The Braindump Blog

Last week I got to go experience the Dream Machine with a friend. The nature of the experience is such that I think it'’ll be extraordinarily hard to convey via text, but I’ll give it at least a weak go.

The overall conceit of the project is that when placed in a dark room, a mix of flashing lights and sounds can alter your conscious experience. Or rather it “invites you on a magical journey to explore the extraordinary potential of your mind” to quote their website.

First up you start off in a room where past participants have attempted to draw what they experienced. You get to do the same when you’re done, although my art skills are such that I didn’t even try. Many of these pictures resemble colourful geometric patterns or bright fields of light. A handful appear to contain human-looking objects, perhaps aliens, that kind of thing, especially exciting to me. You can see some of these pictures on their their website. Here’s an example:

Next up they relieve you of your phone and other devices and, unexpectedly, your shoes. You’re issued a bag that contains some hotel-style slippers, an eye mask and a blanket. There’s a short safety talk to check everyone’s willing and ready. The default experience is not suitable for people with sensitivity to flashing lights (precluding folk with some forms of epilepsy) or loud sounds. But they do have modified experiences available that should allow most people with those sensitivities to proceed if you let them know that’s what you’re after.

You’re led into a kind of inside tent with maybe 10-12 people to sit space d out on a large circular sofa type thing. The back of it is slanted such that you’re half lying down. Two speakers surround your head. There’s a big white spherical thing on the ceiling, which is the soon-to-be-flashing light. Your bag’s blanket is for if you’re a bit cold. The eye-mask is for you to put on if the experience starts to feel temporarily too much.

More safety briefing and confirmations that one is ready to proceed are given. Whilst the supervisors aren’t going to be in the room with you when the experience starts they must be watching you I suppose as the deal is that if you need help you should wave and they’ll come help you. All this is either a bit off-putting or a bit exciting depending your constitution, I definitely felt the latter.

Two key facts include that 1) you should keep your eyes shut throughout the experience if you can and 2) no matter what you think is going on out there they promise that all they’re actually doing is flashing a white light at various intervals. Anything else you perceive is coming entirely from the mysterious world of your brain.

Then there’s a little taster session just to make sure everyone is OK with the actual experience rather than a description of it. The room goes dark, you close your eyes and a prerecorded audio grounding starts. If you’ve done certain types of meditation (including the app types) it’s that kind of thing. Focus on your breath, your body, and so on. Then the sounds start, slightly ethereal music for the most part. And through your closed eyes you can tell the light must be turning on as a kind of brightness changes your eye-closed perception, similarly to how you know whether it’s a sunny day or the middle of the night when you wake up each day but can’t be bothered to open your eyes.

Then a few minutes of presumably flickering lights, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, wherein you get a taste of what’s to come. The taster experience soon ends. The supervisors return and check that everyone is fine to proceed. Everyone was, so the main experience begins, again with the grounding.

This main course is a lot longer. I’m not actually sure how long. Maybe 20 minutes? It’s not like us humans are particularly good at keeping track of time in our heads even when at our most connected to stark reality, which in this experience is not really the case.

The sounds start, the light flashes, on and off, fast and slow, and your mind does what it does. Which in my case was mostly giving me visions of animated geometric patterns. Sometimes white, in line with the white light that we’re told is the entirety of the external generative process. Sometimes not. Deep reds, yellows and oranges filled my inner eye at times.

These were usually organised into field-of-perceived-vision-encompassing dots, hexagons, and a repeating motif of diamonds. They zoomed in and out, they swirled, transitioning more intensely from one to another than even the best PowerPoint could. They exploded. They shrunk into nothingness. At first I felt just a little stressed or even nauseous perhaps, but it didn’t last long and I relaxed into it to enjoy the perception show.

At one point I kind of felt like I saw a face in the centre of my vision - an alien? A God? Who knows? - but as much as I tried to focus and keep the glowing white visage present within the vision, the surrounding burning-white pulsating diamonds suddenly expanded and occluded the face within seconds.

So all in all, a lot was going on. Time flew, and I was not really ready to stop when unfortunately it was time for the experience to end. At that point you leave into a far more normal room with the possibility to draw something of your experience, write about it or just chat around a literal watercooler.

It was my friend’s second time at this kind of show, so one of my immediate questions could be answered. Apparently no, you do not see the same thing each time you do it. And also, as intuitively would be the case, not everyone sees the same things. You are to be silent during the experience so there’s no real way of communicating live what’s going on in your head, and maybe it’d ruin the experience if you tried to do so. But for sure we saw different things; deep blues for her if I remember correctly, reds for me. Assuming we mean the same things with the same words, that classical challenging philosophical problem. I expect humanity’s inner mental lives are as diverse as their outer characteristics.

Tickets are currently £15 and you’d need to get yourself to Hackney, London - everything you need to sign up is here.

Fun fact: apparently this was originally designed as part of the Festival of Brexit (aka “Unboxed” but the former name is much funnier). It’s not an original observation, but there are certainly plenty of folk out there who think that anything designed to alter your consciousness in any direction away from the grim reality of contemporary Britain is the best that we can really hope for to be fair. The Government’s DCMS committee said the whole thing was an “irresponsible use of public money”. The festival of course, not Brexit, definitely not.

It’s much earlier inspiration comes from work by an artist called Brion Gysin. In 1959 he made a much smaller device that used flickering light to create “vivid illusions” in the minds of those who experienced it.

Here’s a photo of it taken by Charles Gatewood.

Gysin designed it after noticing that the flickering of sunlight when driving through trees put him into a somewhat hallucinatory state.

The Dreamachine would awaken humanity, Gysin hoped, from cultural stupefaction and liberate us from being passive consumers of mass-produced imagery. Gysin hoped it would replace every TV in every home in the US and make us creators of our own cinematic experiences.

It might surprise you to learn that that’s not quite what ended up happening. But I’m glad its derivatives are still around for us to experience all these years later.

Over the past couple of days I’ve managed to install Linux Mint onto my Windows 10 computer. The last straw for Windows was when it advertised some story about how great Wetherspoons is to me when all I wanted to do was open some software. My computer also is prohibited by Microsoft from upgrading to Windows 11 (it is old…but runs Windows 10 just fine) so at some point in the possibly distant future I imagine that could have caused me a problem. I’d also like to move more and more towards open source software, at least for my personal computing.

Below is what I did. It didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped to be honest. I probably made it more difficult than I needed to for myself to be fair, and Windows played tricks on me too. But in the end it seems to be working well I’m writing it here in case I need to do it again or someone else encounters the same obstacles.

