Somebody should make a tea cosy but to fit a cafetiere.
That sounds like a great idea.
Kind: Notes
Chapattidilla
Wanted a quesadilla. Didn’t have any tortillas, so substituted chapattis.
It went… only okay. The earthiness of the chapatti pairs with mature cheese less-well than the cornflour-sweetness of a tortilla does.
I tried it, so you don’t have to!
Note #28497
A lot of things are hard right now. But I appreciate that Spring has come and I can enjoy a cheese & pickle sandwich and a fake beer for lunch in the sun. All to the sounds of the birds singing… and, somewhere behind me, the dog excitedly demolishing a pile of pine cones.
It could be worse, right?
Horse Gym
My current temporary home – and, necessarily, office – is directly next door to some kind of “horse gym”: a contraption a little like a huge revolving door to encourage one or more horses to exercise by walking around it:
Every now and then my peripheral vision registers that there’s a horse outside the window and, for the dozenth time, I look up from my work and glance around to barely catch it vanishing off on yet another lap.
Things I do when I’m writing code that don’t look like writing code
Non-exhaustive list of things I’m doing when I’m writing code, that don’t look like “writing code”:
- thinking
- researching
- contextualising
- testing
- measuring
- documenting
- communicating
- planning
- future-proofing
- educating
- learning
- expressing
- anticipating
- discovering
- inventing
- experimenting
- debugging
- analysing
- monitoring
For all its faults, an AI agent might “write code” faster than me.
But that’s only a part of the process.
My typing speed is not the bottleneck.
Note #28424
One last outing for the dog and I along the Cotswold lane we’ve been living on, before we move to different temporary accommodation tomorrow.
We’re hoping soon to no-longer have to move every week or two, but we’re not at that point yet.
Flood of cookies
In sympathy for our flood situation, my sister baked and posted us a big batch of her fantastic raisin & oatmeal cookies.
I’ve eaten like six of them already. Turns out I stress-eat. Who knew?
F-Day plus 19
Nineteen days after my house flooded, causing extensive damage on the ground floor, the insurance company has finally accepted the claim and is willing to pay for our temporary accommodation in the meantime (a few days in a hotel, a few days with friends although that’s not paid-for, four weeks in two different holiday lets), although we’re still waiting for their thumbs-up on a proposal for a ~6-month let of a house to live in while our floors are replaced and our kitchen rebuilt and whatnot.
Meanwhile, yesterday a surveyor came around and looked at all of our walls. Everything still feels like it’s taking a very long time. I appreciate that insurance companies are a maze of bureaucracy and procedure, but from “this side” of the table – living and working out of strange places, never really feeling “unpacked” but without it being a holiday – it’s all a bit of a drag!
Note #28356
I don’t know what this machine was (a crane, perhaps), but it’s now been almost-completely reclaimed by nature.
To really foul things up you need an AI
Today, an AI review tool used by my workplace reviewed some code that I wrote, and incorrectly claimed that it would introduce a bug because a global variable I created could “be available to multiple browser tabs” (that’s not how browser JavaScript works).
Just in case I was mistaken, I explained to the AI why I thought it was wrong, and asked it to explain itself.
To do so, the LLM wrote a PR to propose adding some code to use our application’s save mechanism to pass the data back, via the server, and to any other browser tab, thereby creating the problem that it claimed existed.
This isn’t even the most-efficient way to create this problem. localStorage would have been better.
So in other words, today I watched an AI:
(a) claim to have discovered a problem (that doesn’t exist),
(b) when challenged, attempt to create the problem (that wasn’t needed), and
(c) do so in a way that was suboptimal.
Humans aren’t perfect. A human could easily make one of these mistakes. Under some circumstances, a human might even have made two of these mistakes. But to make all three? That took an AI.
What’s the old saying? “To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.”
Dog tired
Today was a long day. Between commuting (the kids to school from our distant flood-evacuation accommodation), work, childcare, insurance wrangling etc., I was pretty tired when I got back “home”. So I came in and lay on the floor.
At which point the dog decided I was a pillow.
Note #28280
While cleaning up/assessing damage following our house flood, I finally found a lost digital stylus I’ve been looking for for a couple of months.
Unfortunately it’s been sat under the water line so I don’t know yet if it survived. But it’s FOUND, at least!
(Look at me, finding ways to stay positive!)
Normal life
I want normal life back now, please.
I appreciate that it’s only 40-ish hours since my house flooded and we had to move out. But with all the stress and activity that’s necessarily followed, it feels like it’s been so much longer.
Unrelated note: why has the person in the room above me at this hotel been using a pogo stick since around 05:30?
Flood
My house is under water.
Well, fuck.
RIP James Van Der Beek
James van der Beek died this week of bowel cancer; he was only a couple of years older than I am. I guess I’m at that point of my life where unexpectedly-early celebrity deaths might start being “around my age”.
I’m neither young nor angsty enough to enjoy a re-watch of Dawson’s Creek, but I especially loved him in Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 so maybe I’ll re-watch that.