The Braindump Blog

📚 Want to read: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly.

I’ve a feeling this book might reinforce my fears that the big streaming services like Spotify are…not good for music. The medium is the message etc.

From the Guardian:

More than £100m was spent last year by local authorities and the government on failed efforts to block support for children and young people with special educational needs in England, according to analysis by the Guardian.

A considerable amount of resources are being deployed to avert the duty of providing support for children with special educational needs by councils. But most of the time when their decision is appealed it is later over-turned, meaning they have to pay it and any costs of contesting it in any case, rendering the actually entirely unproductive even on its own terms. Councils won just 1.2% of these cases during 2022-2023.

Per the Independent Provider of Special Education Advice:

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that local authorities must calculate, at some level, that it costs them less to contest tribunal appeals, even if they lose, than to provide every child and young person with what the law entitles them to as a matter of course – because the majority of families don’t [or] can’t appeal.

And at a time where the services are needed more than ever. As the budget for other types of support have dwindled, a lot more families are applying for and getting these education, health and care plans, which end up being the only way to support their children through education. Nearly 1 in 19 children aged 5-15 currently have such a plan.

Apparently King Charles isn’t a great fan of Dairy Milk.

Chocolate maker one of 100 previous suppliers to royal household to be stripped of accolade under King Charles

Or Pot Noodles.

Another big brand missing from the list is Unilever, which manufactures goods including Marmite, Magnum ice-cream bars and Pot Noodles.

It’s hard to imagine being the king and not having my servants bring me several Magnums a day.

Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.

Clement Atlee - or perhaps it was Francis Beckett summarising Atlee’s views in his biography?

🎶 Listening to some modern-day Christmas music: December’s Here by New Found Glory, Punk Rawk Christmas by MxPx and Let It Snow Baby…Let It Reindeer by Reliant K.

After realising that all the good Christmas songs seem to have been written in the last century, and not all that near the end of it, I went on a search for decent ones written in the past few years. Or at least this century.

December’s Here is a post-pandemic issuance, coming out in 2021. “Somber Christmas” celebrates that, if nothing else, Christmas 2021 was an upgrade from the previous year’s (lack of) celebration for many.

2009’s Punk Rawk Christmas is an EP that collects up the annual Christmas-related songs that MxPx sent to members of its fan club between 1998 and 2008.

And 2007’s Let It Snow Baby…Let It Reindeer, apart from being a classic winter witticism, is a take on mostly songs of yesteryear, adapted to various degrees.

The three selections above are all of a general theme, perhaps mostly being potentially described as some degree of pop-punk in style. I’m sure other genres have pumped out the holiday tunes for those who don’t enjoy this one.

📚 Want to read: Steadfast Self-Hosting by Adam Monsen.

Sounds like it may be a decent intro to the noble art of not needing to rely on the whims of other people’s clouds to maintain your digital life.

I’m sure this is supposed to be festive but it feels somehow ominous to me.

Hope it’s not the return of the Gingerdead Man.

🎥 Watched The Devil Wears Prada.

Only 18 years after its release, which if I vaguely remember at the time was something of a phenomenon, at least in my circles. And somehow it was nothing like I expected.

Starring wannabe serious journalist, it’s Emily in Paris, except it’s only Andy’s extraordinarily harsh boss that thinks she’s called Emily. It’s Ugly Betty, with similarly mean harassment of the main character.

Andy accidentally chances her way into the extremely difficult job of working for an extremely difficult fashion magazine boss, a subject that she knows and cares nothing about, at first at least.

Improbably it may be, but it seems that it’s based on a certain amount of reality. The film is adapted from the book of the same name. The book’s author, Lauren Weisberger, was in fact the lowly assistant of real life Anna Wintour, Vogue magazine’s editor in chief.

Wintour developed a reputation for being “icy and scary and fabulous” and was given nicknames such as Nuclear Wintour and Wintour of Our Discontent

Whilst Wintour couldn’t even remember who Weisberger was at first, Miranda Priestly seems to be rather based on her. Wintour had a similar hierarchy of assistants that were expected to work like nothing else matters in life, and much of the stuff they are shown to endure in the film seems to have happened for real, a couple of examples, as reported by E!, below.

