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2026-06-23

Week 285: Pigeon with a death wish

We had a gardener round to look at our front and back garden – well, expanse of paving slabs – to start the process of getting them turned into something with less concrete and more life. The good news is that they can do it all from the outside, so it shouldn’t be too disruptive for us.

We were woken in the middle of Monday night by cheering. I assume it was the football, probably the Iran–New Zealand match that kicked off at 02:00 UK time. Some of the games are at very unsociable hours from a western European perspective. I don’t know which neighbours it was, or which team they support.

I know I have Turkish neighbours, and there’s a 03:00 game coming up, so I’ll find out soon enough if they’re football fans.

I potted the pothos cuttings I’d been cultivating on my desk. Technically it’s Epipremnum aureum, which is no longer classified in the Pothos genus, but that’s not my problem, is it? They seem to be doing well so far.

HMRC owe me a decent (four figure) amount of overpaid tax from last year. That’s nice. The process of getting paid the money is pretty onerous these days, however. It used to be simpler, but now you have to download an official government app and scan your driving licence. Or passport, I guess, but I don’t have a valid UK passport. I tried the alternative method of answering a few questions, but after a lot of weirdly specific questions about my precise credit card transactions it told me no. At least I was able to install the app on GrapheneOS, even though there’s no way to do so without getting it from US Big Tech.

I don’t know what you do if you’re a non-driving foreign national. Or if you don’t own an appropriately powerful and modern phone. HMRC get to keep your money, I suppose.

Even though I haven’t got the money yet, the prospect was a bright spot after a rather dispiriting day of unproductive JavaScript wrangling.

The replacement fridge door shelf arrived from France. It fits perfectly, I saved £41, and I’m happy.

I nearly ran over a pigeon. I was rolling rather slowly around the corner of the docks, not even pedalling at the time, when a pair of birds walked straight in front of my bicycle wheel. I was sure I’d crushed one, but when I looked round they had both flown away. I stayed around for a little while, but didn’t see any obviously injured pigeons. I hope they were OK. I was a little traumatised by the event.

I went to see Mandalakia play Greek rebetiko music at Sands Films, from a front row seat. People seem so reluctant to take front row seats; perhaps they still think they’re at school. I’m happy to get a good view.

It was a very tight performance, and the singer is absolutely stellar.

While purchasing a CD from the merch stand afterwards, I learned that, while μανταλάκια (mandalakia) does mean “clothes pegs” in Greek, it also refers to the microtonal adjustment fixtures on the kanun, known as mandallar in Turkish (itself originally a loan from the same root in Ancient Greek).

Of four job postings to the LRUG mailing list in the past week, one is actually in Cambridge (daily, in person), one is for a mid-level role, and the other two both require that the candidate fully embrace the clanker life:

• “Successful candidates will … be using AI to responsibly write all their code”
• “Day to day you will … Champion AI-assisted development”

It’s safe to say I won’t be doing either of those things, and if that means I never get another software development job in my life, it wouldn’t be the worst outcome in the world.

Okinawa Day went well. I played four sets: two of music and singing, and two accompanying the eisa dancers. I didn’t mess up the piece I was most worried about, one which leaves the player absolutely nowhere to hide. Many friends came to watch and support – even an old university friend visiting from Singapore for a few days!

I’ve been hoarding links lately:

• Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health. “Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone. Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realize the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate.”
• Gritcore by Norfolk Trotter is “[t]wo textured walls sourced from playing sandpaper discs on a modified turntable at 8 RPM, track 1 is coarser grit whilst track 2 is a slightly finer grit.”
• Watch our short film on the cosmic sound of Cabo Verde. In 1968, a cargo of modern synthesisers washed ashore in Cabo Verde; hidden from colonial authorities, they ended up influencing the sound of the resistance against Portuguese rule.
• Rising Emissions, Depleting Water and Vanishing Land—UN Scientists: AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions. “By 2030, AI’s water use will match the needs of 1.3 billion people while its power use triples that of 650 million”.
• No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious, says Ted Chiang. “Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot.”
• Bubbles: “Somewhere out there, someone wrote a really good blog post today. You’ll probably never find it. Google won’t show it to you. Social media buried it under engagement bait. Bubbles tries to surface it.”
• Early Web Links: “Before the internet went corporate, it was weird, wonderful, and deeply personal. People built websites just because they had something to share. This directory is full of sites that bring back that feeling.”
• HYPERBLAM “lets you make music with HTML. It’s a declarative implementation of the Web Audio API and is completely dependency free. Create pedal boards, drum machines, sampled instruments. And don’t write a single line of JavaScript in the process. Unless you really want to.”
• Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Lens Repair & Analysis: A write-up of a successful repair of the microelectronics on a modern camera lens.
• Big Tech, big cons: Scammers are hiding in the apps that make your life easy. Google et al are no longer a reliable source of information about anything: not even your neighbourhood wine shop. This story comes from India, but it’s happening everywhere.
• An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt. “To understand why every machine since Gutenberg has wrestled this script and mostly lost, you need one structural fact: Arabic is cursive always. There is no print-versus-handwriting distinction, no block letters. The letters connect in stone inscriptions, in manuscripts, in metal, on screens. Each letter therefore changes shape depending on its neighbours (an isolated form, an initial, a medial, a final), and six letters refuse to connect forward at all, which breaks words into joined clusters and gives the script its rhythm. The shapes are not costumes over some underlying “real” letter. The positional variation is the letter.”
• There should have been an op-ed here but you filed AI slop. “In this slot there should have been an op-ed. A punchy one from a high-flying lawyer on the ever raging debate around inheritance tax, perfectly attuned to the interests of City AM readers. However, as is now happening at an alarming regularity, what said lawyer filed was not an insightful piece drawing on their many years of experience and expertise, but 600 words of AI-generated slop.”
• Jira IS Turing-Complete.