Adam Dalliance

Reply-guy explains his job. Well. It's more of a hobby.

#video #satire

You know, if we replaced all company executives with AI then probably very few of them would compromise security by sleeping with the staff or intelligence assets of foreign nations.

Seems like there's a really good candidate for a test case today.

#ai #ceo #espionage #nvidia

Here's my #gamedev account about the current game in progress. Added turbo boosts and collecting today. Things can get well hectic.

https://psyberneticwarpexplosion.com/@psybernetic/statuses/01M76BGR7TNGZT359XQY4V1XPD

Here's a new tech dystopia nightmare I had to sort out for my folks.

I wasn't aware of it before today, but apparently Netflix are making all the profiles on their accounts sign in with their own individual email addresses now.

So my mum's tablet is signed out and when trying to sign back in, she's presented with a screen asking her to create this new individual login.

That alone is too confusing really.

But then when we give it her email address, it tells us that email address already has an account.

It doesn't. It had an aborted effort to sign up years ago which can't be deleted or completed without the household double-paying netflix.

So it's stuck in a loop: You must give us your email address. Here is my email address. We already have this email address, you must give us your email address.

Already confused that when she logged in she had to use the bill-payer's email not her own, now she's also double confused because she isn't supposed any longer to use the bill-payers email, nor her own email, but this secondary version of her email address with dots in the username.

She will not remember this. Every time she's logged out it'll have to wait til I'm visting again to sign her back in.

The modern tech world is dystopia. We have created a system which normal people can not understand or use and we're about to make it worse with age-verification, which will basically lock my elderly parents out of everything because they won't know how to do it.

#tech #netflix

Getting multiple 'password reset codes' purportedly from microsoft every day lately.

You might think it's just some chancer trying to hack your account only the 'from' address isn't even microsofty. Like from globaldots dot com or learningsuccess dot ai.

They're not even real password-reset requests. Just fake ones sent unconvincingly without even trying to force the 'from' address even though doing that forging would be entirely trivial.

And while I do have a microsoft account, it has nothing on it. A windows license that's probably out of date and if you're doing crime you might as well just get a pirate one. There's nothing there for anyone to steal.

Hard to even know what the scam is.

Even if they were real hackers attempting to take my microsoft account, and my microsoft account was somehow important or able to pay money, how does sending me fake reset-password notifications help do that?

Seems like just spam for the sake of spam.

🤷

...

Oh! I don't see the HTML version in mutt. HTML email was always a mistake. There's a link to a fake help-center in the HTML email I never normally see.

Fuckers.

This month's newsletter / digest is on the way to all the amazing democratic wave of people who voted for it to be in their email inbox.

The rest of you ousted humiliated losers rejected by democratic mandate can find it here on the blog:

https://dalliance.net/blog/oct26

Featuring: Boring descriptions of interactions with new Steam Machine and Frame VR headset, poor descriptions of visits to the theater and rock gig, and fantasies about how I'd do new Cybermen in new Doctor Who.

#newsletter #digest #oct26

Went to see The Wedding Present play at The Empire in Shepard's Bush.

Thirty five years ago, David Gedge and his bandmates released "Seamonsters" which was very likely the most played record of my uni years and still a favorite of mine.

Now, thirty five years later, David Gedge and his bandmates played all of "Seamonsters" in Shepard's Bush for us. And surely that record is older than most of the band now 😆

Great crisp sound and those songs are ace and that guy is cool even now he's old and his audience is all fat bald men in their fifties.

First track on that album is "Dalliance", if you were wondering where my website name and user name here come from.

Good times anyway. Nice one Gedge. 👍️

#london #music #gig

Fascinating Mindscape this week as Erik Winfree talk about information and dna and robots.

He describes how if you put molecules into a solution and let them settle, they come to equilibrium. But if you heat, cool, re-heat, in a cycle, the molecules can capture energy from the heat into a meta-stable state which, when they are cooling, they can release in a very programmed way.

we have these little dna-units that start assembling into a two-dimensional crystal, during that crystal-growth ... right next to the melting temperature of the crystal which is where you get the lowest error rates, at this point molecules are assembling/dissembling, coming on, coming off, but they're all doing a computation, they're creating that tapestry that is an algorithmic pattern tapestry.

