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2026-03-02

Week 269: The bombings will continue until peace improves

It’s been so long since I last went to Shoreditch that I had to think about my way around from the station. I was on my way to the Strongroom to see Mount Forel play live in the UK for the first time in nearly a year. I only caught a bit of Interlaken’s set before, but they sounded pretty good and I wish I’d heard more.

I was delighted to wake up on Friday to the news that the Green Party had won the Gorton and Denton by-election by a considerable margin, beating the increasingly overtly fascist Reform Party, and leaving Labour’s fascism-lite Reform tribute act in third place.

It didn’t last long, however, because Saturday morning brought the news that the two most unhinged countries on the planet, the United States of America and Israel, had started a war of aggression by bombing Iran; not just politicians, but also schools and hospitals.

If there were still such a thing as international law, you’d call it illegal, but we’re back in a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. (Although one must remember that the “strong” Athenians overextended themselves, were defeated by Sparta, and ended up economically devastated, so perhaps we’re still on course for the long-awaited American Century of Humiliation.)

It looks as if our spineless wretch of a prime minister has already thrown in his lot with the American despot, allowing them to use British bases for their campaign.

It’s a long way from what the former human rights lawyer promised when he campaigned to lead the Labour Party:

No more illegal wars. Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice.

Or … you could just do none of that and debase yourself in supine obedience to Trump and his illegal wars.

AI is still out there making everything worse. I keep thinking about the way that it’s shoved down our throats, like a gavage funnel down the neck of a foie gras goose. If I never saw another sparkly anus icon on a web service inviting me to somehow engage with pointlessly shoehorned-in AI, it would be too soon.

I’ve worked with people who believe that AI can help them write software. I’ve seen the output. Maybe it gets you to unmaintainable legacy technical debt in a fraction of the time, but writing code was never the hard part of software, and maintenance is harder and more dispiriting when there was no human mind behind the decisions in the first place.

But you don’t have to believe that AI will actually be good at replacing humans to recognise the threat. It’s enough that oligarchs and credulous politicians believe in it.

I think about how the UK government designated effectively all data centres (everything over 1 MW; the average in the UK is somewhere around 6 or 7 MW) as “critical national infrastructure” and the parallels to the Protection of Stocking Frames, etc. Act of 1788 and its successor bills that made machine breaking punishable by, variously, imprisonment, death, and transportation.

If you decide that you’d rather have housing, or water, or electricity, or jobs, or a somewhat habitable planet, and decide to destroy the infernal machines, they’ll call it terrorism.

The new series from Lisa McGee (writer of Derry Girls) is well worth your time. We’ve watched six out of eight episodes of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast so far. It’s a comedy and a mystery and a thriller, strung together with witty and snappy dialogue.

I only learned about the existence of Smiling Friends from news of its cancellation after three seasons, but I’m enjoying catching up.

This week’s links from around the web:

• Display resolution calculator. Based on the estimated maximum resolution of the human eye, determine whether you’ll actually see the difference between 1080p and 4K. Spoiler: you won’t unless your TV is massive and/or you’re sitting very close.
• It’s the end of the world as we know it (but I feel fine). “The destruction of local news and the rise of social media means that our news consumption is increasingly focused on national and global events — precisely the spheres of life where we are gloomiest. This is corrosive. Spend 16 hours doomscrolling and you may well conclude the end times are here; spend 16 hours living your life and things might not seem so bad.”
• enclose.horse is a fun daily puzzle game in which you have to enclose a horse in the largest possible enclosure.
• Using Make to Transcode Your Music Library. This is an ideal job for Make. You get parallelisation for free!
• Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras.
• BuildKit: Docker’s Hidden Gem That Can Build Almost Anything. “BuildKit is a general-purpose, pluggable build framework. It can produce OCI images, yes, but also tarballs, local directories, APK packages, RPMs, or anything else you can describe as a directed acyclic graph of filesystem operations. The Dockerfile is just one frontend. You can write your own.”
• Git in Postgres. “[A normal git client with a Postgres backend] should be able to push to and clone from a Postgres database without knowing the difference. To test this I built gitgres, about 2,000 lines of C implementing the libgit2 git_odb_backend and git_refdb_backend interfaces against Postgres through libpq, plus roughly 200 lines of PL/pgSQL for the storage functions.”