A new weeknote, where I talk about dev environments, cross origin isolation, Dario Argento, and Jack Sholder.
“Ian Betteridge - No, the UK government did not back down on its plans to spy on encrypted messages”
“The hardest part of building software is not coding, it’s requirements”
The problems have become bigger, harder to fix, and more costly, but the source of the problem is usually the same: The requirements were unclear, inconsistent, or wrong.
We’re pretty much caught up on the history of my amateur photography. Around 25 years of photos
Currently in a slow period. Creativity has cycles. Too much going on, too little time or energy left over for any sort of thoughtful practice
That’s okay. This too shall pass
Other than the ravens, 2023 was light on photography for me.
The highlight was probably our trip to Hlíðarendi (of Njálssaga fame) and Oddi, where Sæmundur Fróði was a priest. Like most sites of historical interest in Iceland, it was light on tourists
And once in a blue moon you’d get a raven that’d just post for you. Pretty far away on the top of a streetlight, mind, but still. Pose.
The thing about youths of any species is that they Do Not Sit Still. It’s a universal law. And my camera isn’t particularly great at capturing fast-moving subjects. Sometimes that resulted in pictures I still liked, though.
And occasionally they did sit still long enough
The photographic highlight of 2023 so far was the raven parliament
Raven youths congregate occasionally in one place to play, hang out, and pair off. We call these meetings “hrafnaþing” in Icelandic (“raven parliament”). This year we had one in Hveragerði
They were everywhere
“Advanced NLP with SpaCy | Hacker News”
The world cannot migrate all its current NLP models for text classification and NER to ICL. There are nowhere near enough GPUs in the world for that to happen
“Pixels of the Week – September 10, 2023 by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.”
“Storing UTC is not a silver bullet | Jon Skeet’s coding blog”
“On productivity metrics and management consultants – Surfing Complexity”
Now that the starlings have discovered my bird feeder my balcony railing has become a bit of a location, a place to stop and check the surroundings for predators.
And poop. Way more bird poop now.
“OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work | Ars Technica”
Yeah.
The only real opportunity I got for photography in 2022 was a trip to the caves near Hella. They’re fascinating evidence of early celtic settlements in Iceland that might provide an alternate explanation for the 40% celtic-originated genetic mix of modern Icelanders
Now we’re in the depressing part of my photographic history. Things got pretty rough after the pandemic started and, despite improvements, we’re still nowhere near where we were, personally or as a society
Still, funny moments still happen and sometimes you capture them
“Silicon Valley’s Slaughterhouse”
This, in my mind, began tech’s age of empty innovation, where software poisoned every aspect of our lives without making them appreciably better.
“Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers”
I see that some of Microsoft’s big enterprise customers have finally forwarded the “WTF!” email they got from their legal department to Microsoft’s sales
I’m not pessimistic about technology. I’m disappointed and let down. The distinction is important because “pessimistic” implies that things haven’t already turned to shit.
This here is the last picture I took in 2021. It’s also my grandmother’s favourite because that’s her window. New year’s eve.
The place is also a stop for the raven population in the sout of Iceland. We don’t have that many of them year-round but Icelandic ravens tend to winter in urban areas and Hveragerði is one of their stops on the way there (and back).
This is one flying over my building
Hveragerði itself can be pretty picturesque, though. There’s something photogenic in pretty much every direction.
