some toppings.
A quesapizza-pizza is a pizza… constructed using a quesapizza as its base. Quick to make and pretty delicious, it’s among my go-to working lunches.
The one you see above (and in the YouTube version of this video) is topped with a baked egg and chilli flakes. It might not be
everybody’s idea of a great quesapizza-pizza, but I love mopping up the remainder of the egg yolk with the thick-stuffed cheese and tomato wraps. Mmm!
The elder of our two cars is starting to exhibit a few minor, but annoying, technical faults. Like: sometimes the Bluetooth connection to your phone will break and instead of music, you
just get a non-stop high-pitched screaming sound which you can suppress by turning off the entertainment system… but can’t fix without completely rebooting the entire car.
There’ve been other “this car is getting a bit older” technical faults too. One of his tyre pressure sensors broke the other month and caused a cascade of unrelated errors that
disabled the traction control, ABS, auto-handbrake, parking sensors, and reversing camera… but replacing the pressure sensor fixed everything. Cars are weird, and that’s coming from
somebody working in an industry that fully embraces knock-on regression bugs as a fact of life.
The “wouldn’t you rather listen to screaming” problem occurred this morning. At the time, I was driving the kids to an activity camp, and because they’d been quite enjoying singing
along to a bangin’ playlist I’d set up, they pivoted into their next-most-favourite car journey activity of trying to snipe at one another1.
So I needed a distraction. I asked:
We’ve talked about homonyms and homophones before, haven’t we? I wonder: can anybody think of a pair of words that are homonyms that are nothomophones? So: two words that are spelled the same, but mean different things and sound different when you say
them?
This was sufficiently distracting that it not only kept the kids from fighting for the entire remainder of the journey, but it also distracted me enough that
I missed the penultimate turning of our journey and had to double-back2
…in English
With a little prompting and hints, each of the kids came up with one pair each, both of which exploit the pronunciation ambiguity of English’s “ea” phoneme:
Lead, as in:
/lɛd/ The pipes are made of lead.
/liːd/ Take the dog by her lead.
Read, as in:
/ɹɛd/ I read a great book last month.
/ɹiːd/ I will read it after you finish.
These are heterophonic homonyms: words that sound different and mean different things, but are spelled the same way. The kids and I only came up with the two on our car
journey, but I found many more later in the day. Especially, as you might see from the phonetic patterns in this list, once I started thinking about which other sounds are ambiguous
when written:
Tear (/tɛr/ | /tɪr/): she tears off some paper to wipe her tears away.
Wind(/waɪnd/ |/wɪnd/): don’t forget to wind your watch before you wind your horn.
Live (/laɪv/ | /lɪv/): I’d like to see that band live if only I could live near where they play.
Bass (/beɪs/ | /bæs/): I play my bass for the bass in the lake.
Bow (/baʊ/ | /boʊ/): take a bow before you notch an arrow into your bow.
Sow (/saʊ/ | /soʊ/): the pig and sow ate the seeds as fast as I could sow them.
Does (/dʌz/ | /doʊz/): does she know about the bucks and does in the forest?
(If you’ve got more of these, I’d love to hear read them!)
…in other Languages?
I’m interested in whether heterophonic homonyms are common in any other languages than English? English has a profound advantage for this kind of wordplay3, because it has weakly phonetics (its orthography is irregular: things
aren’t often spelled like they’re said) and because it has diverse linguistic roots (bits of Latin, bits of Greek, some Romance languages, some Germanic languages, and a smattering of
Celtic and Nordic languages).
With a little exploration I was able to find only two examples in other languages, but I’d love to find more if you know of any. Here are the two I know of already:
In French I found couvent, which works only thanks to a very old-fashioned word:
/ku.vɑ̃/ means convent, as in – where you keep your nuns, and
/ku.və/ means sit on, but specifically in the manner that a bird does on its egg, although apparently this usage is considered archaic and the word
couver is now preferred.