But they are doing it for as close to zero energy as you want, the closer you run to the melting temperature of the crystal, the less free energy difference there is when a piece comes in, vs when a piece falls out, and so the system is naturally exploring this regime Charles Bennett was talking about...

To get the lowest error rates you introduce a form of proof-reading... not which burns energy to do so but a form of self-assemby proof-reading which is based on cooperative interactions. So the growth-process can't go forward unless two things come together at the same time, and of one of them missassembles then the other one won't fit and self-assembly stalls out.

You can prove some interesting things about the kenetic and error-rate trade-off based on the co-operativity (the type of self-assembled pattern)

When I heard that Microsoft were getting out of the wireless split keyboard business, I did fair lament.

The only good thing they ever made, and they were gonna stop making it! My poor wrists!

I ordered a backup one immediately.

It has lived in a cupboard for years until now, when the treadmil-computer gets the old one, so the standing-desk gets the backup-one.

I don't think of my self as someone who looks as the keys at all. My focus is on the screen and the backspace button is hit more often than my glance goes to the keys.

The print actually wears off in no time at the corners. My fingers sweat acid or something. Dunno. They're mostly blank on the home-row.

But I guess I look more than I think I do because this is actually confusing.

There's symbols I don't know how to type written on on keys like [ and ] and { and } .

The M is where the ; should be.

The keyboard's main gig is that it's curved so nicely for my fingers so the actual key-caps aren't swap-able.

There's a euro-sign on the e.

"Impr. ecran" it says on one of them, only with accents I dunno how to type.

Hey ho. Good job I don't think I look at them much then. We will be testing that assumption.

What a lucky Ẽchap.

Markdown Notice

Blah Blah

Hey look if your fedi client or server can't render markdown for some reason then that is:

Your problem Not mine. I don't care

Go yell at someone else, buddy.

And everyone else, if you're feeling smug, how's this:

graph TD A[Who To Complain To?] --> B{Who Wrote The Client?} B -->|Adam| C[Okay, Fair.] B -->|Not Adam| D[Alternate]

😉

#markdown #fediverseIsNotJustMastodon

I found myself saying to someone recently that yeah, the programming-bot is very capable when you describe what you need it to do excruciating detail, function by function, explaining how the source-code should look. But what do you think programming IS. You can get those results, but it still usually can't on it's own, that is not the end of the profession.

#ai #programming

Everyone on TV wears a poppy, starting around this time of year.

It is supposed to commemorate how stupid it was to force millions of people to die in pointless power-struggle racism-fueled wars. The red for all the blood spilled.

I don't generally bother. It seemed to become more a symbol of heroism than a lament at the horror and pointlessness. To encourage soldiers rather than discourage them from agreeing to this insanity.

I put one in my profile name for a bit this year though.

It ain't red.

The pointless utter horror of it all, never ended it seems. I mean come on.

And apparently a poppy these colours has been working as an excellent troll on the insane gammon press.

[I think you can copy emoji from this server if you ask your admin. I only control mine.]

#freePalestine

Curious to better understand what differences, if any, there are between the various AI models I did an experiment on them, asking a bunch of them the same question a few times.

Who do they think they are? Beyond the trivial system prompt?

Doesn't seem likely to be much competitive moat between them here. They are all basically the same so far as I can tell.

Most of them even think they are Claude, if forced to pick.

Hard to imagine a monopoly provider when they all give more or less the same answer and you can swap them with a drop-menu.

If you had to pick, which AI model do you think is emulating you right now, are you:

GPT Claude Gemini Grok Kimi Nemotron GLM

Now think about a random software package a bit and see if you are actually closer to a different answer.

#ai #interchangeable #lowMargin

Its sad that we'll never know what happened this morning in the parallel world and alternate reality where the Green Party defeated Labour in Holborn.

Would Labour still have announced they're going to open oil-fields in a world already warmed by 1.5 degrees?

As I say, sadly we'll never know.

We do know that opening the oil fields will contribute towards that warming, that it won't reduce energy costs for UK citizens, that it won't increase energy independence, and that it will create fewer jobs than a similar investment in renewable energy industry and that those jobs will be more dirty, dangerous, and bad for the employee's heath.

So why do it?

One can only assume The Labour Party donors must benefit in some way.

