Monday was the worst. I took the day off because there was no chance of getting any work done. I managed three days of work; they might not have been my most productive ever, but I did at least finish off the thing I was doing.

In Surrey Quays shopping centre, I saw teenagers queueing up to scan their eyeballs with one of weirdo Sam Altman’s weird World (formerly Worldcoin) iris-scanning orbs. I wonder if we’ll ever hear the outcome of the ICO’s enquiries (that post has since been scrubbed off their website), and I wonder whether scanning the irises of minors into your massive database is actually legal. I would have assumed not, but perhaps it counts as “innovation” and thus benefits from some kind of impunity.

I hope the approximately £5 worth (at current prices) of oddball cryptocurrency is worth giving their iris scans to Sam Altman forever.

It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that happens in a society where things are going well.

L— and I went out delivering leaflets for the Green Party in advance of the local elections. We tried on Friday night, but after about ten minutes it started raining hard and we had to call it off. It was sunny on Saturday morning, so we finished off the rest of it. The hardest part was getting to letterboxes in blocks of flats where the developers have blocked off the post boxes inside the locked entrance. Must be hard to get anything delivered when you live there. The second hardest thing was deciphering the unreasonable house numbering scheme perpetrated by developers when building housing during the London Docklands Development Corporation era.

On the way, we saw a fox brazenly eating off the road in the middle of the day, only moving reluctantly to allow the occasional traffic to pass. On closer inspection, its irresistible meal turned out to by a grey squirrel, squashed flat into a pancake of flesh and fur by passing cars. The fox eventually pried the sheet off the ground and carried it away to be finished off in peace somewhere else.

It’s a bit gross, but hey, that’s the circle of life in the city.

My week didn’t start auspiciously, either. I had to re-prove my identity to one of my bank accounts by uploading a photo of my driving licence – in case I had ceased to be myself in the past few years, I suppose – as a result of which left my wallet on my desk at home before cycling down to Peckham for the day.

I didn’t realise until I tried to get it out of my pocket to open the door. I just turned straight around and cycled home. At least it was a mild and sunny morning for it, although there was enough pollen to leave me sneezing.

On the way, I spotted a sticker on a lamppost advertising another “Unite the Kingdom” jamboree of littering and racism in May. That will be a weekend to avoid central London.

Traid on Rye Lane were doing one of their periodic sales; this time, everything was £2, so I thought it was worth a look. I found a nice hooded cotton/linen lightweight jacket from Uniqlo that’s perfect for the warmer weather. It’s not brand new, but it doesn’t look like it was worn more than once or twice. I’ll take that for £2!

I narrowly escaped falling victim to a similar fate as L— the week before, in the same place, when someone on a rental e-bike (Forest, this time) raced down from the Millwall path onto Senegal Way in front of me without slowing or looking.

Rental e-bikes are useful and clearly popular, but they do seem to attract some especially insouciant riders who put everyone in danger. They’re full of instrumentation and comms hardware in order to track their location and operate the service, so I wonder whether the companies could be made to take more responsibility for their riders. Perhaps accelerometer data could identify hazardous riders, or location data could be used to reduce the maximum speed near junctions. I don’t think they’ll do anything without legislation or the threat of losing licences, though.

I had a much-needed haircut. My hairdresser, whom I’ve been visiting for over a decade, had been away visiting her family in Malaysia for over a month. That’s long enough for me to really need a haircut, but not long enough to go to the hassle of finding someone new. She’s back now, and I look better for it.

We went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner and Constable exhibition before it closes next month. I came away with a distinct preference for Constable’s work: in comparison, his paintings seem livelier, and more human, whereas Turner doesn’t even really seem to like people. Given the choice, I prefer realism over classical scenes. On the other hand, my absolute favourite picture was Norham Castle, Sunrise by Turner, painted late in his life, a canvas of pure light.

On the way back, we passed a Chinese-registered car, just parked on Millbank. How did a car from Harbin, a landlocked city in Heilongjiang province in Northern China, come to be parked in London? How would you even drive here? And why? It’s one thing to transport a supercar halfway across the planet, but a Chinese-made Toyota?

Links for good or ill:

• The major-minor mode dichotomy in music perception. A systematic review of literature on how we feel about major and minor keys. Even in Western music, the association of major with happy and minor with sad is relatively recent.
• Children’s associations between space and pitch are differentially shaped by language. The idea that musical pitch is “high” or “low” is not universal, and not necessarily even particularly intuitive; in this study, they found that the Turkish concept of “thin”/”thick” is internalised at a younger age than “high”/”low”.
• Hister is a search engine that indexes websites you’ve visited.
• Reverse Drafting Club: “Reverse drafting is the process of unraveling fabric swatches and diagramming their construction using weave draft notation. It’s really fun! So fun that we started a Reverse Drafting Club to work remotely on this practice with friends near and far.”
• Tiled Words is a sort of crossword/Scrabble mash-up daily word game.
• March, 19-21: God is a comedian. “Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.”
• The 49MB Web Page. “I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones. […] To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load.”
• The pet I’ll never forget: Penny, the pigeon who never left my side. “[Pigeons] are so misjudged: they’re incredibly intelligent, loyal and affectionate. Just like Penny was. I was never lonely while she was in my life.”

