BIN men: On collection day help householder fitness by leaving their empty bins 2 to 3 houses away. Promote heart health by leaving bins on the kerb edge, partly blocking driveways.
Baz, Mastodon.
#BazTopTip
Baz Top Tips 002
Baz Top Tips 001
DOG walkers: When it’s cold out offer to go on a walk and when the doggie has a poo scoop it into a bag and use it as a hand warmer. Having bags is doubly important at this time.
Baz, Mastodon.
#BazTopTip
RAID
My Engineering Manager put together the detail of a project management course for us, and had it run late last year by an outside agency with vast experience in the field. Quite enjoyable too.
The trainer had individual followup sessions with us all a couple of months ago, but I had nothing specific outside of my regular role to show him at that time.
But some, maybe most, of the concepts stuck and I put myself forward for a key user position (the details of that aren’t important here) that’d need a range of disciplines – project management at a department level included. Also good communication skills, which kind-of put me off a bit.
Anyway, some acronyms.
The basic framework for analysis and ongoing control of a project, ‘RAID‘ stands in my case for Risks, Actions, Issues and Dependencies. I think the classical RAID1 uses Assumptions – but I’m not in charge of the wider project so mine are rolled into Risks.
Surprisingly I managed to shoehorn a RAID log into a Microsoft Planner (basic)2 kanban board using labels and ‘group [ing] by labels’. I’ve added columns for ‘milestones’, ‘input required’, ‘not doing’ and ‘confirmed/completed’ – the latter to get over Planner’s inability to keep completed tasks visible.
And then there’s the ‘RACI‘ responsibility stakeholder matrix3 – a thing I’ve bastardised in my head to Responsible, Accountable, Complicit and Intolerant.
Ok, ok, it’s supposed to be Consulted and Informed but the original letters don’t seem to account for human behaviours, and so I feel entirely justified in giving it a personal twist – mainly so I can, erā¦ simply remember it.
I’m not using one of those, the matrix will be defined by those above me running the project.
You know, the ones who set the project start dates, assign responsibilities, set up access right and trainingā¦
Ok, Microsoft Planner is the tool the ordinary peeps in our department will be using starting soon, so I intend to make the best of it. The problem is it doesn’t easily interface with anything other than Project – including Outlook. That is quite frankly ridiculous. I mean, even Microsoft Power Automate singularly failed to add a new row of data to the Excel thing I put together to capture completed tasks.
Heck, the basic version doesn’t even have dependenciesā¦
Oh, I implied I needed the project management training earlier. That’s true. However I know how to use web software such as ClickUp.com4 (etc.) to manage my own workload – a service I found indispensable to me, keeping me sane working at home during the 2020 UK lockdowns.
So, as the wait to start begins, I have to say I’m getting a little impatient. In a good way naturally. I’m not having dark thoughts and I’m definitely not thinking of increasing the number of Risk entries to one considering the effect of missed dates, nope, not I.
Footnotes:
- ‘What Is a RAID Log and Why Should I Use One?’, ProjectManager.com link: https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/raid-log-use-one ↩
- ‘Compare Microsoft Planner basic vs. premium plans’, Microsoft link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/compare-microsoft-planner-basic-vs-premium-plans-5e351170-4ed5-43dc-bf30-d6762f5a6968 ↩
- ‘Responsibility assignment matrix’, Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix ↩
- ‘ClickUp.com, Software to replace all software’, Clickup.com link: https://clickup.com. In my opinion usability has declined since the 4.0 update (AI included) – it’s no longer the same as the thing that kept me sane). ↩
Apocalyptic
@atoponce@fosstodon.org posted a poll earlier:
What is your preferred “end of the world” apocalyptic scenario?
– Aliens
– Nuclear fallout
– Pandemic
– Zombies
Assume strict science fiction and not fantasy fiction in the scenario (no supernatural magic).
The last time I looked Aliens was comfortably in the lead with 61% of the vote.
