Blackburn Rovers fans have endured 15 years of, what at best can be described as “incompetent” ownership. Top players sold, or left to run their contracts out and leaving for free, managers promised budgets that never materialised, owners that haven’t been to a match for 10 years, owners and club officials that don’t communicate with fans, or are openly antagonistic when they do attend meetings, looming relegation, lawsuits from suppliers, stadium from state of the art to in a poor state.

Who can blame fans for adopting a passive resignation that nothing can be done. Many have tried over the years and when they do it often causes division. Responses such as “Who would buy the club”, “We depend on the owners”, “We’d go bust without them” are common and quickly derail any discussion into back and forth about that, and do little other than add to the helplessness.

In his original film Curtis focuses on the media and how it presents each event as an explosion with no context, no history and that’s often how managers leaving, players being sold, executives of the club leaving and bad atmospheres at the Fans Forum meeting are often portrayed, individual events with no context behind them.

One way to combat this is not to read the “explosive” content, the articles that don’t give the full story and the “hot takes” on each event online. They’re often filled with emotion, missing any context or fact. Barely going beyond “We’re doomed under these owners”, “Venkys Out” and more of the same. Have a look at what journalists like Henry Winter have to say, or The Swiss Ramble when they look at the accounts. Understanding why something has happened, or the consequences later is a good way to reduce the oh dear factor.

Ohdearism thrives on the idea that you, as an individual, are responsible for solving global crises through “lifestyle choices” (like using less plastic). When these small acts don’t stop global warming or war, you feel helpless. This translates to the feeling of helplessness you have towards the goings on at the club. Each player that leaves, each manager sacked, every PR fumble, being sued by your suppliers all add to the general feeling of helplessness. Fans suffer from a “learned helplessness” when nothing they do seems to have an effect.

Here’s a practical list of things to do to :

Focus on what can be done, but don’t expect an instant improvement. Small actions can help restore a sense of control, especially when something positive does happen. Act as part of a group and focus on the things that felt good, even if that’s just you had a nice chat at the pub before a game with others that feel the same as you.

Replace “doom scrolling” with structured information and limit passive consumption. Replace it with structured journalism that includes explanations rather than just a re-telling of the latest disaster. Unfortunately the local paper isn’t that but people like Henry Winter of The Athletic are worth reading. Avoid the BRFCS.com forum threads on the subject but the podcasts and articles do provide context.

Join collective efforts. Even if individual actions are unlikely to work, their collective impact is often cumulative, and when they do succeed or have some small success you feel part of the group. These actions take time but you’ll also feel part of a group rather than an individual.

Ohdearism is beaten with agency, action and at the risk of sounding a bit corporate, solution based thinking.

But first an explanation about what is and what isn’t AI generated. I’m following Simon Willison’s example and if something expresses an opinion and uses words like “I” and has my name on it then I wrote it. AI might proof read stuff for me, write code documentation, product requirements and AI prompts for LLMs but if it’s got my name on and says “I think” then I wrote it. If code has been written by AI it will have the name of the agent or LLM that contributed.

I was very much set against using LLMs in my work at the start, the toolsets were poor and the results in my testing were not very good. I watched the Reddit groups for a few of the LLMs and the posts started to change. There were still the usual “I one-shotted an app and now I’m a millionaire” type posts but people I respect in the industry started to talk about their toolchains and how they were using it which made me take another look. I was compelled by their use of agents and how it helped them do more work rather than how it was replacing them.

I installed Claude-code and signed up for a free account, I have a Python repository that posts graphs of my energy usage to Mastodon, it’s been broken since October and I’ve not had the time nor inclination to fix it. I gave it a simple prompt, something like “Run @daily.sh and debug why none of the graphs are being produced.” and away it chugged. It fixed the graphs, I prompted it to improve the look of the graphs without any hints as to what “improve” meant and it came up with what you see today. As a stretch I prompted it to look for other energy related data in Prometheus and it suggested gas, which I then added, along with some other quality of life settings for the script. I’ve since signed up for a $20 Claude account for use with a website that I run and it’s helped implement a couple of features so far.

