I went into town last Saturday to get a coat. The place is overrun by dogs - and big ones too - and I hadn’t thought to take a preventative antihistamine before heading in. As a result I had to leave a couple of shops, got hives in another, and had a worrying bus trip back as I felt my chest tightening. I was fine in the end.

It didn’t used to be like this - I’d never come across dogs in my daily life. Never had to keep antihistamines and epipens on hand at all times. Now it’s a constant worry. A proper cultural change that I haven’t fully adjusted to yet. All the dogs looked pretty miserable too. It can’t be much fun for them. I get that no-one really cares.

It’s been a week and the hives on my legs are getting better, though I always have to be careful to stop them getting infected if the skin breaks. Anyway, I got a coat. I have to accept that people like me aren’t welcome in the real world any more. Oh for the heady days of ‘guide dogs only’.

Talking of real worlds, my colleagues, usually remote and zoom-flat, were in the office this week for a couple of days. I’m always a bit surprised by their 3d forms - they’re always a bit bigger or smaller, taller or shorter than I remember. It was good to see them. One of the best things is just seeing how others work, picking up tips. That kind of osmosis doesn’t happen as easily for me on a remote team.

I’ve sorted out the ‘tech stack’ for my OU maths degree - LaTeX and Maxima installed and usable. It was a bit of a palaver, not helped by poor documentation from the university. I should write up what I did to help the future. LaTeX has always been tricky for me. Whenever I’m using it a portion of my brain becomes unusable, taken over by the thought that there must be a better way to typeset maths than this. There isn’t.

I hate that I’m losing friends to the polarization caused by the rapid growth in AI adoption. To an extent, I understand it. I’ve always found it difficult to be friends with conservatives that don’t see that the opinions they profess to be apolitical are nothing but. I’m on the other side of that now in the AI debate.

I have a few friends who tread lightly on the planet - not driving, not eating meat, not flying - and I’ll listen to them on the ecology side. I have others who truly live an anti-corporate life and I hold their opinions about the economic dangers to be important.

I know I over-index on this sometimes, giving more weight to people who’ve made personal sacrifices for their principles. Likewise, I can’t stomach pile-ons by meat-eating, globe-trotting corporate wage-earners.

Hypocrisy isn’t the issue here - it’s unfair and a little trite to ask people why they suddenly care about the environment and yet talk an awful lot about bacon. No matter how valid a moral question.

There are more humane concerns. I wonder how to comfort my friends who, in the words of one of my colleagues, are experiencing true grief. Grief at the way AI is changing things deeply important to their sense of self-worth. I suspect it’s a loss they’ll have to find a way to come to terms with. I do actually admire their raging against the dying of the light.

I can give a hundred examples of how AI has made my life more productive or just easier - as an assistive technology - but it wouldn’t help. I don’t think you can really use the technology and not come away believing there is tremendous value in it, applied correctly. Nor that it’s constantly improving. There’s some nuance here, but not as much as you might think from the ai-slop discourse.

But is that going to help? Like I’ve said before, it’s impossible not to be conflicted about the wider context in which this revolution is taking place. I certainly don’t have any answers. When all’s said and done, it sucks to lose friends and see friends fight.

Also, I started making another quilt.

Grab-bag

  • The trailer for Electric Dreams (1984). I sent this to my colleagues who have, in my opinion, lost their minds to zigbee and matter and other home automation macguffins. I imagine the film, an eighties screw-ball comedy that I only vaguely remember, is deeply problematic in all kinds of eighties screw-ball comedy ways. Not an endorsement.
  • Tim Zöller on the Lisp curse coming to your ecosystem: if LLM-generated code starts replacing shared libraries, every project becomes its own little island. And a warning: “software development might become a much lonelier task than it is now.”
  • James Bridle’s Autonomous Trap 001, from 2017: a salt circle of road markings on Mount Parnassus designed to trap a self-driving car. “Ground markings to trap autonomous vehicles using ’no entry’ and other glyphs.” I wonder if there’s a LIDAR equivalent?
  • Kat Shann’s OuijaCNC, a self-playing Ouija board with a magnet-driven CNC mechanism under it, the Raspberry Pi being “the ghost in the machine controlling my Ouija board.” A perfect project and a reminder that ‘planchette’ is a good word.
  • NoRedInk adopting elm-safe-virtual-dom. Elm, which I am contractually obliged to sneak into every blogpost, has a thin server-side-rendering story. This might be the start of a better one.