Mark Twomey

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 01:11:39 +0100

Computing started out expensive and then got cheap. Now it’s becoming expensive again. People need to get back into their garages to develop affordable personal computers, using parts the AI providers have no need for. We did it during the 8-Bit computing era. We can do it again.

The RAM shortage could last years

According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:49:17 +0100

Planned a two-hour Dungeons & Dragons session but since we haven’t played in months it takes 20 minutes just to get everyone back up to speed. The grand finale then becomes “You open the door two doors away from the boss… and we’ll leave it there for tonight.”

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:21:50 +0100

Lana Del Rey’s “First Light” has a better title sequence than most contemporary Bond films.

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:55:25 +0100

In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead two famous nothings hurtle towards a Shakespearean end. Watching them question their reality when offstage from Hamlet has some interest, but it’s a slog to get to their hangings. “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” 🎬

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:24:07 +0100

Because Dune 3 has every IMAX screen locked this Christmas, Disney have gone the “Corinthian Leather” approach for Avengers Doomsday. They’ve invented a brand certification: Infinity Vision. That non-IMAX screen with its laser projector and Dolby 7.1 surround? It’s “Infinity Vision.”

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:15:20 +0100

Setting up an AI to GM a two-player play-by-email RPG for myself and a friend. It would take less time to just make more friends.

The G5

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:02:47 +0100

21 years ago I was excitedly buying a PowerMac G5 with dual 64-bit 2.5GHz processors, 1GHz front side bus, system controller ASIC and HyperTransport. The system arrived, sounded like a jet engine when the nine fans turned on, and generated enough heat to warm my room and the upstairs landing. Two months after the warranty expired the liquid cooler leaked and destroyed the motherboard. A known design flaw Apple never issued a recall for. Ever since, I spend 15 minutes figuring out what to buy that’ll last me five years. And then I just buy that.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:07:44 +0100

Every time I go to Las Vegas the place looks more and more clapped out. $25 for a bottle of water in your hotel room and the entertainment is a stage show from someone who was popular in 2005. Online gambling must have been incredibly disruptive for Vegas.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:18:24 +0100

I just turned on third-party integration in WhatsApp, an EU interoperability mandate, and now people on BirdyChat and Haiket can message me. One is business only and the other is in waitlist preview. I don’t expect a blizzard of messages. Or any.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:41:40 +0100

Watched: Deadwax Season 1 📺 A short form horror for vinyl record lovers. Like The Ninth Gate a tracker gets drawn into assembling a cursed item at the behest of an obsessed wealthy person. This is soaked in noir dread that builds through the episodes. A good supernatural mystery.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:56:48 +0100

Oil prices are going to be high for a while to come and there will be no quick end to the Iran war.

Trump orders US naval blockade of Strait of Hormuz

US President Donald Trump has ordered a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in response to Iran’s “unyielding” refusal to give up its nuclear ambitions during peace talks in Islamabad. … Yesterday, the US military announced that two US warships had transited the strait at the start of a mine clearance operation.

Small language, big world

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:49:13 +0100

I’m a big fan of Small Language Models. The technology to distill a Large Language Model down to something that generates tokens at decent speed is now there. I had a Python application costing me 17 cents per run in API calls, so I started to muck about with Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512 under llama.cpp, and after some tuning got good results. Ministral is energetic and verbose. I had to be clear that inventing answers when the input was thin was not acceptable. Once we were past that, it started performing well.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:44:28 +0100

The real heat in Ireland’s fuel protests isn’t the Iran war, it’s the rising carbon tax. We’re told it’s ringfenced for climate action, except the base rate of €20 a ton isn’t. The only climate target the state is on track with is the tax take.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:48:05 +0100

Windows 11 is garbage because the top people at Microsoft are all focused on trying to keep Azure from burning to the ground. How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:28:30 +0100

If Elbridge Colby and his team did not threaten the Pope they should come out publicly and say so. But they haven’t.

Reports: Pentagon Delivered “Bitter Lecture” to Vatican Ambassador, Warning that the U.S. “Has the Military Power to do Whatever it Wants”

The newsletter Letters from Leo, which covers the Vatican, reported Wednesday that it had confirmed the Free Press account of the closed-door meeting. At one point during the meeting, the newsletter reported, a Defense Department official reached for a 14th-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, when the French monarchy forced the papacy into exile for nearly seven decades.

The reference alarmed some Vatican officials, who interpreted it as a threat to use military force against the Holy See, Letters to Leo’s Christopher Hale reported, citing unnamed Vatican sources.

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:25:35 +0100

Watched: The Boys S5E2, Teenage Kix 📺 Solider Boy remains one of the most awful, but best, characters in this show. He’s a jealous egomaniac whose dialogue is so repellant it’s very funny.

AI coding as VB coding

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:41:38 +0100

Rachel Thomas over on Fast.ai.

Vibe coding provides a misleading feeling of agency. The coder specifies what they want to build and is often presented with choices from the LLM on how to proceed. However, those options are quite different than the architectural choices that a programmer would make on their own, directing them down paths they wouldn’t otherwise take.

