Sigh, no they wouldn't. This is called "impact bias."

The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge sells officially licensed prints of John Harris's stunning sci-fi illustrations from Sinclair manuals - the ZX Spectrum floating city, the ZX81 cover, and the Microdrive manual art. Beautiful on any wall. computinghistory.org.uk

Howay the toon.

I vibe coded my own database.

R Tape Loading Error. Three words. No explanation. No suggestion. No comfort. Just the cold, factual announcement that the last four minutes of your life have been wasted. The Spectrum didn't believe in softening the blow.

Solidaridad con la republica.

This is spot on. The comments are well worth a read for a masterclass in ahistorical liberal self-delusion.

This has aged badly. Inflation means we're now way past £70 and rising fast.

Interesting idea. dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.... Some steps towards an oft-discussed notion of whether lots of crappy servers is better/cheaper than fewer really good servers. h/t @nacrooks.bsky.social

This wins the internet today.

Will this be extended to British nationals? Asking for a friend.

Hey folks, don't suppose anyone has a good recommendation for smoke and CO alarms? My google nests are slowly going out of date and Google have stopped selling them. Systems have to be UK D1 or D2 rated.

Team Starmer have not improved since the departure of McSweeny. This is such an unforced error. There was no need for the punch-left and false equivalence between people who want to work for something better for all of us versus those who want to divide us through hate.

Really pleased to see just how strong the agenda is for @neo4j.com's NODES AI 2026. If graphs and AI are your thing, you should check it out too: neo4j.com/nodes-ai/age...

~20kWh of solar PV today, first day of the year generating more than we need on a daily basis. It's February, in England.

Slightly late notice, but I'm presenting on some interesting distributed systems consensus work tomorrow evening (Australia Eastern time, morning European time). Will be fun, if you like protocols and fault tolerance. www.meetup.com/en-au/sydney...

If only there was some well-known book we could read about how the bourgeois always end up siding with the oppressor to save their own skin.

The British should celebrate the 5th July as a national holiday with fireworks and razzmatazz . It would be a fitting tribute to a revolutionary institution, and have the benefit of confusing the Americans.

But also maybe KS3 and KS4 English literature absolutely kill the joy of books by picking irrelevant works (classics!) or pretending that old plays make good reading (verily!). That's how it went for me.

Labour_Party.gif

Systems friends! The latest edition of the UK Systems conference will be held in County Durham in April. uksystems.org/workshop/2026/ Lovely place, lovely people. Attend if you can!

if("query" != null) { ... } All hail our robot overlords.

Looking at pricing for smoke alarms, and I simply cannot believe that Google are killing Nest. They're 2-3x the price of other smoke alarms - how can you not be wildly profitable at these levels?

I have very much fallen out of love with Google hardware. They EOL'd Nest smoke alarms, and I've had it with their Wifi pucks. I'm just waiting for them to kill their thermostats. Ubiquiti kit ordered. Any advice on smoke alarms?

About 12mWh less gas consumed than in previous years. Reasons: - Mild weather - Internal insulation for every wall and ceiling in all upstairs rooms - Low temp underfloor heating everywhere - Solar thermal in summer (very evident on chart) (Good year for solar PV too: 50% of home plus two cars)

Hands down the best Christmas movie of all time.

Joy Division vs Charlie Brown dance party also slaps...

This beggars belief. It is insane to be spending almost twice as much upgrading the UK's gas network than its electricity network. The gas network must quickly become legacy, not future-proofed. www.theguardian.com/money/2025/d...

Nils "nominative determinism" Pratley at it again. If only there was some magical technology that could multiply the calorific value of the limited gas by 3-4x, then all our heating worries would be solved. Oh wait, there is. Heat pumps = energy security. www.theguardian.com/business/nil...

Hey Melbournians! There's a neo4j meetup tomorrow night. One talk on graphs and AI, and me on some cool research on scalable transactions for graphs. Sign up here: www.meetup.com/graphdb-melb...

That @joneaves.bsky.social fella is fine company, highly recommended. Didn’t try to factorise large primes even once.

To paraphrase Alf Dubs, "there goes one more Labour vote." Mine.

While I do not condone violence, there is straightforwardly no equivalence between antifascists and fascists. Feels like Germany has gone down this path before and it did not end well. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

This is an excellent piece on graphs and semantics. Very balanced and well researched: substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Hey journalists! I know you're very smart and literate, but you are not very numerate. This should say "your already very expensive shopping is going up by another 3.6%" Instead you imply things are getting better for me, rather than getting worse at a slightly slower rate than feared.

This is simply lovely - the agentic graph of Stranger Things. Feels like a return to form for @neo4j.com's nerd-led marketing! neo4j.com/blog/news/ho...

Heh, science.

Not so much solar power in these Autumnal days. Elon pushed a new firmware update to my batteries that is "smarter" and greatly limits the amount of (cheap, off peak) electricity I import. Now I don't have enough battery power to get through the day if I do laundry etc.

Today in “politicians don’t understand computers”

This will not end well.

Pratley by name...

I could definitely argue any parking fine for this, right?

JFC. Seems like the UK Labour policy wonks have been kicked in the head by a horse. The alternative: Tax heavy polluting vehicles properly, including stupidly large EVs, through VED. Stop subsidising fossil fuels. Increase benefits for low-income people to offset the removal of said subsidies.

No Nazis on scooters?

TIL that I badly mispronounce the Spanish verb to pay (pagar). Thankfully the bloke at the cafe had a sense of humour when I told him “I’d like to hit with my card, please.” (pegar)

I’m hoping this is the Guardian being the Guardian. The Bank of England should know that private schools fees are not in its basket of goods and services for measuring CPI, I imagine because so few people pay private school fees.

Me: which cities or towns are in more than one country. AI: Cities located in more than one country are rare, but examples include Istanbul (straddling Europe and Asia). The same company's knowledge graph could, no doubt, have answered correctly.

This is the most thermodynamically illiterate BS that I’ve read in a long time: www.theguardian.com/business/202... note also the 2% by volume which is much smaller as a proportion of energy. Absolutely dismal.

Incredibly sad and shameful.