Did my first run for about 14 years. Out for a whole hour of run-walk-run and then a shopping trip at the end too. Time to start putting my body a bit more up the priority list. Although not looking forward to not being able to walk in 2 days time if past experience is anything to go off!

Coding with AI agents in Cursor IDE is like something out of StarTrek. Very productive but the whole time you can feel your own coding muscle memory wasting away. But I do sort of love it. 30+ years of coding and now I can have an idea and it just makes it happen before my eyes.

New job is keeping me very busy but in such a good way. Got my mojo back and my mind is firing on all cylinders again. Amazes me how much of a funk I’d got into through just being bored at work. My mind needs agency and problems to solve. Now got that so it is flying! Tiring in a good way.

Some really striking numbers in this new survey showing the flip in European public opinion about America. But bear in mind this is only Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, it has been harder to take the blinders off peoples' eyes. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

The authors "estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP per capita by 6 to 8 percent, investment by 12 to 18 percent, employment by 3 to 4 percent, and productivity by 3 to 4 percent. These effects grew gradually over time." www.nber.org/202602/diges... What a total disaster... 🇪🇺🇬🇧

The theft isn't over. ICE thugs are now demanding state-level voter data at gunpoint. If they get that data, presumably, they will throw it into the mix with all the other stolen data available to repression as a service.

So the word “pinnacle” has now taken on a whole need meaning for me! #bridgerton

HOW IT WORKS IN MOVIES: 1. Government lies 2. Brave heroes release video showing the truth 3. Press says “the government is lying!” HOW IT APPARENTLY WORKS IN REAL LIFE 1. Brave heroes release video showing the truth 2. Government lies 3. Press says “Oh no, what now? So confusing! So hard!”

🗞️ Some news! The Trump Action Tracker now has a bot that automatically posts new actions to Bluesky, along with link to news story & authoritarian categories. Follow to stay up to date! We are adding about 10 actions a day at the moment 😢 bsky.app/profile/trum...

Deutsche Bank here with the good stuff. Game on.

Flying to Minneapolis tomorrow to cover the ICE raids for News Agents, what is unfolding and the politics which flows from it. If you’re there or know the city and know people/organisations we should be speaking to, please get in touch. DMs open.

“Journeys are safer & smoother when we all work together” Lovely common sense road rules ad from Wokingham Borough Council.

I propose the only way of getting through *all this* for the foreseeable is to Bring Back Morning Tea Break. I declare 11am to be time for A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down. And maybe a chat. About the weather.

A network of social media accounts posing as Scottish independence supporters has fallen silent once again, closely mirroring a fresh shutdown of internet access inside Iran.

@hcrichardson.bsky.social wrote about a 1945 US leaflet on how to spot fascism in America. I thought it might be worth screenshotting the relevant bit. ALL of the these warnings have come to pass in the past year. 1/2

Spent the afternoon nursing this thing back to health. Blocked drain pump and the leaking drain hose and then kinked inlet hose! It’s as if it’s wanting me to buy a new one! Half way through a cycle now and it’s looking good. I do enjoy the logic puzzle keeping these things alive

Yes, killing peaceful protesters is a sign of tyranny. www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/t...

Take five minutes to watch this video by the always excellent Prof. Pagel @chrischirp.bsky.social to understand under-the-radar authoritarian actions that you may have missed in these last few weeks.

Nick Anderson, Raw Story

Theo Moudakis, Toronto Star

Watched Gremlins for the first time in 30 odd years. Hold up well. I enjoyed it as it my son. My hit rate for old movies we should watch it still 50/50 though

Last working day for me so of course there is an outage with a 3rd party service at work to battle through. Not quite the soft ease into Christmas I hoped for!

Having wisdom teeth out sucks hard. A week on and still in pain and so sick of soap 😟

A depressing milestone on the TrumpActionTracker - 2000 logged actions since January. www.trumpactiontracker.info Shortly about to be 2002 as I have a couple more to add tonight :-/

Yes, govt bent to pressure from MPs over the benefit cap. That's how parliamentary democracy works - and why it's a good thing. It means a leader has to carry a wider movement with them. There's a counter-pressure to the strategists in No. 10. It matters that we elect a Parliament, not just a PM.

