Java is fine. It works. It has a good ecosystem of libraries, and now that I’ve figured out Maven and what the classpath means and how local dependencies are handled, it does what I need. The language is quite verbose, and yet there are obvious missing features, like the fact that you can’t rename imports. It also demands elaborate ceremony: things that in other languages would take one line require you to write an entire class in its own special file and then import it explicitly.

But as I say, it’s fine. It’s recognisably a programming language, and I want to integrate with some existing Java so it’s making life easier to use it.

On the upside, unlike Ruby, Java is not extruded from an LLM, although I don’t know how long that will last. The interim policy is strong, but on the other hand Oracle has gone big on the AI bubble and bet its entire future on running LLM data centres for OpenAI, so if (and it’s a big if) they don’t go bust they might bring pressure to bear on that.

(Over in the Ruby repository, Claude is now involved in a plurality of commits and seems to be responsible for verbose and bizarre slopified commit notes. It’s sad to see.)

What am I doing this for? It’s a project that a few of us are collaborating on to make a songbook of sanshin pieces for London Okinawa Sanshinkai. We already have a program that renders the scores to PDF, but the Java PDF library has very limited typography, which limits the fonts we can use, which makes it hard to produce a consistent book. I’m writing an SVG renderer, which lets us take advantage of vertical text rendering and OpenType support, even when we then render that to PDF. It also means that we’ll be able to put the music directly into web pages with the lyrics, and I’m hoping to be able to reuse the same tooling for both book and website. I’ve made a lot of progress; it’s just missing a few articulation and repeat marks that I deliberately left until I’d got the hard parts working.

The flood in Nepal and Tibet was awful beyond my comprehension. I saw before and after photos, and videos of water so high that it swept away everything. The footage of the seven-storey building on the Chinese border being engulfed and obliterated showed the scale of it, but I still can’t quite imagine it.

Whether or not it was the proximate cause, global warming and the consequent melting of the permafrost will have played a part in the chain of events that led to this.

Meanwhile, the developing El Niño is likely to be the strongest in living memory, and 2027 is on course to be the hottest year on record (after we’ve just had the UK’s hottest summer on record, following four of the UK’s five hottest years on record back to back.)

And does anyone in power seem to be doing anything about it? No, they’re intent on building more AI data centres and going to war with everybody. Don’t think about it, you’ll lose your mind.

It was a big week for famous deaths: Dolly Parton; Tim Curry; and Yayoi Kusama. (Oh, and also notorious war criminal Ratko Mladić, so not all bad news.)

Dolly seemed like a good egg, a generous donor and ally who used her fame and fortune to genuinely positive effect. She supported literacy, medical research, gay and trans rights, disaster relief, and other similarly altruistic causes.

When I look at what the current cadre of techbros spend their VC/crypto/AI-boom money on, I despair. Especially the ones I used to work with, whether it’s Greg Brockman becoming Trump’s number one donor or Patrick Collison donating $7 million to a campaign to prevent him having to pay more tax or, more recently, $1 million to DHH’s (of whom I have written previously) divisive own-the-libs Linux distro (or collection of shell scripts, depending on who you ask). I think they’re signalling which side they’re on: the other one.

On the subject of Dolly Parton, when Jolene came on the radio, I ended up listening to it more carefully than I had done in the past. It has a more interesting structure than I had assumed.

Each verse is four bars followed by a fifth bar that adds tension; the song is mostly in 4/4 time but the chorus has an extra half bar of 2/4 in the middle; and there’s also an additional bar between choruses when they’re repeated.

It also has a funky riff and a catchy melody, but I think it’s those little bits where the arrangement carries on longer than your ear expects that make the song.

Another song that springs to my mind that does the same 2/4 half bar trick is Purple Rain by Prince. So if you ever need to know what those two songs have in common, or to write an impossibly hard musicological pub quiz question, there you go.

I’ve had a bit of a cold all week. It’s not bad, just annoying: a bit of a sore throat, especially first thing in the morning, and a runny nose.

A few links:

• PolyCut “turns a 3D printer into a 2D cutting/drawing machine. Import SVGs or images and convert them to GCode for use with pens, knives, foil tools or other attachments. Think of it as an alternative to Cricut if you already have a capable machine.”
• How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation seems even worse for small businesses in the EU than Brexit was for those in the UK. Whether by accident or design, they’ve produced regulations that only big companies can follow.
• Chinese farmer kills 25 acres of crops after following AI-generated weed and pest control advice. Another example of the rapid deskilling that comes from LLM use: a 67-year-old farmer, with decades of experience, suddenly followed catastrophically wrong extruded guidance and killed his crops.
• There’s no such thing as Just a Tool. “Similarly, you cannot discuss the fact that driving an SUV tends to encourage shitty driving behaviour on the road because, after all, the SUV is ‘just a tool’ and there are some legitimate use cases for it: because this is the case, the fact that the SUV has ideological and behavioural consequences is something that we’re not really allowed to discuss. This kind of folk understanding of tools is very common, but unfortunately it’s almost all wrong.”
• Why You Got Insulted for Your Harry Potter Shirt. “In a sentence: giving money to the fight against trans rights bars you from polite, left-of-center society”.

There are plenty of examples of plays within plays – I can think of three by Shakespeare off the top of my head (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Love’s Labours Lost) – but I don’t know of many musicals within musicals.

We went to see the musical adaptation of The Producers at the Garrick Theatre on Wednesday. It was a lot of fun, the staging was clever, and there were some delightful costumes, especially for the pigeons.

The film is set around the production of a musical, making the adaptation a musical within a musical. It can’t quite beat the original 1967 film in my affections, and it shares with it a weak plot in the second half, but it’s worth seeing.

