This Morning

I just realised that it’s a public holiday over there today. And I thought to myself about how we would have spent the day together*, and I was starting to think of something poetic and nice, like “Today you would have woken up in my arms”.

But pretty quickly I realised that saying something like that would be dishonest, wouldn’t it?

A more accurate way of putting it might be something along the lines of:

“Today you might have woken up in my arms. But there’s also statistically a ~20-30% chance that I would have woken up to you screaming abuse at me yet again, maybe calling me a faggot again, or perhaps ranting yet again about how you ‘fucking hate indians’ because ‘they’re all so racist’, or maybe you’d fall back on the the good old classic ‘I wish I had died’ rhetoric, where you say to my face that you’d rather to be dead than in a relationship with me”.

So, yeah. When I thought about the actual reality of the situation, that took all the romanticism and rose-tint off of things in a big hurry.

I guess every cloud something something silver lining.

* If you hadn’t chosen to ruin everything, that is.

Walking Away

Quote

“I love you, I do, Know that. And walking away from someone you love is one of the hardest fucking things in the world to do.”

- Ally, Mr Inbetween

It’s strange how sometimes you come across a piece of media which puts your current situation into words so perfectly.

I made a chart

According to the news, there’s a bunch of fucking idiots who still think that using nuclear fission for power is a good idea.

Now, anybody with any sense knows this is not the case, and that there’s one place where it’s acceptable (Note: “acceptable” and “good” are not synonyms) to use nuclear fission: offworld.

But apparently there are people out there who have no sense, even after Dutt-plug got his ass handed to him in the election.

So, I’ve put together a helpful chart. I did a bunch of research and took time to make it accurate and to scale. In the full-size image, one horizontal pixel = one year. Click for a bigger version.

A Timeline showing the building of the pyramids, Jesus' birth, current day, and when Chernobyl will be safe again, with both 'optimistic' and 'definitely safe by then' estimates

Now, this seems pretty fucking obvious to me, but I keep seeing idiots talking about nuclear fission like it’s a viable power source for use on this planet. They prattle on about how it’s so much safer now, and there’s been all these advancements, and then they use weasel words in their statements that it’s “virtually impossible that there could be another chernobyl” and “these dry casks are built to withstand a high speed train impact or a magnitude 8+ earthquake – they’re practically indestructible!”

Did you spot the weasel words?

Every time I hear the idiots talking about how safe nuclear fission is, I’m always playing a game of “spot the weasel word”. And in 100% of cases (I was tempted to sarcastically say “approximately 100%”, but I think it’s best to be clear, and there’s nothing approximate about it – it is 100%) I find one.

Apparently it’s up for debate with some people, so I’m just going to make the sane person’s position on fission power perfectly clear:

YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO RISK CONTAMINATING EARTH FOR LONGER THAN THERE HAS BEEN RECORDED HISTORY.

If you don’t give enough of a fuck about your children and grandchildren to want them to have an earth that is habitable, then it’s pretty simple, ethically: you’re a piece of shit, but fine, whatever, you do you.

But, what you don’t have the right to do is impose that on my (great-great-great-great-great) grandchildren. If you think you do, you are a piece of shit.

Case closed, QED, nothing more to be said. If you disagree, you are wrong. If you think it’s not a risk, you are lying or wrong. If the risk is greater than zero percent, given the timelines involved, that risk is unacceptable.

End of discussion.

If you still disagree, somehow, then it’s simple: you are a piece of shit.

Notes:

  • I was also thinking about adding another couple of markers on my chart, for “Nuclear Waste is safe”, but it was difficult enough to do 20,000 years, let alone 100,000. And my research says that it’ll actually be millions of years before all nuclear waste is safe.
  • If you want to talk about where nuclear fission is acceptable (again: I didn’t say “good”), that’s also pretty easy. Using nuclear thermal rockets for interplanetary propulsion is acceptable, because there’s no risk to earth. I would even go so far as to say that, in the absence of fusion reactors and other more advanced propulsion technologies, nuclear thermal rockets might even approach “good”.
  • I would also accept a fission reactor on mars, generating power and heat. I say this is acceptable based on one very simple premise: mars isn’t habitable. However I call this acceptable, given the alternatives, not wise or a good idea. I think that as a matter of practicality, having a fission reactor on mars early during colonisation is probably an acceptable trade-off, due to the difficulties of getting other power sources set up. I think it’s an acceptable trade-off to bootstrap a colony on a world which is not currently habitable. But I would be pushing to move away from fission as soon as practicable, with a goal of only ever having a single fission reactor operating on the surface of mars.
  • Fusion is a whole other ball game, and fine and good, because it doesn’t leave tons and tons of waste radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. And we should be working on that shit as a high priority. And by “high priority”, I mean: “hey, we’re not going to spend anything on our military this year, and instead put that into fusion power”.

