Amsterdam Conference and Elections - Apr 2026
I’m late this month because of spending some timein Amsterdam for a developers conference, whilethe UK went to the polls in local elections andthe Strait of Hormuz continues to be blockaded.
Diary
DevWorld Amsterdam
Amsterdam, I was in you, and high as hell. My room ten stories up in the hotel 😆
Was there for a Dev World conference. I was told it’d be all about software development but a first skim of the program suggests itsmostly about ai.
The opening ceremony involved the speaker asking the crowd individually why they are here. Mostly they seem to want to know how to use ai. And not lose their job.
Didn’t ask me so didn’t get to say that I’d like to learn how to defensively fight ai and prevent it spamming up the web.
All the talks were in sync at 30 minute intervals. This is too short really. They either have to dive in with jargon I don’t get to explain in depth, or barely manage to summarize before the time runs out. No time for Q&A at all which leaves you wondering why not just watch it on youtube?
There’s a hall full of stands from corporations of varying evilness giving out useless tat with trademarks on it. People go mad for the loot. Seems to make people quite excited to get a pair of socks or a fidget toy. I leave them to it. Don’t like talking to salespeople even if you get free socks with trademarks on them. I don’t wear logos in general anyway.
The AI bootsterism is strong, but not omnipresent. Plenty of talks on team management or deployment or progress in non-amazon cloud systems or whatever. Even if they can only be quite surface-detail and lacking depth due to shortness.
It’s like being in school really. Flowing from lesson to lesson. Mostly being taught things that will be Irrelevant or are boring or are unlikely to ever really come up.
You can read more about individual lectures here.
But in summary, it is indeed quite like being at school. Half hour lessons on things that probably won’t ever actually be useful to know in your particular job of varying levels of interest. Mostly pretty low interest honestly. Bumping into colleagues between lessons.
Learned the names of a couple of tools I might try. One google search would have gotten me those but I guess it’s a question of thinking to look for them.
If you can judge the mood of an industry from a random selection of talks from a single conference then the industry is very optimistic that they can make AIwrite a lot of software.
It seems to think this is likely to mean fewer programmers rather than there being more software meaning more workers.
It wasn’t as AI heavy as I thought when I first glanced at the program. Managed to mostly be not-ai I think.
Nobody talking about the ethical implications or suggesting joining a union and only one talk about the environment issue at all, it not really noting how much power the industry is about to take.
Liked having a few meals in Amsterdam with colleagues I never usually see (mostly remote workers, including me). The boss is pretty good at picking people really.
Got a day or so of holiday too, mostly spent wonderingthe city stopping at random bars and coffee shops.
UK Local Elections
The press campaign against the Green Party was intense!Faking up antisemitism charges deliberately conflatingresistance to Israel’s wars with objections to Judaism.
UK Media was shrill over Zack Polanski pressing a retweet on a post wondering if some cops used excessive force.
Apparently police are so weak that someone retweeting about them using excessive force might stop them wanting to use any force at all! We’ll be overrun with crime because the police will be too scared to do anything in case the leader of the 4th largest party retweets something mean about them.
This is very important they shriek, all in a panic, and surely shows that the Green party want criminals to rule the country.
In my ward the greens seem to have got about a third of the vote vs Labour with the rest. 2:1
Which is a big improvement. 300 or so neighbors to turn.
In the borough we’ve gone from unanimous Labor to about a third Green. Which is oddly proportional to my ward. Not really sure I understand the actual counting system with the three votes I had or if it’s PR or not.
Nationally its awful for Labour but also worse for the country since outside London they lost mostly to the Reform (nee Brexit) party/private-company.
Conservatives seem irrelevant, even Lib Dems more important.
I’ve been casting doubt upon the idea of an imminent Reform government, saying it’d be unprecedented for Reform to go from one ever elected MP to 400 MPs in a single election. But these elections feel pretty close to that kind of swing.
Starmer says he’ll stay on. He has no concept of what government should do other than give tax breaks to businesses to try to get economic growth, and crack down in authoritarian ways with increased surveillance and ID checks and prosecuting protestors.
He doesn’t seem to realize that government can just do things, especially after Brexit. It can just pay people to build infrastructure owned by and giving profit to the state. It does not need private investment. Isn’t that supposed to be the point of a Labour party?
So things will continue to get worse and Labour will continue to chase Reform policies (and so validate them). So Reform may well win.
There is one hope. Burnham could resign as mayor, a safe-seat MP could resign, and Burnham stands there. Assuming he wins he could then stand for leadership. And then if he wins and then actually does something despite the protest of the right wing of his own party, maybe things could get better.