In Portugese I cound pelo, which works only because modern dialects of Portugese have simplified or removed the diacritics that used to differentiate the
spellings of some words:
/ˈpe.lu/ means hair, like that which grows on your head, and
/ˈpɛ.lu/ means to peel, as you would with an orange.
If you speak more or different languages than me and can find others for me to add to my collection of words that are spelled the same but that are pronounced differently,
I’d love to hear them.
Special Bonus Internet Points for anybody who can find such a word that can reasonably be translated into another language as a word which also exhibits the same
phenomenon. A pun that can only be fully understood and enjoyed by bilingual speakers would be an especially exciting thing to behold!
Footnotes
1 I guess close siblings are just gonna go through phases where they fight a lot, right?
But if you’d like to reassure me that for most it’s just a phase and it’ll pass, that’d be nice.
2 In my defence, I was navigating from memory because my satnav was on my phone and it was
still trying to talk over Bluetooth to the car… which was turning all of its directions into a high-pitched scream.
3 If by “advantage” you mean “is incredibly difficult for non-native speakers to ever
learn fluently”.
At the weekend, JTA and I – along with our eldest child – explored the Clapham South Deep Shelter as part of one of Hidden London‘s
underground tours, and it was pretty great!
Anybody else get Fallout vibes from this place?
I’ve done a couple of bits of exploration of subterranean London before: in the service tunnels around Euston, and into the abandoned station on the Aldwych branch line. But I was especially impressed by the care and attention that had gone into making this
particular tour fun and engaging.
Had this deep shelter gained a second life as a new tube station, as was originally hoped, this staircase would have connected it to the Northern Line platforms. Instead, it ends at a
brick wall.
The site itself is deep: trains on the Northern Line – already one of the deepest lines on the London Underground – can be heard passing above you, and any
noise from street level is completely gone (even the sounds of bombing couldn’t be heard down here, WWII residents reported). It’s also huge: long interconnected tunnels
provided space for 8,000 beds, plus canteens, offices, toilets, medical bays, and other supporting architecture.
Significant parts of the bunker contain original furniture, including the metal-frames triple-bunk-beds (some of which show signs of being temporarily repurposed as archival storage
shelves). But other bits have been restored to make them feel contemporaneous with the era of its construction.
To extend the immersion of the theme even further, there’s a “warden” on-site who – after your 179-step descent – welcomes you and checks your (replica) night admission ticket,
identifying which bed’s bed assigned to you. The warden accompanies your group around, staying in-character as you step through different eras of the history of the place! By the time
you get to the interpretative space about the final days of its use for human habitation – as a budget hotel for the “Festival of Britain” national exhibition in 1951 – he speaks fondly
of his time as its warden here and wonders about what will become of the place.
The long, long double-helix staircases that brought us deep into the earth represented only a fraction of the distance we walked on the tour, through these long networks of tunnels.
All of which is to say that this was a highly-enjoyable opportunity to explore yet another hidden place sprawling beneath London. The Hidden London folks continue to impress.
I’m glad I’ve got a bed of my own in a house of my own that’s not being bombed by the Luftwaffe, actually, thanks.
I wanted a way to simultaneously lock all of the computers – a mixture of Linux, MacOS and Windows boxen – on my desk, when I’m
going to step away. Here’s what I came up with:
There’s optional audio in this video, if you want it.
One button. And everything locks. Nice!
Here’s how it works:
The mini keyboard is just 10 cheap mechanical keys wired up to a CH552 chip. It’s configured to send CTRL+ALT+F13 through
CTRL+ALT+F221
when one of its keys are pressed.
The “lock” key is captured by my KVM tool Deskflow (which I migrated to when Barrier became neglected, which in turn I migrated to when I fell out of love with Synergy). It then relays
this hotkey across to all currently-connected machines2.
That shortcut is captured by each recipient machine in different ways:
The Linux computers run LXDE, so I added a line to /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml to set a <keybind> that executes xscreensaver-command
-lock.
For the Macs, I created a Quick Action in Automator that runs pmset displaysleepnow as a shell script3, and then connected that via
Keyboard Shortcuts > Services.
