Turnout for Farage's "Lets show the establishment" by-election was 43%.

I wish the Clacton voting was being live streamed like a big swingometer.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp308xpwv34o. Look at that list of candidates. I can't help but think it would have been better if this had been a two horse race, though, rather than siphoning off the weirdo protest votes to 35 other candidates. #clacton

My awesome friend JoeTheDough used to run a little site called "Sexy A Levels" or something that was satirically highlighting the media's tendency to illustrate A-Level result stories with girls, rather than boys. He took it down in the end because it wasn't possible to make the satire obvious enough and he worried it was indistinguishable from a perv magnet.

I think about him, and that, every august when the BBC and newspapers are full of stuff like this:

I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/

The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.

If you’re not abandoning good ideas, you’re probably not ruthless enough in your prioritization.

Funny how America's two big growth industries at the moment are AI and dysentry

Listen, I'm not saying these things are linked, but I'm also not not saying they are…

This is surely a Mountain Goats song.

My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance.

We'll see about that.

Everyone: "We urgently need ethical tech that deals with the big issues facing us as a species"
Tech bros: "Understood. What about an AI app that lets you anonymously switch someone else's heart off & on again? Y'know, for fun. Such an app would only consume about the same energy as 4 Saudi Arabias"

And the body language in this, taken at the end, reminds me why I don't organise conferences any more. :-) https://www.flickr.com/photos/thilosoph/5605360271/

And here's Zoe. That was from the 2011 conference, her second performance. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jrusch/6602232511/. Photo by Zoe's husband Jeff, now sadly gone, like many other people in the pictures.

Now I'm down a Scotruby Flickr rabbit hole. https://www.flickr.com/photos/keavy/4467301289. That looks like @emilybache behind me

@acf

I am eternally grateful to you for this singular experience: https://vimeo.com/23849926

Just fwiw:
I came of (draft) age under Nixon.

Nixon

today

couldn't run as a democrat

because

he was way too far left.

While trying to find a version that works in the US I also found this :) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JI4oAQ9Lo_w

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FGT0A2Hz-uk I am once again posting that KT Tunstall TV debut last minute replacement from 2004 because she blew The Cure and Jackson Browne out of the water.

Max Theriot left my beloved nonsense “Seal Team” for his own vehicle “Fire Country”. I just tried to watch a couple of episodes and it’s truly awful. And I thought Seal Team was bad.

I was asked recently about the cost of running a (#rustlang) conference and why the ticket prices are what they are. We figured we can just publicly share the numbers for RustWeek, in the name of #transparency. :)

RustWeek has many subevents (conference, hackathon, unconference, workshops, Rust All Hands, etc.), but I've tried to extract just the two day conference part of RustWeek 2026:

Venue rent: € ~50k
Lunch, snacks, drinks two full days: € ~130k (incl. catering services and exclusive access to 1000 person restaurant all day)
A/V services: € ~30k (incl. livestreaming, professionals operating the cameras/microphones/screens in the rooms, editing the recordings, etc.)
Stuff we set up at the venue: € ~20k (sponsor booths, entertainment, banners, stickers, wifi, etc.)
Travel compenstation for speakers: € ~10k
External services: € ~25k (accounting, registration & payment, event management, insurance, etc.)
Miscelaneous: € ~15k

This adds up to roughly € 280k for just the two conference days. (The total for all of RustWeek is ~€ 400k.)

The money we get from sponsors covers roughly half of the costs. The other half has to be covered by tickets.

We are currently the biggest Rust conference with 850+ attendees. We give free tickets to all the speakers and volunteers, which is almost a hundred people total. The sponsor packages also include a total of roughly 100 tickets. That leaves ~650 sold tickets.

Those are roughly 250 corporate tickets (~410 euro after tax), 300 individual tickets (~190 euro after tax), and 100 student tickets (~30 euro after tax). Accounting for the various discounts (early bird, discount codes, etc.) and overhead, this leaves us with roughly 140k.

Those student tickets are sold at a significant loss, but it's very important to us to not just run this conference for those with a well paid job.

Setting the ticket prices is very tricky, because you have to set them a year in advance, before you know what amount of sponsorship to expect. We only find out *after* the event if we guessed correctly or if we ran at a loss. This year, we made a (very small) profit, which we'll spend on our Rust Maintainers Team: https://rustnl.org/maintainers/

I'm excited to give a sneak peek of a new member of the Sessions family.

Sessions Nano is a streamlined real-time AUv3 host for iPhone and iPad. It distills the DNA of Sessions Pro into a compact design that’s perfect for the smaller screen.

More details coming soon!

https://www.openplanetsoftware.com