That’s a lot of conditionals. You’d want good odds to place a bet on that.
Or the greens of course. These elections have seen hundreds of new green councilors. The momentum is good. Probably take the council here next time unless that Burnham things happens.
So good for Greens, but better for Reform, and we could do with a Labour party which wasn’t failing.
Oh well. Fingers crossed I guess. Few more years till the national ones.
Then after the weekend, Starmer is doing a thing about election results. Is he resigning?
He says the elections were tough, he lost brilliant representatives.He feels the hurt and takes responsibility. Not just for the results, but also for explaining how they’ll do better in the years ahead.
Times are dangerous, opponents are very dangerous, if we don’t get it right the country will be on a very dark path.
He takes responsibility for navigation in this dangerous world and for not walking away.
Oh right, he’s not resigning then. 😦
He says he’ll prove his doubters wrong. He’s learned a lot! And realizes now we need a bigger response to this unordinary times.
Times demand serious progressive leadership he says, and Zack or Nigel can’t provide that. [Citation needed] Only Labour can [Really, come on, citation needed]
He’s pleased to be reducing NHS waiting lists and crime, and for some reason is pleased migration is coming down too.
He says he realizes that people don’t think Labour cares about them. So that’s something.
So his plan to fix things after this election is to talk more about why he’s doing things instead of just saying what he’s doing.
Right. Sure. That’ll help.
He admits millions of people, like his sister, don’t get respect or help and are held back because the status quo doesn’t work.
He says he’s fighting for them but, eh, perhaps he should be doing that thing where he says more about why and how?
He says we need a complete break to take control of energy and defence and fairness (he isn’t resigning though, not THAT complete a break)
“Strength Through Fairness, Hope and Urgency” is his plan.
Three concrete examples of the plan:
/* British Steel, hours away from closure, was rescued. They took control. Now, having failed to find a corporate buyer, they are going to give themselves power to take full national ownership of British Steel!
Sure, about time, not like the Greens are against that.
/* Europe: Nigel said Brexit would make us richer and reduce migration and make us more secure but he was wrong on all counts! At next EU summit Starmer will once again set a new direction by rebuilding the relationship, putting Britian at the heart of Europe.
Doesn’t sound like he wants a re-join though, so not really sure what this means. The EU don’t allow partial memberships or cherry picking benefits. Some kind of external heart I guess, an outside-body heart pump?
Every Child should have the opportunity to go as far as their talent can take them, so is he going to remove student fees and issue a grant to students, wipe out student loans? No. He’s going to guarantee training or work placements to school leavers.
So in response to likely being unelected next time, he’ll nationalize steel (now he’s failed to find a corporate buyer anyway), is going to renegotiate with Europe (again, they have no better offers to give), and offer apprenticeships to education-leavers (who are still going to be mostly in debt by then).
Right.
Oh, and he’s going to ban more marches too. Almost forgot that.
What a cock.
He did sound a bit passionate at least for a change.
Deleting Corporate Internet
I set up new Signal groups for the old Telegram ones. Robots to mirror the ActivityPubs.
Me: https://dalliance.net/chat
Starship Project: https://starshipsd.com/chat
Tarot Project: https://wordcloudtarot.com/chat
The old Telegram groups will be closed and deleted in due course. Haven’t had it installed on my phone since I switched to Graphene and these groups and robots were the last blocker to deleting it off my desktop soon too.
Changed all the website links etc.
Been meaning to do all that for ages. Yes it did take all day. But I do feel like my powers are increased now I have CLI (and so scriptable) access to a Signal account.
Nobody on Fedi will need any of these things of course. They’re just mirrors of things you can follow over activity pub more easily.
And yes, now I can now turn my lights on and off by talking to my bot that listens to a signal number.
Could make the lights turn red from Morocco if I was there.
Telegram groups will continue to work for a while,but I will not be re-installing Telegram on myphone and I think the desktop app will becomedisconnected eventually, will delete it at somepoint even if it doesn’t.
Ethics On The Web
Peter Singer is a Consequentialist Hedonic Utilitarian Ethicist.
It’s his professional job to be good at ethics and teach others about ethics.
He thinks the best ethics are judged by the consequences, and that good is the best for the most people.
He has a podcast. It’s probably great. He is cool. I only just heard about it.
From the title list, the podcast does (after two episodes) appears to be mostly about AI.
Which does undeniably have ethical implications all over the place. Hopefully the topic range will widen.
But this is his website:
The podcast is offered on Spotify and Apple.
It has an AI chat bot that isn’t even prompted well to sound like Peter for no reason at all.
It has a embed for a substack.
That embed for a substack is expired because it’s run by a thing called Supascribe that is presumably some software as a service scam.
