This post covers my friend Badri and my experiences in Brunei. Brunei officially Brunei Darussalam is a country in Southeast Asia, located on Borneo island. It is one of the few remaining absolute monarchies on Earth.
On the morning of the 10th of December 2024, Badri and I reached Brunei International Airport by taking a flight from Kuala Lumpur. Upon arrival at the airport, we had to go through the immigration, of course. However, I forgot to fill my arrival card, which I filled while I was in the queue for my immigration.
The immigration officer asked me how much cash I was carrying of each currency. After completing the formalities, the immigration officer stamped my passport and let me in. Take a look at Brunei s entry stamp in my passport.
Brunei entry stamp on my passport. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
We exchanged Singapore dollars to get some Brunei dollars at the airport. The Brunei dollar was pegged 1:1 with the Singapore dollar, meaning 1 Singapore dollar equals 1 Brunei dollar. The exchange rate we received at the airport was the same.
Our (pre-booked) accommodation was located near Gadong mall. So, we went to the information center at the airport to ask how to get there by public transport. However, the person at the information center told us that they didn t know the public transport routes and suggested we take a taxi instead.
We came out of the airport and came across an Indian with a mini bus. He offered to drop us at our accommodation for 10 Brunei dollars ( 630). As we were tired after a sleepless night, we didn t negotiate and took the offer. It felt a bit weird using the minibus as our private taxi.
In around half-an-hour, we reach our accommodation. The place was more like a guest house than a hotel. In addition to the rooms, it had common space consisting of a hall, a kitchen and a balcony.
Our room in Brunei. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Upon reaching the place, we paid for our room in cash, which was 66.70 Singapore dollars (4200 Indian rupees) for two nights. We reached before the check-in time, so we had to wait for our room to get ready before we entered.
The room had a double bed and also a place to hang clothes. We slept for a few hours before going out at night. We went into Gadong mall and had coffee at a caf named The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. The regular caffe latte I had here been 5.20 Brunei dollars. On another note, the snacks we got us from Kuala Lumpur covered us for the dinner.
The next day 11th of December 2024 we went to a nearby restaurant named Nadj for lunch. The owner was from Kerala. Here we ordered:
1 paneer pepper masala for 5 Brunei dollars (320 rupees)
1 Nasi goreng pattaya biasa for 4.50 Brunei dollars (290 rupees)
1 plain naan for 1.50 Brunei dollars (100 rupees)
1 butter naan for 1.80 Brunei dollars (115 rupees)
So, our lunch cost a total of 12.80 Brunei dollars (825 rupees). The naan was unusually thick, and didn t like the taste.
After the lunch, we planned to visit Brunei s famous Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. However, a minibus driver outside of Gadong Mall told us that the mosque would be closed in half-an-hour and suggested we visit the nearby Jame Asr Hassanil Bolkiah Mosque instead.
Jame Asr Hassanil Bolkiah Mosque. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0
He dropped us there for 1 Brunei dollar per person. The person hailed from Uttar Pradesh and told us about bus routes in Hindi. Buses routes in Brunei were confusing, so the information he gave us was valuable.
It was evening, and we had an impression that the mosque and its premises were closed. However, soon enough, we stumbled across an open gate entering the mosque complex. We walked inside for some time, took pictures and exited. Walking in Bandar Seri Begawan wasn t pleasant, though. The pedestrian infrastructure wasn t good.
Then we walked back to our place and bought some souvenirs. For dinner and breakfast, we bought bread, fruits and eggs from local shops as we had a kitchen to cook for ourselves.
The guest house also had a washing machine (free of charge) which we wanted to use. However, they didn t have detergent. Therefore, we went outside to get some detergent. It was 8 o clock, and most of the shops were closed already. Others had had detergents in large sizes, the ones you would use if you lived there. We ended up getting a small packet at a supermarket.
The next day 12th of December we had a flight to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam with a long layover in Kuala Lumpur. We had breakfast in the morning and took a bus to Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. The mosque was in prayer session, so it was closed for Muslims. Therefore, we just took pictures from the outside and took a bus for the airport.
Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0
When the bus reached near the airport, the bus went straight rather than taking a left turn for the airport. Initially, I thought the bus would just take a turn and come back. However, the bus kept going away from the airport. Confused by this, I asked other passengers if the bus was going to the airport. The driver stopped the bus at Muara Town terminal 20 km from the airport. At this point, everyone alighted, except for us. The driver went to a nearby restaurant to have lunch.
I felt very uncomfortable stranded in a town which was 20 km from the airport. We had a lot of time, but I was still worried about missing our flight, as I didn t want to get stuck in Brunei. After waiting for 15 minutes, I went inside the restaurant and reminded the driver that we had a flight in a couple of hours and needed to go to the airport. He said he will leave soon.
When he was done with his lunch, he drove us to the airport. It was incredibly frustrating. On a positive note, we saw countryside of Brunei that we would have seen otherwise. The bus ride cost us 1 Brunei dollars each.
A shot of Brunei s countryside. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
That s it for this one. Meet you in the next one. Stay tuned for the Vietnam post!
A recent article in The Atlantic makes the case that
very large language models effectively contain much of the works they're trained on.
This article is an attempt to popularize the insights in the recent academic paper
Extracting books from production language models from Ahmed et al.
The authors of the paper demonstrate convincingly that
well-known copyrighted textual material can be extracted from
the chatbot interfaces of popular commercial LLM services.
The Atlantic article cites a podcast quote about the Stable Diffusion AI image-generator model, saying "We took 100,000 gigabytes of images and compressed it to a two-gigabyte file that can re-create any of those and iterations of those".
By analogy, this suggests we might think of LLMs (which work on text, not the images handled by Stable Diffusion) as a form of lossy textual compression.
The entire text of Moby Dick, the canonical Big American Novel is merely 1.2MiB uncompressed (and less than 0.4MiB losslessly compressed with bzip2 -9).
It's not surprising to imagine that a model
with hundreds of billions of parameters might contain copies of these works.
Warning: The next paragraph contains fuzzy math with no real concrete engineering practice behind it!
Consider a hypothetical model with 100 billion parameters,
where each parameter is stored as a 16-bit floating point value.
The model weights would take 200 GB of storage.
If you were to fill the parameter space only with losslessly compressed copies of books like Moby Dick,
you could still fit half a million books, more than anyone can read in a lifetime.
And lossy compression is typically orders of magnitude less in size than lossless compression,
so we're talking about millions of works effectively encoded, with the acceptance of some
artifacts being injected in the output.
I first encountered this "compression" view of AI nearly three years ago, in Ted Chiang's insightful
ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.
I was suprised that The Atlantic article didn't cite Chiang's piece.
If you haven't read Ted Chiang, i strongly recommend his work,
and this piece is a great place to start.
Chiang aside, the more recent writing that focuses on the idea of
compressed works being "contained" in the model weights
seems to be used by people interested in wielding
esome sort of copyright claims against the AI companies that maintain or provide access to these models.
There are many many problems with AI today, but attacking AI companies based on copyright concerns
seems similar to going after Al Capone for tax evasion.
We should be much more concerned with the effect these projects have on
cultural homogeneity,
mentalhealth,
laborrights,
privacy, and
socialcontrol
than whether they're violating copyright in some specific instance.
mention of bodies being bodies and minds being minds, and
not in the perfectly working sense.
A lot of the youtube channels I follow tend to involve somebody making
things, so of course one of the videos my SO and I watched a few days
ago was about walking around San Francisco Bay, and that recalled my
desire to go to places by foot. Now, for health-related reasons doing it
properly would be problematic, and thus I ve never trained for that, but
during this Christmas holiday-heavy time I suggested my very patient
SO the next best thing: instead of our usual 1.5 hours uphill walk in
the woods, a 2 hours and a bit mostly flat walk on paved streets, plus
some train, to a nearby town: Porto Ceresio, on the Italian side of Lake
Lugano.
I started to prepare for it on the day before, by deciding it was a good
time to upgrade my PinePhone, and wait, I m still on Trixie? I could
try Forky, what could possibly go wrong? And well, the phone was no
longer able to boot, and reinstalling from the latest weekly had a
system where the on-screen keyboard didn t appear, and I didn t want to
bother finding out why, so re-installed another time from the 13.0
image, and between that, and distracting myself with widelands while
waiting for the downloads and uploads and reboots etc., well, all of the
afternoon and the best part of the evening disappeared.