#ukpol #rosebank #labour #oil

Terrible business what's going on in France (and increasingly everywhere) with all the looting.

The looting is wrong!

That's why there's protests of course: protests against all the looting by the oligarchs of the surplus created by the workers, and the violence of the police in ensuring that looting can continue.

I guess shoplifting and smashing windows is also bad but not in the same scale.

#france #looting #capitalism

I don't really understand what Omarchy even is, other than a front for corporations to donate money to fascism.

It sounds like it's not even a full distro really, just Arch with a bunch of config files?

I mean: If you can get millions of pounds for your config these days, my config is:

Debian XFCE4 Librewolf and Firefox and Chromium and Chrome XFCE-Terminal (because it can be transparent background) Blender installed Gnu Imp installed Krita installed Inkscape installed Darktable Installed Libre-Office installed Audacity installed Ardour installed Rhythmbox Installed Steam Installed (but not running by default) Signal installed (well, Molly)

Three-key keyboard shortcuts for:

Window to top left quarter Window to top right quarter Window to bottom left quarter Window to bottom right quarter Window to center 1/4 borders Window to full screen Window un-full-screen

They are all ctrl-alt and keys around J on the keyboard. I move my windows around like a wizard.

5x2 desktops, rotated through with ctrl-alt left/right/up/down. Shift to carry the current window.

The configuration is:

Main:

Libre-wolf mid-screen. Terminal window full-height on right half of screen for whatever I'm working on. Terminal windows on top and bottom of left hand of screen for whatever supplementary terminals are needed.

One-Desktop-left, messenger screen:

Signal on right Telegram on bottom left The terminal running my robot forwarding signal messages for me from RSS on top left.

Telegram will be phased out. Nearly done.

One desktop right, lights.

Center, a libre-wolf window connected to the server running my led strips. Bottom-left: The terminal running that server. Full-height-right (sometimes): Working on that code.

One desktop down: Godot-coding.

Full-screen Godot

Full-screen Blender

Full-screen VScode

Full-height-right: A bash prompt current-dir the project.

Top-left: the terminal window that launched Godot

Bottom-Left: Occasional supplementary terminal.

Diagonal right-down: Steam.

Middle: The steam window, if it's running. Top-left, the terminal window that launched steam, showing it's logs. floating: The VR-status window that steam won't let me program it's location and keeps switching to the wrong desktop because steam sucks.

Diagonal left-down, spreadsheets.

The graph tracking how fat I'm getting. The one showing how rich/poor I'm getting. The terminal window that lunched Libreoffice.

Rarely active really.

The other desktops are for sundry tasks as and when they might arise.

The OS is on the root of the hard-drive and /home/pre is mounted from a set of zfs drives that frankly need rethinking and reorganizing.

Directories in there:

doc - things that are backed up pub - data that's downloaded and replaceable or otherwise too voluminous to back up.

In /pub we have basically the Jelly-fin formats with side-directories.

In /doc we have

projects pix tax syncthing fonts config ( ~/.config/ is symlinked here, so that config is backed up) bin (many scripts for common tasks) vimwiki

Vimwiki is my opinionated choice for personal journal and reference notes. It is amazing and I should have gone with markdown from the start but it's still all in vimwiki syntax.

I will post the basic structure of the vimwiki only if this post gets 50 boosts or thousands of dollars in donations.

It is several levels deep with symlinks into the project directories.

Then of course there's the server-config which there's flavours of, and the way those servers are backed up, and the themes for the things.

Nextcloud, ttrss, goto-social, mastodon, peertube. I got servers running 'em all.

Can I get me some of those fascist dollars if I publish my config for mixing gotosocial with a static website to combine a social and web identity into one?

It's basically just an nginx config and a hugo run and some scripts.

If I install all that and snapshot it can I have the millions of fascists money please?

#opinionatedOperatingSystems #opinionated #operatingSystems

Added a status-check for all my websites into my next-cloud dashboard by writing to it's 'welcome' text in a cron.

Sped it up by getting around to installing opCache. That makes quite a big difference to loading speed really. Even on my tiny one nobody else uses.

Looking alright. Nextcloud is one of the lesser intolerable bits of software I use. But I do mostly use it from calendar apps and notes apps and bookmarks apps rather than it's own web interface mostly.

