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February 2026

My BMI is just above 16, which is dangerously low. I am trying to eat, but it's so hard when nauseated.

Apparently, I have a chronic campylobacter infection. This is like having constant food poisoning. This can happen in immunodeficient people, like me.

https://www.jaci-inpractice.org/article/S2213-2198(23)00645-1/fulltext

My bowel transit is so rapid at present, owing to this infection, possibly, that I am not absorbing any nutrients. I also have muscle atrophy from kidney failure. The result is rapid weight loss. It's also making fluid management, with the kidneys, a total nightmare.

Sorry for whingeing, but it's cathartic. I am desperately worried about ending up hospitalized unless I can put some weight back on. And I am desperately fed up with feeling awful: dizzy, faint, nauseated, and having diarrhea.

End-of-moan

This, indeed, does seem very bad.

(Although I can think of several other "reasons why we cite" beyond giving credit, including context compression - using past concepts without having to re-explain them - and criticising past ideas/contexts.)

Much of this (clearly AI-generated) post is terrifying and probably true re jobs. LLMs are going to unleash all economic hell.

But to claim that "knowledge is essentially free now" is nonsense. New knowledge cannot be synthesised just from all that is. True new knowledge has a labour cost.

Will it always? Perhaps AI will one day sort through archives and conduct experiments. But it doesn't yet.

Don't get me wrong - I think he seems like a bit of a shit and the stuff about "taste" is utter nonsense. But he's also, in my view, not totally wrong about the potential economic consequences.

This morning, to distract myself from the bleak state of the world and the grim state of my health, I cleaned up and released my static site generator for music label websites. It uses open metadata from MusicBrainz.

This is what I use to build https://ticitaci.com/

https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/mblabelsite

The basic premise is: design your site, get all of your label's releases into MusicBrainz - including tracks, track lengths, cover art, remixers, masterers, and cover designers - and it will build you a catalog website. To update the site, you just add data to MusicBrainz and re-generate.

For larger labels, it has full resume support for if the metadata or cover art downloads fail mid-way through. The CLI allows you to manipulate releases - like adding Bandcamp or SoundCloud preview clips, or release notes/physical artwork.

This was my way of making something that allows labels to have a customized web presence while encouraging the deposit of open metadata for musical releases. It meant also that I need not write a full CRUD interface for editing; MB has already done it. Re-using shared open infrastructure!

To be clear: publisher versions of record can be equally problematic! It takes a commitment to accessibility - be that from a publisher or an author - to make these things right.

People often don't know that haemodialysis is very tough on the body. They think it's a treatment: So it should make you feel better, right?

In reality: it stops me from dying (I'd probably live a week without it), but it does not make you feel good. It's usually nauseating and utterly exhausting.

I am very pleased about the Green election win. Such a great result.

Also pleased by the candidate Sir Oink-a-Lot! 🐷🐖🐗

I felt really unwell last night. Faint, dizzy, nauseated, bowel misbehaving. So I really just couldn't face haemodialysis. Feeling much better today, so doing an early morning session right now. This kind of 12hr delay is the maximum I can push it before it can become dangerous.

A BBraun haemodialysis machine in operation, with blood running round the circuit

This is why I was concerned, long ago, about the UK government wanting "anonymised" health data to be made available. I knew it was only time before the technology would catch up and make it possible to de-anon.

Today is also the @copim.bsky.social 2026 conference: "What next for community-led open access book publishing?"

I hope to attend virtually in the background while I work.

I wasn't sure why online tickets for this were so strictly limited. Perhaps to get a more engaged digital response?

An interesting sounding talk at Birkbeck, open to all: Piercing the veil of authority in techno-utopian and AGI future-driven innovation by Dr Rebekah Cupitt.

"This raises the age-old question of how technological development... could be shaped to be more responsible"

https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event/59813/piercing-the-veil-of-authority-in-techno-utopian-and-agi-future-driven-innovation

Sadly, I can't make this, but I hope Rebekah also touches on the (not new) person-simulation in people-centric AI. That is, we talk about "people-centred" technologies, but LLMs are personified. They have a persona and centre a performance of a person ("I am sorry" etc.).

I think this talk may overlap with a lot of the general dissent around LLMs, but Rebekah is a very thoughtful person and I am sure this will have much to offer.

