I’d always wondered why no one had ever published a full, detailed map of the 1960s plan to turn London into a giant web of US-style urban motorways…. It turns even the politicians and designers didn’t make one at the time. It just didn’t exist. Until now.

bugonia is very good, a ripe satire.

got the wordle in 3 and in under 10 seconds Wordle 1,603 3/6 ⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛ 🟨🟨🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

yeah i’m into hyperscaling! hyperscaling my face into an industrial bone slicer!

“Funding the railways through a bubble, rather than through central planning (as was the case in much of Europe), left Britain with a very inefficiently designed rail network,” says Quinn. “That’s caused problems right up to the present day.” on.ft.com/3XcKd3M

For some reason, I’ve decided to get a train from Paddington at 6.30am tomorrow, which means leaving home around 5.15am. WHHYYYYY. Much coffee will be drank at @ripplesbristol.bsky.social

good day at chez messer – the christmas wine arrived. - magnum of soave classico 2023 - magnum of saumur-champigny cuvée prestige 2019 - magnum of champagne brut reserve nv pol roger!

I’m on the lookout for a new contract (preferably inside). I’ve got over a decade of experience working in the public sector, mostly in agile delivery management. Two weeks notice. Not got DMs here but Signal is zuz.1337, or LinkedIn is good. Thx :)

‘If the industrial strategy is to succeed, we’ll need English graduates as well as engineers, historians alongside computer scientists, and social scientists together with health professionals.’ www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/do-we-n... @timeshighered.bsky.social

there’s a line in this film where you can feel the new world strangling the old, creating a shift. really good stuff. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbCc...

melt about 25g of butter in the microwave for 20 seconds, crush garlic into it, then give it another 20-second blast. stir that into your mash. and watch all your troubles melt away.

More notes on kicking off the alpha phase of one of the Prime Minister’s AI Exemplar projects. Plus some cultural bits and pieces. #weeknotes visitmy.website/2025/11/02/t...

appreciated seeing japan score against south africa tonight. the team put in a good effort and always kept their spirits. getting the training in for appreciating *whatever* wales do at next year’s six nations.

i feel this way about phil collins and rod stewart, except it’s me who now likes them

Links to accessible mapping components in here, for anyone doing #30DayMapChallenge.

#30DayMapChallenge Day 1: Points Worked on this experimental dot density map using UK population data by age and sex. The points are generated and coloured in real-time as you explore the map. onsdigital.github.io/dot-map-poc/ 1/3

That week was absolutely packed. Onboarded a user researcher, shared lots of knowledge, got a demo from a local planning authority. We movin’, baby. @weeknotes-bot.bsky.social

Owen is right to highlight this. As taxpayers, we already paid. All this will do is introduce higher prices to all consumers and businesses.

don’t see the appeal of buying a robot to do your chores, why on earth would i spend my leisure time project-managing a clanker

The next time people complain that user research just slows things down, show them this towering monument of hubris. Quite staggering.

basically what it’s like watching ai engineers train models

The ensemble mean of Google DeepMind's experimental machine learning weather model had Hurricane Melissa hitting Jamaica 7 days out. That's very impressive.

Someone paid a lot of money for this

just realised we’re going to cape town when the autumn internationals are in *europe*, so good pub recommendations also welcome!

Returning to #weeknotes after a hiatus. A couple of pieces I read this week were super relevant to my current work, so it’s mostly notes on those. (AI-shaped as you can imagine.)

In other news… an invitation The AI gap is widening, join us for an evening of real talk about AI. Not the hype, the hard part. On Thu 13 Nov, a talk from me, & panellists from Experian, DSIT, Monzo & DeepMind, chaired through a discussion by Richard Allan. ✨ luma.com/xh4nnffz

These folks are nice and doing good things, strong recommend

you should all follow owen for pictures of jojo, she is the most amgry looking cat in the world, it’s adorable

There was a piece or blog post the other week on Solid and how it basically didn’t work. Did someone bookmark it? I didn’t and now need it!

Something that not enough people know about SQLite is that it's in the public domain because it's a product of government. General Dynamics made it on contract with the U.S. Navy. When government software is affirmatively placed in the public domain, and the code is public, good things can happen!

What was that? You would love another blog on planning permission data standards?? This time talking about user research??? Hold my beer… mhclgdigital.blog.gov.uk/2025/10/20/d... I love #OpenWorking #PlanningData etc

russian roulette would be simpler solution, but granted it might not create enough £growth

Good show on statistics (not data), the history of surveys, when and why response rates started tailing off, and everyone acknowledging the problems to fix. Surprisingly early mention of people registers, which obviously meant digital ID surfaced.

hah no shit

As we warned in an @openmarkets.bsky.social report earlier this year, our dependence on a handful of US tech giants for essential cloud infrastructure isn’t just a competition problem, it’s a serious threat to national security & societal stability. How many more outages before we get the message?

Edinburgh castle failing to render, likely thanks to the AWS outage

good stuff to do in cape town?

Here to do the dirty thing and ask you to please reshare this on LinkedIn! Want to get it in front of as many developers and engineers as possible, they need good people on the team. Thank you in advance! www.linkedin.com/posts/steven...

I may or may not be organising a Greggs crawl at our next Product for the People. Get involved!

“Proactive publication leads to greater transparency and could decrease the number of information requests you receive.” And, ironically, I need to FOI the ICO to find out whether their analysis quantified the proportion of FOIs to local government about housing and planning...

Plus! a last re-up for the Q&A I'm running with Ofcom, for people who run small low-risk sites and forums luma.com/rhah4fbl

Birmingham 26th-27th November www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/local-gove...

The simple fact is that the Government is going to have to find a way of rebuilding local government finances systematically. The decay of public realm and social infrastructure is deeply corrosive of public trust. Everyday, people can see the state not working all around them.

The key part of the 1.5 million homes target is that it expresses The Invisible Hand having an influence on all the levers, but really they’re afraid of committing to pulling the levers that really matter. Planning, yes, but bricks and skills? Wishful correlation in the face of needful causation.

Output versus outcome.

have somehow hit a place where i do both too much running and too much sitting, and these activities are totally stressing out my right hip and hamstring. burning the candle at both ends, but for your legs.

Most of government is mostly Excel, most of the time.

Data standards for the spreadsheet infrastructure. Platforms can come later.

Feel like this might be better than that DfT measure of leisure time for anyone doing business cases around time-saving. (Although with the accretion of so many forms, emails, etc. across the digital service landscape, I’m not sure time really is being saved...)