We started the week with a train journey to Rugby, an hour’s travel for the improbably cheap price of £5.95 each. That was an advance ticket with a Two Together Railcard, which gives a ⅓ discount, but even accounting for that it was so cheap that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t made a mistake.

The sad thing is that if I’d seen a flight to a random city in central Europe for the same price I’d probably think it was completely normal. I’m just so completely accustomed to British trains costing a lot that I can’t accept that a train ticket might be affordable.

We stayed in a shepherd’s hut in a field on the edge of Braunston for a couple of nights, while we spent time with friends on their canal boat. The hut was very comfortable – “hut” doesn’t accurately capture what it’s really like – and only about ten minutes’ walk from the marina.

A view along a canal from the back of a boat; another narrowboat is approaching on the port side from under a brick bridge

Boat life

On Tuesday we took a trip along the canal and back again in very co-operative weather. It was warm and sunny while we pottered a little way along the Grand Union Canal and back again, and waited until we got back to the marina to start raining.

I can see the appeal of narrowboats, but the number of boats for sale in the marina gave an indication that there might be downsides. As a place to live, they’re cheap, if you don’t mind the fact that they’re cramped, sometimes cold, sometimes hot, and often damp. As a hobby, they’re expensive. After the droughts of the summer, many locks have limited opening times to conserve water, making the normal ambling pace of canal travel even slower.

After a night back at home we spent the rest of the week in Brighton, staying at my favourite hotel in the city, the quirky, friendly, and conveniently-located Hotel Pelirocco. On this occasion, it was even more convenient than usual, as it’s only about five minutes’ walk from the Brighton Conference Centre, the venue of the Green Party Autumn Conference, our reason for being in Brighton.

The conference was a mix: lots of lovely people; inspiring speeches; tedious and drawn-out plenary sessions; disappointments, such as when a representative of a large environmental organisation on a panel suggested that environmentally friendly “AI” is possible. That doesn’t seem particularly likely to me, given the way that large language models work. From the way some people talk, you’d think that LLMs run on thin air, and hyperscale data centres are just a naturally-occurring phenomenon. No: people make these things, and they take money and resources to run.

L— was there to promote the new health policy, all 296 pages of it. She has done a lot of work on it, and it was accepted without any amendments.

I’ve already written about the “Zionism is racism” motion so I won’t repeat that here.

It was warm and sunny in Brighton the whole time we were there, which was nice but also concerning in what it represents. We went for a dip in the sea on Sunday morning. The sea wasn’t warm – it never is anywhere in England – but it was pleasantly not too cold, and once we got out the air was warm enough to walk back draped in towels.

Brighton beach, derelict West Pier, and a colourful sunset

An autumn evening in Brighton

We ate well: lunch at No Catch; fancy dinner at Terre à terre; group meal at Tofu Vegan; pizza at Purezza; rice-based things at Happy Maki. Although Purezza’s pizzas were excellent (we shared the Pepperoni & Agave and the Parmigiana Party), I’d have to dock them points for trying to foist a faffy payment system on me: scan this QR code on your phone, try not to get fooled into paying a tip when they’ve already added service to the bill, type in card details, etc.; at least this one didn’t add an extra fee on top. Maybe it’s easier if you’re fully assimilated into the ecosystem of one of the duopolies, but I use Firefox on GrapheneOS, there’s no built-in payment mechanism and that’s the way I like it. I took one look at the card payment form, decided I could not be arsed, and walked up and asked to tap my card instead. Done in seconds. Why bother with such a rococo payment system when there’s a simpler way?

Links:

  • Design for 3D-Printing: Useful tips based on real experience.
  • Why Futhark? Futhark is a “purely functional data-parallel programming language in the ML family” intended to be used for “small but compute-intensive parts of an application”.
  • Vis is a “vi-like editor based on Plan 9’s structural regular expressions” that aims to combine the strengths of vi/vim and sam.
  • Slop-free FOSS lists “apps, projects, and services with accounts on the Fediverse that do NOT use AI, LLMs, Claude, vibe coding, etc.”
  • Gleam programming language: Gleam is a “familiar” (i.e. C-like syntax) language that runs on the BEAM (Erlang) VM.
  • PumpkinOS is “a re-implementation of PalmOS that runs on modern architectures”.
  • Alternative Health Influencer Boasts That He’s Been Drinking From a Radioactive Jug for 250 Days Straight. We live in exceptionally stupid times.
  • Who needs thought? “The west’s victory in the Cold war has led not to a strengthening of liberal capitalism but to the opposite; inequality and stagnation […] this stagnation has caused exactly what Ben Friedman predicted - a retreat into racism and illiberalism.”
  • There’s no point at which turning your brain off will work. There’s no future in being a meat proxy for the machines.
  • We are going to kill “unalive”. “If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. […] A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)”
  • Why don’t more developers “use the platform”? “Think of how much you learn as you start building this thing. […] Before you know it, you’ve built a library that’s ready to go on npm. That’s way more fun than just grabbing <dialog> and calling it a day – what a downer!”
  • Lost Myspace: “From 2003 to 2012, Myspace was the premier place for bands to post their music. In 2018, it lost it all in a botched server migration. The Internet Archive has managed to get their hands on a collection of nearly half a million songs, and has made them available in a searchable interface.”
  • CHOMPI Open Source: The sampler is now discontinued, but the hardware and software are open source.
  • FundamentalFrequency: “The LMN-3 is an open source DAW-in-a-box.” Open hardware, software, mechanical design, etc.