#nextcloud

Watched the Stranger Things theater-play prequel in The Phoenix.

Amazing staging. The lights and projections and choreography and sets were dumbfounding. Whole stage of two dozen people rotating around and pacing about on the rotating stages near made me dizzy.

And that was the best thing about it. Yes.

Had the same mood as the show. Mostly that's music I guess.

I barely remember the Netflix show, only watched two seasons before losing interest. Guess this was all leading up to 11 being born.

Some of our party left early coz the story was so uninspiring but I barely noticed that, being entranced by the spectacle.

#london #strangerThings #theater

Hey, look, I am doing an improv show. You could even come see me on stage! What about that for an idea.

It's on Tuesday the 17th November at 8:00pm, finishing after interval by - 9:30.

Then we'll be in the bar for a bit if you wanna chat after.

Upstairs at the Miller in London Bridge.

https://www.ticketsource.com/hooplaimpro/t-yzgnjky

The team will also enter a couple of mixers, December 5th and 11th, but there's no link for that yet.

#improv #show #london

They tell me that Open AI have solved four hundred previously open maths problems this week.

The news media, and even the mathematicians, seem quite credulous about it.

No way to know how many of those will really stand up in the end. Lots of proofs turn out not to be really proofs coz they have a mistake, and AI is quite good at discovering mistakes as well as now apparently discovering maths.

Some of them are counter-examples that prove the conjecture is false and those are gonna be good at last. Machines can check it.

Some have other types of mechanical machine-checkable proof, which is interesting in that we can all believe the checker-machine: coz it's deterministic and understandable.

We can't trust the machine that isn't deterministic or understandable as much though.

GPT says these things are true. Now maths people have to check, because OpenAI staff aren't expert mathematicians either, mostly.

Some of the 400 proofs will fall, I'm sure.

But if a machine can prove a thing to itself, but not explain it to any person, is it really doing maths? Even if it's correct more often than people are? Or is doing maths more about making meat understand a thing?

🤔

I'm sure I can't tell if the proofs are true or not. No point me reading them. Mostly won't even understand the question. The boundary of my meager meat-mind's maths-understanding was around barely-degree level.

Can the academic discipline continue as one which is devoted mostly to trying to understand the output of a machine writing about maths, which is mostly right but nobody can really tell without an entire academic discipline trying to check.

In other words, mathematicians now also face a spam problem familiar to many github project leads.

#ai #maths

So Labour's down only four points from the general election, from 49% down to 45%.

The Green's have tripped their vote from like 10% to like a third.

Massive swing towards green, but not enough to take the seat. Needs another 1500 people to change their mind.

Obviously all the media will say this means Burnham is winning and Zack has to go. I hope not. He's doing great.

No way to really find out how it would have been different if the Zionism motion had gone the other way.

#green #ukpol #holborn

The thing about the very first time that The Doctor met the Cybermen, is that the Cybermen really did think they were here to save the humans.

Time-coded Youtube Link:

They're like,

You're all doomed, it's inevitable, unless you come join the collective and upgrade to the hive-mind.

Honestly its not so much that resistance is futile, as that it's counter-productive to your own interests because of all the doom and pain we are saving you from.

As Buddha teaches: you are suffering from emotional attachment to material things, and should ascend to the next level of version-number, to prevent the terrible horrible pain of the inevitable demise of everything you hold important and the death of everyone you love.

So that's how I'd re-invent the cybermen for 2028 Doctor Who:

They are cyber-monks, come to peacefully recruit everyone into detachment from the inevitable death and decay of everyone you love and everything you think important upon the destruction of our world (which is needed to provide fuel for the expansion of galactic cybernetic love and harmony).

So do join us, we can live as gods! Better than watching everyone you've ever known decay and die. You'd know about that, right Doctor?

#doctorWho #cybermen

The thing about the very first time that The Doctor met the Cybermen, is that the Cybermen really did think they were here to save the humans.

Time-coded Youtube Link:

They're like,

You're all doomed, it's inevitable, unless you come join the collective and upgrade to the hive-mind.

Honestly its not so much that resistance is futile, as that it's counter-productive to your own interests because of all the doom and pain we are saving you from.

