Notes

On his 74th Birthday Kevin Kelly offers another 101 pieces of advice to his children. I especially liked: If you think someone is normal, you don’t know them very well. Normalcy is a fiction. Your job is to discover their weird genius.

Ethan shows how to use a generated .htaccess file to block AI crawlers. I use Netlify so speculating this might be a use case for an edge function.

I think Allan’s right, and it’s not irrational… Been burnt by these (non) features of low-code services a few times.

This is a hard watch, but essential viewing for anyone who cares about what happens when a dictator in all but name unleashes their army on civilians. Direct link

Didn’t know that draw.io supported embedded maths typesetting - even works in the VS Code extension

@majkp@hostux.social shows how to hide large data files from your diffs with .gitattributes

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) says Serco Leisure has been unlawfully processing the biometric data of more than 2,000 employees at 38 UK leisure facilities. It did so to check staff attendance - a practice the ICO said was “neither fair nor proportionate”.

Forget the (slightly strange) world of how schools are managed — this quote is of general applicability in pretty much any organisation: Increasingly I’m convinced that observers have to view the idea of feedback as something that has to be co-constructed to have any value at all. The only feedback that matters has [to] lead to concrete actions a [person] actually takes. A [person] can’t merely receive feedback; they have to generate it themselves, taking account of the observer’s offerings

Wrote up a couple of Power Automate recipes I had to spend ages to get right: reading files from SharePoint and attaching multiple files to email.

An excellent idea from Ton! Adapting it for my own context I can see two possible options - either pull the bookmarks from Mastodon into bookmark entries on this blog, or post to Diigo as new bookmarks. Probably the latter as I am fairly liberal in what I bookmark on Mastodon.

A great way to find new voices and a bit of mind-stimulation…

Dr Shawn Graham ( @electricarchaeo@scholar.social ) runs a course on the history of the internet that takes, in his words, an “archaeological” approach to its subject. Visible from outside the course, and the thing that caught my interest, is his Connectivist approach with Students using Obsidian and Github to maintain notes, and publishing at least part of their work using a pre-configured MkDocs and Github Pages setup with a template repository.

Mikkel’s way of using git seems like it would work for me too.

It’s struck me how we are seeing a renaissance of explaining blogs to people who never saw them before - a good sign but still slightly amusing to those who were around the first time. This post from Frank Meeuwsen is a good example of cutting through the hype that appeared “somewhere in the middle” and getting back to the basics.

Discovered that sites which set Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin break the hypothes.is bookmark. Workaround is to open the site using the “Via” proxy. See GH issue.

Stumbled upon Not a Designer, could usefully review some of these posts. UPDATE - RSS feed is here (via Scott Hanselman))

We have an integration between Dataverse and a third party system that runs in Azure Functions. Third party have now acknowledged that in certain race conditions their system can create two entries duplicated on what should be a unique key. Just deployed what I hope is a fix to our code that uses blob lease distributed locking via the madelson/DistributedLock library…

Some useful ideas for today’s little challenge…

Only just found out that if you set an Excel cell format to Text, it displays formulae as a literal without evaluation. How long did I chase around that issue yesterday? 😠

Note to self - when my single-person Mastodon instance stops serving avatars, check the SSL cert on the media subdomain…

Migrated my Digital garden from Gatsby to Eleventy, using a modified fork of the excellent rothsandro/eleventy-notes

This seems like a useful technique to help code contributors without code maintainers having to commit time they haven’t got to designing the implementation of a feature.

Doc Searls is talking about the essential requirement for a society of any size to have deep news, wide news and a news commons.

For when you don’t have a Mac but your other half does…

Some good practical hints here about making your API more usable through the way you document it.

EU-US data privacy agreement adopted. However, well-known EU privacy campaigners are sceptical, meanwhile a similar agreement between UK-US still seems to be “jam tomorrow”.

One of those problems that comes up so infrequently it’s good to see an explanation from someone whose skills I trust.

I always have to look up the finer points of git submodules, this covers most of them in one place.

An important point about open source being the lynchpin of democratic access to LLM/GPT technology.

It’s not earth-shattering, but I’m happy to support my professional body on this. AI open letter to UK Government and Industry AI is not an existential threat to humanity; it will be a transformative force for good if we get critical decisions about its development and use right. The UK can help lead the way in setting professional and technical standards in AI roles, supported by a robust code of conduct, international collaboration and fully resourced regulation.

10 years of progress lost since pre-pandemic

SEND schools squeezed between legal minimums of staff provision based on student needs, poor funding decisions by local and national government, unfunded pay rises and general inflation…

Like many technologies that go through fads, I still meet people who think these are a new thing.

Finally got around to reading this useful lobbying paper covering some of the things we should be looking to our governments to do around AI. My summary is here.

we’re all pieces of Kintsugi […] the gold representing the people we lost

Hank van Ess writes about how he influenced the output of Google Bard with just three tweets.

When it’s the oldest blog on the internet. Dave Winer reports that Google Bard doesn’t think his blog is actually a blog… #100DaysToOffload 32/100

See this note in my digital garden. #100DaysToOffload 32/100

In summary: significant risk remains of failure to hit targets in many subjects, pay continues to fall in real terms, system capacity to mentor traineees is struggling HT @tonyparkin@mastodonapp.uk

An excellent and informative overview by @ton@m.tgl.eu of the EU vision for public data.

Amazing resource for ‘forgotten gems’ of the radio art. Perfect for relaxing!

