The Braindump Blog

Something I feel myself gradually changing my mind on is the ubiquitous labelling of how many calories each food contains on restaurant menus.

The basic idea there is that if consumers see that some restaurant food choices options have a very large amount of calories in them then they might be less likely to pick them and, as such, consume fewer calories. This would add up so in the long term they’d be less likely put on excess weight with all the concomitant difficulties and associated conditions which that can entail for some.

There might also be some side-effect benefits too, such as restaurants or food producers providing less calorific meals because they don’t want to have a menu full of dishes that exceed the average person’s recommended calorie intake in one ago.

I never felt there was much likelihood that the labelling initiative would actually have a big effect on behaviour, let alone health. It always seemed a bit “this seems like common sense so let’s assume it works” rather than “we have evidence it works so let’s do it”. Intuition over evidence; something that unfortunately rife and occasionally dangerous in the world of weight loss amongst others.

Another potential defect came from its seeming centring of the issue of overweight and obesity on the incorrect, stigmatising and counterproductive idea that the large increase in the proportion of people living at higher weights reveals something about the people concerned being ignorant or making “bad” choices; as though in recent years some evil wizard cast a magical spell over us all that made most of us into foolish greedy gluttons.

This way of thinking is harmful nonsense. It also puts all the “blame”, for want of a better word, on us as individuals and lets us ignore the structural factors - the things that are harder to think about, more complicated to act on and often less favourable to the profits of associated businesses - that are so clearly at play.

Since then most of the research I’ve seen about the various labelling initiatives seems to have confirmed that indeed we’re not going to reduce the rate of obesity meaningfully by making it clear how many calories a Big Mac has at the point of sale. It may even be a entirely ineffectual intervention in terms of clinical significance in the long term.

But, my scepticism on its likely efficacy aside, I saw no significant harm in trying it out as a policy - plus have a personal bias towards always wanting more information, more data, to be made available. It felt like it may even have shifted my own eating behaviour a tiny amount.

But I’m privileged enough that I’m not someone the policy was ever likely to harm. However, critically, those people may well exist. And if so, well, calorie labelling is now mandatory in the UK, a policy that most of the population seems to have been in favour of, so it’s a potential concern we should look to mitigate.

The evidence on the harms side is scant so far to be fair, so caveat emptor, but there are hints of adverse effects showing up in some recent research.

A recent paper by Brealey et al reviewed some of the literature on the impact of food labelling on people that have eating disorders (ED).

They found four studies - listed and summarised as part of this table - that use qualitative methods to end up suggesting some potential for harm.

The researchers summarise the results as:

Recurrent themes describe how calories on menus: can lead to a hyper-fixation on calories, restrict food freedom (meals are chosen for their calorific value rather than what was actually wanted or appropriate for hunger levels), reduce eating out opportunities, increase feelings of anxiety, guilt and shame around food choices, and inhibit ED recovery.

Some participants in these studies expressed anger over the messaging from ‘trusted’ public health authorities on the normalisation of calorie counting, because calorie counting had played a pivotal role in the development of their ED

To be clear, the feelings on labelling weren’t all negative for the participants concerned. Some saw benefits. Many of them also felt that calorie labelling may overall be a net good thing even if it might put them themselves at risk.

The researchers found only a single study that looked at more objective changes to the symptoms of eating disorders themselves, carried out in a university café. That work found no significant effects of labelling on some symptoms associated with eating disorder, but also came with a large number of limitations - not least that the participants hadn’t been formally diagnosed as having a ED.

So honestly the evidence base for harms also seems pretty weak at present. There’s simply not enough research out there to form much of a strong conclusion. And almost none that looks at objective rather than subjective harm in terms of ED symptoms - not to suggest that any types of harm should be disregarded.

But on the other hand, given the dearth of evidence that labelling actually leads to much of a relevant change in peoples' behaviour, let alone any positive change in their health, the risk equation shifts someway in the anti-labelling direction when any evidence, even if it’s weak, for the potential for harm comes to light.

Without wanting to be a cliché, this is one are where “more research is needed”.

If you’re a Windows users who likes using Winget as a package manager, as I do, but would prefer a graphical user interface over hitting the command line then UniGetUI - formerly known as WingetUI) might be the app for you.

It’s a free open-source utility that lets you install, update and uninstall apps via Winget with mere clicks of a mouse.

That wouldn’t interest me all that greatly - I rather like typing commands - except for that it comes with a few extra functions that I don’t think are available in default Winget. Some I like are:

• It can automatically scan for updates to your existing apps on a schedule. If it finds one it’ll notify you so you can choose to update it there and then or not (you can exclude certain apps if you never want to update them).
• It can install, update or uninstall multiple selected packages at once - not just “one or all”.
• It can export a list of some or all of your installed applications (plus any custom installation parameters you installed them with). Then in the future you can import that same list again to a different or newly reformatted computer and it’ll install everything in it in one fell swoop using the same configuration.

If you’re into a different brand of Windows package manger - Chocolatey, Scoop, Pip and more - then the reason the app renamed itself from WingetUI to UniGetUI is because it now supports those package managers too. So you can recursively manage multiple package managers from one place now if that tickles your fancy.

ismy.blue is a weirdly fascinating website whereby it shows you a page that has a background colour of something in the blue-green spectrum - anything between a HSL hue value of 120 and 240.

You then hit a button depending on whether you’d call it blue or green if you were forced to say. The screen refreshes to another place on the same spectrum and you keep making the same blue vs green decision until it narrows down to something approximating what must be the boundary between what you consider to be blue and what you would say is green.

Apparently for me it’s somewhere around hue 175.

This means that for me to call something blue it has to be “more blue” than it would be for 59% of the folk who took the test. So if forced to say whether turquoise was blue or green I apparently be more likely than most to pick green.

My monitor isn’t the best and, as the site notes, that sort of thing is one of many factors that are bound affect the results - so it’s very much “for entertainment purposes only”.

On a similar subject, here’s a handy site that converts from hue values to CSS-style hex colour values.

In a perfect example of the potential made available by the deleterious effects of bad business models music streaming services, someone has been charged with defrauding Spotify to the tune of $10 million dollars.

The allegation is that Michael Smith created a ton of low-effort “music” - of course eventually turning to the tools of artificial intelligence after he realised he couldn’t make nearly enough money from his own more natural efforts. He then invented a big pile of bands that don’t exist to use as the supposed artist accounts that this music could be uploaded to Spotify under.

He then created a huge number of fake accounts for imaginary people - maybe as many as 10,000 - in order to “listen” to that music, which he did via streaming from a variety of computers that appeared to be in different places.

Because it was so many different songs from so many different artists listened to by so many different people - all fake - he wasn’t detected for a while.

It seems it was very much financially worthwhile for him, at least for a while.

From the NYT’s report on this:

According to a financial breakdown that he emailed himself in 2017 — the year that prosecutors say he began the scheme — Mr. Smith calculated that he could stream his songs 661,440 times each day. At that rate, he estimated, he could bring in daily royalty payments of $3,307.20 and as much as $1.2 million in a year.

Of course, because of how Spotify pay-outs work - in simple terms they take the revenue they make from user subscriptions and advertising and divide it up between the artists based on what % of streams the artist receives - presumably this was to the direct financial detriment of other, real, artists (and all the other organisations that also take a cut before it reaches the artist).

A friend gets in touch to let me know that it’s not necessarily scary AI cyber-brains that are going to end humanity. We also need to be wary of robotically-augmented mushrooms.

I’m not sure what sci-fi novel this particular bunch of researchers last read, but something has compelled them to invent a robot which is controlled by the whims of living fungi.

The biohybrid robot uses electrical signals from an edible type of mushroom called a king trumpet in order to move around and sense its environment.

Developed by an interdisciplinary team from Cornell University in the US and Florence University in Italy, the machine could herald a new era of living robotics.

I feel like I could probably outrun it in its present incarnation though:

The Independent article we learned about this in also revealed the existence of a project called OpenWorm which is looking to upload a digital replica of a worm’s brain into some Lego.

📄 Reading the Pivot to AI blog.

This is high-grade fodder for those of us who harbour a significant amount scepticism for the recent boom in AI, especially of the generative type.

Don’t get me wrong, when this stuff works it can seem like magic, and I do use it in small doses many days. But it really doesn’t need to be shoved into every vaguely-digital product, forced down every throat, and used as a threat to the job security of any folk who might well actually be doing their job way better than a robot brain can - even when the AI often exists only because the companies involved took-without-asking the work of the human workers concerned in the first place. Of course improving quality of output isn’t the real reason people are being “replaced”.

The blog reminds me a bit of Molly White’s justly iconic Web 3 Is Going Just Great blog. But instead of incessant reports on the pointlessness, scamminess and criminality that appears to be infused into the soul of blockchain-world, here we see frequent examples of where we’re burning natural resources and consuming vast amounts of money and compute on AI rather than crypto in the name of getting something rather worse than what we had before.