On the Windows box, I’ve got AutoHotKey running anyway, so I just have it run { DllCall("LockWorkStation") } when it hears
the keypress.
That’s all there is to is! A magic “lock all my computers, I’m stepping away” button, that’s much faster and more-convenient than locking two to five computers individually.
Footnotes
1F13 through F24 are absolutely valid “standard” key assignments,
of course: it’s just that the vast majority of keyboards don’t have keys for them! This makes them excellent candidates for non-clashing personal-use function keys, but I like to
append one or more modifier keys to the as well to be absolutely certain that I don’t interact with things I didn’t intend to!
2 Some of the other buttons on my mini keyboard are mapped to “jumping” my cursor to
particular computers (if I lose it, which happens more often than I’d like to admit), and “locking” my cursor to the system it’s on.
3 These boxes are configured to lock as soon as the screen blanks; if yours don’t then you
might need a more-sophisticated script.
We’ve been enjoying the latest season of Jet Lag: The Game, which has seen Sam, Ben, and
Adam playing “Snake” across South Korea’s rail network. It’s been interestingly different than their usual games, although the format’s not quite as polished as Hide & Seek or Tag Eur
It, of course.
The Taste Test Buldak roadblock required the Snaker player to do a blindfolded identification of three different noodle flavours.
In any case: after episode 4 and 5 introduced us to Samyang Foods‘ Buldak noodles, JTA
sourced a supply of flavours online and had them shipped to us. Instant ramen’s a convenient and lazy go-to working lunch in our household, and
the Jet Lag boys’ reviews compelled us to give them a go1.
Buldak (불닭) literally means “fire chicken”, and I find myself wondering if the Korean word for domestic chickens
(닭 – usually transliterated as “dak”, “dalg”, or “tak”) might be an onomatopoeic representation of the noise a
chicken makes?2
So for lunch yesterday, while I waited for yet another development environment rebuild to complete, I decided to throw together some
noodles. I went for a packet of the habanero lime flavour, which I padded out with some peas, Quorn3, and a soft-boiled
egg.
There’s no photogenic way to be captured while eating ramen. I promise that this is the least-awful of the snaps I grabbed as I enjoyed my lunch.
It was spicy, for sure: a pleasant, hot, flavourful and aromatic kind of heat. Firey on the tongue, but quick to subside.
Anyway: I guess the lesson here is that if you want me to try your product, you should get it used in a challenge on Jet Lag: The Game.
Footnotes
1 I suppose it’s also possible that I was influenced by K-Pop Demon Hunters, which also features a surprising quantity of Korean instant noodles. Turns out there’s all kinds of
noodle-centric pop culture .
2 Does anybody know enough Korean to research the etymology of the word?
3 I checked the ingredients list and, as I expected, there’s no actual chicken in
these chicken noodles, so my resulting lunch was completely vegetarian.
Inspired by XKCD 3113 “Fix This Sign”, the site features marquee animations, poor font choices, wonky rotation and alignment, and more.
Like the comic, it aims to “extort” people offended by the design choices by allowing them to pay to fix them. Once fixed, a change is fixed for everybody… at least, until
somebody pays to “reset” the site back to its catastrophic mode.
I can’t criticise Humidity Studios for taking a stupid idea from XKCD and taking it way too far, because, well, there’s this site that I
run…
That’s cute and all, but the difference between a billboard and a web page is, of course, that a web page is under the viewer’s control. Once it’s left the server and
reached your computer, there’s nothing the designer can to do stop you editing a page in any way you like. That’s just how the Web works!
A great way to do this is with userscripts: Javascript content that is injected into pages by your browser when you visit particular pages. Mostly by way of demonstration,
I gave it a go. And now you can, too! All you need is a userscript manager plugin in your browser (my favourite is Violentmonkey!) and to
install my (open source) script.
Much better! (I mean, still not a pinnacle of design… but at least my eyes aren’t bleeding any more!)
I enjoyed the art of the joke that is PleaseFixThisSite.com. But probably more than that, I enjoyed the excuse to remind you that by the time you’re viewing a Web page, it’s
running on your computer, and you can change it any way you damn well please.
