“Bookending | everything changes”

“Adactio: Articles—Declarative Design”

“Word Count 74: Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, reader surveys, do people buy books? — Chocolate and Vodka”

Do people buy books, or is claiming they don’t just clickbait?

“Modern WordPress - Yikes!“

Am I going crazy? Is this not the most utterly bizarre chimera of bastardised code you’ve ever seen?

I know it’s probably unfair of me, but when one of the presidential candidates here in Iceland (Halla Hrund) talks about how Iceland is and should be built on “Christian values” without specifying which Christian values, I have to assume that it’s a dogwhistle of some kind until proven otherwise

“The tech industry doesn’t deserve optimism it has earned skepticism”

I’d go even further and say that big tech companies have earned an assumption of guilt until proven innocent.

“I’ve had this thought but never put it into words. | Apple Annie’s Microblog”

Yeah. This.

Wanna guess what path the neighbourhood cats always take when cutting through this patch of grass to investigate the commercial greenhouses next door?

A patch of grass with a clear path cut through it where all the cats walk.

“Misconceptions about CSS Specificity – Bram.us”

“What Elon Musk’s favorite game tells us about him”

I like Polytopia. It’s the sort of game you play if you want to be bored without feeling bored. That Elon think’s it’s the greatest game ever invented is… well, Dave Karpf explains it better than I could

Some context for those reading my essays: Iceland is union country. Union membership in the workforce is around 90% and is north of 95% for many industries. Even writers have a union in Iceland

Unions have been a major driving force for progress here so I’m biased in their favour

Took this one yesterday in Hveragerði’s small park next to the river.

A black and white photo where the summer sun shines through a tree that hasn’t leaved yet, casting a shadow that looks like a pattern of interlocking black lines

“Twitter reply guys were bad, but Mastodon is no better - localghost”

This is, unfortunately, absolutely correct and, if I get these sorts of replies, I have to assume that it’s even worse for people who are of a more targeted group or have more followers

Here I was watching the replies pour in on a moderately popular post on Mastodon and thinking, “honestly, I only have myself to blame, social media doesn’t do rhetorical questions,” before realising the post doesn’t actually have a question, rhetorical or otherwise

“What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs”

Honestly not sure anymore why anybody would risk using cloud-based apps as their primary writing tool

This neighbour came for a short visit earlier and seemed to be in good spirits. #caturday

A black-and-white cat relaxes on my weathered outdoor tableThat same cat takes care of some personal grooming by licking a paw.She was not above receiving some scritchesAnd, actually, she was very keen on having her head scratched as you can see of this photo where I scratch the cat’s head.

The flip side to “Europeans are lazy and don’t work hard” is that we’re able to maintain a modern society with a high standard of living while still being able to spend time with our families. And why kill yourself through overwork when most of the rewards go to somebody else, anyway?

“Graph: Growing number of threats leveraging Microsoft API | Symantec Enterprise Blogs”

As I’ve said a number of times: there is one constant—a fixed point in technology—that you can rely on always being true and that’s the fact that Microsoft is the absolute worst at security

There is an upside to how dysfunctional Google has become in it’s post-layoff all-in-on-Ai era. For every spam website that rises to the top of their badly maintained search engine a dozen pirated movies and TV series that are otherwise unavailable in Iceland get hosted on Youtube

“Heat Death of the Internet - takahē”

About half of the new weirdness we’re all encountering in our software services (like GitHub Actions) is because the co in question laid off a bunch of their staff a year ago and are now dysfuctional

The other half is because they took much of the remaining staff and put them on “AI”

“Resisting the lure of research — Chocolate and Vodka”

“Social media 1, ChatGPT 0”

It’s telling so many in tech think the only reason for being against something like cryptocoins or “AI” is that it overhyped and won’t fulfil its promise, leading to companies failing…

When the strongest reason to be against them is that promise itself is genuinely horrifying and destructive

Today is International Worker’s Day, known as Labour Day in most countries. The date was originally chosen by the American Federation of Labor to commemorate the strike that ended in the Haymarket Massacre

It’s a day for, among other things, solidarity with protests