Wednesday, February 4, 2026

10:01: Parents evening tonight. God bless the über-TA for giving me some intel about some of my trickier students

18:49: 🔗 Enjoyed this podcast on Workers' Lit featuring Trevor from No Cartridge about Neuromancer, one of my favourite sci-fis anchor.fm/s/d93a8430/podcast/p

Thursday, February 5, 2026

10:13: 🔗 wow Caves Of Qud is coming to Switch m.youtube.com/watch?v=DisUBYdc

I used to play a lot of Qud, as well as other dense trad roguelikes. Handheld pick-up-and-play anywhere would definitely persuade me to pick up Qud again

10:22: 🔗 Some criticism of the Australia social media ban criticaledtech.com/2026/02/05/

I have posted before about being broadly sympathetic to the ban, other than perhaps the privacy implications for adults. I don't find the article very persuasive because it seems to equate social media ban with a complete internet ban. "Social media have educational content"... well, so does Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and many many other sites. Same for facilitating social connection — it can be done without having to go through harmful apps

16:03: 🔗 long but interesting video on progress towards Audacity 4. I use Audacity for most audio tasks, which I don't do super often, meaning I'm definitely in the camp who lacks expertise and finds Audacity's clunky UI a stumbling block — I can nearly always achieve what I want, but often takes several attempts and I always feel I'm doing it inefficiently. All these changes look great to me, and I hope they're not too alienating to expert users. As someone who has never worked on a large software project, the breakdown of the design decisions and trade offs is fascinating

m.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_

19:15: I know all the discourse is about how bad Windows 11 is but man Office is such a mess as well. So many weird behaviours and UI design leave me thinking "man that's fucked up" every day.

Friday, February 6, 2026

6:34: 🔗 vibe coding is killing open source as LLMs depend on open source as off-the-shelf solutions to vibe coding problems, but never give back

404media.co/vibe-coding-is-kil

Not only that, project maintainers are overwhelmed by a deluge of vibe coded "contributions" by people who don't understand, use, or care about the software and just want the prestige/CV fodder of having some of "their" code in well-known projects

6:35: Last week these digests didn't come out right because I screwed up the world's simplest regular expression.

12:23: 🔗 "If you are reading this it is because I’m dead: here’s what I want to tell you about how to live"

theguardian.com/commentisfree/

Thanks to my sis for sending this one my way

13:53: 🔗 A history of the Green Party and where the currents that led to Zack Polanski's leadership originated

theecologist.org/2026/feb/06/g

Saturday, February 7, 2026

8:49: 🔗 Comparing the top 100 books on Goodreads to the top X films on popular user-aggregated movie sites

woolgathering.bearblog.dev/i-c

15:00: 🔗 LLMs and the indie web

osteophage.neocities.org/essay

I am also reminded how annoying it is that anti-bot measures are active on so many sites, it makes Wallabag (read-it-later service) so much less useful. I can no longer send most articles to my ereader via Wallabag

16:04: I get so little "focused" leisure time on the computer right now. Part of it is I don't have the convenience of the Pocket Reform as it's currently in Berlin for repairs. There's a lot I want to write, stuff I want to do on the site, and I want to work on my other web project

19:51: 🔗 Why You'll Never Be Cultured

amugofinsights.org/why-youll-n

What the Chinese etymology for "culture" can teach us

Sunday, February 8, 2026

7:51: 🔗 The Centre Shrinks

lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/february/t

> Centrism in Britain is less a set of principles than a style: a preference for triangulation over truth, ‘responsibility’ over morality, ‘electability’ over leadership. It treats politics as a stress test of optics rather than a contest of values. It confuses the avoidance of conflict with coherence. And it creates a vacuum, an absence of moral clarity, that the far right is delighted to fill.

[...]

> This is the deeper problem with centrism: it wants the prestige of professing values without the cost of acting on them. It’s allergic to taking moral risks. It will cheer international law when it flatters Britain’s self-image, but equivocate when it implicates an ally. Inconsistency is not a minor flaw in an era of authoritarian resurgence. It’s a structural invitation. Fascists thrive on the collapse of shared standards. They feed on the public recognition that rules are selective, that principles are mere branding, that justice is transactional.

11:26: Home is once again ravaged by toddler respiratory bugs. At least there's only one week until half term break

15:21: If you're suddenly following this, it's because I merged my personal account with the (much more active) account I use to generate weekly digest posts on my site, so, hello again!

19:56: 🔗 I got 173 animals on rose.systems/animalist

Surprisingly fun, lots of Easter eggs

19:59: 📖 I surprised myself by getting several days ahead of the reading schedule on The Circle, so I found time to read some Odyssey as well.

21:21: Well, I feel pretty rough today. Mild bug, chronic hiccups (I occasionally get this, and it's painful after a while), and just so tired thanks to snotty toddler. Signing off for the week to sleep all this off (hopefully)