Don’t like the latest design of your favourite social network? Want to reinstate a feature of a popular video playing site? Need a dark mode to spare your eyes on a particular news
publication? Annoyed by artificial wait times before you’re “allowed” to click a download button? There’s probably a userscript for all of those. And if there isn’t, you can have a go
at writing one. Userscripts are great, and you should be using them.
It started with a fascination after discovering a little-known stone circle near my new house. It grew into an obsession with the history of the place.
Two years later, our eldest was at school and her class was studying the stone age. Each of three groups were tasked with researching a particular neolithic monument, and our eldest was
surprised when she heard my voice coming from a laptop elsewhere in the class. One of her classmates had, in their research into the Quoits, come across my video.
It turns out “local expert” just means “I read the only book ever written about the archaeology of the stones, and a handful of ancillary things.”
And so this year, when another class – this time featuring our youngest – went on a similar school trip, the school asked me to go along again.
I’d tweaked my intro a bit – to pivot from talking about the archaeology to talking about the human stories in the history of the place – and it went down well: the
children raised excellent observations and intelligent questions1,
and clearly took a lot away from their visit. As a bonus, our visit falling shortly after the summer solstice meant that local neopagans had left a variety of curious offerings – mostly
pebbles painted with runes – that the kids enjoyed finding (though of course I asked them to put each back where they were found afterwards).
But the most heartwarming moment came when I later received an amazing handmade card, to which several members of the class had contributed:
I particularly enjoy the pencil drawing of me talking about the breadth of Bell Beaker culture, with a child
interrupting to say “cool!”.
I don’t know if I’ll be free to help out again in another two years, if they do it again2: perhaps I
should record a longer video, with a classroom focus, that shares everything I know about The Devil’s Quoits.
But I’ll certainly keep a fond memory of this (and the previous) time I got to go on such a fun school trip, and to be an (alleged) expert about a place whose history I find so
interesting!
Footnotes
1 Not every question the children asked was the smartest, but every one was gold.
One asked “is it possible aliens did it?” Another asked, “how old are you?”, which I can only assume was an effort to check if I remembered when this 5,000-year-old hengiform monument
was being constructed…
2 By lucky coincidence, this year’s trip fell during a period that I was between jobs, and
so I was very available, but that might not be the case in future!
In a little over a week I’ll be starting my new role at Firstup, who use some of my favourite Web technologies to deliver tools that streamline
employee communication and engagement.
I’m sure there’ll be more to say about that down the line, but for now: let’s look at my recruitment experience, because it’s probably the fastest and most-streamlined technical
recruitment process I’ve ever experienced! Here’s the timeline:
Firstup Recruitment Timeline
Day 0 (Thursday), 21:18 – One evening, I submitted an application via jobs listing site Welcome To The Jungle. For
comparison, I submitted an application for a similar role at a similar company at almost the exact same time. Let’s call them, umm… “Secondup”.
21:42 – I received an automated response to say “Firstup have received your application”. So far, so normal.
21:44 – I received an email from a human – only 26 minutes after my initial application – to invite me to an initial screener interview the following week,
and offering a selection of times (including a reminder of the relative timezone difference between the interviewer and I).
21:55 – I replied to suggest meeting on Wednesday the following week1.
Day 6 (Wednesday), 15:30 – Half-hour screener interview, mostly an introduction, “keyword check” (can I say the right keywords about my qualifications and experience
to demonstrate that, yes, I’m able to do the things they’ll need), and – because it’s 2025 and we live in the darkest timeline – a confirmation that I was a real human being and not
an AI2.
The TalOps person, Talia, says she’d like to progress me to an interview with the person who’d become my team lead, and arranges the interview then-and-there for Friday. She talked me
through all the stages (max points to any recruiter who does this), and gave me an NDA to sign so we could “talk shop” in interviews if applicable.