I sorted out our remortgage so we have another five years at an amount we can afford, and it’s just everything else in the world that is unpredictable and chaotic.

My new-to-me phone arrived and I installed everything on it. It’s much less stressful having a battery that lasts a day of normal use once again.

Apart from that, the Pixel 8 seems pretty much the same as my old Pixel 6a. Maybe it’s faster, but I can’t tell. The camera seems to have an extra lens for macro shots.

At some point, once I’m confident that I’ve got everything off the old phone, I’ll reset it to stock Android and get the battery replaced.

On Wednesday morning, I was running late and decided to take my 9am call at home. At five minutes to nine, L— sent me a message to say that someone on a Lime bike had crashed into her and she was hurt. They had flown out of a side path at negligent speed and hit her front wheel, knocking her to the ground.

I cycled down with my trailer to catch her pushing her bike home with one good arm. I folded the Brompton, put it on the trailer, and we walked back. I made a cup of tea while she worked out how badly she was injured.

She couldn’t move her right arm properly and thought it was broken, so we went to the Urgent Care unit at Guys’ Hospital. They handed her the clipboard with admission form, which she couldn’t write, of course. I pointed this out, took it and played the secretarial role.

After an x-ray, the good news was that no bones were broken. It was, instead, a relatively unusual posterior dislocation of the shoulder.

The good thing about the Urgent Care unit is that it’s closer to home and much less chaotic and stressful than Accident & Emergency. The downside is that because Guys’ doesn’t have A&E, they can’t give you the really strong painkillers. Instead, they put L— on laughing gas and got me to hold her hand while they tried to relocate the shoulder.

It’s a horrible experience to be an onlooker while someone you love is screaming in pain as a team of people manhandle her arm. But then! the shoulder clunked back into place and she was suddenly much more comfortable. Her shoulder will still take time to recover properly, but it was a much better outcome than we had feared a few hours earlier.

We got home around 2pm, ate lunch, and both fell asleep for a long nap.

Checking out her bike for damage is a job for this coming weekend.

I bought myself a new pillow speaker. It’s almost exactly the same as the old one, which I was very happy with until the cable broke (which I fixed) and the switch became unreliable (which I couldn’t do much about). They’ve improved the material used for the cable; it’s still absurdly long, but much more flexible than before.

To help me sleep, I like to listen to radio plays and audiobooks, and the speaker lets me do that without either disturbing L— or having to use earphones, which become uncomfortable. I’d been missing my pillow speaker since it stopped working, but when I saw I could pick a new one up off the shelf in John Lewis for under £15, I realised that I had been suffering for no good reason.

For sleep hygiene, I don’t like to keep my phone anywhere near the bedroom, so I use the speaker with an old Sansa Clip MP3 player running RockBox. It has physical buttons that let me operate it, and even resume it at the last playback point, without looking at it, and I’ve configured it so that it turns itself off automatically after 15 minutes, which is usually enough to send me to sleep. It would be much harder to replicate that half of the setup these days.

I spent Saturday afternoon at a workshop on the Guidonian hand, learning about mediaeval hexachord music theory. The lack of a seventh scale tone makes things complicated fast once you move beyond ut re mi fa sol, and you have to treat major and minor scales quite differently.

I also discovered that I can’t easily touch the base of my middle finger with my thumb on my left hand, and that my left thumb is actually at quite a peculiar angle. My right hand is fine. I don’t know whether it’s years of playing stringed instruments, billions of presses on the space bar, or some unnoticed injury (perhaps contemporary with that time I fractured my radial head in one of my own cycling accidents), but it’s weird!

The summary is that because we’re already overpaying, even with a much worse rate than we fixed five years ago, we’d still be overpaying. So as long as we can get everything sorted before they yank the current deals, we’ll be OK.

The Big Tech lackeys at iSmash refused to replace my phone battery. “What is this sir? Is your phone rooted?” “No, it’s not rooted, it’s running GrapheneOS.” (And anyway, what business is it of yours? Why do you care? I only need you to change the physical battery.)