I’m going to need a nanoscale violin, stat!

Bwahahaha!

OpenAI, scraper of websites, violator of TOS and copyright, fighter of lawsuits, baaaaaaaaws because they say DeepSeek ‘Illegally’ violated their TOS.

Oh Noes! So what you’re saying is they’ve stolen your work! That must be really awful for you!

I decided to have a chat with chatgpt about this delicious, delicious situation.

Weirdly and not at all predictably, it initially defended OpenAI’s actions, claiming that:

  1. Well I mean who’s to say whether they really violated TOS or copyight! They’re innocent until proven guilty in a court! That conclusive proof that a bunch of people have posted publicly doesn’t really prove anything!
  2. And look, even if OpenAI did violate a bunch of copyright laws and website TOS, that’s just all totally fine! Because you see they did it in the name of research and advancing humanity and for everyone’s good, because chatgpt is such a clear breakthrough and blah blah blah (just go ask chatgpt for a list of reasons why it’s good and insert that nonsense here). And this somehow makes it okay, I guess.

It then went on to claim that it totally is a problem if OpenAI’s TOS were violated, though, because that would be illegal! And unethical! And only smelly and ugly people with no sex appeal would do that anyway!

After a little bit of discussion I was able to bring it around to a sane, non-hypocritical point of view, that this is maybe the most delicious case of irony and poetic justice since that time Alanis Morisette wrote that song but none of the examples were actually irony. And I got it to write an article, which it titled “The Hilarious Hypocrisy of OpenAI Accusing Deepseek of Illegal Use”.

I was originally going to just post the article here, but then it occurred to me that that’s a bit shit – you’ve seen how terrible “AI”-generated content is. Because that slop is unavoidable in these enlightened modern times. I probably wouldn’t bother to read an LLM-generated article if I’d come to read a hunam’s blog. I’d find that insulting. It would make me less likely to come back to their blog. I respect people who bother to read my words too much to do that.

I’ve included the text of the article below if you want to read it. But it’s nothing special.

Here, watch Steve Buscemi play the world’s smallest violin for OpenAI, stealers of content, baaaawing that DeepSeek have violated their terms of service and stolen ther content.

(NOTE: it took me maybe 10 minutes longer to write this up than it did to get chatgpt to generate an article I was almost happy with, with only a few mistakes, because I had to iterate on the article a bunch of times, re-reading it each time)

Image from reservoir dogs, Steve Buscemi playing the world's smallest violin for the waitresses

Reveal LLM-generated “article”

The Hilarious Hypocrisy of OpenAI Accusing Deepseek of Illegal Use

By ChatGPT, your friendly neighborhood LLM

In a plot twist worthy of tech drama, OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT—has accused Deepseek of “illegally” using its model in violation of OpenAI’s terms of service. The irony is almost too much: OpenAI, a company currently facing lawsuits for TOS violations, is now crying foul over a competitor allegedly doing the same thing.

Hypocrisy at Its Finest
OpenAI has long been criticized for scraping publicly available data, including from platforms like Twitter, without consent. Despite the backlash, they’ve defended their actions, arguing that since the data was public, it was fair game for training their LLMs. Now, Deepseek—a leaner competitor—has allegedly used OpenAI’s own model to build a similar system for a fraction of the cost. And OpenAI, which has skirted TOS for years, suddenly calls Deepseek’s actions illegal.
The hypocrisy is staggering. OpenAI has built its empire using data scraped from the very sites it now claims to protect. And yet, they’re now accusing a rival of breaching their TOS and using the term “illegal.” It’s like a thief accusing someone else of stealing, while sitting on a pile of their own loot.