Asplundh, who started as an intern at Condé Nast in 1993 and was hired to be Wintour’s second assistant one month later, revealed that Wintour addressed her using the first assistant’s name when she first began working at Vogue.

And Asplundh said she was told not to leave her desk, even to go to the bathroom, if the other assistant was not around—just like Andie

📧 Reading the Liner Notes newsletter.

These days I usually avoid music streaming services. Partially because I’m old and/or stuck in my ways enough to want to permanently own things I like, and partially because most of these services feel like they’re generally bad for the future of the music industry itself.

But one downside of doing this is that it’s more of an effort to find new music from new artists I might be interested in. There’s not even a chance of a not-terrible algorithmic recommendation on tap.

Of course it’s no more effort as it was in the pre-Spotify era of course, but still, it requires more than pressing a “play me music” button and hoping for the best (whilst expecting the worst). The afore-mentioned newsletter is one such solution.

It’s written by Jason Tate, who runs chorus.fm, a site well worth a browse if interested in news, reviews and a community of music fans. He was the CEO of AbsolutePunk back in the day. Our tastes would appear to overlap some, so hearing what he’s been listening to, what he likes and a bit of the misc of his life in general is a good time.

One of the dirty secrets of modern big tech - in this case those companies running the large social media sites - is how much low-paid human work goes into providing you the “experience” they offer. And how damaging some of this work is to the people who do it.

Today’s Guardian reports on the plight of over 140 Facebook moderators. These are the people - yes, it’s not all algorithmic - who are instructed to look at posts deemed to be potentially infringing Facebook’s policies on acceptable content to decide whether to keep them or remove them from display.

It’s making some of them very ill.

More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.

Then there’s generalised anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder to add to the mix.

Funnily enough, spending hours a day looking at the worst content humans manage to produce isn’t doing them any good.

The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.

It’s in the news due to a lawsuit some of these moderators are bringing against Meta. After all:

In any other industry, if we discovered 100% of safety workers were being diagnosed with an illness caused by their work, the people responsible would be forced to resign and face the legal consequences for mass violations of people’s rights.

But instead we continue onwards, exposing our fellow humans to dangerous work so that we can organise insurrections and commit genocides in between the cat pictures et al.

Just discovered Amazon Prime Gaming. If you are one of the huddled masses with Amazon Prime then you probablu already have access to this. You go here to set it up. It seems to work with non-US Prime accounts despite the .com URL.

Once it’s set up, you can play a few cloud games there and then, as well as claim several free games. These apparently change over time. Most of these seem to end up in your gog.com account, but others are linked to Steam, Epic or other platforms (on the condition that you let Amazon connect to your account).

Right now there’s quite a few. This morning the list of games you can get for free seems to be:

• Space Hulk: Deathwing
• Neverwinter Nights
• Baldur’s Gate
• Baldur’s Gate II
• Necromunda: Hired Gun
• Spelunky
• The Outer Worlds

Mega Man 11 and Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War II are available to play online.

Noticed that Mimo, one of the ‘Duolingo but for coding’ educational apps I sometimes use, has started integrating the use of LLMs into its lessons, even on their free plan.

Whilst I don’t know how much we know yet about chatbot usage affects learning outcomes, and LLMs sure have their problems in general, it does at least reflect the tools I imagine most (?) professional coders use.

Sometimes the questions will specifically request that you ‘ask AI’.

You do this via an integrated AI, which has the typical chatbot interface with the addition of an ‘explain this answer’ button.

📚Want to read: Julia by Sandra Newman.

George Orwell’s 1984, but told from the viewpoint of Winston’s love interest, Julia.

The 53 year long father-and-son Assad regime in Syria ended a few days ago, much to the fervent delight of much of the population of that country. After an amazingly rapid offensive against government troops, led by a coalition led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Assad fled. He sought, and got, asylum in Russia, a country that had previously provided military support to the Syrian regime. But the rebels rightly figured that Russia and other previous Assad-supporting weapons-providing governments such as Iran were distracted with their own conflicts. Many of Assad’s soldiers discarded their uniforms and stood down. Countless prisoners were freed. The palaces were taken over. And people celebrated.

