Ken Milmore

Ageing software engineer 👴💻
#Debian enthusiast 🐧
Dabbler in mathematics ∞
Lefty vegetarian tree-hugger 🌹🥕🌳
Gateshead, UK 🐐🇬🇧🇪🇺
𝓖↔¬𝖯𝗋𝗈𝗏(⌜𝓖⌝)

#noai #noindex #nobots

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Last Notes

2026-08-23 16:44:46 UTC

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Even if you power a data centre on 100% renewables, that's an opportunity cost of renewable capacity that could have been fed to the grid instead. They provide hardly any jobs, no services to the local community, and no benefit to the local economy. They are not even nice to look at. There really is no good reason to approve a commercial data centre, ever.

2026-07-21 22:49:00 UTC

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I broke off from running KDE way back when they were heavily pushing the semantic desktop. I never liked the look of Gnome and I don't want mandatory compositing. So I've ended up on Xfce for the last 20 years or so. I admire it's consistency, although I did find the transition to GTK3 painful.

2026-06-27 18:14:58 UTC

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I've always assumed that the main reason people use (non-corporate) VPNs isn't privacy per se, it's to torrent movies and other content undetected.

2026-06-22 10:05:26 UTC

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Also like a Reform councillor, it is already unappealing even when it's fresh. (Subjective)

2026-06-22 09:59:01 UTC

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As a yardstick for political impermanence, the lettuce seems well suited - for prime ministers. But I fear we will need a smaller unit to measure the tenure of Reform councillors. I cannot offhand think of a vegetable that perishes rapidly enough. 🤔

2026-06-21 11:09:59 UTC

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Actually the subsidised buses are a big deal. But mostly yeah you're right.
There is the glimmer of possibility that Burnham will actually shift the agenda left once he gets in, but he has to keep his powder dry as otherwise he'll upset the bond markets before he even gets in, and that will be used against him.
The sad truth is that Britain (or at least England) is a conservative country, and it is very difficult to sell anything socialist.

2026-06-13 09:43:01 UTC

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Philosophically, we should probably consider the flip side: Suppose an AI system is ever produced which is considered by general agreement to be sentient. There are dark precedents for putting sentient beings into forced labour. The way to take the wind out of this before it ever happens would be to legislate in advance against any monetisation or ownership of an artificial sentience. If there's no money in it, I can't see the tech bros holding their interest.

2026-06-13 08:31:19 UTC

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I am reminded of Paul Merton on HIGNFY some years ago despairing that we aren't all flying around with jet packs like he'd once been promised. Sometimes we have a false expectation of what technology will bring us.

2026-06-12 17:28:31 UTC

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https://media.wayfresh.agency/fabulous-north/place/6-d85c3c0f6fe.jpg
Maybe the little ones along the top.

2026-05-31 17:54:17 UTC

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The reason I'm being devil's advocate here is that this one issue looms so large in many of the problems we discuss elsewhere about lack of money for everything. If the government gets into a position where nobody wants to buy bonds at a modest return, then presumably we are left with increasing taxation and/or printing money. I assume that the taxation option is viewed as politically toxic. I'd like to know about the nuts and bolts of the remaining option.

2026-05-31 17:05:09 UTC

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But that doesn't seem to be the prevailing narrative: If the bond markets lose confidence then the government is forced to give a higher return on bonds. Is that not what happened to Truss/Kwarteng? (Albeit they wanted to implement tax cuts instead of spending).
If money is all about trust, then I'd say there is serious a trust problem between the government and the private sector. And that does materially limit government spending.

2026-05-31 12:19:20 UTC

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Hasn't QE been panned anyway for enriching the bond markets? Directly funding spending by printing money seems a lot more socially progressive, but I wonder whether the govt. could ever get away with doing it without the entire market system working against them. And good luck trying to take the money back out with progressive taxation...

2026-05-31 11:02:22 UTC

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Specifically, it seems to be a hot issue whether you could print money to directly fund public spending (is that called "debt monetisation"?) or whether this would lead to serious problems. Corbyn/McDonnell seemed to advocate it, and it feels like the Greens might be moving in this direction too. I wonder how that relates to the gilt markets, and whether the government would be burning their boats on borrowing if they ever started printing money instead?

2026-05-15 21:05:10 UTC

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When I was a kid, I found CRT TVs and monitors soooo noisy and annoying. Now I am old I can't hear above 14kHz, but all the CRTs are gone anyway. I wonder are there any modern appliances that squeal incessantly to annoy the youth of today?

