Oh my goodness! I wasn't going mad! I'm having to weed out a few weird ones where there's a specific route priced silly money to make you go the other route eg Hereford to Long Buckby charges £45.10 for a return via brum and £146.50 for "any permitted" route.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)@ashley.rolfmore.com · 2d ago

So turns out there's a bunch of uk railway ticket rovers/rangers (tickets which allow unlimited travel over certain areas) which are now cheaper than off peak single/return fares *inside* the rover/ranger area they cover. I'll be doing some data crunching and reporting back.

Today's rant: if your customers cannot use your data, either because they don't trust or don't understand it, it is poor quality, no matter how many fancy engineers, angels or sparkle fairies generated it. Data is a communication and distillation tool.

So turns out there's a bunch of uk railway ticket rovers/rangers (tickets which allow unlimited travel over certain areas) which are now cheaper than off peak single/return fares *inside* the rover/ranger area they cover. I'll be doing some data crunching and reporting back.

Take a break from being depressed that everything you love is being destroyed by slop for a moment and let me tell you about the beautiful symbiotic relationship between graffiti writers, train yard workers, and model train enthusiasts.

My house is de-goblined but I still cannot locate my keys... eep.

I love it when patterns start to fall into place... 😅

Sue Smith@suesmith.lol · 4d ago

Cheeky wee saturday blog post www.sue.codes/blog/harness...

Day 100-ish of trying to come off Apple/MS for everything... moving our budget sheet into LibreOffice from Numbers initially pasted it as an image, which was not noticed until grabbing a handle and it *rotated*.

Along with this and Incorruptible by Eric Ries, we are having a bumper year of finally being allowed to comment that the previously vaguely tamed garden of capitalism seems to have turned into an unmanaged patch of weeds.

Robin Berjon@robin.berjon.com · 7d ago

I very strongly recommend reading this latest from @anildash.com, especially if you're not in tech, especially if you work in policy on issues of tech and innovation. Most tech entrepreneurs don't want this and need alternatives. www.anildash.com/2026/09/02/c...

Tony Montana teaches us about agentic AI usage. Disclaimer - this is not about whether you should or shouldn't use these tools. It's about understanding what has changed around you and not letting your judgement slip due to it. ashley.rolfmore.com/ai-is-stoppi...

AI is stopping startups from completing puberty

Puberty is that in-between bit between seed stage and a startup working out what it actually needs to be in order to thrive. If you've been in a seed or Series A or B startup, or even an early stage ...

ashley.rolfmore.com

This extremely boring thread made me think, "God, what did weirdos like me do before social media?" and then I remembered that, after my dad died, I found copies of several letters he'd sent to Transport Ministers, outlining his thoughts on ideal railway design, so I suppose there's that

I would like some of the audacity of various AI companies on LinkedIn (most of them have never dealt directly with the sector) implying or just outright claiming “well *we* could have prevented the Lewes derailment”.

Ahem, no Paradise spoilers please.

Josh Sternberg@joshsternberg.com · last wk.

This is where the 1% will go to restart civilization after a nuclear attack. But it for me thinking: what if the uber wealthy built these bunkers for more people — and not for nuclear attacks but for the climate crisis that will get us all — instead of trying to leave the planet?

Nice new blue watercolor virus #sciart artologica.etsy.com/listing/4565...

Currently rationing out this £1.35 bottle of vimto squash like it’s printer ink

Did tourist tour the other day with a friend visiting and the Brits spent ages moaning about how stupid Americans are but when asked by the (amazing) tour guide how to say the past participle of “strike” the group fell silent and the answer came from a native German speaker (Eng is language 3).

I was kinda sad at the complete lack of Iain Banks (or M) in any of the bookshops I visited in Scotland, or even the book themed bar.

Make your favorite film sound as boring as possible without giving away the title: A chief technology officer is worried about keeping his spreadsheets private.

Man loses taxi license and gets mildly irritated by radio presenter he wins cruise tickets from.

Mollie Goodfellow@hansmollman.bsky.social · 2w ago

Man tries to salvage marriage by attending wife’s work event

Man tries to salvage marriage by attending wife’s work event

Neill Cameron@neillcameron.bsky.social · 2w ago

Make your favorite film sound as boring as possible without giving away the title: Humphrey Bogart reluctantly gets involved in the admin regarding an associate’s immigration issues.

I don’t wanna amplify SBC necessarily but this is a good thread 🧵 Observational comedy is always contextual, and needs the comedian to “read the room” for it to be funny. Peter Kay yelling “ROLA COLA” only works on the generations that remember it(!)

Athena Kugblenu@athenakugblenu.bsky.social · 2w ago

We don't want Ali G not because we don't get the original joke. We're not thick lol. It's just not a relavent observation anymore. the influence Black culture has moved on. A non Black person of any class can adopt dress or language adjacent to us in a much more authentic way now because of...

Hello world

I worked at a business that used email as IM back in the day. The content was… as you expect. I’m pretty sure the LLMs will lap up two 19-20 year old male warehouse staff mailing “ur a knob” “only because ur mum is good in bed” at each other repeatedly.

Ben Holliday@benholliday.com · 2w ago

Excellent read which poses some hard questions for organisations…

Excellent read which poses some hard questions for organisations…

Sharon O'Dea@sharonodea.com · 2w ago

Spirit Airlines went under and left behind 500 million Teams messages. Google bid $10m. A startup building AI agents to work inside simulated companies bid $12.5m. Ten years of telling people to work out loud, and here we are. By me for @reworked.bsky.social www.reworked.co/collaboratio...

I begged Woman’s Hour to cover Gamergate in 2014, when it was the NYT front page & UK women in games were living in terror. Gamergate became the model for MAGA. They said they didn’t think it was an important story. That week they covered women mountaineers of the 19th C & new ways with aubergine

Joel Morris@gralefrit.bsky.social · 2w ago

I pitched a show two years ago about this to Radio 4, to tie in with the release. They said they had already made a programme about computers fairly recently.

Oh, threads just lost me again when they’d just got me back on for 5-10min just because they *do not* persist state so the mere minute I took to edit a photo just lost my draft and the ability to go back and reply. It’s like going “I’ve changed, honest” and pissing in your flower bed same day.

Current gig ending shortly. Want to work with someone who diagnoses and fixes product market fit, tells you what the krusty the clown doll teaches us software idiots about ML products, and can wrangle regulatory chaos & enterprise clients without needing to turn on all those jira modules? Ping me.

Nicely put, stealing: “A recurring theme: open data is rarely wrong, but it's frequently inconsistent. Most of the work is writing small, legible rules that reconcile the inconsistency the way a human would.” From: trainmap.co.uk/story.html (if on bsky someone tag!)

Mapping the whole UK rail network, including the stations that no longer exist

How trainmap.co.uk was built: a vanilla-JavaScript map of every UK railway line and station, past and present, plus the messy open-data problems and the communication that drove it.

trainmap.co.uk

It’s really important that independent organisations can hold Government to account. I’m on the Board of @nao.org.uk which does this and we are looking for two new Board members. Could you help spread the word so we can get the best possible field of candidates roles.saxbam.com/advert-detai...

This thread (HT @monkchips.com) is excellent. LLMs write code that is really good now. No notes. But the code wasn't and isn't the problem. The problem is the design of the architecture, the infrastructure, the overall system and all that goes with it. LLMs aren't great at that... yet.

Citizen Platano 🇵🇷@daniloc.xyz · 3w ago

at the line level, the code is fine that code is about as perfect as you have attention to demand it to be the problem is that the LLMs seem to be poor at modeling and executing the overall system, the relationships between components and this level of detail is hard for humans to parse