Wrist Recovery and Building Bedroom Part Two - Oct 2025
Been doing physio exercises to build the strengthand range of movement back into my healing fracturedwrist while sleeping on the sofabed as the buildersmake progress rebuilding the bedroom.
Diary
Bedroom Build
The day by day progress is mostly too boring to relate here. Images in the thread. The electrics have been builtso that I have 14 sockets and 18 USB power holes around theroom. It’s been painted with initial paint, and most of thewardrobes and cupboards and closets have been built.
Another week or two of work still to be done though,painting to be finished, second coats on the walls,all the window-doors and draws still need building.
Taking shape nicely though.
Wrist Recovery
Diligently done all the physio exercises prescribed for my recovering fractured wrist for two weeks only to find it’s just 4% complete.
And what’s the reward for me doing that? They double the work and time it takes!
What bullshit is this? A year of wall pressups and wriststretches taking ten minutes a day doubling every two weeks?
My god.
After doing that for another three weeks, the physio signed me off since I told her that the wrist is more or less back to normal now.
She still wants me to keep doing the exercises for some undefined amount of time. Will into the new year be enough? Dunno. Will do that at least.
Need to get more exercise in general once this bedroom is finished building and I get the flat back to myself most days. Will have the fabled Treadmill Desk in the bedroom then so that’ll help.
Vaccines
Wow, those Covid vaccinations are pretty expensive if you’re young and healthy and want to stay that way eh?
Did it anyway. Suppose I should be glad I still count as young.
Thanks for the profiteering Pfizer, thanks for nothing NHS.
AI
This is the logo for Anthropic’s AI model “Claude”.
Twenty seconds in MS Paint could draw the thing and it looks like, well, lets call it a “chocolate starfish”
Claude is triggered to review all the pull requests that I do to the codebase at work.
While it’s working, it’s little icon animates like this.
Every time I see it, I imagine it straining to push out it’s shit from the chocolate starfish.
Its hard to unsee.
Maybe I should mention how well it does.
It’s caught some bugs before they’re published, some fairlyserious. But mostly its hallucinated many problems which aren’t really there.
With all the code we write being reviewed by robots now, the code is written slightly differently to avoid it going on about issues that aren’t really there.
People imagine that code is written for the computer to run, but really it’s always been written for the programmers to understand. Now it’s also written keeping in mind it’ll be reviewed by an AI that has no context or understanding tasked with nit-picking to review.
Arguably this is ending up with better code. More unnecessary re-validation of everything mostly, but its also taking longer rather than being quicker.
Is that more efficient? 🤷 Sort of maybe?
A few times I’ve spent half a day adding error checking for errors that can’t really happen anyway on the advice of a robot.
Now, instead of crashing with an error message if the input data is impossibly broken, the function instead checks if the error exists, and if so quits with an error code and a slightly different error message.
This is better code apparently. I guess when it’s longer there’s more to read so it’s more readable.
Digital ID
Says Starmer, and literally the only people in the entire world who believe him is the UK press.
He doesn’t believe it himself, the civil servants making the policy don’t believe it, the programmers making the app don’t believe it, the public at large don’t believe anything he says.
Only the reporters show any credence at all. They are programmed to just repeat the words without even assessing if they are true. That’s what journalism is now.
Bluesky
Apparently the US government departments are starting to join Bluesky and are getting ratioed, in that the accounts are being blocked more than they are followed.
Doesn’t really seem to make sense at first. The US DepartmentOf Transportation isn’t going to show up as a reply guy in your mentions and the spooks aren’t going to use that account to spy on your posts.
Is the blocking then entirely performative? Because blocks are public they are votes?
I guess really it’s people deliberately reading the recommended-for-you AI-driven slop feeds.
Blocked users won’t show up in your machine-learning robot-recommended feeds that people apparently must be reading over there.
Just not-following would be enough for me, I don’t see things I don’t follow. But if you read the robot-DJ feeds then anything can show up, so you have to pre-emptively block it. If only to train the robot shuffle.
Musk’s Robot Army
See, I got this robot army see, and if you don’t give me a trillion dollars then someone who isn’tme might be in charge of it see, and I dunno what damage they might do. Only way to make sure my robot army is safe, see, is to give me a trillion dollars.