We found relatively cheap tickets with a good view at the back of the dress circle, but that’s all relative: no tickets are cheap these days unless you’re lucky enough to snag them through a seat filler.

The demolition work on the 1930s buildings in front of Peckham Rye station have reached the stage where the station building is now visible from the street for the first time in nearly a century.

It should look nice when it’s eventually completed, some time next year. I think it’s going to improve significantly the impression that first-time visitors get of Peckham. I remember the first time I left the station and found myself in a gloomy, run-down passageway. It wasn’t the most favourable introduction.

Links:

• repo-slopscore: Check whether open-source projects use LLMs to extrude code.
• All things live coding. The TOPLAP “awesome-livecoding” list has moved to Codeberg.
• Open Slopware: “Free/Open Source Software choosing to use and/or support LLM usage/AI, as well as alternatives and tips to requesting better policies or forking.”
• wg-easy is “the easiest way to install & manage WireGuard on any Linux host” via a Docker container with a web management interface.
• I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip - some thoughts about simpler computers. I bet it can put a keystroke on the screen faster than any modern PC, too.
• Scheme Documentation: R7RS: Portable Guide.
• The people vs the AI overlords. “So, now we have to pay to get anything done? This is peak enshitification of our job: first they steal our work to train their models, and then they sell it back to us at a profit. […] The LLM hype is part of the larger wave of cyberwar against workers, against water, against the Earth, against all the people. This is not a matter of individually ‘adapting to the reality’ or personal choice, but a political, social, hard problem we need to address collectively.”
• HTML Can Do That. “HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.”

BART: This is the worst day of my life.
HOMER: The worst day of your life so far.

At the Makerspace I used the laser cutter to make a replacement back panel for the chair I’m refurbishing after rescuing it from the street where someone had dumped it by the bins.

Despite my test cuts and tuning, the laser didn’t quite cut all the way through everywhere, and I had to carefully score the back to remove the piece from the sheet. Someone gave me a tip for using the laser on thick sheets more effectively, but it was too late by then.

There’s a lot of sanding of the panel and the whole chair still to be done, but it’s progress.

The Japanese (and Chinese) word for “solar eclipse” is 日食 (nisshoku), from characters meaning “sun” and “eat”. Something is taking a bite out of the sun, and I always liked that. “Lunar eclipse” is analogous: 月食 (gesshoku).

The eclipse on Thursday evening wasn’t as impressive as the total eclipse in 1999 (even when experienced through British clouds) but it was still more than the one I saw in 2005, and it was an odd experience. Human vision being what it is, wide variations in brightness are actually very hard to perceive. However, everything took on a pale cast, and the leaves of trees looked silvery. The crows in the park seemed to be acting strangely, perhaps confused by the phenomenon.

I had smugly bought a couple of pairs of eclipse-viewing glasses cheaply back in April when I first realised there was an eclipse coming up, and I even managed to remember the “safe place” that I had put them. We went to Burgess Park, which didn’t work out as well as hoped because the centre of the park was closed off with tall fences for a private event, and it’s not all that easy to find an area with a clear view of the sun when it’s 10° above the horizon. But after moving around a couple of times, we found a suitable spot and had plenty of opportunity to see the eclipse at and around its maximum.

On Friday we caught a train to Retford, so that we could get a shuttle bus to somewhere in the middle of nowhere Walesby Forest for Vegan Camp Out. I’d never heard of Retford before, but it has a direct train from London every hour. Unfortunately, this is split between LNER and Hull Trains, so it’s one every two hours for each operator, and you can’t just buy an off-peak return ticket and take any train. (And, in fact, you can’t buy a return ticket at all on LNER, as part of some ill-conceived weasely-named Simpler Fares scheme that makes buying a train ticket more like air travel in all the wrong ways.)

Anyway, we took Hull Trains. It was fine, although the window of the train didn’t inspire confidence in the quality of the “heat stregthened [sic]” product:

That wasn’t the only misspelling I saw this weekend. The most significant was a person with a tattoo across both thighs, in a metal band lettering style, spelling out “ANIMAL RIGTHS”. Some ragrets, surely.

The festival was fun; we were spoilt for choice with 100% vegan catering, of which about two thirds wasn’t vegan burgers and chips. I don’t mind a vegan burger and chips, but I prefer a bit of variety and imagination.

There were informative talks – I learned a lot about the unfairly maligned and abused feral pigeon – and entertaining ones; there was comedy and music and most of the things you’d expect from a festival. We danced a couple of tunes at the ceilidh until the amount of dust being kicked up from the parched and desertified earth made it impossible to breathe.

The weekend didn’t seem overly cultish, but the common bond between attendees made it feel safe and cohesive. I had a few interesting conversations with random people. There seems to be some controversy about the organisers which neither of us is sufficiently online to decipher.

It wasn’t the best-organised festival I’ve been to. I only found out on Sunday that we could have taken a coach directly from London, which would have been cheaper and more convenient. The shuttle bus to Retford wasn’t advertised anywhere on the festival website, but only on Instagram. The bins weren’t emptied often enough, and there wasn’t enough seating in the main stage, leading to people packed chaotically on the floor. In an emergency, it would have been impossible to evacuate safely.

I was disappointed to see a number of items sold from stalls on the site – T-shirts, stickers, badges – with designs that bore the unmistakeable signs of having been extruded from the slop generator. Others have realised that not doing so is a competitive advantage, however:

We were passed by a whirlwind on Sunday afternoon as we sat eating lunch. It looked like something out of Looney Tunes with so much dust sucked up into it. It probably isn’t an unusual phenomenon, but being able to see one is: without the visible dust it would have been indistinguishable from a gust of wind.

