Wayne Horkan

Engineer. Technologist. Father. Reader. Live music fan. Motorcyclist and off-roader. Design and build large-scale IT systems. Neurodiverse. Vision at @cybertzar

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

1/ The West Midlands Cyber Hub is finally becoming real. We’ve been building toward this “home for cyber” for ages... today feels like Day One (or maybe Day Sixty). Either way: buckle up #BuckleUp #WMCyberHub @WMCyberHub

https://t.co/frd2fU0DPT

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

@davepl1968 Denis Leary - a man who built a career on Bill Hicks jokes 🤣

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

A fantastic Documentary about an absolute bastard who also happened to be one of the greatest Drummers of all time - GINGER BAKER

BEWARE OF MR. BAKER (2012)

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

@SandyofCthulhu Thank you! I get to talk directly to *the* Sandy Peterson. You have no idea how wonderful that is.

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

@SandyofCthulhu I think the important point about Tom Bombadil is that he acts like the lift up at the start of the roller coaster.... just before it's cycles down into shitsville.

And that's why I think he's there.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

2000, a garage Beowulf cluster. By networking cheap, off-the-shelf PC hardware running Linux, we could achieve supercomputer-level performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional UNIX workstations or mainframes.

They said it was “stupid” and “impossible”.

It wasn’t.

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

@feedfracture @HeadWarriorTWM I thought that was manslaughter. Sorry if wrong.

[Digital Rummage @feedfracture]

The trouble is, the answer isn't 'no', is it? For many it's very much 'yes'. Disturbing convo with a mate of mine yesterday who works, let's say, at a senior level & gets the finer points of tech better than the vast majority. His view? 'As soon as the infrastructure is in place
Flip
It'll be done'
So the issue is fully understanding that infrastructure, what it does, where we're up to with its development & how to influence the process going forward. In our favour is that most politicians & many policymakers don't have a clue. Against us is that small cadre of them - generally with surveillance-friendly instincts - actually do.

[🇬🇧📺 Classic British TV 📺🇬🇧 @Classicbritcom]

Remembering the late Actor, James Robertson Justice (15 June 1907 – 2 July 1975)

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

Bernie, is it a Savings Program or an Insurance Program?

If it's an insurance program, why would he pay astronomical premiums for minimal coverage?

Or if it's a savings program, why would he not be able to withdraw what he contributed?

So which is it?

YOU, of all people, know that Social Security is effectively a Ponzi scheme. Don't shame people for treating it like one.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

Whether Elon or Larry has a $500B or $1T does not impact my life in the slightest.

If they were taking it from me, I'd be outraged, but economics is not a pie, and I'm busy baking my own.

Good for them, I guess. At least we know the system works as intended: it's the American Dream we profess to care about, after all.

[archivetvmusings @archivetvmus71]

Doctor Who - The War Games: Episode Eight (7th June 1969). The Doctor meets a familiar face from his past.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

This is the entire source to BSD UNIX's malloc():
Learn more: https://t.co/NwrTzkY4bC

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

Worth a listen.

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

R. I. P. Ike Willis

https://t.co/Eyjxx3Nwl3

[Digital Rummage @feedfracture]

Do I have your attention? If so, you've just handed me a piece of the most precious stuff on the planet. Seen purely as a commodity it’s more valuable than data, than capital & labour, even oil. But it’s obviously much more than a ‘just a commodity’ yet many people give it away away like it's free. Let’s have a talk about this. A 🧵

[Steve Wozniak @stevewoz]

Great Willie Nile concert last night. Lots of stories and content about family and life. Going to another of his concerts tonight in Felton.

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

God bless Sir Roger Penrose

[shouko @shoukointech]

Mathematician Sir Roger Penrose: "AI is a bad term. It's not intelligence"

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

Hilarious and true...

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Google is making $62 billion a quarter destroying the websites it NEEDS to survive.

This is literally a death spiral that ends with Google killing itself.

Let me explain what's going on...

Google added AI summaries to the top of every search result in 2024.

When you Google something now, the answer sits right there on Google's page. You never have to click anywhere. Google took the information from someone else's website, summarized it, and kept you inside Google's ecosystem.

The result: 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click to any website.

Small publishers lost 60% of their traffic in one year. Medium publishers lost 47%.

Even the biggest names in media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Business Insider, all saw traffic fall between 22% and 55%.

The Axios CEO called it "a referral extinction event for the ad-supported web."

