met Rianne in 2011 (somebody’s birthday party) and we began dating a year later. Later this year it’ll be exactly 15 years since we first met.

Rianne and I were colleagues for nearly a decade, nowadays we are busy fighting for the tech community in court. We oppose misogyny, harassment and violence against women, we defend Computer Science, and we promote computer security through Free software.

Rianne is my other half and I am hers. No amount of litigation can change that.

T seems like after some feedback Daniel has made it easier to assess what he stands for.

aniel Pocock is not British, but he is running as if he is British while he is Irish, Swiss, and Australian. Can he succeed? His platform is out of the ordinary, so he can at least stand out and get noticed.

“Apropos Daniel’s run for office,” a friend has told me, “there is the problem of “split ballots” If there are many similar candidates, and one outlier, the pool of voters which are similar spread their votes over the pool of similar candidates. Thus none of them get enough to take the lead. However, the outlier collects as a single candidate all the dissimilar votes and thus ends up taking the lead. That is precisely how Michael Moore ended up in public office a long time ago. The opposition then fielded a lot of candidddates and thus spread their vote pool so thinly that they all lost and an unknown won. Similarly in 2006 during the Eurovision Song contest, there were a lot of similar sounding songs of the same genre which gained a wide spread of votes, none taking a lead. However, there was a single metal contestant and he collected all the metal votes, which turned out to be more than any single other contestant. So I ask where on the political spectrums do the 34 candidates in Daniel’s race lie? If they are similar to him politically, then those backing Farage are trying to water down Daniel’s message. Either way, I wish him both luck and visibility.”

Let’s see how he gets on.

very pleasant anniversary of Tux Machines was celebrated this summer. Tux Machines came under SLAPPs (lawfare) over 2 years ago, just months before it turned 20. That didn’t hurt the site, it only made it more popular.

We’ve meanwhile seen politicians who want to crack down on SLAPPs appointed to the new cabinet and this new report on legal regulation reform from the Legal Services Consumer Panel says abolish the SRA and BSB. They are part of the problem, they don’t regulate.

I will soon do a long series about the SRA.

2 days ago: Manchester’s Status in UK Politics is Improving

very Mancunian government is shaping up, perhaps making a tacit promise to shift the political centre of gravity away from London and better cater for the rest of the country.

We eagerly look forward to working with this cabinet towards a meaningful, effective SLAPP reform.

grew up in the 1980s and back then chatbots did exist and some of us experimented with them on a computer screen. They were not too sophisticated, but they didn’t need nuclear power plants to work, or some dumb shareholders pouring out trillions into a deep well.

LLMs do not work, they cannot even properly summarise text (the way a human would, based on actual comprehension).

“An old online acquaintance (who is quite internationally famous),” one friend has told me, is among the fools who fell for this scam. He “has also swallowed the bullshit hook, line, and sinker,” I am told. “He has come the closest to making that LLMs bullshit look useful but it’s sad to see him turning a blind eye to all the problems and shortcomings and spewing marketing noise.”

Lots of people try to fake not “being behind”, so they adopt whatever crap the media promotes, even if it doesn’t have potential, only hype.

“He used to be no-bs,” I am told of the person above. “I see what he is doing and can guess why. I’m no sure if he is a centimillionaire but he is trying to join the “club”; they have, either way… I hope he is able to repent, while he has time.”

To those of us who never use LLMs for anything (it’s not needed) the above looks like a person addicted to some drug. We don’t have any interest in this drug, we hope the person who is addicted will one day sober up.

arlier today I said that the political landscape had shifted in our favour because my wife speaks with female ministers about what was done to her and is still being done to her. Unfortunately, at this point we’re best advised not to comment on the hearing but instead wait for the outcome. We’ll keep our politicians in the loop.

Rianne’s birthday is almost a month away and we hope for an early gift.