I was taking a disco nap on Friday evening when I was rudely awakened in a state of confusion by blaring sirens from inside and outside the tent. I fumbled to get the noise to stop, which dismissed the alert; I was only able to find out what it said by going into my phone’s settings and looking at the alert history.

And then I was just angry.

I don’t care if you do want to disseminate a message to the whole country. “Don’t have a barbecue” is not the level of urgency that justifies setting off an air-raid siren in everyone’s pocket. I don’t think it even justifies waking me up from a nap.

I have now, of course, turned off the emergency alerts. It was an oversight that they were on in the first place: I had turned them off before, but had since replaced my phone and didn’t realise they were back on. I’ve gone my entire life without the dubious benefit of being able to receive direct alerts from the government, and, especially now that I’ve seen what they decide to use it for, I don’t feel the need to worry about “what if?” hypotheticals.

I reached a 3,000 day streak on Duolingo – that’s more than eight years of daily use – and felt that it’s a good point to let it lapse and free myself from the digital shackles of gamification. None of it is real. I’ve uninstalled the app. Goodbye, owl. It stopped being fun a while ago, and I shan’t miss the silly noises and animations.

A few links:

• A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy. A useful guide to all the tricks and shortcuts that can be achieved with an exclamation mark.
• How I browse the Web with uBlock (Hard Mode).
• CrossPoint Reader is open-source reader software for ESP32-based e-ink devices.
• Welcome To The Resistance: Meet The Workers Dodging (And Sabotaging) Their Employer’s AI Mandates “As a manager, I knew that there were internal dashboards at the company showing AI usage, so I built lots of inane, rambling prompts, like having the AI write (bad) book reports. I did all the real work myself, but my usage showed up on the dashboards and made me an ‘AI Champion’”.
• Tape Echo 2 is a free, open-source Space Echo emulation plugin.
• Little Fluffy Clouds: Ethan Hein breaks down The Orb’s 1991 record.

Tuesday was wasted waiting in for a delivery that was postponed, and a Royal Mail collection that I’d arranged for the same day to kill two birds with one stone, but which didn’t happen until after three o’clock. The evening was better, though, as an old friend from Belgium was in town with her family, and we all met for dinner.

My parents, also in London for a few days, came for dinner on Wednesday.

When I saw that c2c were offering £15 return tickets to Southend-on-Sea this summer, I thought that I should take a day trip to a place I’ve never been. As it happens, I have a Network Railcard, which means that an off-peak day return is more flexible and cheaper still, but the seed was planted, and Friday seemed like an ideal day for it.

At first, I thought I’d catch the train from Stratford, but there’s no direct route from there. The train to Southend runs from London Fenchurch Street, which isn’t all that convenient for me, but it stops at West Ham, which is on the Jubilee Line and therefore an ideal station to catch it from, in theory.

I used contactless payment to get to West Ham, tapped out, and went to buy a ticket like some kind of complete rube. Because this is Britain, and nothing can ever be that straightforward. West Ham station is run by TfL, which means it doesn’t work like a real railway station.

First of all, the ticket machine tries to dissuade you from buying a ticket, and directs you to use contactless instead. If you persist – in my case, because I wanted to get the Network Railcard discount that isn’t available with contactless – it then tells you that this machine will not issue tickets with a Railcard discount on weekdays. That’s an oddly specific “fuck you” to the traveller, and to me in particular. It suggests instead that you should just board the train and buy a ticket from a member of staff, which is putting far too much reliance on the kindness of revenue protection staff for my risk appetite.

After some time spent faffing on my phone, typing in my address and credit card details, missing the train I’d hoped to take, I bought a ticket. I expected an eTicket, but this was delivered in the form of a code which, it turns out, I couldn’t redeem at the TfL-operated ticket machine. And, of course, there’s no booking office any more. The member of staff who let me through the gate advised me to speak to the staff on board the train to issue a ticket.

I took the next train, fifteen minutes after the one I’d intended. There were no staff to be seen on board, so I spent the journey nervous about whether I was going to end up being fined for breaching the esoteric rules of the not-at-all-joined-up British railway system.

In the end it was fine. At Southend Central, instead of drawing attention to my lack of a ticket, I appealed to the staff’s helpfulness by asking where I could collect my ticket from the code. They dutifully let me through the gate and pointed me at a machine that printed my tickets, so that getting back, at least, was no trouble.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried:

In cases where the Ticket Vending Machine (TVM) is not working and a customer has their CTR reference number and/or appropriate proof of purchase and appropriate identification, the customer will be instructed to board their train and be allowed to travel and advised to collect their tickets at the first available opportunity

The first thing I did on arrival was to walk down the High Street (with not one, not two, but three branches of Greggs!), past the fairground, to the pier.

The fairground, and indeed Southend as a whole, seemed very quiet for a seaside town on a hot Friday in the summer holidays, and many small retail booths were shut. My impression is that it’s a place that receives most of its visitors at the weekend.

Southend pier has had a hard life: it suffered fires in 1959, 1976, 1995, and 2005, and was hit by ships twice, in 1908 and 1986. It was at one point the longest pier in the world; now, it’s still the longest pleasure pier in the world. And it is long: 1⅓ miles or 2.1 km, most of which is a long walkway under the unremitting sun across the vast mudflats. It was almost exactly low tide as I walked out: peak mud.

You can take a train to the end and back, on a smelly, diesel-fueled contraption, but the service is infrequent, it’s expensive, and as has previously been established, I’m perfectly happy walking quite far.