So there are various ways you can install Linux Mint on a computer that currently has Windows on it. That includes starting afresh, deleting everything you already have, Windows and all, and going 100% Linux. You can also use Linux Mint inside Windows using a virtual machine without having to do anything to Windows - it acts just like another piece of software you install in Windows, but has the obvious memory and processing overhead of having to run Windows and Linux simultaneously. You can also use it entirely from a USB drive. But I chose to go with probably the trickiest of options dual-booting.

The idea here is that in the end what should happen is that each time my computer turns on it gives me a menu letting me choose whether I want to use Windows or Linux. I thus can choose between Windows and Linux each run and they’ll act independently of each other. The natural cost is that you need to dedicate a certain amount of disk space to both operating systems and any files you want to use in them - but it’s better than having to buy a whole new computer. It’s also proved more tricky to set up than I imagine the other options would have been, although I do lay some of the blame at Windows' feet whilst sucking up a decent chunk of it as being down to my own ignorance.

Get and validate the Linux Mint install software

Step 1 was to download the ISO file containing the Linux Mint image I wanted to install. I went with the “Cinnamon 64bit” version. Also get the sha256sum.txt and sha256sum.txt.gpg files from relevant Linux Mint download page (this was the edition I used) which lets us verify the integrity of the ISO file later.

Once downloaded, verify the file by comparing hashes. I only had access to Windows so per these instructions I downloaded GnuPG - the “Simple installer for the current Gnu PG” from here.

Then to check the integrity if the ISO:

Open a command prompt (PowerShell) in the folder I downloaded those to and ran CertUtil -hashfile linuxmint-21.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso SHA256

Check that the results matched the sha256sum.txt file.

To check authenticity:

Run gpg --keyserver hkps://keyserver.ubuntu.com:443 --recv-key 27DEB15644C6B3CF3BD7D291300F846BA25BAE09

Then: gpg --verify sha256sum.txt.gpg sha256sum.txt

And check that the output says “Good signature from “Linux Mint ISO Signing Key root@linuxmint.com” and the primary key fingerprint at the bottom matches the 27DE…. code from the first gpg output. Don’t worry about the warning about the key not being certified.

Make a bootable Linux USB stick

Now we need to to make a bootable USB stick from the ISO image. First find a USB disk you don’t mind emptying out as this will remove any existing files on it. After that, here are the instructions. For Windows they suggest you install Etcher. I downloaded Etcher for Windows Portable Edition but presumably any should work.

In Etcher, choose to “Flash from file” and select the ISO image you downloaded in the first step. Then “Select Target” to choose your USB drive (after plugging it in, and remembering that you’ll lose any data on it). Then select to flash the drive and wait a few minutes until it’s finished.

Prepare disk space for Linux to install to

Next up we’ll need to create a partition for Linux Mint to install to. Probably your disk is already partitioned 100% for Windows. I needed to reduce the size of the Windows partition and create a new one with space from Linux.

Although the instructions for Linux Mint read to me like you can do this during the Linux Mint install process, most of the info I read on the internet suggested to do it first in Windows, with the Windows specific tool, given you’re messing around with a Windows partition. This is “fiddling around with hard disks” type stuff, so everyone recommends that you back up anything important before doing it just in case either you or Windows does it wrong and lose it all.

Then I did the below:

• Open the built-in app “Disk Management” in Windows - one way to get to this is open the Start Menu and start typing “Disk Management” until the option to “Create and format hard disk partitions” comes up.
• Right click the disk you want to “shrink” in order to make a Linux partition. For me this was the one labelled “C:”.
• Choose “Shrink volume”
• It asks you to input the “amount of space to shrink” in MB. I decided to give Linux 100GB to use for now so typed in 100000 and clicked “Shrink”.
• A while later the Disk Management screen updated to show a 97.66GB unallocated space. Seems like I should have remembered that 100000 MB doesn’t necessarily equal 100 GB if I wanted rounder numbers. But this will do for now.
• Note that of course whatever you “unallocate” here won’t be accessible to Windows. So you need to have a decent amount of free disk space to go this dual boot way.

Reboot from your USB drive

Now it’s time to boot up the bootable USB we created and install Linux into this free space.

First I checked the BIOS to make sure my computer could boot from a USB. For my old Sony laptop this meant turning it off and then holding down the special button marked “ASSIST” and choosing “Start from media”. For most less weirdly proprietary computers I think that’s usually case of looking at your BIOS settings to make sure your computer is set to boot from USB drive before your hard disk and then rebooting it.

Start it up again with the USB drive you prepared earlier plugged in. If you set the boot options correctly you will get a menu. I chose ‘Start Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon 64-bit’’'.

Start the Linux Mint installation wizard

After a few minutes and some slightly scary looking error messages I ignored it loaded up to a Linux Mint desktop. I double clicked the Install Linux Mint icon.

In the subsequent wizards, select your language, keyboard. I chose the option to ‘Install multimedia codecs’ which meant I had to configure secure boot by choosing a password as I apparently have UEFI secure boot enabled.

I think this stage later gave me problems. I’m not 100% sure this is why but I read somewhere that your keyboard will effectively be in US mode at the time of needing this password. So if you have a non-US keyboard then you might want to make the password pretty simple and not full of special characters. Letters and numbers worked for me. Note that you only need to use this password once.

Next up in the install wizard, I chose “Install Linux mint alongside windows boot manager”. A message popped up explaining what changes it was going to make. It wasn’t all that helpful. But I think it did everything OK. There is a “Something else” option if you prefer to try and manually figure out / exert some control your partitions. Most internet guides seem to recommend that, but I must admit I did the “install alongside” option.

Next up I chose my time zone, and chose a username, password, computer name and chose to encrypt my home folder. This password is the one you’ll use to log onto Linux Mint every time so make sure you can remember it. The system then started to install.

I then let it restart the computer, removing the USB when it told me too.

Manage your MOKs (?)

A blue “MOK management” screen appeared. I had no idea what this meant. I think what I should have done was to choose the “Enroll MOK” which was the second option I was presented with, view the key and choose to “Enroll key”. The password is the first password we recorded above, the one to do with the multimedia codecs.

However I had little idea what any of this meant so by the time I got to it it had timed out and automatically picked the first option which was to continue the normal boot process. This loaded up Linux Mint but I’m led to believe this meant the multimedia codecs and maybe some other stuff wouldn’t work. You really want to enroll the MOK.

But it’s a one time prompt - reboot and you’ll not get a chance to enroll the MOK key again. Oh no! But there is a way to reset this and get the MOK key prompt to come back.