Quite naturally given that the world is undergoing an unprecedented period of stability and equality andā¦ I took the question seriously and replied thus:
Feel free to accuse me of overthinking this š but is this based on the likely survivability of my family and me (ark ship, bunker, isolated cottage) or a quick and easy demise free from watching the inevitable dismantling of our, erā¦ civilisation?
*Or* (cue spooky music) something painful in between, something extraordinarily painful?
Maybe I should think of the bigger picture. š
Aaron’s response?
There aren’t really any rules other than no supernatural mumbo jumbo. I think that’s part of what makes this question kind of fun.
Are zombies animated only for a limited few days/weeks before decay makes them immobile?
Will the cancer from nuclear fallout kill you quickly, or will it be a slow painful death?
Are you food for the aliens or a science experiment?
Me, after a bit of thought:
I’ve voted for aliens on the basis that my preferred scenario involves the destruction of Earth for a hyperspace bypass, and it happens not long after the announcement. I’ve never been keen on prolonging things. š
Ok, I’m not at all keen on the destruction of anything but if it has to happen I’d like my participation in it to be over quickly. Incidentally, the hyperspace bypass thing is borrowed from the novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy1, a trilogy in five parts.
So, why did I not choose any of the other worthy contenders?
Nuclear fallout?
I’m thinking of Chernobyl.2 I’ve watched dramatised documentaries34 and actual documentaries of the nuclear meltdown incident. That’s accidents. Thoughts on the intentional use of nuclear weapons leads me right to Threads – a film I cannot bring myself to watch but that I’ve read lots about.5
Not sure, but I don’t think I’d want to survive in a bunker, to see out my days cut off from ‘life’.
Pandemic?
2019- COVID-19. Everyone who reads this will have a memory of the 2019- pandemic. But not everyone died, and civilisation didn’t collapse, so that’s alright then.
1981- HIV/AIDS. Mostly under control, and it’s a good thing global outreach programmes are still well-funded isn’t it.
1918-1920 Spanish flu. Pretty much no-one who lived through this is alive now. A 100% mortality rate by now should annoy most people, right?6
1331-1353 Black Death.
Heck no, it’s not an exhaustive list, but this is only a blog post, I’m no academic!
Pandemics vs epidemics though, it’s all a matter of scale, excess mortality rates, pre-existing medical conditions, demographics, isn’t it.
So, a world-ending virus, bacteria, biological thing, has to be pretty, erā¦ virulent, right?
Zombies
Watch the film ‘Shaun of the Dead’.7. That’s all.
It won’t be enough to prepare you for zombies, but it’s a good start.
I can’t choose this way to go because I wouldn’t want people I know and love to be consumed by or turn into zombies and want to eat my face off. Erā¦ whether they consciously want to or not. I see enough of that with the increasing reliance on social media and propaganda shaping opinions instead of taking the time to have views shaped by ‘hard’ news organisations. So much for my 1997 dream of a golden age of information availability.
And, like most people, I rely on infrastructure spanning the turn of the 21st century for my survival. Were not ready for bartering and butchering and bravery.
Soā¦
Aliens
Right. I’ve read and watched a good amount of science fiction. The ones that stand out, plot themes from memory:
‘Footfall’, novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; conquest, assimilation, kinetic energy weapons.
‘The War of the Worlds’, novel by H.G. Wells; mass killings, enslavement, nourishment, climate change (in the grossest of senses).
‘Battlefield Earth’, large novel by L Ron Hubbard; mass killings, enslavement. Great book, dire film worth watching only after reading the book and then never again.
‘Doctor Who’, TV series; particularly extermination by the Daleks.
‘V’, TV series; sneaky extermination, eating us.
‘To Serve Man’, Twilight Zone TV episode; misunderstandings, a cookbook for humans.
There’s a theme that pervades (is that the right word?) most of these works, that humanity will somehow prevail against the might of space-going aggressors. Sure millions die along the way, butā¦
And that’s the problem. I’d still want to ‘go’ quickly. I’m not prepped and ready, not even for probing by little green men
Hyperspace bypass then. I don’t even want to know of the planning application. Ignorance is bliss.
