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December 2025

Was planning on going to bed at 10.30pm, but there have been a load of fireworks going off and the dogs are scared witless. So I guess I'll see in the NY, trying to calm them down...

What Nigel Farage did as a child (alleged pro-Nazi racism) is treated as a fleeting act of immature rashness. What happened to Begum as a child - exploited to leave home to be sexually abused - is apparently an irredeemable crime for which she may never atone.

Company directors who think that AI means they can ship code that's "fine" but "just not perfect" are in for a really rough ride when they get personal data leaks, hacked, and other catastrophic failures.

One of the things that depresses me most is posts on the UK Doctors Reddit forum, where I lurk, to see the kind of thing doctors talk about when in their own space. There are so many calling for a replacement of the NHS with an insurance system. From their perspective, the NHS is failing...

Because there are timewasters and bed blockers. What they fail ever to address is how the insurance system fixes this, FAIRLY. That is, without simply prioritising people with more money for healthcare. The life of a homeless person is equal to a billionaire. Everybody has just one life.

But this is DOCTORS advocating for it. If that's the level of compassion we've reached, in which there are even arguments that wealthy people have had greater societal utility, then I despair. "Above all else, I will do no harm [subject to fee]."

Hmm.

1 Fire staff
2 Buy expensive new buildings
3 Fire some more staff
4 Close language and music depts
5 Can you guess? Fire more staff

So, we played the memory game/Pelmanism with the cards we made yesterday, with my humorous, terrible drawings.

I then realised why I have not played since I was a child. My sister-in-law scored 18. My father-in-law 6. My wife 7. I got 1.

I have the most terrible spatial memory!

I remember text almost photographically - or, at least, I did, until my kidneys failed. But jigsaws or anything else (puzzles where you put shapes together) that needs spatial reasoning: impossible.

When I was younger, this huge disparity between verbal and spatial was deemed a learning difficulty.

I see the legal vultures have begun their copyright claim emails for books on which LLMs were trained. I've just had one offer that has a 35% legal fee.

Another smaller point from @samuelmoore.org's book, which I won't blog, concerns transparency and costs/prices in Plan S. I really hate the "break down your APC and tell us how much editorial costs" because it treats staff as elastic resources. By which I mean, you need to know how many APCs...

you will receive in a year, and how many staff you will have, before you can calculate the price. Otherwise, you are assuming that staff can just come and go as you need them and there's no need to sustain their livelihood in between articles. It then means that you have set a number of articles...

That you MUST publish to meet your financial targets, which makes a mockery of working on a quality-only basis.

At @openlibhums.org, the finances work the other way around. Libraries pay in advance, so we know how much money we have. That sets the cap on how many articles we can publish.

The economic incentive, then, is for review to reject and only admit high quality work (in so far as peer review can do this). Any surplus is rolled over into next year's budget or used to improve infrastructure.

I'm #OneOfTheTwo people whom Jon Stewart mocked.

I still mask because, with my immunocompromise and kidney failure, I landed in hospital with covid and pneumonia, each for a month. Even a cold can turn to a secondary, life-threatening pneumonia for me.

So yeah. Hilarious.

I also want to protect OTHER people. I have to go to hospital a lot and there are many vulnerable people there, so that's an obvious mask zone. But you don't know where vulnerable people are - they have to go everywhere, like the shops. So I always mask to help others, too. #OneOfTheTwo

We have been creating "pairs" cards to use in the memory game (where you have to remember where the pairs are with only the blank side up). I demonstrate my non-existent artistic talent. "Tiger", "mole", "octopus" (with six legs).

Some very bad drawings of a tiger a mole and an octopus with 6 legs

"There are some things we ought not to do even though people will pay us to do them" - Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the ELIZA chat bot in 1965, advising computer scientists on AI. Cited in McCray's README, p. 93.

This is a really offbeat book for the way it looks at computational history: through the lens of books. That is, it's a book about notable books about computers. A bibliographic - or "bookish" - history of computing.