Getting the MOK enrollment screen to come back if like me you did it wrong the first time

Thank you to Philip from the 11th post here who documented that if you load up to Linux and type this into the command prompt:

sudo mokutil --import /var/lib/shim-signed/mok/MOK.der

Then the next time you restart you’ll get that option to Enroll MOK again. Running the above will ask perhaps for your “root” password which is the second one you selected above and then for you to define a new password. That’s the equivalent of the one-use first password we encountered above with the multimedia codecs. So probably make it fairly simple. It won’t affect the password you log onto your computer with. But it’s this one-use password you use to enroll your MOK.

If feeling particularly committed, this page describes a bit more about what these keys and commands are for. If your computer isn’t “blessed” with SecureBoot then you may not see any of this.

After that, all seemed well. Whenever I turned my computer on I could choose between Linux and Windows just like I wanted.

Connecting to the internet

At first the wifi didn’t work, but once I went into the built-in Driver Manager in Linux Mint and inserted my install USB key when prompted. It scanned, found my wireless card, and when I selected the only option it gave me other than “don’t use it” that all started working well.

When Windows forcibly takes over again

I was glowing with success only for a few minutes until Windows turned nasty….The first time I chose to load Windows it appeared to overwrite the startup menu where you choose between Linux and Windows. Apparently this is pretty normal. I guess Windows just can’t believe that you don’t want to 100% use it and its extremely undesirable Start Menu.

So whilst I’d successfully installed Linux Mint, after the first time I’d loaded up Windows I wasn’t given the option to actually use Linux ever again. Aaargh.

The internet has a vast array of frustrated users and posts with helpful suggestions about what lengthy thing you should type in to where to hopefully sort this problem out. But not a single one of the ones I saw quite worked for me. However they did provide enough clues that I think I eventually got to the bottom of it.

I can’t say I fully understand everything I did here, and it’s probably not very risk free for anyone with no backup, but here’s what worked for me in case I ever need it again. Honestly though, unless you understand it better than me I wouldn’t run it without having a great backup, a bit more research or an expert friend.

First up, you’ll need to get back into Linux however you can (remember you can most likely boot from your install USB if you’ve no other way). Then open the command prompt (aka terminal) and run:

efibootmgr -v

I got a list showing the partitions that could boot and thee order that they’d apparently do so in. One row for Windows and a couple for “Ubuntu”. One of these rows was my main Linux Mint install. The other is “grub” which is the menu system that lets you choose which OS to start when you turn your computer. Windows kept insisting on enabling itself and acting like it was first on the list no matter what I did whereas I needed the grub one to take precedence. The intuitive thing of “change the boot order to the order you want it to be in” did not help.

So I noted down the filenames each of these entries were associated withl- the parts starting: /File(\EFI\....

The Windows one in my case was the file: \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi

The “grub” one was: \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi

The Linux Mint one was: \EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi

Then, shutdown Linux, turn your computer off.

Reboot this time loading Windows (which is probably what will happen anyway given the issue we’re trying to solve here).

Open the Windows command prompt in administrator mode (which means to hold Shift and right click it and choose “Run as administrator” rather than simply double-clicking it) and type this mystical incantation into it:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi

Presumably if you saw something other than \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi when you ran efibootmgr in the previous step then you should put what you saw relating to grub at the end of the bcdedit command rather than copying me exactly.

That said it completed successfully. And since then every time I restarted my computer it’s offered me the choice of which operating system to run exactly as it did before Windows greedily overwrote whatever I’d done in the first place.

If you decide you did want Windows to just load every time without prompting you could undo the above command by just specifying the Windows bootloader instead of the grub one I think:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\ubuntu\bootmgfw.efi in my case.

An important point for any debate about treatments for obesity that’s often missed or downplayed in certain media takes is that obesity appears to be causally associated with a range of other extremely serious health issues, including an early death.

As one example, in a recent review, Pati et al found that 4-8% of all cancers could be attributed to obesity, even if we don’t precisely know why that is yet. Having obesity also makes for worse outcomes in general if you do get cancer.

That study ended with a call to collect more data on cancer outcomes regarding the less traditional forms of obesity treatments; surgical interventions and pharmacological. As it happens, earlier this year a new study on the former was published. Adams et al find that bariatric surgery patients ended up having a 25% lower risk of developing cancer later on than their peers, along with a 43% lower risk to die from cancer.

A new RCT study that looks at the outcomes of one of the GLP-1 anti-obesity drugs that have taken some quarters of the world by storm, Semaglutide, is going to be presented soon. In the mean time, a press release has revealed some of the top-level effects. People with overweight or obesity who were treated with Semaglutide had a 20% reduction in major adverse cardiovascular events, including heart attacks, stroke and cardiovascular-related deaths.

We’ll not know the full details until the full study is published but, assuming the full study is deemed legitimate and in general reflects the headline, it’s hard to argue with the CEO of the Obesity Action Coalition who is quoted by the ConscienHealth blog:

Semaglutide for obesity is a life-saving medicine for a serious chronic disease. It is now crystal clear that making excuses to deny people the care they need for obesity is unethical.

Treatments for obesity are not about personal vanity, body shaming or anything along those lines. Sure, they can be misrepresented or misused, but so can a wide range of other less “controversial” medical treatments. But at the end of they day they are potentially life saving interventions and should be treated as such.

Following on having been inappropriately surprised that a person with dissociative identity disorder (DID) might be allergic to orange juice whilst under control of some personalities but not others, I’ve now learned that it’s possible for some personalities to be blind when others are not.

Here we have a report of a patient known as B.T. She seemed to have been blinded as the result of an accident, and got the appropriate medical tests and later diagnosis for cortical blindness as a result of damage to her brain.

She also had DID. Imagine everyone’s surprise a few years later, being of the chronological age of 37 years old, when at the times when the personality of a teenage boy was in control she could see well enough to read.

It’s not that B.T. had just reported not being able to see for years. Brain tests showed that when in other personalities the areas of her brain associated with visual stimuli didn’t react to input at all, as one would only expect in anyone unable to see . But when in the personality that was able to see, the sight processing areas of the brain started to light up again.

Over time, with training, most of her other personalities learned to see again, although two remain blinded.

I’d totally missed that there’s a substantial amount of landing-on-the-moon activity going on at present. Most recently Russia’s attempt to be the first to land a craft, “Luna-25”, on the southern polar region of the moon - despite everything else that one imagines the administration of that country would be focussing on right now.

That region of the moon is unexplored by landers. It’s thought that there might be interesting ice deposits to examine there. It’s the only area of the moon that has craters with interiors that aren’t near-constantly in sunlight.

