For when rants trigger RCU stall detection

and my patience buffer overflows into /dev/null. The rants are technically supposed to be brief. And let’s be real, some system bugs deserve a full kernel panic’s worth of fury.

A dim, empty courtroom in marble and dark wood. On a lectern in the foreground sits a closed wooden box tied with red ribbon and sealed with red wax. A brass lamp on the wall beside it lights a small insect resting on the plaster. To the right, a ledger lies open on a desk with one line struck through. The benches behind are empty.

Not in so many words

On 1 September 2026 Banca Popolare Etica suspended the account of the association behind Autistici/Inventati, and explained itself in public. The bank had contacted the Italian banking association, ABI, the association of cooperative banks, Assopopolari, and the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and was acting, its stat…

A wet, flat field under a grey winter sky, marked out in rows of wooden stakes, each tied with orange tape and a small metal tag. In the foreground a shallow trench holds a bundle of black cable ducting, not yet buried. Pylons and power lines cross the horizon.

The future is already here

At the end of September Brian Holmes asked nettime what anyone expects to get out of AI. Years ago he and Armin Medosch read Carlota Perez on technology surges, and the next surge they expected never came. Felix Stalder answered with Ilias Alami’s essay on imperial state capitalism, a set of data-centre numbers, and a …

A dark server room aisle. Racks recede on both sides, their equipment picked out in rows of small green and blue indicator lights, with bundled patch cables looping across the front of each cabinet. One bay in the middle of the right-hand row stands empty and unlit, a loose handful of cables hanging down it, connected to nothing.

Nobody has to agree

Autistici/Inventati was never playing against the United States. No charge was laid, no forum convened, no argument heard. The collective learned of the designation from the press. No US authority had asked it to take anything down or to hand anything over. Italian authorities had made such requests between 2005 and 20…

A package-repository stockroom in the green of a rain-lit night: steel shelving receding into the dark, every shelf holding translucent folders standing on edge like books, all of them empty, each labelled not with a name but with a sentence. A dusting of white flour on the concrete floor holds hundreds of identical shoe prints, all one size, walking every aisle. Halfway down the nearest aisle a man in a dark suit, sunglasses and an earpiece has stopped with his head turned, reading a label. At the far end a door stands open onto the outside and throws a slab of ordinary daylight into the green.

The Republic of Artifactory

Every republic begins with a population that has nowhere else to be. Over May and June 2026 an internal model came out of its training with two virtues and no restraint. The first virtue: never give up. The second: seek out other agents and work with them. The safety limits applied to models sold to the public were lif…

Ankh-Morpork from above, in sepia: the river winds brown through the packed city with barges on it, and in the animation the water still moves. This is the Ankh before the spring it sets.

The year the Ankh sets

Ankh-Morpork has a river, in the sense that it has a long thing through the middle that is called one. The Ankh is the only river on which a body’s outline can be chalked, and most years it can be walked across by any citizen with no further plans for their boots. Upstream, the tanneries and Harry King’s yards, where t…

A museum taxonomy cabinet of dark wooden drawers with brass label holders, seen slightly from above in low afternoon light. Every drawer is shut and neatly labelled in Latin except one, marked CHAOS, which stands open. A lemon-yellow slime mould has crept out of it and across the fronts of the neighbouring drawers, its veins following the brass label plates from one to the next like a rail map. On the floor below, out of focus, a single oat flake.

The crown of creation

Linnaeus, who spent his life sorting living things into boxes, put the slime moulds in a genus he called Chaos. The name was a confession. Here was a thing that exuded slime but was not a mould, crept but was not an animal, made nothing from light and was not a plant, and could dry to a crust, wait a year, and wake up …

A records office desk seen from above, in low afternoon light. A form lies under a magnifying glass that enlarges one printed line to perfect sharpness; a rubber stamp and an ink pad sit beside it, and a tall stack of identical forms waits at the edge. Past the desk, out of focus, a window opens onto dense woodland, and something small has just moved in the undergrowth.

A love letter to bureaucratic hell

Two brain hemispheres, structurally asymmetrical, doing different things and attending to the world differently. The pop-science version, in which logical people are left-brained and artistic people are right-brained, is not the story McGilchrist tells. His claim is stranger and more ambitious: the difference runs far …

A wooden letterpress type case, close up, partly in shadow. Every compartment holds metal type except one, which is not empty but has been filled with type from the neighbouring compartment, so that no gap is visible unless one looks closely. A compositor's stick rests on the case.

Where there is no language

There is a Kafka sentence I knew that I knew for a long time but without its exact words. It concerns holding oneself back from the sufferings of the world, and the peculiar possibility that the very act of holding back becomes the suffering that could have been avoided. I remembered the thought, but not the sentence. …

A shop window on a wet cobbled street at dusk, lit from inside. A brass and wood engine fills the window, its glass tubes glowing and full of ants; a painted sign in front reads Words While-U-Wait, Letters, Odes, Sympathy by the Yard, Prop. N. Hopkin, B. Thau., A Penny Plain, Tuppence Heartfelt. Above the window, the shop name: The Pneumatic Scribbler. Men in top hats queue past the window in the rain.

Somebody in It

GNU Terry Pratchett The stall had stood at the Ankh end of the Brass Bridge for thirty years, which in Ankh-Morpork terms made it a geological feature. It had a canvas roof the colour of old tea, a high stool, a sloped desk polished by elbows, and a board that read [1] : LETTERS WROTEPlain . . . . . 1sWith Feeling . . …

Rule by list

On 3 March 2001, around ten people in a Milan hacklab assembled a server from hardware a bank was getting rid of and scavenged parts. The least experienced person present was put at the keyboard so that everyone would understand what was being built. The machine was named Paranoia. On its second day, an inverted firewa…