Jonathan McDowell

Last week I had lunch with a bunch of industry folk who seemed almost angry at my claims I personally saw no benefits in using AI, and insisted I was using it wrong, or hadn't tried enough. Today I had brunch with a bunch of folk from the local tech scene, and while some of them seemed to be using AI regularly some were not, and there was generally an air of scepticism about the touted benefits.

I don't know what my point is other than joy in my local tech scene.

Currently sitting in Denver airport thinking one of these days I need to tack a visit to Portland onto a US trip and see all my peeps there. Mostly these days I minimise the duration of any trip to avoid time away from home.

In Newcastle and the weather is much better today than yesterday. I have, of course, played some skee ball.

I was reminded today that I have found very, very few conferences I am personally prepared to spend much on a ticket for. I tend to find I get more out of the grassroots community events that aren't high cost, but perhaps I'm missing out on something?

Android's gesture based navigation is terrible and someone should be ashamed. It's all been downhill since they dropped the physical keyboard.

After over 7 years of living here, my bedroom ceiling light finally has a lampshade.

@iain @emenel So Framework are out, Dell are out, does this mean I'm stuck with Lenovo?

@jzb@hachyderm.io @TheBreadmonkey@beige.party El Estepario Siberiano.

@RogerBW@discordian.social And now I'm down a rabbit hole of gluing MQTT, GStreamer + SnapCast together in Python, so I hope you're happy with what you've done.

@RogerBW@discordian.social Ta. I see it's on FDroid too. Might be a bit overkill for my needs, but I'll have to give it a whirl.

Anyone else see the latest XKCD and think "You're my wife now, Dave"?

@n8@mastodon.social Perhaps the fact it forced you to have an Instagram account, as it was an offshoot of that?

@simontatham @sunflowerinrain One of the nice things about weechat (which I switched to from irssi, which I switched to from BitchX, which I switched to from ircII) is that the history buffer is per window.

Do modern UEFI firmwares end up shadowed in system RAM, like classic BIOS in the olden days? I've seen some suggestion they are, but nothing authoritative.

As a remote worker I got bored of seeing one sided discussions that don't understand any benefits of return-to-office, so I wrote a thing. https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2024/09/the-rto-conspiracy.html

I have never heard them offer to let people off the plane if they've decided they no longer wish to travel before.

I tried to work out what I want in a Linux distribution. I think the desire for stable releases with security support rules out a lot of the smaller options, but perhaps I'm missing something I should look at, if I do decide I'm moving away from Debian?

https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2026/08/what-do-i-want-distro.html

@broonie@mastodon.social Yup. I've worked in an open plan office with *plenty* of space and that can work just fine, but mostly the tendency seems to be to pack folk in and not have enough meeting rooms etc for the disruptive conversations. Used to work in an office where it hit 5pm and everyone was on a call from their desk to the West Coast. Skype O'Clock, and not conducive to getting anything done.

@n8@mastodon.social That _was_ (probably still is?) the case - your Instagram username is your Threads username as they're backed by the same auth mechanism (or were). I think at the start you couldn't delete Instagram without losing Threads, but that got a bit separated out.

@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer Needs a PicoCF variant.