Sample quote from the most recent post:

The main use case for LLMs is writing text nobody wanted to read. The other use case is summarizing text nobody wanted to read.

More events in what is starting to feel something like a global backlash against some of the big social media companies.

We’ve previously seen the arrest of Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov. Now, elsewhere, Brazil has totally banned the use of Twitter (OK, “X”) for anyone who lives there. on the basis that they’re refusing to appoint a legal representative in Brazil. This is something all foreign companies that operate in Brazil are required to do.

Once again, I know far too little about the situation to judge the rights and wrongs of the ban. Or for that matter its enforceability. Although, at least in theory, X is to be cut off at the ISP level, and hefty fines await any Brazilian users who use VPNs to evade the ban.

It might be noted that this follows Elon Musk, owner of X, becoming upset one of Brazil’s judges asked him to suspend the accounts of users he claimed were spreading disinformation. Elon is of course not known for maintaining his cool when someone does anything other than agree wholeheartedly with him. X is now claiming that the Brazillian judge was making “illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”.

Whatever the ins and outs of the situation, it seems a good amount of Brazil’s ex-X users aren’t all that disheartened by the news, or at least not to disheartened they can’t muster the energy to post through it. They just went somewhere else.

These events have apparently caused a huge wave of signups to X-rival Bluesky - setting an all-time-high record for activity on that platform, plus a substantially lower but above zero number to Mastodon.

From the recent reporting by “Last Week in Fediverse”, it sounds the Brazillian users have also made Bluesky a lot more of a fun place to be.

Some new research is out about that category of drugs which at times seems to be a class of pharmaceuticals that singlehandedly could solve half the world’s ills , at least for rich folks who can afford it - GLP-1s.

The new paper by Scirica et al. concerns a randomised controlled trial where researchers provided Semaglutide (aka Wegovy) to patients with overweight or obesity with a view to learning whether it helped prevent cardiovascular (“CV”) problems, including CV-related death.

The drug didn’t seem to do anything to alter the rate at which participants caught Covid-19. But, for those that did catch Covid, it helped prevent them from suffering from serious adverse events - including death - from it when they did.

Semaglutide did not reduce incident COVID-19; however, among participants who developed COVID-19, fewer participants treated with semaglutide had COVID-19–related serious adverse events (232 vs 277; P = 0.04) or died of COVID-19 (43 vs 65; HR: 0.66; 95% CI: 0.44-0.96).

The study reports that it isn’t only deaths from Covid that decreased - they saw lower rates in terms of all-cause deaths - a reduction of 19% - as well as both cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular related deaths when broken down in that way.

Participants assigned to semaglutide vs placebo had lower rates of all-cause death (HR: 0.81; 95% CI: 0.71-0.93), CV death (HR: 0.85; 95% CI: 0.71-1.01), and non-CV death (HR: 0.77; 95% CI: 0.62-0.95).

Of course no study is perfect, so it’s worth reading the full thing to understand some of the limitations. But it is nonetheless a result that was described as “stunning” by Dr Faust, who wrote an editorial in the same issue of the journal.

Having obesity is a risk factor for suffering greatly or dying from Covid, so this is a group of participants who were more vulnerable to the disease in the first place; albeit it’s not a small group; over two-thirds of American adults live with overweight or obesity.

As far as I can tell the jury is out as to whether it was solely the weight loss associated with this drug that provided protection from Covid’s worst effects - the participants who used this drug did lose 5kg more weight than the others on average 1 year in - or whether there is some other mechanism at play. Doctors Maron and Faust, as quoted in the NYT, think there’s potentially something else going on as well, potentially around the drugs leading to a reduction in chronic inflammation.

I continue to believe that the irrational efforts some people seem to think we should go to to prevent people who could benefit from these drugs actually getting them is nothing short of deadly in some cases. Treating obesity can save lives.

Another great free e-books offer from Verso, a publisher that continues to release at least one book I’d like to read every month. Three temporarily £0 books on the subject of political dissent, released in solidarity with the recent campus protests regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict.

• Springtime - The New Student Rebellions
• Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America
• The Verso Book of Dissent: Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance

I haven’t looked into the arrest of message-app Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov enough to form an opinion, but one thing I did learn from a recent Guardian newsletter on the subject was that Telegram is a lot less private and secure than I’d imagined.

I’d imagined it as an alternative to fully encrypted messaging services like Signal that I just hadn’t had any reason to use much so far. But despite its home page promoting it as being privacy oriented - “Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct”, in reality the service is not end-to-end encrypted for the most part.