Joining a chorus to declaim the idiocy, even though @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social has done the job admirably, but: education is not just training for work. If you want to liberate the masses from work, that's one thing (though I don't believe it), but to "free" people from learning?

The misconception is that all labour - such as the labour of scholarship, research, and learning - should be abolished and are bad. Why not also, then, the labour of art, music, and love?

Half the articles in the Harvard Crimson concern how terrible it is that those associated with Epstein are highly decorated at Harvard and how they must face justice.

Then there's another article celebrating the Harvard Gates scholars.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/25/bill-gates-apologizes-jeffrey-epstein-ties

As always, I note how the main western HE educational "social mobility" (for all the damage of that phrase) that billionaires fund is usually to give a few select people slots at elite institutions, rather than to fund institutions that give broad opportunity to those conventionally denied HE.

The grants in the Education category, here, for example, is page after page of Ivies... Who really need the money?

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants

Is $12 per year - $1 per month - a "big" price increase? For something I use every day and that keeps me much more secure, I do not think so.

This morning I have been diagnosing and fixing a most frustrating problem at Knowledge Commons. Late last night, while I was on haemodialysis, users began reporting that they couldn't login to Works, our repository. Uh oh.

Ian, our valiant repository dev, was overseas in Austria for an InvenioRDM meeting. He nonetheless looked into this, but came to a startling conclusion: the problem was in the main Commons app, not in Works. Indeed, Works was crashing when it got an invalid response from the internal API.

So the problem was the internal link between the services. I could not see for the life of me what was going on. Nothing had changed in the codebase or deployment - at least, as far as I could see. I then noticed though, that the permission error thrown by the API was a CloudFront error. Hmm.

After hours of debugging, our infrastructure wizard arrived and admitted that there had been a rule reordering yesterday in the Web Application Firewall. This had put the AWS "block bots" rule at higher priority than the "allow API calls" route. Reverting this fixed it.

So: Argh. Hours of dev time down the drain. At least I now know that a Cloudfront-generated 403 error can be - and likely, is - caused by a WAF rule blocking the request. I also think that I will write an impact tester app that we can use to assess that the WAF isn't locking us out of our own app.

A thoughtful piece that made me think about my "special" books. Signed editions etc. I guess it's the physical connection to the author that makes these stand out. But there's an oddness to it. If I want to reread, I'll use a different edition to preserve. So, basically, these books are never read.

A fascinating set of documents. I've just been reading the one on BSE/CJD. It's a case study in how governments should NOT be responsible for promoting industrial economic interests, but rather, protecting public health.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/environmental_issue_report_2001_22

"The government’s policy was not precautionary. Its primary objective was rather one of trying to diminish, as far as possible, the short-term adverse impact of BSE on the profitability of the food industry and the level of public expenditure."

When perfectly healthy people joke "I'd sell a kidney for that", they don't realise how *little* that would cost. Most people can lose a kidney and not even notice.

On the other hand, if anyone ever jokes about giving *both* kidneys, I don't think they really realise how much that is to lose.

I note that my weight is now 59kg or approximately 9 stone. This is far too low for a man of my height (6' 2") and the doctors are worried about it.

A warning: this thread contains some bodily function (bowel) discussion.

I have two problems contributing to this. First, I have been having constant and extreme loose bowels for months. I was up from 4am to 6am with this, today.

I can sometimes suppress this with drugs, but it's a neurological disorder to do with the nerves that control my bowel. As a result, I am not absorbing food properly.

Second, kidney failure is causing me to have terrible nausea. This makes it difficult to eat in the first place. I just have to force food down when I can.

Altogether, this is not ideal at all.

Even though a California court case ruled the copyright to be expired, I look forward to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem attempting to sue the living daylights out of this "Einstein" abomination. They still provide licensing for his likeness in the UK (Smart Energy GB ads, for instance).

"faster, reproducible science across disciplines through UKRI‑supported national AI testbeds and shared methods"

Forgive me for expressing scepticism that AI will magically fix the reproducibility crisis.

That's from the new UKRI AI "strategy"

Very unsure re the link between labour & study that this makes. What if you don't study for a job? Also, because the payment only comes to universities when someone is employed, there is a perverse incentive to give good degree classifications for employability.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/22/employers-should-contribute-to-universities

I suppose you could have government underwriting the gap, but the Mail will then howl at how the state is subsidising "bad students" on courses that aren't worthwhile.