So, in a hurry, between the evening and the next morning I prepared a
nice healthy lunch, full of all the important nutrients such as sugar,
salt, mercury and arsenic. Tuna (mercury) soboro (sugar and salt) on
rice and since I was in a hurry I didn t prepare any vegetables, but
used pickles (more salt) and shio kombu (arsenic and various heavy
metals, sugar and salt). Plus a green tea mochi for dessert, in case
we felt low on sugar. :D
Then on the day of the walk we woke up a bit later than usual, and then
my body decided it was a good day for my belly to not exactly hurt, but
not not-hurt either, and there I took an executive decision to wear a
corset, because if something feels like it wants to burst open, wrapping
it in a steel reinforced cage will make it stop. (I m not joking. It
does. At least in those specific circumstances.)
This was followed by hurrying through the things I had to do before
leaving the house, having a brief anxiety attack and feeling feverish
(it wasn t fever), and finally being able to leave the house just half
an hour late.
And then, 10 minutes after we had left, realizing that I had written
down the password for the train website, since it was no longer saved on
the phone, but i had forgotten the bit of paper at home. We could have
gone back to take it, but decided not to bother, as we could also
hopefully buy paper-ish tickets at the train station (we could).
Later on, I also realized I had also forgotten my GPS tracker, so I have
no record of where we went exactly (but it s not hard to recognize it on
a map) nor on what the temperature was. It s a shame, but by that point
it was way too late to go back.
Anyway, that probably was when Murphy felt we had paid our respects, and
from then on everything went lovingly well!
Routing had been done on the OpenStreetMap website, with OSRM, and it
looked pretty easy to follow, but we also had access to an Android
phone, so we used OSMAnd to check that we were still on track. It tried
to lead us to the Statale (i.e. most important and most trafficked road)
a few times, but we ignored it, and after a few turns and a few changes
of the precise destination point we managed to get it to cooperate.
At one point a helpful person asked us if we needed help, having seen us
looking at the phone, and gave us indication for the next fork (that way
to Cuasso al Piano, that way to Porto Ceresio), but it was pretty easy,
since the way was clearly marked also for cars.
Then we started to notice red and white markings on poles and other
places, and on the next fork there was a signpost for hiking routes with
our destination and we decided to follow it instead of the sign for
cars. I knew that from our starting point to or destination there was
also a hiking route, uphill both ways :) , through the hills, about 5 or 6
hours instead of two, but the sign was pointing downhill and we were
past the point where we would expect too long of a detour.
And indeed, after a short while the paved road ended, but the path
continued on a wide and flat track, and was a welcome detour through
what looked like water works to prevent flood damage from a stream.
In a warmer season, with longer grass and ticks maybe the fact that I
was wearing a long skirt may have been an issue, but in winter it was
just fine.
And soon afterwards, we were in Porto Ceresio. I think I have been there
as a child, but I had no memory of it. On the other hand, it was about
as I expected: a tiny town with a lakeside street full of houses built
in the early 1900s when the area was an important tourism destination,
with older buildings a bit higher up on the hills (because streams
in this area will flood). And of course, getting there by foot rather
than by train we also saw the parts where real people live (but not
work: that s cross-border commuters country).
Soon after arriving in Porto Ceresio we stopped to eat our lunch on a
bench at the lakeside; up to then we had been pretty comfortable in the
clothing we had decided to wear: there was plenty of frost on the
ground, in the shade, but the sun was warm and the temperatures were
cleanly above freezing. Removing the gloves to eat, however, resulted in
quite cold hands, and we didn t want to stay still for longer than
strictly necessary.
So we spent another hour and a bit walking around Porto Ceresio like
proper tourists and taking pictures. There was an exhibition of nativity
scenes all around the streets, but to get a map one had to go to either
facebook or instagram, or wait for the opening hours of an office that
were later than the train we planned to get to go back home, so we only
saw maybe half of them, as we walked around: some were quite nice, some
were nativity scenes, and some showed that the school children must have
had some fun making them.
Another Christmas decoration were groups of creatures made of evergreen
branches that dotted the sidewalks around the lake: I took pictures of
the first couple of groups, and then after seeing a few more something
clicked in my brain, and I noticed that they were wrapped in green LED
strings, like chains, and they had a red ball that was supposed to be
the nose, but could just be around the mouth area, and suddenly I felt
the need to play a certain chord to release them,
but sadly I didn t have a weaponized guitar on me :D
Another thing that we noticed were some benches in the shape of books,
with book quotations on them; most were on reading-related topics, but
the one with the Constitution felt worth taking a picture of, especially
these days.
And then, our train was waiting at the station, and we had to go back
home for the afternoon; it was a nice outing, if a bit brief, and we
agreed to do it again, possibly with a bit of a detour to make the walk
a bit longer. And then maybe one day we ll train to do the whole 5-6
hour thing through the hills.
Challenges of the Deeps is the third book in the throwback space
opera Arenaverse series. It is a direct sequel to
Spheres of Influence, but Spoor provides
a substantial recap of the previous volumes for those who did not read the
series in close succession (thank you!).
Ariane has stabilized humanity's position in the Arena with yet another
improbable victory. (If this is a spoiler for previous volumes, so was
telling you the genre of the book.) Now is a good opportunity to fulfill
the promise humanity made to their ally Orphan: accompaniment on a journey
into the uncharted deeps of the Arena for reasons that Orphan refuses to
explain in advance. Her experienced crew provide multiple options to serve
as acting Leader of Humanity until she gets back. What can go wrong?
The conceit of this series is that as soon as a species achieves warp
drive technology, their ships are instead transported into the vast
extradimensional structure of the Arena where a godlike entity controls
the laws of nature and enforces a formal conflict resolution process that
looks alternatingly like a sporting event, a dueling code, and
technology-capped total war. Each inhabitable system in the real universe
seems to correspond to an Arena sphere, but the space between them is
breathable atmosphere filled with often-massive storms.
In other words, this is an airship adventure as written by E.E. "Doc"
Smith. Sort of. There is an adventure, and there are a lot of airships
(although they fight mostly like spaceships), but much of the action
involves tense mental and physical sparring with a previously unknown
Arena power with unclear motives.
My general experience with this series is that I find the Arena concept
fascinating and want to read more about it, Spoor finds his
much-less-original Hyperion Project in the backstory of the characters
more fascinating and wants to write about that, and we reach a sort of
indirect, grumbling (on my part) truce where I eagerly wait for more
revelations about the Arena and roll my eyes at the Hyperion stuff.
Talking about Hyperion in detail is probably a spoiler for at least the
first book, but I will say that it's an excuse to embed versions of
literary characters into the story and works about as well as most such
excuses (not very). The characters in question are an E.E. "Doc" Smith
mash-up, a Monkey King mash-up, and a number of other characters that are
obviously references to something but for whom I lack enough hints to
place (which is frustrating).
Thankfully we get far less human politics and a decent amount of Arena
world-building in this installment. Hyperion plays a role, but mostly as
foreshadowing for the next volume and the cause of a surprising
interaction with Arena rules. One of the interesting wrinkles of this
series is that humanity have an odd edge against the other civilizations
in part because we're borderline insane sociopaths from the perspective of
the established powers. That's an old science fiction trope, but I prefer
it to the Campbell-style belief in inherent human superiority.
Old science fiction tropes are what you need to be in the mood for to
enjoy this series. This is an unapologetic and intentional throwback to
early pulp: individuals who can be trusted with the entire future of
humanity because they're just that moral, super-science, psychic warfare,
and even coruscating beams that would make E.E. "Doc" Smith proud. It's an
occasionally glorious but mostly silly pile of technobabble, but Spoor
takes advantage of the weird, constructed nature of the Arena to provide
more complex rules than competitive superlatives.
The trick is that while this is certainly science fiction pulp, it's also
a sort of isekai novel.
There's a lot of anime and manga influence just beneath the surface. I'm
not sure why it never occurred to me before reading this series that
melodramatic anime and old SF pulps have substantial aesthetic overlap,
but of course they do. I loved the Star Blazers translated anime
that I watched as a kid precisely because it had the sort of dramatic set
pieces that make the Lensman novels so much fun.
There is a bit too much Wu Kong in this book for me (although the
character is growing on me a little), and some of the maneuvering around
the mysterious new Arena actor drags on longer than was ideal, but the
climax is great stuff if you're in the mood for dramatic pulp adventure.
The politics do not bear close examination and the writing is serviceable
at best, but something about this series is just fun. I liked this
book much better than Spheres of Influence, although I wish Spoor
would stop being so coy about the nature of the Arena and give us more
substantial revelations. I'm also now tempted to re-read Lensman, which is
probably a horrible idea. (Spoor leaves the sexism out of his modern
pulp.)