Whilst all messages are “basic-encrypted” such that your internet provider or anyone intercepting communications between your phone and your Wifi router couldn’t read them, only DMs sent via the “secret chats” feature - an opt-in feature that you have to discover and enable yourself - are end-to-end encrypted. Everything outside of that, including all messages in group chats and broadcast channels, is not end-to-end encrypted.

A lack of end-to-end encryption means that in theory anyone with the correct access - legitimately acquired or not - to Telegram’s systems could in theory read your messages. In addition, Telegram would be able to hand your correspondence over to any authority that requests them.

It’s an ongoing debate as to whether this is a net good or net bad thing of course. But if you came to Telegram for its privacy, well, you have to go to some effort and also stop yourself using most of its features if you want to be absolutely certain that no-one other than your intended recipient can read your message.

All in all, if you want truly private messaging that not even the service’s CEO - or a hacker using their account - could see, then from an encryption point of view it turns off you’re likely better off using Signal or even, believe it or not, Meta’s WhatsApp (! A cynic might say that this is a sign that it wasn’t Meta that invented WhatsApp, they just bought it). Both Signal and WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted by default.

That’s not to say even those two services know nothing about you. It just means they don’t know the content of your messages, which is often people’s first concern - even though metadata can on occasion give away rather more information about you that you might expect.

Signal makes a big deal about how little it stores even on the metadata front. They basically know when your account was created and when it was last used, so that’s all they can give to the authorities when legally compelled to do so. WhatsApp on the other hand may apparently know when and where you were when you used the app, the names of your group chats, and has the ability to record which phone numbers your number chats too if legally required to do so.

iMessage or Google’s message apps are also apparently contenders for end-to-end encryption fans but only if you’re absolutely sure that everyone you talk to is using the same type of phone and same chat app. Any convo that involves an iMessage green bubbler for instance isn’t end-to-end encrypted. You also apparently give Apple the keys they need to decrypt your iMessages if you back them up to iCloud using the default settings.

🎥Watched Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde.

Well I just watched the first. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen the second. Now I have.

Now a successful lawyer, Elle finds out that her cute little dog’s mother is being used by a cosmetics company for animal testing. By a corporation her own company represents no less.

Time to quit being a lawyer and head off to Washington for a new adventure amongst a new type of similarly prejudiced Very Serious People in the hope of convincing a sympathetic Congresswoman to get an anti-animal testing bill through the system.

🎥 Watched Legally Blonde.

This was the year rewatched the very famous, very popular, feminist comedy film about a pink-obsessed very feminine blonde young lady who takes herself off on a life-changing journey in a somewhat misguided attempt to preserve things as they are. Eventually she realises she’s worth so much more than a trophy wife to an idiot man living a 1950s lifestyle - she’s more than just a pretty face - and, hey, we all learn some sanitised but important bits and pieces about the necessity of feminism along the way.

Not Barbie, that was earlier this year. Instead, 2001’s Legally Blonde. A classic from my formative years. One of the rare films I deigned to watch more than once per lifetime, and might even spring for tickets to the musical in the future if the opportunity should arise.

Our hero is Elle Woods, a young lady who’s into beauty, hair, nails, hanging out with her girlfriends, the colour pink, small dogs and anything else that you could popularly code as “feminine” back in the year 2001.

Her privileged and wealthy boyfriend dumps her. He still likes her enough. but really she’s just a fun time, a bimbo, a silly little girl. Certainly not someone who he can imagine as the serious person that the serious politician he has an ambition should be married to. And you know, male careers come first.

She does not enjoy this decision. Rather than smash up his expensive car though, she decides to follow him to the prestigious only-brainiacs-need-apply Harvard Law School in order to study law and prove she’s a worthwhile and serious person really.

This might be more than a little wince-inducing as the defining motivation for the character - but do remember we’re talking about early 2000s Hollywood-sanitised pop-feminist takes here. Barbie wasn’t perfect and that was more than twenty years later (it was great though). Besides, it’s an important part of the setup. But yep, the film is necessarily something of a product of its times. Don’t expect intersectionality et al. - it’s all pretty young White Heterosexual Lady trying to win her man back stuff. At least at first glance. The feminist focus here is instead more explicitly on the late 90s style priorities of smashing various glass ceilings, girl-bossing it, becoming respected male-dominated places of learning and work. Of changing the world by yourself, not having to be content with hanging off the arm of someone else who does.

Which, spoiler alert, of course she does. But perhaps the most empowering point it makes is that she can do so without changing herself, without donning a mask - refusing to conform to what 1990s (and yes, 2024 for plenty) saw as the image of a fancy lawyer who happens to be female.

Here we see that yes, it is possible to be a young lady who enthusiastically likes “feminine” things and has “feminine” interests and still make waves in spheres of life beyond being pretty and dating eligible bachelors - not that there’s anything wrong or lesser about being interested in those things as well I’m sure Elle would be the first to tell you.

From the New Statesman review:

If its message – that a woman can be smart and enjoy lip gloss simultaneously – does not feel especially radical now, it is worth noting that a generation of millennial women first enjoyed it at the age of ten or 12, when such an idea could be experienced as a revelation.

Thanks to Wikipedia I also learned that the film is based on a novel of the same name by Amanda Brown based on her own experiences of going to Stanford Law School with the same kind of innate preferences for fashion, beauty and the like as our fictional protagonist here.

There’s also a new prequal spinoff TV series called Elle supposedly coming soon, showing her high school lifestyle. But given the second filmic sequel, Legally Blonde 3, was supposed to be released in 2020 and there’s no sign of it yet it’s probably best not to hold one’s breath.

New contender for the least useful Windows keyboard shortcut in existence: Windows key + Ctrl + Alt + Shift + L.

It’s a shortcut to everyone’s favourite thing to do on a computer: visit LinkedIn.

“But why?” you might justifiably ask.

It turns out it’s a mix of two things. Firstly that Microsoft previously tried to make a special new key on keyboards - the Office Key - happen. As far as I know it ended up happening substantially less than even “fetch” did. I’ve never seen one IRL anyway.

As a sidenote: the smiley face key to the right in the above photo from Microsoft was another new key that as far as I know failed to take off - the emoji key. That one I could see a use for in 2024 business settings, particularly if you’re an enthusiastic marketeer. If you don’t have that key on whatever you’re currently sitting in front of, then Windows key + . (i.e. the full-stop key) does the same thing, open the Windows emoji picker.

Anyway, back to the Office Key. Any keyboard shortcuts that would have used the Office key can now be used by the rest of us via Windows + Ctrl + Alt + Shift + whatever. And LinkedIn was one, it being famously the case that the average office worker trawls that site once per hour desperately looking for a new job to escape from their current deskbound prison to.

And secondly that Microsoft bought LinkedIn back in 2016 for $26 billion with the aim to “integrate it with Microsoft’s enterprise software, such as Office 365”. Well, they did successfully integrate it with a key that almost no-one has access to I guess.

The first point means that actually there’s arguably even less useful keyboard shortcuts available if I’m honest. Office Key/ Windows + Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Y for instance opens “yammer.com” which seems to be a kind of Facebook for companies I’ve never heard of called “Viva Engage”. I must admit to visiting LinkedIn more often than Yammer (total for the latter before today: zero times), although I’m not sure it’s been any more productive.

I could see Windows + Ctrl + Alt + Shift + X for “Load Excel” being a bit more useful for me, although by the time I manage to get my hand into the correct shape to reliably hit that combo I probably could have opened it 5 other ways.

The US Food and Drug Administration approved new vaccines for Covid-19 last week. The recommendation from the CDC is that basically everyone goes avail themselves of them, aside from anyone with any specific health conditions that preclude it one assumes.

These vaccines are a lot more effective than the previous set against the latest strains of Covid that are circulating around. These newer variants are causing something of a new wave of Covid cases, albeit one substantially less harmful to most people to what we saw in the early days of the pandemic. But it’s not less harmful to everyone; people are still dying of it, and that’s before we get onto the horror-show of life-altering risks that Long Covid can entail.

Personally I could wish I’d have had one of vaccines a few weeks ago, having gotten quite ill recently - but without travelling through time and space it wasn’t really an option.

Ibrahim Al-Nasser has officially set a new world record for how many video games consoles anyone has ever managed to connect to a TV at the same time. A critical stage in human development of course.

He’s bought enough cables and adaptors to plug in an astonishing 444 “completely different” gaming machines - everything from 1972’s Magnavox Odyssey to the the latest 2023 incarnation of the Playstation 5.

Apparently the Sega Genesis (aka Mega Drive to my fellow country-folk) is his favourite one.

📚 Finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel.

Imagine Covid but much worse.

This book was released in 2014, several years before the Covid-19 pandemic but is surely a more emotional experience to read after (well, during it). In one or two interviews I saw, the author, very understandably, even seems to feel a little bad that the IRL plague might have proved positive for her in a marketing sense.

