Beautiful Days, Eclipse, Drought, Aug 2026
The country’s drought is finally ended by the Undertones set at Beautiful Days and as one by-election ends, another begins.
Lots of links about AI including a link to some cards asking people not to talk to you about AI.
Diary
Open Mic
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. I 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 neighbours probably hate me.
Anyway, Sea Houses were chill and fun and sang more sweetly and harmoniously than I ever did.
Eclipse
There was a partial eclipse in London.
I 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.
Beautiful Days
Spent a 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 granddad bands playing here singing songs about menopause and being told they used to be beautiful.
They were doing some filming near the bar on the Friday evening. Kris Marshall and Sally Bretton and a small crew of film-makers doing some shots for a “Beyond Paradise” episode.
So I guess there was a fictional murder at the festival this weekend? Guess that’ll air next year. Might possibly be in the shot where he’s saying “Come on” and walking down though the crowd.
Wonder how the reputation of the festival will change if it has a fictional murder there on the TV?
Probably they’ll use a fake festival name I guess.
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.
Climate Crisis
Here’s a dust storm in Greenwich Park.
Haven’t been south of the river in a while. Greenwich Park looked 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.
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.
Guess this makes it an emergency, but is it a climate emergency? Seems the government are treating it as a BBQ emergency.
It is not a BBQ emergency, and this government continues to talk about opening new oil fields.
Some people get to vote about that next month because:
By Elections
Binface in Clacton
Binface was doing daily videos the last week or so of the campaign in Clacton. Of variable quality. Didn’t really like the Divine Comedy karaoke one.
Here’s his message to the aliens though.
These guys on this planet are using “democracy”, well, some of them are.. Sort of.
Everyone come visit, but not all at once, the humans can get a little bit prickley about immigration. Also funny international press interviews on the last day of the campaign:
Stand-up Maths reckoned Binface could win. Sort of.
I mean he definitely could. All it needed was to get the most votes.
In the end 63% of Clacton got it wrong, while only 27% of Clacton got it right.
Clacton really love Farage. Far more than the rest of the country loves him.
Oh well, here’s Binface’s victory speech.
Clacton may love Farage, but Farage doesn’t love Clacton. Didn’t even turn up to the count or the result.
He lied that the cops told him it could be dangerous, the cops say they said no such thing.
His victory speech was a tweet.
Well done Clacton. You get what you deserve.
The investigation into Farage continues, there may be a new election in Clacton in a few months.
Zack in Holborn
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.
This is a pretty good seat for Zack Polanski himself to sand in actually. And, yep, Polanski says he’s up for standing in Holborn and StP.
Would be great to get him into parliament, beat Labour in London, boost the party and Zack’s own voice.
So that’s the fight in the constituency next door.
Either Labour win, and nothing much of any relevance changes.
Or the Greens win, and the leader gets a MPs seat, 20% more green MPs in parliament, and Labour get pressured not to open those oil fields.
Lots of media saying that it’s a huge gamble for Zack to try and win Starmer’s seat.
As though they think if he loses the media will all call for him to resign. 😆 They’re doing that either way, duh.
A bigger gamble would be to put forward a lesser candidate and lower the chances of winning.
Here he is talking to Owen Jones about it anyway.
I’ not quite in the seat, but I’m close enough I could go campaign I suppose.
Really might have to do some volunteering if I can figure out how and find the time 🤔
Home
Remote Control
It requires quite a lot of remotes to fully be able to control my bedroom from the bed.
In order here, left to right:
-
Headboard Lights Left
-
Headboard Lights Right
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Picture-Frame lights (controls all four)
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Computer Monitor power switch
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Main light control
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Projector control
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Air-mouse for bedroom computer
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Full mini-keyboard for bedroom computer
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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.
Computer Upgrade
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 drivers 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.
Ai Poem
I wrote a poem about AI agents
~
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.
Watching
Mythic Quest
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.
Links
Bobby Fingers on Depp’s Poo
Bobby Fingers explains how he made a 1:13 scale diorama of a poo that was left in Johnny Depp’s bed.
Hilarious deadpan commentary and art.
Climate
Johnathan Cook on the climate conspiracy:
Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have catastrophic consequences.
Napster On Nostr
Ben Arc has made a Napster clone using Nostr protocol for comms and Tor for file sharing.
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.
Mastodon
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.
Fedi
A few boosts from the only social network that isn’t owned by billionaires and capitalists, the only network that is genuinely grass-roots, anarchic, decentralized, and owned by it’s users in common.
So, the one with no advertising budget and no PR department pushing it in the billionaire-press.
Ai Coding
You need to be an expert to tell when it is wrong:
This article starts with a story from someone who tried Claude Code and found it amazing, but then switches to the same person a few months later seeing what a disaster it’s been. This quote is key:
The problem is that code produced by an AI agent looks reasonable, but can contain ‘hard-to-spot bugs’ that end up causing major problems
LLMs, by their nature, generate statistically plausible output. That is often a set that overlaps with correct output. But the things that are not correct look exactly the same as the ones they are.
Learning to review code is hard. You look for the bugs that you expect to be possible implementing it by using your theory of mind for the person writing the code and the kinds of things that they might overlook (not necessarily a specific person, but the kinds of things people miss) and also common bug classes.
