After waiting for 20 minutes, the bus turned up, only to terminate short at Southwark Park. We stepped off and waited some time for the next bus, only to find that that one was terminating there as well. Finally, a C10 bus (also a viable option for the last leg) came and we made it home much later than we should have, and much later than we would have if we’d just taken the Tube.

When it comes to getting to Greenwich from here, there are no train or Tube options: it’s either bus or self-propulsion. (Or driving, I suppose, if you’re a psychopath.) On our way to the Queen’s House in Greenwich for a concert, we walked to the bus stop in good time, only to see that the bus had disappeared and the next one wasn’t for 25 minutes. That wasn’t enough time, so we had to find Lime bikes and cycle there. Fine, but less relaxing than I’d intended, and even less so when we had to walk all the way around the circumference of the fence (400 m on the long side) to find the un-signposted side gate that was the only one open for the concert.

The concert, of Italian music from the 16th and 17th centuries, was excellent. Two of the musicians also sang: Lucine Musaelian while playing viola da gamba, and Kristiina Watt while playing lute and theorbo. I was particularly struck by how modern Barbara Strozzi’s (1619–1677) Eraclito Amoroso sounded with Musaelian’s powerful voice over arpeggios backed by descending bass lines.

I don’t think I can trust London buses any more, however, after this week.

On Sunday night we went to The Worst Poets Club at the Hackney Empire.

With each one of them having been told they are the worst poet in existence, four of the UKs bestselling poets decided to form a club.

After a decade of headlines, articles, comments and occasional strangers in person have claimed them as the worst poets, most terrible, mediocre, not even a poet poets, individually and collectively to blame for the downfall of modern poetry, Hollie McNish, Nikita Gill, Donna Ashworth and Len Pennie have come together to form The Worst Poets Club.

It was at times moving, at times very funny. All four are good on stage; Len Pennie’s deadpan delivery of pitch-black humour was particularly entertaining.

(There was indeed verse in anapestic tetrameter, but I can think of another Scots poet who makes plenty of use of that form but for some reason he doesn’t get lambasted for it.)

The rogue superpower known as the United States of America made two further big steps in its moral decline.

First, Pete Hegseth, the guy covered in disturbing Christian nationalist tattoos who is currently employed as United States Secretary of Defense (or is it War?), announced a plan to livestream an execution. I don’t think there’s any place for executions in a civilised society, but televised executions are a level of depravity far below that, one that puts them in unpleasant company.

Then, the next day, the US announced that it was imposing sanctions on the entirety of the International Criminal Court. Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingom released a joint statement stating that they “regret and strongly disagree” but they’re all still allies and sharing intelligence, and nobody made a big deal about it when the US sanctioned ICC judges and officials in June 2025 (4 people), August 2025 (2 people), or August 2026 (4 people). You won’t find any statements on GOV.UK about all those.

The US never signed up to the ICC, preferring to be able to commit crimes against humanity with impunity, but sanctioning it is a step further in undermining human rights around the world. I hope the ICC had completed moving its computing away from Microsoft.

OpenAI published “solutions” to hundreds of outstanding problems in mathematics, (several of which were then retracted for trivial errors) in a way that doesn’t necessarily further the actual practice of mathematics but does make it harder for anyone to have an academic career in the field. What I see is a gleeful destruction of whole fields of endeavour, like children pulling the wings off butterflies, just because they can, with no real care for the wider consequences.

Armstrong said he knew of one group whose entire research program was practically “wiped out” by the release. Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU mathematician who was at the center of OpenAI’s earlier dispute over the Navier-Stokes problem, meanwhile, said he had already heard of “three people who had entire research programs obliterated.”

To [researchers who work with big AI companies] I say: learn from history and get out now. You’ll still be ahead of the curve. The current backlash against AI may seem huge, but it’s nothing compared to what I think the backlash will be in coming years.

The people working at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. would do well to remember that the more vocations and livelihoods they destroy while promising human extinction, the more enemies they make, and no amount of money will save you when everyone hates you.