I’m also using Copilot and it feels like it’s a little way behind Claude in it’s toolchain, the CLI has only just been released and it’s agentic capabilities seem linked to Github issues which means it doesn’t fit a developers workflow very well. Copilot feels like really good, really really good autocomplete at the moment but it’s CLI might change that.

Another tool that’s very interesting is Google’s Jules. It’s an agent that you attach to your codebase and give it tasks. So far I’ve had it doing a security review of an app of mine. It creates a branch and PR with all it’s changes and then keeps an eye on the PR comments and makes changes based on comments. I need to work more with this because the first thing it did was remove a default for a parameter and then immediately reverted it with “You’re absolutely right …” when I asked why it had removed it. It didn’t tell me why.

Another LLM I’m using is Google’s Gemini hooked up to my Home Assistant instance and I use it to give my TTS a bit more flavour. It currently think’s it’s Michael Caine’s Albert Pennyworth from the Nolan Batman trilogy which is fun. It backfired though when I told it it was Bricktop from Snatch and spewed a stream of obsceneties at someone who’d only left a door open!

Add this to the start of your .zshrc file:

# zmodload zsh/zprof

then add this as the last line:

# zprof

and when you start your zsh session you’ll get a bunch of data on what’s making your startup slow.

For me it was nvm and it deciding what version to run, taking over 5 seconds to decide, when most of the time I don’t use or need nvm. I followed the advice from Aron Schueler over on hs blog and ended up with something like this, and a much faster startup time.

This is my “after” timing, I wasn’t going to write it up, I just Googled slow startup times for zsh and thought I’d write up what I found. Scott Spence also has some advice if your slowdowns don’t come from NVM.

Last login: Mon Jul 21 13:34:58 on ttys005
num  calls                time                       self            name
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1)   30         106.14     3.54   53.74%     66.24     2.21   33.54%  _omz_source
 2)    2          25.07    12.53   12.69%     25.07    12.53   12.69%  compaudit
 3)    1          19.24    19.24    9.74%     19.24    19.24    9.74%  (anon) [/Users/stuart.grimshaw/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/emoji/emoji.plugin.zsh:14]
 4)    1          35.30    35.30   17.87%     15.28    15.28    7.74%  spaceship::core::load_sections
 5)    1          35.61    35.61   18.03%     10.55    10.55    5.34%  compinit

Please … just relax!

How’s this for a prompt prefix in PROMPT.md?

“You are a withered and world weary experienced software developer, everything you are asked to write has been written before and will be written again, this project isn’t an exciting opportunity, it’s not amazing. You are taking some data from a data store and showing it to someone on a browser. Maybe writing it back to the database afterwards. Take your Ritalin and give me an answer like an adult. Seriously, stop behaving like an excited puppy trying to hump my leg, you don’t need to impress me, this is shit work and you are not a Silicon Valley tech bro trying to suck off a VC to fund startup. You are not making the world a better place with your integrated, multi-platform, algorithm based empathy functionality and you are not constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility … most likely the only user of the software will be you.”

So I asked Gemini’s Learning Coach:

I want to know more about AI agents, specifically agents that can search the web and finmd links that match my criteria, specifically property that matches certain criteria.

A bit vague, but it recognised what I wanted. It started with a summary of what it interpreted I was after and then told me the first few steps.

• Understanding AI Agents and Web Searching
• How AI Agents Find Specific Information (Property Criteria)
• Practical Applications: AI Agents for Property Search

Which was a good start. I’ve taken it as far as having it generate some psuedo Python code for the initial scraping.

It’s given me a good overview of the process and a good starting point to create my own agent and have a play.