God knows a robot army would be a terrible thing if someone other than me was in control of it, so best give me a trillion dollars so I can make sure the robot army only does what I want.
I won’t even spend it! Who would spend a trillion dollars? I’ll just use it to keep control of my robot army and so long as I get my trillion dollars everyone will be safe.
The shareholders did indeed grant him the pay package.
Musk’s narrative control
Weird to see Sky News, owned by Rupert Murdoch who has no formal authority in the UK but uses his newspapers to control narratives and push right wing content and politicians he favors, complain that Elon Musk has no formal authority in the UK and yet has the power to control narratives and push right-wing content, extreme content, and politicians Musk favors.
🤔
Still, interesting report pointing out those things, and it all just highlights how important it is that these spaces have no owners.
Reading
Buffy Comics
Been reading some of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer comic-books, set after the TV shows ended.
It’s a very different world with Buffy and Xander being commanders of a whole slayer army with seemingly massive resources, from a castle being attacked by various supernatural forces.
Very different pacing from the TV show too.
You know that episode of Angel where Spike and Angel are running around in Italy chasing after Buffy who now dates The Immortal?
Turns out it wasn’t Buffy at all, but one of her decoys that have been deployed around the world. Andrew thoughtit would be funny to troll the two vampires by pretending she was dating The Immortal.
The artwork is all great, but sometimes a little rough and I find it challenging since I don’t always recognize who is supposed to be who, especially as the artists and styles switch from book to book.
Some of the mini stories feel like just pulling the TV show characters back for no good reason.
I hear rumors of a new Buffy TV show starring SMG with no involvement from Joss, and wonder if it’ll assume these stories of visiting the future or fighting with an army from a castle base will be retconned out entirely?
It’s an entertaining read and nice to visit those characters again, but doesn’t feel much like the TV show because it’s such a different setting and Buffy is very different as a commander than a school girl.
Watching
Star Trek Section 31
Watched Star Trek Section 31, a movie about the off-book starfleet characters trying to stop someone blowing up a quarter of the galaxy.
Might be the worst Star Trek ever made.
A crew with a mercenary ex-empressess from themirror world, a mole, and no trust between ’em. They don’t seem to get on but rescue the galaxy anyway. Maybe blow up a quarter of the mirror galaxy instead. Hurray. Genocide of our own galaxy averted.
Jokes aren’t funny, characters aren’t convincing, script full of dud. Somehow the murdering dictator is redeemed without any redemption arc.
Only for star trek completionists.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds S3
On the other hand, watched season three of Strange New Worlds and it was pretty great.
The Enemy Mine episode with the pilot and the Gorn stranded by the Metrons was a nice bit of retcon.
Chronologically the first holodeck episode ever (Or did Enterprise do one? I forget), and the safeties fail and nearly kill everyone aboard the ship. Tech eh? The humans must pursue it even if it kills them. I’m not all that keen on holodeck episodes. It always has this false sense of danger where they have some fake reason to have danger so it’s not all a game.
Everyone’s-a-vulcan episode was stupid and funny. StarFleet is so casual with the humanity of it’s soldiers.
Nurse Chapel is still amazing even though her hair is longer and, unusually, I preferred it short.
Knowing the future in a prequel makes things quite poignant. Kirk and Spock’s first handshake. Their first mind-meld. Oh, the adventures they shall have. Playing with that by making Pike know his own future too is nice meta level scripting game.
Releases
Word Cloud Tarot
Middle East Ceasefire
On the Thirteenth of October 2025, President Trump announced peace in the middle east!
How did this come about? Will it hold?
I did a five minute tarot reading to investigate.
Read the transcript or watch the video:
https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2025-10-14-peaceinthemiddleeast/
Links
Zack Polanski
Media Lens on the propaganda blitz Polanski will face:
As with Corbyn in 2015, the fevered ranting from the extreme right-wing press will be accompanied by initially muted criticism from the extreme centre, at the far end of the truncated media ‘spectrum’. Also as we saw with Corbyn, to the extent that Polanski offers genuine hope of change, the response from the Guardian, Observer, BBC, Independent and others will rise in pitch until the threat to ‘adult’ genocidal and biocidal politics is removed.