Google's response to all of this was to tell publishers they can "opt out" of having their content summarized. But opting out also REMOVES your description from normal search results.

So the choice Google gives you is let us steal your content for free, or become invisible on the internet.

That's extortion.

The Washington Post laid off another round of journalists this year because of it. Stereogum, one of the most respected music publications on the internet, had to BEG readers for donations.

Business Insider cut 21% of its staff. Dozens of smaller publishers have shut down entirely.

The people who actually CREATE the information Google summarizes are going bankrupt while Google posts record revenue.

But here's where this gets interesting and where everyone stops thinking:

Google's AI summaries are only as good as the content they summarize. If the publishers who write the original articles, run the original investigations, and create the original data go out of business, there is nothing left for Google to summarize.

The AI starts recycling old information, the answers get stale, the quality drops, and users start noticing that Google's summaries are increasingly wrong, outdated, or useless.

Google is essentially strip-mining the internet for short-term revenue. They are extracting all the value from content creators without paying for it, driving those creators out of business, and then wondering why the quality of their own product is declining.

This is exactly what Napster did to the music industry in the early 2000s:

Made content free, creators went broke, and quality collapsed. It took a decade to rebuild.

Google is doing the same thing to the entire internet at 100x the scale.

Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard are now suing Google for antitrust violations. Chegg, the education platform, lost 49% of its traffic and is suing too.

The UK's competition authority just ordered Google to let publishers opt out without being punished. The DOJ already ruled Google is an illegal monopoly.

And Google's defense in court is genuinely unbelievable.

They argue that publishers CHOOSE to let Google index their content and can leave anytime they want. That's like saying you choose to pay protection money to the mob because technically you could close your business and move to another city.

Google controls 90% of search. Leaving Google means leaving the internet.

Meanwhile Google is investing billions in custom AI chips to make these summaries cheaper at scale. Every quarter the problem gets worse.

The internet as we've known it for 25 years ran on a simple deal:

Publishers make content.
Google sends traffic.
Advertisers pay for the traffic. Everyone wins.

But Google just BROKE that deal and kept all the money.

[Rodney Marshall @RodneyMarshall1]

Australian pop singer Patsy Ann Noble plays the DJ in the final Danger Man b/w episode Not So Jolly Roger. She even released one of the songs we hear, He Who Rides A Tiger. At the time she was segueing into a new acting career where she would use the stage name Trisha Noble.

[Wayne Horkan @wayne_horkan]

Utterly brilliant, compelling advice...

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

I've been coding for 40 years. Here are the top 5 things I wish I knew when I started.

1. 90% of the job is debugging and fixing, not creating new code. Which is still fun if you're good at it.

I used to think programming was mostly writing fresh, clever stuff. In reality, most of your time is spent in other people's (or your own past self's) messy code, chasing down why something that "should" work doesn't. Get really good at debugging early. Learn assembly reading, call stacks, and kernel debuggers. It pays off hugely. The best engineers I saw were absolute magicians at this.

2. Manage complexity from day one (ie: don't write slop and "fix it later" if it goes somewhere).

Very early on, I'd hammer out code and refactor afterward. Big mistake. Now I start with clean, skeletal structure (minimalism first) and flesh it out carefully, with AI or not.

Messy code compounds and becomes unfixable. Upfront discipline on architecture, naming, and simplicity saves enormous pain later, especially in large systems like Windows.

3. Tools and processes matter more than you think

We suffered with basic diff/manual deltas instead of modern source control like Git. Branching, testing, and good tooling would have made porting and collaboration way smoother. Invest in your environment, automation, and reproducible builds early. Good tools amplify your output; bad ones (or none) drag everything down.

4. Understand the problem and existing code deeply before writing

Don't jump straight to coding. Map out the problem, study what's already there (you'll inherit a lot), and plan. Low-level knowledge (hardware quirks, alignment issues on different architectures like MIPS/Alpha) was crucial. Also: assert early and often. It forces clarity.

5. People, politics, and "the right tool for the job" beat pure tech arguments.

Brilliant engineers still argue endlessly. Sometimes it's about ego, not merit. Learn to spot the difference and "steer" the conversation rather than "winning" it.

Bonus from experience: Side projects like Task Manager (started at home because I wanted the tool) can become your biggest hits. Ship small, useful things often. If you're just starting, focus on fundamentals, patterns over syntax, and building resilience for the long haul. It's going to be a wild ride, but the fundamentals still matter.