Below that is a cookie permissions banner which is asking for permission to spy on you for advertisers even though there are no actual adverts on the site.
There are links at the top and bottom to Facebook and Instagram.
There is no RSS feed embedded in the page.
I repeat: Peter Singer is actually pretty cool, and he thinks about ethics sanely.
This is the web we have built. Where a professional Consequentialist Hedonic Utilitarian Ethicist does all this.
Most of the time when you make ethical decisions you aren’t evenaware you are making ethical decisions.
Even if you are a professional ethicist.
Quantum Bitcoin
BIP 361 is a proposal on what to do with bitcoin if Quantum Computers are buildable.
Interesting abstract question even if you dislike bitcoin or prefer the US controlled Breton-woods petrodollar or using bank-debt charged at interest for money or whatever.
The problem at hand is that coins are unlocked by cryptography which a big enough quantum computer could break.
Sure, you can invent a quantum-proof key type, but all the existing coins have to be unlocked and moved into those types of addresses before that quantum computer is invented.
There is enough space on the blockchain to do that over a few years, but a lot of keys are lost. Maybe millions of bitcoins in addition to the original million or so coins mined by Satoshi which have never moved with keys presumed burned or owner dead.
That means handing maybe 10% or more of the total coins to Quantum Hackers with presumed evil intent.
Can the node-runners and miners who make up the network do anything about that?
BIP 361 suggests forever locking any coins not moved into quantum-proof addresses within five years.
If you’ve been in a coma or in jail with the seed-phrase memorized you’re going to get released and find your bitcoin frozen by the Bip-361 cabal.
But then if bip 361 and similar fails, you’re just going to wake up and find a quantum hacker has taken them instead.
You ain’t gonna recover your coins from your memorized seed-phrase either way.
Some bitcoins are literally time-locked, prevented from moving for ten years. They are stuffed either way and can’t move into safe addresses even if they still have the keys.
Remember that “Some quantum hacker” isn’t a furry kid in a bedroom or the organized crime syndicates. It’s Google or the US Government or a university or Cern or something.
Do you want to lock the coins, or give them to a random state or state-sized corporate actor?
It’s all very well being sad after your timelocked coins are taken by a protocol change, but its just as sad to have them taken by the US Government.
What would the US government do if they took Satoshi’s coins? Probably use them to back a new satoshi dollar? It becomes that Bitcoin Strategic Reserve by default.
Iran
“Operation Economic Fury” happened. Sanctions against the entire middle east. 20% of the world’s oil is stranded and the USA is stuck in a mire and escalating.
Stock market: Oh good, record highs then 🎉
They can’t all be war profiteering surely?
The talking heads on the corporate media are assuring me that Iran was building up its forces and threatening apocalyptic war and that now they can’t do that.
But seems to me that it was the USA which has a large cache of apocalypse weapons and were threatening to drag the entire world into their bullshit war.
Iran was never a bigger threat than the USA, the USA is the biggest threat to world peace that exists, possibly next to Israel.
Trump’s pointless stupid war has left Iran empowered and triumphant,the regime strengthened with more support than before.
But the talking heads can’t admit that at all.
Sounds like the negations to unblock the Strait of Hormuz have gone even worse than you’d have expected.
The number of countries blocking the strait has doubled, as America joins in blocking passage to even more vessels.
At this rate, with the number of countries blocking that sea doubling every month, every country in the world will be blocking the Strait of Hormuz by the end of the year.
Releases
Assassination
This month, a shooter was apprehended as he tried to assassinate the president of the United States.
I did a five minute tarot reading to find out what could be going on in that shooter’s mind.
Read the transcript or watch the show on the website:
https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2026-04-28-mindofashooter/
Links
Some things I bookmarked on the web this month.
Nuclear Genocide
Media Lens on Trump’s threads of nuclear genocide this month.
“Despite all the madness, horror and killing, Trump’s genocidal threat provoked a display of deep-seated solidarity and compassion that defied decades of propaganda demonising the Iranian people as ‘animals’, ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’. Clearly, very few of us are willing to tolerate the threat of nuclear genocide. In these grim times, when it sometimes feels like humanity has completely lost its way, that is something to celebrate.”
AI
The Verge has an article about AI boosterism and thetech industry not really knowing what people want.
The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher.
The Verge again, on the economics of the AI bubble.
Gartner forecasts that large AI companies would need to earn cumulatively close to $7 trillion in AI-driven revenue through 2029, which is close to $2 trillion per year by the end of the period. In order to achieve “historic returns,” the providers would need to earn nearly $8.2 trillion in the same period.