The trade of a marginally slimmer phone in exchange for a glued-in battery was always a bad deal, but at least an ecosystem has grown up of people who can perform the fiddly steps required for you. Except when they won’t, just because you don’t want a US Big Tech company to spy on you and shove ads and AI slop in your face all day long. Why anyone would choose voluntarily to be a foot soldier of Yankee tech imperialism I do not know, but that’s what they’ve chosen.

I could get the battery replaced if I first reset it to a stock Google operating system, but setting up a new phone is hours of work, and it’s even harder if you don’t have the old one for reference. I might as well buy a new (to me) phone, so I’ve ordered a Pixel 8 to replace it. It’s second-hand, because buying brand new is unconscionably profligate, but I did pay the extra £25 to guarantee at least 95% battery life left. I’d rather have eked the remaining year and a bit of support out of my Pixel 6a, and I’d probably have managed it if the battery wasn’t defective and deliberately limited after 400 cycles. Even though I’m prepared to undergo quite a lot of inconvenience for my principles, there is a limit.

In order to make my trip over the river to Canary Wharf not entirely pointless, I wandered round the London Museum Docklands for a few hours. I always enjoy visiting.

On the walk back from the station I got completely soaked. A mixed bag of a day.

I fixed the slow puncture that had been annoying me for weeks. It was so slow that topping up the tyre every morning was enough, and even once every other day would have been tolerable, and so while the weather was wet and cold I elected not to mess around repairing it. But Saturday morning was clement, and I had time. It was a very quick job: the cause was obvious, and easy to patch. A metal spike was stuck through the tyre into the inner tube. It’s the second time that’s happened to me (although the spike was bigger and easier to see this time), and these inner tubes seem very good at keeping air in even when they’ve been punctured.

Hebdomadal links:

• Dear Meta Smart Glasses Wearers: You’re Being Watched, Too. “[S]ensitive and personal footage captured by the devices—including people going to the bathroom, getting dressed, and having sex—is being reviewed by contractors who see all of it uncensored.” The Pervert Glasses are working out as you might reasonably have expected.
• Safe Airspace. “The Conflict Zone & Risk Database provides a single, independent, and eternally free resource for all airspace risk warnings”. There aren’t many safe ways to fly from Europe to Asia these days.
• The first lesson of war is ‘know your enemy’ – and Britain’s enemy now is Donald Trump. “This is Trump’s war of choice. But Britain has choices, too. Two hundred and fifty years after the American colonists broke free of empire, it’s time for a British declaration of independence.” Says Simon Tisdall, who was right on Iraq back in 2002, too.
• Tricked and bamboozled into war. “Constantly, patronisingly and without shame, the west’s warlords sing the same, deceptive siren song […] One day soon, this undemocratic war will start.” Simon Tisdall in 2002, four months before the start of the Iraq War.
• A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines. With AI agents, any input can be a malicious command!
• The Culture War Over Sex Markers on IDs Is Causing Chaos. Here’s How We End It. “Passports exist to confirm identity, not reinforce rigid classifications. […] Sex markers on passports have outlived their original purpose because that purpose was never legitimate in the first place.”
• Hanafuda: How a Banned Game Defined the Pre-Pokémon Era. “The public refused to quit. It turned into a centuries-long game of cat-and-mouse. Every time the [Tokugawa shogunate] banned a deck, the people invented a new version with different pictures to hide the numbers. Finally, they created hanafuda – the ultimate ‘visual camouflage’.”
• Everything Else. “There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies […] it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world – and not be blamed openly for this desire – visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so.”
• On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint.

I was delighted to wake up on Friday to the news that the Green Party had won the Gorton and Denton by-election by a considerable margin, beating the increasingly overtly fascist Reform Party, and leaving Labour’s fascism-lite Reform tribute act in third place.

It didn’t last long, however, because Saturday morning brought the news that the two most unhinged countries on the planet, the United States of America and Israel, had started a war of aggression by bombing Iran; not just politicians, but also schools and hospitals.

If there were still such a thing as international law, you’d call it illegal, but we’re back in a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. (Although one must remember that the “strong” Athenians overextended themselves, were defeated by Sparta, and ended up economically devastated, so perhaps we’re still on course for the long-awaited American Century of Humiliation.)

It looks as if our spineless wretch of a prime minister has already thrown in his lot with the American despot, allowing them to use British bases for their campaign.

It’s a long way from what the former human rights lawyer promised when he campaigned to lead the Labour Party:

No more illegal wars. Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice.

Or … you could just do none of that and debase yourself in supine obedience to Trump and his illegal wars.

(Update to add: even though I think he’s done too much to help the Americans, this “limited support” is still not enough for Trump, who is “not happy with the UK”. But that’s the danger of having no principles: you have no way to decide how to act when presented with a dilemma, so all you can do is upset everybody.)