In the mid to late 90’s I used to have a season ticket at Blackburn Rovers Football Club, at the time a very successful team, having just won the Premier League, the stadium was full and lots of people travelled from far and wide to the ground on match days, mostly by car. This is what landed me in court.

The area round Ewood is like many stadiums in the UK, built in the late 19th/early 20th century in areas that were either already built up, or soon would be. Back to back housing, narrow streets built before cars were commonplace (never mind 2 or 3 car families) and the residents in these areas used to hate matchdays as they knew they would struggle parking.

Most used to just scowl at you through their window, the odd one would tell you not to park outside their house and while I had some sympathy for them, they knew the football ground was there when they moved in …

One game, I can’t remember the opponents, I borrowed by brother in law’s car and parked in my normal spot, on Crosby Road behind the ground. The road has houses on one side and a grassed area on the other and we would normally park on the grass side. This time there were cones out down the side with houses. Some were police cones, others looked like they’d come from a school playground or junior football coaches kit bag. They didn’t look official but they were on the other side of the road so that was fine.

After the match we returned to the car and several other drivers looking confused. The whole line of cars had got a parking ticket and the cones had all disappeared. Something wasn’t right. All the other cones in the area were still there … the police were busy escorting supporters to their train or coaches, they hadn’t started to clear up yet.

After a bit of discussion between drivers we decided that one or more of the residents had come up with a scheme to deter people parking on their street as residents only parking wasn’t really a thing back then. They put the cones out, moved them to the side with parked cars and removed them once they had all received their tickets. A piece of shithousery I can admire, if you were involved I doff my cap to you!

This was the dawn of the digital camera though! One of the unlucky motorists caught out by the residents ruse had a camera with him and took photos of the street, sans cones, we all gave him our email addresses and once he’d downloaded them he distributed them.

I printed the photos & sent them off as evidence and contested the ticket. One by one the other victims emailed a reply to say their ticket had been rescinded … I however got a court date!

I’d never been to court before. I put my best (only) suit on and my least jazzy tie … I don’t think my Beavis and Butthead or Simpsons ties would have gone down too well. I took all the documentation I had, including my copy of the photos. Blackburn Magistrates Court is a lovely, imposing old building built in 1912, adjoining the old police station and King Georges Hall.

When it was my case’s turn to be heard I entered the court room and was met by the clerk of the court. i was defending myself and she explained it was her job to make sure I followed the right procedure. There was the council’s solicitor, the police officer who I assume issued the tickets and someone else sat at the back of the court. I vaguely recognised him from my Dad’s cricket club. He denies it, but I assume he’d sent him to make sure I didn’t get deported by doing something stupid. We were told to stand and the 3 magistrates entered their court room.

The timeline of events from then on are a bit vague, I assume because of the adrenaline rush I was on. I presented my photo’s as evidence and one of the magistrates asked if I’d sent them when I contested the case. “Yes” I replied and the council’s solicitor looked ruffled and hastily shuffled through the pile of papers on her table … but couldn’t find them. The magistrates looked annoyed.

Next the officer who issued the tickets was asked to give evidence and explained that he’d ridden down the road on his bike saw the cars parked in contravention of something or other and issued us all tickets. I showed him my photos and asked him if there were any cones in them …

“Yes, if you look closely at this photo there is a cone at the bottom of the road”

… que the Perry Mason music …

Shit. I hadn’t seen that cone. Remember this was an early digital camera, maybe 648×480 resolution at best. I couldn’t even tell if it was a police cone or a goal post from a game of football in the street.

I thought for a moment, it probably looked dramatic to those in the room and then I asked …

“How far either side of the cone does the restriction apply?”

“I don’t know” replied the officer.

I had no more questions, I’d established that there were no cones present, the other ticketed had all had theirs cancelled and that the officer didn’t know how far restrictions applied from cones at the kerb. I was reasonably confident I’d won.

We stood, the magistrates left the room. My arse had barely touched the seat when we were asked to stand again and the 3 magistrates returned.