We do know what the moon’s south pole looks like from above though thanks to several successful orbital missions. Here’s an image from Wikipedia:

However the Luna-25 landing didn’t go well. As of yesterday it has officially “ceased to exist” as a result of crashing into the moon.

Here’s an artist’s impression of what it would have looked like if it had touched down in 1 piece, taken from the CBS article above.

Unfortunately, given the impact of the craft crashing into the moon’s surface, an artist’s impression is all we can expect from that mission.

India is attempting something similar with its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, due to land on the moon this week. In the US, NASA is funding a commercial attempt to land on the moon from Intuitive Machines later this year. Another commercial offering, this time from Astrobotic, is expected this or next year. China and Japan are also involved in moon-landing missions expected to take place over the next few years.

Most of these are put-robots-on-moon missions. However NASA’s Artemis program has a moon landing planned for 2025 - Artemis 3 - that is looking to drop a couple of human astronauts near the lunar south pole.

In the latest reminder that things you upload to the various big social media services aren’t yours and can’t be relied on to stay there forever, it seems like Twitter has removed all the photos and some of the links that folk posted on it between 2011-2014.

No-one seems to know if it’s deliberate or not,. The email address the press might contact to find out is still responding with the poo emoji.

The forthcoming change to prevent you from blocking users is however all-too-deliberate, which is an absolutely wild thing to do imo given some of the content I understand remains on there.

Somehow deleting 4 years of potentially treasured photos still seems on average less bad to me than a previous Twitter shenanigan that resulted in posts that you would justifiably assumed were deleted- because you personally deleted them a long time ago so why would they even still exist anywhere? - magically re-appeared once more. That one was probably down to incompetence rather than malice. But whatever cause it’s not hard to imagine all sorts of potential bad consequences, embarrassing, awkward or devastating arising, from that.

Whilst Twitter is the current exemplar of these kind of bad practices, seemingly largely because of who runs now runs it, there’s little reason to believe that the potential risks are all that much reduced with its competitors either. The sad fact that if you don’t own the means of computation then you can’t rely on it - admittedly to vastly varying extents - is highlighted here once again.

At the very least, it’s a reminder to re-learn the old lessons of backing up everything we care about and being super careful to never share anything there’s a chance we might not want to be publicly available in the future. In the real world, both are of course easier said than done.

Getting real SimCity vibes from the view today.

We’re up to 91 felonies now in terms of how many criminal charges have been brought against Trump. There’s also multiple civil cases, including the sexual misconduct one that he’s already lost

The latest batch are around his ludicrous pretense of having won the 2020 election in the state of Georgia. Corruption, abuse of position, lying, fraud, all that kind of very not-making-America-great-again stuff.

📧 Reading John Medina’s Substack newsletter. He’s a developmental molecular biologist, and author of Brain Rules. Each newsletter I’ve seen so far usually provides a quick summary of something unusual, occasionally jaw-dropping, about the human brain, how it works, what it does.

Issue 25 was one that stood out to me. It told the story of “Timmy”, one of the “personalities” that a patient with Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka DID, previously referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder) had.

Over time his body would appear to be inhabited by one of around 12 different personalities, if that’s the right word. Some of his personalities were allergic to orange juice. If he drank whilst one of these was active then his skin swelled up, became red and developed hives. This is not so unusual, people often have allergic reactions.

The twist is that some of his other personalities did not have this allergy. If they were in charge of his inner show at the time of drinking a glass of juice then his body wouldn’t show any of those symptoms. No sign of any allergy was to be found.

If he switched from a personality that was allergic to the juice to one that wasn’t in the middle of undergoing an allergic reaction then his hives, redness and itching would simply disappear.

It thus became apparent that what’s usually assumed to be a physical, deterministic, response to a chemical is in fact context dependent. Whilst no-one thinks we usually consciously “create” our allergic reactions, this suggests that something somewhere in our brain must unconsciously be governing them. Hence there’s a sense in which they are under our control, existing in relation to us rather than simply being an inanimate “fact of the universe” - even if we don’t know to how to consciously leverage them

“All in the mind” is a phrase that often used derogatorily, unsympathetically and dismissively to patients suffering various conditions, as if suffering situated primarily in the workings of the mind was somehow of lesser concern than suffering entirely on overtly physical phenomena. But stories like this constantly keep me wondering to what extent almost anything of note is at least somewhat “in the mind”. The book “The Expectation Effect” added a ton of counterintuitive examples towards that end.

📚 Finished reading: The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman.

This is a comic book portraying the author’s difficult conversations with his father about the father’s experience as a Polish Jew in the Second World War. Harrowingly, but far from uncommonly, the experience included time imprisoned at concentration camps, including the infamous Auschwitz.

Most of the people he knew, most of the characters in the book, ended up dying at the hands of the Nazis. They are shot, hung or, more frequently, the victims of a long, slow, tortuous death journey of absolute neglect from captors who do not see you as human.

Actually the book doesn’t portray almost anyone as human, not in literal terms. Whilst the concepts of humanity and inhumanity infuse the story throughout, visually the participants are portrayed as cartoon animals. The Jews are anthropomorphic cartoon mice. Their former gentile country people, occasionally later collaborators, as pigs and the Nazis are cats. And the language is at times rough, ungrammatical, unrefined.

Out of context this might seem to be a strange or trivialising approach to the most awful of events. But in reality the stark black and white illustrative loses none of, and perhaps draws us into, the horror of what transpired. It pulls no punches. The frank representations of what went on maintain their visceral impact.

As Spiegelman once wrote:

Maybe vulgar, semiliterate, unsubtle comic books are an appropriate form for speaking of the unspeakable

This exchange sums it up the criticisms along those lines succinctly:

“Don’t you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?” one angry reporter asked him when the book was published in Germany.

“No,” Spiegelman replied, “I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”

The father, the “hero” who survived the horrors, is a complicated character. He’s on at least his second marriage and it’s not going well. He’s miserly, grumpy, demanding, with unpleasant views, whether shaped by his experience of things no human should every experience or otherwise. He’s demanding, an incessant. His son, the author finds him hard to be around, wants to avoid him, to get away even as he becomes increasingly unwell. The book switches between the father’s story of life in the war back to the present day life and its many tensions until both are resolved, one way or another.

The book - the only graphic novel to ever win a Pulitzer Prize at the time of writing - became more famous in recent times following a ban on it by a Tennessee school board, ostensibly for its bad language and a tangential depiction of nudity. In it’s time the book has also been banned in Russia and burned in Poland.

