Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

The painful truth.

As the Lords start debating the Palestine Action proscription, Peter Hain notes that under this sort of suppression of protest, groups from the anti-apartheid campaigners to the Suffragettes would all have been suppressed.

Its a sad day for democracy when we are now hoping that an unelected second chamber will save us from the machinations of our representatives, all of whom bar 26 voted against democracy!

#democracy #PalestineAction #politics

h/t Guardian

As expected, MPs have this evening voted to proscribe Palestine Action, with only 26 MPs voting against this attack on the democratic right to protest.

The state has reserved to itself the power to decide what is 'legitimate' protest & render other (non-violent) protests as 'terrorism'.

This is a grave day from democracy & the right to protest;

normally I don't like talk of a 'slippery slope' or 'a thin end of a wedge' but this feels like a step change in the attack on protest!

#politics

Don't forget to submit your abstract to PGGConf.EU 2025 by 24:00CEST today!
https://2025.pgconf.eu/call-for-papers/

Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.

> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?

There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.

> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?

None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.

> But are you / they in the cloud?

No. The webserver is in Newbury, in my garage.

> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.

*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*

The most generous elevator pitch for “AI” is “you can speed up the creation of extremely mediocre work that’s possibly wrong”. The fact that that’s exciting to people is depressing.

The state of programming in 2025 that makes vibe coding so attractive is IMO the result of terrible decisions in tech over the last couple of decades. Non-existent stdlibs that normalise the use of a thousand micro dependencies, blindly pulled. Constantly mutating frameworks as performance art. Untyped languages that need huge test suites to prevent basic errors. It all generates mountains of boilerplate that *of course* people want to offload any way they can, even if it’s wrong half the time

OggCamp, the unconference for open source and free culture enthusiasts returns in 2026.
🗓️ Save the date and join us, once again, at The Manchester Conference Centre on April 25th and 26th.
👀 Keep an eye out for the Call for Papers and ticket announcements soon! 🎟️
#Oggcamp #OggCamp2026 #OpenSource #TechConference #Manchester

👋 Meet Karen, Solutions Architect at Snowflake and non-voting Chair of the PGConf.EU 2025 Selection Committee!
This is the first post in our “Selection Committee Spotlight” series - stay tuned to meet the team behind the program!
#PGConfEU #PostgreSQL

Bcachefs may be headed out of the kernel

https://lwn.net/Articles/1027289/ #LWN

#PostgreSQL Event Calendar, Reminder:

⌛️ CfP PGConf EU (Latvia)

Date: 2025-06-30

ICS file: https://ics.postgresql.life/5jro5726dq11dru3s38c919tfi.ics

Registration open https://pgday.uk/events/pgdayuk2025/news/registration-open-11/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/22/labour-disability-benefit-cuts-keir-starmer. The idea that Keir Starmer believes in "human dignity" is a monstrous & vile absurdity, totally disproved by his evil Government's commitment to its #disability #benefit & SEND #education cuts, @ChrisMayLA6, @HarriettMB, @junesim63, @NorthantsGreens. He wouldn't even know what human dignity WAS, let alone believe in it!

Checks out:

https://www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/javascript-broke-the-web-and-called-it-progress/

🗣️ We’re looking for volunteers for the PGConf.EU 2025 Talk Selection Committee!
Interested? Email contact@pgconf.eu by 16 June with:
• Name
• Company affiliation (if any)
• Area of PostgreSQL interest/expertise
• Previous selection committee experience

We’d love to hear from you!

Across the world, right now, billionaires, oligarchs, and corporations are using their wealth to silence dissent, undo decades of social and environmental progress, and manipulate the game in their favour.

It's #TimeToResist the billionaire takeover.

Join us! 👉 https://www.greenpeace.org/international/act/time-to-resist/

Database management 101: The difference between zero and null.

🎉 Join (@karenhjex@mastodon) Karen Jex at #PosetteConf Livestream 3️⃣ to learn about skills, tools and techniques for managing #Postgres at scale. ⚖️ 🐘

https://posetteconf.com

#postgresql #databases #OpenSource