My ribs healed just in time, thanks for your concern.

So I went to Glasto this month and caught all the best acts: Paul McCartney, Dianna Ross, She Drew The Gun, Tankus The Henge, Javis Cocker, Covid-19.

The last one really stuck with me, their stuff is very infectious.

The rest were amazing as usual though. 17 of them done now.

Me

Some stuff from my microblog on the fediverse:

There was a challenge to Boris’s leadership in the form of a No Confidence Vote and I was just glad Nadine Dorris wasn’t defending me. Spoilers: He won and now the whole party has to pretend to be confident in him.

There’s a new bold sign painted outside my tube station.

I gush a bit about how much I love Blender, the 3d software and it keeps adding great new features faster than I can learn to use ’em.

With news that the Royal Mint will issue blockchain Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) I wonder what if the crown was an NFT and whoever has the keys holds the country?

Imagine if they increased the smoking age every year like some suggested, and you were on the cusp-day, doomed to be allowed to buy cigarettes only one day a year.

Priti Patel is throwing Julian Assange to the American wolves so is there anyone she won’t deport? Radio-talk-show-callers are infuriating even when being supportive. The decision to deport a journalist for doing some true journalism stories is appalling.

The chair of the Federal Reserve looks forwards to a new future of total government surveillance of money in the form of Central Bank Digital Currencies.

I wondered what kind of pay-rise the bosses asking the workers to limit their pay-rises would get and was quickly answered as Rishi Sunak says he’ll end restrictions on directors’ pay

solidarity with the workers even if Labour won’t say it for some reason

I went to Glasto and it was great I even took a selfie.

A company tried to get me to email them a unencrypted photo of my passport so I had to write to a data protection officer. Don’t just blindly do what MegaCorp says folks. They have no idea what they are doing either.

Some thoughts on an article about Large Language Models, AI, sentience, understanding and stuff like that.

Happy X-Day everyone! The world didn’t end today as planned, but I may have figured out why and what that might mean. It’s a shocker.

Releases

Spent most of the month with broken ribs or Covid-19 so I’m glad they were separate coz coughing through the broken ribs would have been very annoying, but serially it’s quite time-consuming so not much progress on the projects.

There was one word cloud tarot show on the government’s trafficking people to discourage people traffickers.

Reading

Jenifer Government

I read Jennifer Government by Max Barry, a thriller in which people are named after their employer and John Nike uses Billy NRA to try to bring down the government but Jennifer Government manages to stop them.

It was a fun romp set in a dark corporate present but the story didn’t really grab me.

Watching

Better Call Saul

New season of Better Call Saul was entertaining, great visual story telling in those shows and the characters are recognizable. Never has quite the tension that Breaking Bad had though.

Walking Dead S10

Good grief is that still going? Turns out. Zombie soap opera by now basically. Skin-jobs whisperers are just ridiculous and great.

Links

* Elizer Yudkowsky big list of reasons why AI is dangerous managed to set the AI safety cat among the pigeons. There was also some further discussion on the way GPT does or doesn’t understand.

* the Financial Times article on space-junk has some great visualisations all embeded in the browser nice and neat. Beautiful web work.

* And Then There Were None’ by Eric Frank Russell A great old short story about an alien invasion in an anarchist society. They are driven away by non-cooperation and offering the invading soldiers a better life. Really great story on anarchism and pacifism.

* Twenty Years Of Weebl And Bob I mean, there’s probably barely 20 minutes too, depending how you look at it. But the first Weebl And Bob was 20 years ago and now there’s a new one. Thanks Mr Weebl!

* Marxist Economist Richard Wolf on Lexx Friedman’s show Richard Wolf is great and Lexx is often good at the question asking. If you like three hour discussions on economics and society and want to understand Marxism a bit then this is a good one.

* Media Lens on why not to extradite Assange It really is the most extraordinary story of corruption and appalling behaviour by the state. The fact the media are so silent is a big give away about whose pockets they are in and their loyalties to you or to the state.

* Jeremy Corbyn interview in Declassified Also speaking a lot about who is in control of our media and why is the massive mutual monstering of Jeremy Corbyn from even those who call themselves left. He’s still not bitter somehow. I would be. I am.

* Cory Doctorow on Popups and Cookies and the horror of the weakness of the legal system or apparently the browser companies to do anything about it. Except maybe this plug-in designed to auto-refuse cookies at every popup that asks. Run it in Firefox, Chrome is a surveillance app from a data hoarding capitalist. But there’s a chrome version too if you must.

* Cute Penguin game with art from Happy Toast Can you rescue the penguins without waking the king? you can sort of cheat but you only score one point for completion then.

more…

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 or my RSS feed of interesting links