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2026-02-19

Week 267: Mouldy cobs

L— requested corn on the cob for dinner so I did my best. Co-op didn’t have any. The greengrocer didn’t have any. Tesco had a few corn cob sections, in plastic bags of four. According to the bags, they were still well within the “best before” date. According to the black mould growing on them, however, … I decided to cook something else.

I go to Tesco for the same reason most people do, I think: because it’s there. It’s the only big supermarket within a 10-minute walk of home. But I’ve lived within 10 minutes of that shop for nearly 20 years, and at the moment, it seems to be at a particularly low point in a patchy history. The vegetable aisle is often almost empty. I haven’t been able to buy fresh coriander there for weeks. I don’t bother growing herbs at home because it’s always been more hassle than just buying them, but perhaps that’s not true any more.

I finally understood how JavaScript works in Rails 8, and I think I can say that I now understand how all the assets work. The important thing to know when learning through trial and error – which is the only way to learn this stuff, as the documentation isn’t enough, and the internet is full of misleading LLM-hallucinated slop posts that claim to explain but don’t – is that even if you think you’ve got something working, clear out the app/assets/builds directory and try again, just in case something was built in a previous iteration and is still there even though you’ve subsequently broken the configuration.

Every building I can remember working in has conducted its fire alarm test in the middle of Thursday morning, and I’ve always wondered what happens if there’s a real fire alarm on a Thursday morning.

This week, the test went on for a bit longer than usual, and I had the opportunity to really listen to the recorded announcement. This repeats “please leave the building via the nearest exit” in the most comedically archaic 1930s RP accent, like Mr Cholmondley-Warner from the Harry Enfield sketches. It sounds like the recording must have been transferred from the original shellac.

We watched a couple of classic Bogart films at the weekend. First was The Big Sleep (1946), a fun, stylish, cool, but extremely confusing film that seems to make sense while it’s going, as long as you don’t think too hard, but which left me baffled by the end.

On one occasion, Bogart, perplexed by the death of one of the minor characters, marched onto the set and asked Hawks:

‘Who pushed Taylor off the pier?’

Equally confused, Hawks could get no explanation from scriptwriters William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett. So he sent Chandler a telegram, asking him to clear things up. But the author couldn’t answer Bogart’s question either.

It’s not just me, then.

The second was The Maltese Falcon (1941). It’s convoluted, but not nearly as confusing as The Big Sleep, even though it zips around from location to location without a pause. The dialogue is great, but Casablanca (1942) far exceeds it for quotable lines.

Lots of links this time:

• ‘Absolute hell’: Irishman with valid US work permit held by Ice since September. They arrest you for no reason, then they try to get you to agree to be deported, then they lie and say you agreed, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
• India Street Lettering is “an archive of the shared typographic culture that thrives in the country’s urban spaces. Built over a decade, this ongoing effort by Pooja Saxena is focused on meticulously documenting, annotating and geo-tagging public lettering made by analog means from around India.”
• GDPR-compliant European static site hosting: “Modern static site hosting with European servers and absolutely no personal data collection!”
• CodingFont: Compare coding fonts via a head-to-head knockout to find your favourite (perhaps).
• No, AI Written Romance Novels Are Not Inevitable. “The New York Times interviewed two authors who claim AI is the future of romance novels, who coincidentally also sell courses about how to use AI to write romance novels.” Just because credulous journalists repeat something doesn’t make it true.
• Windows Notepad exposes users to remote attacks. “The Windows 11 Notepad app, recently upgraded with AI features, now carries a high-severity flaw that exposes users to dangerous attacks. Hackers can simply send boobytrapped text files and remotely compromise users with a single click.” I’m not sure that “upgraded” is the word I’d choose.
• Pandoc in the browser compiled with WASM; convert between different text formats without having to install anything or send your files to anyone else.
• WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives for 2026 sold out. The AI bubble is taking the means of production away from us, forcing us to rely more and more on big rent-extracting cloud providers.
• It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines. It’s always Just A Guy, usually in a place with worse labour protections and lower wages.
• UK council dips into capital assets to fund Oracle project. You don’t have a library so that the council can have a vanity ERP system and Larry Ellison can sit on his gigayacht and fund his malign projects.
• I’m A Proud Luddite. That’s Why I Use Linux. “What is a viable form of resistance against this creeping invasion into our professional and private lives? I argue that one way to push back, even if it is just a little, is simply to use Linux instead of a proprietary OS.”
• An oral history of Bank Python. “When I’ve tried to explain Bank Python in conversations people have often dismissed what I’ve said as the ravings of a swivel-eyed loon. It all just sounds too bonkers.”
• Parents opt kids out of school laptops, ask for pen and paper. “Julie Frumin broke the news to her 11-year-old son in the minivan on the way home from school. His laptop was being taken away. His face lit up. ‘Really?’ he asked, beaming with excitement.”
• A programmer’s loss of identity. “If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.”
• The Dog that Caught the Car: Britain’s ‘World-Leading’ Internet. The Online Safety Act “‘risks making everyone less safe’, it is ‘stripping away that potential for self-actualization’ and ‘harming creative expression’, it constitutes ‘a thinly veiled effort to normalize censorship in the U.K. and expand surveillance of British citizens and guests within their borders’, it is ‘[feeding] young people sanitized, mainstream or government‑approved narratives’, it is ‘a facial recognition sham’ and ‘an abomination […] making us less free, not more safe’, it introduces ‘the new book-banning’ and enables ‘Free Speech for the 0.1%’, and is ‘treat[ing] government speech control as a feature, not a bug.’”
• Tech expert ‘called paedo’ in UK Government Online Safety Act meeting. “‘I was actually in a meeting with the [UK Government in 2020] where I was called a paedo for trying to point out these issues to them.’ Burns said.”