David Edgar's website

Sunday, 22 September 2024

šŸ”– The Uneanted Guest, by Tamsyn Muir

Palamedes Sextus and Ianthe Naberius in a battle of wits. I think this is set just after Gideon the Ninth.

Muir’s work really does reward rereads and different angles.

I have no real way to tell, obviously, because I would never meet any of these people, but I am willing to bet real human currency that the people who assume remote workers are slacking and goofing off instead of working actually don't know how in-office people work and behave.

Or, you know, don't know any actual workers.

Wednesday, 18 September 2024

The absolute obliviousness, the actual genuine irony of people getting LLMs to generate their Talk Like A Pirate Day jokes

Saturday, 14 September 2024

I was thinking it’d be funny, but probably too petty, if Port celebrated by play acting taking a group selfie after the siren. But Ken 😬

Monday, 09 September 2024

šŸ”– OAuth from First Principles

For next time I need to talk someone through what oauth is doing

Tuesday, 03 September 2024

I keep seeing the thing from the guy with the messianic belief in startups and extractive capitalism. It's such an obvious thing for a person like that to write that it scarcely warrants mentioning. But I noticed a couple of people say "Yeah, $founder I worked for does the same thing and they're worth billions so what do I know?" as if there aren't countless other founders who did the same thing and flamed out completely and maybe just maybe the on-paper valuation of an organisation is just the consensual hallucination of rent-seekers that bears little to no resemblance to the ability of the organisation to actually meet the expectations that valuation represents.

Sunday, 01 September 2024

I spent the better part of the weekend trying to work out why Mastodon didn’t like my ActivityPub integration. Turns out all the c# libraries think various properties on Actor should be Link objects. They’re supposed to be Collections.

And you know I can’t blame them to much, I’m yet to meet a clear, well written W3C spec.

Tuesday, 27 August 2024

The tendency of technologists to note that some new technology is kinda fucked and almost tailor made to debase society so some billionaires can have more, but blithely shrug and ask ā€œwhat can you do?ā€ continues to radicalise and depress in equal quantities.

Monday, 26 August 2024

šŸ”– No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and no Meetings Without an Agenda

I kind of always worry a little bit about people with bright line restrictions on meetings, like, maybe you're just an introvert who doesn't understand that talking to people is actually the first, second, and third most important tasks on your JD. Still, there is a bit here

Friday, 23 August 2024

It takes a special kind of thinking to emerge from an episode of being so unpopular you have to buy supporters to campaign for your unflattering picture to be removed from view and decide you need to come up with ways to be held in even greater contempt.

Wednesday, 14 August 2024

The thing that sticks in my craw the resentiest about Shorten and the Government not banning gambling advertisements is…. we have publicly funded news. Fucking defend and support that, not the for profit media companies, if you think news is so important.

I just checked and I have a distressing number of notes in my system with the tag #hellojailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ

Wednesday, 07 August 2024

The way things are going, we’re mere weeks away from Vance going on Howard Stern and semi-spontaneously bringing up ā€œthe couch thingā€ to deny it.

Tuesday, 06 August 2024

Luckily no-one is ever going to make the mistake of asking me to adapt a fantasy story for television, but if they did, I am pretty sure I would not pick the one with an extremely thin story, because it’s basically just a fan service book to stop the awful fans from bullying the author, and what cinematic moments it does have cost a bajillion dollars per second to generate on computers.

Friday, 02 August 2024

šŸ”– RFC 9421 - HTTP Message Signatures

Wednesday, 31 July 2024

You’d think Gruber would have an affinity for people who make large, ill-founded stretches to try and score points from a group they don’t like.

Monday, 29 July 2024

There should be half-sized dishwasher-safe occy straps you can use to tie down Tupperware containers so they don’t flip over and fill up with manky water.

Thursday, 25 July 2024

I received a typo'd acknowledgment today, "undertandable". My diseased brain then decided to go off and spend time coming up with a meaning and etymology for that word because why would it do the things I need it to do.

From the Old English under, from PIE *nter- "between, among", and the Middle English both, from Old English toư, from Porto-Germanic *tanthu, from PIE *dent, "tooth"

To be among teeth.

"undertandable" then is to be subscribed to aus.social right after someone has been to the fucking dentist.

Monday, 22 July 2024

šŸ”– I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity

An engineer goes off at the current fad, LLM-based feature development. Particular reference made to grifters and the inability of most companies to even do the basics of software engineering correctly.

Wednesday, 10 July 2024

I’m kind of bummed to learn that Aubrey Plaza is not playing David Haller’s psychotic hallucination in Agatha All Along.

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