AI is still out there making everything worse. I keep thinking about the way that it’s shoved down our throats, like a gavage funnel down the neck of a foie gras goose. If I never saw another sparkly anus icon on a web service inviting me to somehow engage with pointlessly shoehorned-in AI, it would be too soon.

I’ve worked with people who believe that AI can help them write software. I’ve seen the output. Maybe it gets you to unmaintainable legacy technical debt in a fraction of the time, but writing code was never the hard part of software, and maintenance is harder and more dispiriting when there was no human mind behind the decisions in the first place.

But you don’t have to believe that AI will actually be good at replacing humans to recognise the threat. It’s enough that oligarchs and credulous politicians believe in it.

I think about how the UK government designated effectively all data centres (everything over 1 MW; the average in the UK is somewhere around 6 or 7 MW) as “critical national infrastructure” and the parallels to the Protection of Stocking Frames, etc. Act of 1788 and its successor bills that made machine breaking punishable by, variously, imprisonment, death, and transportation.

If you decide that you’d rather have housing, or water, or electricity, or jobs, or a somewhat habitable planet, and decide to destroy the infernal machines, they’ll call it terrorism.

The new series from Lisa McGee (writer of Derry Girls) is well worth your time. We’ve watched six out of eight episodes of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast so far. It’s a comedy and a mystery and a thriller, strung together with witty and snappy dialogue.

I only learned about the existence of Smiling Friends from news of its cancellation after three seasons, but I’m enjoying catching up.

This week’s links from around the web:

• Display resolution calculator. Based on the estimated maximum resolution of the human eye, determine whether you’ll actually see the difference between 1080p and 4K. Spoiler: you won’t unless your TV is massive and/or you’re sitting very close.
• It’s the end of the world as we know it (but I feel fine). “The destruction of local news and the rise of social media means that our news consumption is increasingly focused on national and global events — precisely the spheres of life where we are gloomiest. This is corrosive. Spend 16 hours doomscrolling and you may well conclude the end times are here; spend 16 hours living your life and things might not seem so bad.”
• enclose.horse is a fun daily puzzle game in which you have to enclose a horse in the largest possible enclosure.
• Using Make to Transcode Your Music Library. This is an ideal job for Make. You get parallelisation for free!
• Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras.
• BuildKit: Docker’s Hidden Gem That Can Build Almost Anything. “BuildKit is a general-purpose, pluggable build framework. It can produce OCI images, yes, but also tarballs, local directories, APK packages, RPMs, or anything else you can describe as a directed acyclic graph of filesystem operations. The Dockerfile is just one frontend. You can write your own.”
• Git in Postgres. “[A normal git client with a Postgres backend] should be able to push to and clone from a Postgres database without knowing the difference. To test this I built gitgres, about 2,000 lines of C implementing the libgit2 git_odb_backend and git_refdb_backend interfaces against Postgres through libpq, plus roughly 200 lines of PL/pgSQL for the storage functions.”

After that abrupt termination, I couldn’t get Firefox to start again, so I couldn’t even rejoin the call. In the absence of any better ideas, I ran a software update, and it worked. Perhaps changing the version caused it to abandon some corrupted version-specific cached state.

I didn’t think I was allergic to dogs, but my itchy eyes, blocked nose and sneezing after two hours in the same room tell me I’m definitely allergic to that particular black Labrador, and, presumably, some subset of dogkind. Bad news for L—’s desire that we get a dog.

Someone nearly died in front of me by walking straight under the wheels of a double decker bus as it turned the corner left out of Rye Lane.

He couldn’t see any traffic, so he strode confidently out into the road. He couldn’t see it because his hood completely blocked his peripheral vision, and he didn’t notice the bus until it was centimetres away.

I know from experience that people in hoods never have a clue what’s going around them, and little desire to turn their entire body to find out, so I always cycle carefully around them. Luckily for this individual, the bus driver was also on the ball.

We went to the latest Musica Antica concert, a programme of 17th century Venetian music. They had already recorded the pieces for an album, and performed the same concert elsewhere three times that week, so it was particularly cohesive.

I was in Greenwich on Friday so I decided to pick up one of Crosstown’s large selection of vegan doughnuts to share over a cup of tea later. They’re now £5 each. That’s quite a lot for one doughnut, even at 2026 prices.

My streak of 5+ years without a cluster headache came to an end at the weekend. So far, I’ve only had two incidents, on Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening, and I hope that’s it.

Small Prophets was delightful in its combination of gentle comedy and alchemic mysticism. I found it a little hard to suspend my disbelief: It’s supposed to be set in Manchester but not only is the weather fine the whole time, he even runs out of rainwater in the water butt.

