The value of a library is its ability to expand the knowledge you currently have, not in the distillation of the knowledge in it. The reductive view much of the tech industry takes to learning and knowledge is just depressing www.theverge.com/tech/862531/...

A lovely man who was one of the most continually surprising people I’ve met. We had a work thing at a venue with a DDR arcade machine. Mark walked over to it, stepped on and, as far as I was concerned, out of nowhere turned out to be very good at it. Absolutely delightful.

As a product manager I heard that you like containers karmada.io

It is January 2026 and you are tired of people writing about AI so why not read one more thing by me to really tip you over the edge – exo.org.uk/blah/on-bicy... – in which a metaphor is examined and noticing is discussed

@rodm.bsky.social assuming you have not already seen it this is probably of interest to you. I did not know there was an alternate ending www.ianbetteridge.com/of-ants-saul...

A smouldering thunderclap of a man brooded into the room, taut and sinewy as a stag. Jesamine could barely take her eyes off his stalking progress to ask “Who is that?”. “That is the warband leader, Storm Goretti”.

I was hoping 2026 would be the year we ran out of everything and it would stop happening but alas, still so much

If this is not available in the gift shop then someone should fix that immediately www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

what I did on my 2025 - exo.org.uk/blah/2025-ye... (which once again did not involve adding opengraph tags for better previews)

I, like I imagine a lot of people, have a party playlist that I add stuff I think is party suitable to, for quite a loose definition of suitable, which gets put on shuffle and it is a really delightful way to be reminded of bangers.

I’d not really considered this but of course the machine is always recording what you do. Everything tending towards surveillance capitalism is among the most depressing trends of modern living www.robinsloan.com/lab/claude-i...

In which I did some easy things and then Alex did some clever things and we got some answers.

The text generator generates text. If you ask it for persuasive text, it generates text that is more persuasive. The text generator cannot lie, or tell the truth—it just generates text. Every time we say “the bot lied” we are misleading ourselves.

It is, apparently, giving Tuesday so here in decreasing order of self serving are some suggestions. Firstly @mysociety.org, the people that pay me. While that's surely reason enough, we also make websites, data and reports that make it easier to be civic minded in the uk - www.mysociety.org/donate/

Ask Alex and Julia things about our democracy sites, or about how democracy works in the UK. They love answering questions and have opinions.

This is lovely. I gave a talk about maintenance from a civic tech point of view some years ago that might be of interest: dracos.co.uk/said/tictec-... (and I do make sure maintenance is included in the org strategy goals, I think it’s vital)

A short series of messages where I (badly) cosplay @jukes.ie follows

This is something I absolutely believe in and try follow with my shopping choices. Shops where they recognise you are a delight. www.are.na/editorial/pe...

Second work post in a row but as a summary of how a vote in parliament went the previews from TheyWorkForYou votes really are delightful - votes.theyworkforyou.com/decisions/di...

In not personal news, some things I have been mostly working on recently

Do I want to know how they add him?

The use of virtually in this marketing copy is less load bearing and more single brick upon which the entire foundations depend

Chasing cyclists down the road wielding a pump and offering to inflate their wildly under inflated tyres would be a very normal thing, right?

🪑 Democracy Club is seeking a new Chair for our board of non-executive directors. 🫵 Do you have chairing experience? Good knowledge of UK politics, civic technology, and/or digital service delivery? You could be the person we’re looking for! Take a look👇 docs.google.com/document/d/e...

The good thing about writing and using your own software is that if you want it to do something then you can just do it. The bad thing about writing and using your own software is that if you want it to do something then you have to do it.

TIL that spending enough time looking at the register of member’s interests radicalises you on money in politics

This is probably because I’ve done some stuff at work to help gather data on expenses etc but the more I see this sort of thing the more I wonder why does the chancellor need to go to a fancy event to meet business people? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I have no idea who Alexander Isak is or what the affair is and yet this is still hugely enjoyable on the hyperbole of the content industrial complex www.theguardian.com/football/202...

I think we should formalise rules for declaring national holidays when it's too hot because my brain has already informally implemented this

I do like regular expressions. I don’t much like “AI” (by many definitions/uses). Do I like using AI to generate regular expressions to then be fast, not be reliant on that AI, and not be a black box? Maybe. www.mysociety.org/2025/08/12/u...

Strong applause to the FT for this sub heading and indeed for investigating imported questions www.ft.com/content/6256...

The seven regions: lawful north, neutral north, chaotic north, midlands, lawful south, evil south, chaotic south.

Spent about half of Superman expecting Punk Rock by Mogwai to start. It did not. Was otherwise fine

resets days since I found a mysterious piece of plastic on the floor that looks like it might be important for something counter to zero

I have no idea how people can relentlessly promote their own things. I am all too aware of where the flaws are in mine and being all rah! about things without a lot of British self deprecation is deeply antithetical to my natural mode of communication. (yes I am sub posting about me)

In rare work news, I spent a bit of time recently working on this, in case you wanted to know how well your local council was doing on climate action.

The perils of modern dining are cover versions so bad you regret the invention of music

For a while I’ve joked that my universally true but extremely unsuccessful campaign slogan is “this stuff costs money” but increasingly I think the last word is unnecessary.

It's annoying how infrequently just letting your code have a nice rest fixes bugs.

So, we should give up tech that is making electricity cheaper in favour of tech that is impractical at anything approaching the required scale, and requires yet more power, despite polling showing that net zero policies are pretty popular because reckons? www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The purpose of a campaign is what it does

Surely Royal Mail of all people know where he lives and could just send a card?

Not a week goes by that we (professionally) or I (personally) don’t have to deal with some badly written bot instigating what amounts to a DDOS attack. On traintimes.org.uk I have had to resort to blocking whole continents :-/

Ignoring arguments about the exact figures my all purpose election campaign slogan applies: this stuff costs money. I’m not sure it’s a very effective slogan but it has the benefit of being accurate for almost all values of stuff.

The frequency of someone has asking me if they can do something with a website that I, and only I, work on, me responding "No, but I will look into it" only to discover that it does in fact do the thing they asked for is remarkably often. Past me is very secretive.

and that was how I became captain tardigrade

A thing I had a small hand in is launching today. You should check it out so the weeks @juliacushion.bsky.social spent in spreadsheets wrangling and double checking data do not go to waste. We have thoughts on improving things so she never has to do this again: research.mysociety.org/publications...

I try not to do this very often but I wrote a little sermon today about forming bonds with other people and having fun as the most ssential acts of anti-fascism. www.todayintabs.com/p/it-s-not-a...

It is slightly baffling to me how many councils only seem to publish documents like climate action plans as an appendix to council minutes. Have a page on your website called Climate Plans or similar and put a link there otherwise no one will find it.

This is absolutely great on the sort of culture required for long term archival of digital artefacts, and all the ways in which we are a long way from it. Also an excellent primer on the pros and cons of currently available storage tech. lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scal...