Abolish the Home Office

🤖 If you use LinkedIn, please be aware that they automatically use your profile to train their GenAI. To turn off, go to Settings > Data Privacy > Data for Gen AI improvements.

The ideas behind agile tend to be squashed down to two words: “move fast”. But the Agile Manifesto says nothing about moving fast.

I’m doing a talk at Button, a content design conference, where I’m going to talk about the high cost of tooling in the work we do. I’ve made a survey so I can capture some numbers. If you work in content/design/adjacent (yes, ESPECIALLY if you’re unemployed) this is for you (and thanks!)

I ran my first ever race in Maryland at a vineyard with my mom. After a long stretch of hot weather, I appreciated getting a cooler morning for a run. Blog recap: bit.ly/bordeleau-5k25

A question for people in civil partnerships, (or maybe plan to be). Shares appreciated! How do you feel when you see the word 'spouse' in advice content? For example, do you feel excluded? Are you ever unsure whether it applies? Or do you feel it covers you and you don't really mind? Maybe a mix?

Getting tinnitus terrified me at first, but I’ve learned to live with it. Here’s how I went from an anxiety-filled beginning to life sounding ‘normal’: bit.ly/life-with-tinnitus

today's a great day to make sure "require alt text before posting" is enabled in your settings and to continue to make bluesky more accessible and inclusive bsky.app/settings/acc...

Services are verbs combined with nouns

The UK Home Office, always capable of an even more absurd decision than the previous one

❝Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.❞ arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

I ran the Seven Hills of Edinburgh with @jr-wilson.bsky.social, and I feel shattered for it. A good challenge, but I don’t think I’ll run it again! Blog recap: bit.ly/7-hills25

I know this battle is lost, but: Can we stop calling it “hallucinating”? They’re not tripping, they’re doing what they’re designed to do: generate a series of statistically likely sentences. The technology doesn’t care whether the sentences are accurate, as long as they’re statistically likely.

also it is frankly *outrageous* that news articles are leading with "Lowering UK’s income requirement for family visas would increase net migration". family visas are like 3% of annual migration, oh no people married to british citizens might make it go up by 5% or whatever

It is not just the increase to the Minimum Income Requirement which needs scrapping, it is MIR in general. This is a policy which see families ripped apart, and people denied the ability to be with their loved ones, purely because of where one of them was born. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

There's been a high-pitched ringing in my right ear for the last six months. Here's the story of the illness and ill-advised plane travel that led to me getting tinnitus: bit.ly/how-got-tinn... TL;DR Learn from my mistake, and do not ever fly if you cannot pop your ears.

“64% of CEOs told IBM that they are investing in AI without knowing what value it will bring. Unsurprisingly, it’s not bringing value. That same report says that 3 in 4 AI initiatives don’t justify the expense.” Recommended reading.

I got British citizenship via the five-year route. Labour’s new 10-year rule will cause untold pain | Nesrine Malik

My team has done some experiments with GenAI to edit content. We’ve found it to be unreliable and more time-consuming than manually editing content. Not surprising given it’s a probable word predictor that lies. I don't want my job to be babysitting technology. edin.ac/genai-experiments

ukgov is reportedly looking to make it longer to settle for people already in the uk, as opposed to "just" those who come here post-rule changes. so if you've moved here since 2020, you may have the goalposts shifted on you. terrible, terrible stuff www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A lot has been said about Labour's hardening of immigration rules & dehumanising rhetoric, but nobody is sharing the opinions of migrant workers. That's why we commissioned Nandi Msezane, a care worker in East Sussex, to write this piece for us. www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025...

"The 10-year route is not a pathway—it’s a punishment, forcing families into poverty and robbing people of their most productive years. Where we come from should not deny us the right to belong." Anna, Praxis campaigner Read more from Anna in our full statement👇 www.praxis.org.uk/news/praxis-...

this is not an exaggeration

OK - but how much of these worries are actually rooted in the factual reality of immigration, versus how it is reported on and has been talked about for decades now? For one: it is already SO HARD to come to this country. It's super expensive and there are a shitload of hurdles to get over!

Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water. A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

I’m declaring tomorrow, May 9, #ShortsFriday 2025. #ShortsFriday is my annual tradition where I honor the first Friday of the year that is both sunny and warm enough in Edinburgh to wear shorts. 1/2

My first book report in a while. Here are my 4 takeaways from Alison Coward’s book Workshop Culture: bit.ly/workshop-culture-report

Avoid using emoji as bullet points in social media posts. An emoji has a coded description that gets read by screen readers, and thus could confuse users who think that's part of the content. If you can't use standard lists, use dashes for bullet points or add line breaks.

