- Dismay as cross-border library caught in US-Canada feud: ‘We just want to stay open’ | Canada | The Guardian
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.
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.
- 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.
Bookmarks for April 11, 2025
- Bookmarks
Amusingly recursive: if this works, the first bookmark in my new bookmark manager will be itself. I finally got my linkdump posts working again by building an entire application to grab them Pinboard and post them to wordpress. There's something wrong with me.
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.
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.
2021
Well, that was a year that happened, wasn’t it? I more or less skipped the year-in-review last year, because it felt kind of like a write-off.
2021 did not. Miranda and I bought a house. That’s still astounding to me. It’s been stressful at times, and will continue to be stressful, I’m sure, but we bought a house. It was interesting to go through that process, and I feel like I understand it much better now than I did before. I mean, you’d hope, wouldn’t you? But also, it’s a frighteningly opaque thing if you haven’t done it – it’s one of those practical life things that is not taught, and everyone is just kind of left to blunder through, despite it being just about the biggest thing one will ever do, in financial terms, at least.
Not much else of huge note happened, and I still haven’t been able to properly resume my hobbies, life is definitely not back to “normal” yet, but Miranda and I have been very fortunate this year. Many of our friends and family have not.
So if I have a hope for 2022, it’s for everyone else. I say some variant on it every year, that I just want us all to be happier next year than we were this, and I always mean it, but god, 2021 has been just ghastly, and I just want things to improve for you all, both on a personal level, and on a state-of-the-world level.
As far as personal plans: well, I’m going to start running a classic tabletop RPG campaign (Masks of Nyarlathotep), and I really hope I do it justice for my players. And I’d like to figure out the process of getting a new kitchen. Another hugely expensive thing that no-one teaches you how to do. Oh and in theory, a big project I’ve been working on in my spare time for most of this year will go live at some point, but I’m filing that under wait-and-see.
Bill Vaughan, the American aphorist, has a new year phrase. “An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”
Tonight, I’m strongly considering just going to bed early.