More broadly, I just worry about institutional autonomy - to teach what we want to teach and for people to choose what to learn.

I also worry for those who just want to study something that brings them joy. Life is full of time for tedious work. For many people, work is a soulless lifelong grind, bookended at one end by an impoverished retirement. It would be good if, at the earlier end, there was still room for curiosity.

... And what is this sudden glut of submissions going to do to any responsible grant-scheme review process? Also, with such strong bifurcation of opinion on the acceptability of LLM use, if this is detected, you could easily get a reviewer who takes exception and rejects on those grounds...

Rereading @kfitz.info:

The first is simply to note that books are often far more ephemeral than we often assume. Bindings give way and pages are lost; paper is easily marked or torn; and many texts printed before the development of acid-free paper are gradually disappearing from common usefulness.

But over the centuries libraries and archives have developed a vast infrastructure to support the preservation of print, including space within our institutions (such as the book bindery contained within most research libraries), budgets dedicated to the mission of conserving our print resources...

... and perhaps most importantly, staff members whose labor is specifically dedicated to preservation. If books were as permanent as we often assume, we wouldn’t have needed this infrastructure designed to protect them.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York University Press, 2011), p. 122.

Have some mixed feelings about this article. Bit of a straw man to talk about paying editors and reviewers; it's the specialised labour of publishing that is at issue, in my view. But agree with DK and CR that if diamond infrastructure were just treated as quotidien, we would have a good system.

That said, the thing that worries me is the centralisation that this *could* imply. Fund one central infrastructure. Problem solved? Not quite. There has to be room for doing new things and reinventing infrastructures.

Moving on in my reading to Abby Smith Rumsey's _When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future_.

Apt after the memory games in _There Is No Antimemetics Division_!

The cover of Abby Smith Rumsey's _When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future_. It features a man with pixellated face with a grey upper half of the book jacket and a yellow box with the subtitle in the middle, just above where the face should be.

Writing a commissioned/invited book chapter this morning. Been recounting therein debates about print/digital fixity and preservation, from Eisenstein and Johns, through @kfitz.info, up to @ianmilligan1.bsky.social.

Now, though, Robyn is demanding a cuddle. Who am I to say no?

Robyn, a three legged brown and black dog, lying on a blue sofa, with green and yellow cushions.

Had a nice day, doing very little, except crosswords, reading science fiction, and cuddling dogs. Now, sadly, it's haemodialysis. There is no holiday from that (unless you want to die).

"Trump is railing against the justices who ruled against him in the tariffs case and making the argument that they should not rule against him because he won the presidential election."

This is, at least, quite funny 😂

Was just thinking, in my break from reading, about the tendency of (scholarly) infrastructure to expand and accumulate. This is unsustainable without commensurate staff growth and so it is the job of infrastructure engineers to sunset and cull features, even if that causes user pain.

Every new plugin added, every new theme, accumulates tech debt and long-term maintenance costs. Obviously, core should be shielded from culls, but a FIFO pipe, balanced against feature use, could apply to sunsetting.

New standard demands are tricky ones, too. It's good to support these, but every new bit of interop requires ongoing engineering time.

I've been despairing of this for several weeks now.

There are so many decent academics who teach under often near-impossible conditions.

But there are also highly resourced, narcissistic, money-driven academic cliques. They have huge influence at "elite" institutions & consort w/ sex traffickers.

In some cases of technological innovation, I can see this "unstoppable" logic being true. Once one company knows about eg antibiotics, the knowledge will spread.

With LLMs, only very few large companies have the resources to train. So regulation is not difficult. There's just no political will.

Such a good idea in principle. Of course, it relies on some compliance mechanism and serial liars like Johnson will just bluster that they believed what they said, or were misinformed, or... Etc

Taking a day of annual leave tomorrow, because I am getting ill and need a long weekend.

Planning to read some fiction, write some non-fiction, solve cryptic crosswords, play with my dogs, and perhaps listen to a few new records.

Must not spend too much time on Bluesky. Maybe a little bit.

Half the stuff I read is about how incredible vibe coding is and how now anyone can produce code/apps.