Much as people might hate reading it, AI coding strikes me as the best version of Visual Basic that could ever be created..with all the problems VB brought to software development. VB lowered the barrier to entry and produced a great deal of awful software, written by people who never grew past being novices, deployed in places it had no business being. AI coding lowers that barrier further still, on the assumption the model itself will compensate for the inexperience of whoever’s driving. We’ll see if that happens.

Artemis II is heading home

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:13:40 +0100

From CNN:

After 7 hours, the Artemis II flyby is wrapping up.

Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman thanked the NASA science team for putting together such an exciting observing program for them, as well as “some great, truly human experience moments here.”

“We were well prepared, and we appreciate all of you, and this is what we do best when we all come together and work as a team,” Wiseman said. “So y’all knocked it out of the park. Thank you for giving us this opportunity.”

The European Service Module that pushed Orion out will now push it home, before being cast off for a fiery reentry.

PostgreSQL has performance work to do

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 02:33:48 +0100

My initial reaction to reading that Linux 7.0 had halved PostgreSQL performance was that the kernel team had broken userspace and would revert it. Then I read this:

AWS Engineer Reports PostgreSQL Performance Halved By Linux 7.0, But A Fix May Not Be Easy - Phoronix

“The fix here is to make PostgreSQL make use of rseq slice extension: lkml.kernel.org/r/2025121… That should limit the exposure to lock holder preemption (unless PostgreSQL is doing seriously egregious things).”

So if that stands and shifting the blame to PostgreSQL, Linux 7.0 stable could lead to a significant drop for PostgreSQL performance in some scenarios until that popular database server is updated.

There’s always tension between long-term architectural decisions and the needs of users. But this isn’t shifting the blame, it’s assigning the responsibility. Linux 7.0 is a new major version. PostgreSQL gets to decide what that means for their project.

Moonraker at the half point

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:09:57 +0100

I’ve been drawing out reading Moonraker because of how much I’m enjoying it. The first third contains a high-stakes gambling sequence better written than most suspense set-pieces I’ve seen elsewhere. Bond is very low-tech here. The buttons he pushes aren’t on devices, they’re on people.

He isn’t quippy. He smokes a lot, and you know he’s tough. Not because he says so, but because he acts when required. No second-guessing, no hesitation. Being a hammer is his personality: you hit him and you hit steel; he hits you and something breaks. And Hugo Drax on the page is far more interesting than his film counterpart.

And now I have to go finish the last few chapters. I want to see what happens next.

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:41:17 +0100

I remember my first pair of over-the-ear headphones, Sony, sometime in the 90s. In my memory, nothing has sounded that good since. The reality is they were just my first good headphones. My current AKG K371s feel plastic as hell but sound just as good.

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:17:13 +0100

Watched: I Love LA Season 1 📺 Entertaining show. The writers and cast know how vapid, obnoxious, ludicrous but somehow endearing the characters are. The scene where True Whitaker’s nepo-baby character Alani starts speaking Elvish as a threesome falls apart got a startled laugh out of me.

Black Nail Varnish

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:04:02 +0100

Watched: Influencers 🎬 Opening with beautiful views of the south of France, Influencers lets you know it’s a bigger movie than the original. But it falls into the sequel trap of bloat and over-complication. The antagonist lead, CW, is still a malignant force but she gets a shallow romance arc here that’s 20 minutes of nothing. She’s a psychopath, a malformed mind pushed into the body of an attractive woman in her 30s, her love can only be shallow and self-serving. The attempt to make it something more than that didn’t land for me.

At her best CW is a shark wearing black nail varnish. If she feels joy it’s when she identifies a new target, and with a new set of influencers to rip apart she flourishes. The complication for her is a callback to the prior movie and that part of the story should have gotten more screen time. While this is a messy sequel it’s still worth watching, both movies are a decent weekend binge. I’d watch a third movie, there’s still some juice left in these characters.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:48:38 +0100

There have always been 996 types, 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, and I’m seeing more firms advertise that culture openly. But the pool of people who can actually sustain it is small. Add an in-office requirement and you’d better be offering equity.

The Sword and the Salmon

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:09:03 +0100

Russia has started running its rusting shadow fleet of oil tankers along the Irish coast at an increased rate to avoid Royal Navy seizures. Ireland, of course, focused on policing fishing, doesn’t have the naval resources to deal with this. And now in the Irish Times, Ireland’s military intelligence are warning about the risk of a catastrophic oil spill off the Irish coast. I like that the salmon of knowledge is the logo of our intelligence services, but a new naval service should use Fragarach, the sword of Manannán mac Lir, as its logo. Ireland is no longer a place the world forgets about. It needs to adapt to the world showing up on its doorstep.

‘The spy is the boring guy in a suit’: Inside the State’s military intelligence service

“If one of these single-skinned 19-year-old tankers hits a bag of crisps off the Aran Islands, you now have millions of tonnes of oil in the water and there’s no more Wild Atlantic Way. We don’t have the capacity to deal with an oil slick that size,”