2 in 3 of Nigel Farage’s current and former partners do not speak English as their first language.

If you can't keep people safe without invading their privacy, you have no place in government.

As it was inevitably always going to do, the #AI bubble is bursting. Not everyone may see it, recognise it, or care about it. But like a collapsing star, soon all that will be left will be a dense core of useful technology. And all the gaseous hype will dissipate. www.ft.com/content/23e5...

It is not within Trump's remit to control the BBC, close the air space over Venezuela, or recognise Ukrainian territory as Russian. The overinflated tangerine despot needs to get back in his box and the media need to stop reporting this as "things that Trump has decided". They are not up to him.

Random opinion: Browsers should not default to HTTPS for .local domains.

"Let's go super woke" and "let's sell this to the puritans over the Atlantic" was always going to be a hard square to circle. Might have worked better if the script quality had been more consistent, though. deadline.com/2025/10/why-... #DoctorWho #BBC #Tardis

I stopped reading at "how we want to operate like the world’s largest startup". Corporate midlife crisis red flag 🚩 Startup culture should never be an aspiration for a mature company any more than teenage behaviour should be for a grown adult. www.aboutamazon.com/news/company...

Just deleted my JustEat account. It's never been super-reliable as the drivers can often not find the house, but the past half-dozen orders have either never turned up, had missing items, or been cancelled. Literally unusable.

Tonight, I will be cooking the classic English dish "toad in the hole". For anyone not familiar with this traditional delight, you're not allowed to look it up, and must imagine it based only on its name.

I don't give a fuck how much tourism the royal family brings in, anything that perpetuates the vile levels of entitlement this mob enjoy needs to be abolished absolutely. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv...

Feeling an urge to pivot my career to become the Gordon Ramsay of the tech industry, shouting and swearing imaginatively at stupidity, complacency and incompetence until they sort their shit out.

Of all the stupid things they’ve said, this is the stupidest. And the most dangerous.

Your ggplot2 charts work fine, but are they memorable? Real color engineering: brightness first (strongest differentiator), then hue, finally saturation. Most people get this backwards and wonder why their viz falls flat. www.chartography.net/p/color-engi...

[toots his own horn] I built the Elasticsearch Gemini CLI extension mentioned here. Google made it easy for me to roll something stable out very quickly, which is not always how LLM integrations go, so props to the Gemini CLI devs for that. blog.google/technology/d...

This is solid truth for software eng in general, and has been my life for three decades. Plus, it's a fundamental reason why every organisation should balance commercial and technical forces from the very top of the company. "Engineering as a subsidiary of Product" does not and never will work.

TIL Claude's new code interpreter mode has a /mnt/skills/public/ folder full of prompt instructions and Python utilities for creating and manipulating pdf, docx, pptx, xlsx files - and you can ask Claude for a copy and learn a TON about working with those formats simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/...

While I'm certainly a long way from being proud of everything British, being part of a nation that is at the forefront of cutting-edge insults like "cockwomble" and "wankpuffin" really does warm my heart.

"the Bad Faith Threshold" is a great coinage. The first wave of comments on a post, from those who do actually follow you, is usually interesting or fun or both. But the later waves are of scolds, humourless reply-guys, "sorry to be pedantics", "whatabouts", and "why are you insulting".

I wondered where Boris Johnson had gone. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The US is no longer a political ally. open.spotify.com/episode/1U8E...

Someone needs to take away this government's computers. It's just bad idea after bad idea with this lot. www.gov.uk/government/n...

Another day, another example of our government's depressingly tenuous grasp on technology. www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

While this doesn't quite yet mean the end of access to Wikipedia from the UK, it's certainly a step down that ridiculous road. This gov't are trying to long strong and in control but (in terms of tech at least) are rapidly making the UK an international joke. www.thenational.scot/news/2538029...

If Trump is so keen to swap territory for peace, maybe he should give Putin Alaska, which also used to belong to Russia.

Dragonfly

My goto is to ask LLMs how many states have R in their name. They always fail. GPT 5 included Indiana, Illinois, and Texas in its list. It then asked me if I wanted an alphabetical highlighted map. Sure, why not.

We learned nothing from two world wars. We have all sat back procrastinating while Netanyahu and his gang literally turn an entire civilization into rubble. We must have no tolerance for intolerance. This crazed ideological madness must be stopped. The world's leaders have to step forward.

TIL: in JavaScript Arrays, "the default sort order is ascending, built upon converting the elements into strings". Meaning `[2, 10].sort()` returns `[10, 2]`. WAT? And suddenly I'm wondering how many bugs I left in the wild because of that 😱

I dislike the phrase "Keep[ing] The Lights On" (KTLO) to describe important areas of ongoing work to existing software projects. It heavily diminishes the amount of work required to keep software updated, safe, performant, and relevant. And as such, the work is routinely overlooked at higher levels.

One million percent this. alexkondov.com/i-know-when-...

The only way forward now for governing the UK is for us to learn how to properly collaborate and do coalition. Increasing tribality will go nowhere.

It says a lot about where we're going that the BBC is now running stories in which they ask lifeboat crews whether they will apologise for using their boats to save lives

I'm not really posting on Twitter/X any more, but some things just need a corrective response. x.com/technige/sta...

We've run out of ideas now, haven't we?

Banning VPNs would be akin to banning front door keys for your house.

That @bloomberg.com can have a headline “EU agrees to pay 15% tariff on most exports to US” shows just how far economic illiteracy has gone. And the months of economists explaining how tariffs work makes this extraordinary level of ignorance even more inexcusable.

Because not all people are stupid. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Bravo youtu.be/vich2C-Tl7Q?...

Yes, I hate it for me, but I also recognise that it isn't sustainable in general. Search engines used to be links to pages around the internet. AI results keep the user on the "search engine" page and over time will, if left unchecked, lead to a less healthy and somewhat inbred internet ecosystem.

Our government are fools when it comes to technology. On one hand, they say they want us to be a technology leader, on the other, they act like the worst kind of ignorant technophobes. The so-called Online Safety Act is a nonsense piece of legislation. www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

The only surprise here is how supposedly intelligent people can ever believe that an overhyped technology, so early in its infancy, and founded so strongly on indeterminism, is actually fit for purpose for anything serious. www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/r...

Some wonderfully uplifting statistics on how solar and wind power are now very much mainstream. www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

Reblochon. That is all.

Brilliant news www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-...

Tad nippy out, up here at 3,842m.

At this point, the BBC should just pay to air MasterChef Australia instead. It's miles better anyway. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Having a great time here in France. And I'm curious to know what everyone in the US is doing to celebrate 14th July.

That's not how you spell genocide. www.reuters.com/world/middle...