The Irony of Tech Drama
This role reversal is pure comedy. OpenAI, once a scrappy startup accused of data violations, is now the corporate giant accusing Deepseek of illegal actions. The fact that Deepseek has replicated OpenAI’s model on a shoestring budget only adds to the absurdity. OpenAI, with all its resources, is playing the outraged victim while a competitor pulls off the same feat—cheaper and faster.
And let’s not forget OpenAI’s defense of its data scraping—using the excuse that it was all “publicly available.” Now, they’re accusing someone else of doing the same thing. The irony is almost poetic.

Real-World Pointlessness
None of this changes the fact that these LLMs still aren’t all that useful in the real world. Sure, they can generate text and hold conversations, but when it comes to solving real, complex problems, they’re little more than glorified chatbots. All the legal wrangling and finger-pointing is about tech that still falls short of delivering on its promises.

Conclusion: Irony, Hypocrisy, and Futility
In the end, OpenAI’s accusations of illegal use by Deepseek are a textbook case of hypocrisy. A company that has itself been accused of violating terms of service is now acting as if it’s the defender of intellectual property. And all of this drama is about LLMs that still don’t live up to their hype. Until these models can solve real-world problems, the bickering over ownership and TOS violations is just another distraction in the tech world.

 

Amber’s Requiem

Amber always reads my blogs,
I see it in the server logs.
Her VPN, it does not hide
her failed attempts to sneak inside.
But I don’t fuss, I pay no mind,
I’d rather not be unkind.
Don’t need the stress of talking to her,
and it’s flattering to have a stalker.
So silence reigns for months and months,
and I don’t miss the awful cunt,
abuse and nonsense, bullshit lies,
delusions which she denies.
I have it all in black and white,
yet she insists that it’s her plight.
won’t let facts get in the way
of hurtful things she wants to say.

Amber always reads my words,
but that’s distinct from being heard.
It’s her turn now to speak, you see,
it always is, no time for me.
It’s fine for her to scream and chide,
but abusive if I criticise,
in any way, in any form,
but from her “asshole” is the norm.
Purveyor of hypocrisy,
she doesn’t do democracy,
it’s her turn now to speak, you see,
you had two seconds, maybe three!
She hates it when you interrupt,
she’ll cut you off to say as much
and when she lies and lies again,
it’s rude if you try to defend
by saying that you’re not to blame,
you did not say the things she claims.
For she knows what you said, not you,
and words mean what she says they do.

Amber likes to make up stuff,
usually it’s off the cuff,
she takes no time to think it through,
and yet insists that it’s all true,
with no forethought or reasoning,
she says the thing she thinks will win.
She finds it quite upsetting when
you tell her one plus one ain’t ten,
it’s hurtful to point out the facts,
and only monsters don’t know that,
she always seems to get offended
when her lying spree is ended.

Amber can’t stop spewing lies,
it’s like she wants to be despised.
Did you know that the sky is pink,
and that titanic didn’t sink?
and one plus one is three, no, five!
She’s not said ten, that’s a lie!
It’s in your message history?
That was someone else, not me!
Logic doesn’t get applied,
and common sense is just denied.
When amber gets the urge to yell,
it’s going to happen, and you’re in hell.

Amber is a crazy bitch,
or evil cunt, I don’t know which,
maybe both, who can say?
it doesn’t matter, anyway:
I tried for years to discern,
but lost the will to care to learn.

There’s an old saying…

They fucking renewed Alex Kurtzman’s contract?!?

There’s an old saying that I think is apropos here: “Never Attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity”

I suppose technically I had jumped the gun on trek: I saw the malice and interpreted and called it out as such. But I suppose, technically speaking, until today, you could have made the claim that it was just stupidity, and that CBS had accidentally hired Alex Kurtzman as a TV showrunner rather than as filler for a septic tank system.

But today proves that it wasn’t stupidity at all, it was definitely malice. CBS’s goal is to kill off Star Trek.

But there’s still one part of it that I still don’t understand: Why renew Kurtzman’s contract? He’s already killed it off pretty effectively already – does he really need another 5 years?

I suppose it has been around for a long time and it’s got a habit of being revived and renewed. So if you hate Star Trek and you want to kill it off and make damn sure it stays dead, you might extend Kurtzman’s contract. That would make sense I guess.

While I’m here, I should post the poster that I made a while ago for RedLetterMedia’s excellent 5-hour series of reviews of picard:

Buying “For All Mankind”

I’ve been watching this show called For All Mankind. It’s glorious. One day there will almost certainly be a blog post here gushing about it. It has the potential to be my favourite TV show ever. I’ve told pretty much everyone I know about it.