Gary Larson
Gary Larson was great, but retired years ago.Now he bought a graphics tablet and found drawing funagain, so we get some new stuff:
The ‘New Stuff’ that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with ‘Cow tools.’ (Let’s not get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about improvisation, “You want to try and take people somewhere where they might not have been before.” I think that my approach to cartooning was similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going.
AI
The fundamental issue, Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that makes our lives easier, we’re evolutionarily primed to use it. ‘Our brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.’
Everyone thinks the coming robots will be able to learn how to move, but we can’t generate the trainingexamples because we can’t measure and digitize human touch:
If it is the case for the big successes it is likely also the case for learning dexterity by brute force. If any one or any group is to succeed they will likely have to collect the both the right data, and learn the right thing. Most of the projects to teach humanoids dexterity are doing neither of these things.
Video
Evolution
Veritasium on Evolution. Using simulations to show thatgenes are the basic unit of selection and explain somecounter-intuitive facts about how evolution works.
Musical Mechanics
Half an hour from “minute” physics on the harmonics ofovertones and why they are dissonant or resonant and why thephysics of string instruments with their integer overtonesimply the western scale.
Fedi
Twitter is pushing right wing bias andFacebook/Instagram is admitting it gets 10% of it’s money from showing scam adds to your grandma, but there is still onenetwork owned by nobody and everybody.
Some highlights from the Fediverse:
Oatmeal On AI
Let’s talk about AI art.
Signal and Chat Control
So we remain vigilant & deeply grateful to our allies.
For Signal, Chat Control is an existential threat. If we were forced to choose between building surveillance into our services or keeping our integrity, we would choose integrity & leave the market. We hope it never comes to this.
Space Mirrors
Reflect Orbital (RO) https://www.reflectorbital.com/ wants customers to pay them to reflect beams of sunlight down from orbit. This is called “sunlight as a service.”
Their initial plan is for each beam to be several times as bright as the full moon and at least 5 km in diameter on the ground.
Due to the high speed needed to orbit Earth, each satellite will shine on one point for only a few minutes at most…
Wildlife Pictures
I took a trip out on the Sea Screamer yesterday and got some ok dolphin pics. The dolphins love to hop through the wake the boat creates.
An owl gliding through a cloud of helium-filled soap bubbles reveals wingtip and tail vortices.
Video credit: Usherwood et al. Source: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/223/3/jeb214809/223686/High-aerodynamic-lift-from-the-tail-reduces-drag
GDP
Idea: Fill a basketball with a million dollars and with all the passes in a typical basketball game suddenly you have an amazing (green) GDP boosting engine!
Idea2: Simply calculate the value of every basketball pass that happens in the country based on a $30 valuation of the ball and add that to the GDP, do this for all sports.
Economics solved. You are welcome.
Zack Polanski Interview
Me talking with Zack Polanski on Europe, joining the EU, defence, community building and the Bylines Network. 👇
The Situation
Some of the high points of The Situation:
- The US has descended into full of fascism. There’s no two ways about it, we’re disappearing people in the middle of the night and building concentration camps
- This is just a Republican led escalation of policies and plans that the Democrats implemented and enabled, they wouldn’t stop it if they could, they’d just slow it down and make it look more orderly, and it’s too late for that either way.
- Tech companies are in bed with governments that are violent and repressive
- These same tech companies are trying to destroy any tech that they don’t have full control over, and poison everything with AI
- We’re living through an economic bubble that is bound to collapse at literally any moment and when it does, it will take out vast swathes of “Money” and jobs and housing.
- Surveillance is at an all time high, and anyone who resists fascism is being actively targeted.
- The web is broken, search is broken, everything is broken.
That’s The Situation.
Algorithms rot your brain
Like I know I don’t have to tell y’all, here on the algorithmless fedi, that you-might-like-this algorithms will not tell you things about yourself that you didn’t know, will not help you grow as a person, will in fact stunt you and restrict your ability to change, because they’re designed to show you things that they think you already like, not things that nobody, even yourself, could predict you’d be interested in. An algorithm can’t stumble by chance and serendipity across your next passionate obsession, only a firehose of utterly random bollocks can do that