If you got through Spheres of Influence with your curiosity about
the Arena intact, consider this one when you're in the mood for modern
pulp, although don't expect any huge revelations. It's not the
best-written book, but it sits squarely in the center of a genre and mood
that's otherwise a bit hard to find.
Followed by the Kickstarter-funded Shadows of Hyperion, which sadly
looks like it's going to concentrate on the Hyperion Project again. I will
probably pick that up... eventually.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2026 already! The winter weather here has really been beautiful and I always enjoy
this time of year. Writing this yearly musical retrospective has now become a
beloved tradition of mine1 and I enjoy retracing the year's various
events through albums I listened to and concerts I went to.
Albums
In 2025, I added 141 new albums to my collection, around 60% more than last
year's haul. I think this might have been too much? I feel like I didn't have
time to properly enjoy all of them and as such, I decided to slow down my
acquisition spree sometimes in early December, around the time I normally do the
complete opposite.
This year again, I bought the vast majority of my music on Bandcamp. Most of
the other albums I bought as CDs and ripped them.
Concerts
In 2025, I went to the following 25 (!!) concerts:
January 17th: Uzu, Young Blades, She came to quit, Fever Visions
February 1st: Over the Hill, Jail, Mortier, Ain't Right
February 7th: B ton Arm , Mulchulation II, Ooz
February 15th: The Prowlers, Ultra Razzia, Sistema de Muerte,
Trauma Bond
February 28th: Francb tards
March 28th: Conflit Majeur, to Even Exist, Crachat
April 12th: Jetsam, Mortier, NIIVI, Canette
April 26th-27th (Montreal Oi! Fest 2025): The
Buzzers, Bad Terms, Sons of Pride, Liberty and Justice, Flafoot 56, The
Beltones, Mortier, Street Code, The Stress, Alternate Action
May 1st: Bauxite, Atomic threat, the 351's
May 30th: Uzu, Tenaz, Extra a Humana, Sistema de muerte
June 7th: Ordures Ioniques, Tulaviok, Fucking Raymonds, Voyou
June 18th: Tiken Jah Fakoly
June 21st: Sa an Supa Celebration
June 26th: Taxi Girls, Death Proof, Laura Krieg
July 4th: Frente Cumbiero
July 12th: Montreal's Big Fiesta DJ Set
August 16th: Guerilla Poubelle
September 11th: No Suicide Act, Mortier
September 20th: Hors Contr le, Union Thugs, Barricade Mentale
October 20th: Ezra Furman, The Golden Dregs
October 24th: Overbass, Hommage B rurier Noir, Self Control,
Vermin Kaos
November 6th: B ton Arm , Faze, Slash Need, Chain Block
November 28th (Blood Moon Ritual 2025): Bhatt, Channeler,
Pyrocene Death Cult, Masse d'Armes
December 13th (Stomp Records' 30th Anniversary Bash):
The Planet Smashers, The Flatliners, Wine Lips, The Anti-Queens, Crash ton
rock
Although I haven't touched metalfinder's code in a good while, my instance
still works very well and I get the occasional match when a big-name artist in
my collection comes in town. Most the venues that advertise on Bandsintown are
tied to Ticketmaster though, which means most underground artists (i.e. most of
the music I listen to) end up playing elsewhere.
As such, shout out again to the Gancio project and to the folks running the
Montreal instance. It continues to be a smash hit and most of
the interesting concerts end up being advertised there.
See you all in 2026!
In my last post, Badri and I reached Kuala Lumpur - the capital of Malaysia - on the 7th of December 2024. We stayed in Bukit Bintang, the entertainment district of the city. Our accommodation was pre-booked at Manor by Mingle , a hostel where I had stayed for a couple of nights in a dormitory room earlier in February 2024.
We paid 4937 rupees (the payment was online, so we paid in Indian rupees) for 3 nights for a private room. From the Terminal Bersepadu Selatan (TBS) bus station, we took the metro to the Plaza Rakyat LRT station, which was around 500 meters from the hostel. Upon arriving at the hostel, we presented our passports at their request, followed by a 20 ringgit (400 rupee) deposit which would be refunded once we returned the room keys at checkout.
Manor by Mingle - the hostel where we stayed at during our KL transit. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Our room was upstairs and it had a bunk bed. I had seen bunk beds in dormitories before, but this was my first time seeing a bunk bed in a private room. The room did not have any toilets, so we had to use shared toilets.
Unusually, the hostel was equipped with a pool. It also had a washing machine with dryers - this was one of the reasons we chose this hostel, because we were traveling light and hadn t packed too many clothes. The machine and dryer cost 10 ringgits (200 rupees) per use, and we only used it once. The hostel provided complimentary breakfast, which included coffee. Outside of breakfast hours, there was also a paid coffee machine.
During our stay, we visited a gurdwara - a place of worship for Sikhs - which was within walking distance from our hostel. The name of the gurdwara was Gurdwara Sahib Mainduab. However, it wasn t as lively as I had thought. The gurdwara was locked from the inside, and we had to knock on the gate and call for someone to open it. A man opened the gate and invited us in.
The gurdwara was small, and there was only one other visitor - a man worshipping upstairs. We went upstairs briefly, then settled down on the first floor.
We had some conversations with the person downstairs who kindly made chai for us. They mentioned that the langar (community meal) is organized on every Friday, which was unlike the gurdwaras I have been to where the langar is served every day. We were there for an hour before we left.
We also went to Adyar Ananda Bhavan (a restaurant chain) near our hostel to try the chain in Malaysia. The chain is famous in Southern India and also known by its short name A2B. We ordered
an onion dosa for 10 ringgits (200 rupees),
1 masala tea for 6 ringgits (120 rupees),
2 pooris for 8 ringgits (160 rupees) and
1 plate potato bajji for 7 ringgits (140 rupees).
Dosa served at Adyar Ananda Bhavan. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
All this came down to around 33 ringgits (including taxes), i.e. around 660 rupees. We also purchased some snacks such as murukku from there for our trip.
We had planned a day trip to Malacca, but had to cancel it due to rain. We didn t do a lot in Kuala Lumpur, and it ended up acting as a transit point for us to other destinations: flights from Kuala Lumpur were cheaper than Singapore, and in one case a flight via Kuala Lumpur was even cheaper than a direct flight!
We paid 15,000 rupees in total for the following three flights:
Kuala Lumpur to Brunei,
Brunei to Kuala Lumpur, and
Kuala Lumpur to Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam).
These were all AirAsia flights. The cheap tickets, however, did not include any checked-in luggage, and the cabin luggage weight limit was 7 kg. We also bought quite some stuff in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, leading to an increase in the weight of our luggage.
We estimated that it would be cheaper for us to take only essential items such as clothes, cameras, and laptops, and to leave behind souvenirs and other non-essentials in lockers at the TBS bus stand in Kuala Lumpur, than to pay more for check-in luggage. It would take 140 ringgits for us to add a checked-in bag from Kuala Lumpur to Bandar Seri Begawan and back, while the cost for lockers was 55 ringgits at the rate of 5 ringgits every six hours.
We had seen these lockers when we alighted at the bus stand while coming from Johor Bahru. There might have been lockers in the airport itself as well, which would have been more convenient as we were planning to fly back in soon, but we weren t sure about finding lockers at the airport and we didn t want to waste time looking.
We had an early morning flight for Brunei on the 10th of December. We checked out from our hostel on the night of the 9th of December, and left for TBS to take a bus to the airport. We took a metro from the nearest metro station to TBS. Upon reaching there, we put our luggage in the lockers. The lockers were automated and there was no staff there to guide us.
Lockers at TBS bus station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
We bought a ticket for the airport bus from a counter at TBS for 26 ringgits for both of us. In order to give us tickets, the person at the counter asked for our passports, and we handed it over to them promptly. Since paying in cash did not provide any extra anonymity, I would advise others to book these buses online.
In Malaysia, you also need a boarding pass for buses. The bus terminal had kiosks for getting these printed, but they were broken and we had to go to a counter to obtain them. The boarding pass mentioned our gate number and other details such as our names and departure time of the bus. The company was Jet Bus.
My boarding pass for the bus to the airport in Kuala Lumpur. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
To go to our boarding gate, we had to scan our boarding pass to let the AFC gates open. Then we went downstairs, leading into the waiting area. It had departure boards listing the bus timings and their respective gates. We boarded our bus around 10 minutes before the departure time - 00:00 hours. It departed at its scheduled time and took 45 minutes to reach KL Airport Terminal 2, where we alighted.
