historically my primary use of a VPN has been … in the course of my work for the British Government, where it is mandatory for a number of critical tasks. i’d love to know if the “tech minister” has spoken about this to anybody who understands computers.

CW: gbpol The idea of Streeting as prime minister is farcical. I think I’d emigrate out of sheer embarrassment.

When you are using the "AI" framing, does the way you talk about "AI" carry water for the Sam Altmans of the world? That is, are you helping to paint a picture of their tech as inevitable, all powerful, and/or anything other than commercial products? >>

I know I’m a cynic but this absolutely does not seem like an appropriate usecase for an “AI chatbot” https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/10/ai-chatbots-stop-prisoner-release-errors

New blog post: Reading (September–October 2025) https://eskola.uk/2025/reading-september-october/

i’ve recently seen the words ‘alderperson’ and ‘ombudsperson’ used, apparently seriously; and while I’m absolutely in favour of gender-neutral language i feel fairly certain that there were other alternatives available here.

doing my periodic thing of checking chatgpt on a topic I actually know about, in this case the workings and limitations of AES-GCM. its responses are at best right-by-accident, and at worst catastrophically incorrect

They made... an AI tool... to make AI... which is already built on actual writing... seem less like slop... JUST DO THE WRITING YOURSELF TO BEGIN WITH JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

love to post a link to someone else’s blog post on bluesky and get someone complaining at me about the title what do you expect me to do about it exactly?

@escalatenow.bsky.social I noticed as I passed the south end of the Greenwich tunnel that although the lift is fenced off the sign was saying that the south lift was in service. I hope the sign at the north end isn’t also claiming the south lift is in service, I worry that people will rely on that.

Long weekend this weekend in order to use up some leave before the end of the year. Using the time to finally sit down and read Crafting Interpreters. Nice and relaxing, you know.

“”AI” is a failed technology. … LLMs haven’t met any markers of success we’d apply to, well, literally any other technology.” Great article by Ethan Marcotte @ethanmarcotte.com ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/agains...

I’m obviously against the death penalty but I do wonder if it should perhaps have been abolished for everybody *except* the royal family. Just to focus their attention, you know.

1) Understand it completely 2) Review it thoroughly 3) Manually fix any problems 4) Assure it integrates with the surrounding code and architecture. 5) Test it exhaustively (and push/submit those tests with the PR) Anything else is unprofessional, bordering on malfeasance. 2/5

I regularly hear about people pushing (and creating PRs) for essentially unreviewed AI-generated work. A "vibe coder" who accepts what the LLM creates without thought is causing more problems than they're worth. It is the responsibility of whoever is using an LLM to write the code to: 1/5

Why are the government making bodies DO this? What possible purpose does it serve other than to make innocent people miserable?

Fun discovery: the #debian installer doesn’t work on my laptop. 12.x installed just fine — but didn’t support my WiFi (I ran testing until Jessie was release.) 13.x _runs_ just fine, but I can’t do a fresh install with the 13.1 installer.

AI is *so fucking bad* at this. I can't find any writing job that AI is just not offensively dogshit at. Yet again, AI boosters literally cannot tell good from bad, they think you're lying when you say you can, and they just will never shut the fuck up about how great drinking piss is.

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

It's increasingly obvious that Labour's strategy - call it Starmerism, Blue Labour, whatever - has got it badly wrong. It has alienated the party's core vote while failing to win over those leaning to Reform. There was no shortage of people warning them they were getting it wrong either.

Every changelog autogenerated from a commit history using #ConventionalCommits is its own argument against ‘Conventional Commits’.

CW: gb politics, labour, monarchy, abuse For a party that still has 'socialist' in its constitution (if that still means anything, or ever did), Labour is embarrassingly eager to defer to the monarchy https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-faces-fight-jeremy-corbyn-prince-andrews-titles-3990774

"it isn't just X—it's Y" is by far the most annoying ChatGPTism

Latest laptop sticker arrived

Fighting with Rails N+1 queries this evening. Add an `includes` to fix the warning in one place, and immediately get a warning popping up elsewhere that I have an unnecessary `includes`. 🙃

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

15 years ago this was a BNP policy, now it’s being pushed by the Tories.

We just use Tailwind.

If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.

Here's a rule of thumb: If "AI" seems like a good solution, you are probably both misjudging what the "AI" can do and misframing the problem. >>

“Control was handed to Greenwich in the 1980s” I’m not saying that everything wrong in this country is because of Thatcher but it happens more than you’d think.

Somehow Bach's St Matthew Passion and St John Passion are all-year-round music, not just for Easter; but the Christmas Oratorio, like Last Christmas by Wham, can only be listened to in December. #ClassicalMusic

Ruby Central said some really concerning things today. I don’t think they’re representing the situation accurately. andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/t...

happiest telecommunications

CW: tech racism and transphobia Ah I see we’re having the “why can’t we keep politics out of discussions about whether we should give money to people who advocate deporting non-white people and exterminating trans people” discussion again.

For the third time in three months I’ve taken my kindle out to find it’s made itself unusable. This time within the space of the five minutes it took to change trains. Am I supposed to be doing firmware updates on the District line just in order to be able to read on the way to work?

"You are a senior Ruby on Rails developer" if only it were that simple

Well that’s a new one on me: just got a key stuck down on my iPhone keyboard. Pressed backspace and it just… kept going. Thanks Apple.

Recently learned Etsy is full of prints of AI-generated garbage being labelled as the work of actual famous artists — e.g. a generic bland glossy picture of a train described as being by Turner. Who buys this shit?

"Don't run Bundler as root. Installing your bundle as root will break this application for all non-root users on this machine." Good thing there won't be any non-root users. Mind your own business and do as you're told #ruby

Have been wanting to figure out how to get the 'copilot' key on my #thinkpad doing something useful in Linux (primarily #Debian ) for a little while and finally sat down to investigate it properly.

Sounds like the solution is to extend the LTN into Charlton. (Frankly, the fundamental problem here is not LTNs, it’s that the average driver is a selfish entitled prick who’ll do anything they can to avoid the rules applying to them.)

We deplore racist attacks at home for the same reason we deplore genocide abroad: we believe in the equal value of human life. My response to calls for the cancellation of peaceful protests for Palestine.

Unhelpful recent genre of post re: the recent #Ruby problems — “oh but ruby is a bad language anyway”. ok? not sure how that helps even if it’s true? but i’m glad that you’re able to be morally superior thanks to your technical choices as a *checks notes* C# developer.

I think I need to adjust my mastodon client’s font in order to better distinguish between Weird AI and Weird Al.

CW: AI/LLM, corporate hype https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/01/anthropic-ai-model-claude-sonnet-asks-if-it-is-being-tested

Hilarious statistics here: www.theguardian.com/politics/202... Starmer has taken a moderately unpopular policy and made it extremely unpopular. The @openrightsgroup.org should give him an award.

Since switching back from macOS to Linux I’ve wanted to start collecting stickers for my laptop again too, something I’d never bothered with on a MacBook for some reason. The first arrived a few days ago:

Implemented an awkward workaround for something in my hobby Rails app. Refactored a couple of times. Eventually noticed a bug in my bodge job. Completely removing the workaround fixed it, and the original issue is also gone. Great, I guess?

New blog post: Reading (July–August 2025) https://eskola.uk/2025/reading-july-august/