2026-05-13 09:30:03 UTC

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I agree. But I think people are making a terrible mistake if they consider Labour "no better than Reform". Same goes for the Lib Dems. I think we are on a one way street to oblivion here: look at what MAGA has done in the US; if we get the same in Britain it will be impossible to reverse. It is a mistake we only get to make once.

2026-05-13 08:56:00 UTC

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Should that really be the strategy? despite their recent success, I doubt the Greens will be able secure an overall majority in a general election, so that's just more likely to hand power to Reform. I wish the progressive parties would each stop pretending that they can get everyone to vote for them and try to develop some cooperation against what is an existential threat to British democracy.

2026-05-08 14:20:31 UTC

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The big problem with the right is that they tend to do irreversible things. Like selling off public assets that councils will never be able to afford to buy back. It's never about who you vote *in* in England; its about who you manage to keep out.

2026-04-11 21:30:13 UTC

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It's easier to desolder them from the BNC connector end.

2026-03-26 19:11:48 UTC

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If China were ever to move in on Taiwan, we'd be in the same position with digital technology rather than oil. The effects would be less immediate, but just as far reaching.

2026-03-22 11:46:37 UTC

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Having had some exposure to a government IT project in the past, my impression was that the lack of related skills on the civil service side put the vendors at an exploitative advantage. I'd conjecture that few of the senior staff had any useful function, finding themselves managing a "digital service" they knew nothing about. If the government had kept IT "in house" early on and transformed the civil service that way, they could have saved a fortune.

2026-03-19 13:02:18 UTC

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Toothless regulators seems to be a recurring pattern across multiple industries; it seems like just another backwash effect of the original Tory privatisations.
I find it difficult to understand why Labour didn't just appoint more aggressive state regulators across the board. I wonder is that mainly for fiscal reasons or is it because it would hinder their attempts to court the right?

2026-02-20 11:55:07 UTC

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I think you can extend this argument to the whole "benefits culture" that the right complains about so much. A lot of working people need benefits because employers expect them to work for next to nothing. If workplaces paid better, trained better and offered more flexibility (they have never come to terms with single-breadwinner households no longer being the norm) then there would be less burden on the state to prop everyone up.

2026-02-20 10:26:57 UTC

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My impression of SEND is that it has dropped on society in much the same way as social care for the elderly. For whatever reason, it is a large expense that didn't exist before and does now. One assumes that people with certain needs were formerly either institutionalised or allowed to fall by the wayside. It's one of the ways in which progress calls for a "big state" with relatively high taxation, at just the same time as popular opinion votes for the opposite.

2026-02-17 08:29:19 UTC

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The entire motivation powering the "AI revolution" is that it is a way of making money without expending human effort. That is diametrically opposite from the idea that we should all pursue socially fulfilling vocations. I don't expect young people to buy this nonsense for long, which basically tells them to get used to being poor while someone else becomes incredibly rich. ☹️

2026-02-05 12:19:39 UTC

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It all gets a bit circular though: I guess that "meaning", in the sense you "mean" it, has a different meaning to different people, so it is subjective. But then I may have missed your point, which is exactly my point. 🤔
As for what is "important" though, I guess the pain and suffering of conscious beings is very important in the sense that it is bad, and worthy of our attention. Most of us recognise that, even though it is also subjective. 😢

2026-02-04 21:42:19 UTC

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My OH asks is that graph inflation adjusted or is it in absolute £?

2026-02-01 13:26:46 UTC

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I think the politicians assume that AI will be like biotech, that it will give us another nerdy speciality quaternary sector with startup companies and collaboration with universities and suchlike. In reality it is going to be a bit like hosting a US airbase. Except with no staff, so you don't even get to sell beer and crisps to them at the weekend.

2026-02-01 13:21:50 UTC

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What is the driver for all this questionable inward investment? Is it because our balance of payments is shot because we are not exporting enough products and services to balance consumption?

2026-01-22 12:58:43 UTC

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It features a lot less of Greenland and Alaska than I might have expected.

2026-01-06 18:08:35 UTC

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I saw a post on here a few days back about sleeper trains across Europe, and that played a similar chord. Demand doesn't seem to count for much in the rail industry.

