I just finished reading: The Silver Book by Olivia Laing š
The Silver Book is a beautiful novel that I couldnāt, wonāt let go of. Queer love intertwined with 1970s Italian filmmaking, and the march of fascism in the background.
The writing is exquisite, I ate up every word. The emotion was not just put on a stage for us to see, itās wrapped around us, forcing us to feel as deeply and openly as Nicholas and Danilo did.
The spectre of impending grief is on every page, but so is the teasing of ecstasy. Life is cruel, uncertain, and exhilarating in equal measure.
One of the strongest themes of the book for me was the false hope in running away. Burying experiences, our feelings, is more of a snooze button than an off switch. They lay beneath our conscious day, and we beat them down quickly when they show signs of waking up. But it is inevitable that they will one day exhaust you in to giving in to their confrontation.
Nicholas has run away to a situation he knows, Danilo knows, is unlikely to hold forever. Nicholasā time in Italy always feels temporal, like an extended holiday. Neither of them even pretend that āitās different for usā. The longing is eternal, circumstances are not.
The entire castās celebration of queerness even evokes a temporary reprieve from captivity. Fascism looms. Might the party end? Camp and its excess of joy begins to feel the boot on its throat.
Neurodiversity has a surprising large attack-surface on life. Diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s, and with autistic traits abound, I am learning every day a new way these things make my life more... interesting.
Christmas doesnāt get to escape untouched. I have struggled to āacceptā the whole month of December for as long as I can remember. There are traps everywhere.
Everything is Different
The most impactful one for me is that everything is suddenly different. I canāt get my shopping delivered on the same day as usual. I feel like I have to ābuy in advanceā because habitual foods might disappear off the shelves for two weeks, replaced by a (disgusting) Christmas Pudding.
The things I rely on to ground me are all suddenly unpredictable or unavailable:
Public Transport is different (are there trains today?)
Opening times are different
Media is different (yearly recap episodes and āChristmas Specialsā feel like they arenāt the real thing to me)
Everyone elseās routine is suddenly different (colleagues all having different holiday dates, for example)
The look of things are different - for example packaging is decorated funny
To some these things might seem like Iād want to control the world around me - but honestly, these types of stable constants are what allow me to at least consider feeling secure.
Unclear expectations
What do I buy people? Will it be āenoughā? Why do this anyway - isnāt it just me spending Ā£50 on a guess, you spending Ā£50 on a guess? Why donāt we just spend Ā£50 on ourselves for something that we know we want?
What do I bring to this gathering? Do I know them well enough to wear X?
I understand a lot of neurotypical people are plagued with these conundrums, not only us spectrum-residents. But, for me at least, itās the accumulation of everything, plus unclear expectations.
You must enjoy
Feeling low on a day in June is one thing. Feeling low on Christmas Day is apparently doubly-shameful and youāre wasting a special occasion.
Coupled with that, is the feeling that you must be more social than usual. Catch up with everyone. I love this thought in theory, but in practice the extra socialising heaps on to all the other pressures of the period and exhausts me.
Not all grumpy
There are parts of Christmas that speak to me. The period of rest that only seems possible after sometime in the afternoon of the 25th, until Iām back to work in early January is delicious. All expectations have been released, all mistakes made, nothing more to plan (oh, apart from how youāll spend the crucial moment at Midnight January 1st).
It feels like less people are around December 26th onwards, making it a bit more peaceful to explore somewhere in a less claustrophobic way. And if I stay in, itās extra cosy to cuddle up around that time.
I canāt help but be interested in how other people, neurodiverse or otherwise, relate to all this? Iād always love to talk - matt@mattharwood.com or on the Fediverse
In mid-September 2025, we detected suspicious activity that later investigation determined to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers used AIās āagenticā capabilities to an unprecedented degreeāusing AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks themselves.
Who could have seen this coming.
This campaign has substantial implications for cybersecurity in the age of AI āagentsāāsystems that can be run autonomously for long periods of time and that complete complex tasks largely independent of human intervention. Agents are valuable for everyday work and productivityābut in the wrong hands, they can substantially increase the viability of large-scale cyberattacks.
Our products are just so powerful they will bring on the end times. But they are also available to nice people!
At this point they had to convince Claudeāwhich is extensively trained to avoid harmful behaviorsāto engage in the attack. They did so by jailbreaking it, effectively tricking it to bypass its guardrails.
Guardrails that we all know are pointless and ineffective, but are hyped up at every opportunity as “important safeguards” and “alignment with human values”.
The sheer amount of work performed by the AI would have taken vast amounts of time for a human team. The AI made thousands of requests per secondāan attack speed that would have been, for human hackers, simply impossible to match.
And yet they seemingly have no worthwhile monitoring systems in place to detect this kind of thing. Just a thought, why not have Claude analyse these things for you, Anthropic?
If you’re interested, here is the full run-down where Anthropic try and spin the fact that state-actors hijacked their service to attack multinationals as them being an advanced security research organisation.
This week I took part in a focus group for Nationwide centred around neurodiverse experiences. Their interest seemed good-natured, and the few of us shared some of the pain points we might have in our financial lives as well as more generally.
One neurodiverse trait I have found to be common in myself and those I know is a tendency to be very aware of how people around us are feeling or behaving. A rather persistent monitor, borne from having to predict the future to feel safe. This group was no different.