In a system described as “oppressive and dystopian” by a whistleblower, Co-op Legal Services is using AI models to record, analyse and award a percentage score for interactions between agents and customers seeking advice about probate, wills and estates.

A model from OpenAI has been trained to assess more than 50 discrete aspects of each phone call and provide pass and fail scores to managers who use the data to analyse employee performance. One worker said the system can mean their work is monitored by AI for several hours a day as they handle inquiries often from recently bereaved customers.

I am a member of the Co-op and I don’t like the sound of this at all, so I wrote to them at their complaints email address. Here’s my email.

I am a Co-op member (number [REDACTED]) but after having read about the AI panopticon that you are placing your staff under (“‘Dystopian’: Co-op becomes latest firm to put staff under AI surveillance” in The Guardian), I won’t be choosing Co-op Legal Services for any legal services I require in the future.

Human beings are not simply fungible units of work resource, and placing them under constant automated monitoring and rating is degrading, dehumanising, and stress-inducing. Large language models (LLMs) are not objective; on the contrary, they encode the underlying biases of their training material – material that includes as much internet content as the companies making them can scrape, including content that is sexist, racist, or otherwise bigoted – but in a way that makes it impossible to evaluate why they might have produced their conclusions.

Using LLMs to perform this monitoring adds significant environmental cost, and helps to further entrench the power of American megacorporations – OpenAI in this case – who do not have the best interests of members or even of humanity at heart. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, might believe that we must “[accept] the fact that some bad things are going to happen”, but we don’t have to actively contribute to them.

I believe that this use of AI surveillance is contrary to several of the Co-operative principles, specifically:

• Self responsibility: because staff who are constantly observed are not able to enjoy their own responsibility.
• Solidarity: with workers, with those whose artistic work has been ingested and plagiarised by LLMs, with those whose homes are blighted by hyperscale data centres, and with everyone else whom the AI megacorporations consider to be acceptable collateral damage.
• Social responsibility: because the environmental cost of AI data centres is destroying habitats and increasing power consumption at a point when our planet can least afford it.

Indeed, it is with the principle of solidarity for employees of Co-op Legal Services that I write to you today. I urge you to take a step back, instead of rushing towards a future that will be bad for everyone, but especially bad for the employees who find themselves at the sharp end of this technology.

In retrospect, I missed the obvious point that as a customer I wouldn’t want the contents of my conversations being fed into Altman and Brockman’s plagiarism machine, either, but perhaps you’d like to add that to your own email to them.

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

This was originally going to be called something like, “How slopcoded is your programming language?” But as I gathered the data, I found something else – something worse.

Almost every popular language is now substantially developed using LLMs. Particularly notable are C# and Ruby (both approximately one third of recent commits) and Julia (over half!). The languages that stand out in retaining their humanity are Chicken Scheme, Perl, Lua, Clojure, and – perhaps surprisingly for a project so closely associated with Oracle, a company who have gone all-in on hyperscale data centres and “AI” in everything – Java.

However, all of these rely on a C compiler (indirectly via the JVM in the case of Clojure), and both of the main C compilers now receive significant amounts of LLM commits. I’m not so surprised by LLVM (15.9%), but I am disappointed by GCC (3.1% and apparently rising). Outsourcing your thinking to megacorporations and commercial tools seems out of step with the GNU ethos of freely available source that anyone can modify: code that is generated by machines quickly becomes code that is only parsed and modified by machines, and a subscription to OpenAI or Anthropic becomes the (financial, environmental, and geopolitical) price of entry.

In 1984, in his acceptance speech for the ACM Turing Award, Ken Thompson described a method by which a compiler could be subverted so that it would always insert a backdoor into the UNIX login command, and, furthermore, when used to compile itself would insert a similar subversion into new versions of the compiler. Once this has been achieved, no one has access to an uncompromised compiler.

The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.

Does it matter how slopcoded your language is or isn’t, when everything below it is slop?

(A small note for clarification: it is the ethical contamination that I am most concerned about. It is no longer possible to produce software that is free of LLM output, even if you don’t use it yourself, even if you use a language that doesn’t use it itself.)