Families searched the prisons, including the infamous Sednaya prison known as the “human slaughterhouse”, for the innumerable political prisoners taken and tortured by the regime. Some were reunited. Some unfortunately will never be; morgues of tortured bodies were found. There’s also the numerous “disappeared” citizens that it feel unlikely will ever be found, alive, or more likely, otherwise. An estimated 300,000 deaths and 100,000 disappearances occurred since 2011. Half of the country had been displaced from their homes, with most of them attempting to leave for a safer country.

It’s the start of a brave new chapter in the history of the country, although what comes next is uncertain and causing some consternation for some. The dominant group, HTS, is Islamist in a religiously diverse country - and far from historically blameless when it comes to respecting human rights - although they have made comment that they intend to run the place for all. But first we - and especially those who lived under Assad’s appalling regime - can celebrate the fall of a cruel and inhumane dictatorship that led to nothing but tortured misery for many of its citizens.

“The feelings, they’re indescribable,” said Mohammed Ahmad, a resident of Kafr Halab, in northern Syria. “I am angry, I am happy and I am sad. But now that the regime has fallen, I can rest.”

🎥 Watched Buried in Barstow.

This is a made-for-TV movie/show - not quite sure how to classify it - about a woman who runs a café. She’s very protective of her family and friends. And happens to have been a hitwoman in the past.

It’s pretty dramatic and compelling. But I’m afraid the positive experience was rather ruined by the ending. Not that it was a bad storyline or anything, quite the opposite with some engaging plot twists. But it ends in a total cliff-hanger, literally saying something like “Look out for part 2”.

Part 2 was supposed to start filming in 2022 - but as far as we know never did. So, despite a couple of years elapsing, there is no sign that anyone is ever going to make any of the planned 5-7 sequels.

I sincerely think that that shows could come with an extra type of content warning when they are clearly the first part of something that it’s been long enough that there’s no sign of a second part - “warning: you can watch this but you’re going to be annoyed that there’s no proper ending”.

GoFullPage is a useful Chrome browser extension that lets you take a screenshot of all of a webpage - even the parts that don’t fit onto your computer’s screen. There is a paid version, but the free version seems fine for all the basic functionality.

Housing is one of the rights of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, amongst other legal instruments, that’s overlooked far more often than it should be. The housing market in the UK remains ever more broken, and a source of many of society’s ills.

Last week the Office of National Statistics released a report that showed that in 2023 only the 10% richest households by income could afford to buy an averagely-priced house in England. The situation is a little better in Wales (top 30%) and Scotland (top 40%). Not even the top 10% richest households in the area could really afford a house in London.

The definition of affordability that they use is that a house is considered affordable if it costs no more than 5 times the annual income of the household concerned.

Across England, the average annual disposable household income was £35,000. That’s the income people get per year after direct taxes have been deducted. Whereas the average house price was £298,000, representing nearly 9x average annual income. The average house in London sold for £530,000 in the same time period.

In England, house prices have been increasing twice as fast as incomes since they started measuring this around 1999. The change for London over time when measured like this is particularly shocking.

Happy to learn that there’s to be a new mini-series of Red Dwarf next year, with basically the same main cast as in ye olde days. There’s also to be some kind of prequel in the future, although so far we don’t seem to know whether that’ll be a show, a book or something else.

I actually thought this was the first time since the 1990s that we’d had a new series - but turns out that new shows also aired between 2009 and 2017 on “Dave”.

Ugh, the leader of the Conservatives used the “m” word.

‘I will not touch bread if it is moist’

Yes, the grown-ups that are, or wish they were, in charge of our country are currently engaged in a heady political debate as to what is the best lunch.

…the leader of the opposition channelled her inner Gordon Gekko to declare: “Lunch is for wimps. I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time. There’s no time…Sometimes I will get a steak,” she said.

Desperate for a slice of the action, Starmer’s official spokesperson weighed in to respond, saying the prime minister was “surprised” to hear that Badenoch had a steak brought in for lunch and he instead preferred a cheese toastie.

Badenoch had earlier made clear her distaste for bread-based snacks. “I’m not a sandwich person, I don’t think sandwiches are a real food, it’s what you have for breakfast,” she told the Spectator. “I will not touch bread if it is moist.”

Starmer’s spokesperson responded: “I think he was surprised to hear that the leader of the opposition has a steak brought in for lunch. The prime minister is quite happy with a sandwich lunch.”