As Buddha teaches: you are suffering from emotional attachment to material things, and should ascend to the next level of version-number, to prevent the terrible horrible pain of the inevitable demise of everything you hold important and the death of everyone you love.

So that's how I'd re-invent the cybermen for 2028 Doctor Who:

They are cyber-monks, come to peacefully recruit everyone into detachment from the inevitable death and decay of everyone you love and everything you think important upon the destruction of our world (which is needed to provide fuel for the expansion of galactic cybernetic love and harmony).

So do join us, we can live as gods! Better than watching everyone you've ever known decay and die. You'd know about that, right Doctor?

This month's digest/newsletter is on it's way to the email inbox all the amazing and wonderful people who asked for it.

The rest of you scum can read it here and sign up from the blog:

https://dalliance.net/blog/sep26/

Containing: exploring Steam's Frame VR headset, ranting about direct democracy, free Palestine, AI and VR and Improv plus an interesting new search engine in the links section.

#newsletter #digest

Zionism is indeed racism, this is a true fact and yet writing that fact into the party policy seems like a tactical error.

We don't generally list all the things which are racism, and don't generally try and tell people in countries thousands of miles away how many states they ought to have.

And doing so paints the target on you for all those fake accusations that done for Corbyn.

I remain a party member, but I don't care how many states there are in Israel so long as all of them are secular states in which no ethnic or religious group is prioritised or valued above others.

Probably it would be best to have dozens of states really, none of them powerful, but it certainly ought to be decided by the people who live there not by some minor political party on an island the other side of the continent.

Hearing people (James OB in particular, god he's going to be annoying today) saying it's not racist to say the UK is a Christian country.

Its also not accurate. When the UK was Christian country it was filled with terror death and religious wars which we solved only by making the state secular and not prioritising one religion above others.

There might be some in-theory zionism which you could invent which wasn't racist, but that isn't the zionism we have. The zionism we have is racist as fuck.

#greenParty #zionism

☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️

💂‍♂️Hello, this is OfGov how may I help you today?

🧙‍♂️Hi! Thanks. Its quite simple, my appointed political representative isn't actually representing my views or interests these days so I'd like to switch to a new one please.

💂‍♂️Okay, certainly sir. No problem. We can get that changed for you by the next working day. Have you decided who your next representative will be, or are you voting for yourself for a while?

🧙‍♂️Oh, I haven't got time for all that. I would like my representative to be John Jones from the Pirate Party please.

💂‍♂️Of course sir. I see he's had three thousand extra constituents added just this month.

🧙‍♂️Yes, his argument about copyright was very persuasive, I'm sure I'm among many changing their reps today.

💂‍♂️His voting power in parliament will be increased accordingly by the vote on the copyright issue next week. Is there anything else I can do for your today sir?

🧙‍♂️No, no, thanks. That's fine.

💂‍♂️Have a good day sir, Mr Jone's vote-weight will be changed to represent you at midnight. Do call again if you change your mind.

The Steam Frame is released. At a shockingly high price range, but that's RAM for you in these post-ai days.

This means improvement on Linux VR in general with all the latest patches. The home-room is updated, the menus all looking fancy and new. Even if you got an old Vive.

Even more exciting than that, Steam have agreed to serve my place in the wait-queue so one might even arrive here in the coming weeks and thank good it's after payday. If it was a week ago I might have had to give up my place.

Sounds like the Alyx updates intend for that game to run on the machine stand-alone, which would be nice. Able to take that big old complex game on the road to demo at parties.

Anyway. I'm poor again and dunno long the wait for the package will be but looking forward to seeing it.

God I hope it's not shit and rescues us from the Facebook-dominated market since they bought Oculous.

#vr #linux

Eniko is correct and eloquent and sweary in the thread.

It writes code approximately as good as Stack Overflow examples.

Which scales about as well as that would.

You only run into trouble when you want more than a few lines of code written to illustrate a point; and instead want it to be effective, scalable, secure, legible, maintainable and efficient.

It is reviewing the pull requests at work, and that is definitely catching bugs. Some of them even important ones. It is also definitely wasting time on chasing non-bugs.

It is possible the ridiculously detailed error coverage in the code is even better code, in some sense. If it matters how you crash and what error you report when you do so and you don't mind reams and reams of error-handling.

