Less so over time

he driver’s licence in my possession says 2026, so this isn’t sour grapes. I can still drive, but I’d need to rent or buy a car to do so.

But would I?

Last time I checked the process of renting a car (paperwork etc.) and costs, I was immediately amused. How would that save any time? Even if driving somewhere could save time, why would I spend 3 hours dealing with forms, refilling the tank, returning the car?

Buying a car? Forget about it. Purchasing price aside, consider all the toil associated with monthly paperwork (insurance, MOT etc.) and maintenance, repair, clean-up and so on.

I simply fail to see how cars would save me time. They can enhance mobility, sure, but at what cost?

Phoning a taxi isn’t hard. In relative terms, they are not so expensive either.

The mental burden spared by “renting a driver” (not a car) is already invaluable.

Penalties

HE Man City financial charges case is still preying on our minds. They might escalate this to the High Court, I’m not entirely sure if they first need to seek permission (to appeal), but it seems inevitable the club will be penalised one way or another. We dread the idea of relegation or of a massive point deduction.

We went past the Manchester City Stadium twice yesterday. It looks better than ever (many fantastic improvements) and we agree with Burnham about the Manchester City owner improving the city. We’d like to see that carrying on, even if selfishly.

I’ll probably write about this regularly. My knowledge of the legal system in the UK is fast improving.

Babysitting

wo days ago I wrote about Durian and Peanut. They’re still here a lot (but not most) of the day and a somewhat sick (seemingly adult) bird parked here overnight again, waiting for the next meal. The joke is, it’s there to protect me and I’m here to protect the bird from an ambush by cats when it’s dark. It’s rainy today, so the birds need oil. To have oil in their feathers they need seeds.

Last time we fed the 70+ birds in the park was yesterday. It’s close to a local ASDA, so afterwards I go shop there. The joke is that those birds give me some bargain charm. I found plenty of good things and I enjoy them in my coffee at this very moment.

I expect to publish many articles today (40-50 in total), so I’ll be at my chair most of the time (except when Rianne and I jog) and will babysit the birds.

The world needs more birds. It needs birds more than it needs humans.

Still doing well, even better

hree quarters of this year are gone and it’ll soon be 3 years since I last rebooted my laptop (uptime right now is 1,022 days). That more or less (almost) marks 3 years since the change in our life and, more important still, life’s priorities.

Back in 2022 we knew something was wrong, aside from COVID-19. We made a decision to make big changes and we finally made them in October. That same year I wrote here in this blog about it. I still remember that.

I slept 7 hours this past night, a bit more than the usual, with the aim being on top of things, not tired. I need to keep running many things for a community of ardent, courageous volunteers. It takes energy and care.

Last night we made it to the front page of Hacker News and the Techrights site could cope with the traffic.

The thing about self-hosting is, not all parties are equal. Setting up one’s environment is one thing, whereas keeping it running for decades takes focus, not jumping from one idea to the next every month or so (like so many devs do).

Techrights turns 20 soon.

Trying “addiction”

he other night the company behind MATLAB E-mailed me to say I got a “badge” 20+ years after I, a postdoc student, had uploaded code that people apparently still download (after 2+ decades) in meaningful numbers.

I was at one point (in 2005, if I remember correctly) ranked #1 in the world for downloads there. They called it “MATLAB Central” (maybe they still do).

Badges are nonsense. They don’t offer any financial compensation, this is just gamification. This is “addiction”.

Over a decade ago, without my explicit consent, they also decided to change the licence of my code.

There are many lessons here.

China’s Fentanylware

his morning I asked, “What Has Happened to Singers Who Can Play Several Musical Instruments?”

“This leads me to a sneaking suspicion that artists got lazy,” I said.

A friend has responded by saying: “Not the artists [got lazy] but that the means to reach a public became centralized and under corporate control. They don’t want skilled people, they want easily replaceable minions who are in over their heads and know it.”

“That way the threat of replacement doesn’t need to be spoken (much) to gain unswerving obedience. Note that most successful 70s groups ran their own business side.”

“Even Led Zeppelin financed their own album before shopping around for a record company. Taylor Swift is first and foremost an astute businesswoman in the entertainment branch who’s schtick happens to be pop music.”

Well, Taylor Swift now leverages China’s Fentanylware (CheeTok) with an “Exclusive”. Way to close control. Quoting the report, “Taylor Swift teams up with Fentanylware (CheeTok) for another exclusive in-app experience celebrating The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore and her new single, “Patient Zero.”

So now she is bossed by China, indirectly.

“Her music is tuned for ear buds and those who listen on ear buds,” the friend has said. “That’s another factor. In the 1970s and 1980s having the best possible sound system at home was a status symbol. That required music to show off the sound capabilities and the musicians leaned into that. You also had many regional radio stations, not the centralized mess owned by a handful of companies. Streaming is even more centralized and, again, there are only earbuds.”

OSINT shows that Reform UK is a giant scam in “political” clothing, selling itself using racism and tribalism

HIS week a lot is happening and the mainstream media looks the other way.

Reform UK is being exposed for the sham it was all along. It’s a company.

“I’m not sure of the full context though,” a friend told me, as “CIA used to be ‘The Company’. Slang for it has been ‘The Company’ and has been for *many* decades. It was founded to advance and protect corporate interests extralegally.”

That seems like the goal of Reform UK as well.

“In the campaign scandal which Daniel is digging into,” I was told, “he might look into
who paid to split the vote through so many ‘opposition’ candidates [to Reform UK] and
why the paid press chose to focus exclusively on a few cranks. Had there been fewer opposition candidates and less press coverage of one of the cranks, people might have concentrated their votes and beat Farage…”

That’s the failure of the media here.