And the big help is that the person writing the code is not thinking adversarially. They are not trying to sneak bugs in. Normally. Unless they’re a supply-chain attacker, and we’ve a depressing amount of evidence that code review doesn’t catch supply-chain attacks.
An LLM is not trying to do anything. It has no intent. But it is a machine that is trained on code that made it past code review. The kind of bugs that it will generate are ones that look like code that appeared in production. This is exactly what an attacker would do: try to write code that looks correct but is subtly wrong.
I’m only being slightly flippant when I say LLMs are a mechanism for bringing supply chain attacks in house.
Non-programmers are in fact writing software to make computers do the things they want in ways the industry failed to allow them to easily to before:
So, hard pill to swallow, but I think there are a lot of AI enthusiasts who got that way because computing fundamentally failed them, for whom getting a computer to do anything for them is a whole-ass bullshit ordeal and who deserve our empathy and solidarity even so. We, computer-people we, can’t escape responsibility for abandoning user empowerment in favour of corporate consolidation and vending machine interfaces decades ago, now that we’re reaping the whirlwind of mechanized capitalism.
AI Conversation Stoppers
For when people in his bar try to talk to him about AI:
Do Not Talk To Me About “AI”
I had some cards printed up.
These are unlikely to change any minds, but they will defintely shorten some incredibly tedious conversations at the bar.
Here’s a PDF if you’d like some of your own.
Ai Debt
Okay I’m a teacher. So let me explain this to you in as simple a way as I can.
Let’s say I want to buy a cake. But not just any cake. A specialty cake for my nieces quinceañera. A cake like that costs at least $100 bucks. But I don’t have $100 bucks. What do?
Well, I could save up to buy the cake. But that might take a long time and by then her quinceañera would be long over and gone. I could go take out a loan for the $100 bucks. But I don’t want to take out a loan because it might make my credit look bad to have that much debt. So what’s the solution?
Well if I’m particularly creative and not overburdened by an abundance of morality, the solution is easy. I make another me. A special me. A me designed for one purpose only - to saddle with debt.
So I create another Lana. A legal fiction. Let’s call her Twona. Twona’s only purpose in life is to get a bunch of credit cards and then cakes for my niece’s quinceañera. Twona gets a MasterCard and a Visa, and puts $50 on each. When the cake arrives, Twona gives me the cake, and keeps the debt. And if the IRS or the banks ever come calling asking pesky questions about how I managed to afford a special quinceañera cake, I can legally and truthfully tell them I do not have any quinceañera credit card debt.
And you may be asking why the credit cards would do this. Why just give Twona those lines of credit, knowing that she was just going to buy a quinceañera cake with it. It’s not like they can repossess a giant 5-tiered specially cake with “Congratulations Niece on Your Quinceañera” written on it in bright pink fluffy icing. No one would ever buy that from them. It’s worthless as a repossessed asset. And the reason is that I signed an agreement with MasterCard and Visa saying that if they ever had to come collect on the debt, that I would pay them a certain amount of interest on the debt for the next 100 years.
So let’s recap.
I got: the cake, and no record of debt on my financial documents
Twona got: the debt
The credit agencies got: promise of residual income for the next century
Congratulations, now you understand how all these enormous data center buildings in rural places are being funded. Just take the quinceañera numbers and multiply them by 10 orders of magnitude. Meta and Amazon and Oracle and the rest of the tech companies are set to invest almost a trillion dollars in AI buildout just this year alone. And none of it is going on their financial documents. Because technically, none of them have taken out any loans. The loans are being held by shell companies created specifically for this purpose, with names like (I am not making these up) Beignet and Sopaipilla. These shell companies own the debt. And in return, Meta gets to build a $27 Billion dollar specialty data center building in the middle of rural Louisiana. And then Beignet rents that building to Meta. Nobody except Meta will ever use that building. It exists for one purpose only. But legally, Meta does not carry the debt on constructing it. Beignet does.
And the big burning question here is why. Why would Meta do this?
The reason is because if Meta had that debt on its own books, $27 billion dollars of debt looks like exactly what it is - the biggest financial gamble in the history of modern finances. Bigger than the housing bubble of the late 2000s. Bigger than the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Bigger even than the stock market bubble of the roaring 1920s. And we all know how well that one went.
So what’s the fallout here? Nobody knows. What I’m saying is that you, the public, are not getting the full story. It’s being deliberately hidden from public view. But now that you know it exists, you know what to look out for. This is a bubble. And when it bursts, there will be almost no warning. And some people stand to lose everything.
Cartoon
The cartoon is called Kumiai-Ki The Mighty Labor Union Mech, and it is about a union of Amazing Warehouse and Amazing Digital Services workers who rise up to defend themselves from a violent attack by CEO Geoff Bozo, by banding together to pilot their Mighty Union Mech.
Signal Allow Tablets
Finally! You can link your second android or ios device:
New: Link an Android tablet, Android phone, or iPhone as a linked device to your Signal account.
The most important links are with the people who matter to you, but if you want two phones, a tablet, and a laptop linked to your Signal account, we’ve got your back.
Identity Theft
The trouble with having ID checks on the web,is that you let private companies take scans of all the documents and then they get hacked and everyone’s private documents are leaked:
Breaking, exclusive and spicy, from me:
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.