The other half is written by programmers working on complex production code... And they say it's "low quality" and unsuitable for deployment.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/godot_maintainers_struggle_with_draining/

I have found that it can deal with discrete, atomic issues in a large codebase, but that it is often hopeless at making even trivial changes when given a large project with complex interdependencies.

"National research information infrastructure may be better suited to not-for-profit, community-governed ownership."

Who would have thought it?!

I doubt he'll starve or freeze (unlike disabled people in this country).

He's had to downsize his palace and household staff. He still lives in a residence funded by the king.

Having "nothing" means very different things to different people.

'The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is “seismic” and has left senior royals in “uncharted waters”, a royal commentator has told the Press Association.'

Yes, it is pretty uncharted for people in his position to face any kind of justice.

It's good that celebrity nobodies, known and priveleged only by the accident of birth, also face arrest for wrongdoing. But I note that it seems to be only the insider trader allegations and not any accusation of sexual abuse or people trafficking.

An anxious evening as people in our postcode are reporting power outages. That's a bit more of a sinister affair when you have your bloodstream hooked up to a dialysis machine. If the power goes out in the night, I've got 20 mins of emergency backup power to get off the machine.

Generally, this is good news, obviously. I guess I would just say that £400 is not that much. And only 60k people benefitted from the home adaptation stuff, so it's a relatively small number.

But, again, this is better than their attempts to take money away from disabled people.

Another cool infrastructural win... The Journal of Cultural Analytics is also now running on @janewayolh.bsky.social!

Again, credit to my co-conspirator @ajrbyers.bsky.social for building this with me and then for him continuing the work with a team.

https://culturalanalytics.org/

A rabbit hole of identifier geekiness I'd love to have more time to investigate: the International Standard Recording Code.

It's an identifier for musical _recordings_, uniquely specifying a particular incarnation of a musical work and tracking it across distribution channels.

https://isrc.ifpi.org/

"UK Redundancy Survey" - on the one hand, this is collecting data on misery to write stories to sell the magazine. It feels distasteful.

On the other hand, obviously, redundancy and the impending collapse of the UK university sector needs to be reported on in the open.

Really struggling with health this week. Only just made it through my talk yesterday.

I have terrible autonomic symptoms that come on: nausea, vomiting, dizziness, fainting, pain, tummy trouble, feeling absolutely freezing. All from vasculitis.

Taking Friday off for a long weekend to recover.

"The turning point was that Torvalds not only accepted outside changes but actively encouraged them, treating his kernel as a commons that others could extend."

Hardly a new point, but always jumps out at me when open digital projects use the language of The Commons.

(Disclaimer: I work on/for Knowledge *Commons*.)

And this report - an interesting and worthwhile read from @samuelmoore.org et al.! - is hosted on KC Works, the platform I oversee as Technical Lead for @kcommons.bsky.social.

It's gratifying to see the infrastructures I build and maintain in use, making humanities scholarship available for all.

A really interesting article on Wikipedia and fiction by Kiron Ward in @c21literature.bsky.social, published by @openlibhums.org.

Complements nicely the article on Wikipedia and the Novel by Ryan Ruby in the current issue of New Left Review.

https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/id/24043/

Also cool: @c21literature.bsky.social runs on the software I co-created with the mighty @ajrbyers.bsky.social and uses the funding/business model I co-designed and built with the excellent @theblochian.bsky.social, making it all free for readers to access, thanks to 300+ global libraries.

Posting rants about tuition fees and the consumerisation of higher education is like fishing for trolls to block. They just come swimming to the surface...

This is emblematic of the consumer culture that fees have engendered.

What the hell did the students expect? It was a ONCE IN A CENTURY PANDEMIC. There were LAWS against congregating in public. Staff worked themselves to the bone to get online delivery working.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq6qge7rmm1o

Unis also had obligations to protect staff. But, I mean, should I get compensation for having to shield at home for 5 years? I have, after all, missed out on years of life "experience". Or should I just realise that life is not fair, pandemics happen, and we need goodwill towards each other.

Everyone (not you, Boris Johnson and your "government") was doing their best during the pandemic. It was bad. But this suit is just hateful and an embodiment of the reduction of university to an "experience".

This bloke can't read the room. Not only is he responsible for the absolutely hated tuition fees that are now bankrupting universities, he clearly has no idea how hard it is to live on £15k. I mean, for heaven's sakes. The last thing you need if you are earning only £15k is a 3% loan repayment.

