"From every corner of the world came sailing
The Fifth International Brigade
They came to stand beside the Spanish people
To try and stem the rising fascist tide
Franco's allies were the powerful and wealthy" 🎶
https://www.

Spain grants citizenship to descendants of civil war’s International Brigades
About 32,000 volunteered to fight Franco dictatorship, including 2,500 men and women from Britain and Ireland

Series B, Episode 05 - Pressure Point
AVON: Frankly, I don't see how you can do it without me. Your strongest enemies are going to be the defence computers. I am the only one qualified to tackle them.
BLAKE: Yes, that had occurred to me. You better start getting kitted up. Do you want to tell me why?
https://blake.torpidit…

Is there any legal justification for the US attack on Venezuela?
International law experts expect Washington to claim self-defence and face little serious pushback [from the UN]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan

sp_baboons: Baboons' interactions (2020)
Network of interactions between a group of 20 Guinea baboons living in an enclosure of a Primate Center in France, between June 13th 2019 and July 10th 2019. The data set contains observational and wearable sensors data.
This network has 23 nodes and 3197 edges.
Tags: Social, Animal, Offline, Unweighted, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata

Protests erupted nationwide as the U.S. attacks Venezuela and kidnaps President Maduro and his wife.
San Francisco was no exception.
As the recent days of rain let up for a grateful pause, activists of all ages from the Answer coalition, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Democratic Socialists of American, Revolutionary International Youth, Refuse Fascism, and just people with home made signs rallied at Powell and Market.
They then marched down Market Street to …

Protests Throughout as U.S. Attacks Venezuela to Grab Country's Oil : Indybay
Blatant criminality characterized by NY Times as "some in Washington are concerned."

Court documents: in a deposition, Ilya Sutskever documented significant internal conflicts at OpenAI prior to Sam Altman's firing and discusses his OpenAI exit (Rocket Drew/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/op

An OpenAI Founder Discusses Anthropic Merger Talks, Internal Beefs in Deposition
Anthropic initially expressed “excitement” about a possible merger with OpenAI two years ago, after OpenAI’s board fired CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever told attorneys in a deposition made public this week. Such a deal would have potentially placed ...

Had Fun

Bought a car/micro-camper

Bought a van to do up as a micro-camper, and did a temporary rush job of that conversion myself while waiting in the list for the pro to do it.
Then the pro gave himself a health criss the week it was booked so I took apart my temp job and only got another temp kit-job in it's place.
Went out in it like four times during that and then broke my wrist and couldn't really use it or improve it.
Then had to take it apart even more to try
and figure out where the ad-blue hole was.
I will do a proper permanent job of the
floor and walls and ceiling and adjustments to the kit-job to make it the nicest it's been so far during the spring next year.
My assumption that the prior conversion
into a van and for wheelchair-access meant the microcamper conversion was half-done already turned out to be false.
If I buy a new one, it'll be one that has never been wheelchair adapted.
But it's going okay. Only scraped it once so far.
Fewer than aimed for or booked, but I broke my wrist and had to cancel the second half of the summer.
Went to a conference about money and computers and fringe decentralized social media and it wasn't as boring as you might expect and felt pretty much like a festival.
Exactly the target number! It's lovely.
Took 3 times longer than I'd hoped and
50% more money than I'd planned for really.
Still improvements to make but they will
be incremental and gradual over the coming year or two now.
It's been interest-only for 20 years so a big old lump sum payment that I never really expected to be able to make. Expected to have to sell and move at the end of the mortgage term.
But surprisingly the stocks ISA got high enough to pay it off after all, so I did that.
Cash-flow ruined by that and the bedroom but should start to feel a bit richer next year.

Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence https://openbuddhism.org/library/videos/2022/elodie-emery-wandrille-lanos-present-buddhism-the-unspeakable-truth/

‘Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence’
In a brief video in English, the French filmmakers Élodie Emery and Wandrille Lanos introduce their documentary ‘Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence’ (Arte, 2022). It can be watched here.

Just learned that Symfony 7.4 ships with Multi -Step form support.
That's exactly what I need for my current project. Nice!
https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-7-4-multi-step-forms

New in Symfony 7.4: Multi-Step Forms (Symfony Blog)
Symfony 7.4 introduces form flows, a new way to build and manage multi-step forms using the same familiar concepts as regular Symfony forms.

Here in the Bay Area of San Francisco, some of the world’s biggest companies are fighting it out to gain some kind of an advantage.
And, in turn, they are competing with China
This race to seize control of a technology that could reshape the world
is being fuelled by bets in the trillions of dollars by the US’s most powerful capitalists.
The computer scientists hop off at Mountain View for Google DeepMind,
Palo Alto for the talent mill of Stanford University, <…