David Edgar's website

Decades into their career, looking like a bit like they just finished a game of dominoes, but still rocking it like they might tear a strip off you with just their tunes.

• Concert
• Music
• Rock

I imported into my archives every post from a blog I operated in the early to mid 2000s. And my pinboard links and Twitter posts. They’re all private because the person who wrote them is a bit of a dick. Tonight though I went to a talk on the importance of memory institutions at the State Library of NSW. Provoking and inspiring and only partly relevant to this. I was there at the invite of Kris Howard, who has also imported old archives. She allows them to be public though, no matter how embarrassing. She reviews and fixes dead links though and she mentioned a post about a new canon for the computer age that I had commented on. I commented mentioning a book I had to think hard to really recall, The War of Art. Arguably the thrust of that book is “get over yourself, you idiot”. So maybe I should just make them public and still not think of that guy at all.

A bunch of notes from Darius Kazemi on learning/implementing ActivityPub. I continue to be a little bemused why my ActivityPub implementation is not working, or at least posts don't show up in Mastodon. I have not found to date a good test resource that can tell you "This is why this isn't working."

• activitypub
• darius_kazemi
• fediverse
• mastodon

What took them so long? Surely it is a very short, very straight line from the Pirate Lords moaning about the need for more texts to train the next generation of models to the organisations that have the text and the ability to control access preventing it being "exfiltrated". Even setting aside the fact Salesforce are building their own models. They make money from giving you "unlimited" access to your Slack content, mediated by Slack itself, naturally. Why would they allow someone else to make money from it?

And at this point, people building products based on being able to yoink data from the iron grip of other SaaS providers is on a short road to insolvency.

• business

T†IL it is not enough to make notes of how you have configured things, you need to also make sure you don't lose your notes. This time it was "Ok, so these disks I turned into a RAID, now the Pi that was running the raid is unrecoverable... what kind of raid was it again? And how do I get it back?"

† well, Saturday at least

I stalled out on Andor season 2 at episode 7 because I felt like I wasn’t really paying enough attention and taking it in. I had lost some threads, so I’ll go back. But I also started a book about the Weimar Republic (Vertigo by Harol Jàhner) and it reminded me that the Amberlough Dossier books always made me think of the Weimar.So I think it’d be interesting to go back and re-read them after I finish Andor.

• Books
• Starwars
• tv

hmm, yeah. King's Birthday. You know, when we do finally grow up as a nation and move Australia Day to something less hurtful, January 30th will be just sitting there, free of neighbouring public holidays, waiting for us to make it the much more amusingly appropriate day to think about His Majesty.

Two thirteen year old (probably) girls sat next to me on the train from Museum to Revesby. Talking the whole time. Vocal fry. Calling each other ‘bro’ constantly. Discussing which one of them looks like a boy, if they turned into a boy they wouldn’t be like their brother, what’s wrong with your brother, he’s so weird, he’s nice to me, well I’d be a good brown boy for you. If a breeze had picked up in the carriage I would have blown away in a plume of dust.

Is it weird that my “proud to be Australian” moments are almost exclusively because of something like this https://www.livescience.com/animals/birds/australian-trash-parrots-have-now-developed-a-local-drinking-tradition

Irony may have been killed today. I was sent a trolley problem variant generated by an LLM

I put it to you that any question that starts with 'Is it malicious compliance….' can be answered before going any further.

"Given we’re in WeWork and given they are forcing return to office for everyone, and given booking meeting rooms costs money after you exhaust your free points, is it malicious compliance to start booking meeting rooms for all the meetings we used to do online?"

Every weekday at 17:00 I sit down on the couch in my home office and spend the next five minutes very carefully, very very precisely ensuring there is an even distribution of pats and attention between both fomo beasts.

• dogs

There are two or three people out there who .. look, I get it, You are angry about the genocide the government and military of Israel are carrying out. Me too. And you don't see how anybody can enjoy the Eurovision thing, which is clearly a celebration of nationalism as well as Pan-Europeanism, because there is Israeli participation. I definitely acknowledge your point. I definitely acknowledged it the second time. And the third time. It was around the fourth time I started realising. It isn't really about Israel and Gaza. It's about you. People differ about the way they can register their disagreement with Israel committing genocide. Fucking get over it.

As the days grow colder the four-legged cat will come into my office, sit on the arm of the couch, and glare silently until I re-assemble Fort Ti-cat-deroga.

• cat

Political Compass sent me a post-election survey and one of the questions was something like how much did I enjoy the election. And I used to find the whole thing fascinating, and probably would have answered "Very" once upon a time. But then I became radicalised and disenfranchised. One of - by no means the greatest, but one of them for sure - causes for that was the insistence by deeply unserious people that I should take their performative hissy seriously. Their sky-is-falling caterwauling for the benefit of the rusted-ons and the brokens, duly reported on by the media that tied itself to this stupid circus. Fucking thirteen year olds would look at the carry on about Comey's "8647" photo and go "Aren't you being a bit childish?"

Nevertheless, 86 47. Preferably into the Sun, but the sea will suffice.

• media
• politics

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams

You've probably heard of it. NGL I mostly read it because Facebook Striesand'd it by getting an injunction against the author to prevent her publicising it. Brilliant work there to keep it obscure. A memoir of the author's time working Facebook. In (mostly) episodic chapters it tracks her initial enthusiasm for the possibilities of connectivity souring as the leadership reveals their true faces. You can taste the residual animus in the final chapters, particularly the epilogue. Boy howdy did she earn her right to that though. I believe her. Come for the sly anecdotes about Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and Kaplan told with that kind of amused detachment New Zealanders seem to have. Stay for the self-reflection on ideals being lost... in that same amused detachment.

Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells I started re-reading All Systems Red because of the TV adaption about to start (mid-May 2025, I believe). Actually I re-read the series on the regular. It's the competence porn. It's the little bit of identification with Murderbot. Its the tempo of the stories. On Book 6 now.

• books
• fiction
• non-fiction
• review

It’s long been known that the most significant problem America has with prisons is that there are not enough Americans in them. Trump is thinking too small - as usual. Don’t stop at re-opening Alcatraz. Let’s make that whole country a prison.

I like the democracy sausage thing because it doesn’t feel like astroturf, it’s a bit of a laugh and one of the few things Australia likes about itself without a hint of cringe. Also, it wasn’t that long ago we had people discussing doing away with compulsory voting and the democracy sausage is a bulwark against that. Whatever else you can say about Australia, at least our political establishment isn’t actively invested in preventing people from voting.

I like the democracy sausage thing because it doesn’t feel like astroturf, it’s a bit of a laugh and one of the few things Australia likes about itself without a hint of cringe. Also, it wasn’t that long ago we had people discussing doing away with compulsory voting and the democracy sausage is a bulwark against that. Whatever else you can say about Australia, at least our political establishment isn’t actively invested in preventing people from voting.

Democracy Sausage eaten; American mustard acknowledged but politely refused and mocked behind its back. Probably a bit to on the nose for the fundraisers (the RFS), but I would definitely have eaten a potato scallop if there were any on offer in anticipation of his slice and dicing when the knives come out tonight.