At the end of the pier, I bought a pilsner from the café and drank it in the shade while enjoying the relatively cool breeze. Then, inevitably, I retraced my steps back to shore.

Southend isn’t all seaside tackiness and a very long pier, however. There’s a delightful garden around Southchurch Hall, a 14th century manor house with a largely-intact Great Hall plus some later additions, of which I received a personal guided tour from a friendly volunteer.

At the Central Museum, there’s an impressive set of artefacts – including a gold decorative buckle that looks as good as the day it was made – excavated from an Anglo-Saxon burial at Prittlewell. The Beecroft Gallery hosts exhibitions (I saw Heidi Wigmore State of Her) and the Jazz Centre UK, “the UK’s national cultural centre for jazz” and a great place to buy second-hand jazz CDs. (I found a copy of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s classic album Time Out for £3.)

I think I’ll be back to see some of the things I missed: the permanent collection at the Beecroft Gallery; the rest of the museum; Prittlewell Priory; the curious Cliff Lift. At £13.05 return it’s a cheap day out.

All these photos were taken with my 22-year-old 6 megapixel Lumix point-and-shoot, recently resuscitated with a new battery. It works well for candid photography because it’s so tiny and unthreatening. I like the 28 mm equivalent lens, and there’s not much to do in the way of control apart from frame the shot (as best as you can in a screen that isn’t all that visible in daylight) and hope. It was a fun exercise.

After some research, I think I have found an actual workable way to travel from West Ham to Southend with a Railcard that doesn’t rely on travelling to pick the ticket up or hoping that the inspector has a good day. First, in advance, you have to order a (free) smartcard from c2c. Because, as mentioned earlier, nothing is properly joined up, this is not the same as the (also free) Key smartcard that works on Southern, Thameslink, and Great Northern in London and the Home Counties. Why not order one of those as well while you’re at it? There’s a South Western Railway smartcard too! And Greater Anglia! And half the operators have their own card. Are they interoperable? Maybe!

In theory, and as far as I can test the process without having yet received a card, you can then buy a ticket on c2c’s website and associate it with your smartcard, and it should be loaded onto the card when tapping in. If you don’t leave the station, you have to remember to tap in and out with both cards at the foot of the staircase when changing to and from the Underground.

That’s the idea, anyway. I’ll let you know how it works.

We spent Sunday afternoon in Bedford with L—’s family for a significant birthday. We made up several jugs of non-alcoholic not-actually-Pimm’s with ANON English Garden. At a 1:3 ratio with lemonade, fruit, cucumber, and mint, it’s delicious and I really couldn’t tell the difference in taste. Recommended.

There’s still no end to the oppressive heat. The media report an “unprecedented” fifth heatwave of the year but I’m not sure when the four intervening non-heatwave periods are meant to have occurred. It doesn’t seem good, does it?

Links for the week. Don’t have nightmares.

• The moral hazard of large language models. “Do it [engage in ‘conversation’ with the LLM] often enough, and you will start thinking about the model in terms of human interaction, which is a category error with serious implications.”
• Degeneracy is a Symptom. “Your grandparents lived in a hedge-financed world. They could afford to be virtuous, in the conventional sense, because virtue paid. The young live in a Ponzi-financed world. They cannot afford to be virtuous in the conventional sense, because virtue does not pay, and the only strategies that have any chance of clearing the threshold their grandparents took for granted are strategies their grandparents would not recognise as strategies at all.” A brutal discussion of how unchecked rentier capitalism has immiserated the young.
• American farmers slid solar panels over 62,000 acres of farmland, and the biggest payoff had almost nothing to do with electricity. Partial shade from the panels results in less water use and greater yields.
• The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate. “The other scenario, which scientists now say ‘recent data aligns more closely with,’ is 3C of warming. At that level, the Exeter authors warn of up to 4 billion deaths. Four billion. That is half the planet. In 26 years or less.”

Befell that, in that season on a day,
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay,
Ready to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with devout coráge,
At night was come into that hostelry
Well nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry folk, by áventure y-fall
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all,
That toward Canterbury wouldë ride.

Can you walk from London to Canterbury in less than 48 hours? Maybe. Should you? Probably not. But I did.

Five of us set out on Friday evening from Southwark Cathedral with an optimistic plan.

• Friday evening: 12 miles (19 km) to Bexleyheath
• Saturday: 28 miles (45 km) to Sittingbourne
• Sunday: 19 miles (31 km) to Canterbury

The downside to doing it in such a short time is that you’re forced to take a direct route that includes some quite unpleasant sections, like the part where you have to walk along a footpath separated only by a crash barrier from an eight-lane dual carriageway that is a motorway in every sense except the strict legal definition. I was glad that I had packed earplugs. And for some reason, almost every footpath alongside a busy road is on the north side, so you never get any shade from the trees.

There were good bits, though, when we walked along quiet shaded roads, along fields, and even through woods where I snacked on blackberries, plums, and cornelian cherries.

We rented a house for each night. On Friday, I ended up in the attic room which was initially hot, but tolerable after I opened the window for some air. In return I had a whole floor and an en-suite bathroom to myself.

On Saturday, however, the house that was advertised as having three beds and two sofa beds had only three beds and two sofas. I took some sofa cushions to the dining room, fashioned a comfortable bed for myself, and slept very well with a keffiyeh for a blanket. I slept so well, in fact, that I woke up at 03:30 feeling very refreshed before looking at my watch and going back to sleep for a bonus round. All the same, a proper bed would have been nice.

Walking boots were also a mistake. So much of the route was on tarmac – and what wasn’t was baked hard anyway – that running shoes would have been a better bet. Nonetheless, my feet survived with only one insignificant blister that didn’t even cause me discomfort.