I only took the initial stages of my Firstup interviews in our library, moving to my regular coding desk for the tech tests, but I’ve got to say it’s a great space for a quiet
conversation, away from the chaos and noise of our kids on an evening!
Day 8 (Friday), 18:30 – My new line manager, Kirk, is on the Pacific Coast of the US, so rather than wait until next week to meet I agreed to this early-evening
interview slot. I’m out of practice at interviews and I babbled a bit, but apparently I had the right credentials because, at a continuing breakneck pace…
21:32 – Talia emailed again to let me know I was through that stage, and asked to set up two live coding “tech test” interviews early the following week. I’ve been
enjoying all the conversations and the vibes so far, so I try to grab the earliest available slots that I can make. This put the two tech test interviews back-to-back, to which
Ruth raised her eyebrows – but to me it felt right to keep riding the energy of this high-speed recruitment process and dive right in to
both!
Day 11 (Monday), 18:30 – Not even a West Coast interviewer this time, but because I’d snatched the earliest possible opportunity I spoke to Joshua early in the
evening. Using a shared development environment, he had me doing a classic data-structures-and-algorithms style assessment: converting a JSON-based logical inference description
sort-of reminiscent of a Reverse Polish Notation tree into something that looked more pseudocode of the underlying
boolean logic. I spotted early on that I’d want a recursive solution, considered a procedural approach, and eventually went with a functional one. It was all going well… until it
wasn’t! Working at speed, I made frustrating early mistake left me with the wrong data “down” my tree and needed to do some log-based debugging (the shared environment didn’t support
a proper debugger, grr!) to get back on track… but I managed to deliver something that worked within the window, and talked at length through my approach every step of the way.
19:30 – The second technical interview was with Kevin, and was more about systems design from a technical perspective. I was challenged to make an object-oriented
implementation of a car park with three different sizes of spaces (for motorbikes, cars, and vans); vehicles can only fit into their own size of space or larger, except vans which –
in the absence of a van space – can straddle three car spaces. The specification called for a particular API that could answer questions about the numbers and types of spaces
available. Now warmed-up to the quirks of the shared coding environment, I started from a test-driven development approach: it didn’t actually support TDD, but I figured I could work
around that by implementing what was effectively my API’s client, hitting my non-existent classes and their non-existent methods and asserting particular responses before going and
filling in those classes until they worked. I felt like I really “clicked” with Kevin as well as with the tech test, and was really pleased with what I eventually delivered.
Day 12 (Tuesday), 12:14 – I heard from Talia again, inviting me to a final interview with Kirk’s manager Xiaojun, the Director of Engineering. Again, I opted for
the earliest mutually-convenient time – the very next day! – even though it would be unusually-late in the day.
Day 13 (Wednesday), 20:00 – The final interview with Xiaojun was a less-energetic affair, but still included some fun technical grilling and, as it happens,
my most-smug interview moment ever when he asked me how I’d go about implementing something… that I’d coincidentally implemented for fun a few weeks earlier! So instead of spending time thinking about an answer to the question, I was able to
dive right in to my most-recent solution, for which I’d conveniently drawn diagrams that I was able to use to explain my architectural choices. I found it harder to read Xiaojun and
get a feel for how the interview had gone than I had each previous stage, but I was excited to hear that they were working through a shortlist and should be ready to appoint somebody
at the “end of the week, or early next week” at the latest.
This. This is how you implement an LRU cache.
Day 14 (Thursday), 00:09 – At what is presumably the very end of the workday in her timezone, Talia emailed me to ask if we could chat at what must be the
start of her next workday. Or as I call it, lunchtime. That’s a promising sign.
13:00 – The sun had come out, so I took Talia’s call in the “meeting hammock” in the garden, with a can of cold non-alcoholic beer next to me (and the dog rolling
around on the grass). After exchanging pleasantries, she made the offer, which I verbally accepted then and there and (after clearing up a couple of quick queries) signed a contract
to a few hours later. Sorted.
