After 11 years, I've finally managed to convince HM Passport Office that I am in fact a British citizen.

Just discovered this. Great example of the largely untapped power of labellers to improve the quality of online conversations.

Mastodon announced it will add five much-needed features and improvements thanks to funding from the German government’s Sovereign Tech Agency. The five deliverables include: 🔸Blocklist synchronisation To improve moderation and safety, Mastodon servers will be able to subscribe to shared […]

Looks like there was an event on at Te Kaha this evening but they're now having their first ever fire drill! #Ōtautahi #Christchurch

Ōtautahi, shut the front door are closing this weekend and have a big sale on - in particular they’ve got some wire baskets that are perfect to be strapped onto bike racks for $15-20

To my non tech normies, PSA: when you share a link, everything after the ? is tracking. Those “query parameters” tell companies exactly how you arrived, what app you clicked, which ad or email sent you, sometimes a unique identifier tied to you. You can delete everything after the question mark.

It was my pleasure to review the dress rehearsal in Ashburton yesterday. Opening night was tonight and it sounds like it went amazingly. #theatre #Ashburton

FYI if you’re talking about the #Artemis II mission and you want to get the spaceflight terminology right, the mission is “crewed,” not “manned.” (NASA made the terminology change official decades ago, so this isn’t new, but a lot of folks just aren’t aware.)

Think of a number between 1 and 19. It’s 11. If you got something else, you’re wrong.

Latest tax data is depressing. The economy has stalled and we've got a recessionary wave coming towards us from overseas. Govt and their ghouls think the solution to global volatility and the widening gap between income & expenditure is to reduce spending! Why are they fking idiots? Read on. [🧵 1/n]

New website is up! eurosky.tech Englishs only atm. German, French, Dutch, Polish, Spanish and Italian coming soon!

Average of all the polls. We just hit crossover day! Great moment to join as we take on Reform next. Join.greenparty.org.uk

School maps in Japan when I lived there had Japan at the centre. Some of my American colleagues never got used to that.

Ever wondered why North is at the top of our maps? If you're assuming there are logical, scientific, Nature-driven reasons for it - yeah, me too. In fact, they're often whimsical, arbitrary or just plain ridiculous! Hold onto your hat. This may turn your world upside-down. 1/

📣Hi folks, Im looking for experts to talk with about the internal logics of the algorithms that shape social media feeds and that drive LLM search results. (I’m thinking Bayesian algorithms in particular). I need folks who can speak conceptually (not just technically) about these internal logics.

#auspol Australian government agencies should remove US software and use open source products. Australian data should only be in secure Australian managed cloud services not in US controlled cloud services.

I made this #gay short #film yesterday as part of 24CHCH26 in #Ōtautahi #Christchurch.

Note to governments, especially the “invisible hand” fanciers: Turns out people really do respond to price signals, and that travel mode is actually elastic, and not just a function of preference…

It was lovely to attend the opening/blessing of Te Kaha One New Zealand Stadium in #Ōtautahi #Christchurch.

If you joined InternetNZ last year to stop the hostile takeover by the FSU, here's a reminder to renew your membership before the end of the month. Rumour has it the FSU may be attempting another takeover attempt Internetnz.nz

5m tonnes of CO2 emitted in just 14 days of US war on Iran, analysis finds https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/21/middle-east-iran-conflict-environment-climate War in the Middle East is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined

I remember Sagan explaining climate change to congress decades ago How times have sadly changed

On this day in 2020, New Zealand went into COVID Alert Level 4 a.k.a. lockdown. We did really well as a country, saved thousands of lives. Six years later, COVID is part of our landscape; we're in our 9th wave of COVID. nzhistory.govt.nz/new-zealand-... Uh, happy anniversary? #kikorangi

for the daily update a v2 of my tool that allows you to search your bluesky likes new features: - also search your bookmarks, posts and reposts - filter by account, min likes, reposts, replies, date and embed - hopefully a lot faster at indexing your likes atmo.tools

Canterbury could end up with 12,400 more cows as dairy profits are prioritised over the nitrate emergency #TooManyCows #TooMuchInfluence www.thepress.co.nz/business/360...

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/116262809209036712 Chuck Norris has died? Bruce Lee is waiting to give him one big arse-whooping on the other side. (The fear of this happening was why Chuck lived so long.)

this is completely insane: since when is it acceptable for a tech company to rewrite news outlets' headlines without their consent? especially at a time when audiences are sensitive to how stories are framed in headlines? (ie Israel/Palestine, the Trump admin, ICE) www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...