Fedi
There is a place that isn’t a place, a distributed networkcreating a space in which people can talk without corporateowners or adverts or surveillance. The Fediverse. Here’s someof my favourite of this month’s posts on it.
The morld
Anarcho Nina on the media response to Trumps wars:
Like, all those people, every journalist, editor, fact checker, layout manager and so forth, spent ALL FUCKING NIGHT writing and polishing to hit the morning news with gripping, hard hitting analysis of something that is, afaict, completely fake, irrelevant, and not actually happening. Pizzas were ordered, gallons of coffee were drunk, marriages were broken up a little more… all to analyze something that’s entirely fake and irrelevant 12 hours later b/c we’re lead by mad donkeys.
Fediverse
The EFF is leaving Twitter, concentrating on Fedi.
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X.
This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. 🧵 (1/5)
There was a DDOS against fake-decentralized Bluesky this month,which bought down the whole network.
There was also one on really-decentralized Mastodon.Most people didn’t even notice. Only one of the manyservers was down.
JWildeboer notes:
DDos (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against BlueSky a few days ago: The whole network goes down.
DDoS against mastodon.social today: Lots of users on that instance impacted, the rest of the Fediverse keeps on running, my instance doesn’t really notice, messages will be queued up until mastodon.social is reachable again.
Both networks claim to be decentralised and federated. You decide :)
Find Out Media are setting up their own Fediverseserver. TChambers notes on that topic:
This from #FindOutMedia is really important. It’s another example of the #findoutMediaPodcast folks building their following directly on the open social web: a network they own, that can’t be taken away by Zuckerberg,Musk or by Google’s or YouTube’s latest algorithm. They just launched their own fedi server, and dedicated mobile apps, and each new account joining there is automatically bridged over to BlueSky. This is the model to keep an eye on. Everyone else with… 🧵 1/3 https://findout.media/public/local
Fdroid
Fdroid is the free Android app-store, offering opensource projects.
Gina has been elected to the FDroid board of directors
I’m honoured to have been elected to the Board of Directors of @fdroidorg , the most well-known #opensource alternative to Google’s Play Store.
Imagine Microsoft deciding from now on what you can install on your laptop. No internet, you can only download things through the MS app store. Apps that MS has approved. Who wouldn’t find that suffocating? Yet that is what Google wants to do on our Android phones (and what Apple already has - a closed ecosystem).
1/4
Corporate Enclosure Of The Web
Graphene is an alternative to Android, and has athread on the threat of Google requiring all usersto any websites using their robot-checker to scana QR code to prove they have an Android/iOS phone.
More attempts to enclose the public web for privateownership.
Apple and Google are gradually expanding their use of hardware-based attestation. They’re convincing a growing number of services to adopt it. Google’s Play Integrity API and Apple’s App Attest API are very similar. Apple brought it to the web via Privacy Pass, which Google intends on doing too.
Credulous Markets
Buermann Has a joke riffing on the Efficient Market Hypothesisas markets rage despite war and embargos and oil shortage.
The Credulous Markets Hypothesis states that asset prices reflect all available hype. A direct implication is that it is impossible to “beat the market” consistently on a hoopla-adjusted basis since prices should only react to new hype, so the CMH only makes testable predictions when coupled with a particular model of propaganda.
Space
Astronomer Professor Sam Lawler has a thread on her comments tothe space control people over applications for orbitaldata-centers:
Blue Origin wants 51,600 satellites, all in sun-synchronous orbits.
That means they’ll follow the terminator line around the Earth and be sunlit ALWAYS. They want to distribute them between 500-1,800 km altitude, which means some of them will be sunlit and visible all the time. Fanfuckingtastic.
For The Children
AJs comments on age-gating the internet asan excuse to monitor and track and enclosethe public web for corporations.
There’s a lot of legislation going around “for the children” right now that will have the impact of making us all less safe and free, making computers more difficult to use, and generally making life worse for everyone.
Lots of folks are talking about this as if it is the only intended outcome of these laws, but it isn’t
Part of these laws are also about children.
About controlling what kids can read, who they can talk to, what they can watch, and how they can interact with one another, making it harder for kids to use digital resources to learn about themselves and the world while at the same time making it easier for abusive and controlling parents to abuse and control their kids.
UKPol
Remittance Girl has a thread on the elections:
Look, I am not entirely disconnected from the economic system in which we find ourselves. I do understand that the Tories left a mountain of debt that needs to be serviced and a stagnant economy.
But there absolutely ARE ways to address this if you can get economists who can think outside the box.
That is what Labour should have done, instead of simply re-embracing austerity. It wasn’t just cruel, it was lazy answers to challenging questions.