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🔗 NY Mag: Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast
Two thoughts on this. The first is that I think these kids are doing a disservice to themselves. I’m not someone who’s going to say “don’t use AI ever,” but the only way I can really understanding something is working through it, either by writing it myself or spending lots of time on it. I find this even in my job: it’s hard for me to know of the existence of some feature in a library I haven’t touched myself, much less how to use it correctly. Offloading your thinking to AI may work when you’re plowing through boring coding tasks, but when it comes to designing something new, or working through a Sev-1, it helps to know the system your working on like the back of your hand.
Second thought: TikTok is like some sort of wraith, sucking the lifeblood of all who touches it, and needs to die in fire.
Via: Sharp Tech
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How and when did “double click” become a phrase meaning to focus on or get into the details of a topic? Just heard it being used on a podcast for the second time in as many weeks.
Also, it’s slightly anachronistic, but I’d guess it easier to say rather than having one “pinch to zoom” into a topic.
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If Apple think the recent App Store ruling is taking away their right to monetise their IP, then Apple needs to explain what the $US 99.00 developer fee is for. They’re probably shooting their videos for WWDC right now. Maybe have one going through each line item of a theoretical “developer fee invoice” and explain what the fee is, and what IP rights the fee is covering.
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When hiring a senior software engineer, it’s probably less useful to know whether they could code up a sorting algorithm versus knowing whether they can work out what time it is in UTC in their head. 😀
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Ooh, I lost my temper when I was under the pump and MacOS decided to stop everything and throw up this modal, asking if I permit Terminal to access files from other apps.
Of course I do, Apple! I’m not using the terminal to amuse myself. I’m trying to get shit done, and your insistent whining is getting in my way! 😡
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Seeing these river tour boats moored like this reminds me of the UK, and all the narrowboats in the canals.
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📘 Devlog
Blogging Tools — Ideas For Stills For A Podcast Clips Feature
I recently discovered that Pocketcasts for Android have changed their clip feature. It still exists, but instead of producing a video which you could share on the socials, it produces a link to play the clip from the Pocketcasts web player. Understandable to some degree: it always took a little bit of time to make these videos. But hardly a suitable solution for sharing clips of private podcasts: one could just listen to the entire episode from the site. Not to mention relying on a dependent service for as long as those links (or the original podcast) is around.
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Ah, CSV files. They’re a little painful to work with, but they truly are the unsung heroes of ad-hoc scripts written in haste.
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Listening to all the recent platform talk on Stratechery has been fascinating, if not a little melancholy. We may never see another mainstream platform be as truly open as Windows, MacOS, or the Web is right now.
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What ever happen to Power Nap on MacOS? Is that still a thing? I’ve been asked when I’d like to install updates for about a week now. Yet despite choosing “later tonight” every time, nothing’s been happening. I could choose to install them now, but I thought deferring them to a time when I’m not using my computer was the point of this feature.
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Argh! Someone has discovered my secret of where the best place to stand on an A-class tram is (it’s at the back, beside the back door).
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It’s easy to get a irrational sense of how scalable a particular database technology can be. Take my experience with PostgreSQL. I use it all the time, but I have it in my head that it shouldn’t be used for “large” amounts of data. I get a little nervous when a table goes beyond 100,000 rows, for example.
But just today, I discovered a table that had 47 million rows of time-series data, and PostgreSQL seems to handle this table just fine. There are a few caviets: it’s a database with significant resources backing it, it only sees a few commits per second, and the queries that are not optimised for that table’s indices can take a few seconds. But PostgreSQL seems far from being under load. CPU usage is low (around 3%), and the disk queue depth is zero.
I guess my point is that PostgreSQL continues to be awesome and I really shouldn’t underestimate how well it can handle we we throw at it.
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Ah! I think I know why I keep asking for a bagel with lettuce, tomato, and cheese instead of ham, tomato, and cheese. It’s because I always said “lettuce, tomato, and cheese” when ordering sandwiches back when I was working in the CBD. Wow, talk about old habits dying hard.
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🔨 GSAP
Another JavaScript animation library. Has some interesting features that might be pertinent for a project I’ve been toying with in my mind.
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It’s 2025. Why am I still not writing down thoughts I had in the shower that I knew I wanted to remember? 🤦
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The Alluring Trap Of Tying Your Fortunes To AI
It’s when the tools stop working the way you expect that you realise the full cost of what you bought into. Continue reading →
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📘 Devlog
Dialogues
A post describing a playful dialogue styling feature, inspired by rubber-duck debugging, and discusses the process and potential uses for it. Continue reading →
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Bluesky needs a bookmarking feature. It took me a while, but I’ve grown to bookmarking posts in Micro.blog and Mastodon that I’d like to revisit in the future. Extra points for having a public API/RSS feed for those bookmarks.
