My parents were in London for an evening event, so we met for lunch.

I went to see The Standard of Living at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, starring Rory Kinnear playing something other than a Prime Minister. (Until L— reminded me, I’d forgotten that he was the porcine-compromised PM in Black Mirror as well as playing one more recently in the Diplomat).

It’s funnier than you’d expect from a film about economics, and maybe a bit propagandist towards the end (though I approve of the message). John Maynard Keynes had a much more interesting private life than I was previously aware of. His Russian ballerina wife was played by a Russian ballerina (Natalia Osipova). Time needed for costume changes and set adjustments was appropriately filled with short ballet dances.

I see that Zendesk have forked one of my repositories since I said I wasn’t going to maintain any Ruby gems any longer. That’s fine, it’s entirely within their rights, but I can’t help thinking that’s a bit of a dick move to have done it without using GitHub’s built-in “Fork” function, so it’s not listed in the forks of my repository and mine isn’t listed as the source of theirs.

The only real change they’ve made is in the licence which is now more corporate and restrictive. I wonder how long it will be before the yellow bar of shame appears.

Yellow bar on GitHub: “A user you’ve blocked has previously contributed to this repository.” The user is Claude.

The yellow bar of shame

Tip! You too can see this on repositories with LLM commits if you block all the agents on GitHub:

  • @claude
  • @codex
  • @cursoragent
  • @gemini-code-assist
  • @openhands-agent

When I was sorting out things in the loft, I dug out the old NUC (small form factor computer) that I was using up until mid-2020. I retired it because it tended to overheat when trying to do video calls, but now that I don’t need to do that it’s fine. It’s an i5 with half a terabyte of SSD and 16 GB of RAM (fuck you Sam Altman), and it works fine for the projects I’m actually using it for; for example, it builds a 30-page PDF with LuaTeX quicker than I can get distracted by something else. The main advantage is that I can leave it at the coworking space and avoid having to cart a laptop there every day, which means I can walk there without carrying that extra weight for an hour. I like long walks, but I don’t like lugging heavy bags.

On the topic of getting distracted while waiting for long processes, I have found a useful hack. At the end of the slow command, I add notify-send to flash up a notification in the Gnome desktop:

make; notify-send -t 3 "Command finished"

The sanshin repertoire book is nearly finished. I’m working on some background about how to read kunkunshi notation, then there will just be final formatting tweaks to make.

L—’s brother and family are moving to Australia next month, so that will mean both of us having brothers down under. Unfortunately, he’s not moving anywhere convenient, but to the opposite side of the country from mine, to a small town in Western Australia that takes 6 or 7 hours to reach by a bus service from Perth that runs only once or twice a day. You can get that down to about 4½ hours if you rent a car and drive yourself. You wouldn’t catch me moving anywhere that far from a train line, I can tell you.

One of the final events of London Festival of the Dead, on Hallowe’en itself, was a showing of the silent classic from Weimar Germany, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with improvised live accompaniment from the phenomenally talented Stephen Horne. He played piano, flute, accordion and timpani at the same time – flute with one hand and piano keys with the other – and reached into the piano to coax unusual sounds from the strings.

The film is delightful, and I wish that more films were made with such impressionistic sets today.

Something about the reversing and re-implementing of the M-Vave FM-1 firmware makes me sad. It’s neat that people can add their own features, but after just a few weeks there are over 250 solipsistic competing implementations, every last one slopcoded.

I fear that this is where open source is going: instead of living documents on which people work together, it’s just raw materials to pipe into your own slop extruder. A kind of fast fashion for software with just as many external costs.

It might be quixotic, but this makes me want to work on a human-made open firmware for it (and similar small devices).

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