Went to a cocktail bar last night fully intending to order a cocktail.

Bartender: "We don't have a physical menu. You have to check us out on #Instagram to get the cocktail list."

I find them on Instagram only to discover that it's impossible to see their menu there when not logged in.

I. Don't. Have. An. Instagram. Account.

Me: "Yeah, I'll have a small beer, thanks." (at less than quarter of the price of a cocktail)

🙄 FFS businesses, stop getting captured by #Meta. It hurts your business.

Comet C/2025 R3 PanSTARRS

NASA reminded me that we have a new, if transitory, neighbor in the skies overhead. The comet PanSTARRS is making a quick visit and tonight is the closest it will come to the sun.

APOD- 2026 April 18 – PanSTARRS and Planets

This is a good weekend for northern hemisphere comet watchers to try to catch PanSTARRS an hour or so before sunrise, as the comet grows brighter approaching its perihelion on April 19. On April 26 the comet makes its closest approach to our fair planet but by then will be difficult to see in the solar glare. Good views of this comet PanSTARRS in late April and early May will be from the southern hemisphere.

If your skies are clear and dark, check it out!

* * *

The recent post criticising Free Software advocates for advocating user-modifiable software and then being annoyed at LLMs annoys me and the reason is best illustrated by this analogy:

Public-transport advocates spend years advocating for a connected public-transport infrastructure, where it’s easy to take a small combination of busses, metros, trams, and trains to get from anywhere to anywhere. The network would be efficient and operated as a non-profit-making public good, making individual movement cheap (or, ideally, free). They work with municipalities to build out some of this infrastructure, persuade national governments to invest in the longer routes, and so on.

Someone comes along with a massive subsidy for a handful of private taxi companies to hire a bunch of drivers and give free (paid for by investors) ride to everyone. The drivers are immigrants who don’t speak the language very well, which is great for the taxi companies because they are easy to exploit (they are, in fact, underpaid and put in dangerous situations routinely). The owners of the taxis are pocketing a load of investor money for every ride though.

When you get in one of these taxis, there’s a 90% chance they’ll take you where you want, a 9% chance they’ll take you somewhere nearby, and a 1% chance they’ll just drop you off in a dangerous part of town. A bunch of people are mugged and a few more murdered as a result of this, but the companies aren’t liable. The investors behind this tell everyone ‘don’t bother learning to drive, there’s no point, our taxis will take you anywhere, for much less money!’. At the same time, ridership on existing public transport drops off, leading to calls to cut its funding and there are mass redundancies for bus drivers and so on. The taxis are all diesel and heavily polluting, leading to worse air quality everywhere they go. To make sure that they can pick people up easily, the ones not actively giving rides are constantly circulating, placing huge strain on road infrastructure and further increasing pollution.

And then someone says to those public-transport advocates: ‘this is what you wanted, why are you unhappy just because it’s not delivered in the way you imagined?’