Anyway, back in this imaginary world we see a pandemic flu come to the fore - the ‘Georgia Flu’.

But it’s far, far more virulent in terms of spreading and killing than our most recent real life pandemic was. The vast majority of humans are dead within weeks.

Civilisation as we know it collapses in short order.

Travelling via air was one of the first casualties. But within a few years the few folk that survived now live mostly in small, guarded, settlements in a world without basic services such as plumbing or electricity. People are dying of things we’d find inconsequential for the lack of medical resources or technologies.

The book goes forwards and backwards through time, pre and post pandemic , with the most recent sections being set around year 20 of the pandemic if I remember correctly. By that point we have young folk who never knew the pre-pandemic world in place. For this new generation the idea of flying machines and lit up TV screens is pure science fiction.

Governments are long gone. Borders are unguarded. The very concept of countries is alien to those who don’t remember the before-times. In any case there’s no realistic way to travel long distances unless you like very long journeys by horse.

The book follows the lives of various characters before and after the big event. Much of it is centred around the story of a group of musicians and actors known as the ‘Travelling Symphony’.

This is a band of not always merry men and women who travel via horse and cart from settlement to settlement - a far from risk-free endeavour - in order to perform music and theatre to the residents. Why? For them, ‘survival is insufficient’; a quote explicitly borrowed from Star Trek: Voyager.

This is a very engaging, wonderfully written book whose sentimental impact and poignancy has surely only increased now most of us have lived through an admittedly far milder, but still plenty deadly, pandemic of our own.

Whilst dark and upsetting in places - it wasn’t only the good guys who survived, and the collapse of civilisation wouldn’t be pretty either way - the overall message could be taken as one of hope, of the indefatigability of humans and their humanity.

There’s a recent TV show based on the book too which I’m enthusiastic to see at some point.

It’s quite something to have gotten to the point in Britain that a UN committee feels compelled to write reports asking our politicians (amongst other public figures) to be less overtly racist.

The Committee notes the various measures adopted by the State party to address hate crimes. Mowever, it is concerned about the persistence and in some cases sharp increase of hate crimes, hate speech and xenophobic incidents, including racist and xenophobic hate speech in print and broadcasting media as well as the Internet and social media, and by politicians and public figures…

Just in case any wayward Americans wanted even more reasons to vote Democrat in the upcoming presidential elections - although “we’re not Trump” should really be sufficient to be fair - it seems like the Dem campaign co-opted a tweet from none other than world’s best poster dril in service of their campaign.

They went with a screenshot of one of the more famous missives; the now-a-decade-old “I’m not mad” one.

and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.

It was of course in reference to the increasingly unhinged performances by their mortal enemy, Trump, at his ramshackle press conferences. Writing that sentence just brought back happy memories of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

As far as I’m aware this is the first time that this God of the Posting Age has been immortalised in official campaign material. I hope this means he’s granted a special place in the Library of Congress or something.

Unfortunately, the Dems repeated the mistake of all those embarrassing Republican campaigns who use some famous music only to be told by the artist concerned that they loathe everything the campaign stand for. Dril was not quite as vocally aggressive perhaps, but honestly, Kamala should give him at least the $25 he requested

“I think they should be forced to apologize publicly,” writes @dril, “in an unnecessary and embarrassing display of fealty towards me and my posts, as well as compensate me for the full value of the tweet, which I estimate would be about $25.00.”

Maybe he’d even consider withdrawing his rather feisty post on the subject of the current government’s approach to the Israel/Palestine troubles (but probably not, dril doesn’t seem the kind of guy to be so easily bought in this way).

Given he’s back in the news, it seems as good a time as ever to commermorate some of dril’s finest work. If “x.com” ever does totally vanish that will be perhaps the only part I’d miss. Here is some of that gold dust for posterity.

