Like many of us¹, I partake in the social ritual of daily puzzle games. Some of my favourites of these are lesser known gems such as The Daily Spell², Clues by Sam, and Bracket City³, but my first love was NYT's Connections (sorry Wordle fans⁴).

Now, Connections is a flawed game⁵, and yet I find myself inexorably drawn back to it each day (even if only as one item in the sequence of other puzzles in the binge). Perhaps it's the thrill of cracking Purple first, or perhaps it's telling myself that I should just do it to try and do something potentially edifying with my last few minutes of the day, or perhaps it's just to spite whatever outlandish and/or unguessable groups it no doubt has to present that day⁶.

So, what does one do while staring at a puzzle, other than think about meta-gaming it?

There is currently much hullabaloo in the software-producing¹ domain about whether LLMs (or AGI generally) will soon™ replace us all (or indeed, all white collar jobs).

Burnout comes not from working hard, or even working hard without reward — but from being worked hard without hope of improvement.
These conditions do not come about by accident — they are a product of company culture, planning, and management techniques.

So, if I were a manager with an employee I wanted to quit, here's what I would do:

The Problem:#

I ran into an interesting problem today when trying to handle a particularly hellish scenario¹. The situation is thus:

• I'm spinning up a new API service (using ASP.NET)
• We are re-using a bunch of existing infrastructure, including:
  • Our business-modelling graph database (we use Memgraph), and
  • Some C# libraries that define our interface with that DB, and a bunch of API helper services
• For primarily historical reasons², said graph database models most entities that are accessible via the API as nodes that have two IDs.
  • One is an internal ID (arbitrary, auto-assigned by various databases over time)
  • The other is a publicly-shared UUID³ (that we give customers and is used in our API's I/O)
    continue post →

And so, I find myself entering the blogosphere, about two decades too late. Three if you don't restrict yourself to the period of time where penning a blog would be something I would (a) be interested in, and (b) be capable of.

The death of the blog¹ has many contributing factors that I would not be qualified to comment upon², but the latest bugle-batten screw in the coffin is the slew of LLM-spewed SEO-spam content-farms generating "chunked" pages, masquerading as Real People™ writing Real Content™. You know the ones — they have a 10-15 point numbered table of contents two pages of scrolling down outlining the five-Ws of whatever the topic at hand is, and contain about 100 times as many words as would be necessary to actually address the headline question³.
The web feels bad.