This is what AI scrapers are doing to our platform. Our database capacity is just being ruined every time they initiate a fresh scrape and our tech team has to scramble, taking radical measures, to keep the platform up.

In your case, it seems entirely possible.

The root cause of our woes is a legacy codebase running in BuddyPress at an unanticipated scale being hit by vast waves of traffic on uncached material. It's the perfect storm.

We have a replacement almost ready, but progress is delayed as I have to resurrect the current site and every time I do, it derails my other work!

A graph of database connections, showing a massive spike at around 18.30.

I am quite, quite exhausted this evening after working through a rough health day.

However, this evening I started looking at ‘Scientific, Rhetorical and Lifestyle Use of the Terms “Ecology” and “Environment” in Reference to the “Ecosystem Crisis”’, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2024.2307650

It's an article about the use of the term "ecology" in arts and humanities disciplines. (For example: "textual ecologies"). I have yet to read it all, but I believe the author to be highly suspicious of this trans-disciplinary uprooting of a biological term.

Personally, I was interested in the OED 1.c. definition of "ecology", which has apparently been in circulation since 1976 (so a good half century), as "In extended use: the interrelationship between any system and its environment; the product of this".

My view on the Time Allocation Survey that UK university staff must complete to log how they have spent their time:

It is tiresome, burdensome, technologically clunky, bureaucratic, financialising, and generally symptomatic of contemporary university management. I have always hated it.

The idea that overworked university staff will keep precise track of and categorise their working time is just absurd.

The general public have no idea. They think university lecturers just swan about, thinking abstractly, and then get the whole summer off, to do some more thinking. They have no idea that academics have to categorise their time down to single-percent figures.

I see that some Silicon Valley psychos are developing a chip that streams music straight to your brain. Why? I have music going round inside my head every waking hour of the day and always have. It often bursts out in singing to myself. And then I like to listen to it externally, to match it up.

The only times in my life this music has stopped was when I had a stroke and then when I was suffering from severe depression quite a few years ago. The silence was awful.

Actually, also during severe migraines.

Today is more book sorting. Finding it exhausting, so when I can do no more I am looking forward to getting stuck into THERE IS NO ANTI-MEMETICS DIVISION. Have heard good things about this from multiple people.

The cover of THERE IS NO ANTI-MEMETICS DIVISION. It has a deer-like animal walking on waves

As poster says, ignore the seemingly homophobic heading, this is a good read, particularly on her disability and challenges of access to public spaces. I still think she was foolish, voting Tory at one point, but her convictions seem generally sound.

Bit of a disaster here this morning. Mrs Eve has been unwell, up all night with sickness and in no state to deal with the dogs. But the dogs are totally bonded to her. Robyn won't go for a walk with just me. Luka won't even let me put his harness on. "Oh well, they can miss a walk", you might think.

Except Robyn won't, for some reason, poop in the garden. Luka won't even go to the garden with me luring him with a fish skin (he hunches over, looks away, with the look of a man condemned to the gallows). But basically, if Helen is ill, we have no good fallback for caring for the dogs.

Why, you might also ask, do you have dogs that hate you? Well, Robyn doesn't hate me. She loves cuddles. Comes right up to me and snuggles in. She begs for treats constantly! But she will not go for a walk with me, on our own. We get a few paces and she lies down, refusing to move.

Luka, on the other hand, is a deeply traumatised dog. He spent 8 years in a cold and miserable shelter where they didn't know where the monthly food bill was coming from. He has a deep distrust of men, it seems. Especially when they are in his territory. So: me.

Outside the house, he is fine with me. I can stroke him. I have done training classes with him and he treats me like a different person. In the house/sitting room, though, he thinks I am a monster and is terrified. We are working with a behaviourist to try to help him.

And that's really what it's all about: care and help. We got the most beleaguered rescue dogs because they needed a home. But it comes with difficulties, particularly since I lost my mobility and the care fell directly and indeflectably on Helen. When she collapses, so does the whole care structure.

Anyway, this may all seem trivial, but I am wondering what on earth I will do with the dogs today. I suppose Robyn will have to get over her garden toilet aversion. I've managed to get her outside, at least. She is sitting by the back door.

A picture of Robyn, our three-legged dog who is brown and black and medium size Luka - a big black dog with some Labrador and Husky in him. He's looking at me suspiciously.

