completely avoiding mitigating risk by throwing the linen suit i need on saturday into the tumble dryer

made a potato gratin in an air fryer. this is what the future feels like.

The Product for the People meet-up series is returning to Bristol on the 3rd September in some shape or form to be decided so save the date...or don't...I'm relaxed either way. Product for the People is for people interested in public service product management - but not just product managers!

Started a new thing this week. (These pictures rarely have any correlation to the content, btw, it’s just stuff from my camera roll.) #weeknotes visitmy.website/2026/05/15/t...

stag do on the train is going around collecting up everyone else’s rubbish as well as their own. top lads!

News: Research on AI governance & digital sovereignty by @alturobov.bsky.social has been cited in a House of Commons Library briefing. He argues that if governments can’t inspect AI, challenge its rules, or force interoperability, they become dependent on whoever controls it. 👉 bit.ly/4dtkhJf

Brilliant work by @cocochan.bsky.social and colleagues. Build, don’t buy! Palantir is not magic :)

Should have tagged @weeknotes-bot.bsky.social with this, and also added #weeknotes

Due to the changes happening over on Medium, I’m looking for people who want to keep blogging/weeknoting but don’t want to think about/pay for/manage their own website. I’ve been working on a side project around this sort of thing but can get it out earlier if people want to leave Medium. HMU!

the new all-electric routemaster bus has the best noise by far. would love to rip it and flash it to my ev (even though the nissan noise is quite good).

beef mince that’s 35% offal: it’s offally delicious! don’t need a stock, the depth of flavour is right there!

this is good yusu.bandcamp.com/album/foundry

great big helvetica sign 🤤

the perfect accompaniment to the fractured politics of today, beyond the two-party system, would be if the majority of exit poll responses were ‘i can’t remember’

Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-...

Though you probably never expected to be reposting something from Matt Hancock, here he is supporting open source code in response to NHS England’s decision to start making repos private. www.linkedin.com/posts/mattha...

Anybody who thinks the UK government could competently roll out a national ID programme hasn't tried to use UK Gov One Login to verify their identity for Companies House

In a rational world the government would be asking people to respond to the current fossil fuel crisis by car sharing, turning lights off, and generally saving fuel and energy. And yet Ministers can’t even propose better efficiency standards for tumble dryers without the right wing press going mad.

May the 2nd be with you

keepthingsopen.com Early GDS did so much work to enshrine open source as not just a positive tech working practice but a democratic choice in the spirit of open government. A bunch of dinosaur infosec people (who mean well) want to close all the boxes, at the cost of better services. Say no!

plugged in the turntable i got as a surprise present at christmas. been going down memory lane listening to records i bought 2007–2011. i don’t have enough albums to own only one deck.

Anyone used a decent landscaper / gardener in South London? Need to get a patio layed and fences done, plus some trees and bushes removed, and it’s good work for one company. My dad’s knees are knackered and is retiring so can’t call on my usual builder!

Happy Thursday! 🌞 📸: 'What A Pheasant Morning' by Chris Tremain

forcing myself to have a creative hobby that isn’t cooking or drinking wine or writing about work (i am a bore), i’ve purchased a teenage engineering sampler impulsively.

If another country is using activist investor techniques on your country’s infrastructure, you’re gonna have a bad time. www.ft.com/content/9459...

Doing some client work. Their prioritisation framework uses Value and Effort to calculate a Priority score. Value / Effort = Priority This calculation means they are actually prioritising ease of delivery over user value. Red flag! 🚩

The new data.gov.uk team need folks to join its user research panel, so they can ask you about stuff portal.participantkit.com/74e3e483-044...

Friend of mine adopted Claude Cowork across his agency, and revenue is significantly up. However he said he’s looking for side projects because all the creativity of the job is gone, and he just spends all day prompting. Email. Slack. Chatbots. The face of work is so soul-draining.

Github downtime since the Microsoft acquisition

My gf is attempting to run the London marathon today, after we ran the Manchester marathon last week. Please do sponsor her! www.justgiving.com/page/mali-ri...

Mike’s notes are so fucking good mikegallagher.org/posts/from-g...

at a job interview "whats your biggest weakness?" "understanding the semantics of a question but ignoring the pragmatics" "could you give an me an example?" "yes i could"

With warmer, sunnier weather continuing to shine in the Lake District over the weekend, an amber wildfire risk has been issued. To help us prevent wildfires in the National Park, please: -Do not light fires -Pack a picnic, not a barbecue -Take your litter home -Leave no trace

Knew it. This was one of the reasons I wrote that ‘Local and open first’ principle for working with AI. Knowing how the financials of these companies work, you can see the problem from far down the road. ICYMI: boringmagi.cc/2024/12/08/o...

Found what Marty Cagan said about product management in the age of AI surprisingly comforting, and I loved how he wasn’t breathless about pumping AI into everything. The man values human thinking! visitmy.website/2026/04/24/m...

“NOTE: For security reasons, you won't be able to use your Defra supplied laptop for prototyping using the GOV.UK prototype kit. You'll need to use a different machine for this purpose.” digital.defra.gov.uk/design/tools That is fucking dumb. (H/T @frankieroberto.com.)

over a decade ago i decided not to watch veep because ‘it’s just the thick of it, but american’ and that was not only an incorrect take but also a mistake.

petition to rename slide decks and presentations to ‘thought carousels’

This was also a problem for GOV.‌UK’s site search. Departments don’t always manage their content well, preferring to create new pages instead of changing and updating existing pages.

The laying of these regulations (plus the guidance and services we built to support LPAs) sets the foundations for national planning datasets.

Because the phrase ‘at pace’ is in the news currently, I implore everyone to listen to this: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

might focus on my half-marathon game for a few years,

loads of mk dons away fans on the train to crewe, they were singing all the terrace songs (which have the same tune as all the other teams’ songs), so i know i’m gonna have ‘glad all over’ on my mind in the marathon tomorrow

Milky Way over the Cuckmere meanders 🤩 Congratulations to Daniel Richards for winning the People's Choice award in our annual astrophotography competition with this impressive photo! #InternationalDarkSkiesWeek

Choose Microsoft, choose a false sense of security, choose horrendous documentation, choose siloed working, choose incompatibility with anything else, choose co pilot, choose a culture set by technology.

@pablobones.bsky.social Sir! I’ve run out of Boom Sauce. Where did you buy it from again? Was it Worthing or Brighton?

Heard this post is doing the rounds, being shared on a few Slack/Teams channels in gov depts. So for those that don’t know: boringmagi.cc/2026/04/02/r...

people who wait for you to open the train doors and then walk on first #names

Lyse Doucet, you poet

It's International Dark Sky Week 💫🌠🌃 In the Yorkshire Dales National Park Dark Sky Reserve our dark nights enhance habitats for wildlife, improve health and wellbeing and brings economic benefit to our local tourist industry. More 👇 https://idsw.darksky.org/ 📸 Pete Collins | #IDSW #DarkSkyReserve