Walking through the little touristy area next to Tower Bridge, which is home to both a Starbucks Reserve (what the what) and a Paul where you can get an ice cream in a croissant, and sometimes real life seems indistinguishable from generative AI
John Sheridan
@johnlsheridan.bsky.social
I’m a Civil Servant, with a keen interest in many things including computers, data, law, digital preservation and archives. You’ll find me at The National Archives, helping to look after the digital archive, web archive, legislation.gov.uk etc.
41 years ago, Carl Sagan gave a clear and elegant explanation of the science behind global warming.
Listening to Schubert’s Impromptus, D.935, played by Radu Lupu. This is very beautiful music. Hard to explain, but Schubert somehow mixes events and memories: “let’s dance” -> “remember when we danced”, “let’s talk” -> “remember when we talked” and so on. Schubert had a tender soul.
If you live inland you may not have noticed that the Met Office app has tide times, wave heights and weather-appropriate sea safety advice for beach locations. Very useful in planning your day out
Met Office - weather and climate@metoffice.gov.uk · last mo.If you are heading to the coast, stay #WeatherReady and check out the beach forecasts on our App before heading out. Here's some more advice from our partners...
This is an absolutely brilliant Lunch with the FT - she comes across as delightful company as well:
Met Office chief Penny Endersby: ‘There is not going to be a usual summer’
The head of the UK’s national weather service on this year’s multiple heatwaves, the net zero backlash and why geoengineering is not a panacea
ft.com
Simon Willison is an (inter)national treasure. If you want the definitive take on the OpenAI/HuggingFace hack, it's here on his excellent blog: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/...
OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the …
simonwillison.net
An extended version of the preface to Platformland - on waiting, digital, and the surfaces the state presents to the world -: https://richardpope.org/2026/07/20/an-extended-version-of-the/
Last chance to book our exclusive webinar with Sir Nigel Shadbolt as he asks if AI is now part of daily life, but the data underpinning it is often poorly governed and inadequately protected. How do we fix this? buff.ly/yi1C5qV #Sovereign_Data #Data_Ai #AI
#CALC26 begins! Excited to see so many legislative drafter colleagues from across the globe! It’s one of the few places you can make a niche statutory interpretation joke and deem the laugher to have occurred :p
In summary: come and see, you will never see so many famous docs from that period all at once in the UK. If you're coming on Sunday it's Archives Fest, ticketed and with loads of extra goodies www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/whats-on/exh...
Revolution 250: America's Independence Story 1763–1783
Marking the 250th anniversary of The US Declaration of Independence, this powerful free exhibition charts the emergence of the United States of America.
nationalarchives.gov.uk
I had time to buzz round our Revolution250 exhibition today. Some great mixes of government and parliament records. These are the Townshend Acts, frex, and a War Office account of the Boston Tea Party
This is what we mean by the whole “not everything is digitized” — not everything is fully *catalogued* yet! This is at the UK National Archives at Kew.
John Sheridan@johnlsheridan.bsky.social · 2mo agoWell, look at that. A rare copy of the US Declaration of Independence has just turned up, where I work. See: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article....
This just *keeps* happening to us. (This is a great, great story, about brilliant work in the now and fascinating print diffusion in the past. Come and see the exhibition which is STUFFED with this kind of story.)
John Sheridan@johnlsheridan.bsky.social · 2mo agoWell, look at that. A rare copy of the US Declaration of Independence has just turned up, where I work. See: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article....
Lovely story, and thankfully devoid of the clichés and errors that are often present when finds in archives are reported.
‘Vanishingly rare’ copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives
One of 11 surviving copies of ‘Exeter printing’ and only one known outside US was taken from American privateer ship
theguardian.com
Well, look at that. A rare copy of the US Declaration of Independence has just turned up, where I work. See: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article....
Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives
The newly discovered copy is one of only 11 of its kind in the world.
bbc.co.uk
The utterly glorious porch roof at St John the Baptist, Burford. Anyone who uses 'medieval' as a pejorative should be made to look at this until they promise never to do it again. Photo taken lying on my back shuffling around the floor until I was happy with the framing.
Waiting for the train to leave Euston back to Birmingham, finding myself in Private Eye (joining in the Radio 3 discourse), mentioning intunemixtapefanclub.dracos.co.uk and coming across as a bit of a nerd 🤣
Anyone want to join my new group for discussing beam-type steam engines? It's on Watt'sApp
Exciting news: two dumps of weeknotes in two days. Random ramblings on AI and "the commons" and some other stuff off the back of a conference @anyaso.bsky.social and I went along to last week. CONTENT WARNING: yes, AI. Sorry ukparliament.github.io/ontologies/m...
2026 - Week 22 - Tragedy?
Work in progress to design data models for UK Parliament
ukparliament.github.io
Item descriptions for REQ 2/299-308 (Court of Requests proceedings for James I and Charles I) now searchable on Discovery. This 1624 case in particular caught my eye, about the East India Company getting too big for just one clerk. REQ 2/302/2 discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C2...
discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk
What’s the future of the humanities at a time of pressure in higher education and wider digital change? I’ll be on R4 at 4pm discussing this as part of their Rethink series. It was recorded several weeks ago so I now have no recollection of what I specifically said! www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
BBC Sounds - Rethink, Rethink... the Humanities
Should we be rethinking the humanities for a digital age?
bbc.co.uk
The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians is powered by its members. Every event, every initiative, every resource BIALL delivers is made possible by volunteers. Quite simply — BIALL cannot function without you.
Design legend Margaret Calvert is 90 today. Look at that cake! If you've ever admired a road, rail or metro sign in Britain it's likely she had something to do with it. One of Britain's design heroes - happy birthday to her. Photo by: @oshgallerylondon (IG) Cake by: mybaker.co
Is there any point writing about how 'governments should adapt to AI' when they currently find any serious change impossible? Hence this piece by @ukcivilservant.bsky.social on why reform of the Civil Service is so hard is fully on point: ukcivilservant.substack.com/p/why-civil-...
Why Civil Service Reforms Fail
There has been increased interest, in recent years, in civil service (or Whitehall) reform.
ukcivilservant.substack.com
Both shocking and unsurprising. What’s truly troubling is how many people have likely already produced, published and relied upon ‘insights’ they assumed came from analysis of their data but were in fact just the usual stereotyped LLM guesses
Adam Kucharski@adamjkucharski.bsky.social · 4mo ago"Based on the dataset you shared, US and UK responses differ mainly in tone, intensity, and wording style, even though they express similar emotional states" New post on what happened when I got Copilot to do some data analysis: kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signa...
The Chinese translation of The AI Mirror just arrived and I am over the moon. This is the first translation I’ve held in my hands! (Japanese, Indonesian, and Malayalam are coming out later this year)