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On AI, Process, and Output
Manuel Moreale’s latest post about AI was thought-provoking:
One thing I’m finding interesting is that I see people falling into two main camps for the most part. On one side are those who value output and outcome, and how to get there doesn’t seem to matter a lot to them. And on the other are the people who value the process over the result, those who care more about how you get to something and what you learn along the way.
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Very happy with how this evening has panned out. 🇦🇺
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Free business idea for anyone: I see lots of people around the polling booth with dogs. I don’t believe dogs are allowed inside, so they must be walking them. But they’ll need to vote eventually, and if the queue is small, maybe they’ll think it’s worth voting now.
So, here’s the pitch:
Stand outside the front along with those handing how-to-vote cards, and offer to look after their dogs while they go in to vote. I’m not sure you can charge much for the service — voting usually takes around 5-10 minutes if the queue is small — and it might be more community minded if you just offer to do it for nothing. But maybe you can earn $10 for standing around half-a-day? Buy a democracy sausage and coffee for that.
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At the cafe. Polling station is directly across the road and will open in a few minutes. Already a queue of people waiting to vote. Party banners on the fence, people with how-to-vote cards at the ready. Hardest decision I have before me is if I should join them once I’ve finished breakfast. But the barbie’s not been wheeled out yet and I’ve not organised anything for lunch.
It’s funny: the whole thing sort of ramped up at around 5 minutes to 8 o’clock.
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Lot of welcomed news from the open-source realm: Redis is moving back to an OSS license, and NATS has settled their dispute with CNCF. That’s good news for users of these packages. But some doubt remains. The reason for why they turned to commercial licenses still seems largely unanswered to me.
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The journey to being good at parkour begins with a single step.
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Been listening to Elton John for the first time in a while. What’s remarkable is how many of his songs just end after the last chorus. No coda or outro; just in and out, wasting no time. Quite a contrast to what I usually listen to.
Okay, may have exaggerated a little: it’s not that many. So far I count two: “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road” and “Candle in the Wind.”
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Even without considering AI, it’s amusing to consider how complicated modern software systems are that the developers themselves don’t know everything about them. A true beast of their own creation, where they’re left with suggestions on how it’ll behave if some particular thing were to happen.
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Made a fool of myself after congratulating someone on a significant life event, to which they politely reminded me that not only did I already congratulate them a couple of weeks ago, but I got certain key details about this event quite wrong. And you know what: the world didn’t end. Other than feeling a little silly, I left the encounter just fine (it helps that they were super nice about this faux pas). So I’m noting this to myself for next time I’m in a situation where I’m too shy to say anything to anyone.
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While we’re talking about schema changes and generated code, here’s some more advice: don’t add any generated code into shared libraries. These libraries will change less frequently than the schema the code is generated from, and when you include such libraries in services that also generate code from these schemas, you’ll get namespace conflicts.
The generated code should only exist in the service that contains the build targets to generate them. That’ll mean duplicated code across the code base, but that’s not a big deal. After all, it’s not like you’re hand-rolling this code.
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Merge Schema Changes Only When The Implementation Is Ready
Integrating schema changes and implementation together before merging prevents project conflicts and errors for team members. Continue reading →
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“Get out more” goal for April failed. ❌
Oh! April just when by too quickly, and much of it was filled with family events that it left me socially tired. Fortunately it’s looking like May will be quieter so will try to get back on this horse.
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I seemed to have developed some sort of condition where I hear American podcasters say Instagram, and it sounds like they’re saying “Insta-Graham.”
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Near the start of the pandemic, I dropped my cutting board onto the tiled floor and it developed a split along the surface. This evening, five years later, that split finally separated apart. Not a bad run actually. And the board itself is still usable, it’s just a little smaller.
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Since moving from Vim to VSCode back when I was learning Go, I lost my muscle memory for all those Vim keyboard commands I was using. Which is a shame, as I still use Vim to write Git commit messages. I probably don’t need to relearn them all again, but a useful subset would be nice.
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🔨 XCancel
If you want to view a Twitter/X post or user without an account, this tool has proved to be quite useful. I’ve used it a few times and works flawlessly.
Via: @amerpie@social.lol on Mastodon
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Oh wonderful. Now there’s an online sports betting/gambling site that shares the same first name as me. 🤮
And no, you don’t get a link to it.
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Looks like a nice, polished, online Kanban board. Will file it away when I need something like this in the future.
Via: Mike Crittenden (the developer)
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Oof! The cocktail of feelings one has when taking public transport: empathy for those stranded due to a major line disruption, mixed with relief that it’s not affecting your line.
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A style of video I enjoy watching are vlogs by those that post other videos on YouTube. Because they put all their effort in their main topical videos, they can just be casual in these vlogs, with no pressure to be performative. It’s refreshing to watch.
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I wonder if one of the desirable features of a foldable phone is its thickness when it’s folded up. Easier to find in a bag, easier to handle when using it in its closed form. I’m not sure it’s for me, but I can see it being a pro for others.