We reached 6 hours before our flight s departure time of 06:30. We stopped at a convenience store at the airport to have some snacks. Then we weighed our bags at a weighing machine to check whether we were within the weight limit. It turned out that we were.
We went to an AirAsia counter to get our boarding passes. The lady at our counter checked our Brunei visas carefully and looked for any Brunei stamps on the passports to verify whether we had used that visa in the past. However, she didn t weigh our bags to check whether they were within the limit, and gave us our boarding passes.
We had more than 4 hours to go before our flight. This was the downside of booking an early morning flight - we weren t able to get a full night s sleep.
A couple of hours before our flight time, we were hanging around our boarding gate. The place was crowded, so there were no seats available. There were no charging points. There was a Burger King outlet there which had some seating space and charging points. As we were hungry, we ordered two cups of cappuccino coffee (15.9 ringgits) and one large french fries (8.9 ringgits) from Burger King. The total amount was 24 ringgits.
When it was time to board the flight, we went to the waiting area for our boarding gates. Soon, we boarded the plane. It took 2.5 hours to reach the Brunei International Airport in the capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan.
View of Kuala Lumpur from the aeroplane. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Stay tuned for our experiences in Brunei!
Credits: Thanks to Badri, Benson and Contrapunctus for reviewing the draft.
Same as last year, this is a summary of what I ve been up to throughout the year.
See also the recap/retrospection published by my friends (antiz, jvoisin, orhun).
Uploaded 467 packages to Arch Linux
Most of them being reproducible, meaning I provably didn t abuse my position of compiling the binaries
35 of them are signal-desktop
29 of them are metasploit
Made 53 uploads to Debian
All of them being related to my work in the debian-rust team, that I ve been a part of since 2018
Also applied for Debian Developer status (with 4 Debian Developers advocating for me)
Made 14 commits in Alpine Linux aports
13 of them being package releases
Made 2 commits in NixOS nixpkgs
Also joined their Github org
Made 4 commits in homebrew-core
With special focus on polishing the Rust development experience for the RP2040 microcontroller
Lost Onion, my cat of 13 years, to inoperable cancer. He has been with me throughout my entire open source journey (sometimes being credited as co-author) and who looked after me for my entire adult life. You won t be forgotten.
Developed 6 hand-held games with embedded Rust, most of them being birthday gifts for people close to me
embedded-graphics-colorcast a library I developed so I can keep using embedded-mono-img on ST7789/ILI9486 screens - I used tinybmp in one project but it was fairly slow
ch32v003-demo to demo and document the lowend ch32v003 RISC-V microcontroller, with devboards that are commonly sold for 0.50-0.70 on AliExpress (it s cute but lacks the required 5.1k resistors on the USB-C configuration pins that tell the host to provide 5V, so it won t work with many USB-C chargers, which is quite annoying)
embedded-savegame an atomic/transactional savegame library, with powerfail-safety and wear-leveling, optimized for flash and EEPROM storage
djb2 a very lightweight non-cryptographic checksum algorithm that replaced my use of CRC32 in the embedded-savegame library, to make it more suitable for the ch32v003
Dark Ambitions is a science fiction romance novella set in Michelle
Diener's Class 5 series, following the events of Dark Matters. It returns to Rose as the protagonist and in that
sense is a sequel to Dark Horse, but you
don't have to remember that book in detail to read this novella.
Rose and Dav (and the Class 5 ship Sazo) are escorting an exploration team
to a planet that is being evaluated for settlement. Rose has her heart set
on going down to the planet, feeling the breeze, and enjoying the plant
life. Dav and his ship are called away to deal with a hostage situation.
He tries to talk her out of going down without him, but Rose is having
none of it. Predictably, hijinks ensue.
This is a very slight novella dropped into the middle of the series but
not (at least so far as I can tell) important in any way to the overall
plot. It provides a bit of a coda to Rose's story from Dark Horse,
but given that Rose has made cameos in all of the other books, readers
aren't going to learn much new here. According to the Amazon blurb, it was
originally published in the Pets in Space 5 anthology. The pet in
question is a tiny creature a bit like a flying squirrel that Rose rescues
and that then helps Rose in exactly the way that you would predict in this
sort of story.
This is so slight and predictable that it's hard to find enough to say
about it to write a review. Dav is protective in a way that I found
annoying and kind of sexist. Rose doesn't let that restrict her decisions,
but seems to find this behavior more charming than I did. There is a tiny
bit of Rose being awesome but a bit more damsel in distress than the
series usually goes for. The cute animal is cute. There's the obligatory
armory scene with another round of technomagical weapons that I think has
appeared in every book in this series. It all runs on rather obvious
rails.
There is a subplot involving Rose feeling some mysterious illness while on
the planet that annoyed me entirely out of proportion to how annoying it
is objectively, mostly because mysterious illnesses tend to ramp up my
anxiety, which is not a pleasant reading emotion. This objection is
probably specific to me.
This is completely skippable. I was told that in advance and thus only
have myself to blame, but despite my completionist streak, I wish I'd
skipped it. We learn one piece of series information that will probably
come up in the future, but it's not the sort of information that would
lead me to seek out a story about it. Otherwise, there's nothing wrong
with it, really, but it would be a minor and entirely forgettable chapter
in a longer novel, padded out with a cute animal and Dav trying to be
smothering.
Not recommended just because you probably have something better to do with
that reading time (reading the next full book of the series, for example),
but there's nothing wrong with this if you want to read it anyway.
Followed by Dark Class.
Rating: 5 out of 10
AI and Secure Messaging Don't Mix
Over on the ACLU's Free Future blog,
I just published an article titled AI and Secure Messaging Don't Mix.
The blogpost assumes for the sake of the argument that people might actually want to have an AI involved in their personal conversations,
and explores why Meta's Private Processing
doesn't offer the level of assurance that they want it to offer.
In short, the promises of "confidential cloud computing" are built on shaky foundations, especially against adversaries as powerful as Meta themselves.
If you really want AI in your chat, the baseline step for privacy preservation is to include it in your local compute base, not to use a network service!
But these operators clearly don't value private communication as much as they value binding you to their services.
But let's imagine some secure messenger that actually does put message confidentiality first --
and imagine they had integrated some sort of AI capability into the messenger.
That at least bypasses the privacy questions around AI use.
Would you really want to talk with your friends, as augmented by their local AI, though?
Would you want an AI, even one running locally with perfect privacy, intervening in your social connections?
What if it summarized your friend's messages to you in a way that led you to misunderstand (or ignore) an important point your friend had made?
What if it encouraged you to make an edgy joke that comes across wrong?
Or to say something that seriously upsets a friend?
How would you respond?
How would you even know that it had happened?
My handle is dkg.
More times than i can count, i've had someone address me in a chat as "dog" and then cringe and apologize and blame their spellchecker/autocorrect.
I can laugh these off because the failure mode is so obvious and transparent -- and repeatable.
(also, dogs are awesome, so i don't really mind!)
But when our attention (and our responses!) are being shaped and molded by these plausibility engines, how will we even know that mistakes are being made?
What if the plausibility engine you've hooked into your messenger embeds subtle (or unsubtle!) bias?
Don't we owe it to each other to engage with actual human attention?
The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering]
(https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for
November.
Activity summary
During the month of November, 18 contributors have been
paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual
contributor reports are located below).
The team released 33 DLAs
fixing 219 CVEs.
The LTS Team kept going with the usual cadence of preparing security updates for Debian
11 bullseye , but also for Debian 12 bookworm , Debian 13 trixie and even
Debian unstable.
As in previous months, we are pleased to say that there have been multiple
contributions of LTS uploads by Debian Fellows outside the regular LTS Team.
Notable security updates:
Guilhem Moulin prepared DLA 4365-1
for unbound, a caching DNS resolver, fixing a cache poisoning vulnerability
that could lead to domain hijacking.
Another update related to DNS software was made by Andreas Henriksson. Andreas
completed the work on bind9, released as
DLA 4364-1 to fix
cache poisoning and Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities.
Chris Lamb released DLA 4374-1
to fix a potential arbitrary code execution vulnerability in pdfminer, a tool
for extracting information from PDF documents.
Ben Hutchings published a regular security update for the linux 6.1 bullseye
backport, as DLA 4379-1.
A couple of other important recurrent updates were prepared by Emilio Pozuelo,
who handled firefox-esr and thunderbird (in collaboration with Christoph
Goehre), published as DLAs
DLA 4370-1 and
DLA 4372-1,
respectively.
Contributions from fellows outside the LTS Team:
Thomas Goirand uploaded a bullseye update for
keystone
and
swift
As mentioned above, Christoph Goehre prepared the
bullseye update for thunderbird.
Mathias Behrle provided feedback about the tryton-server and tryton-sao vulnerabilities that were disclosed last month, and helped to review the bullseye patches for tryton-server.
Other than the regular LTS updates for bullseye, the LTS Team has also
contributed updates to the latest Debian releases:
Bastien Roucari s prepared a bookworm update for
squid,
the web proxy cache server.
Carlos Henrique Lima Melara filed a bookworm point update
request for gdk-pixbuf to fix
CVE-2025-7345, a heap buffer overflow vulnerability that could lead to
arbitrary code execution.
Daniel Leidert prepared bookworm and
trixie updates for r-cran-gh to fix
CVE-2025-54956, an issue that may expose user credentials in HTTP responses.
Along with the bullseye updates for unbound mentioned above, Guilhem helped
to prepare the trixie update
for unbound.
In collaboration with Lukas M rdian, Tobias Frost prepared
trixie and
bookworm
updates for log4cxx, the C++ port of the logging framework for JAVA.
Jochen Sprickerhof prepared a bookworm update for syslog-ng.
Utkarsh completed the bookworm update
for wordpress, addressing multiple security issues in the popular blogging
tool.
Beyond security updates, there has been a significant effort in revamping our
documentation, aiming to make the processes more clear and consistent for all
the members of the team. This work was mainly carried out by Sylvain, Jochen
and Roberto.
We would like to express our gratitude to the sponsors for making the Debian
LTS project possible. Also, special thanks to the fellows outside the LTS
team for their valuable help.
Activity summary
During the month of October, 21 contributors have been
paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual
contributor reports are located below).
The team released 37 DLAs fixing 893 CVEs.
The team has continued in its usual rhythm, preparing and uploading security
updates targeting LTS and ELTS, as well as helping with updates to oldstable,
stable, testing, and unstable. Additionally, the team received several
contributions of LTS uploads from Debian Developers outside the standing LTS
Team.
Notable security updates:
https-everywhere, prepared by Markus Koschany, deals with a problem created by ownership of the https-rulesets.org domain passing to a malware operator
openjdk-17 and openjdk-11, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixes XML external entity and certificate validation vulnerabilities
intel-microcode, prepared by Tobias Frost, fixes a variety of privilege escalation and denial of service vulnerabilities
Notable non-security updates:
distro-info-data, prepared by Stefano Rivera, updates information concerning current and upcoming Debian and Ubuntu releases
Contributions from outside the LTS Team:
Lukas M rdian, a Debian Developer, provided an update of log4cxx
Andrew Ruthven, one of the request-tracker4 maintainers, provided an update of request-tracker4
Christoph Goehre, co-maintainer of thunderbird, provided an update of thunderbird
Beyond the typical LTS updates, the team also helped the Debian community more broadly:
Guilhem Moulin prepared oldstable/stable updates of libxml2, and an unstable update of libxml2.9
Bastien Roucari s prepared oldstable/stable updates of imagemagick
Daniel Leidert prepared an oldstable update of python-authlib, oldstable update of libcommons-lang-java and stable update of libcommons-lang3-java
Utkarsh Gupta prepared oldstable/stable/testing/unstable updates of ruby-rack
The LTS Team is grateful for the opportunity to contribute to making LTS a high quality for sponsors and users. We are also particularly grateful for the collaboration from others outside the time; their contributions are important to the success of the LTS effort.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-thirty-sixth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:
[DLA 4316-1] open-vm-tools security update to fix one CVE related to a local privilege escalation.
[DLA 4329-1] libfcgi security update to fix one CVE related to a heap-based buffer overflow via crafted nameLen or valueLen values in data to the IPC socket.
[DLA 4337-1] svgpp security update to fix one CVE related to a nullpointer reference.
[DLA 4336-1] sysstat security update to fix two CVEs related to a size_t overflow and a multiplication integer overflow.
[DLA 4343-1] raptor2 security update to fix two CVEs related to a heap-based buffer over-read and an integer underflow.
[DLA 4349-1] request-tracker4 security update to fix one CVE related to CSV injection via ticket values with special characters. The patch was prepared by Andrew Ruthven
[DLA 4353-1] xorg-server security update to fix three CVES related to privilege escalation.
I also attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.
Debian ELTS
This month was the eighty-seventh ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:
[ELA-1538-1] libfcgi security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch, related to a heap-based buffer overflow via crafted nameLen or valueLen values in data to the IPC socket.
[ELA-1551-1] raptor2 security update to fix two CVES in Buster and Stretch, related to a heap-based buffer over-read and an integer underflow.
[ELA-1555-1] request-tracker4 security update to fix one CVE in Buster, related to CSV injection via ticket values with special characters. The patch was prepared by Andrew Ruthven.
[ELA-1561-1] xorg-server security update to fix three CVEs in Buster and Stretch, related to privilege escalation.
I also attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.
Debian Printing
This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:
Debian IoT
Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic.
Debian Mobcom
This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:
On my fight against outdated RFPs, I closed 31 of them in October. I could even close one RFP by uploading the new package gypsy. Meanwhile only 3373 are still open, so don t hesitate to help closing one or another.
FTP master
This month I accepted 420 and rejected 45 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 423.
I would like to remind everybody that in case you don t agree with the removal of a package, please set the moreinfo tag on this bug. This is the only reliable way to prevent processing of that RM-bug. Well, there is a second way, of course you could also achieve this by closing the bug.
Continuing from where Badri and I left off in the last post. On the 7th of December 2024, we boarded a bus from Singapore to the border town of Johor Bahru in Malaysia. The bus stopped at the Singapore emigration for us to get off for the formalities.
The process was similar to the immigration at the Singapore airport. It was automatic, and we just had to scan our passports for the gates to open. Here also, we didn t get Singapore stamps on our passports.
After we were done with the emigration, we had to find our bus. We remembered the name of the bus company and the number plate, which helped us recognize our bus. It wasn t there already after we came out of the emigration, but it arrived soon enough, and we boarded it promptly.
From the Singapore emigration, the bus travelled a few kilometers and dropped us at Johor Bahru Sentral (JB Sentral) bus station, where we had to go through Malaysian immigration. The process was manual, unlike Singapore, and there was an immigration officer at the counter who stamped our passports (which I like) and recorded our fingerprints.
At the bus terminal, we exchanged rupees at an exchange shop to get Malaysian ringgits. We could not find any free drinking water sources on the bus terminal, so we had to buy water.
Badri later told me that Johor Bahru has a lot of data centers, which need a lot of water for cooling. When he read about it later, he immediately connected it with the fact that there was no free drinking water, and we had to buy water. Such data centers can lead to scarcity of water for others in the area.
From JB Sentral, we took a bus to Larkin Terminal, as our hotel was nearby. It was 1.5 ringgits per person (30 rupees). In order to pay for the fare, we had to put cash in a box near the driver s seat.
Around half-an-hour later, we reached our hotel. The time was 23:30 hours. The hotel room was hot as it didn t have air-conditioning. The weather in Malaysia is on the hotter side throughout the year. It was a budget hotel, and we paid 70 ringgits for our room.
Badri slept soon after we checked-in. I went out during the midnight at around 00:30. I was hungry, so I entered a small scale restaurant nearby, which was quite lively for the midnight hours. At the restaurant, I ordered a coffee and an omelet. I also asked for drinking water. The unique thing about that was that they put ice in hot water to make its temperature normal.
My bill from the restaurant looked like the below-mentioned table, as the items names were in the local language Malay:
Item
Price (Malaysian ringgits)
Conversion to Indian rupees
Comments
Nescafe Tarik
2.50
50
Coffee
Ais Kosong
0.50
10
Water
Telur Dadar
2.00
40
Omelet
SST Tax (6%)
0.30
6
Total
5.30
106
After checking out from the restaurant, I explored nearby shops. I also bought some water before going back to the hotel room.
The next day, we had a (pre-booked) bus to Kuala Lumpur. We checked out from the hotel 10 minutes after the check-out time (which was 14:00 hours). However, within those 10 minutes, the hotel staff already came up three times asking us to clear out (which we were doing as fast as possible). And finally on the third time they said our deposit was forfeit, even though it was supposed to be only for keys and towels.
The above-mentioned bus for Kuala Lumpur was from the nearby Larkin Bus Terminal. The bus terminal was right next to our hotel, so we walked till there.
