Weeknote 2025-50

5 4 more working days left of 2025.

I have a work meeting at midnight tonight. Help, I am in trouble.

The myriad school events leading up to the end of term continue. This week it was the Christmas Fayre: A reasonably entertaining event, where the kids get to pay small amounts of money to play party games and eat mediocre cakes in the guise of fundraising for the school. It was Elliots first Christmas Fayre and he had a great time, which was lovely.

Also I won a double gin and tonic on the bottle tombola, which I enjoyed on the Friday night work social call. So good time had by all. It is nice to know that the school have a few more pennies in the coffers. Especially important given the cuts that are coming next year.

The best thing about the Fayre was watching my use of the word Fayre cause some consternation to my North American colleagues. Ended up being a very enjoyable Slack thread touching on the Magna Carta, the Danelaw, the Norman-isation of town names in medieval England, Oliver Cromwell and tautological place names.

I’ve recommended it before and will continue to do so, but the History of England podcast (and it’s related re-recorded early parts Anglo-Saxon England) is absolutely fantastic.

I got the results from my annual health check through recently and it’s flagged that I need to keep an eye on both my cholestorol level, and my blood pressure. With the advice to reduce stress (lol), avoid ultra-processed food, and exercise more.

I’m pleased that I have already started running more. I pulled out the walking pad this week and have done a few 5-6km walks while I’ve been working, which I’ve enjoyed. I also did another 5km run on Sunday. I love running as the sun is coming up.

I decided to shift my Guix experments from running on a VM to my laptop. I wrote about it a bit, which was fun.

I still need to write about the installation experience, mainly so I don’t forget. It’s not as easy as I’d like it to be because the hard free software requirement of the distro mean it uses the Linux-libre kernel out of the box, which doesn’t support my laptop.

Speaking of blog posts, I really enjoyed this one by technology writer/adviser Jürgen Geuter. The idea that GenAI incarnate is the perfect capitalist machine incarnate: a concrete impelentation of a system designed to maximise growth and ROI by investing as little as possible of anything of value, and exploiting prior art is truly chilling.

I’m pretty scared for when the AI bubble bursts, which seems inevitible at this point. Because everyone with a stock market index-linked retirement fund is going to have a really bad time.

I look forward to my retirement age trending towards infinity, until the only option left to extract value is to plug me into the giant flesh battery.

Unrelatedly, I am so angry right now. Not just about AI, but so many, many things happening in the world. A deep seated futile anger that I don’t know what to do with.

Still, stiff upper lip and all that, Christmas soon: must take my rightful place in the annual orgy of consumption lest I bring shame to by people and unleash the righteous anger of the Bezosian Gods.

I think I just need a break.