Links from the week:

• Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox. It doesn’t matter how many safety rules you’ve given the chatbot, it will just forget them when faced with enough new information.
• Inside Reform’s plans for a fascist takeover. Please let them lose on Thursday.
• Ancient artifacts hint at earliest protowriting. 40,000-year-old artefacts from Germany might contain the earliest symbolic precursors to writing ever found.
• As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts. The TruDi Navigation System misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments inside patients’ heads. “Cerebrospinal fluid reportedly leaked from one patient’s nose. In another reported case, a surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull. In two other cases, patients each allegedly suffered strokes after a major artery was accidentally injured.”
• The political effects of X’s feed algorithm. Just seven weeks of exposure to the algorithmic feed “shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions”
• Scribe and prejudice? A report from the Ada Lovelace Institute about the use of LLMs in social care. “The foundation models that power the summarising feature in AI transcription tools can also produce biased outputs that would be harmful in social care contexts.” I am once again furiously tapping my sign: LLMs do not summarise, they just appear to do so.
• Internet Protocols, Power and the Rebirth of the Border The open, global internet that we knew is dying.
• It’s Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto. 17 times more likely than its infamous predecessor, in fact.
• DVDs are the new vinyl records: Why Gen Z is embracing physical media.
• Open Printer “is an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair.”
• New accounts on HN 10x more likely to use EM-dashes A little indication of how much of the internet is now slop.
• x86CSS is “a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required.” Only works in Chrome(/-ium) and it’s slow, but it works!
• fuck off ai music. “in this movement we believe that ai music should fuck off.” As do I.
• Modern CSS Code Snippets “side by side with the old hacks they replace. Every technique you still Google has a clean, native replacement now.”
• How far back in time can you understand English? I managed back to 1100, but 1000 was a step too far.

I go to Tesco for the same reason most people do, I think: because it’s there. It’s the only big supermarket within a 10-minute walk of home. But I’ve lived within 10 minutes of that shop for nearly 20 years, and at the moment, it seems to be at a particularly low point in a patchy history. The vegetable aisle is often almost empty. I haven’t been able to buy fresh coriander there for weeks. I don’t bother growing herbs at home because it’s always been more hassle than just buying them, but perhaps that’s not true any more.

I finally understood how JavaScript works in Rails 8, and I think I can say that I now understand how all the assets work. The important thing to know when learning through trial and error – which is the only way to learn this stuff, as the documentation isn’t enough, and the internet is full of misleading LLM-hallucinated slop posts that claim to explain but don’t – is that even if you think you’ve got something working, clear out the app/assets/builds directory and try again, just in case something was built in a previous iteration and is still there even though you’ve subsequently broken the configuration.

Every building I can remember working in has conducted its fire alarm test in the middle of Thursday morning, and I’ve always wondered what happens if there’s a real fire alarm on a Thursday morning.

This week, the test went on for a bit longer than usual, and I had the opportunity to really listen to the recorded announcement. This repeats “please leave the building via the nearest exit” in the most comedically archaic 1930s RP accent, like Mr Cholmondley-Warner from the Harry Enfield sketches. It sounds like the recording must have been transferred from the original shellac.

We watched a couple of classic Bogart films at the weekend. First was The Big Sleep (1946), a fun, stylish, cool, but extremely confusing film that seems to make sense while it’s going, as long as you don’t think too hard, but which left me baffled by the end.

On one occasion, Bogart, perplexed by the death of one of the minor characters, marched onto the set and asked Hawks:

‘Who pushed Taylor off the pier?’

Equally confused, Hawks could get no explanation from scriptwriters William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett. So he sent Chandler a telegram, asking him to clear things up. But the author couldn’t answer Bogart’s question either.

It’s not just me, then.

The second was The Maltese Falcon (1941). It’s convoluted, but not nearly as confusing as The Big Sleep, even though it zips around from location to location without a pause. The dialogue is great, but Casablanca (1942) far exceeds it for quotable lines.

Lots of links this time:

• ‘Absolute hell’: Irishman with valid US work permit held by Ice since September. They arrest you for no reason, then they try to get you to agree to be deported, then they lie and say you agreed, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
• India Street Lettering is “an archive of the shared typographic culture that thrives in the country’s urban spaces. Built over a decade, this ongoing effort by Pooja Saxena is focused on meticulously documenting, annotating and geo-tagging public lettering made by analog means from around India.”
• GDPR-compliant European static site hosting: “Modern static site hosting with European servers and absolutely no personal data collection!”
• CodingFont: Compare coding fonts via a head-to-head knockout to find your favourite (perhaps).
• No, AI Written Romance Novels Are Not Inevitable. “The New York Times interviewed two authors who claim AI is the future of romance novels, who coincidentally also sell courses about how to use AI to write romance novels.” Just because credulous journalists repeat something doesn’t make it true.
• Windows Notepad exposes users to remote attacks. “The Windows 11 Notepad app, recently upgraded with AI features, now carries a high-severity flaw that exposes users to dangerous attacks. Hackers can simply send boobytrapped text files and remotely compromise users with a single click.” I’m not sure that “upgraded” is the word I’d choose.
• Pandoc in the browser compiled with WASM; convert between different text formats without having to install anything or send your files to anyone else.
• WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives for 2026 sold out. The AI bubble is taking the means of production away from us, forcing us to rely more and more on big rent-extracting cloud providers.
• It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines. It’s always Just A Guy, usually in a place with worse labour protections and lower wages.
• UK council dips into capital assets to fund Oracle project. You don’t have a library so that the council can have a vanity ERP system and Larry Ellison can sit on his gigayacht and fund his malign projects.
• I’m A Proud Luddite. That’s Why I Use Linux. “What is a viable form of resistance against this creeping invasion into our professional and private lives? I argue that one way to push back, even if it is just a little, is simply to use Linux instead of a proprietary OS.”
• An oral history of Bank Python. “When I’ve tried to explain Bank Python in conversations people have often dismissed what I’ve said as the ravings of a swivel-eyed loon. It all just sounds too bonkers.”
• Parents opt kids out of school laptops, ask for pen and paper. “Julie Frumin broke the news to her 11-year-old son in the minivan on the way home from school. His laptop was being taken away. His face lit up. ‘Really?’ he asked, beaming with excitement.”
• A programmer’s loss of identity. “If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.”
• The Dog that Caught the Car: Britain’s ‘World-Leading’ Internet. The Online Safety Act “‘risks making everyone less safe’, it is ‘stripping away that potential for self-actualization’ and ‘harming creative expression’, it constitutes ‘a thinly veiled effort to normalize censorship in the U.K. and expand surveillance of British citizens and guests within their borders’, it is ‘[feeding] young people sanitized, mainstream or government‑approved narratives’, it is ‘a facial recognition sham’ and ‘an abomination […] making us less free, not more safe’, it introduces ‘the new book-banning’ and enables ‘Free Speech for the 0.1%’, and is ‘treat[ing] government speech control as a feature, not a bug.’”
• Tech expert ‘called paedo’ in UK Government Online Safety Act meeting. “‘I was actually in a meeting with the [UK Government in 2020] where I was called a paedo for trying to point out these issues to them.’ Burns said.”

I was soaked riding home on Tuesday, but the cycling wasn’t all bad this week. I improved my route to Peckham slightly. Instead of going along Meeting House Lane, which is fairly busy, clogged with parked cars, and imperilled by people coming in from perpendicular roads without properly giving way, I diverted onto the road to the north along Studholme Street and Fenham Road, through a modal filter that blocks motor traffic. It feels more relaxed.

Things are happening at the long-foretold Surrey Canal Road station site. A week or so ago I saw people clearing out vegetation from the concrete box under the bridge that was built to form part of a future station, and now a small container with some kind of equipment has appeared next to it. As I cycled past on Monday and Tuesday mornings I saw a gang of surveyors clad in fluorescent orange taking measurements with theodolites.

According to the plan that was approved by Lewisham council:

7.1.Subject to receiving the full package of funding for the design works, this would commence in early 2026 and complete in early 2028.

7.2. The main works would commence following this and last for approximately two years (subject to TfL securing funding to meet the current funding gap).

This would just be the design works, then, and an actual station isn’t likely this decade. But it’s a start.

Meanwhile, the new entrance to Surrey Quays station seems to be getting close to completion. That will be a huge improvement: we won’t have to cross the road to get there, and access to the northbound platform will be upgraded from the single narrow staircase that currently serves it.

L— was getting her hair cut in Peckham on Wednesday evening, so we had a drink and dinner there before going home. As we waited at Peckham Rye station, a freight train went past on the other track hauling two brand new train sets. The colour scheme instantly made me think of the Tyne and Wear Metro, and when I looked it up that seems to be exactly what they were: new Metro trains passing through London on their way from the builders in Switzerland.

My grandparents’ house in Gosforth backed onto the Metro depot, and even after the decades, changes of livery, and different rolling stock, it seems that there’s still something that’s instantly recognisable to me about a Metro train.

I picked up an empanada for lunch on Thursday, from Rustic, the Chilean-British vegan restaurant in Rye Lane Market. It was delicious, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that by four o’clock I was feeling dizzy, and had to go home and lie on the sofa with my eyes closed until the world stopped spinning. It was very disconcerting: I felt like I was drunk, but it didn’t last as long as a hangover, and I felt normal again by dinner time.

