Week 268: Suspension of disbelief

The week started badly: I opened my laptop for a 9am meeting only for it to run out of battery and die seconds later, before it even had time to tell me it was running low.

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.