Kind: Reposts
Reposting of content from another site, often with commentary.
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The Last Post for the Nightline Association. How does that make you feel?
Fellow Nightline enthusiast James Buller has written a stirring piece about his decades of volunteering for and around Nightlines, and - as usual - underplays the importance and significance of his work. Here's my take.
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On Being
This week, my friend Boro shared a poem that he'd written. It's simple, and energising, and insightful, and I really enjoyed it.
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If this man isn't hired immediately, it's a huge loss
Shortly after I found myself redundant, the other month, my former colleague Kyle wrote some inspiring words on LinkedIn that I've re-read about once a week ever since then. So now I'm going to keep a copy here for posterity.
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The Who Cares Era
Dan Sinker looks at the symptoms and causes of the "Who Cares Era" we find ourselves living in, and raises interesting thoughts about AI's role in it. His post's worth a read, but here's my take.
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What If the EU Never Existed?
It's Europe Day, and Nebula/YouTube channel EU Made Simple has released a video, What If the EU Never Existed?, describing a chilling alternate-history of post-WWII Europe. Well worth a watch.
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LayoffBot - eliminating the human in human resources
In a perfect example of gallows humour, a friend shared with me a satirical (I hope?) website about an AI service for performing bulk redundancies. Alarmingly, compared to my recent experience, it doesn't sound completely bad...
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The call is coming from inside the house
Kellie Peterson, in response to Automattic's mass layoffs and the drama that's followed, lays into Matt Mullenweg and others in company leadership.
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Why is there a "small house" in IBM's Code page 437?
There's a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM's infamous character set Code Page 437. "Small house"—that's the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for "Delete" (DEL) should logically exist. It's cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it … -
Scots Fire Brigade Union demand new legal protections for people with more than one romantic partner
Scotland's Fire Brigade Union is calling for legal protections for the polyamorous. Wait, what?
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My on-again-off-again relationship with AI assistants
Like me, Sean McPherson finds AI agents sometimes useful... but struggles with whether they're actually as useful as some folks seem to claim.
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Bored of it
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Every article glorifying it.
Every article vilifying it.
Every pub conversation winding up talking about it.
People incessantly telling you how they use it.
I feel dirty using it.
You know what I’m talking about, even though I’ve not mentioned it.
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Paul … -
It's not cheating if you write the video game solver yourself
Robert Heaton wrote a solver to help him crack a puzzle in a video game, and I'm 100% behind this as a valid approach to playing single-player games, if it's more fun for you than the alternatives.
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It is as if you were on your phone
When you use your phone to play this game, it really does look indistinguishable from being on your phone. Weird!
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Generative AI use and human agency
Joanna Bryson's put together an absolutely fantastic list of considerations about the use of AI, and two of her points do a better job than I did at saying what I was trying to, last week.
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![Comic comparing 'Devs Then' to 'Devs Now'. The 'Devs Then' are illustrated as muscular men, with captions 'Writes code without AI or Stack Overflow', 'Builds entire games in Assembly', 'Crafts mission-critical code fo [sic] Moon landing', and 'Fixes memory leaks by tweaking pointers'. The 'Devs Now' are illustrated with badly-drawn, somewhat-stupid-looking faces and captioned 'Googles how to center a div in 2025?', 'ChatGPT please fix my syntax error', 'Cannot exit vim', and 'Fixes one bug, creates three new ones'.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2025/02/devs-then-devs-now-lieo-720x480.jpg#25882)
AI Is Reshaping Software Engineering — But There’s a Catch…
Eduaro Ordax is concerned that less-experienced developers will (be encouraged to) use AI as a crutch rather than learning programming fundamentals. I have similar and related concerns, and I'm still of the opinion that we just don't know how to teach people to program!