Methodology

I cloned the source repositories for implementations of programming languages that ranked highly on TIOBE and LangPop. For each, I performed a shallow clone going back to the start of July:

git clone --shallow-since=2026-07-01 ${url}

I then wrote a short script that takes a three-month period and counts the number of commits that appear to be LLM-assisted. This is determined by

• the phrase “AI disclosure” or “LLM disclosure”;
• an Assisted-by: field; or
• a Co-authored-by: field with the email address of a known bot.

This isn’t perfect – I saw one commit that had a disclosure field followed by “none” and a link to a manifesto opposing LLM-assisted coding, but I don’t think those edge cases are significant.

#!/bin/bash

bots="ai disclosure|llm disclosure|assisted-by:|co-authored-by:.*(noreply@openai.com|noreply@anthropic.com|cursoragent@cursor.com|copilot@users.noreply.github.com)"
date_since="2026-07-05"
date_until="2026-10-06"

cd repos
for repo in *; do
  cd ${repo}
  total="$(
    git log --oneline \
      --since=${date_since} \
      --until=${date_until} \
    | wc -l
  )"
  botted="$(
    git log --oneline \
      --since=${date_since} \
      --until=${date_until} \
      -E -i --grep "${bots}" \
    | wc -l
  )"
  percent="$(printf %.1f $((10000 * ${botted}/${total}))e-2)"
  echo "|${repo}|${botted}|${total}|${percent}%|"
  cd - >/dev/null
done
cd - >/dev/null

Results

This yielded the following table, which I have sorted and annotated:

Repositories don’t map one-to-one to programming languages: some implementations cover multiple languages, and some languages have multiple implementations.

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.

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.

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.

I voted against it, and I wish it hadn’t passed.

The motion passed on a margin of only 209 votes (1,022 for, 813 against) out of a membership of over 200,000. A member-led democracy isn’t all it should be if under 1% of the membership take part in votes.

The preamble states that

Zionism is a political ideology which called for the creation – and, now it exists, the continuity – of an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population. The real, material manifestation of Zionism has been the historic and ongoing dehumanisation, displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement and destruction of Palestinians. This is based upon European settler-colonial systems of domination and oppression, which has also created racial hierarchies between Jews of different ethnicities in Palestine.

I agree with the sentiment. Perhaps there’s some theoretical version of Zionism that involves people from the Jewish diaspora moving to the region and living in peaceful coexistence, but that’s not what happened, and it’s not what is happening. Zionism as it actually exists is militarised expansion, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing. Ethnocracies are, ipso facto, discriminatory. That’s what they’re for. That’s what they do. Israel’s recently-passed Basic Law is explicit about its ethnic basis:

C. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

If that isn’t enough, this is a state that imposes the death penalty only for Palestinians.

On a pedantic basis, I couldn’t agree with clause 3 of the motion:

3. Following from Motion E05, which affirmed that Israel is an apartheid State committing genocide, and Motion E07 supporting reparations and accountability, the Green Party supports the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants.

As it happens, I do think that the only long-lasting stable solution is probably a single state – a two-state solution became untenable long ago – but it has to be a state that provides equal dignity to everyone within its borders: Palestinian, Jewish, Druze, and anyone else. But I don’t think it’s the place of a British political party to define a solution for other people. That kind of thinking is how we got into this mess in the first place.

My main opposition, however, is practical. I regret that the motion was passed because it will have no substantive impact on the conditions of Palestinians, but I fear that it takes the one party that would actually fight for the rights of Palestinians further away from power and the ability to do something about it – or the environment, or workers’ rights, or health, or the rights of trans people, or anything else that matters. It will be used as a stick to beat the Green Party, and it will crowd out discussion of other topics.

I don’t think many people have a positive impression of Israel any more. It’s a nuclear-armed state that uses its enormous military power, supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the declining Western hegemony – the defunct “rules-based international order” – to take territory through right of conquest, and to dispossess the people who previously lived in Palestine, Lebanon, or Syria.