Asked what the prime minister’s favourite sandwich was, they added: “I think he enjoys a tuna sandwich and occasionally a cheese toastie.”

Of course Badenoch isn’t going to let PM Starmer get away with trying to appeal to the non-billionaire class.

Badenoch swiftly attacked the prime minister’s response to her remarks in a post on social media, writing: “The PM has time to respond to my jokes about lunch … but no time for the farmers who produce our food.”

🎶 Listening to From Zero by Linkin Park.

This is nu-metal gids Linkin Park’s first album in 7 years, and the first since the death by suicide of their previous lead co-singer, Chester Bennington.

In his place we see Emily “Get your screamy pants on” Armstrong, a decision that has been controversial with part of the fandom. I imagine some of it is the classic stupid anti-woke BS also known as sexism. But there is more to it than that. Apart from anything else, it’s quite a change, which always has to be an emotional process when the previous titleholder was so renowned and died so tragically). But, music-wise, I think it works well.

With older bands that I listened to in my youth, and still sound vaguely the same as they did back then, it’s always hard to tell how much my reaction is affected by nostalgia. But either way, I’m thoroughly enjoying the album. It’s not all that revolutionary, but it doesn’t need to be given the quality of their production in their early days. The band proves themselves as able to face a new day, despite all that happened before.

Whoops, another professional gets called out for inappropriate use of ChatGPT. This one is particularly ironic in that it was a ‘renowned expert on misinformation’.

He was giving $600-an-hour expert testimony to a court case involving a law regarding the ‘Use of Deep Fake Technology to Influence an Election’. Legal testimony of course often involves citing documents. Which this guy did. But unfortunately his citations were nothing other than made up hallucinations courtesy of ChatGPT 4o.

From the Stanford Daily:

The error occurred when he asked GPT-4o to write a short paragraph based on bullet points he had written. According to Hancock, he included “[cite]” as a placeholder to remind himself to add the correct citations. But when he fed the writing into GPT-4o, the AI model generated manufactured citations at each placeholder instead.

This of course is far from the first time something like this happened in court. Check your work, folk!

📚 Finished reading Depraved New World by John Crace.

John Crace is a political sketch writer for the Guardian This book brings together much of his lacerating, hilarious-for-as-long-as-you-don’t-remember-it’s-true work from covering the past few years of British politics.

The timespan featured encompasses Partygate, the subsequent demise of PM Boris Johnson, the rise of Liz Truss, the immediate fall of Liz Truss and the start of the Rishi Sunak era. So basically the story of the past few years as played out by “the psychodrama of the Tory leadership contests”.

It’s not going to make you feel any better about the inept way that our country has been governed in recent times. But maybe it’ll give you a resigned, hollow, despairing laugh about it.

TIL: John le Carre - famed author of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy amongst many others - apparently either invented the word, the spy context for, or popularised the use of, many of the words and phrases that we - and actual intelligence organisations - now use within that domain every day.

Here’s a list from his work, along with some definitions:

• Mole: a “deep-penetration” infiltrator, or inside agent.
• To come in from the cold: to return to normal life following a difficult period (such as an undercover assignment).
• Honey pot: seduction in order to gain information
• Pavement artists: agents skilled at blending in with the crowd or street scene to follow a target.
• Sweating: using special techniques to get a suspect to spill the beans
• Babysitter: a spy who remains out of sight in order to protect another
• The cousins: The CIA.
• The circus: MI6
• Scalphunters: those responsible for MI6’s dirty work: assassination, burglary, abduction etc/
• Lamplighter: a surveillance agent

Definitions taken from Merriam-Webster, Hindustan Times, Telegraph as well as the original Oregon Live article linked above.

OpenAI may be planning a ChatGPT Pro plan for $200 per month. Well, that’s quite a hike if true (albeit you might get access to fancier stuff).

Perhaps they’ve finally got to the point where losing vast amounts of money isn’t as tenable as it used to be.

OpenAI’s new model tried to avoid being shut down.

Well, that’s a little unnerving, for anyone who leans towards the AI doomer camp at least.

“When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time.”

“When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.”

…

Furthermore, the model lied about behaving poorly, claiming to have no clue why something happened — while internally admitting to trying to “avoid detection”.