I was just informed, by @ernestopriego.com, that, in Mexico, Valentine's Day is a celebration of romantic love AND friendship/other types of love. I really like this. VD can be very lonely or isolating for many people but it's worth reaching out to friends, I think.

I wonder what Dave Eggers is doing these days? He used to be the talk of the town, but I haven't heard his name for quite a while.

This is a good read! And I think that they are right: they are reporting on already-public material. Anonymisation may spare some feelings, but it makes it much harder to verify if the meta-scientific claims are true.

A friend put me on to World of Books for selling second-hand books and I AM IN LOVE. You just scan the books, they give you a price, and then they collect them. It's like magic and so much easier than Ebaying them. I had setup a complex script to scan barcodes and list on Ebay. This is way better.

Really struggling with rheumatoid arthritis flare up this morning. Hard to get going and every movement is terribly painful. It will improve, but I could have done without this!

This. Totally this.

My favourite incarnation of it is: senior academics decrying something like open access for "stopping" junior scholars from publishing in "top" journals, with "career consequences".

But who gatekeeps the career progression and uses the "top" journals to do so? Senior academics.

This morning's writing music is/was Exit Planet Dust, the 1995 debut album by The Chemical Brothers. Still sounds incredible and other-worldly. "Three Little Birdies Down Beats" remains the most euphoric resolution of repetition.

Brothers gonna work it out.

The cover of Exit Planet Dust featuring a car driving down a highway past a man and a woman walking on the side of the road. It is apparently a 1970s fashion photo reject.

“let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident”

Thomas Jefferson on preservation principles in 1791.

Thomas Jefferson, ‘To Ebenezer Hazard’, letter to Ebenezer Hazard, Philadelphia, 18 February 1791, Founders Online, National Archives <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-19-02-0059>.

Writing on digital preservation and remembering that the core principle is very old.

This would be a popular move, but it is through REF that disciplines get to "mark their own homework". Quality is appraised by people in the discipline. Doing this w tech could severely disadvantage smaller institutions. BBK was second in English. Would that be the same in a tech approach?

Fantastic!

Leveraging a publisher's backlist as packages for libraries to subscribe to can give revenue for frontlist titles to be made OA.

This works because backlist titles are often exhausted and only sell sporadically. Opening the Future gives these titles a new life and makes new works open.

The important thing is this balance: libraries need to pay for SOMETHING often - they won't speculatively fund open future works - so give them something of value for their subscription (the backlist packages) BUT THEN use that money to fund upfront OA in new works.

Drat. The real problem with this major book clearance is that, in the current chaos, I can't find works I need. Just been hunting for my copy of @ianmilligan1.bsky.social's The Digital Dark Age and I can't find it anywhere. Grr.

Is there a way, in the Android app, to search Bluesky lists that people have created? (the packs where you can follow a curated list)

Today is quite a big day internally at Knowledge Commons for me. I've been working on a sizeable project for many months - absolutely crucial but also not very visible, in an infrastructure-ey kind of way - and it's about to enter internal testing...

I've just done almost 2 hours of tedious medical admin. 1hr getting off the dialysis machine & disinfecting it. Then 20 minutes of immunoglobulin injection, followed by 20 mins of sorting and taking morning drugs, followed by 20 mins of waiting for the morphine to kick in.

And now I can begin...

Another frustration for me is the muscle wastage/atrophy I have as a result of my kidney failure. It was compounded by a deconditioning hospital stay last year.

Anyway, I have a friend coming round to lift boxes of books for me today, as I can't. Once sorted, the garage may be accessible once more!

Just recovering from dialysis this morning. Had a bad realization yesterday that I have lost more weight. Down to approx 60kg. At 6ft 2inches that is not good. I just can't eat enough as I am always nauseous. Gotta force myself...

There's a joke going round software engineering circles that, soon, with AI, all that will be needed is for people to accurately describe precisely what they want in a piece of software. So: software engineering jobs are safe.

It's amusing, but the state of AI coding is both alarming AND overhyped.

It's overhyped because the AI cannot get basic things right. Ask it to realign an item in CSS under any complexity and it writes hundreds of lines of CSS that don't work. If you get it to do big, interlinked technical tasks, it also hits the fail whale big time.

