Alasdair Watson

Fun insights into Chinese food culture.

So, on the one hand, they're not saying it'll stop working. Just that it'll only have more or less the same features that a non-smart thermostat has. But still – I'd be pretty irked, if I had one. This is, broadly, the peril of buying smart home gadgets. and why my rule of thumb is that I want them to be able to perfom most of their functions without internet access – in case the company behind them goes bust, and the infrastrcuture vanishes. But Google haven't gone bust. There's no suggestion that the couldn't, if they chose, keep these running. They're just not. Unimpressive.

Because, well, yeah, it really is. It's justghastly stuff, and I just do not understand these people with hate in their hearts who are determined to drag us all backward. On this issue, and so many others.

A thread of mostly-90s RPG covers redesigned to gently mock the game they're commenting on. Niche interest, but it's my niche, and why yes, I have bought many of these.

Upgraded version of the spatial library I've used for years (that the original maintainer seems to be ignoring), working with Laravel 12, useful for migrating systems to modern laravel, and of no use to anyone not working with Laravel and GIS.

A way to use PHP to extend an LLM and give more context, this could be very useful at work

I'm mostly just interested in the way this feels both madly granualar and weirdly arbitrary. What's a "Christmas children & family films for ages 5 to 7", and where's the line between that and "Goofy christmas children & family films". And what if a christmas film is both British *and* Goofy? And are there really so many "hijacking movies" that they need their own subcategory? Apparently so…

Quite a good set of rules for living a slightly more private and secure digital life on the modern internet. Very little here I would not recommend doing.

I really hope this works out to replace the US govt as part of globally-critical IT security infrastructure.

Oh god, I'm never going to be able to unsee this. I'm going to have to use nothing but Deepseek from now on.

I quite want a bunch of these. Useless but lovely.

Do not create The Colour Out Of Space in remaining eye!

I was a fan of The Onion, back in tha H-Dog dayz. Then I sort of drifted away. Over a series of owners, their content became… thinner. Funny, but insubstantial. But since the sale to Global Tetrahedron, they've been absolutely firing on all cylinders again. Wonderful to see.

Well, this is deeply, deeply bad news. I'm just about old enough to remember doing IT work at a time before the CVE program, and I do not wish to go back.

I may be late to the party, but this looks like something useful to streamline jobs I do a dozen times a day.

An incredibly depressing sign of the times – a building that is physically split by the US/Canada border is being closed off to Canadians – or at least made much harder to access. Something that should be handled with goodwill and common sense for the benefit of the people who live there is a casualty of politics and bureaucracy.

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.

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.