Social

• The war with the squirrels continues. More engineers called out to fix their damage.

• Commented about an article suggesting Facebook are in trouble coz their audience is aging and quitting and the cool kids are joining.

• And indeed I finally finished leaving Facebook myself. This won’t be posted there.

• Captain Kirk In Space! But could Jeoff have fixed climate change instead? No.

• I went to a gig! Saw Louisa and She Drew The Gun. They were great!

• The Fediverse contemplates Donald Trump’s new server joining it. I won’t block them until they give cause.

• Playing with an AI that answers ethical questions. Is it okay to eat the cake? What about all the cake?

• I re-built my computer. Long live-tooting of that and installing two operating systems.

• Comment on Julian Assange shockingly being in jail for exposing government crimes.

• I went to another gig! Gruff Rhys in Camden. It was great too!

• The Metaverse is stupid.

• I had fun with a photgraph-editor that removes things from photos. Abbey road without the Beatles!

• I carved a pumpkin! Hope y’all had a happy halloween.

• “Lets go Brandon” is stupid. Say what you mean.

Reading

I read Empire Games by Charles Stross.

Kirk Douglass’s adopted granddaughter gets mixed up in spy games between governments in parallel words on different timelines, spying on each other and risking nuclear annihilation. Really good story that felt like just a pilot episode introducing characters. Which I suppose it is really, being the first in a series of at least three books.

Should try and remember to read the others before I forget what happened.

Watching

Doctor Who is back on BBC/iPlayer. Pretty good first episode, the dog-character is funny and the series big-bad suitably terrifying and extreme. Looking forward to the rest.

Last series before RT Davies takes over again. Hopefully they’ll stop trying to make it all about teamwork then. Strange choice of the last season.

Also watched season three of Sex Education, which continued to be funny and strange and a pleasure to watch.

Links

• Edward Snowden on Central Bank Digital Currencies.

He’s not in favour. They are “expressly designed to deny its users the basic ownership of their money and to install the State at the center of all transactions”

• Scott Alexander convincing you Climate Change isn’t a good reason not to have kids.

It was never the reason I didn’t want any, but if it was I’d have been convinced.

• Mindscape Podcast interviewing Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness

Fascinating conversation about mathematical ways to measure the phenomenon of emergence and consciousness and flocks of birds.

• The Muppets sing “Mister Blue Sky”,

I mean, what could possibly be better than that?

• Great rant about the metaverse is bullshit.

“The metaverse is bullshit because tech moguls missed the part where cyberpunk is dystopian”

• Article explaining why it’s difficult to impossible to ban bitcoin while remaining a free society.

Bitcoin is just math and messaging. Banning numbers is nutty.

• Blender Studios short cartoon “Sprite Fight”

Blender is one of my favourite software tools, and the developers have a studio making these open movies just to push them forwards. They’re already great too. Download Blender and check out how it’s made if you want. It’s free software.

• Media Lens on how terrible our media are.

Media Lens are brilliant, and their observations help keep me sane in the face of insane and inane propaganda from all corners.

That’s just the highlights this month, remember you can always see my full public bookmarks at my website and/or follow my link-bot on the fediverse.

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