I would very much like to annex at least up to the Yellow Line in Gaza and up to the Litani [River] in Lebanon.

Whatever moral high ground the Israeli state might once have been able to claim over the attacks of 7 October 2023 is now gone: the deaths and injuries from that event are now a mere rounding error compared to over 10% of the population of Gaza who have been directly killed or injured since then in the IDF’s campaign of retribution against Palestinians for what increasingly seems to be the crime of simply existing.

We’ve seen the hospitals being bombed. We’ve seen snipers shooting children as they try to get food – and making a game out of where they can hit them. We’ve seen the starvation and malnutrition resulting from the famine the IDF caused and perpetuated. We’ve seen the amputations and corpses. They’ve killed so many journalists, sometimes deliberately targeting them, sometimes as collateral damage while firing missiles at hospitals, but information still gets out.

And we’re seeing a particular pattern of injuries whereby particular body parts are being targeted on particular days. So one day we will see mainly abdominal gunshot wounds. Another day we’ll see head gunshot wounds. Another day we’ll see neck gunshot wounds. So there is a very clear pattern that all, not just me but all of us, have seen in this hospital, whereby particular body parts are targeted on particular days […] I think seeing four young teenagers come in, in the space of one hour, with gunshot wounds to their testicles, which we have never seen before, is beyond coincidence.

We can now look on Google Maps’ satellite view and see with our own eyes that much of Rafah and Khan Younis have been reduced to rubble.

However, to the British establishment and the commentariat, Palestinians aren’t really people, and Palestinian lives are less important than preserving their own places in the status quo. Long after the scale of mass murder became irrefutable, they still hedge their criticisms of the Israeli state. That’s why it’s treated as a greater crime to hold a sign supporting Palestine Action than to organise a masked and uniformed mob to shut down a port. Given the choice between a left-wing party gaining power and implicit support of genocide, there’s no contest for them.

There will now be a full-spectrum assault on the Green Party, and on Zack Polanski specifically (even though he neither spoke in favour of nor voted for the motion). They will use the same tactics that worked against Corbyn, but this is not 2019. In the end, the effect depends on whether a high-intensity media campaign of spurious anti-semitism accusations can sway the public, or whether they’ll go on believing their eyes, the photos of maimed and murdered children, and the satellite images that testify to a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

I hope it’s the latter.

Thursday evening was perfect weather to wander around Russia Dock Woodland looking at trees with s group of people led by someone from the London Wildlife Trust. I can now tell you the different between a field maple, a Norway maple, and a sycamore, and I can distinguish an aspen from a white poplar.

I wrote to my MP expressing my displeasure at the apparent legal immunity enjoyed by Daniel Thomas and his organised, uniformed gang of masked fascists after he blocked the port of Dover, gathered a mob to attack and interfere with RNLI volunteers, and filmed himself deliberately damaging a boat with someone aboard. I pointed out several potential crimes that attract custodial sentences, and compared this unfavourably with the treatment being meted out to pensioners holding cardboard signs supporting Palestine Action.

The next day, he was arrested, but I’m sure my useless MP had nothing to do with it.

The police are still arresting people for holding signs, though.

Our digital kitchen scales stopped working right as I was about to make bread on Saturday morning. Instead of anything useful, all they show is out2, which seems to indicate some kind of calibration problem. I had to buy a new set, but I still have the receipt from the old ones, so I’m going to try to take advantage of that 15 year guarantee they offered.

I made the dough last night, using the new scales, and baked it today. The loaves came out perfectly.

I like to read French novels occasionally in order to keep in practice. I enjoy literary fiction, and I use the Prix Goncourt as a selection of things that might be worth reading. 2020 winner L’Anomalie by Hervé le Tellier is a fun experiment in fusing together multiple styles, including a jarring section of airport-thriller schlock in the middle. 2021’s La plus sécrète mémoire des hommes by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is a deep, layered, immersive, often confusing web. 2022’s Vivre Vite by Brigitte Giraud is a poignant exploration of loss and of self-recrimination, and of the “if only” moments that could have averted an accident. I haven’t picked up 2023 or 2024’s winners yet, which is clearly an oversight on my part.