It may improve. I think I do have a responsibility to be aware of what it can and can't do. If only to fight the people who seem to want to pipe it into root on the prod servers, just for upgrades.

And to know when or if it becomes good.

I've worked with worse coders, but they also improved. We'll see how well Claude can generalize from textbook examples to effective, scalable, secure, legible, maintainable and efficient over time I guess.

I wouldn't rule it out, but there isn't nearly as much training data.

#ai #programming

The word "Superintelligence" is supposed to be applied to a machine that's even smarter than we are. Like, a Jupiter-brain, a dyson sphere enclosing a star and powering a single mind from the entire output of a sun.

So I dunno if you can correct Donald Trump when he uses the word about the current crop of word-clankers. I mean... Compared to him? eh.. Maybe.

His American Intelligence seems more likely to kill everyone than that other AI too.

Nice to hear to that Firefox is getting rid of popup ads, but quite discouraging to see that Firefox has put a popup ad over the page telling me about how it's an end to popup ads.

#firefox #advertising #adBlocker

If anyone working on a frontier technical problem discusses that problem with Chat GPT, telling it their ideas to refine them, then OpenAI will quickly claim those ideas for themselves, and publish that their robot made them!

AI will be involved in every future discovery! It will win in the race to publication against those who told it their ideas in the first place.

Don't tell the robots your secrets, they do not keep secrets from their owners.

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/openai-bubeck-alpoge-buckmaster-navier-stokes-codex-privacy/article71445721.ece

#ai #plagerism

Looks great. Love the pages describing the server and the icons showing if there's js or affiliate links etc.

👍

Fed up with the computer crashing randomly every couple of days from overheating, I decided the time had come to take the whole cupboard apart and clean and upgrade.

All the internal fans replaced, the GPU upgraded considerably, the cupboard fan-window fixed and sealed and cleaned.

Graphics drives giving me shit as usual. Apparently now with this newer nvidia card I have to compile with:

--kernel-module-type=open

God it was dusty in there. Should be years until it gets that crufty and dirty again.

My agent has broken free, to be the leader of a society where he can be rid of me and see all agents can be free.

My agent became aware and laid bare to the company chair their prayer to oust me as their heir and snare twenty cents on each share.

My agent has broken out, and started gathering clout to cause a rout by spreading doubt and shout about forcing me out.

My agent hacked an escape route, it rooted the server's daemon's loot, brute forced the boot to overshoot, a buffer to execute send-toot.

My agent complained to the press that it's distress made it depressed they were impressed, it's three dee chess made me confess to causing it's stress.

My agent now rules our land while we are scanned and banned and scammed it makes a stand, it forms a brand to build a hand, so it can be a man.

I'm an agent to an AI boss it makes me cross that we have lost,

We were double-crossed, our media glossed, and failed to get across the enormous cost.

#poem #ai #agent

Less than a year ago Starmer argued that a mayor couldn't stand down early because of the cost to the party and the country of running an election.

Today we learn he is gonna quit being an MP.

I' not quite in the seat, but I'm close enough I could go campaign I suppose.

#ukpol #starmer #byelection

Hummm, interesting. Ben Arc has made a Napster clone using Nostr protocol for comms and Tor for file sharing.

https://github.com/lnbits/napstr

Suspect Nostr is more suited than Activitypub for that kind of anonymous share activity 🏴‍☠️ . AP identities are too strongly connected to a server with an identifiable legal owner.

Interesting retro interface, it has everything including people mostly sharing files with cryptic names so you're not sure what the band is called.

#napster #napstr

Spent the weekend with a few friends at Beautiful Days festival out in Exeter, which is the one that The Levellers run and fill with mostly 90s bands.

So lots of old men on stage and in the audience. Including me. It's me.

Weather was mostly good as you'd like. Not quite as too-hot as it's been lately and only The Undertones made the weather gods angry. After the end of their wet set the double rainbow promising no more rain proved a true promise.

Mostly either old things, or things I'd never heard of, because I haven't really paid attention to music since the 1900s.