The same couldn’t be said of my walking mates, all of whom suffered various difficulties with feet, legs, and exhaustion from the hubristic pace we had set ourselves. By Sunday morning, I was clearly in a much better condition than anyone else. Even before we walked from the house to the main road, the differences were becoming obvious between two of us at the front, and the three behind. They elected to find a train from Sittingbourne, while we pressed on.

However, they subsequently managed to walk a bit further and made it as far as Faversham, and the shrine of St Jude – who is, appropriately, the patron saint of lost causes – before taking a bus the last 10 miles. I don’t think that’s a failure: every depiction of historical pilgrims along the route shows them on horses or donkeys, and Chaucer’s pilgrims are described as riding. Doing it most of the way on foot in such short time was still a huge achievement.

Meanwhile, my remaining companion and I continued, he suffering with leg pains, I doing my best not to rush off ahead at my natural pace, and we made it to Canterbury together just after 16:00, in plenty of time for Evensong.

My feet were a little tender from being bashed against the hard ground for so long, but I arrived with no particular ill effects other than slightly stiff legs. By Monday evening, after a night of proper sleep, and an idle day with an afternoon nap, I felt almost completely back to normal. Is it from eating a plant-based diet? Is it from being fitter? (The fact that I cycled nearly 500 km a couple of weeks ago can’t have hurt.) Is it just that I weigh a lot less than anyone else and so it takes me less energy to move around? It is a strange feeling to have succeeded relatively easily at something that was such a challenge to others.

Nonetheless, I still feel that I achieved something significant, and unlike William of Perth I didn’t get murdered just past Rochester, so that’s nice.

We’ve also raised a significant amount for young people’s swimming in online and offline donations. The irony is that I don’t do that kind of swimming at all. I’ve never been able to master the technique of breathing while doing front crawl, because I lack the buoyancy and/or skill to keep my head above the water so that I can breathe.

We finally have fibre-optic internet at home again, five years after we last had it before we moved to these infrastructure-starved wild lands in inner London, less than 4 miles from Charing Cross. The engineer came and fitted the cable from the recently-installed box in the pavement to the front wall. It’s both faster and a bit cheaper than VDSL. I’ve gone with the cheapest tier (115 Mbps down) for now, because I wasn’t particularly dissatisfied with 58 Mbps before. It’s enough to download over a terabyte per day, and with the current AI-bubble-inflated cost of storage, who needs that much data?!

I’ve been hoarding links lately. Here they are:

• The git history command deserves more attention. git history fixup is new to me, but potentially very useful.
• E73 is a “rendering of the ECMA-42 standard bitmap printer font from 1973.”
• justif implements Knuth-Plass in JavaScript.
• We write code by hand: “We use Natural Intelligence to build software libraries and applications in production today. Some of them you may be using right now.”
• Copilot worm can spread through Microsoft Word docs. “It’s hard not to chuckle a bit with this one […] Thirty years later, we’ve built an entire category of software that can’t tell the difference [between data and instructions] at all.”
• BitBang: “Run BitBang, get a URL, and open it in any browser – you’re connected to the machine, peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted. There’s no account, no port forwarding, and nothing to install on the connecting side.”
• Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools With Tcl/Tk. Powerful, Event-Driven, Open-Source And Future-Proof Toolkit… From the Past?!
• Data centres could pay hundreds of millions in deposits for power demands. “[Ofcom] said the amount of electricity capacity being requested by projects seeking to connect to the grid had risen from 41 GW to 125 GW in the past year, reflecting a sharp increase in demand. This is significantly more than double 2025’s peak electricity demand in Britain of around 46 GW.” Ridiculous amounts of power that we don’t have, and which we need for the transition away from fossil fuels.
• AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking. “I’ve had a front-row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath-taking mass psychosis. This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent on paying lip service to madness, and to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy.”
• The Hare programming language: “Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime.” Fits on a floppy disk, and is opposed to the use of LLMs or GenAI.
• Extinct Media Museum Tokyo is “a private museum that collects and exhibits media and media equipment that have died out or are dying out in the process of evolution based on the belief that all media other than paper and stone will become extinct.”
• Fast Synthesis of Basic Oscillators.
• Why Aren’t There More IMAX 70mm Screens for ‘The Odyssey’? “Sources at Imax confirmed to Variety that many of the parts needed to build these specialized film projectors ‘simply no longer exist.’ The original design files were created roughly half a century ago, but as Gelfond alludes to, they were never properly maintained. As a result, Imax no longer has a complete manufacturing blueprint — and much like the lost tribal knowledge of the Apollo-era spacecraft, very few engineers working today fully understand the systems.”
• slash pages is a “guide to common pages you can add to your website”
• Unicode Variation Selector-15 and some of my tears. How to render ↩ instead of ↩️.
• The AI Resist List: “Actions against the empire of AI.”
• polyUAnalog is a “Polyphonic Analogic and Open Source Synth”.
• GitLost: How We Tricked GitHub’s AI Agent into Leaking Private Repos. The fact that LLMs have no separation between data and instructions strikes again.
• Interview: Drew DeVault on an AI-free version of Vim . An interesting and deep interview that goes far beyond just programming.
• The devout Muslim making a living from Islamophobic AI slop.
• DHH Calls for Death to Cows as He Writes the Word Remigration. Whatever shreds of mask remained on the face of the Rails guy, they’re off now.
• Reviewing AI Code Is Not A Viable Argument. Reviewing is the bottleneck, and reviewing LLM-generated code is harder than reviewing human-authored code.
• Worse on Purpose. “Why your stuff stopped lasting, who profited, and what’s still built right.”
• Grumpystack. “Computers. The Internet. Are too complicated. But they don’t have to be.”

Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, is the creator and chief designer of the Ruby programming language. He isn’t outspoken, he doesn’t make many pronouncements outside the strictly technical arena, and he conducts most of his online life in Japanese. That provides a space onto which to project anything, and that gave us a motto of the Ruby programming community: MINASWAN (“Matz is nice and so we are nice”).

I’m not saying that Matz isn’t nice, but the “Matz is nice” trope was only ever projection, and in the end it doesn’t matter, because if we’re honest, we must conclude that the Ruby community is not “nice”.

Two of the most obvious “not nice” but powerful people in Ruby are David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, and Tobias Lütke, and Matz shares a stage with both of them.

Let’s take DHH first. He is the creator of and prime mover behind the Ruby on Rails framework. Rails is Ruby’s success story, and represents the vast majority of Ruby development and deployment. It has given me much of my paid work for the past couple of decades.

DHH owns the Ruby on Rails trademark and is, in effect, the dictator for life of the project. He was a controversial figure in the early days of his Ruby fame.

He’s noisy, he’s reactionary, he’s anti-intellectual, he’s very sure that he is right, and he enjoys being rude.

But who among us has not been an idiot in their youth? He seemed to grow up, calm down, chill out, and for a time even espoused inclusive policies and ideas.

More recently, however, he has pivoted his entire online personality to being obdurately “anti-woke”, and started to publish pieces that are increasingly, unarguably, white nationalist and far right in tone and content, lauding Stephen Yaxley-Lennon dba Tommy Robinson, attacking immigrants and other minorities, and generally revelling in reactionary bigotry.

“As I remember London” should be a wake-up call for everyone in the Ruby and Rails communities. This is not a man who wants to keep going. This is a man who romanticizes a past that was predominantly good for white men. This is a man who has spent years railing against diversity, equity and inclusion and who spreads anti-trans rhetoric. This is a man who is deeply afraid of immigration changing countries’ cultures and “national identities”, despite this kind of change being a constant for the whole of human history. This is a man who is a white nationalist. And he is in sole control of Rails, this framework we all love.

Unfortunately it isn’t just migrants and non-white people that have come under fire in DHH’s recent writing and social media posts. There have been multiple examples of anti-trans rhetoric. There was the post where he described an ad featuring a plus-sized Black women as “grotesque” and celebrated the ads being replaced with ones featuring “blond babies” (what is it about the baby’s blondness that is relevant I wonder?). There have been the posts veering into puritanical Pronatalism, another favourite subject of the nationalist right. Whether it’s his direct intention or not, there has been a consistent theme of othering and stigmatising in his recent writing.

In the past few weeks, DHH has gone much further, calling for “remigration”, the euphemism for mass deportation of citizens used by the far right.

Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It’s also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization.

He has also, most recently, compared Roma people to wolves that need to be shot, and then got very upset when an LLM refused to translate it because it was “dehumanizing towards an ethnic group”. You don’t gotta hand it to the LLMs, but on this occasion, fair play.

When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn’t hard, it isn’t cruel. It’s the basic logic of self-preservation.

As Emily Gorcenski pithily observed:

just figured out what the HH in DHH stands for

Hansson is also a board member of Shopify, a company that provides hosted online shops, and who you may know from 10,000 annoying podcast ads.

Shopify employs five of the ten foremost current human (we’ll get to that) contributors to the Ruby language. It is the largest sponsor of the Ruby Central organisation, and exercises a great deal of de facto control over the Ruby ecosystem as a result. When Sidekiq withdrew their sponsorship after Ruby Central announced DHH as a speaker at the final RailsConf – the final RailsConf because Hansson, piqued at not being invited to a previous year, had set up his own rival Rails World conference – Shopify pushed Ruby Central to take over full control of RubyGems in a very murky series of events.

Shopify’s technical and labour contribution to Ruby has been significant and valuable; however, along with its financial contribution, this has given it a great deal of power and control over the language.

Billionaire Tobias Lütke is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify. In 2022, against the wishes of 46% of shareholders, he was granted a “founder’s share” giving him 40% voting power.

This week, he’s in the news for endorsing the idea that rich people should get more electoral power.

Shopify has long been infamous for hosting the online store of far-right publication Breitbart (along with other right wing publications and vendors of Nazi memorabilia). They have defended this as supporting free speech, but there has always been a suspicion that there might be more alignment than that. Shopify’s COO until 2025, Kaz Nejatian, was behind a Canadian right-wing anti-immigrant website.

In January 2025, shortly after Donald Trump’s second election win, Shopify terminated their support programme for Indigenous entrepreneurs and their One Million Black Businesses initiative, and then in February closed the Slack channel that had allowed participants to stay in touch. The members of the equitable commerce team left the company without explanation. Despite being a Canadian (by naturalisation) running a Canadian company, Lütke seems to be increasingly aligned with Trump.

you are right that there was stuff spreading everywhere so I guess the initial assertion is true that there was a lot of woke stuff at Shopify, but it was never sanctioned.

Lütke doesn’t say anything nearly as incendiary as DHH, but the actions of the company he controls tell their own story, and his posts on X, the Everything App, document his turn to the right, along with all the crypto and AI stuff you’d expect to go along with it.

He gave Hansson a seat on Shopify’s board long after the latter had started on his anti-“DEI”, anti-immigrant theme. Lütke also recently reposted DHH writing about “not caving to the woke mob”. That’s more than just tacit acceptance.

I hope the move to fork Rails succeeds, but while it’s necessary, I’m not sure it’s sufficient while Ruby as a whole is substantially controlled by the same people.