Got several vinyl records for Xmas. Included Leng Records 15yr Comp, The KLF's buy-now-die-later Music for Funerals and Pyramid Building, and The Muppet Christmas Carol soundtrack!

Wheeled down to the seafront and then stood on the beach for a few minutes this morning. Gorgeous day, but cold.

There's no way I can walk the distance to the beach, but the chair makes it possible to get there, where I can then take a few steps on the beach itself. So good to be able to get out.

Me standing on the beach with my dog, Robyn

We are, at Christmas, very fortunate to have enough to eat. But I find it a difficult time. Nausea and general lack of appetite from kidney failure means that there's constant pressure on me to eat and boost my weight! But I just can't summon much desire to do so. No risk of overeating, at least.

Finally, now, can sit down for some catch-up reading and I'm turning to @samuelmoore.org's recent "Publishing Beyond the Market". I'm a few pages in and he's cited just about the best bit in my book, so it's looking promising 😂 Seriously, though, looking forward to this.

The cover to Samuel A Moore's Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons

It's been a pretty epic Christmas Eve of proofing, revising, and final tidy-ups, but revisions to the Star Trek: Voyager book are done and sent. They were a total killer to implement, but they are now complete and I hope the peer-review gods will be appeased.

Now: to Christmas!

Just read my Star Trek book manuscript on the ReMarkable for the fifth time and think I have final corrections to make from my scribblings.

1. I love this paper tablet device

2. I think the book is almost there!

Saw an astute Reddit post recently re Anna's Archive. The poster noted that AA's 300TB piracy of the entire Spotify cat is likely to lead to high-profile action against it. When it was just books and articles, there was not such an impetus (because govs don't care). This puts AA in the crosshairs.

I love our dogs, dearly. But Robyn is proving a challenge at the moment.

She's only got 3 legs and arthritis. I don't blame her for that if she's tired and can't walk. So she needs her own walk.

But, without Luka, she keeps just stopping and lying down because she is obstinate. Won't budge.

The result is that I am now freezing and she had to be picked up in the car!

You wouldn't believe how much setup these photos took 😂

PS - that last picture was such a bad idea. Getting back up took a substantial period of time!

2 dogs in front of a Christmas tree One dog in front of a Christmas tree

I've had a sudden urge to play video games that I haven't felt since I was a teenager. I'm a bit disappointed in the selection of modern games though - there don't seem to be many FPS games that are just, literally, fun/skillful and not mission based or interrupted by plot cutscenes every 2 minutes.

I used to love original Unreal Tournament, but most modern games seem to be cinematic movies with some gameplay in between. Please prove me wrong by showing me something that isn't this, because otherwise I feel like a dinosaur playing old-school UT despite having really good modern hardware.

I've also been playing Build-engine games and remasters! That's how bad it's got. But I would love some modern eye-candy.

Alternatively, I could just commit to reading over the break, as I normally do... Pesky games!

I feel as though these "trials" are UBI-esque. We get stuck in constant experimentation territory, even though the trials look positive. Then it's just Groundhog Day on loop. Would be good if someone at least set some pre-registered targets for the trial.

Also at risk from hep B: dialysis patients. One mistake in machine disinfection could lead to this. But sure, let's throw them to the wolves so we can punish a bunch of other people who are apparently "bad".

Just had a publisher try to solicit a book proposal. They state that they are a "platinum" OA publisher, but use BPCs of £10k or so. However, it's OK, because this means "the author never pays", "libraries do". ERRR. That is NOT how "platinum" etc. works. Infuriating.

Sad news. Spoke alongside him on several occasions and, I particularly remember, he very generously took me out for a lunch in Russell Square. Supported OLH from the start and was a driving force behind the open access UCL Press.

I have a blissful Inbox Zero across all of my four inboxes!

"'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even..."

I continue, in my early morning sessions, to plough through the latest Star Trek book draft. I think it's greatly improved and hope the readers do, too. Should have it done by the New Year.