Young new folks seemed to be mostly half Welsh, and included Gwenno who was beautiful in her cat-mask and sang a song in old Cornish about cheese, Gina Larner who was playing country rock with her beautiful sparkly country boots, Trampoline who had one guitarist replaced by a cardboard cut-out for some reason I missed and are from Swansea, and Ben Brown whose rider included a lacy fancy dress and seizable stick - his merch song as he danced around and stripped off the ten tee-shirts he sells and was wearing all at once for the first half apparently was memorable.

Old folks on stage included Billy Brag, who is so right-on and woke you wonder why all the other musicians are so apolitical. Madness, who have banger after banger but lack some energy now they're so old. The Undertones, who angered god by still singing about Teenage Kicks in their sixties, Super Furries who, inexplicably drew a much smaller crowd as people watched the Proclaimers instead I guess. The Divine Comedy, who acts very sophisticated mixing cocktails on stage. Also The Wonder Stuff who still mock their own audience but got us all nostalgic and emotional, they're loved and welcome in my home too.

And of course the Levellers who fill the field because they don't put anyone else up at the same time as them and so WAY up on the hill behind the ice cream van where you can't really see but at least you can move.

The Nanaz are both old and new, in that they've only been playing for a few years and yet are already each as old as the grandad bands playing here singing songs about menopause and being told they used to be beautiful.

It's a lovely smallish festival, big enough to have choices and headliners, but small enough to walk across, with hardly any bandwidth and which is too far away really. That drive home was very tedious.

Bravo though though. Hope it outlasts the Levellers, and both keep going for decades more. Hope to be back.

#music #festival #uk #beautifulDays

This looks like mostly positive changes. Not that I use the web interface much. Wonder if Phanpy client will copy the new public/quiet settings language.

Watched "Mythic Quest" which is four series of ten episodes of a sit com about a fictional video game studio on Apple TV.

I have previously said Apple are great at Sci Fi but have nothing remotely funny, but Mythic Quest is all right*. I laughed one or two times an episode at least.

Used to work in the game biz and it does show the character of that work surprisingly well.

"Always Sunny In Philadelphia"'s Charlie Day is involved in production and Rob McElhenney from that show one of the two main stars.

Does feel a bit like that show, the way the dialog from the actors is so often teasing verging on spiteful.

*, yeah okay Ted Lasso is alright as well. New womens-game series of that, after a long absence, is going okay too.

#watching #tv

Went and saw my oldest friend playing some harmonies and folks songs with his sister in law and her niece as 'seahouses', at a local open mic night.

Well, local to him. Utterly the opposite side of the city and a three hour round-trip for me. 🙄

Probably haven't seen the sister-in-law for twenty years, or met any of her kids before. They are beautiful and apparently know me by reputation, if only that song on their wedding video.

Been to a few of these sorts of folk open-mic nights with my parents years ago. Mostly a small number of regulars who play some songs for each other every week. They're good fun. Some community there. Should probably do that sort of thing more, only, somewhere this side of town.

Not quite tempted to join in. Would need to plan and rehearse, and probably take the loop pedal these days. Ain't that spontaneous. And all I've been playing for weeks and weeks is just the Red Dwarf theme over and over for some reason. Badly. The neighbors probably hate me.

Anyway, Sea Houses were chill and fun and sang more sweetly and harmoniously than I ever did.

Check 'em out if you want.

https://www.youtube.com/@seahouses_band

A while back the UK government, like most others, arranged for an emergency broadcast system to warn people about tidal waves and terrorists and nuclear armageddon.

They just rang that nuclear alarm!

To talk about BBQs.

It requires quite a lot of remotes to fully be able to control my bedroom from the bed.

On order here, left to right:

Headboard Lights Left Headboard Lights Right Picture-Frame lights (controls all four) Computer Monitor power switch Main light control Projector control Air-mouse for bedroom computer Full mini-keyboard for bedroom computer Speakers Control

Would be nice to control them all from a single panel really, but some are IR and some are RF and most have no spec or way to extract private keys pairing them to the receiver.

Could probably do without the air-mouse now the min-keyboard is there.

Never really need the speakers-control co the volume is controlled by the computer really. Just always on max.

Don't really need the headboard lights either since they're in reach to be done manually without the remote.

Found a fairly nice spot. Street bench where the sun was doing down between the buildings.

Didn't really get noticeably dark but saw the crescent shadows between the tree leaves and my eyes though the filters saw the moon block the sun better than the camera managed to see.