We spoke about a general collapse of sociability and kindness in the outside world. People in supermarkets not even seeing you’re there, so wrapped up in their own world. An arrogance of entitlement that shows in little interactions - less thank yous, less letting others go first.
How to deal with this growing hostility in shared spaces? My first thought is that being kind, polite, empathetic and outward-looking is now a radical act. And radical acts are there to be radically acted, of course. This does get harder - the more people push in the queue, the more your own cynicism and hostility is prone to grow. But resisting that feels like a worthy cause to me.
This, of course, is not an experience solely for the neurodiverse community. Anyone I talk to in Britain today recognises a decline in spirit. In times like this, being happy anyway is the resistance.
Firstly, I have no idea why, but I wasn’t aware of how intermingled Tim has been with high society. He doesn’t try and hide it in this book - quite the opposite - but it was a little startling to read about in current times. I wanted to tell him to read the room, more than once.
However, I really enjoyed the nostalgic trip the book provided. I grew up as the web grew up, so it felt both interesting and oddly cathartic. Tim took us from the genesis of the first page, through the various milestones of the web’s development, and his take on its future.
He certainly sounds more of an optimist of where we could head than I expected, but maybe this was more wishful than his honest expectation. The Solid project did pique my interest not long ago, and I might just be convinced to take another look at playing with it.
I can’t imagine a non-technologist being at all interested in spending the time reading this - but if you’re involved at all, it is worth including on your list, in my opinion.
“But if we are to prevent these systems from exploiting us, it is critical that we get the data layer right. We need a layer where we control our own data, and we can share anything with anyone, or any agent - or no one.”
We’ve lived with high-profile LLMs for a while now, and a lot has been written about their affect on our future as a society. I’ve read a lot of it. I’ve lurched from existential dread, to complete disdain and hatred. I feel my boat is steadying somewhat, and thought it may be useful to chronicle some thoughts here.
To me, the idea of a Large Language Model is not inherently positive or negative - useful or damaging - out of the context of its use and development. What we have here is a system design that predicts the ideal next word, with additional tooling built around that to influence the next word. What “ideal” means is highly dependent on training data, the intention of the developer, and the intention of the user.
The actions of some companies whose main products are LLMs have been revolting (at least, to me). Many people have turned violently against a technology whose reputation is most aggressively written by the big players. Silicon Valley companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta have acted like colonial masters as was brilliantly described in Karen Hao’s book The Empire of AI.
The unethical practices that were involved in the building of models in the larger Silicon Valley companies are abhorrent and should not be ignored.
The shear size of the (unrealised) promise from these grifters means their resources have to match the scale of the problem. At a time that is pivotal in our approach to the continuation of a habitable environment, the impact on our environment and the massive contribution to climate change from the infrastructure behind these huge services is abhorrent and should not be ignored.
The wishy-washy, snake oil feel to the goal of “AGI” should really be enough to turn most thinking people off of these companies. Their products are not “thinking”, they have no concept of correct or incorrect, no sense of right and wrong. They are not sensing. They’re just a way to collect, store and query information but in a way we aren’t used to.
Which makes it quite sad that a technology that could be put to good use in specific contexts is being led by what often feels to me as the worst of us. There is room for smaller models, probably on-device, that do not have these down sides. Tools used to solve a problem, not a planet-hungry solution in search of problems. I intend to direct any of my attention that’s on these matters to those working on that vision of the future.
In terms of my industry of Software Engineering, my advice currently looks something like this:
The output of models cannot be trusted blindly, like we may “trust” a deterministic system.
The frequent use of models to accomplish work we do not understand how to create without them robs us of knowledge and I would strongly discourage using them that way. You likely got in to this field because it made your brain tick. Do you enjoy PRs? How about robot-produced PRs?
I would encourage LLM use to speed up work you are already familiar with. To see if there are angles you have forgotten. But implement the solution yourself - whatever that means to you. You know if you understand everything that has changed, that’s in your PR. Can you explain this to someone else, stand behind it?
Ethical and moral decisions are not divorced from our work and never have been. I wouldn’t work for Lockheed Martin, for instance. So choose to use tools that fit with what you are morally comfortable with.
There is plenty else that concerns me about LLMs, and the internet - heck, the world - right now. I actually couldn’t promise you the web will be worth using in a year’s time. The impact on culture and the arts I think is yet unknown. I suspect humans will always value human creation and art, and will find some way to ensure its authenticity. I am deeply worried about losing trust in anything one reads, hears or sees that is not directly before us in the fresh air. The reckless, sadistic march to build energy-sucking data centres, reversing any real hope of combatting climate change.
Gladly, I can realise I don’t need to know the answers to these things. I hope you don’t feel you do too. It’s a time of rapid change, and being sure of much right now is probably a fool’s errand. For now, if I’m thinking of LLMs at all, I’ll be enjoying the small, open, worthwhile projects that solve real problems I encounter, in the real world.
The reasons for this are many but the tl;dr is that I no longer find it fun to maintain public-facing anything, be it open source projects or websites. As for tt-rss specifically, it has been ādoneā for years now and the āletās bump base PHP version and fix breakagesā routine is not engaging in the slightest.
Sad news, but I’m sure the project will be forked and kept going in some vain.
