Benjohn

I watched Project Hail Mary with two of my kids last night (16 and 10). It was great, and I think really worth a watch, even if you would often not go for sci fi.

What I particularly liked about it, at this current time, were its overall level of optimism.

It has confidence in the goodness of humans (and non humans!), and our ability to resolve existential problems together and care for each other.

It was pretty diverse and didn’t begin from an assumption of “America saves the world”; The eponymous project seems to be a an international effort and not even US lead.

The characters are not, on the whole, regular “heroes”. They’re flawed, and troubled, but they can still get good done, which i also find to be a very helpful message.

It was also fun, entertaining, not overly perilous, and didn’t take itself too seriously while telling a solid story.

The plot holes were mostly easy to ignore. I’d be happy to read the book and see if it fills them.

So, I recommend it, and if you watch it, I hope you enjoy it too.

My god. I almost feel moved to write an essay on breaking the law. Jeez. Go back to sleep, Ben.

Went to the beach with my boys, made a fire, and looked at the stars through binoculars for an hour, listening to the waves. Was totally great. I’d like more of that.

At a local youth bands gig. Some great stuff. Most playing their own work - the only cover so far not as good as the kids’ own original works. Great how they’re making music that’s fresh and relevant to their life or ideas.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.

I couldn't take everything being so fucking broken on computers when I wanted to share a web image with my son. So I took a screen shot and shared that instead.

It’s a weird thing, being made to obey a law.

Is that unusual? Usually we actively choose whether to obey laws, and so shitty ones are visibly ignored. Good ones are not. That has its own problems, but problems that are perhaps understood.

I broke the law this weekend. I slept on the beach with my children, under the stars. I think a law prohibiting that is a load of arse, so I chose to break it.

I choose to drive within the speed limit. I’d actually welcome being forced to, personally. Interesting.

Being made to obey a law by my phone seems rather different. I don’t like it.

This is regarding iOS now requiring me to verify my age in the UK to access age controlled content and web sites. I can trivially do this with the cards I have in my wallet, but i do not wish to do it. I’m very far from being persuaded this is a good thing I should comply with.

Would be absolutely superb is #Apple #Safari browser (but any browser, really), indicated per tab energy impact in a visible way.

I know from Activity Monitor that, say, safari media has high impact, or sometimes even a given domain is named, I think — but mapping that to a tab in some window is really tiresome.

The visibility would be an instant flag to call out sites that kill battery life.

Why do apps on my Mac want to "find devices on your network" – today "Signal"? Like … why? What the feature this gives me?

@tryst@fedi.imu.li on the BTree typing, yes.

It’s fairly general and is not key value specific. It is generic on the leaf, which mostly just needs to be a Monoid of some kind.

A leaf could be an array, or a list of kv pairs. Or fairly specific things as needed, so, perhaps fragments of an attributed text document.

The BTree has a generic join function (That I got passing tests last night since working from start of the summer!) that can be told how the underlying leaves should be joined. It’s hopefully efficient and minimises work where trees are similar.

So, the tree doesn’t inherently know how to join data, the content leaves need to know this.

Eg, I anticipate a generic leaf for a CRDT list, which I’m hoping to work on roughly next.

If you 3D printed in wax, you could make some really cool custom candles.

To comply with UK law, my iPhone needs me to verify my age.

What if I do not choose to comply with (this) UK law?

More benches. And little roofs for if it’s raining.

Lovely act of interfaith solidarity https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/20/attorney-general-richard-hermer-kemi-badenoch-public-prayer