AI is invading every space and it’s annoying the heck out of me.

Google gives me AI-generated slop instead of search results. Recipe searches result in AI-generated nonsense. Discussion threads get AI-generated replies. Customer support queries get useless AI-generated replies.

The administrator at my knitting club uses AI-generated banner images for the group’s Facebook events. Workshop participants turn to ChatGPT for generating creative ideas.

The other day I was co-interviewing a candidate for a role as a software developer in our team. Part of the interview was a pair coding exercise. We had turned off AI assistance in the code editor, and the candidate was completely helpless without it. Before diving into live coding, he had told us about all the problems he had solved and projects he had architected and completed. And yet, when given a keyboard and a text editor, he couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t initialize an array. Couldn’t loop through one, either. Couldn’t explain any of the choices he had made in past projects – everything ended in “I’d have to ask Google or ChatGPT about that”. We concluded that we need to update the job requirements to clearly specify that candidates are expected to be able to code without AI assistance.

Some people are literally losing their ability for thinking. They’re outsourcing not just the boring tasks, but even the fun and creative stuff. And they even seem proud of it.

I just noticed that the “On this day” feature at the top of the blog is giving me suggestions from twenty years ago. This blog has been live for twenty years. Go me!

2006 was still a time of specialized forums and personal blogs, when individuals and small groups had control over what they posted, who could read it, and where it appeared. The focus was on creativity and sharing, rather than influencing or hating. The web was a happier place back then. So was all of society, actually. More innocent, optimistic, honest and social.

I’m glad I set up my online presence before centralized social media like Facebook etc. It is important to me that my posts will not appear next to ads for busty blondes, or hate-inducing content from Russian troll brigades. I don’t need to worry about losing everything I have ever posted because the platform goes bust or gets acquired or decides to lock me out.

Some years ago I did wonder whether I should start cross-posting to Instagram, to make it easier for people to see my posts, but never got around to it. Then it got acquired, added videos, and now it’s gone the way of all other social media – full of marketing instead of connecting with your friends. I thought I was missing out but that problem disappeared on its own by just waiting. Instagram came, rose, appealed, and got enshittified within, what, ten years?

Some forums still exist. Blogs technically exist but these days they are mostly a thing that companies add to their websites for marketing and SEO purposes. More and more often filled with AI-generated swill.

Will we ever find our way back to honesty and good will online? There’s enough awareness that the current state of online “social media” is damaging that perhaps the pendulum will swing back one day.

Mending a pillowcase while watching Swedish state television’s real-time reporting of the church move in Kiruna. “Heavy slow TV”, they call it. Unexpectedly fascinating.

The iron ore mine next to Kiruna has been getting closer and closer to town, and an effort has been underway for years to literally move the town. Ordinary houses get torn down and replaced; culturally valuable ones, such as the iconic and beloved church, get moved.

It’s mind-boggling to watch an entire church majestically roll from one side of town to the other. Like a ship, especially in the wider shots where you can see the top of the roof peaking out above treetops.

People in Kiruna have mixed feelings about the whole thing, of course. From a technical point of view, the process is fascinating, and the TV reporting represents it well. The move itself is shown from various angles, both up close and from a distance. The reporter in the outdoors “studio” interviews guests, including a project leader for the move who’s really good at explaining the process. Another reporter interviews random people in the audience.

Interesting facts: There are tilt sensors in the church to make sure that it doesn’t tilt too much, nor bend in any direction. There are people actually monitoring the move from the inside, and one of their main tasks is to listen to the (wooden) building because any creaking would be a sign of stress on the building.

The church measures 40 metres across and the minimum clearance in one of the turns is 1 metre to the house next to the street. They built an entire new stretch of road so that the church can go past (and not through) a 90-degree turn. Other roads have been widened temporarily. The church will move 5 km in total, at a maximum pace of half a kilometre per hour. It stopped for lunch in the middle of the day, and will stop for the night halfway through its journey.

Visited Ahhaa science centre with a bunch of friends of various ages. Their interactive exhibits captured everyone’s attention for hours.

The current temporary exhibition was AI-themed. We got to try out AI attempting to deduce our emotions, recognize images, drive a toy car, etc. Very well done.

The exhibition also included a kind of a poll about visitors’ views on AI. Would you trust an AI diagnosis? Fly an AI-piloted flight? Would you be more inclined to forgive a human or an AI for a mistake they made?

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. It’s easy to be distracted by LLMs and other generative AI, and forget about all the other kinds of AI out there, doing more workmanlike tasks. I rather like AI analysing X-ray images and sifting through tons of data to find anomalies.