Meanwhile, what of Ruby? The second most prolific contributor to the Ruby codebase in the last six months is Claude. Is this even worth salvaging?

When I performed at a festival in Athens earlier in the year, I could just have taken a plane to get there – everyone else did – but I try to avoid unnecessary flying. Instead, we made a holiday of it, and spent a fortnight on trains, buses, and ferries, travelling through four different countries. In the process, I had the chance to visit Rome for the first time, as well as Turin, Bologna, and Basel. I saw the whole length of the Italian countryside from train windows. I came back relaxed and refreshed, and I never had to worry about whether my instrument would be allowed as carry-on baggage.

When I walk into a restaurant, I could just order anything off the menu. My life would be a lot simpler. Going vegan has profoundly changed my relationship with food. In exchange, I cook and eat much more interesting and varied food, and I feel much happier with the consequences of doing so.

I’ve been running Linux on a variety of computers, mostly second-hand laptops, for decades. My life would undoubtedly have been simpler if I had just thrown money at the problem and bought a lot of proprietary hardware and software. In work situations, I have long been the only person not using a MacBook. “Just buy a Mac!” they exhort me from the keyboards of their £3,000 machines. I’d be afraid to carry something so expensive and fragile around every day, and the inflexibility of Mac OS bugs the hell out of me. Meanwhile, I’m using a corporate surplus ThinkPad that cost me £170. I saved a computer from landfill instead of buying a new one. I don’t have to give my personal details to US Big Tech just to sign in or install some software. If I don’t like the way something works I can change it, and that makes me happy.

So when people tell me that so-called “AI” is here to stay, and there’s no point resisting, and I’ll be left behind if I don’t embrace it, I don’t care. I don’t just have to do anything. I don’t want to argue in English with a graven image of a human mind, to cajole a gaslighting automaton into writing some software for me, when I already have an unambiguous means of instructing the computer to do exactly what I want. Besides, my human brain is right here, it costs me nothing to use it, it doesn’t create any additional environmental damage to do so, and continuing to exercise it keeps it working.

You only have to spend time in a country with high income inequality to see the negative moral and intellectual consequences of “having staff”. “AI” chatbots and agents bring the same decerebrating idleness to many more people who, like plutocrats of old, think they’re somehow doing actual work while they really become less capable.

I don’t just have to give in, and you don’t either.

After a reasonably early bed and an adequate night of sleep on Sunday night, I woke, ate breakfast in my tent, packed everything onto my bike, and left the festival site a little after seven o’clock. My first day’s route was 86 km with 860 m of climbing.

I saw wrens, corncrakes, peacocks (and peahens), a dunnock, some birds of prey I couldn’t identify (buzzards, perhaps), some I could (red kites), and some unexpectedly excellent cycling infrastructure in Gloucestershire outside Cheltenham.

I had to attack one particularly steep hill in 10 m bursts, but I loved coasting down the other side at over 50 km/h.

I imported my maps from cycle.travel into Organic Maps, but made the mistake of allowing it to suggest a slight variation that looked better on the map. This turned out to be impassable to anything less than a lightweight mountain bike, and I had to take a significant detour.

For lunch, I ate a carb-on-carb feast of hash browns in a bun in a café in an old prison.

My campsite for the night was basic but comfortable. My tent attracted hundreds of flying ants. I managed to keep most of them outside. The site was close enough to RAF Fairford to see and hear a few fighter jets, but they didn’t keep me up at night. In fact, it was my first night camped on a level pitch for a while, and I slept better for not sliding down towards my feet.

My second day of cycling was long: 150 km with about 660 m of climbing. I reasoned that, as a shorter distance would have taken me to the outskirts of London anyway, I might as well push on all the way home to a real bed. In the worst case, it would be possible to catch a train into the centre.

On my way back along the Oxford–Witney bypass cycle track, I stopped off again at Greggs for a morning coffee and vegan sausage roll, and sat on the ground enjoying it. Greggs’ coffee is cheap and, in my opinion, a lot better than many actual coffee chains. Even I, a notorious coffee snob, find it drinkable, which is not something I could say of Costa or Caffè Nero.

I encountered a 15% incline after Princes Risborough that I couldn’t ride up. I had to push my loaded bike to the top, taking frequent breaks, dripping with sweat. But I made it, and from there it was mostly flat as far as the pub I’d targeted for lunch.

The pub kitchen was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, unfortunately, but I bought a drink and sat in the garden eating my own food with their blessing. As I chatted with the regulars, I learned that Kop Hill, the hill I’d just conquered, was the venue for a motor vehicle hill climb challenge. I assume that “Kop Hill” is another one of those tautological place names that just means “hill hill”. It’s definitely a hill.

There was another impossible hill immediately after Great Missenden, on a dirt track which reaches a vertiginous 19% gradient. I struggled not to slide back down the hill as I pushed my bike. This particular track (along with Kop Hill) is on Sustrans the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust’s National Cycle Route 57, which goes to reinforce my negative opinion of that organisation: they proclaim all these cycle routes that they have “created”, but it most cases their work seems to be limited to the addition of hard-to-see signs on routes that aren’t always practical or even safe for cycling.

Mindful of the effort of the gravel section on my first day outbound, I chose a “tarmac” route for my return into London. This took me along a safe but unpleasant track alongside the A40 for what felt like a long time, until I was able to duck through some small streets and get onto the Grand Union Canal all the way back to Notting Hill. From there, I rode through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park by the light of the evening sun, then the familiar streets of south London, then home.

