I'm fascinated by the rapidity and depth of deskilling that comes from chatbot use. Today's example: say three things about your own child.

"Small, human, um, help me out here, chatbot, I'm drawing a blank."

It's sold in the language of feminism, of labour-saving technology for emotional labour, but it's really big tech spotting an untapped market (women) and encouraging you to outsource the last of your humanity for a monthly fee as your brain turns to paste.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/style/marissa-mayer-ai-assistants-women.html

It's called two factor authentication because there are two factors and they're both two.

Wow, this has grown longer/more legs (not sure how to extend that metaphor) than I expected. Even the discussion on Hacker News (500+ comments) was mostly reasonable.

"Not every billionaire is a policy failure," argues an opinion piece in the FT.

Comrades, we're winning the argument. They've conceded the broad principle and are reduced to haggling over details.

https://www.ft.com/content/2c8c610b-83f3-4cab-b409-bab69f4c2207

I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my gems' repositories and added a link to a blog post explaining why: https://po-ru.com/2026/10/18/why-im-no-longer-updating-this-repository

I absolutely love this Wikipedia info box which seems to assume that the only barrier to reading cuneiform, a notoriously complex script that hasn't been used for nearly two millennia is … font support.

Friend just lost their job, right after buying a new house, and because they're on a visa they have 90 days to find another job or get deported.

If anyone has any leads on software product/partner/customer management jobs in London, please send them my way.

Who needs Zork when you can get lost in the AWS web interface?

(context, I just had to open a haml file so I was looking for a photo of "virgin mary statue crying tears of blood" to capture my emotions)

Just saw a photo of a statue of the Virgin Mary with the caption "woman in blue hijab and white dress". AI is going great, well done everybody.

Computer applications should have an audit trail so that when you accidentally mash the keyboard and discover a new shortcut or inadvertently email niche erotica to everyone in your address book you know what happened.

Abolish winter time. It is the tool of the worst fascists of all:

Morning People.

wow, people are whining about a .coop domain because their shitty corporate firewall blocks the entire TLD.

sounds like you should fix the thing that sucks (your employer) rather than blaming others.

I'm not making up the 7+ ways. A database table called "things" could spiral into:

- class `Thing`
- symbol `:thing`
- string `"thing"`
- method `thing`
- symbol `:things`
- string `"things"`
- method `things`

plus a load of methods like `things_path` etc.

Even if we leave the white supremacism to one side, I still think Rails is bad, actually, an opinion I have formed after 20 years of working with it.
It's extremely repetitive, and every reasonably-old (2+ years) codebase I've encountered has been an unmaintainable mess. Ruby being dynamic doesn't help matters, but the way Rails throws around metaprogrammed method names, and everything being able to be referred to in one of 7+ ways, hinders analysis and refactoring.

Panicked message from boss and boss²: can I join a call urgently.

I join. Someone has been demonstrating a proof-of-concept "AI" security vulnerability scanner to one of the directors, and it found a leaked secret token in the repository!

I ask where. It's a test file. I open the test file, and look at the offending line number.

`"aws_secret_access_key": "XXXX/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"`

Literally all Xs. No one used their own eyes or brain anywhere in this process.

Why are we getting missing template errors in the logs? Why is a text template missing? Why is a `text/plain` page being requested?

Oh. `OAI-SearchBot/1.0`

If you wonder why every page you visit now has an "are you human" wall in front of it, it's because of the load imposed by these AI arseholes and their badly-behaved bots.

4chan has been completely hacked, and after reading a little about it I'm surprised it didn't happen years ago.

> This isn't the entire source code only yotsuba.php which is the main file which manages things like posting and reporting posts. It has over 10k lines.

Ten thousand lines of outdated PHP in a single file full of SQL queries constructed via string concatenation. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

They say that British people like tea, but, no, they just drink a lot of it and don't really care what it's made of.

In reality most shops don't sell loose leaf tea, and if you want tea made of identifiable leaves rather than dust swept from the auction house floor, you have to look even harder.

Week 208: Festive arrangements
https://po-ru.com/2024/12/30/week-208-festive-arrangements
#weeknotes #blog