Such is the way with rheumatoid arthritis, but I've awoken today to find my left knee hot, swollen, puffy, and very painful. Sigh.

The endless obsession of believing that storyworlds must be expanded or filled in with backstories fundamentally misunderstands the economy of fiction, where blanks allow room for the imagination.

This is what I meant when I spoke of review overload. I only have a small amount of time each day to devote to research activities. It's not part of my main job. But I have an article review request, an edited book review request, and a PhD thesis for examination to read right now.

Reviewing and examining can become full-time jobs by themselves.

It took me a long time to read - writing, reading _for_ writing, and actual work took my time, on top of medical time-suck - but I finished Thomas Pynchon's _Shadow Ticket_. Dizzying sentences and an absurd picaresque plotless structure. I frequently felt lost, but that's partially the point...

It's another case of trolling by the right, I know, but Badenoch saying that people get free cars for "acne, anxiety and constipation" first relies on not understanding how bad these conditions can be. Some forms of acne can cause total disability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acne_fulminans

Second, and I say this again and again: it is SO HARD to get PIP. And especially the mobility component. You have to struggle to walk any distance. To suggest that it's just "fill out a form, get a car for a few pimples" is disgusting.

Disability victimisation and hate incitement in full flow.

He does it to provoke outrage, I know, but it works. To think that people might be faking needing a wheelchair? Urgh. Then to feel somehow offended by seeing people in wheelchairs? Urgh.

Basically stirring up hate against the disabled to fill his massively overpaid column.

One of my students has her PhD viva today. No matter how many times, as supervisor, this happens, I _always_ feel extremely nervous on the candidate's behalf.

The biggest rework after peer review in my Star Trek: Voyager book is to rewrite a chapter that was on "race" to focus much more precisely on borders, refugees, and asylum seekers. It's been quite an epic act of transformation, but think it's finally coming together now.

It is quite impressive: B.Braun, who deliver my dialysis supplies, give me a precise schedule for the whole coming year at this time in December, including when they need orders by and when they will deliver.

I have fallen prey to the Google depreciation trap.

They used to make REALLY GOOD smart smoke alarms. Being able to silence from my phone was great.

They've discontinued them, because of course they have.

In other sadder news, Robyn can't walk today 😭 Her back leg just won't work. She's very unhappy at not going on a walk and is howling/crying. Despite having cuddles and treats. We're considering a wheelchair for her, for days like this.

Robyn a medium brown dog

OK, so it's really geeky and all, but I posted about the remake of Blood that I couldn't get working on Linux... Some rando from Facebook reached out after I complained and helped me troubleshoot the problem, and now IT WORKS! Ha. Pretty amazing.

Now I'm definitely writing The Dark Web book, the hardest decision looms: what should go on the front cover that is NOT a bloke in a hoodie, sitting at a computer?

Peer reviewer explicitly said: please don't do this 😂

Exciting! I have just signed a contract for an Essential Knowledge series book with The MIT Press called "The Dark Web".

I'm also making good progress on the Star Trek book revisions. Being most thorough with them and hope it will be much improved as a result.

Today's been a fiddly day of deployment setup (getting the new IDMS stack dev and prod to deploy correctly from the same codebase), forward planning for full on replacement of our current system, and discovering some functionality I didn't know about before. 😱

I'm doing small posts whenever I encounter an error in my technical work that takes me a while to solve, to help others resolve it.

Today: ERROR: failed to build: failed to solve: failed to compute cache key: failed to calculate checksum of ref XXYYZZ during docker build.

https://doi.org/10.59348/1r757-mm685

The number of peer review requests I'm getting at the moment is too much. As with everyone else, I only have limited time to devote to this activity, which displaces my own research time. At the same time, I recognise that the system only works on mutual generosity and I need others to give, too.

First batch of 10 giveaway books went out this morning - great to think they will have good homes. Just waiting for the special book packaging to arrive before I do the next lot.

Watched the film Train Dreams at the weekend. A melancholy fictional bio-history of the coming of modernity in America.