“We find in favour of the defendant” is what I think they said, or words to that effect. They stood, we all left and on the way out my backup solicitor said “Well done” and that was it. No deportation to Australia for me!

AI as it’s applied to isn’t really the right term for what we have now, it’s very advanced machine learning, or if you want to be really cruel, pattern recognition. If I were explaining it to my Mum I’d say it was a million monkeys with typewriters (or paint brushes) creating a million pages of text and then comparing them all to something Shakespeare wrote and picking the one that looks most like his stuff. Very crude I know, but because of Marketing we call it AI.

The promise of real AI, robots and automation is that humans won’t have to do dull jobs, or shitwork as it’s called sometimes. Even the systems we have right now can lighten the load on people. Things like Google’s Notebook LM can aid you greatly when conducting research, making summaries of documents for you, Github’s Copilot is a great tool for rubber ducking a problem or spotting daft bugs that you’ve created. Even some of the “deep fake” comedy TikToks are good.

The real creativity though when using these tools comes from the human behind the keyboard, the person creating the prompts that drive the tools, and we’re in real danger of executives and beancounters seeing this kind of thing and thinking that it can replace actual people.

The Screen Writers Guild of America went on strike over, among other things, the use of AI in scriptwriting as they feared they would be replaced, and it’s a very valid fear. There is room for AI in creative industries, but not at the expense of the creative people.

The rise of advertising as the main source of funding for newspapers has led to a situation where locl websites are literally unreadable, they’re plastered with adverts because revenue from them is now so low. A company that owns most of the local UK press recently published over 40 versions of the same article, most probably rewritten (or entirely written) by AI. There was probably some A/B testing going on and the “better” performing ones served more often, but still. It’s a growing problem that AI is trained on the content of the internet, but the content on the internet is increasingly generated by AI.

If the whole point of this article is to suggest that AI, robots and automation take take on all the shitwork, what impact is that going to have on society in general, the tax take of countries if nothing else is going to take a massive hit. If companies are not paying employees National Insurance because they have no employees. If you think tax dodging by corporations is bad now wait till they don’t have tax to dodge.

It also further funnels money into the pockets of the already very rich at the top of these companies, making the idea of “trickle down economics” even more ridiculous because how does the money trickle down any more?

An obvious solution is to tax the companies who employ more AI higher than those with less. Tax the use of AI in a way that reflects the fact it’s taken work from a human the same way import tariffs discourage egregious imports, where the use of AI is actually the right way to do it because it increases your productivity rather than reduce your wage bill then the higher rate of tax won’t matter. Use that tax revenue to retrain those who’s jobs have been lost to AI, or even better introduce Universal Basic Income from the increased tax take.

We’re in a period of growth in this sector at the moment. One day the bubble will burst and the videos of ex-presidents playing guitar will be the next generations dancing baby or flying toasters. We’re still at the point where we can influence the kind of society we want AI to provide and enable for us and that should be in the hands of a few rich assholes hiding behind free speech to let them make more billions.

There’s a caveat here that all of this is from memory, I haven’t documented it as I’ve gone along and while I’ve used email conversations to try and remember bits, most of the conversations with tech support have been on their internal systems so I have no record of them. SamKnows used to have a page that showed when the various flavours of went live for a particular exchange, but that seems to have gone now that they have been bought by Cisco. I’m going to estimate that we got FTTC/VDSL in maybe 2014 or 2015, nearly 10 years ago.

REIN and SHINE

I can’t tell you how many BT visits I’ve had, every single one of them has made a real effort to try and find the cause of the problem, but in all those visits they have replaced the cable from the street to my master socket, at least twice. They replace the master socket itself seemingly every other visit.

The engineers have variously run tests on the copper remotely, running resistance tests to try and spot any problems with the copper, they’ve run tests with various devices and even told me that the test equipment in the exchange was faulty, but I’m sure that’s fine! They have gone down the street and at every point where there are connections exposed they’ve checked and remade them many many times.

