Quick bits:

• Happy 100th anniversary to the Surrealist Manifesto.

• Nobody commented on how the double quotes around the word “pedant” in my previous week­notes were the wrong ones. I’m impressed!

• I have a Bluesky account now. I’m not entirely sure why; I don’t really intend to use it much. Perhaps it is just to reserve my username there. (It would have been nice to grab “denis” as a username, but that opportunity is long gone.)

  Of course, I signed up right before Bluesky announced their Series A investment from a fucking blockchain company. Eurgh!

• I had brunch with friends and suggested paying for the group before I realized the place was cash-only and I didn’t even have enough cash on hand to pay for my own stuff so I had to go back and ask them to pay for me instead. Awkward.

• Interpreter book update: three chapters have their first draft done, and one chapter is in progress. I’ve got about seventeen chapters to go. (And then the second draft, and so on.)

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Shower thoughts:

• The incremental improvements to AI turned out to be more like excremental improvements.

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I replaced the font on my web site with the standard system font. The previous one, Atkinson Hyperlegible is a little too quirky for my liking.

As an added benefit, the site should be even lighter now, and thus load even faster. Cloudflare’s URL scanner tells me my homepage is a tiny 81 kB (uncompressed). Also, the Website Carbon Calculator gives me an A+ rating. Neat!

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In my last week­notes, I wrote that I think anything worth doing is worth doing well, but in the mean time I have rather changed my mind on the subject.

There are a great many things in my life that I have done, and still am doing, “well enough.” A few examples:

• In university (and to some extent in high school), I studied just enough that the chance of passing the exams was high enough. There were subjects where I ignored entire chapters because what I had already studied gave me a high-enough passing chance.

• At work, I don’t generally go the extra mile to attain the financial bonus. I’ve written before about how I think bonus programs are not worth the effort. I always still do good work,¹¹1 As evidenced by the positive performance review results I got at work earlier this week! Hurray!  but I’m not going the extra mile.

When do I go all the way, when do I aim for “good enough,” and when do I put in only the minimum necessary effort?

Is this, perhaps, my fear of failure wearing a mask?

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I got the most cursed job opportunity from a recruiter earlier this week. This was an opportunity for an AI chatbot company, which provides “personal and interactive AI companionship, allowing adults to indulge their fantasies safely and without judgement.”

Gross. Unbelievably gross.

I told the recruiter that I would not in good conscience be able to work on products like these, and that I believe these sorts of chatbots are inherently unethical, and no amount of safeguards or constraints will ever make them okay. I also told the recruiter to reconsider working with this AI company.

AI chatbots are dangerous, as evidenced in the recent lawsuit regarding a chatbot that caused a teen’s suicide.

Any creator of software has a duty to society to do no harm. When we as software developers create something, we need to think long and hard about the negative impact it can have, and refuse to create products or features that harm.

An AI chatbot that “[allows] adults to indulge their fantasies safely and without judgement” is deeply and inherently problematic.

I do not fear AI becoming sentient and taking over humanity any time soon, but I fear technologists dabbling with technology without understanding — and especially not caring about — the impact on society, culture, and psychology.

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I would like to translate bits of the article Bolt CEO vows to crack down on ‘insanity of people working from Bali’ into regular English:

We are too scattered

We think remote working inherently doesn’t work. It’s not just us being bad at it — honestly!

people feel disconnected

If we bring people back to miserable offices, they’ll have nothing but each other for support. We’re connecting people! We’re truly doing this for the benefit of our employees! We are so selfless.

attrition is too high

We believe the best way to decrease attrition is to make people more miserable. We have charts that clearly show this, and we are definitely not holding those charts upside down.

and our offices lie empty

We’ve accidentally bought a hundred thousand pencils that nobody wants to use. We are amending the contracts to forbid anyone from using any other writing utensil. We believe this is sensible.

We will stop the insanity of people working remotely from places like Bali. That is a vacation, not what we hired them to do

We believe the people of Bali are lazy. In a non-racist sort of way, of course!

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Entertainment:

• I finished the Alan Wake novelization²²2 Rick Burroughs, Alan Wake (New York: Tor, 2013).  and played the remastered Alan Wake game.³³3 Alan Wake Remastered (Remedy Entertainment, 2021), published by Epic Games Publishing.  I think I have immersed myself in too much Alan Wake. It’s just Alan Wake Alan Wake Alan Wake over here these days. What am I doing‽

  Also, I upgraded my copy of Alan Wake II⁴⁴4 Alan Wake II (Remedy Entertainment, 2023), published by Epic Games Publishing.  to the Deluxe Edition, giving me access to the DLCs. I’ve finished the The Lake House DLC, which was great — and distinctly horrific.⁵⁵5 This probably does not come as a surprise, but playing horror games well into the early night is not the most conducive to having good sleep. Mistakes were made.  Alan Wake Alan Wake Alan Wake!!!

• I’ve rediscovered The Chemical Brothers, with their albums No Geography⁶⁶6 The Chemical Brothers, No Geography, Virgin EMI Records, 2019.  and For That Beautiful Feeling.⁷⁷7 The Chemical Brothers, For That Beautiful Feeling, EMI Records, 2023.  Both fantastic albums. Alan Wake.

Alan Wake. Alan Wake.⁸⁸8 Alan Wake. 

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Tweets and toots:

• “Grand Theft Autocomplete is my new favourite term for LLMs” — ben ui

• Simon Tatham on the median’s little-known dual statistic: I laughed out loud.

Links:

• Gaza in rubble and ruin (Reuters)

• Hidden in Midwestern Cornfields, Tiny Edens Bloom (Cara Buckley for the New York Times)

• Guess who’s suing the FTC to stop ‘click to cancel’ (The Verge): Ugh.

• Six Lies Elon Musk Believed (in the last 24 hours) (Hank Green)

• Half-assing it with everything you’ve got (Nate Soares, via Alexander Mankuta)

• Is my blue your blue?: Well obviously turquoise is blue.

• Mersenne Prime Discovery - 2^136279841-1 is Prime!

• Overwhelmed by Digital Privacy? Reset with These Practical Tips (The Markup): From January this year, but still relevant!

• Perfectly Packed (Minecraft Mod): Unhinged. (The square packing problem produces such bizarre solutions that make me question the nature of reality.)

• i made an illegal shoe to run faster (Answer in Progress): I love Sabrina on her silly yet definitely interesting quests.

Tech links:

• nevesnunes/z80-sans: OpenType font that disassembles Z80 instructions: Ewww!

• Smarter than ‘Ctrl+F’: Linking Directly to Web Page Content (Ahmad Alfy): I had never heard of this! I will definitely make use of this.

• Accountability sinks (A working library/Mandy Brown)

• Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said (Garance Burke and Hilke Schellmann for ABC News): Whisper is the only decent thing that has come out of OpenAI, and even that piece of software is… very much not great.