The statement I was most positive about was “I can imagine AI teaching me”. And I absolutely can. An AI-curated, individually adjusted learning path, instead of listening to pre-prepared hour-long videos where I find myself skipping half – yes please. Then I thought about AI teaching children, especially at a younger age, and my immediate reaction was a visceral “no”.

In the evening we gathered and played “Bang”, which has for many years been our go-to game for large groups. I might be growing just a little bit tired of it, but we only play it for a few evenings each summer, and it’s become a firm tradition by now.

I’ve complained about the cost of international postage before, and it just keeps getting worse. In the five years since 2019, the price has increase by 70% – and another increase coming up in January will bring it up to over double what it was back then.

This is what you get when essential services are privatized and expected to “compete” on the market. We don’t expect the military to make a profit, or the road network, but somehow the postal service needs to.

Hourly power prices above 1,000 (one thousand) öre per kWh, for the first time ever, as far as I know.

Too little transmission capacity between the north and the south of Sweden, and high demand from Germany, and lack of wind. Plus a price model that allows the marginal cost of that power sold to Germany to affect the electricity prices for households.

There won’t be any baking of lussebullar or running the tumble dryer during those hours, for sure.

Kastlösa to Mörbylånga, around 15 km. Hot.

As usual, the first order of business is topping up my water bottles. Kastlösa is a large enough village to have a small hotel, so I snuck into their bathroom and got fresh water, and also a chance to wash my hands and face with running water. There has been a significant shortage of washing opportunities on this trail.

Kastlösa also has small crafts workshops and antiquities shops that would probably be fun to visit, but as with most places I pass, they’re all closed.

From Kastlösa the trail follows small roads towards the western coast of Öland. On these roads you need to keep a lookout for tractors and farm machinery and trucks transporting produce, more than cars.

It’s harvest season. Some fields were already bare, others were being harvested as I passed them, still others were green and growing yet.

The fields were nice, even when bare, like the potato field above. Less nice was the chicken factory of Ölands kyckling. I’m sure they live up to the minimum levels of environmental regulation, but passing a large windowless barn that smells of nothing but chicken shit was depressing.

Same with cattle. Cattle roaming on the alvar or the seaside meadows do not smell noticeably, and neither do their cow pats. When the air is saturated with a smell of cow dung, it’s because I’m passing directly downwind of a barn – a large number of cattle in a small space.

Anyway, after a few kilometres I reached the sea shore and that was much nicer. As is becoming habit, I took a brunch break and dried my tent. The days can be as hot and dry as anything, but the nights and mornings are cool, and by morning, my tent is always dripping with condensation. In the cool morning air, it takes forever for the tent to dry, so I just roll it up as wet as it is and strap it on the outside of my backpack and start walking, and dry it later when the sun is high.

The beach here was fascinating. At first glance, it looked pretty though not spectacular.

Then I got closer, and it was all mucky, blackened seaweed, with clouds of flies buzzing around.

Just beyond the water’s edge, things got a lot more interesting to look at. White and pale pink strands of stuff, floating around together with delicate pinkish fluff. I have no idea what any of it is, or why it’s pink, but it was very pretty and had beautiful colours

I first clambered around on the tufts of dry black stuff, trying to find the firmer ones that wouldn’t give way when I stepped on them. Pretty soon I gave up, took off my boots and waded into the water. The black stuff looked unappealing but didn’t smell, and was not actually sticky or anything – after I stepped out again, my feet were wet but clean.

The water was very wader-friendly: shallow, and with a firm, flat limestone bottom. And amazingly hot! Not like a swimming pool but like a bathtub. It was surprisingly pleasant to walk around in.

I soon realized that I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed it. There were jellyfish everywhere.

First I saw one, then I saw another, and the more I looked, the more I found.

This was their place, not mine, so I left them to it and got out of the water.

From Risinge to Mörbylånga there was a mixture of small roads, gravel and asphalt, in between fields and small villages of summer cottages.

In the afternoon I reached Mörbylånga. On the minus side: asphalt roads and cars. On the plus side: supermarket! Fresh fruit and vegetables, the season’s last strawberries, local bread. Fruit and vegetables are difficult to carry with me on a hike – they’re heavy and fragile – but I could give a few of them special for the few remaining hours of this day.

Also, ice cream. This stage of the trail is a short one, and I’ve had to make an active effort to walk slowly and take long breaks, so as not to get to the end too early. I had plenty of time to stroll through the small town and sit in the harbour and enjoy my ice cream.