We had too many parsnips so on Friday I baked a spiced parsnip cake with ginger, cardamom, coriander, cloves, and cinnamon. I adapted a recipe using the ingenious Elements of Baking book that I asked for and received for Christmas. It explains exactly how, depending on the type of baked good, you can adapt it to remove gluten, dairy, or eggs, or (my particular interest) to make it vegan. It came out very well.

No links this week as I’ve apparently been too busy working, trying to understand how assets work in Rails 8, or gazing in horror at the news.

So I paid someone to fix it. It was quick and easy and I was out in ten minutes with no blood and having sustained injury only to my wallet. He cut away the loose section, filed it down smooth, and it should now just grow out normally over time. It looks a bit weird right now, but it’s not uncomfortable.

As a bonus, I was right next to Waitrose so I bought a vegan haggis on the way home for a slightly late Burns Night-inspired supper on Tuesday night.

There were at least a dozen uniformed police on Rye Lane on Wednesday, stopping and checking dodgy e-bikes that don’t conform to regulations. This included quite a lot of food delivery riders. They are often a menace to themselves and others, but I feel sympathy towards them. It’s really the delivery companies that are responsible for the abusive conditions that drive them to take unnecessary risks in order to earn what still isn’t really a liveable amount.

And, of course, I blame the treat enjoyers most of all, the people who use a precarious labour force risking death and injury to provide them with mother-as-a-service, to save them the effort of picking up their own takeaways or – God forbid! – cooking their own dinner. This wasn’t a normal thing a few years ago. There were a few types of food that transported fairly well – stir fries and curries and pizza – and you could even get them delivered, but you couldn’t employ casual labour to bring you a single McDonald’s burger on a regular basis unless you were the kind of rich person who had jeevacation in their address book. Now I see people getting fast food delivered for breakfast! And you don’t even have to talk to the staff! The technofeudalists somehow willed it into existence by selling a dollar for fifty cents, got people hooked, and now they can squeeze the margins at both ends.

And that, via a chain of causation, leads to people riding electric bikes without the legal constraints on speed, to make as many deliveries as they can in the time available. It doesn’t have to be this way, but you’d be paying a lot more for that burger if it were fair and not exploitative.

There was also a monowheel – one of those suitcase unicycle things – on the lorry of confiscated vehicles. There may be a place for an electrified circus act, but it’s not the public highway.

My cousin Kara performed Zimmerman’s Oboe Concerto on Thursday evening at the Royal College of Music. She won the RCM Concerto Competition last year while still a student, playing the same piece, and the prize is that you get to do it again as a public concert. She nailed it, the supporting orchestra were excellent, and it was a joy to hear. She’s obviously very good – she has the accolades to prove it objectively – but watching her perform such a virtuosic piece made it absolutely clear.

Here’s a representative few bars of the score to give an idea of what the player is faced with:

I also thought that I should go to more concerts at the Royal College of Music. It’s easy to get to from home or from Peckham (with a train to Victoria), the standard is excellent, and the value is unbeatable.

My own musical accomplishments this week have been a bit less rarefied. At Saturday’s Sanshinkai rehearsal, I played the jikata accompaniment to the eisa dancing on my own for the first time. It went OK, although, after fifteen minutes of what is more or less a continuous run of quavers with no breaks, my left hand was worn out. Still, it proved that I can in principle do it, even if I need to practise more.

The book of John Dowland lute pieces arranged for ukulele I ordered arrived, and I’ve been practising the first piece, Awake, sweet love, thou art return’d. I can play it, but now I need to put the expression into it.

Here’s a whole load of links from the past week:

