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2026-06-02

Week 282: Frankenpad

I attended a Prokofiev concert. Not that one, although Gabriel Prokofiev is the Russian composer’s grandson. Even though I used to go to gigs at Iklectik regularly when they were in Waterloo, since they’ve moved into their new venue in the same building I work in I hadn’t been until last week. It doesn’t help that their website’s “What’s on” page still says that they’re updating it; I only knew about the event from a poster.

The programme was some of his older work followed by a UK première of his Dark Lights album for electronics and chamber orchestra. I sat right in front of the stage and felt completely immersed.

The hinge on L—’s laptop broke, though through wear and tear rather than an accident (like when I dropped mine on the floor). I looked on eBay for viable used ThinkPads and found one that was very cheap (about £80) and in excellent condition apart from some keys that didn’t work. It was a T470s, exactly the same as the one I fixed, which meant that I had a spare keyboard of exactly that model.

In fact, not only did I have a keyboard, the half-a-ThinkPad in the loft had a better processor, too, and I had spare RAM and an SSD that were an improvement on what was in there, so I transplanted the motherboard across, repasting the heatsink in the process, and installed the SSD and RAM.

The Frankensteined laptop needed an operating system, and for her needs that has to be Windows. Windows 10 is nearly at its end of life, so I went for Windows 11. That wasn’t straightforward, because the processor is slightly too old to be officially supported. It works – in fact, the original SSD had Windows 11 running on it – the installer just won’t let you install it without a bit of a workaround.

However, that workaround requires a computer running Windows, and I don’t have one of those. I first needed to run a Windows virtual machine on my computer, so that I could run [Rufus] and build an install image with the CPU check patched out (and, as a bonus, some of the bloat not installed by default). [Rufus]: https://rufus.ie/en/

But that wasn’t easy, either, because of AI. Let me explain. I used quickget and quickemu to download and set up a virtual machine. In the past, this worked very smoothly, and lived up to its promise that

quickget automatically downloads the upstream OS and creates the configuration

Nowadays, however, every second website has some kind of bot challenge, because badly-behaved LLM agents are DDoS-ing the web, and quickemu can’t fetch the virtio-win.iso CD image it needs at boot to give the installer the drivers it needs to see the virtual hard disk. Unfortunately, it doesn’t realise that it failed; all that happens is that the fragment of HTML that it saves in an unusable .iso file doesn’t load properly.

Jobs, a habitable planet, politics, culture, the very epistemic basis of knowledge itself, and now downloading a .iso file. Truly, there is nothing that the AI boom can’t make worse.

I eventually sorted it out, wrote the patched installer to a USB drive, and installed Windows 11.

I went about cleaning up the default installation and adding programs she wanted. The stock experience of Windows 10 and 11 is awful, full of annoyances and distractions and unnecessary software and services, but under all that there’s actually a perfectly usable and, actually, pretty snappy operating system. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s not bad! If only Microsoft had any respect for their users, they could ship a good operating system.

Windows 11 comes with PowerShell and WinGet, so you can install software – including third-party software – via a command-line tool, rather than having to search for an installer and avoid getting scammed. You can also uninstall Windows components and programs, and it turns out that if you remove all the Bing components, and the widgets, and CoPilot, it runs very well, and no longer needs all that processing power and RAM just to stand still. Thus, another computer is saved from planned obsolescence.

The Pope released his encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. I wouldn’t normally find myself in the position of eagerly awaiting a papal encyclical, and I don’t think that you’ve entirely gotta hand it to the Catholic Church, and even though I’m sick of hearing about AI and even sicker of being obliged to engage with its output when other people employ the infernal machines to produce software, I am interested in what people who actually read, and write, and think deeply about these things have to say.

Unfortunately, he did not call for a Butlerian jihad crusade against the thinking machines. Alas.

It’s very long, and I’ve only given it a quick first reading so far, but there’s a lot of thought on the relationship of humanity to technology, and the inability of machines to make moral or artistic choices, and the antagonism of capitalism and war to human dignity and the planet. I would characterise it, more than anything else, as a very humanistic document. It’s very quotable:

If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.

