Alun Jones

Microsoft, is everything OK?

Just a tiny amount...

They should have installed it behind an err gap.

Another reminder that LLM-based AI is theft in its creation, and is used to commit further theft.

People and egos are fragile. Systems and processes should not be.

We also didn't get stickers, here in the urban hell that is the County of Snohomish (an old English word, meaning "a bit like an igloo").

Trillions of dollars in productivity gains could be made if we could only find all the stuff that works properly, and stop fucking around with it.

"You still need the domain expertise..." - does anyone remember how a developer acquires the domain expertise?

dBase users have known this for decades. Do not, under any circumstances, 4.

When I recognise that a brand is using AI to generate its advertising, I realise they're telling me "we don't respect skilled people enough to pay them, we'll steal their work if we can, even if the result is not as good, because what are you going to do, go somewhere else?" - so that's what I do.

I gave a talk at EMF titled "Men in Tech #YesAllMen", in which I told my experience of being a woman in tech. I was afraid to publish it in case it affected my current or future employment. With all the current news I would like to add my 2¢. So here is the recording: youtu.be/WXL6K1lhvt0?...

Doing our bit

I read somewhere the other day that an advantage of AI is that it has the whole of human knowledge available to it, where individual creative people have only a fraction of that. Where do you think creativity comes from? This is why AI slop looks like all other AI slop - there's no variety.

The difference between UK SNL and US SNL.

That flying car demo had all the look of a "making the Statue of Liberty vanish" TV special.

Remember to take a day every so often to work from home (if you can), so that you don't forget that one of the things we learned over the last few years is that almost all of your job (for certain jobs) can be done from home. Don't let them and their RTO mandates wipe this knowledge away.

Steeeeeeve! @syfuhs.net

Does anyone else feel like the last few years, software has just routinely been getting worse? It's not just the AI, but it's doing its part.

One of these is always empty, and none of the rest contain the timetable for the bus you're on. Obviously.

Honestly, if I get on a list because I searched for "poi", and the autocorrupt decided to extend the word to "poisons", I'm going to be so grumpy.

Azure Portal no longer allows you to create an azureedge.net endpoint, but the API still allows it. This may cause issues leading to subdomain takeover before those domains are finally deprecated about a year from now.

Astronomers don't need to explain gaps in their resumes, they just assume it's full of dark career.

Bug bounty was never a field for beginners to do well in. It only worked that way for a while, because the targets were also beginners. Now that the targets are flooded with scan results, they're still vulnerable, but not paying bounty, because that bug's been found a dozen times this week.

Amazon's "About You" is convinced that all three of us live in a house with two adults. Still trying to figure out if that means the techbros there can't figure out that millennials are staying longer with their parents, or that Gen X parents might still be married and living together.

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

Normalise the response of "if you couldn't be bothered to write this email yourself, I'm not bothered enough to read it."

Yet another fifty thousand line pull request from AI that needs human reviewing to make sure it's not full of garbage.

We've been ten years away from AGI for the last sixty years, why not be ten years away from it for the next sixty?

You can always tell when a program is developed out of spite. It's awesome. The code works, the program is useful, and the output is just what you need. I wonder sometimes if there's a greater motivator to creativity than being told "that won't work, it's not possible".

After a week's PTO, it can feel a little like you're playing a version of Kim's Game, looking around to see if anyone's new, or if anyone's missing, since the last time you were in the office.