2025-12-21 11:51:50 UTC

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If only this "flawed but least bad" stance on capitalism were taken by our Labour government, we might actually be in a better position. It admits corollaries that regulation, taxation etc will be needed to mitigate capitalism's worst excesses. Instead there seems to be a crushing fear of upsetting "the markets" or "business confidence", or of deterring inward investment, which causes them to adopt a perpetual perky optimism where a cold skepticism would better serve.

2025-12-04 10:40:56 UTC

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I take a more cynical base position: "AI" is an attempt to prevent computing from becoming democratised. It enables a rentist model of extraction based on ownership of huge data centres and infrastructure, on stealing our data and culture en masse and leasing it back to us. It's a land grab and those perpetrating it will consider that it "works" insofar as it imbues them with wealth and political power.

2025-11-22 13:24:32 UTC

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A political admission that Brexit was a mistake and that we would like to rejoin would be the first step. I suspect people will immediately rankle at the negotiation terms though. We will be applying as a junior member, the rebate will be gone, we might have to accept the Euro. We can never have back what we spaffed away.

2025-11-22 11:56:32 UTC

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We have a diversity of views on the left, which I see as a good thing, but having been collectively out of effective power for so long I suspect we are bad at making compromises. We each make our own hill we want to die on. The right also have it easier than ever, because in the strange information fantasy land they've created, anything is possible, however implausible. In fact I think some wear their adherence to blatant untruths as a badge of honour.

2025-11-22 11:12:05 UTC

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It's the politics of embarrassment. Those who supported Brexit are either in denial or don't want to face the humiliation. We all don't really want to face the cost, which is huge. But because none of the politicians will talk about it, we haven't begun the much needed public debate over what remedies might be available to make the situation slightly less awful.

2025-11-10 21:29:50 UTC

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I find myself feeling emotionally compromised by this more than any other news event since Brexit. What has given me most cause to despair from the reaction on this platform, is that a lot of folk on the left have become so frustrated with the level of bias recently, that they appear to have burnt their boats and there's not much goodwill left for the Beeb on either end of the political spectrum. How do they get back from that?

2025-11-05 11:04:24 UTC

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Yes this. It's a common trap to forget that a basic feature exists and then gasp in awe when it is given back to you disguised as a fancy framework.

2025-10-29 21:11:27 UTC

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But presumably they have not given him any money? The sort of money they have spent on Crossrail, let alone HS2, applied a bit further north (Liverpool Manchester Leeds Hull Darlington Newcastle) could do some very interesting things. But they will never allocate the money.

2025-10-18 14:23:49 UTC

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The BBC Today programme is the worse off for her departure. She has a very cerebral and controlled style though, which doesn't pair so well with bombasts.

2025-10-18 12:16:02 UTC

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No criticism meant! Thanks for all your insightful posts, I always read them with interest. And thanks for letting us all use your feed as a discussion forum, you are exemplifying what's great about the Fediverse. 🙂

2025-10-18 09:30:37 UTC

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I missed your poll but I'd have prevaricated over the options anyway. The "AI" acronym seems to have become a synonym for "LLM", which makes it difficult to discuss the possibilities and dangers of the underlying technology. In terms of funding, I sometimes think it is like George Stephenson demanding we cover the entire world with railways and mine all the coal in advance before they can even start to build a steam locomotive. LLMs are a shiny bauble to raise money.

2025-10-10 12:24:40 UTC

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That article now seems to have been removed!

2025-10-09 11:52:59 UTC

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Are you saying it is *algebraically* zero or is this an artefact of numeric methods? Presumably there is a Nonzero field at each sample point but the vector sum is zero? Or is it because lack of symmetry with 83 points?

2025-10-04 13:22:23 UTC

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I remember reading (in John Sargent's autobiography of all places) about John Cole, who I remember as BBC political editor when I was in my teens. He was ostensibly the first political editor to go for that inside view, interpreting all the lobby gossip, mood music and intrigue. Trouble is, that style only works well if you can keep your political bias, left or right, well out of the analysis. Maybe we'd be better off reverting to more straight reporting and less interpretation?

2025-10-04 13:10:00 UTC

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Yes the Beeb engages in a lot of political pandering, and it is upsetting. But I still credit most of their senior news people like Lise Doucet, Jeremy Bowen, Steve Rosenberg, Ros Atkins, John Simpson and the like as being unbiased and objective. In fact I trust them at that level more than any other news source. People seem to express disgust when media people express opinions they don't like, or don't express an opinion that they do. But with news coverage I only want facts.