Day 23 – You remember that I mentioned applying to another (very similar) role at the same time? This was the day that “Secondup” emailed to ask about my availability
for an interview. And while 23 days is certainly a more-normal turnaround for the start of a recruitment process, I’d already found myself excited by everything I’d learned about
Firstup: there are some great things they’re doing right; there are some exciting problems that I can be part of the solution to… I didn’t need another interview, so I turned down
“Secondup”. Something something early bird.
Wow, that was fast!
With only eight days between the screener interview and the offer – and barely a fortnight after my initial application – this has got to be the absolute fastest I’ve ever seen a tech
role recruitment process go. It felt like a rollercoaster, and I loved it.
Is it weird that I’d actually ride a recruitment-themed rollercoaster?
Footnotes
1 The earliest available slot for a screener interview, on Tuesday, clashed with my 8-year-old’s taekwondo class which I’d promised I’ll go along and join in with it as part of their “dads train free in June” promotion.
This turned out to be a painful and exhausting experience which I thoroughly enjoyed, but more on that some other time, perhaps.
2 After realising that “are you a robot” was part of the initial checks, I briefly
regretted taking the interview in our newly-constructed library because it provides exactly the kind of environment that looks like a fake background.
The tl;dr is: the court ruled that (a) piracy for the purpose of training an LLM is still piracy, so there’ll be a separate case about the fact that Anthropic did not pay for copies of
all the books their model ingested, but (b) training a model on books and then selling access to that model, which can then produce output based on what it has “learned” from those
books, is considered transformative work and therefore fair use.
Compelling arguments have been made both ways on this topic already, e.g.:
Some folks are very keen to point out that it’s totally permitted for humans to read, and even memorise, entire volumes, and then use what they’ve learned when they
produce new work. They argue that what an LLM “does” is not materially different from an impossibly well-read human.
By way of counterpoint, it’s been observed that such a human would still be personally liable if the “inspired” output they subsequently created was derivative
to the point of violating copyright, but we don’t yet have a strong legal model for assessing AI output in the same way. (BBC News article about Disney & Universal vs. Midjourney is going to be very interesting!)
Furthermore, it might be impossible to conclusively determine that the way GenAI works is fundamentally comparable to human thought. And that’s the thing that got
me thinking about this particular thought experiment.
A moment of philosophy
Here’s a thought experiment:
Support I trained an LLM on all of the books of just one author (plus enough additional language that it was able to meaningfully communicate). Let’s take Stephen King’s 65 novels and
200+ short stories, for example. We’ll sell access to the API we produce.
I suppose it’s possible that Stephen King was already replaced long ago with an AI that was instructed to churn out horror stories about folks in isolated Midwestern locales being
harassed by a pervasive background evil?
The output of this system would be heavily-biased by the limited input it’s been given: anybody familiar with King’s work would quickly spot that the AI’s mannerisms echoed his writing
style. Appropriately prompted – or just by chance – such a system would likely produce whole chapters of output that would certainly be considered to be a substantial infringement of
the original work, right?
If I make KingLLM, I’m going to get sued, rightly enough.
But if we accept that (and assume that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California would agree)… then this ruling on Anthropic would carry a curious implication.
That if enough content is ingested, the operation of the LLM in itself is no longer copyright infringement.
Which raises the question: where is the line? What size of corpus must a system be trained upon before its processing must necessarily be considered transformative
of its inputs?
Clearly, trying to answer that question leads to a variant of the sorites paradox. Nobody can ever say that, for example, an input of twenty million words
is enough to make a model transformative but just one fewer and it must be considered to be perpetually ripping off what little knowledge it has!
But as more of these copyright holder vs. AI company cases come to fruition, it’ll be interesting to see where courts fall. What is fair use and what is infringing?
And wherever the answers land, I’m sure there’ll be folks like me coming up with thought experiments that sit uncomfortably in the grey areas that remain.
I’ve been in a lot of interviews over the last two or three weeks. But there’s a moment that stands out and that I’ll remember forever as the most-smug I’ve ever felt during an
interview.