I’ve been paying attention to the case of Thélyson Orélien, the Haitian-Canadian novelist whose book C’était ça ou mourir, which won the Prix du roman Fnac and was one of the 2026 Prix Goncourt selections, is alleged to have been substantially authored by generative “AI”. This has been followed by others digging into his published work to find other transgressions, in an unpleasant echo of how Jason Arday was targeted.

This does appear to be another case of a successful black person being targeted by racists. The allegations may also be correct. Radio-Canada has a detailed article (in French) based on interviews with experts and on their own experiments that test various objections to the Pangram-supported assertions.

However, I think that Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s response says it best (I translate).

I don’t know whether Thélyson Orélien used AI for this book. I don’t venture onto that terrain. But it seems important to me, even if you have doubts, even if you have, like me, not been touched by this novel, to defend the author against the ideologically facile and malicious part of the accusation. […] If the partial or complete use of AI in the writing of C’était ça ou mourir comes to be proven, then, whilst deploring and criticising this usage on principle – because I believe, in my old-fashioned way, that the pride and honour of an honest author consists in writing alone, even if they are never alone, I will continue nonetheless to defend the author against racist attacks. It must be possible, in my eyes, to hold these two positions.

Horrifying discovery of the week: the concept and practice of the daily standup has escaped containment, and people in non-software fields are now being subjected to the awful quotidian ritual. I can only apologise for my part (albeit unwitting) in the establishment of this terrible observance.

I keep getting spam emails from bots promising to help me promote various of my open-source repositories. I have responded to each one with the full script of Bee Movie.

After being pointed in the direction of Geneva drone-folk band La Tène and listening to some tracks, I ended up ordering a shruti box. I’d had a tab open for about 6 months, so it wasn’t entirely impulsive. Anyone want to get together and make some weird acoustic music?

This week’s links:

• Z80 Assembly: “This document is intended for everyone who wants to learn Z80 programming in its depth.”
• One month without AI: “I went back to TDD, to my PRs with just 5 files changed. To my 2-line PR descriptions that were straight to the point. I went back to understanding what I was doing, to deploying with confidence, to being ready for a detailed code review, because I knew what the changes were doing, and I could justify every line of code.”
• cgit as an Unintentional Honeypot If a crawler is hitting an old commit in an old fork, it’s probably a bot; here’s how to ban the IP address with fail2ban.
• LLM Policies: Progress At All Costs. “Unfortunately this ‘expert slop’, where expert is a self-perceived title, carries a corporate framing that damages interactions. Others become, at best, fungible coworkers, and, at worst, annoying speed bumps in the race to 100% completion of any software interest the expert has. No more mentoring, debating, flame wars. ‘Progress’ is the only goal. The line must go up.”
• AI Workers’ Inquiry 2026: “The UTAW Tech Workers’ Inquiry outlines how generative AI is changing work across the tech sector, written with the perspectives and experiences of workers who build, deploy, manage, evaluate and use this technology.”
• With hollow feet and harlequin hats: Tuscan letters, a prank of lapidary origin? “Basically, a typeface is considered Tuscan when its serifs are bi- or tri-furcated (sometimes with a greater number of extensions) to achieve a certain degree of fantasy or ornamentation.”

I’ve had a couple of specific annoyances with my most recent keyboard (the one I found in a charity shop for £5.50). First, it overloads the keys in the bottom right to work as cursor keys when you tap them, but modifiers when you hold them. However, it isn’t fast enough to keep up with the speed at which I use one hand to tap Shift-; to get : or Shift-/ to get ?. Instead, it would interpret this as Up, followed by the unmodified key. I ended up with a lot of questions that finished abruptly and with a / inserted in the middle of the line above.

Second, the red (linear) switches don’t provide enough tactile feedback for me to avoid accidental presses. This might be a me problem, but it is very much a problem for me.