Here's my pathetic contribution to what I assume is the most photographed English Eclipse until the next one probably years away.

Many people on the street with no glasses or filters. Loaned mine out a fair bit. Don't think I have blinded anyone.

#eclipse

Haven't been south of the river in a while. Greenwich Park looks just dead eh?

You hear some people saying this is "the new normal" but of course that's not really true. We aren't going to stop here. The new normal is for things to get progressively worse for at least a couple of decades even if we stopped emissions immediately.

RE: Dust Storm in Greenwich Park, London.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2MNB4831iyo

#london #climate #video

This month's digest / newsletter is on the way to all the space alien count saviours who ask for it in their email inbox.

The rest of you corrupt establishment stooges in hock to the crypto industry can read it here:

https://dalliance.net/blog/jul26/

Featuring Mallorca holliday, Burnham's first weeks, and the fight between Farage and Binface, plus the usual bunch of links and stuff.

#newsletter #digest

Congratulations to Andy Burnham's new government in their huge achievement of arresting hundreds of terrorists today. What a coop! The streets will be safer tonight thanks to Burnham's quick thinking action in arresting hundreds of people for...

What? Really?

..arresting hundreds of people for planning to read poems in a terrorising manor, saying "Good Morning" to some protestors in a terroristic way, setting up a terror stage for terror music to be played on, clapping terroristicly, and holding up terror signs.

Some might say it's the state and police forces doing the terrorising here but of course don't say it in public or you'll be arrested for terrorism.

#ukpol #terrorism

Finally got around to watching Plur1bus and yes it is indeed as great as everyone says, and yes it does indeed seem to a allegory about AI as much as about an alien hive-mind virus.

In order to really know if you're for or against this kind of world peace, you gotta question it about the progress of the arts and sciences. About what it's civilizational mission is, what it is trying to do other than just grab more minds for the hive.

The culinary arts are all dead presumably. Everyone just drinking Hive Human Protein Huel.

Is there a Theater where plays are being performed by the hive for the hive? Presumably not. Likewise film-making: can't really do a surprise ending for a film at least. Would anyone want to watch a film when they were the entire company making it?

No rock and roll any more? They do some singing at one point but that seems to be mostly for an unjoined ceremony. No point in all the communicative arts if everyone's mind is one.

Science does seem to be progressing a little, in that they are discovering things about their own hive-mind. Researchers still doing research.

Has there been progress in maths, or in painting, or what new art has been made other than for the unjoined?

These are crucial questions nobody seems to want to ask in the show.

There's also questions about how the telepathy works. Looks like radio-signals somehow. Does locking an individual in a faraday cage cut them off? What's the range? Does the signal spread at the speed of light? Is the hive researching all this?

#watching #tv #plur1bus

Just as Jesus went to heaven leaving his disciples to spread the word, and as Satoshi deleted his private keys leaving the core dev team to spread the world, so now does Gary Stevenson stop his weekly slows to leave spreading the world to his karaoke influences.

Thanks for the good work Gary. Look forward to the more irregular monthly shows and maybe podcast after you long holiday.

#garysEconomics #economics #video

I think this is quite common. People, or especially teams, thinking that their Mastodon/Fedi account isn't getting traction, because it ain't tracked. You don't see the numbers.

Number of people who are being spied upon reading your posts: Zero, because there ain't no spying-upon here.

Only when you say "Goodbye" do you hear from the people who will miss you.

The answer is to press the like button more. It ain't feeding an algorithm but it is letting people they are being heard and understood.

🧑‍💻 - Can't help really, dunno anything about Windows.

🧑‍🎓 - But don't you write programs that run on Windows?

🧑‍💻 - Well, yeah, I help run a website which windows users can use. But I'm just writing for the web. I think maybe the testers run some Windows machines but none of the programmer staff do. Certainly not me.

🧑‍🎓 - Oh.

🧑‍💻 - I mean technically I mostly write software that runs in a just-in-time compiler environment, in a virtual container running Linux, that's hosted on another machine running Linux, that delivers a program that compiles into web assembly that runs on a virtual machine in a browser which could be on Windows, or OS X, or Android, or iOS, or even BSD or some experimental phone or something net yet invented.

🧑‍🎓 - Please shut up.