There’ll soon be news to share about what I’m going to be doing with the second half of this year…
This particular interview included a mixture of technical and non-technical questions, but a particular technical question stood out for reasons that will rapidly become apparent. It
went kind-of like this:
Interviewer: How would you go about designing a backend cache that retains in memory some number of most-recently-accessed items?
Dan: It sounds like you’re talking about an LRU cache. Coincidentally, I implemented exactly that just the other
week, for fun, in two of this role’s preferred programming languages (and four other languages). I wrote a blog post about my design
choices: specifically, why I opted for a hashmap for quick reads and a doubly-linked-list for constant-time writes. I’m sending you the links to it now: may I talk you through the
diagrams?
Interviewer:
That’s probably the most-overconfident thing I’ve said at an interview since before I started at the Bodleian, 13 years ago. In the interview for
that position I spent some time explaining that for the role they were recruiting for they were asking the wrong questions! I provided some better questions that I felt they
should ask to maximise their chance of getting the best candidate… and then answered them, effectively helping to write my own interview.
Anyway: even ignoring my cockiness, my interview the other week was informative and enjoyable throughout, and I’m pleased that I’ll soon be working alongside some of the people that I
met: they seem smart, and driven, and focussed, and it looks like the kind of environment in which I could do well.
As time has gone by, a great many rural English villages have been consumed by their nearest towns, or else become little more than dormitory villages: a place where people do little
more than eat and sleep in-between their commutes to-and-from their distant workplaces1.
And so it pleases me at least a little that the tiny village I’ve lived in for five years this week still shows great success in how well
it clings on to its individual identity.
Right now our village green is surrounded by flags, bunting, and thematic decorations.
Every summer since time immemorial, for example, it’s hosted a Village Festival, and this year it feels like the community’s gone all-out. The theme this year is A Century in
Television, and most of the festivities seem to tie-in to the theme.
If you recognise these characters from their first time around on British television, you’re probably older than I am. If you recognise them from their 2001 “reboot”, then you’re probably younger.
I’ve been particularly impressed this year by entrants into the (themed) scarecrow competition: some cracking scarecrows (and related decorations) have started popping up around the
village in advance of festival week!
Bob the Builder’s helping out with the reconstruction of the roof of one of the houses down towards the end of my hamlet, just outside the village proper.
There’s a clear bias towards characters from childrens’ television programmes, but that only adds to the charm. Not only does it amuse the kids when we walk by them, but it feeds into
the feeling of nostalgia that the festival theme seems to evoke (as well, perhaps, as a connection to the importance of this strange village tradition).
Well-played, Letterbox Cottage. Well-played.
If you took a wrong turning and found your way through our village when you meant to be somewhere else, you’d certainly be amused, bemused, or both by the plethora of figures standing
on street corners, atop hedgerows, and just generally around the place2.
Shaun the Sheep and what I believe must be his cousin Timmy stand atop a hedge looking down on a route used by many children on their way to school.
The festival, like other events in the local calendar, represents a collective effort by the “institutions” of the village – the parish council, the church, the primary school, etc.
But the level of time and emotional investment from individual households (whether they’re making scarecrows for the Summer festival… decorating windows as a Christmas advent calendar…
turning out for a dog show last week, I hear3…)
shows the heart of a collective that really engage with this kind of community. Which is really sweet.
An imaginative use of a coloured lampshade plus some excellent tinfoil work makes Zebedee here come to life. He could only have been more-thematic if he’d been installed on the
village’s (only) roundabout!
Anyway, the short of it is that I feel privileged to live in a village that punches above its weight class when it comes to retaining its distinctive personality. And seeing so many of
my neighbours, near and far, putting these strange scarecrows out, reminded me of that fact.
I’m sure I’m barely scraping the surface – there are definitely a few I know of that I’ve not managed to photograph yet – but there are a lot of scarecrows
around my way, right now.
Footnotes
1 The “village” in which our old house
resided certainly had the characteristic feel of “this used to be a place of its own, but now it’s only-barely not just a residential estate on the outskirts of Oxford, for example.
Kidlington had other features, of course, like Oxford’s short-lived zoological gardens… but it didn’t really feel like it had an identity in
its own right.
