Jim Webber

Keeping the lights on is actually one of the most complex systems humans have ever built. Flick a switch, light! But what lies beneath is truly remarkable.

Australian Gas Infrastructure Group’s push to tell you all about their tiny Gladstone hydrogen park Recently I came across something on LinkedIn (I *know*! Shut up!) from the Australian Gas Infrastructure Group that I think you need to…

Not even three fifths of fuck all:

Some notes on Australian Gas Infrastructure Group's desire to pat themselves on the dick for their Gladstone renewable hydrogen project.

They want you to be left with the impression that they have a future. They don't.

100 stirs before milk. 100 stirs after.

This is the way.

“A data point?” That exercise in punching down? A data point. Yeah totally not bringing me round to the cause here lad.

Short memory there mate. We had a coalition and it was quite awful.

Nuclear power is not about low carbon. It’s about money. The Brits are having their wallets inspected before a single Watt is generated.

Still explaining? Can’t help yourself but to be right eh?

Sadly Andy he was. You're still explaining.

Andy here is explaining a fundamental truth about British politics.

But continuity remain never internalised Reagan’s saying, “When you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

And that is a significant factor in how we ended up here in the first place.

This is a really good and interesting conversation between my colleagues @jimbobc.bsky.social and @alekusi.bsky.social from @neo4j.com about new ideas and research for a #graph #database #runtime and gratefully focusing on system engineering and little on AI for a change.

Cypher Versioning - Graph Database & Analytics Balance the stability and evolution of graph querying with Cypher versions offering extended support for existing Cypher queries.

Big news for Cypher users: versioning is here! 🤩

Two tracks, one goal: balance stability and innovation.

Cypher 5 is now frozen and stable, perfect for production environments that value consistency.
+

Neo4j Live: Aurendil - A Future Graph Database Runtime YouTube video by Neo4j

Join us this week and hear about Neo4j Research’s radical new graph-native runtime that rewrites the rules of query execution youtube.com/live/sZketgH... #neo4j #cypher #database #research

Neo4j Live: Aurendil - A Future Graph Database Runtime YouTube video by Neo4j

In this week's #neo4j live we look at the work of our research time. Meet Aurendil: a bold reimagining of what a graph database engine can be. youtube.com/live/sZketgH... #research #cypher #database

The Guardian, bless ‘em, seem to struggle a lot with concepts like “area under a curve.”

I was just about to post my own gripe about this. Sure AC uses power for a few weeks when the Warner is hot. It for the other 9 months of the year it’s an air source heat pump that gets us off methane and lowers costs overall.

Enshitification is the enshitification of the word shitty.

Whenever this comes up, always follow the money.

The other arguments are specious. Renewables are intermittent? Nukes close for repairs. Or water discharge is too hot, so lower generation in the summer.

*Every generator* is intermittent. The *system* should not be.

The shot, the chaser.

The liberal in-house magazine shilling for nukes yet again.

With my sincerest apologies to Leslie Lamport.

Mate I’m very much hoping that history will repeat itself.

Like English, Spanish is constantly evolving. Unlike some English speakers, we welcome that | María Ramírez Purists’ attempts to police our global languages are doomed – there’s joy and inspiration in new expressions from all over the world, says journalist María Ramírez

Interesting article, but slightly off on the evolution of British English. We are snooty about Americanisms (I particularly dislike “oftentimes”) but words from other languages and cultures permeate our language quite well.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Methane companies in the UK will get to fleece us for network upgrades for a product we cannot safely use. Meanwhile badly needed electricity grid upgrades are much lower.

I cannot wait to disconnect permanently from the methane network.

I am still as terrifying as the day that image was made. I hope.

But RIOT doesn't sacrifice correctness. Particularly important for me (and @neo4j.com) is that it supports leaderless operation (every server is a reader and a writer) and of course reciprocal consistency for sharded graphs.

The new work, RIOT, removes some of the asymmetry of voting in consensus protocols. In doing so it opens up the chance to make a lot of local decisions for scalability.

The picture is an AI generated image of a real thing that happened in the late 1980's at a certain failing comprehensive in the Black Country in the English midlands after which I named a new protocol.

If you're into distributed systems and consensus protocols then I'm going to present something hopefully new and interesting at conferences.ncl.ac.uk/ideas2025/.

Re-using a golden oldie (GraphConnect 2017) by @technige.bsky.social where I will introduce something that I now think could change the way we think about transactions and distributed systems.

"They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies" -- Orwell

GraphModel: A .NET Abstraction for Graphs - savas parastatidis Just over a month ago, I published “Playing with graphs and Neo4j“. Back then, it was just a toy implementation, an experiment, to help me with what I have been doing for my startup. Well, that little experiment has grown into something much more substantial. As I started building on top of my Neo4j Graph […]

I built the Graph Model abstraction and implementation over Neo4j to support my startup-related explorations. I am making it available as open source with the hope that the community will help me evolve it.

savas.me/2025/06/27/g...

For reviewing PDFs (book drafts, papers) I use a remarkable. I don’t pay for its cloud service but instead use the (clunky) Google drive integration. It’s ok, slightly more convenient than paper for my workflow.