Many people believe that the in reality the Tennessee action was nothing more than a continuation of the politically driven book-banning so favoured by the supposed freedom-loving political right of the US. At the very least, I worry about the mind and priorities of anyone who thinks the most disturbing thing about this book is the occasional mild swear words.

But it’s the sort of disturbing that is important that humanity never forgets, never thinks can only happen once, only in the past. ‘Never again, and again and again’ to quote the author.

📽 Watched Interstate 60.

Fun coming-of-age-roadtrip type movie about a young man who is torn between following the life he wants as an artist vs the life his rich father and girlfriend should want, as a lawyer with a fancy red car.

After suffering an injury he ends up in a hospital where he learns that everything is perception, and perception isn’t necessarily reality. Somehow this gets him into a parcel-delivery mission down a non-existent highway, accompanied at times by a unusual genital-free man who grants peoples' wishes for better or worse - shades of a much more relaxed and horror-free Wishmaster - via smoking a weird monkey-shaped pipe. Guided by an extremely prescient Magic 8-ball and visions of a lady only he can see, he sets out to delivery his parcel and of course along the way make those all-important life decisions.

Whilst this might imply existential wrangling, it’s pretty much light-hearted fun and games in this case. It’s written and directed by Bob Gale who also co-wrote Back to the Future. A couple of the same actors appear - Christopher Lloyd who was Back to the Future’s Doc Brown, and Michael J. Fox who of course was Marty McFly, and it often has similar kinds of vibes.

A lot more enjoyable than I first expected given I’d never heard of it before.

The clowns are at it again. When Sunak took over the British premiership from the last Conservative mess of a Prime Minister, someone who must have set some kind of record for their damage-to-tenure ratio, I did have a little hope that he would at least try and be the “sensible adult in the room” that was promised. No hope at all that he’d come up with thoughtful or progressive policies, but maybe at least he’d manage to be some kind of boring technocrat before losing the next general election.

I guess I was wrong. It seems like he wants the next election to be fought over the issue of which party can promise to damage the environment the most, with a side-helping of who can make the roads as dangerous as possible for us, their valued citizens. My fear is Labour will actually sign up to that battle, throwing away the last remnants of the only policies of theirs I positively liked to the wind. “The wind” of course being the next devastating hurricane the ongoing climate catastrophe summons up.

A few days ago he was promoting his slightly 2017-robot-disguised-as-human visage via a photo of him supposedly sitting in Margaret Thatcher’s old car.

Inevitably this turned out to be another lie, albeit probably an accidental one, insomuch as the car he was sitting in was not in fact Thatcher’s vehicle, but rather one that her protection squad used.

Sunak of course has form for pretending he’s in other people’s cars for PR reasons, namely the famous incident him filling up his Kia with post-tax-cut petrol that in fact wasn’t his Kia. At least it shows he has wherewithal to feel some tension between showing off his own extremely expensive fleet of cars and unnecessary helicopters and appearing as, same as they all want to pretend to be, yawn, “a man of the people”.

Anyway, why was he polluting the media-waves pretending to be in Thatcher’s car? Well a part of it was no doubt the weird obsession many of the wannabe Conservative movers-and-shakers and their acolytes have with their former Prime Minister who it must be said did actually manage to get things done. The wrong things, sure, but things. Things with even more impact than the best of today’s cabinet sponsored warm-take cringe-tweet.

But also following the only Conservative hold in the recent “Day Of 3-Byelections”, the Uxbridge result where they managed to lose only around 93% of their previous majority, it’s been decided by all and sundry that the reason they won was because they campaigned against the “ULEZ”.

Despite it’s name, the ULEZ is not a species of war-mongering aliens, but rather the Ultra Low Emission Zone. It’s a London based policy whereby if you have a vehicle that emits above a certain threshold of polluting emissions then you have to pay £12.50 a day to drive it within the specified zone. The zone now includes Uxbridge after the (Labour) Mayor of London extended its scope. So this was admittedly potentially going to get pretty expensive for folk who have cause to regularly drive. Labour seems to agree, with their leader, Kier Starmer, deciding he’s also against it.

It seems a reasonable criticism that making people with with non-compliant cars pay probably biases the charges towards older cars, which in turn means that the average owner might likely be poorer than someone with a newer, compliant, car (but much richer than someone with no car, plus not all new cars are compliant). Whether the charge will be tilted towards folk with a lesser ability to afford to pay it or not is a factual matter. I’m sure someone has looked into it. And if it is, and it’s seen as unfair, then sure, let’s dream up a new policy that actually gets at what we really want to do here - which is to protect the environment, rather than let people pay to damage the environment.

But somehow the issue of a certain constituency saying they don’t like a very specific fairly punitive-at-the-individual-level scheme has developed into the idea that all pro-environmental policies are evil. Hence the Sunak tweet, sitting in his fake car, “talking about freedom” (cringe) blasting out how he’s the true motorist’s friend.

And it’s not just bad tweets.

He’s ordered a review of all current low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs). Despite the fact in reality they’re quite popular, even if Conservative MP Nick Fletcher does believe them to be an “international socialist concept”, whatever that means.

Further complicating matters is that no-one knows what LTN even means. Depending on the definition taken, there may be more than 25,000 of them. Their main use is to stop a torrent of traffic ripping its way through narrow residential streets. Pedestrians and cyclists can pass freely, and cars can still access the streets in order reach any destination within the area - but they’re generally blocked in a way that stops you motoring your way right through a city entirely on the small, easily clogged, heavily pedestrian oriented streets where children play and suchlike.

In a further bid to lionise the act of speeding tons of metal through inappropriate routes, ministers are also apparently thinking to restrict councils' freedom to create 20 miles per hour speed limits. The RoadPeace charity is amongst many other interested parties who express sentiments along the lines of being “extremely disappointed to see roads made demonstrably less safe.”

Central government imposing these restrictions on council decisions - I guess Sunak stopped “talking about freedom” right after he left the photo-op - might not actually be be legal under current legislation. They might have to change the 1984 Road Traffic Regulation Act to go ahead with this.

These things are also important for reasons outside of environmental emissions, and in fact aren’t necessarily even targeted at improving our atmosphere in that way. As Devi Sridhar recently summarised, this stuff is:

…not about banning cars, but about making it cheaper and simpler to replace short-distance single occupancy journeys with alternatives that have far-reaching benefits for the city’s inhabitants and the planet.

Those benefits include staying alive. The ultimate freedom, if we must. It was a campaign group whose name translates to “Stop The Child Murder” that helped compel the Dutch government to make their cities less car focussed. Over 400 children died in traffic accidents over there in 1971. Now it’s more like 17 per year.