Don’t hand it to ISIL:

issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”

Good vs bad:

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: “theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron”

Gender wars:

“This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender,” i holler as i overturn my uncle’s barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit

Budgeting:

Food $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Candles $3,600 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

At the zoo:

IF THE ZOO BANS ME FOR HOLLERING AT THE ANIMALS I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL

No rest when you’re dead:

if your grave doesnt say “rest in peace” on it you are automatically drafted into the skeleton war

Celebrities

it is with a heavy heart that i must announce that the celebs are at it again

On bad years:

awfully bold of you to fly the Good Year blimp on a year that has been extremely bad thus far

Drink driving

drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or no

Therapy:

THERAPIST: your problem is, that youre perfect, and everyone is jealous of your good posts, and that makes you rightfully upset. ME: I agree

Posting is hard:

DOCTOR: you cant keep doing this to yourself. being The Last True Good Boy online will destroy you. you must stop posting with honor ME: No,

Guns:

the human mind… perhaps the most powerful weapon. second only to the “GUN”

Racism:

turning a big dial taht says “Racism” on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right

Sharia Law:

i often disagree with DigimonOtis, but his efforts to keep Sharia Law out of the donkey kong 64 wiki are much needed in this wolrd of danger

Taking the knee:

i hate i t when girls think im proposing whenever i take the knee at them in protest

Flags:

the worst part of nationalism is having to pretend the flag is really good, like “yeah the country looks exactly like that. they nailed it”

The first troll:

theres a popular nursery rhyme in which the singer claims to be a teapot. this, for many children, is their first experience with “Trolling

Not the world’s smallest violin:

playing the worlds most normal sized violin

Who needs capes?

in a world where big data threatens to commodify our lives,. telling online surveys that i “Dont know” what pringles are constitutes Heroism

He’s here to save us:

im the only guy who knows how to call out the bull shit of society the smart way. and against all odds i do it for free

Another one with potential to victimise the Trump campaign with:

“im not owned! im not owned!!”, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob

Algorithmic dislike:

ME: please show me the posts in the order that they were made COMPUTER: thats too hard. heres some tweets i think are good. Do you like this

But don’t write to him:

let me be very clear: i would rather attend a Pig’s wedding than attempt to sift through the dumpster you people have made out of my dm box,

The human condition:

the pursuit of having trhe nicest opinions online… is the only thing that separates us from the god damn animals. the sole reason we exist

Honestly, so many gems. None of them really possible to explain to anyone who isn’t immediately bowled over by their beauty

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has released a handy interactive tool that lets you analyse how all the tax and benefit changes since 2010 - the year the Conservatives were elected into government under David Cameron - have impacted the disposable incomes households have at their disposal.

You can segment the chart in various ways including by household income, family type, having children and so on.

It may be a fairly harrowing experience for anyone who hasn’t been following the impacts to date. Its default setup, showing impact of changes to benefits and direct taxes since 2010 shows that the people with the lowest incomes suffered the most. By far.

The general pattern is people with higher incomes were more rewarded by the changes. The rich get richer, the poor suffer more and more.

The exception is the top decile by income who did lose disposable income - equivalent to £2180 per year since 2010. That might sound a lot, but it’s less even in absolute terms that the £2205 that the poorest decile lost out each year.

And because people with the highest incomes have…well…higher incomes to start off with - higher by an order of magnitude on average - in percentage terms the losses by the poorest folk are far, far more dramatic.

Truly sickening. Headlines such as “Absolute poverty: UK sees biggest rise for 30 years” and “Official child poverty statistics: 350,000 more children in poverty and numbers will rise” cannot come as a surprise.

Perhaps the most dramatic, most terrifying, result I found within the chart so far has a relationship to the latter headline above. Whatever cruel untruths the more extreme members of the Conservatives party might like to pretend about adults in poverty, it’s hard for anyone to blame the children. But set the chart to look at working age households who have children and you’ll see that those who had the lowest 10% of incomes in that group apparently lost an astonishing £6,009 per year on average.

It beggars belief to even imagine how they could even begin to cope. I suppose the headlines show that many of them cannot.

Gotta say, currently being in the midst of the outstanding book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ is putting me right off owning any devices labelled ‘smart’.

Although the book is a few years old, it’s super relevant to today’s AI tools too.

I came across another random fix to an annoying computer problem. When using a Windows 11 laptop it started insisting there were no devices capable of playing sound, even though the computer had its standard speaker, I’d plugged headphones in and so on.

Sometimes the built-in audio trouble-shooter would fix it, but only temporarily.

After some fiddling around I determined it seemed to happen when my webcam was plugged in. It turns out that this isn’t a problem unique to me, but Reddit helped provide an answer.

The solution for me was to open Device Manager. One way to get there is to open the Start menu and, type Device Manager.

Then look for the category of devices in it called “Sound, video and game controllers”. Assuming you find that your webcam is listed there (in my case it was a Logitech C920), right click it and choose to disable it.

After a reboot I had my sound back! And the webcam still appears to work. At least as a video camera which is what I use it for. I suppose any audio functionality it has built into it may not work, but I didn’t test that. Personally I don’t need my webcam playing or recording its own audio.