Or is itā¦
Links:
- ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guidevto the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams, Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheHitchhiker%27sGuidetotheGalaxy. ↩
- ‘Chernobyl disaster’, Wikipedia link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster ↩ - ‘Surviving Disaster review Chernobyl’, brief Aerial Telly review, 2006: https://aerialtelly.co.uk/surviving-disaster.php. (Page is broken but the review still stands).
‘Chernobyl Nuclear – Surviving Disaster (BBC Drama Documentary) FULL COMPLETE 1hr – ADE EDMONDSON’, video on DailyMotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tufjj ↩ - ‘Chernobyl (miniseries)’, Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries) (Jared Harris is superb in this). ↩
- ‘Threads (1984 film)’, Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film). (One of the most terrifying things the BBC has ever shown). ↩
- Please note the sarcasm here, sorry! ↩
- ‘Shaun of the Dead’ film, Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_of_the_Dead ↩
power
The thing about power, including when people use terms like soft power and hard power, is that it is entirely misunderstood.
There is a quotation that follows people with power and authority. Until literally just now I had never thought to search out the context.
Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, KCVO DL) wrote it in a letter1 to Archbishop Mandell Creighton on April 5, 1887.
So, not just anyone then.
And this is it:
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
Speaking of bad men, I wildly overestimated the number of false or misleading statements made by the 45th President of the United States of America. It turns out that, according to the Washington Post, he only made 30,573, not the 48,000 figure I had in my head.2
It’s only been a little over 5 years since he lost the previous election.
My most repeated quotation with the #QuoteSunday hashtag – across 4 social networks including the fondly-remembered App.net – is by George Santayana. You’ll have seen and probably heard this one too:
” Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Until about 16 or 17 months ago it was my fervent hope (even as an Englishman I’m being honest here) that President 47 would be constrained by the power of existing laws, and ‘the people’ would have the representation toā¦3
Yeah, I’m naive.
Dictator.
No, in no way, shape or form a benevolent one.
Anyway, even when power is wielded for good it doesn’t always work out as intended.
R. White, whose tireless leadership led to the retention of the Cleveland Browns Football Franchise for this great community.
Mayor White quarterbacked a team of citizens who refused to quit until they scored a final and permanent victory.
“Our name, our team, our colors,” became the slogan and the goal for his successful campaign. This magnificent stadium serves as the new home of the Browns and it also serves as a tribute to the effort that reflects the spirit and tenacity that makes Cleveland a special place.”
- Link to Lord Acton’s letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton, Apr. 5, 1887: https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html ↩
- ‘False or misleading statements by Donald Trump (first term)’. Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump_(first_term). (Wikipedia used because the WaPo page might be paywalled). ↩
- ‘Trumpās vow to only be a dictator on āday oneā follows growing worry over his authoritarian rhetoric’, AP News link: https://apnews.com/article/trump-hannity-dictator-authoritarian-presidential-election-f27e7e9d7c13fabbe3ae7dd7f1235c72 ↩
AI
A couple of days ago I signed up to The Human made Webring, a ring for people actively avoiding AI on their own web sites. That is not all of the philosophy of course, but I have a confession. Not a deep or in-depth confession.
I use AI.
I have been thinking, how do I use it?
Most of the time it is entirely involuntarily. That said, I do try to avoid it wherever I can:
- I switched AI off on my iPhone. Being honest, when I last tried it, it was not much help, especially attempting to summarise incoming messages or grouping alerts. Now there may be a time when it’s unavoidable, you know how fashions go.
- Itās switched off at Github.com. I do not code much but when I do I prefer to do things myself (yes, with help from StackExchange.com).
- I use the Kagi.com search engine (without its AI). It simplifies search, no AI summary, no ads, no sponsored content. It finds stuff without the guff.
- I haven’t touched Facebook for a while. It’s sometimes necessary to find out what’s happening locally or for shop opening times. I do use WhatsApp because I’d struggle to keep in touch with people I care about – those who don’t use Mastodon.
- Twitter is occasionally a necessary evil for hyper-local news.
- My car is over 16 years old and not even the clock updates automatically. I don’t know if I’d have auto updates by spending the extra Ā£1,000 for the top of the range version. But even that just had more things to potentially go wrong.
When I cannot avoid AI:
- I scroll past it at work when Iām using Google or Bing. (Iām not paying for Kagi at work). Iām only enough to remember an internet without Google. The problem is, I could probably save time by using the data in the AI summaries, especially some of the more technical stuff.
- I check sources sent to me from colleagues. It’s not that I don’t trust their judgment, it’s just I’ve learned a lot through bitter experience.
What Iām unsure about:
- Translations.
- Everything else online. This one’s a biggie isn’t it.
The thing is, how can AI and large language models be defined? I’m old enough to remember (you’ve heard this phrase before) much simpler stand-alone and connected systems:
- When computers weren’t powerful enough to do anything but simulate an intelligence, e.g. ELIZA, a natural language processing program. It was interesting but after even casual use didn’t really give the impression it understood the conversation. Illusion.
- Infocom adventures – interactive fiction. They used a limited parser to navigate a path through imaginary worlds full of monsters and traps. Spellbinding stuff. If you’ve ever seen a variation on “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.” then you have a glimpse of how important the Zork adventure was.
- The first telephone banking automations, the “Read out the 16-digit long number after the beep”, and the “Say yes” kind of things.
I suppose one could lump these two into a small language model type? And I’m probably using the word ‘simulate’ incorrectly too.
Dunno what’s next as I slowly remove AI.
Obsolescence?
War
When a nation is at war with another a calculation is made, how can we end it quickly?
Negotiation or an overwhelming display of force, both strategies are intended to show the foreign power it would be a good idea to stop attacking.
The 2026 Iran War is not a war. I’m pretty sure none of the wars the USA had involved themselves in since WWII have been wars. They get fancy names, Desert Storm, Operation Epic Fury, adult stuff right?
So if not wars then what?
It’s about control, not an imminent threat.
And because there’s no imminent threat one has to be manufactured.
Of course 2 parties are using missiles or dropping bombs on the other, and sure, other nations are helping out. But both Israel and the USA don’t seem too concerned with the convention of “we need to end this as soon as we can”.
If the war was won a few weeks ago then why are the bombs still dropping? Why is the deranged US dictator threatening to destroy all the Iranian bridges and power plants tomorrow? Why the deaths?
There’s another calculation in wartime. The first part, how long will it take to rebuild after the conflict ends and destruction and loss of life can be assessed? The second part, who’s going to do it? The third part is likely to be, how much can we make on the interest payments?
It’d be naive to assume that people don’t get rich from making armaments and reconstructing a country’s infrastructure. But I sense there’s been a plan all along.
China and Russia are used to building major infrastructure projects in areas ‘the west’ neglects, especially when the west withdraws funding.
But they’re not the bad guys here, despite Russia’s Ukraine War. Not the bad guys in the limited context of a rebuild or a shift in the world order.
There’s money to be made. Lots of it. And the people who make it for themselves don’t care where it comes from. Same as it ever was.
Before I finish this superficial, fact-light post, I have to make mention of a Mastodon toot I saw earlier. When replying to a post about the elevated likelihood that nuclear weapons would be used against Iran, a reply said they were more concerned with the near-certainty of climate change than the chance of nukes.
Climate change and the devastation that will bring is real. But we must not take our eyes off the here-and-now. We can’t allow an imminent terrible thing to happen because we don’t care it’s not as big as a more far-away terrible thing.
A fourth part to the calculation above, how long will it take for the defeated nation to pay for a rebuild? Right now it’s looking like the power plants and bridges might be destroyed tomorrow. Oil facilities have already been targeted. How could Iran pay?
I mean, it’s not as though there’s a narrow strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea that’s ripe for luxury resorts. Is it now.
So oil? Well, of course.
If it was just the re-opening of the Straits of Hormuz there’d be no need to make a country literally dark and impenetrable.
In much the same way the USA wanted to acquire the minerals and rare earth elements from Ukraine and Greenland, it’s greed.
