Notices by Mike Taylor 🦕 (mike@sauropods.win)

"In 1989, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sold off our then publicly owned water and sewerage industry for £5.2 billion.
…
Private companies have paid out, in 2024 prices, around £83 billion—an average of £2.4 billion a year—as dividends, while loading the companies in debt. Often, those loans were taken out simply to increase the amount of cash extracted as dividends."

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-09-14/debates/0E4845C2-E1B3-4BBB-8A08-6C7E05BD78DD/WaterSectorPublicOwnership

AWESOME new feature in #LibreOffice! Every time I change the anchoring of an image to "as character", the whole program crashes!

And I have 19 figures to paste and arrange into this manuscript that I want to get submitted tonight.

_sigh_

Welcome to the shiny digital future.

CC @libreoffice!

@Gargron Will you be any chance be at Morsefest UK in September?

I have submitted my suggested storm names to the Met Office: ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Gazprom.

In "Reason for name choice(s) (optional)" I wrote:

These are the corporations whose deliberate actions have caused the storms. They deserve credit.

Make your own recommendations at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/forms/name-our-storms-call-for-names

@Gargron Thanks for responding. What this LOOKS like is Mastodon saying "Hey, here's a person who you don't follow but might want to". But much of the promise of Mastodon is precisely that it doesn't do that.

Have I misunderstood what it is?

@Gargron (My initial message was confusing because I idiotically omitted a negative — now edited!)

Woah! What's this? Surely not Mastodon giving me a feed that is ENTIRELY AND ONLY people who I have deliberately chosen to follow?

Please @Gargron tell me this isn't what it looks like? I couldn't bear it if Mastodon enshittified.

"The truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. […] When you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them."

https://www.theringer.com/2026/05/28/tech/pope-leo-xiv-ai-encyclical-tech-industry-problems

@JMarkOckerbloom What a betrayal. The WHOLE POINT(*) of Mastodon is that I see only what I have explicitly chosen to see. Turning this crap on by default is a violation.

(*) OK, not the WHOLE point, but still.

CC @Gargron

"In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.

In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.

Same energy."

https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/

@ploum It's a digression, but: "(And, yes, I consider Brits Europeans. They will join us back, we miss them, I promise.)" As a Brit, I really appreciate this gracious stance, and I hope with all my heart that you are right.

@anon_opin I don't think it's that. I think it's just so counter-intuitive that it would work, that people find it hard to believe all the accumulating evidence.

@guyjantic @anon_opin I don't think that's true. Most people, however fair-minded and generously inclined, when they first hear the idea "Let's have the state give absolutely everyone a fixed monthly payment that is enough to live on", will immediately think "Nice idea, but it would never work".

"These were not professional circles. You didn’t need a CS degree. You needed curiosity and stubbornness and a tolerance for reading things that were too long and trying things that didn’t work on the first ten attempts. The culture valued that and passed it down. … The knowledge propagated because the culture treated knowledge as worth propagating."

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

Over the last few weeks I have noticed a behaviour in myself.

If I follow a link and I get a "We care about your privacy" popup, I click the "Reject all" button and read the article.

But if there is no "Reject all" button, just a link to a complicated set of preferences, I simply close the window and never see what the article had to say.

I wonder how many others do this.

And how many web-sites are losing A LOT of their traffic for this reason.

—
UPDATE: see replies, lots of people do this!

"I don’t think I’m going out on much of a limb, politically, when I say that the armed men in masks who attacked and killed both a woman who was trying to drive away, and a man who was trying to help a person up off the ground, are NOT the heroes of this, or any conceivable story. The idea that anyone might be offended to hear me say that shows how far we’ve fallen."
https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2026/2/2/how-to-finally-piece-things-together

"The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU."
— Cory Doctorow, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

"I’ve read many historical books on the subject [of Open Source], including [Richard M Stallman]’s biography and many older writings.

And something struck me.

RMS was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not RMS or FSF. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen."

https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

@acdha See the opening of the quoted article:

"Disclaimer: Lot have been said about the fact that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not discussing those nor defending the man himself. I’m not in favour of blindly following that particular human (nor any particular human). I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I claim that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today. Maybe more than ever."

Douglas Adams on selling the idea of Arthur Dent to Hollywood executives:

"I’ve hit a certain amount of difficulty over the years in explaining this in Hollywood. I’m often asked ‘Yes, but what are his goals?’ to which I can only respond, well, I think he’d just like all this to stop, really. It’s been a hard sell."

https://shreevatsa.net/post/douglas-adams-cultural-divide/