Upon reaching there, we found out that the process of boarding a bus in Malaysia resembled with taking a flight. We needed to go to a counter to get our boarding passes, followed by reporting at our gate half-an-hour before the scheduled time. Furthermore, they had a separate waiting room and boarding gates. Also, there was a terminal listing buses with their arrival and departure signs. Finally, to top it off, the buses had seatbelts.
We got our boarding pass for 2 ringgits (40 rupees). After that, we proceeded to get something to eat as we were hungry. We went to a McDonald s, but couldn t order anything because of the long queue. We didn t have a lot of time, so we proceeded towards our boarding gate without having anything.
The boarding gate was in a separate room, which had a vending machine. I tried to order something using my card, but the machine wasn t working. In Malaysia, there is a custom of queueing up to board buses even before the bus has arrived. We saw it in Johor Bahru as well. The culture is so strong that they even did it in Singapore while waiting for the Johor Bahru bus!
Our bus departed at 15:30 as scheduled. The journey was around 5 hours. A couple of hours later, our bus stopped for a break. We got off the bus and went to the toilet. As we were starving (we didn t have anything the whole day), we thought it was a good opportunity to get some snack. There was a stall selling some food. However, I had to determine which options were vegetarian. We finally settled on a cylindrical box of potato chips, labelled Mister Potato. They were 7 ringgits.
We didn t know how long the bus is going to stop. Furthermore, eating inside buses in Malaysia is forbidden. When we went to get some coffee from the stall, our bus driver was standing there and made a face. We got an impression that he doesn t want us to have coffee.
However, after we got into the bus, we had to wait for a long time for it to resume its journey as the driver was taking his sweet time to drink his coffee.
During the bus journey, we saw a lot of palm trees on the way. The landscape was beautiful, with good road infrastructure throughout the journey. Badri also helped me improve my blog post on obtaining Luxembourg visa in the bus.
The bus dropped us at the Terminal Bersepadu Selatan (TBS in short) in Kuala Lumpur at 21:30 hours.
Finally, we got something at the TBS. We also noticed that the TBS bus station had lockers. This gave us the idea of putting some of our luggage in the lockers later while we will be in Brunei. We had booked a cheap Air Asia ticket which doesn t allow check-in luggage. Further, keeping the checked-in luggage in lockers for three days was cheaper than paying the excess luggage penalty for Air Asia.
We followed it up by taking a metro as our hotel was closer to a metro station. This was a bad day due to our deposit being forfeited unfairly, and got nothing to eat.
We took the metro to reach our hostel, which was located in the Bukit Bintang area. The name of this hostel was Manor by Mingle. I had stayed here earlier in February 2024 for two nights. Back then, I paid 1000 rupees per day for a dormitory bed. However, this time the same hostel was much cheaper. We got a private room for 800 rupees per day, with breakfast included. Earlier it might have been pricier due to my stay falling on weekends or maybe February has more tourists in Kuala Lumpur.
That s it for this post. Stay tuned for our adventures in Malaysia!
It occurred to me recently that one of the attractions of vinyl, or more
generally physical media, could be that it's inert, safe: the music is a
groove cut into some plastic. That's it. The record can't do anything
unexpected to you1: it just contains music.
Safe.
There's so much exploitation of attention, and so much of what we interact
with in a computing context (social media) etc has been weaponised against
us, that having something some matter-of-fact is a relief. I know that
sometimes, I prefer to put a record on than to dial up the very same album
from any number of (ostensibly more convenient) digital sources, partly
because I don't need to spend any of my attention spoons to do so, I can
save them for the task at hand.
The same is perhaps not true for audio CDs. That might depend on your own
relationship with them, of course. For me they're inexorably tied up with
computing and a certain amount of faff (ripping, encoding, metadata). And
long dead it might be (hopefully), but I can still remember Sony's CD
rootkit scandal:
CDs could be a trojan horse. Beware!
Quiete some things made progress last month: We put out
Phosh 0.50 release, got
closer to enabling media roles for audio by default in Phosh (see related
post) and reworked
our images builds. You should also (hopefully) notice some nice
quality of life improvements once changes land in a distro near you
and you're using Phosh. See below for details:
phosh
Switch back to default them when disabling automatic HighContrast (MR)
Hande gnome-session 49 changes so OSK can still start up (MR)
Rory Stewart is a former British diplomat, non-profit executive, member of
Parliament, and cabinet minister. Politics on the Edge is a memoir
of his time in the UK Parliament from 2019 to 2019 as a Tory
(Conservative) representing the Penrith and The Border constituency in
northern England. It ends with his failed run against Boris Johnson for
leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister.
This book provoked many thoughts, only some of which are about the book.
You may want to get a beverage; this review will be long.
Since this is a memoir told in chronological order, a timeline may be
useful. After Stewart's time as a regional governor in occupied Iraq
(see The Prince of the Marshes), he
moved to Kabul to found and run an NGO to preserve traditional Afghani
arts and buildings (the
Turquoise Mountain Foundation, about which I know nothing except what
Stewart wrote in this book). By his telling, he found that work deeply
rewarding but thought the same politicians who turned Iraq into a mess
were going to do the same to Afghanistan. He started looking for ways to
influence the politics more directly, which led him first to Harvard and
then to stand for Parliament.
The bulk of this book covers Stewart's time as MP for Penrith and The
Border. The choice of constituency struck me as symbolic of Stewart's
entire career: He was not a resident and had no real connection to the
district, which he chose for political reasons and because it was the
nearest viable constituency to his actual home in Scotland. But once he
decided to run, he moved to the district and seems sincerely earnest in
his desire to understand it and become part of its community. After five
years as a backbencher, he joined David Cameron's government in a minor
role as Minister of State in the Department for Environment, Food, and
Rural Affairs. He then bounced through several minor cabinet positions
(more on this later) before being elevated to Secretary of State for
International Development under Theresa May. When May's government
collapsed during the fight over the Brexit agreement, he launched a
quixotic challenge to Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party.
I have enjoyed Rory Stewart's writing ever since The Places in Between. This book is no exception. Whatever one's
other feelings about Stewart's politics (about which I'll have a great
deal more to say), he's a talented memoir writer with an understated and
contemplative style and a deft ability to shift from concrete description
to philosophical debate without bogging down a story. Politics on
the Edge is compelling reading at the prose level. I spent several
afternoons happily engrossed in this book and had great difficulty putting
it down.
I find Stewart intriguing since, despite being a political conservative,
he's neither a neoliberal nor any part of the new right. He is instead an
apparently-sincere throwback to a conservatism based on epistemic
humility, a veneration of rural life and long-standing traditions, and a
deep commitment to the concept of public service. Some of his principles
are baffling to me, and I think some of his political views are obvious
nonsense, but there were several things that struck me throughout this
book that I found admirable and depressingly rare in politics.
First, Stewart seems to learn from his mistakes. This goes beyond
admitting when he was wrong and appears to include a willingness to
rethink entire philosophical positions based on new experience.
I had entered Iraq supporting the war on the grounds that we could at
least produce a better society than Saddam Hussein's. It was one of
the greatest mistakes in my life. We attempted to impose programmes
made up by Washington think tanks, and reheated in air-conditioned
palaces in Baghdad a new taxation system modelled on Hong Kong; a
system of ministers borrowed from Singapore; and free ports, modelled
on Dubai. But we did it ultimately at the point of a gun, and our
resources, our abstract jargon and optimistic platitudes could not
conceal how much Iraqis resented us, how much we were failing, and how
humiliating and degrading our work had become. Our mission was a
grotesque satire of every liberal aspiration for peace, growth and
democracy.
This quote comes from the beginning of this book and is a sentiment
Stewart already expressed in The Prince of the Marshes, but he
appears to have taken this so seriously that it becomes a theme of his
political career. He not only realized how wrong he was on Iraq, he
abandoned the entire neoliberal nation-building project without abandoning
his belief in the moral obligation of international aid. And he, I think
correctly, identified a key source of the error: an ignorant,
condescending superiority that dismissed the importance of deep expertise.
Neither they, nor indeed any of the 12,000 peacekeepers and policemen
who had been posted to South Sudan from sixty nations, had spent a
single night in a rural house, or could complete a sentence in Dinka,
Nuer, Azande or Bande. And the international development strategy
written jointly between the donor nations resembled a fading mission
statement found in a new space colony, whose occupants had all been
killed in an alien attack.
Second, Stewart sincerely likes ordinary people. This shone through
The Places in Between and recurs here in his descriptions of his
constituents. He has a profound appreciation for individual people who
have spent their life learning some trade or skill, expresses thoughtful
and observant appreciation for aspects of local culture, and appears to
deeply appreciate time spent around people from wildly different social
classes and cultures than his own. Every successful politician can at
least fake gregariousness, and perhaps that's all Stewart is doing, but
there is something specific and attentive about his descriptions of other
people, including long before he decided to enter politics, that makes me
think it goes deeper than political savvy.