I can’t bring myself to conclude anything right now. Well, apart from wondering who’s going to be the first nuclear power to use them in the 21st century.
USA?
Israel?
Oh, and we’ve got an entire region potentially up in arms. Yay.
Terrorists? Yay.
But terrorism, when it starts, will have a sound foundation that not many rational, sane people can deny.
From a blog post in 2017:
“One final point, simply attempting vengeance, to kill terrorists without any other coherent strategy to stop ordinary people being turned into terrorists, will never work.”
From another, showing what sane people are up against, another (sweary) 2017 blog post:
“We really do not know how lucky we are.”
Human made Webring
I happen to be lazy when it comes to generating blog posts. No, I don’t use any form of AI1, I just occasionally repurpose text I’ve made elsewhere.
So here is one lightly remodelled from an email I sent asking to sign up to The Human made Webring, a ring highlighting sites made by people against using AI slop in their personal websites.
Great idea @peach@phpc.social!
So what is a webring? A collection of sites set up around a ring-like structure with simple links to a previous site, a next site, and a random site. Look at the bottom of each of my pages here for more. (As of the time of writing I’m not in the ring so only previous and next work).
Itās been decades since I last signed up to one – something I found on GeoCities, so probably common during the late nineties and early noughties. Iāve not gained much in the way of social reach since, so I wonāt be much of a publicist or evangelist. But as a member and consumer of fediverse content I’m definitely hoping this takes off!
Best wishes to everyone who signs up!
- I have one AI-generated image in this blog. A prize to whoever finds it. (The prize is not having to read more of my blog). š ↩
Flush
It sometimes takes the smallest of things to spark my interest. The combination of the Artemis II toilet situation1 and this Mastodon post about returning home by @sundogplanets@mastodon.social did that. Big time.
In 1992 mum and I went on our first foreign holiday, to the west coast of the USA. I had enough time to research what differences we were likely to find, but my biggest fail was not anticipating mixer taps and toilet flushes.
A tap is a faucet in the ‘States. But that’s not it.
San Diego and Phoenix had cards by the handbasins asking patrons to save water directly, and save water by cutting down towel change requests. Makes a lot of sense there due to the region’s climate.
In the United Kingdom taps were, in my experience at least, two at a time, a hot and a cold. No mixers. Toilet flushes were either a pivoting handle on the front of the cistern or a chain pull when the cistern was suspended just below ceiling level.
And, right through until 2007, that’s just how it was. Pretty much.
And then my wife, first daughter and I moved house.
The previous owners – we called them ‘The Bastards’ for various reasons throughout the period of negotiation, the legal stuff, and for the issues we found after moving in – had installed ‘luxury’ features such as single push button low-capacity-cistern flushes, mixer taps in the en-suite (did we become posh buying the place?) and bathroom (the place with a bath).
Ooooā¦ nice.
The utility room (yeah, we’re posh) and downstairs toilet (we have 3 toilets!) had a hot and cold tap and a handle flush. Fine, we’re not in those for long, and it was familiar.
But time passed and upgrades happened. So now we have push button flushes through and mixer taps everywhere apart from the utility room.
It’s not fashion. We save money with each flush – the designs have been updated to use less water. I get it. Butā¦
Work installed new toilets, stand-up urinals and handbasins within the last year. The toilets have a dual-button flush. The taps have proximity detectors, the urinals work off a timer. (I don’t go in the Ladies). Every time I use the flushes I must think – which button?
I need an acronym thingy, because ‘small for yellow and big for brown’ doesn’t somehow work.
- Great head and tag lines! ↩
Space
I watched a NASA moon launch live last night (UK time). Artemis 2. This mission sends a crewed spacecraft around the moon1 but you probably already knew that.
Cannot remember anything of Artemis 1. Still sinking in that I’m old enough to at least have been alive during the Apollo mission programme. I do not remember any of that either but I am lucky enough to know someone who does.
And as I have the Pale. Blue. Dot. feels right now I’ll go to bed thinking of great things.
- I wanted so badly to say “fly” but it just does not sound right somehow. Need to refresh my nerd creds. ↩