David Edgar's website

I hadn't been doing my homework for Sydney Technology Leaders and needed to put the meetup.com events together quickly. So I asked ChatGPT to write the text for me, and then because I am me, I asked it "Make it more cynical". Reader, despite my cold dead heart of jade, I was impressed. Not that it produced usable copy, I'm not at all surprised that the plagarism machine trained to trick humans came out as seemingly coherent. No, I was impressed that even I thought it might be a bit much.

Been doing some interviews lately. I have someone else in the room helping who hasn't done many interviews before. Partly because it is interviewing for a role I don't have any practical experience in. I have come to the conclusion that:

a) TAFE should still exist. I mean actually exist, not the shambling corpse the various flavours of neo-liberal governments have allowed to continue to wander the earth. b) It should offer a semester long course, with labs, of how to interview.

ugh...the dilemma of being excited for a space launch, but also kinda wanting it to fail because the money guy is a prick, and his motivations are absurd.

Having heard the same predictions about the demise of the LNP party in 2007 - and for that matter about the GOP in 2008 - the nihilist in me assumes that in about twelve months people will forget about the awfulness and be very aware of transient cost of living issues and once more find that second classing a bunch of people is a fair price to pay for comforting lies about economic and financial realities. #ascot

A lunch.

• cooking
• food

A lunch.

• cooking
• food

Apple like to think they are pretty good, but with their smart assistants they are so far behind. Why, Siri is still telling me, years down the line, that she can’t find anything in the web for the sound of chicken frying in the pan or the sound of my mixer kneading dough. Get your shit together, Apple.

One of my teams just came through a tough period of getting a piece of work through an initial round of testing so it can be merged and hidden behind a feature flag. It was hard in them and I’m proud of them for solving the problems.

Some of them worked long hours and weekends and we have to deal with that. Spoke to some of them today and told my newest team member that I will never expect her to be responsive at all hours. That if I need her to work long hours I’ll actually specifically ask for it and set boundaries and work out time in lieu.

She told me it’s the first time a manager has ever said that to her.

What is wrong with people?

I might be “become expert with pro-tools” level of obsessed with the idea of Rebel Girl, but with a string quartet.

I’m beginning to think auto correct has achieved some low form of sentience and has recognised my (regrettably ongoing) issues with your/you’re and there/their/they’re and is changing them even when I get it right.

We’re moving offices into a WeWork and my pass has a slogan “Do why you love” and I really appreciate this suggestion to go home and have a nap and maybe start drinking some G&Ts while reading a book.

I bet I'm not the only person to ever fat finger and type crontab -r.

Seems like a bad design to use those two keys for what I imagine are the most-used and least-used commands.

I had a problem, so I tried to solve it by downgrading to ElasticSearch 7.x, and now I have no problems.

I don't have to touch ElasticSearch very often, but every time I do these days it really does feel like they were sitting around and thought "We've got a really useful product that people find useful. But Amazon are making some money off it. So let's light ourselves on fire."

"What do you want, David?"

"ummm....a planet destroying asteroid strike?"

"...ok."

"It was a very open ended question."

"From McDonalds"

• nihilism

"Have you got a spare USB key I can use?"

"Yeah, I think so. Here's one, it's only got......all the source code for Legion Interactive SMS gateway? How the hell did I get this, I never worked for them?"

End stage palliative care is just cruelty. The people who insist that patients and families suffer are monstrous.

The question in standup yesterday was “What’s your favourite tree?” And I said Treebeard. No one got it.

And then one of the team said they thought I would say something like binary search tree and I’m still mad that I didn’t think of that.

The speakers on Data topics tonight convinced me of something, the importance of keeping my metadata private. Or perhaps the folly of allowing data scientists to access it. I should stop Boosting and Liking on the fediverse, even, and keep it on my own site.

So glad @web_goddess found my good side at #sydtechleaders