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2026-05-11

Week 279: Two out of three

It was a short work week thanks to the bank holiday on Monday. I spent a few hours on Monday typesetting various pieces of music; I feel like I understand Lilypond better and better.

I’ve been busy with the local elections recently, and especially on election day itself on Thursday. I woke just after 6 and spent a few hours delivering election day leaflets to identified Green supporters to encourage them to get out and vote.

After work, L— and I spent an hour telling outside a polling station – that’s the thankless task of standing outside in the cold asking people if you can check off their poll number so that they don’t end up getting disturbed later on. After that, we went to knock on the doors of people to encourage them to vote before polls closed at 10.

All that is a lot of work, and walking, and doing things that I really don’t particularly enjoy, but the past few months paid off: in the target ward (Rotherhithe) we got two out of three Green candidates elected.

Because the effort was focused on wards identified as winnable, in our own ward of Surrey Docks there was no activity and only paper candidates. In the final count, however, the Green candidate who came fourth was only 27 votes away from third place. It’s a shame, but it bodes well for the general election.

For Greens in Southwark it was a good result: Labour no longer have control (down from 52 out of 63 councillors at the last vote) and the council is now split: 29 Labour; 22 Green; 12 Liberal Democrat.

I completely wrecked my voice shouting over the din at the celebrations on Friday night; I was still a bit croaky on Sunday.

We dropped into the Surrey Docks Farm Spring Fair on Saturday, where a friend was singing with the London Sea Shanty Collective. That was a lot of fun to listen to.

I left after their first performance with the intention of cycling to Sanshinkai practice, but a busy week, not enough sleep, and a late night on Friday caught up with me and I took a 1½-hour nap instead.

I’m going to Electromagnetic Field (aka EMF Camp) 2026 in July. I went for the first time in 2024, and loved it. This year, however, the tickets sold out within seconds, before I could even open the drop-down menu and click “buy”, and I resigned myself to missing it unless I managed to snag a last-minute ticket again. But I also submitted a couple of talk proposals. One was accepted, so I was able to buy a ticket without needing gamer reflexes, at a bit of a discount.

It’s a talk proposal that I first sketched out a few years ago, and it’s been percolating in my mind for a long time. I’m looking forward to making it real at last.

I’ve heard far too much of that excessively auto-tuned new song by the Strokes on the radio this week. I hope it drops out of 6 Music’s playlist soon.

Links:

• PicoHDMI “leverages the RP2350’s dedicated HSTX (High-Speed Transmit) peripheral with hardware TMDS encoding. No bit-banging, no overclocking required: just near-zero CPU overhead for video output.”
• FastCGI: 30 Years Old and Still the Better Protocol for Reverse Proxies.
• Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags. But after a year and 504 citations, much damage is already done. “It really seemed like a paper that should not have been published in the first place.”
• AMY is a high-performance fixed-point synth library, written in C, that runs on almost anything and implements Juno-style analogue, DX7-style FM, and wavetable synthesis as well as sample playback.
• Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps.
• Your hex editor should color-code bytes. Makes a convincing case.
• AI as a Fascist Artifact.
• Beans is How: “A campaign to double global bean consumption by 2028”.
• Mythos: Backlash builds over NHS plan to hide source code from AI hacking risk. “NHS England is pulling its open-source software from the internet because of fears around computer-hacking AI models like Mythos. Opposition is growing among those who say the move is bad for transparency and efficiency, and will also do nothing to improve security”.
• Keep things open: it makes things better. An open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open.
• That “Pending PayPal Charge” Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal. “PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. […] PayPal’s system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction. Here’s the catch: the email’s subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn’t sanitize it.” Eek.