I wrote in my diary last week, “Trump’s tariff madness. Is this the end of the US?”. And that was back on Thursday, when it was just beginning. It’s hard to understand what is going on in Trump’s mind, but we should maybe consider the most parsimonious explanation of all: he’s just a complete idiot with a child’s understanding of the world. He’s the man who bankrupted several casinos, and what are the world’s stock markets if not the world’s biggest casino?

I don’t feel nearly so smug about putting more money into my pension a couple of weeks ago. I hope it will go back up again before I retire. If not, we’ll have more problems to deal with.

I worked from home on Wednesday thinking that I had a full day of meetings. However, after some quarterly planning (that I wasn’t involved in) the Eye of Sauron has shifted its focus so those meetings were all cancelled. Then they were replaced with different ones, and I still ended up with a day full of meetings.

Thursday was pretty much the same: meetings all day, dealing with the jarring shift of priorities. I hope it’s going to settle down after this.

I went bouldering at the climbing wall for the first time in ages, and was shocked by how weak my upper body has become. One of my reasons to do it is specifically to avoid becoming enfeebled by age, so I’m going to have to make an effort to go a bit more often. It’s fun, even if I’m not very good.

My parents have been married 50 years and had an afternoon reception to celebrate. Conveniently for me and almost no one else, it was in central London so I took the Jubilee Line for half a dozen stops to meet family who had come from much further away.

On the basis that I’m not married now and even if we did get married I’d be approaching a century in 50 years’ time, it’s an achievement that I’m unlikely to match.

It’s pretty obscure. You wouldn’t have heard it. We went to a performance of L’Humanità Redenta by Antonio Draghi, a piece of music that had only been performed once before, in 1669. It’s a lovely piece, and it’s a shame it’s been forgotten for so long.

The weather has been unnaturally fine for longer than I can remember. The sky has been blue, and the days sunny. It’s not particularly hot, and the nights are very chilly, but seeing the sun every day brings so much joy. I’m reminded of how during my time in Japan even the winter was bright and cheerful, and so unlike the undifferentiate damp greyness I’m used to in England.

We watched Crá, an Irish-language murder mystery set in county Donegal. It’s a good watch, and it’s heartening to see something entirely in Irish in which the language is incidental. However, some of the actors had very stilted Irish, and the dialects and pronunciation weren’t all consistent with the setting. I know there aren’t all that many fluent Irish speakers, but there must be more than that!

Links:

  • Denial. “When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they were trained on other people’s creative work without permission. But this is an ongoing problem that’s just getting worse. […] If you’re going to use generative tools powered by large language models, don’t pretend you don’t know how your sausage is made.”
  • Germany Deportations Target Gaza War Protesters. None have been convicted of a crime; three are EU citizens.
  • Stirling PDF is “A locally hosted one-stop shop for all your PDF needs.” Useful for manipulating, filling, and signing PDFs.
  • Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish. “You might not have noticed, but year after year, document formats like .docx, .ppt, and pdf lose a little bit of steam.” WYSIWYG is dying, and not before time.