Over here in the UK, last year a study found that reducing the speed limit in the city of Edinburgh to 20 mph - the very thing that the government is rumoured to oppose - reduced road deaths by 23%, serious injuries by 33% and collisions by 40%. “Livability”, things such as safety, health, sustainability and living standards also improved, as did the number of people who supported and were willing to obey the new limits.

The majority of Dutch people are cyclists now, making them the one of the most physically active populations around according to an Ipsos poll , with all the concomitant health and life-extending benefits that brings. People seem to embrace pro-cycling infrastructure when it exists; increasing the number of cycle lanes in Paris led to a 54% increase in cycle usage.

And air pollution does more than cause our planet to burn up. A group of doctors wrote to the Labour leader and mayor of London begging them not to bow to the pressure to throw away the progress made so far with initiatives such as ULEZ because:

Air pollution affects every one of us from before we are born into old age. It not only causes respiratory conditions such as asthma, but also heart attacks, heart arrhythmias, strokes, child developmental disorders, lung cancer and dementia.

A recent study also suggests that air pollution may be exacerbating the rise of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance already kills 1.3 million people a year, and if it gets out of hand could in theory make a serious dent in global human population numbers. It’s “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.” according to the World Health Organisation:

…we are heading for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries can once again kill.

The ULEZ scheme specifically seems to be helping on the air pollution front. London’s air pollution has dropped. I haven’t looked into how to quantify this directly in terms of health benefits. But 4,000 of London’s deaths were apparently attributable to air pollution in 2019 so there are some major wins potentially to be had.

One study suggested that if the mayor’s air pollution policies were followed then Londoners would gain an extra 6.1 million life years by 2050. It would be even higher, 20% higher, if they managed to meet the World Health Organisation guidelines.

The ULEZ scheme itself aims to save over a million hospital admissions, albeit this particular figure sounds like a somewhat vague aspiration that won’t be realised until 2050 so possibly one should dig into the evidence around that before parroting it too much.

The doctors raised another important point, and one that highlights that any “unfairness” or economic harm caused to some people by ULEZ is down to policy choices, not its overall objective.

The policy shouldn’t stand alone. Rather there should be “a commitment to a much more affordable, frequent and reliable public transport system” as well. People do need to get to places. No sensible person should argue otherwise. But I can easily think of several other carrot-rather-than-stick approaches that might be added to the mix, rather than removing one of the few things that seems to be working for the sake of the Conservatives desperate attempt to introduce some US-imported-style culture war banter as a last ditch effort to not get totally laughed out of office next time we have a general election.

Obviously the idea should be to put together a package of policies that improve the health of us and our planet whilst mitigating any downsides of any individual approach. Not just give up and throw them all in the landfill-destined bin because a few of those people not rendered too ill by air pollution to get to the polling station in a couple of years time might vote for you.

The insanity is not limited to the motorist love-ins unfortunately. Last week Sunak announced a vast expansion of North Sea oil and gas drilling. Living as we do in a post-truth world, he claims that this is “entirely consistent with our plan to get to net zero”. He actually seems to think that it’s positively pro-environment. More on this in a bit.

Oxfam’s climate advisor disagrees and highlights that should we want to generate more energy more locally at less environmental cost - all good objectives when the current option often seems to lead to paying war criminals big bucks to import it let alone the environmental concerns - there is an obvious alternative:

Extracting more fossil fuels from the North Sea will send a wrecking ball through the UK’s climate commitments at a time when we should be investing in a just transition to a low-carbon economy and our own abundant renewables.

It’s not like he’s proposing nationalising the process, or really doing anything other than let whichever company does the extraction run riot on the “free” market as far as I can see.

Per Mike Childs from Friends of the Earth:

Granting hundreds of new oil and gas licences will simply pour more fuel on the flames, while doing nothing for energy security as these fossil fuels will be sold on international markets and not reserved for UK use

Similar comments abound. Kate White from the WWF is quoted by Sky News

" [Sunak’s plan will] do nothing to cut household energy bills or shore up our energy security - it will simply line the pockets of the extractive industry while the world burns…the solution to the climate crisis and the cost of living crisis is in affordable, clean energy; better insulation for our homes; and restoring our natural world.”

Carbon Brief looked into some of the energy security related claims. Unsurprisingly they don’t stack up.

Apparently on average it takes 28 years after the granting of oil and gas licenses for the flow of fossil fuels to start. If it’s anything like as long as that then these fuels won’t come online until the 2040s. They do nothing to solve today’s security or cost of living crisis. And by 2040 we should be well on our way towards net zero, with the plan (supposedly supported by Sunak) being to decarbonise the UK economy by 2050. If we need a new flow of fossil fuel at that point then something went very wrong.

There are so many other ways the government could improve the cost of living situation for UK citizens that don’t involve waiting a quarter of a century and hoping big businesses show unprecedented compassion.

There’s certainly no reason to suspect the fossil fuel companies would by remotely shy about maximising their profits from any new gas and oil that they could possibly get their hands on. In these cost-of-living-whilst-the-world-burns crisis times Shell recently reported its largest ever first quarter profits: $9.6 billion for the first quarter of this year. BP made $5 billion profit during the same period.

Sunak et al also seem to have gotten this odd idea that “buying local” is incredibly environmentally beneficial when it comes to fossil fuels, claiming that importing fuel from elsewhere ends up releasing 3-4x as many carbon emissions.

At first this made me wonder if Sunak thinks that we import oil by putting it into small bottles and hand delivering it via single-passenger private jets or something. Once I got over myself, I actually looked into what the reality is and wrote about it in more detail here.

The TLDR would be that the “3-4x the emissions” claim for imported alternatives to North Sea gas and oil is not exactly an outright fiction but it’s very misleading. It appears to refer to only the emissions associated with the transport of fuel, only for gas, and only for the minority of gas that is transported to the UK in liquid form.

The process of shipping gas via boat involves converting it to liquid form (Liquified Natural Gas, or “LNG”) before putting it on a boat and then converting it back when it arrives. That is an energy intensive process, quite possibly generating 3-4x the emissions associated with (just) the transporting of gas via methods not involving LNG, such as via a pipeline.

However, it turns out that only a minority of Britain’s imported gas is transported via LNG. Most of it comes through a pipeline and hence does not incur anything like that process' emissions penalty.

In any case, the emissions generated by even the nasty LNG gas process are only a small fraction of the total emissions generated during the lifecycle of the gas overall. The large majority of emissions come from the actual use of the fuel itself. There is no possible way to reduce the actual emissions associated with that gas by anything like as much as 3-4x by fiddling around with the extraction or transport process when most of the emissions are associated with the end use of the gas itself.