👇👇

Dealing with Twilio’s support AI now makes me understand why lots of folks hate AI. Terrible implementation and a complete waste of time.

Not often I’m hit by the dead of someone famous. But sad tonight for the loss of the best bassist of my youth. Name sake of my old pet dog too. Sleep well Mani.

Privileged to share a guest post today by a US veteran and intelligence analyst on the echoes they see between the regimes they used to monitor and today’s US. They asked to remain anonymous - itself a sign of how worrying things have become in America. christinapagel.substack.com/p/authoritar...

Both the Budget and the asylum bill are disintegrating before they've even been formally announced. Absolutely dead government.

If I was devising a set of announcements to elevate (but not satisfy) the hard right, alienate the middle ground and completely discourage your base, I couldn’t come up with a much better strategy than McSweeney and Number 10

Why seek political office if you have a stonking majority and you use it to…endlessly fret about losing your majority rather than running a country? It’s no good. There is no theory for how to make things better. It’s not even well managed decline.

Battlefield Design colouring books available now! 30 pages of aircraft, vehicles and patterns to colour. £12.95 ea + postage. PLEASE NOTE - UK ORDERS ONLY via the link below! For US / EU orders please contact me via www.battlefield-design.co.uk square.link/u/eYCAExic

Whole fucking thing makes me sick to my stomach. An abject fucking liar, a man who lies as easily as he fucking breathes, threatening an organisation which strives for truthfulness. And plastic patriots like the Mail and Farage urging him on. Jackels.

quick rundown of some classic autocratic behaviours over the past few days in America Covering attacking enemies, helping allies, cowing institutions and purging the military All actions and more on www.trumpactiontracker.info? youtu.be/Mx4c4JfgLeU

Thursday's @theguardian.com cartoon #zohranmamdani #mamdani #zohranfornyc #NewYork

Musk: This Muslim man has a difficult name. Also Musk: My children are named Seldon Lycurgus and Techno Mechanicus.

it's time for journos to start asking Johnson meta questions "Speaker, on 5 occasions last week you said 'I haven't seen it' when asked about news events w/big implications for public policy. Do you ever read the news, and do you agree it's problematic for the Speaker to be so woefully uninformed?"

This has always been been my worry with AI. Not that they would generate a video that’s shows something false but presented as real but that it gives people the chance to claim what’s real is false. I’ll never understand why those working on GenAI do so. What good comes of it? What is truth now?

The hypocrisy of Reform going on TV to allege that certain groups are constantly over represented on TV is truly epic.

The Trump Action Tracker has an update! Main change is to break down the five authoritarian domains into ten - this allows for easier understanding of why actions have been logged and more tools for searching / filtering the now 1621 actions. www.trumpactiontracker.info? 1/2

Sadly, there's a lot to be said for Marina Hyde's analysis here. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck and looks like a duck…

Vance’s Double Standard: Nazi Jokes Are “Kids Being Kids,” But Mocking Charlie Kirk Gets Your Visa Revoked JD Vance thinks praising Hitler and talking about putting political enemies into death chambers is harmless “kids being kids,” but criticizing Charlie Kirk is somehow deserving of…

"Authoritarianism, it's a cancer. The symptoms are here, today... We thought it couldn't happen here... and now the disease is growing, metastasizing in America. But there is a cure—it requires you. On October 18, Americans will stand up, peacefully, for what makes America, America." nokings.org

This deserves more attention than it has received. Gove: "we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working". Exactly as so many of us warned at the time, and as the government denied at the time. www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/country-and-...

Ada Lovelace Day has begun! As midnight arrives on Kiritimati Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, our global celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and maths begins! Join us in celebrating by posting about your fave women in STEM #ALD25!

every single tech idea is like “soon our robots will be capable of playing catch with your kid, freeing you up to spend more time working on your employers’ spreadsheets”

Claude Code tip: prompt "use sub-agents" and it will do exactly that, firing up multiple parallel sub-agents to achieve a task, each with a fresh context "Write markdown documentation for the context passed to each of the templates in this project. Use sub-agents." simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/11/...