I read a lot of "AI is fine when it's taking other people's jobs" posts. Especially amongst the creative industries. While hypocritical, it's quite understandable. I'm after the human connection in the art I consume and now spend time sifting out prompt generated art.

Some real characters running in Clacton. 34 candidates, now with pics & info (thanks to the work of Democracy Club). Just 5 are registered to vote in the seat, according to DC. Lots of earnest independents, and a few spiritual types. There are more joke candidates standing than there are women...

UK Parliament elections: The 34 candidates in Clacton

See all 34 candidates in the UK Parliament elections on 13 Aug 2026: Joseph 77 (Independent) Adham Alkhatip (Forward Party) Count Binface...

whocanivotefor.co.uk

Here it is. My manifesto for the 2026 Clacton By-Election. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Join me, clean up Clacton and let's make 13th August Bin Day! #VoteBinface #VoteyMcVoteface #YesWeTinCan

10 years on from Brexit, there are still no rules to stop lies in election ads. We’ve tabled amendments to prevent ads like the Brexit bus misleading voters again. Email your MP and ask them to sponsor them. 16 MPs have so far. It takes 30 seconds 👇 reformpoliticaladvertising.org/take-action/...

The @ncsc.gov.uk blog on vibe coding is full of issues and I expect it to be used by senior managers for justifying horrific shortcuts. Internal tools and demos have a habit of suddenly becoming production code. What then? Get another model to check it? www.ncsc.gov.uk/blogs/the-vi...

A wonderful read.

Gail Simone@gailsimone.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The kid is so excited he is going to be able to give this to his mom, he can’t stop smiling. So I start to sign, and Jin, waiting and hearing all this says, ‘Maybe you could give your mom this?’ And takes out a Wonder Woman book to give to the kid from his collection he brought. 8/

In 1997 I was a Cybernetics undergrad at dept of Cybernetics at Uni of Reading, UK. Back then I pithily wrote on a webpage: "AI has the potential to tell us what human consciousness is by showing what it isn't." Sadly all the recent efforts are going into replacing people, not understanding them.

This man is a megastar of diligent code delivery. Tirelessly pouring his soul into Rise of Piracy. I salute him!

IrishJohnGames - Rise of Piracy available NOW!!!@irishjohngames.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Rise of Piracy Patch 41 is out! Alot of heavily requested items such as game speed changes, formation improvements and other QOL items in there! store.steampowered.com/news/app/140... Delighted with how its been received so far! #gamedev #indiedev #pirategame #riseofpiracy

Bit harsh, Toyota.

Really miss Tech Bugs and Rock-n-Roll @dylanbeatt.ie, @rendle.dev, @eli.holderness.dev. I hope it's on pause because you're all super busy and everyone is doing as fabulously as possible! Sending love, peeps. 🩵

They used the CRT oscillator, which tx 10 -> 15khz. That with loop antennas, you could pick up a TV user's location pretty easily. I had a crystal radio it could tell whether the TV was on downstairs. My dad (GPO/BT man) reckoned they were more of scare story than realistic enforcement.

Mystic Monk 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇮🇪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦@grumpy-bloke.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The problem with these fantasy detectors is that a TV is a receiver The only thing that can be detected is a transmitter. It was an absolutely massive scam. A neighbour told TV Licencing that he would challenge them in court and it was the last time they ever bothered her. (She was an RAF radar op)

I only fully disagree with #20. Don't trade your time. Work as you're being paid and enjoy your youth. If you're planning on a typical life trajectory, when you get old your outside responsibilities will pile up and your free time will be gone. 60hr weeks aren't clever or 10x, they're toxic.

kottke.org@kottke.org · 7mo ago

Thoughtful lessons from a Google software engineer. “The punchline isn’t ‘never innovate.’ It’s ‘innovate only where you’re uniquely paid to innovate.’ Everything else should default to boring, because boring has known failure modes.” [addyosmani.com]

I remember "clean code" explained as a Cybernetics UG in the mid-1990s. IIRC the lecturer (post doc?) explained that your future self was a different person. "Don't make future you hate you!" Really love this from Kevlin: kevlinhenney.medium.com/code-cleanli...

Code Cleanliness

On the origins of ‘clean code’

kevlinhenney.medium.com

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Me: What are the origins of #AI? Google Gemini: McCarthy mid 1950s. Me: What about Norbert Wiener? GG: Errrrr... shit, yeah, actually, I'm the product of Cybernetics and not symbolic AI of McCarthy. Me: Why are you telling people McCarthy is the origin? GG: They had more money.

🗺️ Bing Maps no longer has the Ordnance Survey overlay. In the UK that was the USP of Bing Maps. Now there is absolutely no reason to visit Bing Maps. Ordnance Survey is a government organisation, I've already paid for the data collection, feels mean that they now want me to pay for it again.

And it's up! All together now... 🎶 Somebody told me the user provider should use an adaptor to proxy the query factory builder... 🎶 www.youtube.com/watch?v=p03o...

Somebody Told Me (The User Provider Should Use An Adaptor To Proxy The Query Factory Builder)

YouTube video by Dylan Beattie

youtube.com

Dylan Beattie@dylanbeatt.ie · 8mo ago

My new music video goes out on YouTube at 3pm UK time today. To every developer out there who has ever been asked to do something really, really simple that turns out to be impossible because there is Too Much Architecture in the way: this one's for you. 🤘 www.youtube.com/watch?v=p03o...

✏️ Blog: Using GnuPG and Bouncy Castle in .NET for some delicious asymmetric payload encryption. Needed to work this out for work, leaving here as a public aide memoire. brainwipe.github.io/2025-11-19-g...

So many companies keep adding complexity to their products, endlessly growing that it becomes so complex that the basics get screwed. Cloudflare can't even serve a Proxy or DNS right now. That's like basic shit. Trello (Atlassian) also adding so much faff to what was a perfect product.

Cloudflare: bet you it's DNS. It's always DNS. And yet there's no concerted effort to fix it - just load it up with more features.

I know I'm old and all that but it's still astounding to me that I can have a native linux terminal window in Windows without all that cyg-win works-alright-except. WSL is cool. And then I can run docker containers in that there sub system. That's also really cool.

What you’re witnessing is a populist assault on the BBC. This is not an institutional scandal in any meaningful sense of the word. It is an attack on public service broadcasting. iandunt.substack.com/p/extra-edit...

website: hey we need all your data for security person: for security? website: for security yeah person: and is it gonna leak website: of course it's not gonna leak do you think we're idiots website: so hey promise not to get mad

It's DNS. It's always DNS.

Post hog ergo propter hog #aws

The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL)@themerl.bsky.social · 10mo ago

AWS is down, post hog

It's DNS, of course it is. It's always DNS. The world needs to replace DNS because it's utter shit. health.aws.amazon.com/health/statu...

The internet appears to be broken. Can someone switch it off and on again? At least Downdetector can tell us it's bad: downdetector.co.uk All the sites I'm responsible for are still up but 🫂 going out to my tech brethren that are having a hard time right now.

Status overview

downdetector.co.uk

Spent an afternoon going through all the company's to assess business+operational+technical risk due to AI. Some are well documented and have sub processors listed etc. Others have only marketing BS. None publicly explain the risks and mitigations.

Future people are going to look back at F12 dev tools, setting breakpoints and running ad-hoc code in the console and wonder why everything didn't just fall apart.

I'm not saying that healthcare data exchange standards are a worry but also this: