Replying to
@jik@federate.social They’re not even faster at coding – they’re faster at cobbling together a copy-pasted solution based on billions of lines of software previously written by people.
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Kerry Buckley
@kerryb@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Computering, running, cats and general incompetence
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Joined April 04, 2017
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Ipswich, UK
I like a good pun, but I swear it was completely accidental that in a discussion about an old bug with infinite scrolling on a page I just said that I “didn’t think we’d ever got to the bottom of it.”
Replying to
@Edent Ugh. Where I work it’s even worse – very little has ever been open sourced, but at least it was easy to share code internally. Recently our internal Gitlab has been reconfigured to remove the ability to set repos to “public” (anyone on the network) or “protected” (anyone signed into Gitlab), and only allow “private” (specific people or groups). Not just “default closed”, but “only closed”.
Replying to
@shezza_t@mastodon.ie The It Could Happen Here podcast had a good episode last week talking to someone in Belfast about the community response [1]. Also one this week about media responsibility [2], but I haven’t listened to that one yet.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/an-update-from-belfast/id1449762156?i=1000773831542
[2] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-media-context-for-the-belfast-pogrom/id1449762156?i=1000774639273
Me, a programmer, shouting at a podcast for laughing about how the 64 in “$64,000 Question” is “weirdly random”.
Replying to
@jasongorman I love they way they’ve grudgingly included a feedback loop, but only “have we got the specifications perfect before we start implementing them?”
Not saying my brain’s full of useless facts, but listening to a few episodes of Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth I spotted two truths before the panelists had actually said them.
Someone should make a Scandi Noir version of that John Thaw detective show, and call it Inspector Norse.
I know it’s hardly the worst problem with social media, but it’s annoying how algorithmic feeds (not here) mean that I’m still seeing tedious April Fool posts popping up.
Looking at the Facebook page for our 40 year school reunion, and my name isn’t on the lists for “going”, “not going”, “undecided”, “awaiting reply” or “we have no idea where they are”. I shall continue to keep my head down.
Weeknotes 2026-09: temporarily missing cat.
Great news from Gorton and Denton, but it feels like we really need some form of PR soon, before all those claims of “but it’ll give seats to the far right!'” massively backfire.
More confirmation of how old and out-of-touch with popular culture I am, in the form of an “incredibly famous” Taskmaster contestant who I had previously never heard of.
I assume there’s not a version of the 25th Amendment that caters for the possibility that the President is mentally unfit but the Vice President is also a psychopath.
First day back at work after the weekend, and this year only one group of failing CI tests for something implemented in the past six months that assumes local time in the code but UTC in the tests.
Weeknotes 2026-13: a friendly sheep.
The strait between North Wales and Anglesey is made of everything that’s wrong with the modern internet: men and AI.
Just saw an advert for the Land Rover Discovery (priced from £64,810) with the tag line “for everyone”.
Pleased with myself for remembering to put my black and brown bins out last night, then realised this morning that it’s blue bin week. Fortunately they’ve only just come, because after forgetting to put it out a couple of times my blue bin was full up.
Hope I didn’t accidentally binfluence any neighbours into putting the wrong ones out too.
Weeknotes 2026-11: a quiz and a half (by which I mean neither a very good quiz nor 1.5 quizzes).
Resisting the urge to bother commenting on an internal “suggested GitLab branching model” that somehow manages to be even worse than GitFlow, while optimistically claiming to be consistent with continuous deployment.
Today’s helpful phone autocorrect*: meant to type “in the polls”, but it came out as “on the pills”.
*Or whatever you call the Google drag-your-finger-through-the-letters keyboard thing.
I popped outside at lunchtime, and it almost feels like a summer’s day. In February. If this is global warning, then IT’S STILL AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS THAT WE SHOULD BE PAYING FAR MORE ATTENTION TO.
Pretty sure it’s the progressive policies more than environmentalism that’s attracting people to the Greens at the moment. This makes about as much sense as their other tactic of adopting xenophobia to attract Reform voters.
The search engine seems to have been removed from our corporate intranet. Normally this kind of thing would annoy me, but in many ways this is an improvement on the search functionality we’ve had for the past 20-odd years.
Weeknotes 2026-12 – only one day late.
Weeknotes 2026-14 – hot cross buns.
Good. Seems like that would mean a lot of wrongful arrest actions on their way, although in practice I expect imprisoning people for breaking an illegal law is probably considered perfectly OK.
Weeknotes 2026-07: did you see that ludicrous display last night?
Oh, look, that story the other day about an AI bot writing a whiny blog post after having a pull request rejected was probably fabricated nonsense. I am so incredibly surprised. https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-fabricated-quotes-about-ai-generated-article/
Told the Labour councillor who knocked on my door that I was likely to vote Green this time (because if enough people tell them then maybe they’ll realise the damage the party’s doing to itself by trying to appease Reform voters). He gave me a leaflet anyway, which turned out to just be boasting about how Labour would build a northern bypass – potentially through countryside where I often run – which didn’t do much to change my mind.
Being made to feel slightly old seeing that Mac OS X was released 25 years ago, but more surprised that the “recent” (in my head) naming scheme has now been going for longer than the original big cats.
I wrote up a deliberate process of narrowing down a performance issue using a profiler (with a brief digression into benchmarking tools). Fortunately (given that I was writing the post in parallel with doing the actual work) it turned out well, delivering a 30–40× speedup. #MyElixirStatus
Oh look, the government’s uninformed parroting of AI companies’ investment hype turns out to be smoke and mirrors. I’m shocked.
Replying to
@tommorris@mastodon.social I glanced at this post and misread “funding”, which briefly made it look like a far more exciting story.
Weeknotes 2026-10: high blood pressure all round.
Maybe we could go back to the old system where when the monarch dies any claimants to the throne have to battle it out amongst themselves. Or, you know, just abolish the lot.
Weeknotes 2026-08: poorly-performing code, plumbing and legs.
Pleased to see the Observer Everyman crossword is free for non-subscribers again (not sure how long that’s been the case), but the UI seems to have got much worse in the mean time (random scroll jumping; no tab navigation).