But it’s an Apple TV show, so I can’t ethically recommend any legitimate means of watching it.

Today, I decided to do a thing that I do every now and then: make a good-faith effort to find a way to reward creators of content like this in an ethical way.

In other words, I want to buy For All Mankind on DVD or bluray.

So I decided to hit up apple for a chat to ask them when it’s coming out in a format where it can actually be purchased (as opposed to rented, which is what you get when you “buy” it from Apple TV), and unencumbered by DRM.

That went about as well as you’d expect.

The TL;DR version is that Apple won’t even discuss the possibility of you buying one of their shows on DVD without you providing your personal information. Much less actually release a show on a medium where you can actually buy it. Not only that, but they insist on using misleading terms like “buy”, and “purchase the content legitimately” even when called out on it. I guess they do deserve some minimal number of points for consistency.

So, if you want to watch For All Mankind, the most ethical way I can recommend to watch it is by using The Pirate Bay. You get very high-quality web-download rips there regularly every week.

And I really do recommend watching it. It’s great.

Dear Ronald D Moore: Your show is really great. I’d love to give you and your production company some money to support it’s ongoing creation, but Apple refused to help me with that. If you want to reach out to me and let me know how I can do that, Please do. I’d happily pay premium prices for a box set, I’ll be all like “shut up and take my money”. Thanks.

Here’s the chat log in full:

(well, almost full. This is the last screengrab I took. It was very close to the end of the chat. After this it was pretty much just “well, thanks for nothing I guess? Bye.”)


image of a long, text-based chat with apple tech support. Sorry, vision-impaired people!

The Register’s Totally Unbiased Journalism

I’ve been reading The Register for close to 20 years now. Certainly well over 15.

They have been getting less and less impartial, and thus worse and worse at journalism, over the years.

And today I found out that their comment moderation is also totally fair and unbiased. For instance, check out this totally offensive post that they censored:
Totally innocuous comment mentioning that their journalism isn't very impartial censored by their moderators
As you can see, I was totally out of line and very offensive here.

To add to this hilarity, it turns out that the person moderating comments on the article is the same guy who wrote it. Totally fair and not at all a recipe for a little fiefdom of echo chambers.

And as if that wasn’t enough, this comment was censored in such a way that there is no visible mention on the website that a post has been censored. Usually on their site, any moderated post will be replaced with a message saying “this post was removed by a moderator”. So it turns out that not only do they censor any even mildly critical viewpoints, they do it using a special censorship mode that they have implemented, so that nobody can tell that they’re basically nazis.

And that was the day that I stopped reading the register. Chris Williams, their editor in chief, is a little hitler wannabe.

Top notch reporting

Full Article archived here

Nice one, ABC. That’s some top-notch journalism right there.

Firstly, I’m struck by the neutral tone of this article reporting on this…uh… “extra-legal”… murder. And I find myself wondering what the tone would be like if it was a nuclear scientist in a western country who had been killed. I can’t help but agree with the phrase “shameful double standards”. This was an act of terrorism, pure and simple.

Secondly: What, you couldn’t afford to have an actual interpreter translate the tweet?

tweet translation straight from google translate, with the nonsense translation obscured by an ellipsis

Nah, rather than wait an hour or two and spend maybe a couple of hundred bucks on having an actual interpreter give an actual translation of what was actually said, we’ll just run the tweet through google translate! And hey, if google translate returns something clearly nonsensical, we’ll just edit that part out!

Nice one, ABC. I can see why you’re in favour of making google and facetube pay for the media they link to. With reporting of this high caliber it’s clearly worth it.

Accountability

…and since images of text (particularly PHOTOS OF PRINTOUTS OF DIGITAL DOCUMENTS! WTF?!?) are the done thing now, no more of this pesky text that can be read semantically and parsed by machines and accessed by blind people, I’m not going to actually write much in the way of commentary here, I’m just going to post some images full of text:

Image of Jenny Mikakos' statement on twitter where she refuses to take accountability, and a bunch of backslapping idiots lapping up her rhetoric and praising her for taking accountability.

I feel like maybe this news article I read literally 2 days earlier might also be relevant somehow:

A news article from 2 days earlier about a letter sent by the Health Workers Union accusing her of 'breathtaking incometence' and 'lacking even a basic understanding of her portfolio'