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2026-08-27

Week 294: A musical within a musical

I didn’t do very much last week, which is probably why I haven’t got around to writing this until now. We spent Monday morning travelling back from the festival, I did a lot of laundry on Monday afternoon and Tuesday, and apart from that I’ve been tinkering with some software projects.

There are plenty of examples of plays within plays – I can think of three by Shakespeare off the top of my head (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Love’s Labours Lost) – but I don’t know of many musicals within musicals.

We went to see the musical adaptation of The Producers at the Garrick Theatre on Wednesday. It was a lot of fun, the staging was clever, and there were some delightful costumes, especially for the pigeons.

The film is set around the production of a musical, making the adaptation a musical within a musical. It can’t quite beat the original 1967 film in my affections, and it shares with it a weak plot in the second half, but it’s worth seeing.

We found relatively cheap tickets with a good view at the back of the dress circle, but that’s all relative: no tickets are cheap these days unless you’re lucky enough to snag them through a seat filler.

The demolition work on the 1930s buildings in front of Peckham Rye station have reached the stage where the station building is now visible from the street for the first time in nearly a century.

It should look nice when it’s eventually completed, some time next year. I think it’s going to improve significantly the impression that first-time visitors get of Peckham. I remember the first time I left the station and found myself in a gloomy, run-down passageway. It wasn’t the most favourable introduction.

Links:

• repo-slopscore: Check whether open-source projects use LLMs to extrude code.
• All things live coding. The TOPLAP “awesome-livecoding” list has moved to Codeberg.
• Open Slopware: “Free/Open Source Software choosing to use and/or support LLM usage/AI, as well as alternatives and tips to requesting better policies or forking.”
• wg-easy is “the easiest way to install & manage WireGuard on any Linux host” via a Docker container with a web management interface.
• I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip - some thoughts about simpler computers. I bet it can put a keystroke on the screen faster than any modern PC, too.
• Scheme Documentation: R7RS: Portable Guide.
• The people vs the AI overlords. “So, now we have to pay to get anything done? This is peak enshitification of our job: first they steal our work to train their models, and then they sell it back to us at a profit. […] The LLM hype is part of the larger wave of cyberwar against workers, against water, against the Earth, against all the people. This is not a matter of individually ‘adapting to the reality’ or personal choice, but a political, social, hard problem we need to address collectively.”
• HTML Can Do That. “HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.”