Author: Alasdair

Bookmarks for April 13, 2025

Bookmarks for April 12, 2025

  • Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
    This is a solid bit of writing from a few years back that explains a lot about the stages of growth of the internet and how we've arrived at the current moment. I think that four years later, his conclusion that we're headed back to a more open and decentralised internet is optimistic – but thinking about Bluesky, and the idea that independent writing plaforms (or, as we used to call them, blogs) are having a resurgence in response to everything, maybe not totaly unfounded.
    Tags: politics, business, technology
  • LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything • The Register
    Fascinating new exploit wrinkle, and a very strong argument for not using LLMs to generate entire applications – it'll literally decide to try and pull in dependencies that don't exist, and if the app runner doesn't notice, then a bad actor can simply occupy that space with whatever they're like, and completely co-opt the AI-generated app.
    Tags: lmm, exploit

2024

Well, the two really big things this year have their own posts – a honeymoon and a new kitchen. Both amazing. I started doing a one photo a month thing on Facebook last year, and have just put 12 photos on there, and I’ll stick them on the end of this post, too.

2024 was pretty great, all told. A year I’ll look back on with more or less unalloyed delight. Sadly, 2025 is looking less promising, personally and more globally. I’ve had some (minor, treatable, more-or-less to be expected) warning signs around blood pressure and cholesterol that mean diet and exercise need to be a bit of a focus for next year. Globally, well, Trump takes office again in January, and I expect that to render things broadly worse, and let’s be real: they’re pretty shit already on the broad view.

Still, we’ve a roof over our heads, and things to look forward to already in the diary, so it’s not all bad. I hope 2025 treats us all as well as possible.

(January: Wassailing. February: Matt Smith in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People at the theatre. March: Dopamine Land for Miranda’s birthday. April: New Orleans. May: Disney World. June: QI Party. July: ???. August: Outdoor Shrimp Boil while the kitchen was re-done. September: Kitchen was finished. October: Visting the new Sorted Food studio. November: a proper Cajun food pop-up for our first anniversary. December: a particularly well mise-en-placed meal in the new kitchen.)

Before, During and After

We got a new kitchen – something I have wanted to do for about the last decade. Getting a kitchen with the specific equipment I wanted was obviously impossible while renting, and then after buying a house, there was a) other house costs, and b) getting married, and other stuff, we had to wait for there to be room in the budget, but we finally managed it.

The process was not without a certain amount of pain and fustration. We were told it would take about two weeks from start to finish (so we assumed that somewhere between two and three weeks is what it would actually take), and in the end it took over six. But in the end, we have a kitchen that is brighter, better equipped, has more storage, and somehow, feels much larger. I am delighted.

Honeymoon

We went on Honeymoon. My first proper leave-the-country-for-an-extended-period holiday in about a decade. (I’m not a natural traveller.). We took ourselves off to New Orleans and Disney World for slightly over two weeks, and it was exactly what a Honeymoon is supposed to be – the holiday of a lifetime.

We picked two incredibly touristy places, but I don’t regard that as bad, in as much as an alternate definition of touristy might be said to be “incredibly good at turning money into fun”. Because they both are, in different ways.

In New Orleans, we ate amazing food, listened to jazz, toured cemeteries and bayous, visited museums, art galleries and churches, and yes, drank bad overpriced “hurricanes” on Bourbon Street, and generally experienced culture in all sorts of ways. At Disney we, well, we did Disney things. Rides, merchandise, shows, and meeting disney characters. A bit of me wishes I’d kept a diary, but I’ve got hundreds of photos, quite a lot of them of food, and it was all basically stunning.

Having had the “holiday of a lifetime”, we’ve naturally immediately started working out how we might afford to do it all again.

2023

I am now a respectably married man. That’s all that happened in 2023.

Yeah, OK, other things happened. The world continues to be on fire, possibly worse. I remain in the same job, and remain happy there. I have not moved house. I failed to LARP, but I have done some very rewarding tabletop gaming, and am looking to continue that in 2024.

Plans for 2024 include a honeymoon, and, if I am very lucky, a new kitchen. I continue to appreciate my immense and undeserved good fortune, and can only wish that everyone was so lucky.

2022

Well, given that I made exactly one post on this site this year, it’s not really hard to guess what the big news of the year was: I got engaged. Miranda continues to be the very best, and I remain astounded at my good fortune. Next year’s big news will, I hope, be kind of predicatable as a result, because if anything happens to knock “got married” off the top spot, something will have gone badly wrong.

Outside of that: did my first LARP and my first in-person gaming since pre-COVID toward the end of last year. I was delighted to do both, and look forward to more next year.

Other than that, I don’t really have any significant personal achievements or milestones to note, just another trip around the sun.

2022 felt like te year the world established a new normal. It’s a bit too willing to let people catch COVID and live with the poorly-understood long-term consequences for my liking, but we do seem to have kind of collectively decided to treat this disease (which is nothing like a cold) like a cold. It’s a little maddening, but I can’t deny that I am taking part in the “return to normality” myself.

My biggest risk factor is mitigated by the fact that I am still only in the office a handful of times in a year, and I’m certainly happy for it to remain that way. Work wise: very happy at my current employer, managing a small team of devs building internal tools. Steady, sensible work.

The world, is, of course absolutely on fire. Cost of living crisis, poltiical turmoil at home and abroad, but my little corner of it is, so far, lucky enough.

It’s hard to have much optimism for the world going in to 2023, but on a purely personal level I am looking forward to it. I hope it’s as good for all my friends, near and far, as it looks like it will be for me.

Engagement Metrics

Well, it’s been a few months without an update. I should write something up about the first third or so of 2022, but in keeping with my current vague remit for this blog being “a limited sort of personal diary for when I’m old and don’t remember what happened when” the big headline: on the 27th of April, a year to the day after moving in to the house, Miranda and I got engaged.

I am quietly (ok, loudly) pleased that even though she’d been on at me to propose for ooh, a while, and I’d been saying “I have a plan for that”, I still managed to actually surprise her. In related news: it turns out that even when one is 99.999% sure that the answer will be yes, actually proposing is still nerve-racking.

a photo of the two of us, holding champagne and showing off the engagement ring

So yeah, life is now entirely about wedding planning. We’re doing (I think) OK at it so far. I’m sure it’ll all get more stressful as we go.