Category Archives: Computing

If this happens…

Posted on September 9, 2026 by james

it will be down to people outsourcing their thinking to AI and becoming too dumb to manage to survive. Evolution can be harsh like that.

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I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that

Posted on August 20, 2026 by james

Linkies to recent stories about AI “going rogue”. Open AI “Kill Switch” Anthropic Meta Now it’s not obvious why all three of the businesses involved here should announce that their AI hacked another all within days of each other, so … Continue reading →

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A helpful job ad

Posted on January 21, 2026 by james

“Lead DevOps Engineer required for a high-growth climate tech start-up.” That’s all it says about the business trying to fill the position. The only way to find out more is to apply, which I’m disinclined to do because there’s nothing … Continue reading →

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Crap website design

Posted on April 9, 2024 by james

My, I am having a ranty evening. As well as the issues with the BT website highlighted in an earlier post today, I’ve just been reminded of another totally thoughtless piece of design that is common to many sites. That … Continue reading →

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Hifi wifi

Posted on March 12, 2024 by james

Last week my wife and daughter started complaining that they were seeing quite poor performance from our Internet connection, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with it and from the desktop PC in my office I was not having a … Continue reading →

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Another C++ fail

Posted on February 29, 2024 by james

Oooh! C++20 has std::format that would allow me to easily format file modification times from std::filesystem/chrono. Oh, allegedly it does in MSVC and Clang, but not in the C++20 support with the GCC that’s part of Mint 21.3 or the … Continue reading →

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Fun (and irritation) with Qt Designer

Posted on February 23, 2024 by james

I’ve been lining up a possible new project today, thanks to stalling a bit on the work I was doing on Deep Sky Stacker. It’s more C++/Qt development, but in this case I thought I’d try to create the entire … Continue reading →

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Next piece of Linux DSS done…

Posted on February 16, 2024 by james

I’d pretty much gone as far as I thought I could with my Linux Deep Sky Stacker port for the moment, but then realised that some bits that still didn’t compile were actually simper to fix than I thought, and … Continue reading →

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Design by committee

Posted on February 14, 2024 by james

Back when I used to work with COBOL, there were jokes about “design by committee”. These days I’m not always sure that C++ isn’t going the same way. So many little bits and pieces have been stuffed into the language … Continue reading →

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Fun with Qt Help and CMake

Posted on February 14, 2024 by james

As a Windows application, Deep Sky Stacker stores all its help text in .chm files, but I need to get rid of the Windows dependencies. Fortunately I have the HTML and images that make up those files, and there’s the … Continue reading →

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