A great explainer about how the Fediverse differs from “Big Social” from Lee LeFever at Common Craft

I often have to force myself to write documentation, so this is a very useful list of resources from @rachelandrew@front-end.social

Lovely idea, but what about learning for the over-60’s? “People up to age 60 will be entitled to the LLE” ##100DaysToOffload 27/100

I really like your phrase ’large antenna arrays’! And thanks for the link back to your 2008 post - I think we are seeing a lot of things revisited in the context of the fediverse…

I’m so happy to have discovered these posts by @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space - I learned about microprocessor engineering and programming using the then-current Z80, and the 8086 as featured in this series represented the excitement of the new. These products represent a time when CPU chips were comprehensible to an undergraduate (at a system block level anyway), and carry a load of nostalgia :-) #100DaysToOffload 21/100

In short, based on City Hall figures, the subsidy would be £2.54/meal, whereas the cost to schools is £3.30/meal as estimated by the NEU. HT @tonyparkin@mastodonapp.uk

Not seen this resource previously, HT @harold@mastodon.social CONSPIR: Contradictory, Overriding Suspicion, Nefarious Intent, Something Must Be Wrong, Persecuted Victim, Immune to Evidence, Reinterpreting Randomness #100DaysToOffload 19/100

I could say it’s entirely typical of life that this appears after a big splurge of updates, but I’m interested in exploring incremental side-by-side for upgrading a legacy API from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core #100DaysToOffload 17/100

I like this idea from @ton@m.tzyl.eu that extends beyond the anti-library as another way to manage future attention…

Used to enjoy reading Michelle Ockers on social learning, so good to see her feed light up again after a few years of silence! #100DaysToOffload 15/100

Yet another technology challenge, this time around the Microsoft low-code approach to Power Apps. I’ve been meaning to look more at some of their low-code approaches, this might be a good way to start. #100DaysToOffload 13/100

See New Project Setup - C# #100DaysToOffload 11/100

Via Tony Parkin I see that Alleyn’s (a fancy private school with a fancy price) has taken the bold, but probably sensible step, of ceasing the use of written essays as homework on the basis that the students can easily use a tool like ChatGPT to turn them in. Instead they require the students to do research in preparation for dialogue and assessment in the classroom. How may years will it take the bodies that ‘oversee’ state education in the UK to allow forward-looking Headteachers to do the same thing?

I thought we had learned these lessons before, but maybe not! never assume that colleagues won’t try to do something that they think should work , just because we haven’t told them that the feature is available (or not) 😄 time spent writing good automated tests is rarely wasted - they are your saviour when you revisit code that you last looked at months previously and try to understand what that “cowboy builder” (your past self) did exactly!

Award-winning economist Simon Wren-Lewis dissects the failures of the current government. Notwithstanding their claim to be “neo-liberal”, when compared to two other recent neo-liberal administrations in the UK (Thatcher 1979-1990 and Blair/Brown 1997-2010) their economic failure is stark. Throw in the accompanying moral vacuum and a clear picture emerges of just how disatrous they have been.

One of those things you don’t know you need until you really need it… Find and restore file from Git history #100DaysToOffload 3/100

Manual import of AWS resource to Terraform #100DaysToOffload

The European Central Bank really don’t think much of bitcoin

Sound common-sense advice from a well-known security expert

The impact of users with huge follower counts on Mastodon server resources (in short, $$)

Thought-provoking essay on the cultural challenge of #TwitterMigration

An incredibly clear explanation of how to use the new –update-refs option with git rebase.

Useful addition to the flow runs views for Power Automate, can configure what data from the flow shows in the list, making it easier to debug issues.

Ton comments on the joy of intertwingled conversations “I often state the importance to me of the distributed conversations that blogging and other online interaction, but also travel and making new contacts that continue online, generate. Mostly that effect isn’t easily made tangible, the loops and traces too convoluted to easily explain. But sometimes it suddenly is tangible. […] I’ve mentioned it before, my sense of beauty resides in that mix of complex human interaction and life, the layers, both positive and negative that make up our shared context and connection.

Once it has been agreed to implement new functionality, how long do the associated tasks have to wait in the to-do queue?

A hierarchy of value-producing activities in while processing knowledge in a Digital Garden, Zettelkasten or pretty much any other way of constructing and learning from notes: Reading Collecting quotes Creating excerpts Creating Atomic Notes Creating Connection Creating Tools and Products And concrete steps to improve value: Identify the structures you want to build within your system. What would be a resource for your future self? Be deliberate and avoid all vagueness.

From 0th (known knowns) to 4th (meta ignorance) - a gem from 2000

Will this post to twitter? Will replies come back as webmentions? #indieweb

Ton finds his habit of revisiting “on this day” posts and his mature note-making habit have some interesting synergies: This morning I was reading a blogpost from a few years ago, and immediately two things stood out as concepts. They were just mentioned passingly in the blogpost, but this time they seemed more meaningful than their place in the original text suggested. Off I went down a little rabbithole, writing both notions up and connecting them to the current things that make them stand out to me now, and incorporating other references.

It’s been around almost long enough to have gone out of style and back again, so maybe I’ll give it a go…

Helen Blunden describes the pleasure of knowing that “the company” don’t know what box she fits in, followed by the glow of being visibly appreciated by colleagues from several teams…

Created a new folder in Zotero for my anti-library

Some uses for hypothes.is integration grab my annotations since last run, check convert to bookmark posts on blog ditto but post into markdown pages in garden search for annotations against my domain (once I enable it for hypothes.is) and convert to incoming webmentions

Useful pointer to how to configure the new service on other record types.

this looks like a pretty complete solution - should be able to adapt this to integrate micropub endpoints into this site

Lots of ideas here, and a great example of how, in return for committing to the services from a specific cloud vendor, you can build some really smart application architecture.