We’re in the middle of watching Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials 🎥. Two episodes down, and the last one to watch tonight.
That Bundle is a great character. And Superintendent Battle seems a bit useless and annoying so far. I haven’t read any of the books about him.
Oh, damn, I just read in Ansible: Dan Simmons has died. The Hyperion Cantos are some of the best SF of the late 20th century.
Here’s his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry.
Sad. So it Goes.
Sometimes even the best software lets you down. This morning I dropped a quick note in Obsidian about something I wanted to blog about. This evening it’s gone. Not on my phone, not on my Mac.
Can I remember what the idea was? I cannot.
I know we’re not supposed to celebrate the death of another human being. But what else can you do when it’s Khamenei?
I mean, do you think anyone one didn’t celebrate Hitler’s death in 1945?
I just hope the Iranian people will be able to rise up and free themselves after this. Sadly, history does not hold many examples of this kind of thing working out.
It feels very strange to be supportive of the USA attacking a middle-eastern country (or any country). Even more so when it’s Trump in charge. But the chance this could bring down the Islamic Republic — that evil, terrorism-exporting, citizen-murdering regime — is much to be hoped for.
Of course, it won’t be as simple as that. Things never are. The desire to find simple answers to huge, complex questions, is at least partially the cause of many of our problems today.
But still. The idea that the Iranian people might have the chance to overthrow that monstrous regime: that is huge.
📚 Books 2026, 4: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O'Hagan
I really enjoyed this. It’s set in London (mostly), in a later year of the pandemic (2022, probably), and across just over a whole year. The characters are people from the upper-middle to upper classes, and some of the lowest classes in society, including criminals and illegally-trafficked people who have to work for them.
Some of the blurbiness on the cover describes it as a ‘state of the nation’ novel. It doesn’t quite seem like that for me (though I don’t know if I could give you an example of one that is), not least because the main characters exist at a fairly rarified level of society. They are things like academics, authors, journalists, MPs and lords. Or else they’re would-be drill rappers in street gangs. There’s nobody who’s just normal; whatever that means.
There are so many characters that O’Hagan provides a list of them, a dramatis personae, which I approve of.
Anyway, it’s very good, and I read it much faster than I expected to, which is usually a good sign.
Ed Zitron’s latest, On NVIDIA and Analyslop, is very good on the current state of some financial stuff related to ‘AI’. It’s also good on how much more complex software development is than the ‘vibe coding’ believers would tell you:
Software is a tremendous pain in the ass. You write code, then you have to make sure the code actually runs, and that code needs to run in some cases on specific hardware, and that hardware needs to be set up right, and some things are written in different languages, and those languages sometimes use more memory or less memory and if you give them the wrong amounts or forget to close the door in your code on something everything breaks, sometimes costing you money or introducing security vulnerabilities.
Fuckin hell, Apple Music! This is just what I was talking about a few weeks ago. ‘Camera’ and ‘(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville’ just aren’t going to play, for no reason.
A quick note just to keep up my streak of having posted every day this year. Is that stupid? Maybe. Will mentioning it jinx it? Time will tell.
Automatic Introspection
On texts created by prompts. If you can express your meaning in a prompt, why not just send out the prompt?
Watched: The Eagle Has Landed 🎥
if you’d have asked me I’d have said I thought I’d seen this back in the day. But no. Very much not. It’s a very odd film.
I thought it was going to be about some allied mission into or over Germany during WW2. It was actually the opposite: a secret German mission to kidnap Churchill from Norfolk. Including an IRA member helping them, and a traitorous English villager providing them with information.
it’s so totally not what I expected, but it’s pretty good.
Fun Minute Cryptic clue today.
Minute Cryptic - 20 February, 2026 “Dropped Jacksonville’s latest quarterback after non-pass?” (4) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 2 under the community par (71,660 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com
Watched: Ludwig Season 1 🎥
This was unexpected, and surprisingly good. David Mitchell playing a semi-serious (but still fairly comic) part, as a puzzle-setter whose twin-brother police officer goes missing. Anna Maxwell Martin as his sister-in-law. Good stuff.
Ablative Irony
Also via Kottke comes this article by Claudio Nastruzzi at The Register, where he talks of ‘semantic ablation’ in text generated by ‘AI’:
When an author uses AI for “polishing” a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and “blood” reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks “clean” to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its “ciccia” – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.
It’s about how LLMs — probability-based machines, after all — tend to push text in a generic direction, away from a writer’s unique voice, towards a common mean.
So let’s all not do that.
The irony is, I was trying to look up an unfamiliar word in that quote — ‘ciccia’. The dictionaries installed on my Mac had nothing useful, and nor did Wikipedia. DuckDuckGo’s search only came up with uses of the word as a family or brand name. I used the ‘!g’ syntax to send the query to Google.
It must be the first time I’ve had to do that in quite a while. I’ve heard people mention — complain about — the ‘AI Overview’ the Big G provides, but I’m not sure I’ve every seen it before now. But it was what had the answer:
informal Italian term for meat or, idiomatically, body fat (flab).
Clearly Nastruzzi is using it as we might say ’the meat of an argument’, or similar.
Google’s AI thing does not cite its source, though, and none of the next few search results give a reference for that use in English, though one is to the meaning of the Italian word.
Anyway, my recommendation to all fellow writers, would-be writers, and people who want to or have to communicate by writing: express yourself. Don’t let American machines do it for you (and use as many em-dashes as you need, as I have done here).
Question being asked on BlueSky (saw it from @kottke.org: ‘Not big movies, more culty ones’) about what movies you saw on first-run at the cinema. Mine, actually premieres at the Edinburgh Film Festival back in the day:
- The Company of Wolves
- Repo Man
- Brazil
The latter two being two of my all-time faves.
Watching the Women’s Freeski Big Air final. They’re such incredible athletes. And Kirsty Muir, from Aberdeen, is currently in the silver medal position! (Briefly was gold, but changed as I was typing.)
Francisca Sinn: “@jamie I am an IP lawyer and…” - Mastodon
This Mastodon post reminds me that what I quoted Cory on the other day, regarding copyright in ‘AI’ training, may not be the whole story. Of course.
📚 Currently reading: Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan.
Looks like the Micro.blog book search is working again.