Week 258: A day in the Cotswolds

In positive news, no one tried to kill me this week.

Our Christmas tree was delivered, but then sat naked for most of the week. On Sunday I dug out some Christmas CDs and cooked while L— did most of the decorating. It now looks very festive.

I spent a day in the Cotswolds to discuss some potential contract work. Cirencester is a very bougie town – it has an Aga shop, for example, a sure sign of people with more money than sense – but it doesn’t have its own railway station. Instead, you have to take a train to Kemble, a small hamlet a couple of miles up the road. The station is a rather desolate stretch of platform surrounded by car parks, but it does at least have a fast direct train from London.

Yes, of course it’s Beeching’s fault.

More news on the work in due course, I hope.

London is full of public transport amateurs at the moment. I assume they’re in town for Christmas. They gawp and stare and crowd and block the doors as if it’s their first day out in the world, and perhaps it does feel like that for visitors from Carland.

Quite a few links this time:

• GitHub → Codeberg: my experience. This is on my to do list too.
• Time to sound the alarm: the United States no longer behaves like a friend. Not news, but even centrist media can’t pretend otherwise any longer.
• Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US: ‘You are effectively blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system’. Sanctioned for authorising arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. The United States not only condones crimes against humanity, it enthusiastically supports them.
• ‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life. “Prost had been added to the United States’ sanctions list, because in 2020 she ruled to authorise an investigation into possible atrocities in Afghanistan, including by US troops.” The United States is inimical to humanity itself.
• AI Is Eating All the DRAM. DDR5 Prices Just Doubled. GPUs Could Be Next. It’s all just externalities, dumped onto the rest of society.
• 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple. Professional Apple fan, author of Mac OS development book, and organiser of Apple developer conference has his account locked, loses access to his photos, and has all his devices disconnected at the whim of a faceless gigacorp. And no one will help him. Never trust Big Tech.
• Why I Don’t Use AI. “Andy Balaam encourages us to pause and think about why [embracing generative AI] might not be a good idea.”
• This is not the future. “Nothing is inevitable, nothing sold by powerful grifters is ‘the future’ no matter how much they wish that were true.”
• Schraubenkiste is an open licensed font for representing screw heads and their drive types.
• Vanilla CSS is all you need.
• Cartero is a free, open, private native app for HTTP request and API testing because the popular commercial ones are bloated spyware.