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Marina's on Fire Again
Marina Hyde may have written her greatest line (so far):
the Commons decision to take the prime minister into special measures
The whole piece is, as ever, glorious.
The Compulsive Pursuit of a Product That Does Us Only Harm
Rafel Behr analyses our national condition:
It looks like British social awkwardness elevated to the scale of a constitutional meltdown. It is the stiff upper lip chewing itself to pieces rather than name the cause of our suffering: not the deal, not the backstop, not the timetable, not Brussels, but Brexit. The poison in our system is Brexit. We need a path to recovery, not May’s frantic hunt for a stronger, purer dose.
Nick Cave on AI and Songwriting
If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend?
Mr Cave’s latest newsletter muses on the potential songwriting abilities of AIs.
“Why’s it taking so long? We should just leave!” | The Reinvigorated Programmer
Suppose your family lives in a flat that’s rented from a housing association. And you have come to feel (rightly or wrongly) that it’s not a very nice flat, and that the association interferes too much. So you discuss it as a family, and you think about all the lovely houses out there that you could live in, and eventually you decide to leave. So far, so good.
EU Figures Rule Out Concessions as May Postpones Brexit Vote
Honestly, she has no idea what she’s doing. Plus, she seems to be acting alone. We don’t have a presidential system here. The Prime Minister is not the entire executive.
EU figures rule out concessions as May postpones Brexit vote
Some Labour MPs are thinking along similar lines to me.
Wes Streeting:
“Labour cannot sit by and allow the choice to be between the economic ruin of a hard Brexit or the loss of sovereignty under Theresa May’s deal, with Britain subjected to EU rules but with no say over them,” he said. “As with any fork in the road, there is always the option of turning back home.
“We know this is a mess made by the Tories, but the Labour party can’t just sit back and watch. It’s time for all of us in the Labour party to make the full-throated case for a people’s vote with the option of remaining in the European Union.
“That leadership must now come from the top, or our party may never be forgiven for the consequences that follow.”
Chris Leslie:
“With even Tory ministers recognising Brexit threatens the poorest in society, our public services and Britain’s place in the world, to have a Labour leader just shrug about it, then go awol, is nothing short of a dereliction of duty.”
OK, they’re maybe not planning to leave the party, but still.
They Took Something Very Weird and Made It More Usable
Good piece by Paul Ford, writing at Bloomberg on Microsoft buying GitHub:
[GitHub] has a well-designed web interface. If you don’t think that’s worth $7.5 billion, you’ve never read the git manual.
He means the man pages, I assume.
GitHub is “the central repository for decentralized (sic) code archives,” which is mildly amusing. But this:
In the pre-git era, you updated your software annually and sent customers floppy disks. But if you’re running a big software platform, you might update your servers constantly—many times a day or every 20 minutes.
is a bit over the top. There were a lot of changes between sending out floppies and continuous deployment.
I question his (lack of) capitalisation. The command is git, all lower case. But if you’re talking about the application, you should spell it “Git”, with the capital. I think so, anyway. You would write about “CVS”, even though the command was (is) cvs; and “Subversion,” with the command svn. But at least it’s not as annoying as people who write it in all-caps.
Lastly, when he says, “Computers are mercurial,” I’m assuming he’s wryly referencing what was once Git’s major rival in the distributed version-control space. Nicely deadpan, if so.
Microsoft to Buy GitHub?
I can’t help but feel concerned about the news that Microsoft may be buying GitHub. I know they’re big on open source now, and even use GitHub themselves. But I remember how antithetical to open-source they used to be, so that worries me. And it rarely works out well when a big company buys up a small, interesting one.
It's Inconvenient to Talk
On Trump’s phone (mis)use:
Trump’s call-capable cellphone has a camera and microphone, unlike the White House-issued cellphones used by Obama.
I mean, it’s not going to be much use at making calls without a microphone.
A Special Way of Being Afraid
I only know one other of Philip Larkin’s poems; it is about parents and children. This one — ‘Aubade’ — is the best poem about death I’ve ever read.
A sample:
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.