For what it’s worth, oil isn’t affected by the LNG process so I couldn’t find any similar-in-scale emissions savings to be had there.

It’s also of note that some countries are substantially better than the UK at extracting gas and oil in terms of having reduced emissions for the extraction process itself. The trend there will also be that they improve further if they enact the process improvements that they’ve already committed to. But this is still not the biggest deal: remember that the majority of the emissions associated with gas come from the usage of the gas itself.

For what it’s worth, switching to basically any form of renewable energy would vastly outweigh even the very best case emissions savings one could get from the North Sea network. Vastly. Yes, even when you take into account the end-to-end impact of manufacturing, maintaining and disposing of the equipment needed to use renewables.

Other assumptions that one would have to make in order to see even the small North Sea emissions benefit prospectively on offer include:

1. That the North Sea gas is all kept and used in the UK rather than being exported elsewhere. As mentioned above, there’s no reason to believe that that will happen.
2. That any extra gas and oil extracted from the North Sea means that there will be a similar reduction in the amount extracted (and in part exported via LNG) globally. I see no reason to think that that will be true. It’s not like we’ve reached a level where the demand for energy is entirely satiated. Instead, there’s a good chance that the oil and gas market will simply enlarge. And if more gas and oil is sold then - especially as most of the associated emissions come from the use of the fuels - proportionally more pollution will be generated.

So for all Sunak’s hobby of “talking about freedom” he seems to be chatting about only very specific types of freedom.

It’s a type of freedom that values the freedom to create traffic jams on unsuitably small residential roads over the freedom to not become ill from other people’s air pollution infusing your home. The freedom to legally drive 10 miles per hour faster than you used to be able to, over the freedom to not be involved in a fatal accident. The freedom for a few to greatly profit from the harmful exploitation of natural resources over the freedom for us all to live in a planet with a bearable climate. You can’t enjoy exceeding the 20 mph limit all that much if you are too ill or too dead to drive.

The people who tend to be most vulnerable to pollution or the immediate ravages of climate change are of course on average poorer, more disadvantaged, and hold less economic and political power than the average person, let alone the CEO of whichever big oil company and the owners of very fast cars. In this way, Frank Wilhoit’s evergreen canard that conservatives naturally tend towards the idea that laws exist to protect in-groups by binding out-groups shows its face once again.

From PC Magazine:

For 16 years, Jeremy Vaught had control of the @music account on Twitter. But no more. On Thursday, Elon Musk’s company seized the @music account out of the blue, offering no advanced warning to Vaught or any compensation

A reminder that nothing you “have” on other people’s proprietary, locked-in platforms is really yours. Musk wanted “@music”, and he of course wanted “@x”. The ex-owner of the latter can now be reached at @x12345678998765.

Hope these folk don’t have their handles listed on any promotional materials, Youtube vids or the like!

Turns out the UK’s Electoral Commission has been hacked for the past couple of years.

At the very least, hackers got access to the name and address of anyone who was registered to vote between 2014 and 2022; tens of millions of UK residents. And potentially any email correspondence in the system at the time.

This includes the information about anyone who had opted to keep their personal information off the open public register.

🎙️ Listening to Brad & Will Made A Tech Pod.

The name is pretty self-explanatory. Lots of tech talk, but way less Apple-obsessed as many of the computery podcasts I’ve encountered over the years. Perhaps I’ve just been looking in the wrong place, but it’s nice to see Windows, Linux et al getting a look-in for those of us not fully uploaded to the iCloud.

Not that it’s all computer-nerding. VR, electric cars and space travel feature in the promo blurb. I learned a lot about how to make decent coffee from a recent episode. Still need to put it into practice but at least I know how disgusting my current coffee practice is now.

I’ve been feeling drawn to the Linux operating system recently, partly under the guise of seizing the means of computation away from those who would surveil us, distract us with adverts each time we want to open an app or restrict us from using our devices as we wish.

Moving as much as possible towards open source software where people who have the coding skills can see exactly what it’s doing and contribute changes to anything they don’t like seems like A Good Thing overall.

It’s been double digit years since I’ve looked into Linux. I used it for a while in the past doing networking related stuff but not for more day-to-day tasks. But since then it looks like there’s been several options developed that address the challenges that were present back in the day. Namely that it was just all so complicated to set up in comparison to the more ‘consumer-friendly’ operating systems, doubly so if you wanted to use it in alongside those operating systems.

It was also potentially tricky to find equivalent software to that one may have been used to using on other platforms. However it looks like things have changed a lot in a decade, no surprises there. And, despite only having a limited amount of time to fiddle around with setting things up, it might be well worth trying it out again.

The Linux Mint distribution seems to be recommended by quite few folk for people who don’t want to spend a whole lot of time learning a new way of computing or figuring out where to get the necessary software for basic day-to-day computing tasks. It appears to come with a tool enabling easy access to tens of thousands of apps.

So I might try that one. But part of the beauty of this scene is that there’s many other options available, as well as the ability to modify any particular option that exists, if the one you try first doesn’t appeal in the end.

TIL: There’s an estimated 3 million shipwrecks dotted across the ocean floors of our planet.

With an estimated $60 billion worth of sunken treasure onboard.

But don’t get too excited. These days you can’t just keep any such treasure you find. A state tends to own it. In one example case courts ruled that a company that had discovered half a billion dollars worth of treasure had to hand it over to Spain.

A new paper from Scarborough et al. looks again at the level of environmental impact that different types of food pattern consumptions have; everything from vegan through to high meat diets.

How this paper differs from some others I’ve seen in the past is that:

1. It standardises the dietary intake of each person, hence ensuring that any observed differences aren’t a result of meat eaters simply consuming a different number of calories than vegans.
2. It takes into account the fact that the environmental impact of a certain type of food can vary dramatically depending on how and where it is produced.

Nonetheless, the punchline is basically the same as more straightforward analyses show.

All environmental indicators showed a positive association with amounts of animal-based food consumed.

Dietary impacts of vegans were 25.1% (95% uncertainty interval, 15.1–37.0%) of high meat-eaters (≥100 g total meat consumed per day) for greenhouse gas emissions, 25.1% (7.1–44.5%) for land use, 46.4% (21.0–81.0%) for water use, 27.0% (19.4–40.4%) for eutrophication and 34.3% (12.0–65.3%) for biodiversity.

At least 30% differences were found between low and high meat-eaters for most indicators.