Whether those of his flock in positions of power and influence (JD Vance or Tony Blair, for example) will read and act on it, I don’t know. I suspect not.

We now have a Green Party-led coalition running Southwark Council as a result of the local elections. There was an extraordinary general meeting of Southwark Green Party earlier in the week to vote on the proposed coalition, which we both attended remotely. There are dangers to any coalition, but they’re pretty normal in countries with less absurd voting systems, and I think if you have the opportunity to effect political change you should take it. And this means I personally know some of the people running the council after knocking doors and delivering leaflets with them.

Our Labour MP is taking it extremely normally:

This was, of course, in your former role before you jumped ship with other Marxists no longer welcome in Labour. I suspect your impact will be just as grim in your new role, but wanted to flag up some concerns at the outset.

Despite this atrocity in the community I serve, you shamefully ignored the police advice on counter-terrorism measures on Borough High Street — prioritising a cycle lane instead.

(I have no idea how a cycle lane is supposed to hamper counter-terrorism.) But there’s a backstory to his antipathy, and Coyle has form for behaving badly.

James McAsh’s reply was perfect:

I will not attempt to respond to the many factual inaccuracies in your letter, in which even my name is misspelled. Instead, I will liaise with the Chief Executive to find a time for the three of us to meet and discuss any issues affecting your constituents.

I’m glad it’s a bit cooler. I can’t really cope with the heat. On Saturday, I made it about halfway through preparing my bike to cycle to Sanshinkai practice before I realised that I was already so overheated and agitated that there was no chance of achieving anything. On such a hot day, there’s no good way to get there. Cycling involves hills. (I could hire an electric bike, but without a luggage rack I can’t take my sanshin.) Buses aren’t air-conditioned, and the Tube is whatever the opposite of air-conditioned is. The Overground and Elizabeth line are cool, but there’s too much walking at the other end for that kind of weather.

Some links:

• ESP-Osito. This is the kind of software development that inspires and excites me. “You can buy a ‘Cheap Yellow Display’ for $10. That is a dual core CPU, gigabytes of storage, a full color touchscreen and more. If we treat it like a real computer, that is a $10 computer. In our modern world, this is hundreds of times slower than your phone. But … it is hundreds of times faster than a Palm Pilot. And on palm pilot apps started instantly. And the device turned on/off in under a second. Have you seen how long your good pocket computer takes to TURN OFF? So, let’s take something cheap and make it good.”
• Harper: The Private Grammar Checker: Works locally and doesn’t use an LLM.
• Unintended Consequences. “As you read this, please think about the echoing thought of ‘this is what we are burning the planet for.’”
• Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI. From Amnesty International: “This briefing examines how standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, are in conflict with international human rights law (IHRL) and standards through their design, development and deployment. While these technologies promise sophisticated automation and efficiency, they rely on data collection and model training practices that abuse privacy rights, enable discrimination, and threaten freedom of expression and thought.”
• Package Manager Threat Models.
• The UK has 90 taxes. Here they all are. An interactive visualisation.
• Pinsent Masons: LA AI, MVB and NVB. A law firm gets in trouble. “Readers of AI hallucination cases have been to this rodeo before: rely on hallucinations, get found out, create minimal viable bullshit (MVB) to try and dig oneself out of the first hole, find the second hole is much bigger and deeper because minimally viable BS is in fact non-viable (NVB).”
• End of an Era: Iconic Shibuya Hands to Close After 48 Years I think I’ve visited this shop every time I’ve been in Tokyo. It’s a warren of three seven- and eight-storey buildings with different floor heights, linked by a staircase, full of all kinds of hobby paraphernalia.
• Under the Hood: Building a Real-Time Chord Recognizer. “Piano players often leave out notes that a dictionary entry might expect. Extended chords add notes that no fixed dictionary entry anticipates. […] What you actually need is a scoring model.”
• The Grove Remembers. The now-infamous AI-written Granta prize-winning short story, analysed. “Every overlapping n-gram in the story, drawn against a web-scale corpus — so you can see which phrases the writer invented, and which ones the world had already said.”
• AI-slop, GrantaGate and Bad Writing. It writes like that because it’s regurgitating sequences from bad fan fiction.