It's alarming because of what it CAN do. What it can produce from scratch is amazing. Small, specific, well-defined tasks are dealt with. It's quite good at auditing code, too. But unless you have a good test suite for acceptance (and audit it so it doesn't modify the tests), it ain't great.

I see it as a bit like modern medicine. It is absolutely astounding what we CAN do. Heart transplants. Dialysis. Brain surgery. But what we CAN'T do seems ridiculous. Cure the common cold.

The thing is, Labour will oust Starmer and replace him with someone like that weasel Streeting.

But

'On 9 September 2025, Health Secretary Wes Streeting defended Mandelson, stating that he should not be judged as "guilty by association" for his links to Epstein'.

Great judgement, Wes.

I know that I shouldn't get my hackles up over this, but it's pretty disgusting to say "this is how men behave". It wouldn't justify individual instances, even if true, but they - we - don't have to behave like this and many of us do not.

I really can't tell if this is parody... A platform that allows AI agents to hire humans to perform embodied tasks on their behalf. 😭

I mean, this is just human to AI to human, in one sense. But it has that Total Dystopia vibe about it.

https://rentahuman.ai/

Just had a painter/decorator pull out of doing a job he told me he'd do. On the day. Because he's "taken on another big job".

Clearly rubbish. He could just have said he didn't want to do it. But now I've wasted a load of time waiting on him.

Grr. (Needed to let this steam off somewhere!)

Even if his reason is true... WHY TAKE ON ANOTHER JOB WHEN YOU ARE ALREADY COMMITTED?

It seems pretty clear to me that there's a load of hypocrisy here. British people don't want to pay for healthcare, for example. But then they say that doctors should repay their student loans, because the education is a personal benefit to the doctor.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/feb/03/student-loans-martin-lewis-rachel-reeves-graduates

Doctors are the extreme example, but we all benefit from having a higher educational standard among the population. It's not just a personal benefit in any case. Student fees and loans are just a horrible way to fund HE. I thought it when they came in and I think it now.

The sad thing is, every time I think about how critical Zotero is to me I remember that most users, even though it's also crucial to them, do not financially support the software (although they also "sell" synchronisation storage plans).

We NEED to find a better way to support such infrastructures.

Also updated repositories with metadata-only copies of my work-in-progress, some submitted, some being written.

My website about page then pulls these data from the repository: https://eve.gd/about/

For those who care, I am writing:

Eve, Martin Paul, ‘The Archive at the End of the World: Speculative Preservation and the Politics of Loss’, in Textual Ecologies: Media, Materials, Environments, ed. by Katharina de Boehm, Orietta da Rold, and Vicky Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2028)

and

Eve, Martin Paul, ‘AI, Copyright, and Open Licensing’, in Handbook on Critical Approaches to Artificial Intelligence in Library and Information Studies, ed. by Merisa Martinez, Melissa Terras, and Anna Foka (TBC: TBC, 2028)

Publication dates are estimates.

Of course, these could be rejected and require tombstoning. I still like to feed in metadata early so that discovery services can pick it up quickly when the work is out. I also like to list these things I have written but that have not appeared on my CV.

After all, I do not know when the "end" in "end-stage renal failure" will come. And I'd hate to leave behind a partial archive and index :P

Found Zotero 8 truly excellent in my writing/research period this morning. Working brilliantly and the new citation dialog is SO snappy. Love it.

This is a core piece of research infrastructure without which I would be distraught!

https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-8/

I have actually already used the reading mode function! Reflowing badly formatted HTML with way-too-small text and no way to change it in a philosophy journal.

I agree with Schneier re corporate capture and the enclosure of knowledge being bad things, but this analysis should hang more critique on "transformative use" and the fairness of this crucial legal fair use defense. Because that's what this all hinges on. Is it fair? Is it right?

I have to admit that a large part of my Ebay pricing strategy is sentimentality. Books cost more, the less I want to let them go.

I can report good results from day 3 of the posture corrector buzzer device. It constantly reminds me when I slouch and I can feel core support muscles being used that usually are not. In fact, I have definite muscle ache already! And I am sitting much straighter.

Reading a live report on the Alcaraz-Djokovic match:

"But the purity of Djokovic’s ball-striking is too much: he’s not going for corners but he is contrloling the pace, securing the break. He is quite good at tennis."

That last line!