• Jmail: Read Jeffrey Epstein’s emails as if you were using his Gmail account.
• The UK is a rich country built on mass poverty. “Record levels of very deep poverty expose the true cost of austerity, inflation and the concentration of power at the top.”
• Golf Must Be Abolished. It’s time to destroy the sport of kings: our humanity is at stake. “Imagine reclaiming a golf course, and with it your self respect. You could plant trees and save the bees, rewild the place if you want.”
• Last turbine on [Ireland’s] first commercial wind farm dismantled. The 21 original turbines are being replaced with 18 new ones, each of which can generate more power than the entire previous farm.
• The British Museum Posted AI Slop… (and quietly deleted it).
• 7 Reasons Why Teens Are Rejecting AI. “Some young people only turn to artificial-intelligence chatbots as a last resort, citing concerns about relationships, creativity, the environment and more”.
• OpenAI exec becomes top Trump donor with $25 million gift. Brockman was CTO when I worked at Stripe. I didn’t have a great opinion of him at the time, but it’s so much worse now.
• Anthropic’s Philosopher Weighs in on Whether AI Can Feel. We don’t know if AI can feel? Yeah, sure, and we don’t know whether the moon is made of green cheese underneath that layer of regolith. Give me a break.
• Why I Have Joined the Greens. “A socially liberal party with left wing positions on a raft of issues that speaks to the class interests and outlooks of immaterial workers, stands up against the scapegoating and racism of the mainstream, and being the only party that really takes climate change, energy challenges, and the green transition seriously, Zack Polanski’s leadership and his adroit interventions have catalysed and coalesced mass support around the Greens.”
• Stanford scientists found a way to regrow cartilage and stop arthritis. I hope this comes to fruition before I need it.
• AI won’t replace us human literary translators just yet. “As a reader, you might care about the loss; you might not. I do – for one thing, I’m writing a book at the moment, so I’m rather hoping for more than ‘basically, yeah, that’s the gist’ from my own translators.”
• Spain plans to give 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status. Moral leadership in a global political environment that’s sorely lacking it.
• Leonardo da Vinci’s Recorders. Designs for recorders with slots instead of holes, so that they can play a continuous variation of pitch. Includes a video featuring a reconstruction.
• worstofbreed.net: “Welcome to the premier destination for Resume-Driven Development, Over-Engineering, and Resume-Padding. Why build simple solutions when you can build a distributed monolith managed by 4 different committees?”
• India’s 60 million street dogs are turning from village scavengers to city territory defenders. The relationship between India’s not-quite-wild dogs, the people who feed them, and the consequences.
• What It’s Like to Get Undressed by Grok. Horrific, and yet no one with power seems willing to stand up to the world’s richest man.

I’m glad I don’t live in America, but I still have to live in America’s world.

On the other hand, we don’t exactly seem to be free of morbid symptoms over here, either, with a Home Secretary dreaming of an AI-powered panopticon:

When I was in [the Ministry of Justice], my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.

Not only do these people think these things, they say them out loud!

The Labour government act as if they don’t realise what everyone else knows, that they will not get a second term, and that they risk building an ever more effective apparatus of repression for a future government that might be a lot more enthusiastic about using it to its fullest. In the US, Democratic administrations funded and supported ICE, and even though it’s now a tool to be used against their own constituency they still struggle to disown it.

Is there some kind of epistemic lacuna in sensibilist politics that, even as they insist on ever more control, renders them unable to imagine bad guys having the exact same tools?

I had to buy a replacement nozzle for the garden hose, because after I hosed the dog shit off my bike in the freezing cold a couple of weeks ago, the water froze in the nozzle and cracked the plastic. Obvious in retrospect, but I didn’t think of it at the time and now I’m £14 poorer, which is yet another annoyance from that event.

I got soaked cycling both ways on Wednesday. I saw a fox on the way home, contradicting my previous assumption that they must not like rain because I only ever see them on clear days. It’s not disproven, but there’s a data point against the hypothesis.

There were two fire alarms at the co-working space; real fire alarms in the sense that everyone had to leave the building, but false alarms in the sense that really matters. It does get harder to take them seriously when you’ve had two disruptive false alarms in the space of three days, though.

We watched 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple at Peckhamplex, home of the £4.99 £5.99 £6.99 cinema ticket. (At least I can just pop downstairs and buy a ticket in person, avoiding an additional 60p for online booking.) Like all good zombie films, hell is actually other people, and the bloodthirsty Jimmy Savile impressionists provided the real horror.

It wasn’t a relaxing watch, but I enjoyed it. The coda looks like the setup for yet another sequel, and if I’m right I also have some ideas about what that might be – or could be, anyway, and it’s related to both the topic being discussed at the end and to what happened to Samson.

While L— was out on Sunday evening I watched an old folk horror film, Witchfinder General (1968). As it’s set in Suffolk, I enjoyed spotting all the places I knew – Lavenham; Kentwell Hall; Orford Castle – and was indignant when they were supposedly in Brandeston but it absolutely wasn’t Brandeston at all. The only really unforgiveable thing about it was the colour of the fake blood. Anyone who has ever donated blood or even cut themselves badly will know it’s not the colour of a Royal Mail postbox, and I’m sure they could have done better.

This week’s links:

• Drone carrying live pig crashes into power lines, cuts Sichuan village electricity for 10 hours.
• EMU2 is a simple text-mode x86 DOS emulator for Linux that supports basic DOS system calls and console I/O.
• A ‘shopping list of autocratic actions’: what would-be autocrats do to recede democracy.
• Shame is a Weapon. “If anti-AI activists want to win, they have to grow fangs.”
• The Trump Administration Is Publishing a Stream of Nazi Propaganda. “The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery.”