Igloo my son & girlfriend built at New Year is still standing! (Uppsala, Sweden, featuring a guest spot by Ruby Dog).

The Grok "response" really does sum up Starmer's government: The inability to make even a very simple decision A complete lack of morality Incoherent and contradictory rhetoric Shifting the responsibility to someone else SpAds running policy for their benefit Eventual reversal of policy

No shit eh @suecowley.bsky.social

My train was supposed to leave at 13h47 and we are still in Toulouse. Already eaten my consolation cookies. Gonna be a long journey home.

It's a very high bar but tempted to say this is the second stupidest British government of my lifetime and it unfortunately has a much longer shelf life than the stupidest one.

The premises... that this is anything to do with being a cop [the pardon of Honduras' ex President! Trying to coerce Ukraine! operation having no legal basis in US!]... that Trump is part of what the rest of us understand as 'Western civilization'.

This is all very well, but why haven’t British parliamentarians and members of government taken any formal action against X, as several of their French counterparts have done? www.politico.eu/article/fran...

At least some French politicians seem to be taking appropriate action over CSAM and non-consensual sexual images on X. www.politico.eu/article/fran...

Es ist wieder soweit! It's time to take down and responsibly dispose of your xmas tree. Please consider the Christmas tree cannon

Fascinating thread but I don't feel it's that complicated? This is what happens when you go out of your way to performatively kick your own coalition in the hope of impressing voters who never liked you to start with.

Brings a new meaning to ‘disruptive technology’. The Waymo outage in SF is pretty funny, but underlines how potentially dangerous AVs might be in a civic emergency.

In case anyone reading my posts this morning thinks I'm an apologist for the car industry - I'm a cyclist and public transport enthusiast who gets in a car perhaps a dozen times a year ;) I would personally like to see fewer cars full stop (regardless of powertrain).

Back home from a work trip to a sparkly clean and neat house. As my OH said to me, with some justification, ‘it’s much easier to keep the house tidy and free of clutter without you in it’ 🤣

At St Pancras Eurostar. Discovered that there is a water fountain, but it's so well hidden that you really have to know where to look. (For fellow travellers: it's at the right hand end of the 'station pantry' counter).

British trains are so noisy! Thank god for noise cancelling headphones.

Kinda surprised no one just picked it up and put it on the road, where an autonomous vehicle should be.

"How Do You Avoid Hitting People with your Car" mini guide. Now in French! 🇫🇷

Guy who claimed he could make boobs grow with the power of his mind says he can also perform magic with the economy. This is completely unsurprising, why are people acting shocked.

I came to this country as a child refugee. No English, no certainty, no idea what my life could become. Britain gave me refuge. Not on a timer, not with conditions attached, but with a chance to grow roots. A thread 🧵 1/8 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Tax policy on the British left is pure "anti-bedtime left". Bizarre idea that you can have a big social democratic welfare state without everyone contributing properly www.economist.com/britain/2025...

I’ve just discovered that: “The term captcha—Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart—was coined by researchers in 2003.” From @charlesarthur.bsky.social’s morning newsletter.

Actually lol-ed at this. Entirely consistent with my personal experience of AI! Is this what we are burning our planet for? We deserve go extinct.

Garden strawberries in November 😲

It's 1€ train weekend in Occitanie. Heading into Toulouse, just because. Platform was rammed - good to see lots of other people taking advantage of cheap fares rather than driving! *will take the opportunity to go bouldering and see my son

I’ve experimented with using an LLM for the bits of my job I like least (writing press releases that will get through the corporate comms review process) and the result was garbage. And I tried using one for the part of my job I like (the research) and it just made shit up!

This might be what finally puts the nail in my own Labour support. I accept that left-wing voters can’t afford purity tests, but if Labour can’t commit to defending very basic rights, wtf is the point of them? But not sure where else my vote could go (certainly not to magic-boob-expanding man).

So much wrong in the NHS that is not just about money. Sam’s account chimes with my chaotic NHS A&E experience last year, when I felt the least safe I have *ever* felt (if I ever fall ill in the UK again I will be on the first Flixbus to Paris before it has a chance to get more serious).

Pretty much sums up why I would never cast a vote for the Greens (despite being green both in name and in political leanings).

Hop not Hate

My kid took an amazing photo and gave me permission to share it. Love this. ♥️

Garden still producing almost all the veg we need in late September.

Why is the U.K. - with its poor track record of large govt IT projects - so obsessed with making everything digital? What’s wrong with a physical card like the credit-card-sized ones we carry in France?

Wonder if this guy thinks of *himself* as an ‘immigrant’, an ’economic migrant’ or an ‘expat’? 🤔

timeline cleanse: franky watches the garbage truck pick up the trash this morning

Written by a doctor at St Thomas' Hospital, London after the Tommy Robinson march on 13/9.

Love this idea. My son took up UBEG (actually, his big sister’s strat) at 14 and has never looked back. Hugely beneficial socially and personally.

One policy solution to Young Men we should be considering is Universal Basic Electric Guitar (UBEG). I'm not joking, by the way. Kids of any gender should get a low-cost starter kit for some hobby of their choosing once they turn 13. A camera, paints, a cheap sampler, etc.

It *looks* amazing but my attempts to use AI for work tasks mostly fail: - summarise a report for a press release: superficially OK but unusable - extract data from a report: just made up the numbers - scour public domain docs for info on electrode materials in a device: it ‘lied‘ repeatedly

This gets progressively funnier with every use of the term "floppy".

The sort of utter nonsense that discredits the environmental movement and indeed the scientific method. Drivers, walkers, and indeed electric bike users all have to eat. Most cycling takes place over short distances and uses fewer calories than walking the same distance.

Great piece. I once had a small translation business; was pretty lucrative but then machine translation arrived. I refused post-editing jobs and hung up my boots in 2022. I have a day job in another field so I’m OK, but it’s terrible for younger translators, and for anyone who cares about quality.

Took a week off work to do some DIY, chose the hottest week in history.

Ces cartographies proviennent de l'association à but non lucratif Infoclimat, la vigie du changement climatique : un réseau ouvert et gratuit en temps réel, qui lève un financement participatif depuis hier pour installer de nouvelles stations météorologiques en France : ulule.com/infoclimat

Stripping old wallpaper in the spare room on the hottest day of the year. Using a steamer and it's turned the room into a sauna. At least now the rest of the house (currently 30c) feels like a fridge.

What did they think would happen? I’m about the same age as Starmer. I cannot understand how anyone under 70 could be so naive about young (and not so young) people and technology.

Today's haul from the garden, not including the onion and peppers that have already been snaffled by my OH for tonight's meal

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

It's 'black Saturday' (half the French population is on the move) so of course our local train service is only once every 2 hours instead of every 30-60 mins and my train is absolutely packed.

I often feel sorry for the IT bods at work, but then they do something insane like putting in place a blanket block on Russian websites (which I need to visit for my work on critical minerals) 😡🤪🤐