Prescience
Frank Herbert couldn't have been any more prescient... "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -- Dune #ai
Jason R Briggs
Jason R Briggs
Latest posts
KDE, the return
The first version of Linux I ran at home (23+ yrs ago) was Gentoo with KDE (where a typical upgrade involved a nail-biting setup and overnight build where you kicked off the compile and hoped like hell you hadn't messed up something when you restarted the next morning). Since then it's mostly been Gnome on more user-friendly dists. After a year or so with Manjaro/Gnome, I've finally flipped to KDE…
Kiwi activist alleges violent abuse by Israeli forces
stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360984340/i-could-die-here-kiwi-activist-alleges-violent-abuse-israeli-forces "A spokesperson for the Israeli prison service said the allegations were 'false and entirely without factual basis'." Renowned liars tell yet more lies and expect the world to reject the evidence of their own eyes...
Keep Android Open
https://keepandroidopen.org/ I've already installed f-droid , and interestingly there's a Notes app there which is closer to what I wanted than the free ones in the Play store...
Alternate AI business model
So if AI can regurgitate works in their almost unmodified form , I wonder how long till a new business model emerges... where a company dual-licensing their code under (for example) GPL and a commercial license, can then charge an exorbitant amount of money to corporates to stop the GPL infection of their codebases - because there's no way to tell how much copied code their employees are being…
Corruption in the UK courts
"This would be the first time a barrister has ever faced contempt of court for the contents of their closing speech. Menon now faces two years in prison for the high crime of reminding the jury of their centuries-old right to return verdicts without fear of punishment from the trial judge." https://thegrayzone.com/2026/04/12/uk-jail-palestine-action-terrorism-uk/?ref=jasonrbriggs.com
Lawful?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-sri-lanka-submarine-warship-b2933385.html?ref=jasonrbriggs.com It’s telling that UK media hasn’t highlighted the Iranian frigate being unarmed, despite it being widely reported across Asia (lots of talk in Thailand). There’s also been little scrutiny of whether adequate assistance was provided to sailors in the water. Touting the sinking of…
Spanish premier rejects unilateral military action by US, Israel
What a legend: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260228-spanish-premier-rejects-unilateral-military-action-by-us-israel/
It's funny how the brain works
(In memorial: David Bowie) I saw David Bowie in 1987, at the final concert of the Glass Spider Tour at Western Springs Stadium in Auckland. A local radio station had organized a couple of buses, and my friend and I - both teenagers at the time - decided we had to go (much convincing of parents then ensued). The buses were scheduled to travel together, 8-9 hours each way, meaning we’d spend all of…
When you should check the forecast...
The above picture was the view walking towards Pico de la Zarza, in Fuerteventura , on Tuesday. The cloud was thick enough that you could barely see a few metres ahead of you (which is more than a little disturbing once you reach the top and you know there’s a fairly steep cliff on the other side), and also dense enough that I could actually wring water from my beard. And this is what it’s…
Spacing causing confusion
Martin writes: My son is working through your book. He spotted a very minor error and I thought we would report it: In Chapter 8 on Page 102, the code for the three classes is missing an extra newline between the Animal and Mammal class. This can create some confusion when typing in the code at the REPL. Thanks for the report and good spot. I’ve fixed it in Overleaf (which is the tool we used to…
Python for Kids in Bulgarian
I somehow forgot to post this last year, but the Bulgarian translation of Python for Kids (2nd Edition, no less) was published in October 2024. Available from Via Lettera .
The last thing you expect to find in a recipe book
I’ve just returned from a trip to New Zealand over Christmas - my first time back since before covid. While there, I was looking through an old handwritten recipe book, which my mother inherited from an aunt (or great aunt, I forget now), and on the back of one of the many recipe newspaper cuttings (which were pasted in, but eventually worked themselves loose over the past 50 years or so), I found…
ActivityPub on a (mostly) static site
Following on from this post , for anyone who's interested in getting ActivityPub integrated on their static site, this is what I've needed to setup/build (some of this may indeed be redundant, but it 'evolved' over time, so easier just to leave alone than fix). Some not-hugely-relevant background: I have a custom-built site generator, written in Python, pushing files via git to a Gitea instance…
Mastodon and http sig
I've been trying to integrate ActivityPub (basically Mastodon ) into my static site with varying levels of success. The most difficult part is the inbox which is obviously not static - there are 3rd party services to help, like fed.brid.gy , but I had limited success with that unfortuately, so in the end I've rolled my own basic inbox. The next major hurdle was responding to activities (like…
An update on duckduckgo search
After reading the experiences of a number of other folk also having issues with Microsoft Bing (and thereby DuckDuckGo) indexing -- particularly this comment on Hacker News, I've come to the conclusion it was my fault after all. At some point last year, I redirected my older (mostly unused) domain to this site, but using "cloaking". Meaning the url in the browser stays the same, and it just serves…
Salting with Spark
Posting this on the off-chance it's useful to someone else... On my current project, we have a tonne of Spark logic which needs to aggregate and (generally) sum data which is grouped by different keys, in order to then apply business rules at the record level (i.e. if the total of amount x, when grouped by a, b and c, is over a threshold then apply one calculation to each record in the group,…
Leaving DuckDuckGo... sort of
This is a weird one. DDG has been my search engine of choice for a number of years, so I also used it as the search engine for this site (since it's statically generated ). At some point over the last 3 (I think) months it stopped working - returning no results for any search criteria. Given Bing provides at least some percentage of DDG's content, I went digging in Bing's webmaster tools and found…
Python for Kids 2 and LaTeX
For those who are interested, Python for Kids 2 has been completely rewritten as LaTeX (using No Starch 's style); partially in text files, and partially in Overleaf : Overleaf was great, particularly for the review process, but I have to say working in LaTeX is an order of magnitude better than using a Word Processor - especially when the files are backed by a git repo (which Overleaf provides)…