AI chainsaws, continuous finishing, and safety in numbers mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/claude-...

Lobster pots, complexity and starting small in the right way Or the case against use-cases https://www.platformland.xyz/ways-of-doing/lobster-pots-complexity-and-starting-small-in-the-right-way/

I guess any code hosting platform could now dramatically grow its user base and code portfolio by offering free AI security scans for open source software.

It’s frustrating when reports like this cite the “highly interoperable nature” of commercial software as a given. Interoperability doesn’t mean “everything in one place”—it means the opposite. But redefining it allows vendors to present a magical solution.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 5mo ago

Palantir’s NHS England contract ‘opens door to government abuse of power’, health bosses told

corollary: if you run an open source library with any users at all, you are now in a vulnerability-finding arms race with those who will mechanically find and exploit security issues in your code… and embarrassingly, any software that depends on it

Rollofthedice@hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 5mo ago

this is wild lol

new post on translation, holding different versions of reality, and living between worlds mikegallagher.org/posts/of-med...

Noting that NHS England currently has job ads out for a CDIO and CDAO (this is in addition to the Department of Health and Social Care CDO): findajob.dwp.gov.uk/details/1794... findajob.dwp.gov.uk/details/1794... There's a month to apply.

“bottlenecks are not natural obstacles – they are, in most cases, the consequence of increasing production” 💎

Dan Davies@dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 6mo ago

in which I write many things which will look ironic when I am starving in the gutter begging for a few hours work tagging images for my robot overlords. backofmind.substack.com/p/finally-we...

“We continue to immediately ban and publicly ridicule everyone who submits AI slop to the project.”

daniel:// stenberg://@bagder.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 6mo ago

The end of the #curl bug-bounty https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/26/the-end-of-the-curl-bug-bounty/

So it looks like the government is announcing a National Police Service. Again. It's one of those ideas that seems perfect from the outside, but yet we never seem to be able to get right. It got my brain whirring, so I wrote up some reflections. andreasthinks.me/posts/reflec... #Policing #uk

formats over apps

A Social Filesystem — overreacted

Formats over apps.

overreacted.io

How many govt services end up crocked, despite the efforts of skilled teams. (Policy and delivery being treated as separate. Shared platform cosplay. Leaders rotating off every 2yrs.) medium.com/@veroj/inter...

Interface failure is leadership failure

Thousands of support requests rained down on our teams for the second autumn in a row.

medium.com

Wrote about my first 7 months transforming the technology underpinning the national breast screening programme: lizlutgendorff.substack.com/p/lessons-le...

Lessons learned after 7 months at NHSE

Not what I expected but in a good way.

lizlutgendorff.substack.com

My sense is that the Test and Learn movement in the public sector anchors much more on “build-and-test” than “describe-and-defend” as this essay sets them out… possibly to its detriment?

Manoel Horta Ribeiro@manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social · 7mo ago

In a new blog post, I contrast two flavors of empiricism: the one practiced in the social sciences and the one practiced in ML/CS. I argue that we need both, given that CS is increasingly about "claims," and not just constructing artifacts. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

“You want your structural engineers to be drawing, not laying bricks, after all. I don’t know if structural engineering works like this, but software engineering doesn’t. In practice, architecture advice often has to be ignored by the people on the ground.” www.seangoedecke.com/you-cant-des...

My 2025 #yearnote as—sorry!—a listicle. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/2025/

10 lessons from 2025

Technology & identity in GDS and the NHS

mechanicalsurvival.com

I disagree with the conclusions of this excellent, reasonable article by @zoescaman.bsky.social zoescaman.substack.com/p/the-palant...

The Palantir Model

Where Strategy Goes Next

zoescaman.substack.com

One of the many joys of using AI for programming is the creation of huge PRs on complex topics that the authors barely understand, but still suggest "because they work". Here's a great example from #OCaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/... Kudos to OCaml's maintainers for handling this so gracefully.

DWARF support for macOS and Linux by joelreymont · Pull Request #14369 · ocaml/ocaml

DWARF v5 Debugging Support for OCaml Native Compiler This PR adds DWARF v5 debug information to the OCaml native compiler, allowing proper source-level debugging in GDB and LLDB. What's Impleme...

github.com

This really resonates. Meetings are the synchronisation penalty public servants pay for an overwhelmingly synchronous, distributed system of management. The “meeting culture” is not optional—it expresses a cultural void where autonomy can’t flourish.

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Sthg I don't specifically call out in this blog post on AI notetakers is how awful some bits of govt meeting culture appear to be. The bit about presenteeism directly reflects feedback from junior folk who talked about how important it is to turn up to meetings www.careful.industries/blog/2025-11...

This fantastic paper "proposes a vision of AI that embraces local vernaculars, the multiplicity of objectives, the responsibilities that come with producing persons, and the potential of instigating rather than circumventing political contestation." read.dukeupress.edu/public-cultu...

A few ideas on what "good software" (not "good code"!) is, touching ethics, interop, commercials and functionality 🧵

Charity Majors@charity.wtf · 9mo ago

for context: the second edition of "Observability Engineering" starts off swinging with an opinionated chapter called "The Fundamentals of Building Good Software". which begs the question... what IS ✨ good software ✨? i'll drop my answers 👇 but curious to hear others.

"[Open standards] can feel like a burden to the participants. They should! The alternative is each product imposes its incompatible opinions directly on the users rather than working through the trade-offs with competitors first." Yet as we outsource "the work" to suppliers, we outsource this too.

olizilla@oli.zilla.org.uk · 10mo ago

Several current and former NHS staff have told me similar, angry stories about what happens to our old health records after the contract for a new, incompatible IT system is signed. It turns out proprietary storage formats are a problem: oli.zilla.org.uk/2025/10/20/w...

This morning's AWS outage prompted reflections in NHSE towers that "disaster recovery" and "inclusive services" directly overlap. For instance, the Record a vaccination service have designed a paper-only data capture process for when the internet is unavailable

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Wrote a blog post about why there's no such thing as a universal digital service - which may seem counterintuitive "now that everyone has a phone" but it remains as true today as it was 10 years ago. www.careful.industries/blog/2025-10...

Clichés take hold in political language, a vicious cycle that runs through campaign speeches, through citizens’ expectations, and down into the software we build or procure by cliché, whose accordingly poor performance invites further calls for simplification. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/design-...

Design by cliché

We reject cliché. We require true names

mechanicalsurvival.com

a wonderfully humane take on the real consequences of our choices around ai and teamwork and diversity and pretty sure i would have been ugly crying by the end.

Duncan Brown@duncanjbrown.com · 10mo ago

Why I don't believe in "small giants": mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/team-dy...

Some reflections on @duncanjbrown.com's recent article "Team dynamics after AI", which is one of the best/most important pieces of writing I've read on AI in a long time

Rob Bowley@robbowley.net · 10mo ago

This is now the favourite thing I've read on AI. Why the idealistic AI maximalist dreams just do not stack up. Can't recommend it enough. Long read, so grab yourself 15 mins without distraction. Sure I'll be coming back to it many times

Why yes that IS a @charity.wtf sticker on my work notebook! 💖

Why I don't believe in "small giants": mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/team-dy...

Team dynamics after AI

Small giants and real giants

mechanicalsurvival.com

If prompts are all we have left to record our intentions when we're programming, we should keep them. Automatically, if possible. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/prompts...

In praise of AI applications that can finish. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/structu...