John Marshall

You can see society struggling with the reality that "many paragraphs of well written text" is no longer a signal of quality.

Not just cover letters on resumes but articles and blog posts.

Short, information dense, and quickly to the point might be the aim now.

Heh. I'm so old-fashioned that I'm putting that effort into the commit messages too.

The good news is the new PR is often pre-populated with the commit message text (or it's just a copy'n'paste away), so you just need to adjust/add to it to fulfil the additional “why we need this change now” role.

Me, I dislike this setting. Commit messages explain a change for posterity; PR descriptions also introduce the change (and its author, for new contributors) and explain why the maintainers should be motivated to merge it now. These texts can need to be different, as their audiences and roles differ.

I just get tired of the constant disinformation.

Perhaps before posting an allegation, people could take a moment to verify whether it is true.

Curses library issues when compiling samtools · Issue #2303 · samtools/samtools I previously noticed that the Conda version of samtools does not support the interactive tview command. However, even after compiling the latest version (v1.23) from source, the resulting binary st...

“I previously noticed that the Conda version of samtools does not support the interactive tview command.”

In fact bioconda's samtools has supported tview for the last eight years.

“Yes, I've heard that previous Conda versions of samtools had this issue, but I haven't tested the latest one…”

a nice thing about when the internet was a bunch of little sites and servers was that it was a lot harder for governments to pressure "the chat provider everyone uses" to implement age verification.

you wanna pressure 300 separate IRC servers? good luck with that. but one company? easy

The consequences curve is now so sharp companies can do the finding out months before they fuck around

/me SCREAMS IN NORWEGIAN SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND

If they see this thread, maybe we can crowdsource the spelling corrections: “[…] at any time”.

Electronic travel authorisation (ETA): guide for dual citizens What dual citizens with British or Irish citizenship (or right of abode) need to do to travel to the UK.

If you were, for example, an Irish/New Zealand dual citizen, you will soon be obliged to use your Irish passport to enter the UK, as you will no longer be eligible to get an ETA with your NZ passport. www.gov.uk/guidance/ele...

TBH I would eventually like to support this: cibuildwheel can in principle build the wheels on GH Actions, I am supportive of people playing around with pysam where they want to, and — most of all! — I would like to stop being spammed with such requests.

But it's at the bottom of a long to-do list.

Install of pysam on win64 · Issue #1375 · pysam-developers/pysam Have been trying to do the above using Cygwin. Found it very frustrating to a point of trying to rebuild the binaries from the repository and drilling down to rebuilding htslib and the associated t...

Dear open-source maintainer,

Please expend effort to support a platform that is of no interest to you or the bulk of your project's user base, because “that's where the majority of the non-[your project's audience] user base lies”.

Black and white photo of two women and a young girl, one in a veil

A few years ago I learned the history behind this photograph. it was taken by a soldier in Nazi occupied Sarajevo, the Muslim woman is using her veil to cover the yellow star of the Jewish woman behind her. But there's so much more to the story

I went “hooray!!” out loud.

With the possible exception of the Law Commission bit.

(To be clear, I am an equal-opportunities disparager, and will be even happier when Luxo and that prick Seymour put themselves out to pasture.)

In truth… from time to time — especially when travelling — I used to telnet into port 110 and type POP3 commands by hand to have a basic look at any new email.

Rutte:

-slaps top of existing arrangement relating to US presence in Greenland-

"This bad boy can fit so many US military bases and whatever the fuck Golden Dome is in it!"

Trump:

"I'll take it! Art of the deal, baby!"

Melt Banana T-shirt, with what appears to be one anime character exploding another via the power of her voice. My shirt was black print on light blue.

Fairly sure this is the only band tee shirt I have ever owned.

Got it at their concert in London which we went to a few days after first hearing them, when they wowed John Peel on his radio show.

Demands Met on 73rd Day as Three End Strike – Prisoners For Palestine After 73 days of hunger strike which began on Balfour day, 2nd November 2025, as some prisoners are facing imminent death, Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed, and

Writing to Starmer and Lammy was of course like writing to a black hole. OTOH I got a reply from my LibDem former MP within two hours, sharing my concerns and sharing the letter she had previously written to Lammy. Which is something.

Now the hunger strikers just need to survive their recovery.

Hey, that was me! However for some reason she didn't answer my question about WHY she left off the status-quo option that she clearly didn't want anyone to be able to select…

Palestine Action hunger strikers are still the state’s responsibility | Letters Letters: The power is in the hands of the DPP or the attorney general, writes Stephen Sedley. Plus Roshi Fernando on Keir Starmer’s unforgivable conduct

A number of people on this platform have been claiming that it's not up to government to shorten people's time on remand, however far beyond the statutory limit that time extends.
Well, take it from a very eminent retired judge. It is.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

I was going to suggest Spanish Civil War, but it seems there has been an update to something I read yesterday… bsky.app/profile/seth...

This is interesting because when I went for my first Covid vaccination, Farage arrived and pushed straight to the front of the queue.

My interest in and level of caring about UK politics has decreased in the three years since I left the UK. But I care about this. Today I've written to Starmer and Lammy imploring them to act, and written to my former MP. If you're in the UK, I hope you will too.

Removing sensitive data from a repository - GitHub Docs Sensitive data can be removed from the history of a repository if you can carefully coordinate with everyone who has cloned it and you are willing to manage the side effects.

You can raise a GitHub support ticket to get them to purge sensitive information in unreachable objects.

However I interpreted @utf9k.net's comment as suggesting it might be a good time to make a local clone of the blog posting and/or public repository “for posterity”… 🤣

The Post reprints MELANIE PHILLIPS, of all people, for a New Zealand audience? That's just spectacularly depressing.

Dialog box in the ManageMyHealth iOS app saying “Manage My Health is temporarily directing users to the Web Application to ensure consistent access to information and support, following the cyber security incident. To launch the Web Application, tap the ‘Help and Support’ button or log in by visiting www.managemyhealth.co.nz”.

LOL 🤣

At a first glance, you might think Calvin's bike maintenance videos are going to be boring. But you rapidly realise his knowledge of the craft is incredible, his ability to clearly explain it is unsurpassed, and there's just the right amount of dry humour in there.

Conceivably there's an iOS app update that Apple hasn't rolled out to our phones yet…

…MMH App Store listing suggests not. But does show that in 7 updates in the last year they haven't managed to update their copyright message away from ©2024.

(For me, 2FA settings are on the web but not iOS app.)

Good point. I did have, but I had logged out fully and would expect to have to do a full login flow to get back in again.

And now I've deactivated biometrics and logged out again. And again it just needs username/password but no 2FA code to log back in again.

Couldn't see any #ManageMyHealth 2FA UI before today, but now I can and have set it up. The enrolment flow seems mostly competently done (surprisingly) and it's now active on my account. Except:

• the iOS app doesn't bother checking 2FA 🤷
• recovery codes mix 1 and letter I in the same positions 🙄