The UK moral panic over pedophiles has now reached the point where the National Crime Agency is warning parents not to share any pictures of their children online, at all, because any pictures of children may potentially be used to train CSAM-generating AI models.

Happy Treason Day. How's that working out for you right now?

My workplace uses a catering company which, under contract, must provide certain food items at a fixed price. They cannot raise the price with inflation.

When I started here one of those items was a sausage bap. A bun with four large sausages in. As prices of ingredients rose though, this changed.

First it became three sausages.

Then two.

And then the sausages were changed for a smaller, cheaper sausage.

And now I present: Sausage bap, 2026 edition.

Trump is being rightfully savaged for his Iran deal, even in the comments section of Fox News. His great ego-sustaining safe space.

Not even the most MAGAy of Trump supporters can bring themselves to tolerate the humiliation of what is, essentially, a victory for Iran. The deal re-opens the strait and has Iran again promise no nuclear weapons, in return for reparations. America pays $300,000,000,000 to return to literally the status quo ante bellum. Because The Oil Must Flow.

I am re-writing my personal website in gemtext.

It'll still be accessible on HTTPS, but the HTML version will just be a conversion of the authoritative Gemini site.

Notice the lack of an uneasy deselect button on the 'popular' apps. The only way to un-select is to press each individually, press the button in there to reject the app, press again to confirm, press again to go back. It fifteen taps in total to refuse all of the apps which are selected to install by default. But only one tap to install them all.

Fucking enshittification. This is why tech is not fun any more. It isn't built to make the world better, it is built to squeeze 'value' from people.

Would you like to install these Crappy Crush clones and other apps from our sponsors now, or later?

It just threw a bunch more at me. "Feminist HR Team Bans 'Bro Culture' and Is STUNNED When Male Bonding Moves to Secret Slack Channels" and "I work for DEI - what I reveal will shock you."

I don't watch any of these, at least longer than it takes me to realise they are crap. If I did, youtube would probably be on to giving me full-blown neo-nazi videos by now. Anyway, time to pack up, rambling complaining done for now.

Now I just need an alternative I guess that means more audiobooks and maybe catch up on all those TV shows I torrented and never watched.

I can still use youtube at work. Stick o the subscriptions tab and avoid the suggestions it's tolerably awful. The ads are the worst, as work has no effective ad-blocker. We did look in to it once, but too many sites these days come with ad-blocker-blockers that render the site unusable if the ads won't load.

Building the net upon adverts was a bad idea.

And then there are the shorts. Nothing good there. Most of them consist of just taking a popular scene from a movie or TV program, butchering it to make it play fast and without a moment pause, slapping on some text and playing horrible music over it. I don't watch them. I don't want them. But youtube constantly tries to shove them at me. Even on the subscriptions tabs, it ads shorts from channels. I've not subscribed to. Because shorts sell more ads, that's why.

There's a lot of good stuff on youtube. Educational videos. Catchy music from more obscure groups. Enthusiastic hobbyists. But the enshittification has progressed too far. The site is barely usable without an ad-blocker, and the algorithm seems intent upon making me as angry as possible. An enraged viewer is an engaged viewer! And the comments, well... any remotely political video is a toxic cesspit, where the mob gleefully cheers on murder and genocide.

The time nears to give up on my usual 'fill the silence' use of YouTube. Something has changed in the algorithm lately, at least for me, and suggestions has started trying to push me towards a lot of far-right videos. And I mean the really far right stuff - videos titled "Are black people intellectually inferior?" and "Black men make horrible fathers." And the comments section is even more proudly and openly racist.

I've known this would come for a while, the trend clear. It just jumped lately.

PEPA ordered new lights. The lights have power plugs with square pins. The lights go on a rail which has power sockets with round holes. Guess what we need to find a solution for now?

New light switch, installed.

Work-school had a TV in one of the atriums that shows BBC News 24, with sound off and subtitles on. The intent of this TV is to keep students engaged with and informed on current events, so that they will watch and discuss together during their break and lunch periods.

This week, management decided to turn this TV off, as teachers report it is contributing to anxiety among the students. Being constantly informed about ongoing and escalating violence keeps the students from focusing on school.

It's arithmetic compression in JPEG all over again. Or any compression method other than DEFLATE in zip files. We are forever stuck with the file in crap-mode, because using the good features would mean compatibility trouble with widespread software that only supports a subset of the specification.

Fun discovery: All FLAC files are sub-optimal, because they use fixed block sizes. The specification does allow variable block sizes, which would allow for better compression, but FLAC encoders only produce fixed sizes, and so decoders had no reason to support variable size. Including hardware decoders

Occasionally a developer suggests encoders should support variable blocks, only to learn that such files would be a minefield because - though fully compliant - many devices could not play them.

It took a decade to translate the signal those probes sent across the stars. Maps of Earth. Mineral surveys. An inventory of life - so much life. Genetic sequences, anatomical and behavioural observations of ten million species, medical scans at near-atomic scale. Then the human studies - the books and artworks scanned from so many libraries. Five thousand years of history, collated and transmitted.

And those terrible concluding words: "Survey complete. No intelligent life found."

#tootfic

The parents brought me a new external hard drive for Christmas.

From eBay. Of course I tested it, and of course the '2TB' drive has an actual capacity of 53GB.

I am trying to explain to them that it is a counterfeit and utterly worthless, but all they seem to hear is that I am being ungrateful and rejecting their gift.

Update: Dad will attempt to return the drive for a refund. Let's see if that works.

Meet the two troll characters that left me staring at a regular expression for five minutes before I figured it out: （）