A new fresh hell is upon us: “vibe gardening”. When the garden company came round for an initial visit and chat, they showed me an example of a garden design: to scale, drawn by hand on squared paper. They quoted an initial price to make the plan.

What they delivered was a series of fancy looking renderings, each of which was accompanied by a top-down view that didn’t match the rendering, and neither matched the actual size and shape or the positions of doors and gates of either our front or back garden.

We began to suspect the malign claw of “generative AI”, and our suspicions were confirmed when they sent us a link to an image with impossible geometry and chatgpt.com in the URL. We have asked for our money back.

The thing that saddens me is that, a few months ago, these people were probably competent at their jobs. But a short period of exposure to the obsequious confabulating device has left them unable either to make a simple plan, or to recognise that what they are producing is completely unfit for purpose. It’s a deskilling of disturbing rapidity.

My advice is, never talk to the machine. When billionaires, politicians, and bosses want you to outsource your thinking to the machine, the best resistance is to keep thinking for yourself.

I answered a call from an unrecognised number on Thursday. A robotic voice just said, “Goodbye”, and hung up. The machines are onto us.

Khan’s Bargains is open again. The most useful shop in south London has been closed since the store room fire a few weeks ago, and I’ve missed it.

I’m one of those people who discovered a few years ago that most of the population can literally visualise things, and that the mind’s eye isn’t just a metaphor. I was astounded to learn that “counting sheep” involved enumerating perceived sheep, and not just counting up from one like you’re playing hide and seek.

However, as I lay in bed on Friday morning, awake but only just, I found myself imagining an apple; as I concentrated I was able to see it in colours of red and green, and even to feel the texture and smell against my face. I was awake, but perhaps I was still close enough to dreaming, or perhaps aphantasia is a thing that can be overcome.

I got a letter from the government the other day; I opened it and read it, it said they were … going to send me a load of money. The work I did for the Department for Education was paid through a complicated arrangement involving multiple intermediary companies. Because I finished in the middle of a tax year, they didn’t supply me with a P60 end-of-year calculation, and I had to reverse engineer it from my pay slips. Evidently, I made a mistake, because they did send the calculation to HMRC, and I had paid more tax than I thought. Someone at HMRC corrected my tax return, told me I was owed a refund, and £5,800 appeared in my bank account the next day.

We both volunteered to work as stewards at London Trans+ Pride again this year, after a year in which trans people have been subject to more attacks from society, the state, and one particularly rancid billionaire.

Last year, the turnout was estimated at 100,000; this year, it was about 150,000 trans people, their families, friends, and other allies.

Trans people are a small minority of the population, but you’re not alone. A lot of us will stand with you.

A video recording is available.

I have exported the slides as a PDF.

I’ll add a transcript in due course.

Further reading

• Matrículas de coche de todos los países del mundo
• License Plates of the World
• Olav’s License Plate Pictures
• License Plate Fonts of the Western World: History, Samples, and Download Info
• Vehicle registration plate on Wikipedia
• Jeff’ Plates

References

• Walter Long, House of Commons, 4 August 1903
• Convention with Respect to the International Circulation of Motor Vehicles 1909 (Paris)
• International Convention relative to Motor Traffic (1926)
• Geneva Convention on Road Traffic (1949)
• Vienna Convention on Road Traffic
• UK ratification of Vienna Convention
• Explanatory Memorandum on the Convention on Road Traffic
• States close seat belt law loophole
• Car-driving Tips from Beijing Government
• Who was Charles Wright?
• The German EU numberplates: a typographic road accident?
• Kosovo-Serbia Licence Plate Dispute Proves Hard to Resolve
• Kosovo-Serbia License Plates ‘Sticker Regime’ Comes Into Force
• The dangers of driving under Israeli apartheid
• Luxury car sales hit by new lime green plate scheme
• From stigma to status symbol: Lime-green plates lose bite after a year on the road
• Japan License Plate Generator

Credits

• “Volvo S60 2” by dani31-at, CC BY 2.0
• “DSC_1298” by Chris Blackhead, CC BY-SA 2.0
• “Classic Cars and Trucks” by Martin Pettitt, CC BY 2.0
• “Standard Vanguard Vignale Estate” by Eddy CJ, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
• “HJV815E 1967 MG 1100” by Steve Knight, CC BY 2.0
• “Russian car 03” by Mike W., CC BY-SA 2.0
• “Belgian rear 1953-62” by David Howard, CC BY 2.0
• “Summer memory” by LuK MoG, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
• “IMG_4275a” by Ian Fuller, CC BY-NC 2.0
• “British three wheeled car” by Zach A, CC BY 2.0
• “Next Generation.” by Reece Garside, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
• “Dieppe, Seine-Maritime - France” by Mic, CC BY 2.0
• “Decani Kosovo [a]” by Dave Proffer, CC BY 2.0
• “KLRKS7543_S” by Konrad Lembcke, CC BY-NC 2.0
• Israel’s System of Segregated Roads in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (c) Visualizing Palestine 2012 BY-NC-ND
• What does this green plate mean by Wild_Strawberry7986
• “Tacla Taid Anglesey’s Transport Museum - Motorcycles room - Ariel and BSA” by Elliott Brown, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

That’s 94 km or 58 miles, in under 48 hours, from Southwark Cathedral to Canterbury Cathedral. It’s not exactly the original pilgrimage route – we’re avoiding the A2 as much as possible, for one thing – and there will be more Tescos Express en route than a mediaeval monarch could have imagined, but it’s similar.

We’re hoping to raise money for the local swimming club, which has suffered from increasing costs and from the temporary closure of the local pool earlier in the year.

Blatant appeal for money follows: please visit our sponsorship page if you’d like to donate.