Third, Stewart has a visceral hatred of incompetence. I think this is the
strongest through-line of his politics in this book: Jobs in government
are serious, important work; they should be done competently and well; and
if one is not capable of doing that, one should not be in government.
Stewart himself strikes me as an insecure overachiever: fiercely
ambitious, self-critical, a bit of a micromanager (I suspect he would be
difficult to work for), but holding himself to high standards and appalled
when others do not do the same. This book is scathing towards multiple
politicians, particularly Boris Johnson whom Stewart clearly despises, but
no one comes off worse than Liz Truss.
David Cameron, I was beginning to realise, had put in charge of
environment, food and rural affairs a Secretary of State who openly
rejected the idea of rural affairs and who had little interest in
landscape, farmers or the environment. I was beginning to wonder
whether he could have given her any role she was less suited to
apart perhaps from making her Foreign Secretary. Still, I could also
sense why Cameron was mesmerised by her. Her genius lay in exaggerated
simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new
style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If
critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute
confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead
of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism,
open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics
demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but
power and manipulation. If Liz Truss worried about the consequences of
any of this for the way that government would work, she didn't reveal
it.
And finally, Stewart has a deeply-held belief in state capacity and
capability. He and I may disagree on the appropriate size and role of the
government in society, but no one would be more disgusted by an
intentional project to cripple government in order to shrink it than
Stewart.
One of his most-repeated criticisms of the UK political system in this
book is the way the cabinet is formed. All ministers and secretaries come
from members of Parliament and therefore branches of government are led by
people with no relevant expertise. This is made worse by constant cabinet
reshuffles that invalidate whatever small amounts of knowledge a minister
was able to gain in nine months or a year in post. The center portion of
this book records Stewart's time being shuffled from rural affairs to
international development to Africa to prisons, with each move
representing a complete reset of the political office and no transfer of
knowledge whatsoever.
A month earlier, they had been anticipating every nuance of Minister
Rogerson's diary, supporting him on shifts twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week. But it was already clear that there would be no
pretence of a handover no explanation of my predecessor's strategy,
and uncompleted initiatives. The arrival of a new minister was
Groundhog Day. Dan Rogerson was not a ghost haunting my office, he was
an absence, whose former existence was suggested only by the black
plastic comb.
After each reshuffle, Stewart writes of trying to absorb briefings, do
research, and learn enough about his new responsibilities to have the hope
of making good decisions, while growing increasingly frustrated with the
system and the lack of interest by most of his colleagues in doing the
same. He wants government programs to be successful and believes success
requires expertise and careful management by the politicians, not only by
the civil servants, a position that to me both feels obviously correct and
entirely at odds with politics as currently practiced.
I found this a fascinating book to read during the accelerating collapse
of neoliberalism in the US and, to judge by current polling results, the
UK. I have a theory that the political press are so devoted to a
simplistic left-right political axis based on seating arrangements during
the French Revolution that they are missing a significant minority whose
primary political motivation is contempt for arrogant incompetence. They
could be convinced to vote for Sanders or Trump, for Polanski or Farage,
but will never vote for Biden, Starmer, Romney, or Sunak.
Such voters are incomprehensible to those who closely follow and debate
policies because their hostile reaction to the center is not about
policies. It's about lack of trust and a nebulous desire for justice.
They've been promised technocratic competence and the invisible hand of
market forces for most of their lives, and all of it looks like lies.
Everyday living is more precarious, more frustrating, more abusive and
dehumanizing, and more anxious, despite (or because of) this wholehearted
embrace of economic "freedom." They're sick of every complaint about the
increasing difficulty of life being met with accusations about their
ability and work ethic, and of being forced to endure another round of
austerity by people who then catch a helicopter ride to a party on some
billionaire's yacht.
Some of this is inherent in the deep structural weaknesses in neoliberal
ideology, but this is worse than an ideological failure. The degree to
which neoliberalism started as a project of sincere political thinkers is
arguable, but that is clearly not true today. The elite class in politics
and business is now thoroughly captured by people whose primary skill is
the marginal manipulation of complex systems for their own power and
benefit. They are less libertarian ideologues than narcissistic
mediocrities. We are governed by management consultants. They are firmly
convinced their organizational expertise is universal, and consider the
specific business of the company, or government department, irrelevant.
Given that context, I found Stewart's instinctive revulsion towards David
Cameron quite revealing. Stewart, later in the book, tries to give Cameron
some credit by citing several policy accomplishments and comparing him
favorably to Boris Johnson (which, true, is a bar Cameron probably flops
over). But I think Stewart's baffled astonishment at Cameron's vapidity
says a great deal about how we have ended up where we are. This last quote
is long, but I think it provides a good feel for Stewart's argument in
this book.
But Cameron, who was rumoured to be sceptical about nation-building
projects, only nodded, and then looking confidently up and down the
table said, "Well, at least we all agree on one extremely
straightforward and simple point, which is that our troops are doing
very difficult and important work and we should all support them."
It was an odd statement to make to civilians running humanitarian
operations on the ground. I felt I should speak. "No, with respect, we
do not agree with that. Insofar as we have focused on the troops, we
have just been explaining that what the troops are doing is often
futile, and in many cases making things worse." Two small red dots
appeared on his cheeks. Then his face formed back into a smile. He
thanked us, told us he was out of time, shook all our hands, and left
the room.
Later, I saw him repeat the same line in interviews: "the purpose of
this visit is straightforward... it is to show support for what our
troops are doing in Afghanistan". The line had been written, in
London, I assumed, and tested on focus groups. But he wanted to
convince himself it was also a position of principle.
"David has decided," one of his aides explained, when I met him later,
"that one cannot criticise a war when there are troops on the ground."
"Why?"
"Well... we have had that debate. But he feels it is a principle of
British government."
"But Churchill criticised the conduct of the Boer War; Pitt the war
with America. Why can't he criticise wars?"
"British soldiers are losing their lives in this war, and we can't
suggest they have died in vain."
"But more will die, if no one speaks up..."
"It is a principle thing. And he has made his decision. For him and
the party."
"Does this apply to Iraq too?"
"Yes. Again he understands what you are saying, but he voted to
support the Iraq War, and troops are on the ground."
"But surely he can say he's changed his mind?"
The aide didn't answer, but instead concentrated on his food. "It is
so difficult," he resumed, "to get any coverage of our trip." He
paused again. "If David writes a column about Afghanistan, we will
struggle to get it published."
"But what would he say in an article anyway?" I asked.
"We can talk about that later. But how do you get your articles on
Afghanistan published?"
I remembered how the US politicians and officials had shown their
mastery of strategy and detail. I remembered the earnestness of Gordon
Brown when I had briefed him on Iraq. Cameron seemed somehow less
serious. I wrote as much in a column in the New York Times,
saying that I was afraid the party of Churchill was becoming the party
of Bertie Wooster.
I don't know Stewart's reputation in Britain, or in the constituency that
he represented. I know he's been accused of being a self-aggrandizing
publicity hound, and to some extent this is probably true. It's hard to
find an ambitious politician who does not have that instinct. But whatever
Stewart's flaws, he can, at least, defend his politics with more substance
than a corporate motto. One gets the impression that he would respond
favorably to demonstrated competence linked to a careful argument, even if
he disagreed. Perhaps this is an illusion created by his writing, but even
if so, it's a step in the right direction.
When people become angry enough at a failing status quo, any option that
promises radical change and punishment for the current incompetents will
sound appealing. The default collapse is towards demagogues who are
skilled at expressing anger and disgust and are willing to promise simple
cures because they are indifferent to honesty. Much of the political
establishment in the US, and possibly (to the small degree that I can
analyze it from an occasional news article) in the UK, can identify the
peril of the demagogue, but they have no solution other than a return to
"politics as usual," represented by the amoral mediocrity of a McKinsey
consultant. The rare politicians who seem to believe in something, who
will argue for personal expertise and humility, who are disgusted by
incompetence and have no patience for facile platitudes, are a breath of
fresh air.
There are a lot of policies on which Stewart and I would disagree, and
perhaps some of his apparent humility is an affectation from the
rhetorical world of the 1800s that he clearly wishes he were inhabiting,
but he gives the strong impression of someone who would shoulder a
responsibility and attempt to execute it with competence and attention to
detail. He views government as a job, where coworkers should cooperate to
achieve defined goals, rather than a reality TV show. The arc of this
book, like the arc of current politics, is the victory of the reality TV
show over the workplace, and the story of Stewart's run against Boris
Johnson is hard reading because of it, but there's a portrayal here of a
different attitude towards politics that I found deeply rewarding.