I’ve no idea if this is a bug with Windows 11, the specific drivers some part of my audio setup or the webcam itself, or what. But whatever the cause, the above fixed it. You can always repeat the above and choose to re-enable the thing you disabled if it doesn’t work out for you.

Is there anything more ‘US politics in 2024’ than this?

While the real Trump-Musk Space on X does not appear to be working, there’s currently a deepfake livestream of the Trump-Musk interview on a fake Tesla channel on YouTube, with 200,000 people watching.

(from Shayan Sardarizadeh)

Especially when it turned out to be a cryptocurrency scam.

So far in 2024, one woman in the UK has allegedly been killed by a man every three days on average. The Guardian tells their stories.

📚 Finished reading Starting & Running a Business All-in-One For Dummies by Colin Barrow. At least the sections of it that seemed relevant to what I wanted to know.

After years of exclusively working for larger organisations, I recently had reason to learn something about how to set up a new business. Having little experience in the area, and with no obvious lead contender in books to learn this stuff from, I felt like a book “for dummies” might be appropriate for me.

It claims to be six books in one. That’s perhaps a stretch - but does give a clue as to how the volume is laid out. These are the titles of the six “books”:

1. Laying the groundwork
2. Sorting out your finances
3. Finding and managing staff
4. Keeping on top of your books
5. Marketing and advertising your wares
6. Growing and improving your business

There is a little repetition between some of the sections, but not a ton.

Having not a lot to compare it to I don’t feel qualified to give a strong verdict on it. My sense it that whilst it doesn’t go in-depth enough in many topics to be all you would need to know in order to optimally succeed, it did provide at least a couple of helpful features:

1. It helps those of us who are inexperienced at least know which topics we should be thinking about. For instance, I’m not sure I’d have realised that I should look into the insurance implications of working from home, or that there are so many different organisations out there that may be open to supporting or nurturing small businesses. It also helped me to know what the basic suite of financial reports that folk evaluating a business would be interested in are - even if there’s likely not enough detail enclosed to, for instance, confidently complete a tax return. But it at least reminds you that you will need to complete one!
2. It also has plenty of links to further information - mostly websites, and a few phone numbers. Lists of potentially useful organisations, links to free tools and templates, to government resources, to further information from industry bodies and so on. So it’s a also nice collection of “here are some websites you might want to visit before going too far down any unchangeable path”.

The past few days have made it very clear that anyone who thought the days of the British far right as an effectual and meaningful force was a relic of the past were wrong.

The days of overt racism leading to rabid racist-inspired violence at a level that “matters” (as if any level wouldn’t) have gone nowhere, even whilst people that should know better occasionally try and pretend everything is at least OKish.

Catching up with the news somewhat late, there was a horrific and deadly, attack on a group of children and the people who were supervising their dance class. Three children died and a further group of 10 adults and children were stabbed. It was an appalling act. There are no excuses. The perpetrator is in custody and that can only be a good thing.

Some bright spark on “X” decided to invent the fact that the attack was carried out by a Muslim asylum seeker who had just gotten off - of course - a small boat - naming him and everything. In reality the attacker was born in Wales, but hey, social media gonna social media.

Of course even if that story had been true what came next would have been outrageous. But for it all to be based on a lie just makes it even more sickening somehow.

The event kicked off far-right inspired protests, riots, and abject violence all around the country. Screaming hatred at anyone who didn’t look like Nick Griffin’s idiotic vision of what a “true” Ingerlandder looks like was just the start. Presenting a truly hostile environment beyond even the original vision of the Conservatives was on full display. Petrol bombs were thrown at mosques. Police vans and stations were set alight. Rocks were hurled at Filipino nurses who were on their way to work in a hospital as emergency cover during these riots. Mobs even descended on multiple hotels where they believed asylum seekers were being held in order to burn them alive, all whilst shouting “England, England, England”.

In short, all the things that one might expect to happen in a resentful, racist country which has for years (forever?) been constantly fed inflammatory lies from our mainstream politicians and media, mixed in with the malign influence of present-day social media, about how some of the most desperate people in the world are “invading” our country solely in order to ruin your life specifically. We’ve been somehow convinced that it’s the people with no power, rather than the people that exercise true power over us, that make our lives a struggle. As soon as some perceived - no matter how illogical - “excuse” for individuals of certain views to let out their simmering, violent, racist intentions pops up, this is what we see; egged on by foreign disinformation spread by such luminaries as Elon Musk amongst many others.