Vegan diets were superior to high meat diets in every measure of environmental impact here. Whilst there is a lot of uncertainty on some measures due to not knowing how exactly each item of food was sourced, in no case at all is that uncertainty enough to make it remotely plausible that vegan diets actually aren’t superior on these measures.

Another repeated finding is that there’s good returns from simply cutting down one’s amount of meat consumption, or switching to fish. In today’s world it seems unlikely that everyone is going to seriously consider becoming vegan, but perhaps all of us that haven’t yet done so might consider reducing our meat consumption. It will help the planet.

Many of us have seen those adverts for smartphone games, often embedded inside other annoying phone games, that if one is misguided enough to think they look interesting enough to download turn out to bear almost no resemblance whatsoever to the game it’s claiming to be. So much so that sometimes they end up banned by the Advertising Standards Agency.

Anyway, someone has had the genius/madness idea to take some of those supposedly appealing fake games that are shown in the adverts and actually make them.

You too can play games that look terrible but still somehow substantially better than the game that was being advertised if you procure the catchily-named “YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!”.

Available at least on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Below are notes I took from reading the paper: How much food tracking during a digital weight management program is enough to produce clinically significant weight loss?

It’s known that weight loss can be facilitated by lifestyle interventions.

One of the strongest predictors of how much weight loss will occur is how often participants track the food and drink they consume each day, usually with a view to remaining within a set calorie goal.

However, tracking your consumption in detail is effortful. Most people do not find it possible to do so over the longer term. One approach to improving adherence would be to reduce the amount of effort required, for example by reducing how often people are asked to track food or reducing the amount of their food they are asked to track.

It is not yet clear how much food tracking is needed to get to certain weight loss milestones. Studies so far suggest that “abbreviated” food tracking approaches do correlate with weight loss, with the possible exception of tracking by taking a photo of the food.

Using data from subscribers to a weight loss program over a 6 month intervention period, the study aims to:

1. establish whether the abbreviated method of food tracking facilitated by by the program remains associated with weight loss.
2. establish thresholds of food tracking that are associated with certain weight loss milestones

Aim 1 was tested with both a nonparametric and linear regression methods.

There was a significant correlation between the percentage of days participants tracked food with the percentage of their original weight that the participant lost after 6 months, r = 0.4, p < 0.001. A 1% increase in the number of days tracking food associated with a 0.08% greater in weight loss.

A ROC curve analysis looked at showed that food tracking was highly predictive of the clinically significant 3%, 5% and 10% weight loss thresholds after 6 months. The optimum predictivity threshold was defined by the sum of sensitivity and specificity.

• For predicting achieving at least a 3% weight loss, the optimum threshold of food tracking corresponded to 29% of intervention days.
• For 5% weight loss this was 39% of days tracked,.
• 67% of days was the optimum threshold for predicting the 10% weight loss threshold.

Aim 2 added a time series clustering analysis method, dynamic time warping, to look for similarities between member food tracking behaviour.

This produced 3 clusters based on the number of days participants had tracked food in each week over the intervention period. The clusters differed by levels of food tracking, weight loss, participant age and marital status.

This study could not quantify the mechanisms why participants showed different food tracking behaviours. For instance, perhaps some had higher motivation or fewer barriers to food tracking and/or weight loss.

Limitations include:

• Participants were biased towards being female, with college degrees and higher incomes.
• This approach cannot fully establish that food tracking causes weight loss. There could be confounders.
• Whilst the optimum thresholds for predicting 3%, 5% or 10% of weight loss were established, there was no step-change in cutoff that perfectly predicted weight loss success. We should be cautious about interpreting the specific thresholds here.
• Food tracking was defined as tracking at least 1 food item on a given day; other definitions could be applied.

In conclusion, this study shows that participants can achieve clinically significant weight loss after 6 months even without perfect adherence to the recommended daily food tracking. In fact, no-one in this study tracked every day. Given that perfect adherence doesn’t seem to be possible for most people, and isn’t necessary for achieving significant weight loss, we should question whether it should be the default prescription for weight loss interventions.

Should one have the need to mass-download their Kindle books from Amazon without a ton of clicking around the Kindle Download Helper Python project looks to enable that.

I haven’t yet tried it, but it seems to work for other folk. Of course you’ll have to let it log in to your Amazon account which might be a deal-breaker for some, along with any risk associated with the fact that I can’t imagine it complies with Amazon’s terms of service. Although as it’s open source you can at least check in advance what the code is doing.

🎶 Listening to Endless Summer Vacation by Miley Cyrus.

Came to it via the ultra-viral hit Flowers which holds the record for being the fastest ever song to reach a billion streams on Spotify amongst other such achievements, taking 113 days if I did my maths right. It got 60 million streams occurred within a single week.

That song book-ends the album: the version you know at the start, a substantially differently-vibed demo version at the end. But there’s plenty of pop-rock in-between from the current phase of Miley’s constant re-invention. Bit of a mixed bag imo, but it’s a fun enough summer listen.

Somehow only today did I realise that you can use if statements directly within R’s dplyr library filter function in order to make conditional filter criteria.

For example if you want to filter a fictional dataframe to show only scores below 10, but only if the variable x has the value “filter” you can do:

filter(data, if (x == "filter") {
      my_score < 10
    } else {
      my_score == my_score
    })

A variable always equals itself, so the score == score bit effectively means “don’t apply a filter in this case”. You can of course use other criteria there if you want to apply different filters based on different conditions.

Inevitably some bright spark has developed a large language model AI chatbot whose explicit purpose is to assist with computer crime.

Based on GPT-J, WormGPT has no safety rails and has been trained on data from the darker side of the internet. So far its stated uses appear to be to write very convincing phishing scam emails, and to create and advise how to distribute malware.

Not the first area of life I’d have picked for needing to democratise and make accessible to all, but there we go. I remember listening to an episode of the Data Skeptic podcast last year where a researcher talked about the AI phishing email side of things so it’s not exactly a massive surprise that some 2023 malevolent entity went ahead and made it.

Tom’s Hardware quotes its developer:

This project aims to provide an alternative to ChatGPT, one that lets you do all sorts of illegal stuff and easily sell it online in the future. Everything blackhat related that you can think of can be done with WormGPT, allowing anyone access to malicious activity without ever leaving the comfort of their home.

A screenshot from PC Magazine:

All yours for 60 euros a month. Sigh.

Very unexpectedly, something about the apparent inanity / insanity of its plot makes me actually want to see the Barbie movie.

I’d assumed it’d be at least 80% problematic, but if it made Ben Shapiro spend 43 minutes burning his dolls in disgust at its wokeness then maybe it’s not so bad after all.