I’ve been using small-footprint keyboards for twenty years, but I still struggle with remembering the incantations for useful things like Home or Page Down, so I decided to get a slightly bigger one where I’d have more dedicated keys.

I went for a Keychron C1 Pro “tenkeyless” 80% layout, with brown (quiet, tactile) switches. It’s not particularly fancy, but it is reprogrammable and it’s even possible to swap the switches without soldering, although I have no such plans at present. The brown switches are good for feedback, while not being so loud that they’ll annoy everyone around me.

So far, I am feeling slightly calmer.

In the package was one of those fluffy promotional toys that used to be available at every museum gift shop when I was a child. I haven’t seen one in years.

Apparently, it’s called a weepul.

Whilst transferring items from the plastic basket to the checkout at Lidl, I scraped my hand. The edge of the moulding was sharper than I realised, sharp enough to leave me bleeding and trying not to get blood all over my shopping and clothes.

I should have kept my (fingerless) cycling gloves on.

We watched The Man with the Plan in the same building it was filmed in. It explores the Beveridge Report and what actually happened to its recommendations; it’s both inspiring and frustrating when compared against the destructive strip-mining of the public realm that has been economic orthodoxy for the past four and a half decades.

It’s been ages since I made kimchi. This time, I used red cabbage and loosely followed Maangchi’s recipe without the squid and fish sauce. I didn’t have any rice flour for the porridge, so I used fine polenta instead. It seemed to work well, but I haven’t tasted any since it’s been fermenting.

A couple of dogs whose humans work in Peckham Levels turned one year old, and had a party in the bar on Friday. They were very excitable, until they ate their special canine birthday cake, after which they all had to lie down to digest. The cake, made of banana and peanut butter, smelled amazing.

The inaugural Southbank Centre Lecture on Sunday was given by Ash Sarkar on The Future of Relationships. She was funny, thought-provoking, and insightful. I came away thinking (even more than I already did) that we all need to use our phones a lot less, and do things in person a lot more.

Links:

• Iceberger: “Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.”
• You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It. “Ironically the banner designed to hide the machine has taught the public more about the machine than a thousand podcasts ever will. Even non-technical people stop at ‘your data is shared with 996 partners.’”
• Opus databending drumkit: “Make glitchy beats with randomly generated Opus protocol packets.”
• We Must Create the Shit Machine. “Could the Shit Machine END WORLD HUNGER? It’s NOT IMPOSSIBLE in the most LITERAL SENSE, which is all the justification we need to invest an AMOUNT OF MONEY that would OTHERWISE BY ITSELF END ACTUAL WORLD HUNGER.”
• Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek. A long, detailed, fascinating exploration of the non-Indo-European substrate below Greek.
• Everybody’s Lost Their Minds. “You know there are two ways for AI to achieve superhuman intelligence, right? One (theoretical) way is the mystical “recursive self-improvement” by AI. The other one is the path we’re very clearly on: The agentic brain worms have been spreading, and it looks increasingly like everybody’s lost their goddamn minds already. AI is the tool that dulls its users; it incrementally replaces understanding with a new dependency and addiction as you actively de-skill yourself.”

This goes double if, like me, you’ve been working in Ruby for the past couple of decades. That language and ecosystem, particularly Rails, has now completely fallen to fascism, slop, and slop-loving fascists. Even though I was there 3,000 years ago and I wrote one gem with nearly a quarter of a billion downloads to date, I’m not sure I can bring myself to care about Ruby any more.

As my grandmother, who spoke almost entirely in aphorisms, used to say, a change is as good as a rest. It doesn’t even matter which language you choose: I’ve loved finding my way around the Java programming world, which is not something I ever expected to say. I’ve made a program that does what I want, I’ve learned a lot along the way, and I’ve been able to take advantage of a mature and well-tested ecosystem, including things like FreeMarker, the most capable templating library I’ve ever used.