Numbers Labour could publish on foreign born people instead of criminal history: 😀Windrush without compensation 😀People who have experienced hate crime 😀Stats on NRPF that they refuse to publish 😀Stats on race/ethnicity that they refuse to publish 😀Visas denied due to racist decision making

'Anywhere But Here' is only 99p on Kindle for a limited period. Go go go! amzn.eu/d/6vfyNly

"If you really need to tell people where something is, think about writing better content instead of using directions or locations." Lots of great advice in this post on how and why to avoid things like 'see above' and 'link below' in website content. 🙌

The pain in a name — Is information architecture right to call itself architecture? I have long felt uneasy about modern occupations associating themselves with high-status traditional professions.

This thread is a good round up of all the specific bad things Labour are doing around immigration and refugees. Bragging about deportation is only the tip of the iceberg.

Relatedly: emojipedia is your friend. Look up the emoji you want to use and check the technical information tab to find how it will be read out by screen reading software. Never use emojis as bullet points for that reason, and try to only put them at the end of a post. 😊 #accessibility #content

I wrote a recap of what the content designers in my team did in this project. We also wrote some reflections on how we found the experience. I'm so proud of each of them for the ways they've grown through this project. Here's what we've been up to the last 4 years: edin.ac/content-desi... 6/6

Monday marked my 10th anniversary of working (continuously) at the University of Edinburgh. It was also the day my team went live with our new degree finder and study site for prospective undergraduates. 1/6

I'm running a tree test to help me understand if the information architecture I've designed for my website makes sense and is easy to use. It takes 5-10 minutes to complete and the results will be so valuable to me. Take it here: uxmetrics.com/collect_tt/5...

This is a rgreat breakdown, complete with excellent citations, about why Gen AI/LLMs may not be the tool for most of us. I also agree that the normative/political arguments are the most important. Maybe we can use the “not there yet” ones to start, but by asking where “there” is and who defines it?

We're reaching the end of the first phase of a new journey, with the launch of new provision for prospective students next month. As a team we've been reflecting on how things have gone: blogs.ed.ac.uk/future-stude... I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

4. This is bad full stop. It creates a class of person who are forever excluded from civic life no matter how long they live here. It's also a a clear breach of the Refugee Convention. And it will also, just as clearly, have zero deterrent effect. It's totally pointless in real-world policy terms.

Labour have changed the rules on applying for British citizenship to prevent most refugees from *ever* getting it, if they arrived by small boat or entered using forged documents, for any reason, on the basis that it means they’re permanently not “of good character”.

We are understanding the opportunities that can be provided by better structuring our information. We are using a variety of robust information architecture techniques, including an increasingly popular method called object-oriented user experience (OOUX)

“Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship.” In other words, using AI turns humans into checkers/editors/managers of AI products, not original thinkers.

This is what we've been warning would happen.Now imagine that it is an employer or landlord who don't understand how evisas work, and there will be many. The government needs to step in and take action to ensure that people are not left in precarious positions. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

I felt more satisfied with racing in 2024, getting to run half my races with loved ones and not feeling unfulfilled by any of them. I want to build back my strength in 2025 after my longest run-free spell due to illness. Running in 2024 recap: bit.ly/running-2024

I set a New Year’s resolution to begin writing my memoir about my immigration experience. A year in, I’m about halfway through at over 50,000 words. Here are some reflections on the writing process so far: bit.ly/memoir-progress

My partner @jr-wilson.bsky.social and I had a couples New Year’s resolution this year to cook a new dish each month. Here’s what we made and what we thought. bit.ly/new-dish-2024

Screen reader users wanted for accessibility testing. Preferably members of the LGBTQ+ community. See thread for details. #AccessibilityTesting #Screenreaders #LGBTQ

Next year’s scandal, in which people get made unemployed or even destitute, or get expelled from the UK, bc of problems with the Home Office’s digital visas, has been so widely predicted, and the HO’s lack of concern so obvious, that you’ve got to assume those affected just don’t matter to it at all

anyone who claims the uk has "open borders" has a) not had to deal with the home office and b) is wrong, lying, or both. ask a student, a work visa holder, any spouse, any refugee what kind of fun old open borders time they had of things upon first contact with the home office