Book Review: The World After Amazon - Stories from Amazon Workers by Xenia Benivolski


Black and white illustration of a fascist hellscape.

This is a brilliant idea for a short story collection. Gather a group of non-writers, all of whom have experienced the dystopia of working for Amazon, and support them to write speculative science fiction. Given how futuristic Amazon is, perhaps they have a unique insight into what its future holds. Or, as the rather academic intro puts it: The Worker as Futurist project asks another question: …

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Book Review: Problems Have No Sex - Caroline Haslett (1949)


A blue book cover with a spine that reads "Problems Have No Sex" by Caroline Haslett.

This is the best book on practical feminism that I've read. Because it is long out of print, I had to get the British Library to pull this book out of the archives for me. I'm fascinated by the evolution of feminist discourse in 20th Century UK. I read Myself When Young (1938) which is a series of mini-autobiographies of prominent women. One of them was Dame Caroline Haslett - an electrical…

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Grinding down open source maintainers with AI


Can of Spam. From https://www.flickr.com/photos/27308606@N04/3920588954/in/photolist-6Ys3vh-D4tFyP-5Nfafk-4YquSL-j76egA-b4ThXT-j71TQi-4C6NQo-4zGP8b-8jBWuu-9NZujn-4mZsmC-Skcx6h-6qY9vr-hNh67-5Hf4WS-mSRtT-718hHC-71HDFc-kCAL2L-2NYWTK-kCANQm-6eLuK-6cSS7G-vVZqB-79Z3X-dgu3-4sqgZw-8WuDpp-5FQ3yz-4nFSR8-563Gj-mb7gL-39uw1-5f1fho-2NiBSN-5pDMMS-8b9Hjq-pRrxLR-hfXfA-5xmaj-9vw9hx-o9bd3k-258kqqN-tuDnQ-8YeJPL-5hrex8-pFKpm-vSKr9b-39r59D

Early one morning I received an email notification about a bug report to one of my open source projects. I like to be helpful and I want people who use my stuff to have a good time, so I gave it my attention. Here's what it said: 😱 I Can't Use On This Day 😭 Seriously, What’s Going On?! 🔍 I’ve been trying to use the On This Day feature, but it’s just not working for me! 😩 Every time I input my d…

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Get the location of the ISS using DNS


The International Space Station floats above the planet Earth.

I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability space, the more prosaic reality is that they're just boxen in data centres. They …

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Book Review: The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections - Eva Jurczyk


Book cover.

I did not care for this book at all. It is a dreary crime novel where - shock! horror! - someone has stolen a book. And, yes, it is the obvious suspect. Much like The Martian Contingency I found the lead character profoundly irritating. A miserable protagonist who is completely ineffectual and refuses to take even the most minor of actions. Her self-loathing drips off the page and smothers any…

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Making My Own Hacktoberfest T-Shirts


Two t-shirts with the various Hacktoberfest logos stacked on them.

Between 2014 and 2022, DigitalOcean sent free t-shirts to developers who completed the Hacktoberfest challenge. For entirely sensible reasons related to sustainability and spammy entrants, they stopped doing physical merchandise in 2023. I'm the sort of hip fashionista who only wears free conference t-shirts. GDS@GDSTeamWe support open source. And we’ve got the t-shirts to prove it (thanks @…

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Process Vs Prejudice


A mouse in a clockwork puzzle.

I recently read an interesting article about Accountability Sinks. In it, the author argues that part of the reason for having business processes is that they diffuse accountability. Every one of us has tried to have an argument with an employee of a big company, and it always goes like this: the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on …

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Book Review: The World According to Cunk - An Illustrated History of All World Events Ever, Space Permitting by Philomena Cunk


Book cover with famous people on the front.

There are some characters whose tone of voice is inimitable. You cannot fail to read this without Diane Morgan's languid cadence echoing in your big empty head. The book has been written with a very specific pace - one chuckle per paragraph, a big laugh every page, and a set number of uncontrollable giggles per chapter. Somewhat formulaic, but highly effective. I kept highlighting bits of it…

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Are Brother's Insecure Printers Illegal in the UK?


A padlock engraved into a circuit board.

Another day, another security disaster! This time, multiple printers from Brother have an unfixable security flaw. That's bad, obviously, but is it illegally bad? Let's take a look at details of the vulnerability: An unauthenticated attacker who knows the target device's serial number, can generate the default administrator password for the device. Recently, the UK brought in some laws aimed…

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Book Review: The Left Hand of Dog - Si Clarke


Book cover featuring a person, their dog, and an interstellar tea-pot.

I have to say, I did not get on with this book. The central conceit is that a sci-fi fan is abducted by aliens and their universal translator converts everything into understandable slang. So we get lots of warp factors, ansibles, dilithium crystals, and Hitchiker’s references. It makes the whole thing feel a bit cheap. OK, maybe it is a little silly when an author comes up with some t…

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Contactless Payments with GrapheneOS


Notification showing I paid £3.95 for a sticky bun.

Google's monopolistic stranglehold on Android results in poor experience for power-users, and artificially restricts choice for those who have older phones. For example, Google Wallet is the de facto way to use NFC payments on Android. There's one problem though - it only works with Google's Android. If you have the temerity to install a 3rd party Android OS - like the hyper-secure GrapheneOS - …

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Book Review: First Contact - The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens by Becky Ferreira


Book cover showing a UFO and digital signals.

This is a cheerful and convivial look through the history of humanity's search for life "out there". It isn't an "ancient aliens" style book of nonsense, but rather a steady walk through what has actually happened - and what we hope might happen. It is a beautiful PDF which has been gorgeously typeset and lushly illustrated. So many fonts! Sure, it isn't brilliant for eInk but excellent for a…

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