2 Depending on exactly which wrong turn you took, the first scarecrow you saw might well
be the one dressed as a police officer – from some nonspecific police procedural drama, one guesses? – that’s stood guard shortly after the first of the signs to advertise our new 20mph speed limit. Holding what I guess is supposed to be a radar gun (but is clearly actually a mini handheld
vacuum cleaner), this scarecrow might well be having a meaningful effect on reducing speeding through our village, and for that alone it might be my favourite.
3 I didn’t enter our silly little furball into the
village dog show, for a variety of reasons: mostly because I had other things to do at the time, but also because she’s a truculent little troublemaker who – especially in the heat of
a Summer’s day – would probably just try to boss-around the other dogs.
What can I possibly say about Bored Gay Werewolf, which caught my attention with the garish colours of its front cover when I saw it in
Waterstones and whose blurb suggested that it might, perhaps, be a queer fantasy romp with a Buffy-esque sense of humour.
Werewolf? Sure, it’s got a few of those. There’s even a bit of fun, offbeat humour each time the protagonist reflects on their curious monthly cycle and tries to work
out whether they attacked or even killed anybody this time around. But mostly it’s not a story about werewolf: it’s a story about a slacker who gets suckered into a pyramid scheme, with
just a hint of lycanthropy around the fringes.
Gay? I mean: the protagonist’s gay, and many of their friends are queer… and while the representation is good, sexuality doesn’t feel like it’s a particularly
significant issue to the storyline. I enjoyed the parallels that were drawn between Brian’s coming-out as gay versus his (for most of the story) closeted werewolf nature – which even
though I saw them coming from the first chapter onwards were still well-presented – but apart from that it almost felt like gayness wasn’t a central theme to the story. A smidge of
homophobia, some queer culture references, and a throwaway Grindr hookup with a closeted MSM dude do not contribute enough homosexuality to justify “gay” being the largest, pinkest word
on a novel’s cover, if you ask me.
Bored? I was, at some points in the book, but I’m not convinced that’s what was intended. The pacing’s a little inconsistent: a long and
drawn-out description of an exercise routines overshadows an exploration of the impact of werewolf super-senses, for example. And a long-foreshadowed fight scene finale feels like it’s
over in an instant (with a Van Helsing ex Machina twist that felt simultaneously like the brakes being slammed on and a set-up for an inevitable sequel).
I sound pretty negative about it, I’m sure. But it’s not actually bad. It’s just not actually good, either. It’s a passable, middle-of-the-road time-filler
with an interesting hook, a few funny set pieces (I laughed out loud a couple of times, for sure), and a set of misfit characters who spend most of the book feeling a little…
incomplete? Though it’s possible that latter point’s at-least partially deliberate, as this is without a doubt a “Gen-Z Grows Up” story. Maybe if I were younger and didn’t yet have my
shit together the story would appeal better.
![Stylish (for circa 2000) webpage for HoTMetaL Pro 6.0, advertising its 'unrivaled [sic] editing, site management and publishing tools'.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2025/08/hotmetal-pro-6-640x396.jpg)
![XKCD comic. Transcript: [A single panel containing a large, elevated sign with Ponytail standing in front of it.] [Title, slightly off horizontal, more to the right than central and the character spacing is not entirely consistent/aesthetic:] Doanate[sic] to fix this sign! [To the left of the lower part of the sign there is an 'QR code', tilted slightly with a plaintext link beneath it:] https://[illegible].com [To the right are several dollar values, in one column, and 'fixes', in a second, some of which have their own self-demonstrating quirks.] [The letters "R" and "N" may be too close together:] $10 fix kerning [Both dollar value and fix text are shifted left of their respective columns:] $20 align columns [This line is in a smaller font:] $20 fix text size $50 fix typo $50 fix centering $100 fix rotation [Ponytail stands looking at the sign, apparently in the process of using a smartphone:] Grrr... [Caption below panel:] My new company's business model is based on extorting graphic designers.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2025/07/fix_this_sign1.png)