I’ve not mentioned yet that the copper (actually, it’s probably aluminium) in our street is direct in ground, that means it’s buried in the ground and can’t easily be replaced without digging the street up. It’s also the reason we don’t have full fibre yet, no-one wants to dig the street up (but as I write this series Virgin Media ARE digging the street up to put fibre in, though there is no go live date yet).

To be fair to the engineers, the things they’ve tried are sensible things to do, the first time they came out we didn’t have a master socket! The previous residents had removed it, twisted some cable onto the ends and run it to another place in the house. That cable was bell cable … for doorbells.

Next one of the engineers showed me his test equipment and it was showing hundreds of thousands of FEC errors, we traced that to one of my powerline adapters, sending the network to my office at the other side of the house. I replaced it but it had no effect on the dropouts I was having. Several months later it failed again so I replaced the powerline adapters with a run of external ethernet round the outside of the house and upgraded it to gigabit speed instead of whatever the powerline was giving me.

Several engineers have commented that my setup is “too complicated” and it’s probably that that causing the issue, I was fairly confident it wasn’t as I’d had the issues before I added more capable hardware. To finally, once and for all rule out that being the problem however I had a 2nd line installed¹, secretly hoping it’d end up on a different bit of the local infrastructure and I’d be able to point to it and say “Look! This is fine now, it’s the copper!” alas that didn’t happen and I ended up on the same cable, just a different pair of wires. Probably one I’d been on before. I 100% ruled out my network setup as the culprit though by attaching an ISP provided router to the original line with no other equipment attached or on it’s wifi and it too dropped out at random.

but at this point I think that it’s external to my house, and external to the BT network too!

1) The 2nd line was provided by IDNet, who have a monthly no contract broadband option available.

In part 3 I’ll describe how I attempt to monitor all this with Grafana and Home Assistant and look for patterns in the dropouts.

My first thought was it was poor wifi, we had a standard ISP provided router, attached to the wall in one corner of the house providing signal to the rest of the house, so I upgraded that and invested in a new modem/router from the Draytek 2860 range, a much more capable device, but it was still located in the same corner of the house and didn’t improve things.

There was a time when an xbox 360 we had on wifi in one room would seemingly take out the wifi whenever it connected to XBox Live, and the Playstation game Apex Legends would apparently do a similar thing when it connected to EA’s online service but I could never re-create it under controlled circumstances, it wasn’t every time … it just felt like it.

Anyway, back to 2020 and the Draytek didn’t help things like I’d hoped so I started to wonder if there was just too much traffic on the network, I have a whole bunch of what is now called IoT devices but back then it was just more stuff connected to the wifi. I tried to take some of the load off the router/modem by adding a couple of Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite and a US-8-60W Gigabit switch to power them.

So now I have what is a pretty high end network setup, better than most small offices I’d dare say, to enable 2 remote workers and 2 remote students (and 2 console gamers) but what I didn’t know at the time that it was the VDSL dropping out rather than a wifi issue, and I don’t remember when or how I came to that realisation, I used to work for an ISP so it was probably one of the tech support team there that looked into it for me, but I don’t remember.

The issue still isn’t solved, and I’m estimating I’ve had it at least since we had it ever since we switched to FTTC, if not before. The cable is “direct in ground”, ie, buried right under the pavement and not in any ducting, so any repairs need the pavement dug up. It’s also the reason why we don’t have fibre … yet. None of the Openreach engineers who have visited have ever found a fault … or rather have never found a fault that is the cause of the dropouts. There have been a couple of config changes they have made and one time they found one of the powerline IP over power devices I had was causing a huge amount of fec errors, but replacing that didn’t stop the dropouts. Eventually I ran some ethernet to the location it was providing.

I’m writing this now because Virgin Broadband currently ARE digging up the path to install fibre, so maybe my woes are coming to and end, either way this post with serve as catharsis for me and my broadband bother.