Notices by Jonty Wareing (jonty@chaos.social)

Honestly the funniest thing I've seen this year. I know it's only mid-January, but still.

you had ONE JOB

Things I regret: Looking at github issues for the open-source self-driving car conversion kit.

Thousands of people use these things on public roads.

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/34346

Candidate for understatement of the year: "This can be a safety issue if a driver is misled into thinking that steering is occurring"

The most damning evidence I've ever seen for "this device is only used by single people":

If you have a passenger they *also* have to be looking at the road or it sets off the "pay attention" alarm.

Or they can put their head on the dashboard.

You can say "Threads is an apocalyptic drama which causes psychological damage" and accurately describe both Threads (1984 British TV film) and Threads (2023 Social Network)

My TV show pitch is Storage Wars but with abandoned S3 buckets

Applause for the marketing team who turned this bug into a feature

Fuck it, we can call them all out - please collect the worst consumer electronics UX nightmares you see this Christmas and send them over. Take photos, videos, describe it - jonty@jonty.co.uk

I'll shove them all on a website and try to embarrass companies into fixing them.

Press friends: I shall be in touch

I feel desperately sad when thinking about all the non-technical people with nobody to help them. This industry is making them feel stupid and frustrated, purely for profit reasons.

Don't build dark patterns into your UX. Refuse. Complain. Call them out. You're actively hurting people in the world.

Family members keep saying "I need lessons" or "I'm too old for this technology" over Christmas.

When I look at what they're struggling with it's reliably a buggy UX nightmare, and often wasn't cheap so they persist in using it.

I don't know how we fix this. Consumer electronics is totally broken.

The worst thing is that people make what seems like informed choices when buying - "good" brands, expensive models, recommendations from press.

But those rules no longer work in a world where brands change hands, software updates constantly, and the device has to be compatible with everything else you own.

Explaining this is hard.

In my free time I also run a camping festival, an arts building, and have founded more than one hackerspace. I have a lot of very weird experience which comes in handy more often than you'd expect.

I would really love to work in the music industry again if anyone has a jonty-shaped hole.

I was part of the early last.fm team and miss it dearly. Music is my happy place, especially live music.

So I've been notified that my role is at risk. Would anybody like to hire a me.

I've spent the last 7 years as chief architect, which realistically meant doing every job from infrastructure to product and occasionally acting CTO. For the last two years I've been merging platforms of two billion dollar companies.

I am interested in everything, and curious to try new things.

I like python and postgres, but happy to quickly pick up any stack. You do not want me anywhere near your frontend code.

Knitted metasurfaces! Absolutely wild, straight out of ~2000s speculative fiction.

I would like a Christmas jumper that doubles as a passive radar antenna array.

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-11-blanket-sophisticated-radio-frequency-antennas.html

The people who previously owned this house were clearly Perl programmers, because if there was more than one way to do something they made sure to do it in every possible way

What is the most inappropriate connector with enough pins to support USB-C?

I suggest:

Can someone please find a vulnerability triggered by a pair of HTTP requests because "2 Curls 1 CUPS" getting into the news would make me laugh for weeks

Computers are Obscene