If you liked Stewart's previous work, or if you want an inside look at
parliamentary politics, highly recommended. I will be thinking about this
book for a long time.
Rating: 9 out of 10
The seventeenth release of the qlcal package
arrivied at CRAN today, once
again following a QuantLib
release as 1.40 came out this morning.
qlcal
delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R
package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained
and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be
demanding to build). qlcal covers
over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its
complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples
are in the README at the repository, the package page,
and course at the CRAN package
page.
This releases mainly synchronizes qlcal with
the QuantLib release 1.40. Only
one country calendar got updated; the diffstat
looks larger as the URL part of the copyright got updated throughout. We
also updated the URL for the GPL-2 badge: when CRAN checks this, they always hit
a timeout as the FSF server possibly keeps track of incoming requests;
we now link to version from the R Licenses page to avoid
this.
Changes in version 0.0.17
(2025-07-14)
Synchronized with QuantLib 1.40 released today
Calendar updates for Singapore
URL update in README.md
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there
is a diffstat report for this
release. See the project page
and package documentation for more details, and more examples.
Tobias Frost
did 5.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
Utkarsh Gupta
did 16.5h (out of 14.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.5h to the next month.
Evolution of the situation
In September, we released 38 DLAs.
Notable security updates:
modsecurity-apache prepared by Adrian Bunk, fixes a cross-site scripting vulnerability
cups, prepared by Thorsten Alteholz, fixes authentication bypass and denial of service vulnerabilities
jetty9, prepared by Adrian Bunk, fixes the MadeYouReset vulnerability (a recent, well-known denial of service vulnerability)
python-django, prepared by Chris Lamb, fixes a SQL injection vulnerability
firefox-esr and thunderbird, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, were updated from the 128.x ESR series to the 140.x ESR series, fixing a number of vulnerabilities as well
Notable non-security updates:
wireless-regdb prepared by Ben Hutchings, updates information reflecting changes to radio regulations in many countries
There was one package update contributed by a Debian Developer outside of the LTS Team: an update of node-tar-fs, prepared by Xavier Guimard (a member of the Node packaging team).
Finally, LTS Team members also contributed updates of the following packages:
libxslt (to stable and oldstable), prepared by Guilhem Moulin, to address a regression introduced in a previous security update
libphp-adodb (to stable and oldstable), prepared by Abhijith PA
cups (to stable and oldstable), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
u-boot (to oldstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert and Jochen Sprickerhof
libcommongs-lang3-java (to stable and oldstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert
python-internetarchive (to oldstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert
One other notable contribution by a member of the LTS Team is that Sylvain Beucler proposed a fix upstream for CVE-2025-2760 in gimp2. Upstream no longer supports gimp2, but it is still present in Debian LTS, and so proposing this fix upstream is of benefit to other distros which may still be supporting the older gimp2 packages.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-thirty-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:
[DLA 4168-2] openafs regression update to fix an incomplete patch in the previous upload.
[DSA 5998-1] cups security update to fix two CVEs related to a authentication bypass and a denial of service.
[DLA 4298-1] cups security update to fix two CVEs related to a authentication bypass and a denial of service.
[DLA 4304-1] cjson security update to fix one CVE related to an out-of-bounds memory access.
[DLA 4307-1] jq security update to fix one CVE related to a heap buffer overflow.
[DLA 4308-1] corosync security update to fix one CVE related to a stack-based buffer overflow.
An upload of spim was not needed, as the corresponding CVE could be marked as ignored.
I also started to work on an open-vm-tools and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.
Debian ELTS
This month was the eighty-sixth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:
[ELA-1512-1] cups security update to fix two CVEs in Buster and Stretch, related to a authentication bypass and a denial of service.
[ELA-1520-1] jq security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch, related to a heap buffer overflow.
[ELA-1524-1] corosync security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch, related to a stack-based buffer overflow.
[ELA-1527-1] mplayer security update to fix ten CVEs in Stretch, distributed all over the code.
The CVEs for open-vm-tools could be marked as not-affeceted as the corresponding plugin was not yet available. I also attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.
Debian Printing
This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:
misc
The main topic of this month has been gcc15 and cmake4, so my upload rate was extra high. This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:
I wonder what MBF will happen next, I guess the /var/lock-issue will be a good candidate.
On my fight against outdated RFPs, I closed 30 of them in September. Meanwhile only 3397 are still open, so don t hesitate to help closing one or another.
FTP master
This month I accepted 294 and rejected 28 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 294.
Brunei entry stamp on my passport. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Our room in Brunei. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Jame Asr Hassanil Bolkiah Mosque. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0
A shot of Brunei s countryside. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
A recent article in The Atlantic makes the case that
A lot of the youtube channels I follow tend to involve somebody making
things, so of course one of the videos my SO and I watched a few days
ago was about 
And then, 10 minutes after we had left, realizing that I had written
down the password for the train website, since it was no longer saved on
the phone, but i had forgotten the bit of paper at home. We could have
gone back to take it, but decided not to bother, as we could also
hopefully buy paper-ish tickets at the train station (we could).
Later on, I also realized I had also forgotten my GPS tracker, so I have
no record of where we went exactly (but it s not hard to recognize it on
a map) nor on what the temperature was. It s a shame, but by that point
it was way too late to go back.
Anyway, that probably was when Murphy felt we had paid our respects, and
from then on everything went lovingly well!
Routing had been done on the 
And indeed, after a short while the paved road ended, but the path
continued on a wide and flat track, and was a welcome detour through
what looked like water works to prevent flood damage from a stream.
In a warmer season, with longer grass and ticks maybe the fact that I
was wearing a long skirt may have been an issue, but in winter it was
just fine.
And soon afterwards, we were in Porto Ceresio. I think I have been there
as a child, but I had no memory of it. On the other hand, it was about
as I expected: a tiny town with a lakeside street full of houses built
in the early 1900s when the area was an important tourism destination,
with older buildings a bit higher up on the hills (because streams
in this area will flood). And of course, getting there by foot rather
than by train we also saw the parts where real people live (but not
work: that s cross-border commuters country).
Soon after arriving in Porto Ceresio we stopped to eat our lunch on a
bench at the lakeside; up to then we had been pretty comfortable in the
clothing we had decided to wear: there was plenty of frost on the
ground, in the shade, but the sun was warm and the temperatures were
cleanly above freezing. Removing the gloves to eat, however, resulted in
quite cold hands, and we didn t want to stay still for longer than
strictly necessary.
So we spent another hour and a bit walking around Porto Ceresio like
proper tourists and taking pictures. There was an exhibition of nativity
scenes all around the streets, but to get a map one had to go to either
facebook or instagram, or wait for the opening hours of an office that
were later than the train we planned to get to go back home, so we only
saw maybe half of them, as we walked around: some were quite nice, some
were nativity scenes, and some showed that the school children must have
had some fun making them.
Another Christmas decoration were groups of creatures made of evergreen
branches that dotted the sidewalks around the lake: I took pictures of
the first couple of groups, and then after seeing a few more something
clicked in my brain, and I noticed that they were wrapped in green LED
strings, like chains, and they had a red ball that was supposed to be
the nose, but could just be around the mouth area, and suddenly I felt
the need to play 
Another thing that we noticed were some benches in the shape of books,
with book quotations on them; most were on reading-related topics, but
the one with the Constitution felt worth taking a picture of, especially
these days.
And then, our train was waiting at the station, and we had to go back
home for the afternoon; it was a nice outing, if a bit brief, and we
agreed to do it again, possibly with a bit of a detour to make the walk
a bit longer. And then maybe one day we ll train to do the whole 5-6
hour thing through the hills.
2026 already! The winter weather here has really been beautiful and I always enjoy
this time of year. Writing this yearly musical retrospective has now become a
beloved tradition of mine
Manor by Mingle - the hostel where we stayed at during our KL transit. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Dosa served at Adyar Ananda Bhavan. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Lockers at TBS bus station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
My boarding pass for the bus to the airport in Kuala Lumpur. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
View of Kuala Lumpur from the aeroplane. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering]
(
It occurred to me recently that one of the attractions of vinyl, or more
generally physical media, could be that it's inert, safe: the music is a
groove cut into some plastic. That's it. The record can't do anything
unexpected to you
Quiete some things made progress last month: We put out
The seventeenth release of the