2025-10-04 12:28:06 UTC

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You're not wrong. Around here, we had a few more bus services back in the '80s: Certainly you could reach quite a few outlying places that are no longer served at all by public transport. But most of the local branch rail services disappeared before I was born, in the Beeching axe of the mid '60s. Some recent attempts have been made to rectify this crime, but it is very slow progress. Ironically this year we are celebrating 200 years of rail travel in the North East of England. 🙄

2025-10-04 11:56:13 UTC

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I still do a fair amount of that too! But I end up regularly making journeys with 3 or 4 connections, which can be 3 hours end to end. Returning doubles that. So after you've already conceded to losing 6 hours of your day to travel, it becomes a matter of not losing so much more that the journey was effectively a write-off.

2025-10-04 09:01:29 UTC

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I managed to avoid having a smartphone up until a couple of years ago. I use public transport a lot, and find it invaluable to be able to get live travel information. In a pinch, I could make do with a Linux device that has a usable web browser and can do phone/SMS, but it would be good to keep some of the live travel apps. So I'm hoping someone will find a viable solution before Goggle pull the carpet out from under me next September. Watching with interest! 🙂

2025-09-29 09:23:45 UTC

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I tend to feel managers are greatly overvalued, while competent administrators are greatly undervalued, in the modern workplace.

2025-09-28 09:12:36 UTC

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I tend to think of the existential threat stuff as a smoke screen. It paints the AI as the potential threat rather than the people who own and control it. The whole LLM thing is particularly galling: Having illegally expropriated the collective intellectual efforts of humanity they expect to claim ownership of the product for their own enrichment. It is the greatest theft ever attempted and threatens to destroy the social contracts by which we all labour for our sustenance.

2025-09-27 08:29:57 UTC

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In the UK, we seem to have the Starmerite approach of following the window as it shifts to the right, versus the Corbynite attitude of 'Jerusalem or bust'. I guess these correspond to Tony Benn's 'weathervanes' and 'signposts': Attitudes you might hope could coexist in the same party and arrive at a practical and electable compromise in terms of policy. Except they don't. ☹️

2025-09-07 10:13:08 UTC

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It is a well worn cliché that we Brits don't like to talk about money, but I think this has made it even harder to appreciate the huge gaps in income and assets which have developed. Families with "ordinary" middle class careers will routinely end up accruing millions of pounds worth of assets, creating an enormous gulf from low income earners who don't have pennies to rub together. Very occasionally, they get a glimpse of how appalling the inequalities really are.

2025-08-29 08:45:55 UTC

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If birth rate is linked to political views, is that perhaps a side effect of political views being tied to socio-economic groups? Also politics is very fluid these days: Are all the traditional Labour voters who have lately flipped to Reform counted as right wing now?

2025-08-28 09:07:30 UTC

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There remains though, the issue that net migration has been significant, and the UK population is predicted to grow for the next few years. One would expect that growth to be accompanied by infrastructure investment to accommodate more people. But in the context of austerity and constrained spending it implies that more people will have to do with less. I think people sense a contradiction there: Where are all the new homes, schools, hospitals, transport hubs...?

2025-08-21 21:52:29 UTC

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Here's how I view all this: Every decade or so there has been an expansion of IT which has given an enormous return on investment: PCs in the'90s, Web in the 2000's, Mobile apps in the 2010's or whatever. There is an expectation in the IT industry of the next high return thing. What if it doesn't happen? What if we have reached peak IT? They cannot imagine their industry without growth.

2025-08-04 12:28:26 UTC

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There will likely be some setup related to exposing the server to the internet, either via port forwarding or a DMZ (normally configured on your router). Also you should first check if your ISP has given you a static address, and if it operates a firewall.

2025-06-18 22:19:48 UTC

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It's annoying that none of these articles link to the specific documents or rulings involved. It's not necessarily that I want to read them, but it is sometimes useful to know exactly what they are talking about. I think this is the appeal court judgement here: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/civ/2025/571

2025-05-24 18:04:26 UTC

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Care to summarise for non-subscribers?

2025-04-09 20:39:05 UTC

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That does not look like an insulated screwdriver.

2024-11-17 16:03:05 UTC

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Seeing this has made me realise where the late Russ Nicholson derived his style from.
https://russnicholson.blogspot.com/