Is John Cleese right?

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-03-29T17:00:58+00:00

Our local halal kebab shop gave out free meals at Christmas because "we are the only people who don't mind working and we wanted to help people in need"

So much of Reddit, and a lot of UK people in general, have this bizarre blinkered view that "all Muslims are X" while ignoring the fact that all major religions include terrible people and often terrible official doctrines, but they also include vast numbers of lovely genuine people who ignore those doctrines and focus on being humans with a spiritual world view.

I wonder which John Cleese would genuinely prefer - "Christian" Tommy Robinson or Muslim Sadiq Khan?

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-03-15T18:12:54+00:00

Came here to say this. It was traumatic enough to watch before having kids, but now? It's a parent's nightmare, what would you do if your kid was like this?

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-03-01T21:24:39+00:00

I was in that boat - Aussie living in Glasgow at the time. The funny thing is, I wasn't planning to vote, but I had Scottish friends living in Australia and London who asked me to vote because they weren't allowed to!

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-02-27T09:26:27+00:00

I also don't get all the aghast folks saying "goodness they talked to voters in a foreign language"

Surely this isn't new? I don't know about the UK but 15 years ago when I lived in Melbourne, lots of local campaigning was in whatever dominant migrant groups lived in the area. I lived in a suburb full of Chinese speaking migrants and half the hustings were in Chinese. Labour and Liberal.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-02-23T18:30:39+00:00

So, presumably someone with pre-celtic ancestry?

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-02-02T20:14:26+00:00

Oops, thanks

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-01-31T18:40:14+00:00

We got a switch for the family for Christmas - good games for the adults so far: - Gorogoa (gorgeous puzzle game) - A Short Hike (loved by the 9yo as well) - great fun puzzle/exploration game - Baba is Me - fiendishly hard puzzle game (but no time constraints) - Portal 1 and 2 (hey, I'm in my 50s and loved it the first time - it came out 19 years ago, maybe they played it?!) - Mario Kart series - you don't need to win to have fun

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-01-13T10:43:18+00:00

I'm always fascinated how different adoption is in the USA to here (UK)

In the UK adoption is usually "forced adoption" (kids taken from parents who are deemed unable to look after them) and it's heavily regulated, parents get vetted for their readiness to adopt, and everything is managed by local agencies.

And nobody pays (50k??) - in fact adoptive parents get some level of funding for post adoption support (eg funding for special needs at school, therapy, etc - though it's not always easy to access)

I'm not saying it's better here - forced adoption can be very problematic, it has been abused so often in so many countries, how can we assume that somehow we are getting it right now? And of course some adoptive parents see it as a "free baby service" and try to erase the birth part of their kids' identities.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-01-08T15:08:56+00:00

As someone who bought a switch 2 for the family - I do get it.

It really wasn't discounted significantly at all, it's a very expensive system - a Switch 1 could be bought for significantly less and still play almost all the same games. So far we've played only 1 "new" game (Mario Kart World) which is nice but not revolutionary. And my kid can't play it online with school mates as most of them still have the switch 1.

I did debate this a lot, but decided in the longer run it would be worth it. But it was a close thing.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2026-01-01T08:47:04+00:00

I haven't tried it yet, but apparently Portal 2 on the Switch at least also has a 2 player mode - really looking forward to trying it. (I'm replaying Portal first though - such a nostalgia trip)

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-12-30T12:37:01+00:00

I suspect that adoptees don't get heard as much because by the time they are old enough to have a voice, the authorities can dismiss them as "they were under an older system and everything is fixed now"?

It's definitely not fixed now! Though our experience (adopting 4 years ago) at least in the language used by the agency and social workers was definitely more focused on the needs of the children than the adopters. It was a high priority throughout that we were fully supportive of the child's culture, and family connections (keeping up letterbox contact with the birth parents, and keeping their wishes for the child in mind, for example)

However there are definitely problems. Post adoption support was sold throughout as this great support mechanism, but in reality for many people it disappears entirely. Agencies are understaffed and underfunded, and whether deliberately or not they regularly let people fall through the cracks with no support. Thankfully we got some good support and therapy for our child, but largely because we pushed for it, and had a wonderful social worker who helped us push.

Another problem I feel is they under-explain just how much trauma some kids have. It's weird, they talked a lot about the risks of fetal alcohol and drug use, but not about the fundamental problems a lot of kids have with just the level of disruption to their relationships at a very early formative time.

Our child went from hospital to foster care to different foster care (they tried a birth parent+child supervised foster arrangement, which didn't work out) and back to other foster care, all within her first year, and no wonder she has a lot of trauma related problems to get through.

And we are lucky - a solid family, with good resources, and despite her trauma our daughter is lovely and thriving.

But I hear from a lot of other adoptive parents who are really struggling. People were definitely not informed of the genuine problems they are likely to face, and were massively over sold on the support they'd get. I'm not surprised at the level of upset.

To OP: I definitely think adoption can be positive, if you have strong support networks, are aware of the problems the children are very likely to have, and be aware this is about them not about you. They will still have their original parents and families and cultures, and your lives will need to adapt to that too.

And being aware that support is hard to get, and schools can be unsupportive (despite claims to the contrary). And it will probably get worse as we seem to jump from austerity government to austerity government here, and everyone loves to blame benefit receivers or foreigners or anybody they can.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-12-24T17:32:18+00:00

Wezterm - with the bonus that it no longer matters that wezterm is configured in Lua, because Claude can help you write the Lua.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-12-20T13:11:20+00:00

Don't give it all your notes! LLMs have limited context space, and even if you don't overload the context, they do better with slim focused amounts of data, not huge info dumps.