It has also allowed the Spanish PM to speak the truth about various genocides and oil wars and their tech bro propagandists, and to adopt independent policy that reflects the views of the people and the national interest. (You know, democracy, national sovereignty & independence). #auspol

So $716m for the 2 new worse ferries plus the $670m we lost canceling iRex means the 2 new ferries now cost us $1,386 million Thanks better business managers! /s #nzpol

see? here's the thing. A lot of people are like, the earth is fucked, it's beyond salvation, it's hit the tipping point, but time and time again we see that if we just fucking fixed the problem, it rebounds so incredibly fast. Imagine what could be done if people actually cared

Last week: Covid Royal Commission of Inquiry says NZ must be better prepared for the next pandemic. This week: Government rejects WHO proposals for being better prepared for the next pandemic. If we had this government in 2020, it would have killed so many fuckin people dude.

Wow. Just wow. I am beyond pissed off right now so I apologise in advance for my language. The Ministry of Health (MOH) have been saying for years that they have no data on Long COVID prevalence in New Zealand, and have not made any attempts to quantify LC patient numbers. A thread 🧵 /1

The way anything that is good for mitigating climate change is now left-coded (also feminine coded, that's a whole thing) means I'm seeing people on the right arguing that the solution to the looming fuel crisis is, somehow, also fossil fuels

There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends. It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.

The reviews searched over 12,000 references. They screened 547 full-text papers for inclusion. They included 17. That's a 96.9% exclusion rate at full text. 530 studies were relevant enough to survive initial screening, then rejected by the review criteria. 6/10 reviews found 0 included studies.

And this is the anti-trans logic loop: 1. demand evidence 2. design reviews that cannot find evidence 3. cite absence of evidence as justification for withdrawing care 4. use withdrawal of care to prevent generation of new evidence. It's what the Reagan administration did to trans folks.

Some personal news: I’m transitioning from CEO to a new role as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer! I’m excited to welcome @toni.bsky.team as our interim CEO. More here: bsky.social/about/blog/0...

This man speaks so well. Just listen to his description of the racist oppression of migrants in Calais that the UK government is spending hundreds of millions of pounds on. And how he is so clear about the need for solidarity with trans people, and condemning Labour’s appeasement of the right.

Based on this response, they seem to barely use it. That should hopefully get mentioned whenever they talk about its upsides

Over summer, I OIA'd every minister for their AI chat logs. Here's what I found: newsroom.co.nz/2026/03/06/h...

who among you is brave enough to take a guess what happened the last time tech companies made a voluntary pledge to protect the public from the harmful impacts of data centre over-development

This story needs a correction. It is absolutely true that admissions are the highest since October, but 184 admissions is the last 4 weeks (to 16 Feb), not last week (to 16 Feb). 184 in a week is 2022 levels. This would be much easier to keep track of if we had the data rather than a Power BI report

I hope the trial shows a demand for rail. The buses to the commuter towns are great but get stuck in traffic just like cars do, a train could bypass the traffic and get someone to the city faster than driving www.odt.co.nz/star-news/st...

I'm annoyed that I never got around to watching the new Avatar movie. I refuse to watch it in a cinema in 2D, there are now no screenings left in Canterbury at all, and I missed seeing it on IMAX in Auckland by a day because I got gastro.

Trump’s billionaire allies will now own CNN, Fox News, CBS, WaPo, WSJ and NY Post — plus 185+ local tv stations and news in 100 markets. They also control X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, TikTok, Truth and Twitch. This is all by design to manipulate and surveil us. Pay attention.

Housing should be a priority for any government. action.greens.org.nz/housing_2026

I don’t know what I did to deserve two cats that meow to be picked up and then held like a baby 🥲

How Londoners used data to survive the Great Plague www.bbc.com/news/article... A journal of the plague year: Samuel Pepys and the Bills of Mortality as accounting doi.org/10.1177/1032... Bills of mortality en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_o... #publichealth #deathstats proto- #opendata

The Spelling of our Tongue was in the main ſettled ere the eighteenth Century, & the Grammar has ſuffer'd but little Alteration ſince. Yet before this happy Settlement, things were exceeding ſtrange.

Mastodon, a decentralized alternative to X, plans to target creators with new features https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/mastodon-a-decentralized-alternative-to-x-plans-to-target-creators-with-new-features/