I’ve done it all without touching an IDE, either, and with nothing more sophisticated than grep and a fuzzy file finder to navigate the codebase. It’s just another language, after all, and if you’re prepared to take the time to understand it and write out the getters and setters and a bit of Maven XML configuration yourself (all right, a lot of XML configuration), you can do it all in any text editor. I’m probably missing out on some magical automatic refactoring commands, but the other side is that making the changes myself gives me more opportunities to understand how things fit together. The compiler catched most of my errors – forgetting the semicolons at the end of lines is the most common – and I’m using spotbugs, checkstyle, and PMD to analyse the code for bugs, solecisms, and other weirdness. I’ve found them useful.

After working my way from a proof of concept and aggressively refactoring it up to something that’s reasonably well architected, I now have a working program which is part of our book publishing workflow.

I don’t give a fuck if Claude could have done it faster. I enjoyed it, and I understand it.

You don’t get fit by watching sport, and you don’t get good at anything by watching a machine do it for you.

I filled in a crack in the plaster of our porch. It was replastered a couple of years ago, and shrinking or flexing had left a line down the corner. I filled and painted it. After it dried, I realised that I had foolishly painted it in satin rather than matte paint, so it’s now the wrong kind of white. At least it should work as an undercoat.

Pat was over from Melbourne and so I saw a whole load of people I hadn’t seen in a while, conveniently at an entirely vegan restaurant (Mallow, near Borough Market). Unfortunately, we ended up in the loudest part of the restaurant. Perhaps it’s time to bring back tablecloths, carpets, and curtains. (I say this with a bit of hypocrisy, as our house has neither carpets nor curtains, but we also don’t have dozens of people in the same room talking at the same time.) Failing that, might I introduce the restauranteur community to the concept of acoustic treatment?

There was a world premiere of a new 4K restoration of weird cult Japanese classic Survive Style 5+ (2004) at the famous, threatened Prince Charles Cinema on Thursday. It’s weird, it’s colourful, it’s poignant, it’s impossible to explain. Great film.

I caught up with Thayer over lunch on Friday, during which she coined the phrase “techboom-ers” to describe those of us who did OK out of the early 21st century and have somehow managed to find ourselves thrown clear of the wreckage.

A friend who was close to being deported after losing his job found a new one, and has now signed the contract. That’s a huge relief, especially for him and his family. When politicians pander to xenophobia for a few more racist votes, it’s real families, friendships, and communities that they are destroying, and they deserve contempt and ostracism for it.

My annual eye test determined that my short-sightedness is worse, and my near vision is also worse. However, I can still read with my current prescription, and my distance vision is still 20:20, so rather than go to a stronger distance vision prescription that would need reading accommodation, I’ve decided to do nothing for now. But age is coming for me, and I’ll need to do something about it next year, I think. Varifocals might help with reading, but I’ll need another pair for the computer. It sounds both expensive and inconvenient.

Links:

• Power grab: “Omarchy should not matter. But sadly it does. As a power grab.”
• The X11 Conservancy Project “pulls together the disparate set of programs which were being written between the very late 80s, and early 90s – usually for Unix and Linux.”
• Opusfived is a simulation of “writing” code using Claude. I can’t vouch for its authenticity, but if it’s really like that I’d lose my mind within a day.
• 関西弁アクセント辞典: A pitch accent dictionary for Kansai dialect. Very useful if, like me, you learned Japanese in Osaka, and find 99% of reference material useless.
• This NASA Color Trick Was Meant for Mars. Now It’s Unveiling Rock Art on Earth.

When writing, you can create novel kanji by combining any components you wish, but if they don’t have corresponding encodings, you can’t actually represent them on a computer. Even if you could, they don’t necessarily have glyphs in the font you want to use, or perhaps in any font at all.

You can fake these kanji by squishing together existing components, so ｲ + 老 looks like ｲ老, and it doesn’t look too bad.

But I’m a perfectionist, the shortcomings are more perceptible in print, so I made a complete set of SVG versions of the kanji used for sanshin notation, including all the characters that don’t exist in fonts, in Unicode, or in any other context.

Maybe I should see about trying to get these characters into Unicode. It would make some things easier to have standardised codepoints for them, even if they didn’t have glyphs in any existing fonts. The experience of the team that shepherded the IEC power symbols into Unicode might be useful.