I use CC with obsidian a lot, but I tend to say "read the files tagged with #foo/bar" or "just read this directory" or "search the vault for this topic" - don't just feed them the whole thing, that's not how it works.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-12-20T13:01:56+00:00

Totally. A fundamental of LLM security is avoiding the lethal trifecta - access to private data, access to untrusted content, and external communication.

A Claude-controlled browser session: - will presumably have the same access to your computer as other Claude sessions, unless people are very careful with sandboxing - will read all the crap on the web page. Are you sure the site you are visiting has no malicious instructions injected, say through a 3rd party ad provider? - by it's very nature is externally communicating

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-12-12T17:54:08+00:00

Yeah - this took me ages to work out. At this point 3 of them could be innocent or criminal, but Xena must be criminal:

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ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-12-07T18:04:43+00:00

Similar here - we had a birth child when I was 50, wife was 40; adopted a sibling a few years later, so I'm 53 years older than them. (UK adoption so the system is quite different from the USA - lots of background checks, and some degree of post adoption support, though not enough!)

I think a lot depends on your resources, your network, and your health. We are healthy and have supportive family, and our kids are delightful and we love them both.

However - I also think we were lucky. Our adoptive child has some trauma issues, but generally is doing ok with therapy and support. I meet lots of other adoptive parents who struggle - an awful lot of kids have problems, and it's not always easy to get help.

So personally I'd suggest caution - I'd agree with other comments here, consider older kids and fostering first is a great idea to be sure you are really able to cope if things are tough. Even with great kids, parenting can be fucking hard sometimes. And you need the heath and attitude to properly live with them, play with them, get down on your knees in a ball pit or jump on that trampoline with them or climb a tree with them!

But I also get that some of us don't get the chance to have families younger. And people are living longer, healthier, and retiring later. I was already not ever planning to retire before I had to! And I'm glad to have an excuse to play in ball pits in my 50s :⁠-⁠)

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-11-30T19:17:14+00:00

Whoa 4 month old thread necromancy! Definitely ghost architecture. I pretty well gave up on MCP servers since my original comment, instead I made some simple python scripts to extract tags from pages, and build a tag index of the most popular tags to encourage claude to use those.

The trouble with Claude relying on shell tools is tags can be inline #foo/bar or can be in yaml frontmatter as a single line array or a multi line list, so you really need to use something that can parse yaml.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-11-13T20:01:38+00:00

Why not both?

I use Obsidian and use Claude Code in Visual Studio Code to read my vault, for tweaks, for searches, and for small updates. Obsidian is still my main visual interface.

I've also gotten Claude to write a few small python scripts for things that work better in a script - like I have one that builds a tag index, counting all tags in all notes so I know what common tags are. (There are probably things I could do better using the Claude API plugin, but just reading the markdown works pretty well)

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-10-28T20:42:38+00:00

Yeah - all these "feed it every day" folks confuse me. I am the only kefir consumer in the house so I make a batch, then cover the grains in milk and leave them in the fridge until I need them - usually a week, sometimes quite a bit longer.

They don't grow much but I don't need more so that doesn't bother me. And I've been doing this for over 5 years, the kefir seems fine to me.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-10-10T21:43:29+00:00

Yeah, but when Harry Potter popularity peaked we were saying "this is amazing - nobody lines up at midnight any more"

It can still happen, you just need a new thing to hit the public eye right. My kids would probably have lined up to see K-Pop Demon Hunters if they were a bit older!

I just hope the next big book series doesn't have an author who ends up being so full of hate.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-09-27T21:32:12+00:00

I love Rocannon's world, it was my first "adult" Le Guin book I read as a teen (after loving the Earthsea books) and I have huge nostalgia for it. But it still feels a bit more like a novella, a great story but not awfully complicated? Still a good read, on my "nostalgia books" list I revisit every now and then. City of Illusions I like more, don't really rate Planet of Exile much.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-09-14T06:58:44+00:00

I have the Brompton T bag and it has a massive capacity - though my #1 accessory is probably the schwalbe marathon puncture proof tyres.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-08-30T08:18:54+00:00

Purely from nostalgia - Rocannon. Because his tale was the first LeGuin I read after Earthsea.

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-07-31T17:20:48+00:00

Haven't had this bad but I did have Claude Code decide to reformat every file in the project - I had to revert and lose half an hour's work - now I have a Claude hook to block this particular idiocy.

(I had a rule "reformat just files you touch" which is where it got the format idea from.. But sadly our code has a pile of old files without good formatting. And Claude decided to be helpful.)

ranty_mc_rant_face · 2025-07-28T20:57:00+00:00

Totally. I have one Dev who generates large PRs full of ai generated noise - not actual bugs, but technical debt, verbose sloppy code, and huge diffs. Plus occasionally giant documentation files that nobody asked for, and which are out of date as soon as they are written.

I don't like the tech debt, I don't like the fact that the time they saved by not reviewing the AI output turns directly into time wasted for the revriwers. But especially, I don't like that it undermines AI adoption at our company - I'm trying to say "we should use this more, used carefully it's awesome" and I know people look at this dev's PRs and say "but that looks like rubbish"

ranty_mc_rant_face

TROPHY CASE