(Crappy phone photo? Yes. I’ve been taking one photo a day on my phone, so that I could share it with the family in the evening, as a sign of life. There was a major national news story just a week before I went on my hike, about a couple of hikers in Sarek who hadn’t returned from their hike as planned, and were being searched for by helicopter. I really wouldn’t want to cause anyone that kind of hassle, so I’m reporting daily on my location. Öland is of course nothing like Sarek in terms of remoteness, but since I’m on my own, stuff could happen.)

The stage ends in Mörbylånga and I guess you’re expected to stay at a hostel or something. Which I had no interest in, so I kept going for another kilometre or so, until my surroundings didn’t feel too urban any more.

I put up my tent in a little patch of pine wood just north of Mörbylånga.

The trees all slanted towards land, away from the sea.

The Olympic Games are happening in Paris. I’m sort of vaguely interested, but not enough to pay for access, so I’m not watching any of it, apart from short clips of highlights.

Except today! We had an Olympic day at the office, since it was just the four of us on the third floor, and nobody could complain. A teammate who is more into sports has a paid Eurosport account, and we have a big screen on the wall that normally shows graphs and statistics about new customer signups and take-up of the new customer portal and other such inspiring things, that he could Chromecast the stream to.

We saw various branches of gymnastics (always super impressive), table tennis doubles (all Asian teams at the top), swimming, men’s volleyball, and probably more. Not continuously, but whenever I was waiting for a build to complete, or was switching tasks, etc.

The technical setup itself was interesting enough. 360 degree cameras around the table tennis setup, so they could freeze the scene and pan around, Matrix-style. Visualizations of all the spots where ball had hit the table during the game. Miles beyond the blurry slow-motion cameras of yesteryear.

The current ever-recurring discussion topic: the new EU regulations about bottle caps that came into effect this year. My friends in Estonia didn’t need to say more than “bottle caps” for everyone to know *exactly* what they were talking about.

If you’re not living in Europe, or if you’re future me and have forgotten, EU law now requires plastic bottle caps to be attached to the bottle (or milk carton, or other packaging). The bottle on the left is of the old type with a detached cap; the one on the right is of the new type.

Environmentally-conscious and recycling-oriented as I am, I have never in conscious memory thrown a bottle cap on the ground. Or even dropped one and not picked it up. (Heck, I pick up other people’s litter when I’m out walking.) But I guess enough people do for this initiative to be worth the cost and effort of changing all production lines. I assume someone’s done the maths.

Out of curiosity, I went looking for statistics. I found this report of a Dutch study of garbage found on beaches which mentioned that “bottle caps are among the top 5 items found during beach cleaning and beach litter monitoring around the world”, and “research […] on beach litter over the last 12 years shows that on average, 19 bottle caps are found every 100 metres”. They also report numbers from other countries: “On average, the highest number of caps were found in Sweden (170/100m)” – not because people litter more here, but because of sea currents converging here.

But the new caps are annoying. Most are well-designed: you can twist them out of the way and they stay there while you pour or drink. But they are in my face when I drink. And turning a bottle upside down while drinking also turns the attached cap upside down, which sometimes leads to drips from the lid. Which matters little in the case of water, but I don’t want smoothie dribbles on my face. So now I have to inspect and possibly lick the cap before drinking my smoothie – or detach the cap after all, which is of course intentionally not easy.

Drinks companies complained loudly of course, arguing that the new caps will require more material so the net effect will be negative. Innocent (who makes several of our favourite juices and smoothies) on the other hand managed to make their new bottle caps smaller than the old ones, so clearly it can be done if someone’s willing to make the effort.

Voting in the EU election. Election day is tomorrow, but I see no point in waiting another day just to queue more.

The participation rate in these tends to be lower than in the national ones. The media do their best to improve turnout. If it’s sounds like too much work to figure out who to vote for, they say, it’s not a bad idea to just choose the same party you’d vote for nationally.

I’m not going down that route. The national questions I prioritize are not the same as one the EU level. In this vote, it doesn’t matter to me what their opinion is on education, healthcare, crime, or most social questions. I only really care what they will do about climate change, because that’s the area where national decisions matter little, and continental or global action is needed to make a real difference.

The various online guides tell me my opinions match up most closely with the Environmental party, the Left party, and the Centre party. No matter how much we agree on the environment, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to vote for the Left party. They no longer describe themselves as communists, but their communist past still permeates their ideology, and I just cannot.