We went to a book launch on Thursday: Tansy Hoskins’s new book Charity Shop World is an investigation into textile waste and what happens to the clothes that get donated to charity shops. Spoiler: some of them are making the billionaire prince regent/oligarch of weird microstate and absolute monarchy Liechtenstein even richer.

It’s fascinating. Also, please wash your clothes before donating them!

Fascism is on the march, literally in the case of England. Hundreds of black-clad, masked men, organised by a far-right organiser and convicted kidnapper, gathered in Dover and blocked access to the port to express their “legitimate concerns” about immigration.

While the main entrance to the port attracted most attention, a smaller group gathered at the Western Jet Foil facility, used to process incoming asylum seekers, where they defaced the road outside the entrance with the slogan “Blood is on your hands”.

Despite having been tipped off, the police were unprepared, and their response was feeble. Not a single person was arrested.

And then, the next night, the same goons turned up in Portsmouth to interfere with the rescue of people from a dinghy in the Channel.

Even though police were injured, once again, no-one was arrested.

There have been 6,539 arrests linked to terrorism-related activity since 9/11 in Britain. Of these, 2,819 (43 per cent) were linked to expressing support for Palestine Action following its proscription in July last year, according to latest police data on terror arrests up to March 2026.

At the time of writing, there have now been over 3,200 arrests in the past 14 months for crimes like holding signs and chanting slogans in support of Palestine Action.

The police arrest grandmothers holding placards under the ludicrous pretence that they support terrorism, but when masked thugs in uniform – actual blackshirts – turn up to block national infrastructure or terrorise lifeboat volunteers, they get away without consequence.

This is how fascism thrives, with the acquiescence of the state.

Meanwhile, in Germany, fascism is closer to being the state, at least in one of them. Alternative für Deutschland received 43.8% of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt state election, leaving them just three seats short of an outright majority. (In the United Kingdom’s absurd voting system, those kinds of numbers would give you an unassailable supermajority, so be grateful for small mercies.)

The AfD is officially listed as a “far-right extremist party” on the state government’s website.

On 7 November 2023, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution confirmed, in response to enquiries from members of the press, that the Saxony-Anhalt regional branch of the AfD had been classified as a confirmed far-right extremist organisation within the meaning of Section 4(1) of the Law on the Protection of the Constitution in the State of Saxony-Anhalt (VerfSchG-LSA).

I wonder how long that will stay up. Here’s an archive link just in case.

Liens de la semaine:

• I Don’t Have a Smartphone…. “[This] is, according to my experience, the easiest explanation, the shortest way to force people to get their shit together and take the required actions to allow me to live without being glued to a small screen dependent on a huge American megacorporation.”
• Radically is a “component-based CJK character search engine” that’s far more comprehensive than any other I’ve seen.
• Bad Vibes Coding. A very enjoyable and insightful rant: “Today I’m just sad, seeing people so eager to throw away their principles for the sake of saving a little time and effort. (Or more accurately, believing that they’re saving themselves some time and effort).”
• 1Password wades into a right-wing mess after funding a Linux project. “1Password faced immediate backlash from customers this week over a $300,000 pledge in support of a Linux distro created by David Heinemeier Hansson, who has regularly published overtly racist blog posts that include comments calling for deportation of ethnic minorities in Europe.” At least the word is getting out beyond the programming world.
• There is no ethical consumption of HBO’s Harry Potter series. “Rowling has been transparent about her desire to keep assisting people in their efforts to rob transgender people of their dignity and human rights. That seems very much to be the entire point of The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund.”
• It’s Time To Grow Up. “You should tell people discussing the show [Harry Potter] that you’re not watching it, and why, and you should let yourself openly cringe at your sister-in-law’s Harry Potter tote bag, and you should bring up unprompted that the onslaught of legislation against trans people makes you sad and angry, presuming it does, and you should do this because, not despite, the fact that it will make you look annoying as hell and may make everyone present uncomfortable.”

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”.