I 100% agree with this, and on a related note, I really want to build an atproto implementation of @octopus-ac.bsky.social, because it would be the best thing.

Funneling scholars into a few major platforms isn’t just annoying, it’s corrosive to intellectual freedom. Institutions should support researchers moving to more democratic and decentralized alternatives. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

All of Tom's games are exceptional, go buy them!

Doing a fireworks night without a single K Pop Demon Hunters song should be an actual crime

is anybody apart from Anthropic supporting the new agent skills yet? Building quite a weary MCP implementation, and strikes me that using Skills would just be way easier...

Nick, Nick, Nick... #TheTraitorsUK #TheTraitors

The extremely strange afterlife of the Xbox Kinect camera, which came out 15 years ago today: www.theguardian.com/games/2025/m...

Secret Maps opens today! 🤫 🗺️ From medieval manuscripts to Cold War espionage, our new exhibition explores how maps have hidden as much as they revealed for over 600 years. Book now: bit.ly/BLSecretMaps

This is excellent. @tangled.org continues to be one of the single most impactful projects on ATProto, it's really worth checking out if you haven't yet!

Vibe coding yourpolice.events got me excited for the potential of vibe coding and public data APIs, so I wrote a hot take on what the National Data Library should be for... andreasthinks.me/posts/nation...

This week's FT column: why I've stopped worrying about birthrates:

I wish I had internalised this two years ago but it was a different world and a different game. I'm just grateful I've moved away from this all or nothing mindset now

Omg, the solution to CIA's Kryptos being discovered by someone becoming a subject matter expert, going on location, and finding the plaintext sitting in a vault several miles away is the absolute *perfect* ending to Kryptos. You couldn't write it. Just absolutely A+ www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/s...

I am very excited (and not sure Waymo know what they're in for. Mostly roundabouts)

This seems notable - on current data, the 90 homicides recorded by the Metropolitan Police in the year to August 2025 is the lowest 12-month total since the monthly data started in 2003. #crimestats

Don’t move to Dubai — this is still the place to be - on.ft.com/3KQ8utE via @FT

ICYMI: Last week got grumpy trying to reach my local police Safer Neighbourhoods Team, so built yourpolice.events, that automatically adds upcoming events from your local policing team to your calendar and keeps it up to date.

Found my Nine Worlds #geekfest program from 2015, and now I'm nostalgic and sad 😭

Star Sword Nemesis is now available! Read about the most fashionable girl in a utopian collective of Trans-Neptunian Objects falling in love with her fencing instructor, the deadliest turncoat milf in all of space, feat. art by @mightyatom.bsky.social! loveconquersallgames.itch.io/star-sword-n...

I know statistics are poorly understood and are misused. But facts matter Between the 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2021 Census *every* ethnic group in the UK has become *less* geographically segregated and *all* groups, majority and minorities, are more likely to interact with people not like them

Okay, so what you're going to do is get some friends together. They don't all have to be radical leftists but they do at least need to believe that borders are fake. They also need to think that the sentiment of NASA's Voyager record is the coolest thing ever but that's easy because who doesn't?

Why I don't believe in "small giants": mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/team-dy...

ICYMI: Last week got grumpy trying to reach my local police Safer Neighbourhoods Team, so built yourpolice.events, that automatically adds upcoming events from your local policing team to your calendar and keeps it up to date.

Folks need to be paying attention to the growth of Real-Time Crime Centers. It is not just NYC, but they tend to lead on these things. www.biometricupdate.com/202510/nypd-...

Have I Got Fake News For You takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/have-i-got...

Fellow endless procrastinators and #Obsidian users, built something for us this morning: Timed Posts, a plugin that gives you 60 minutes to complete your post... or permanently deletes it. Commit to writing the thing! (and yes, I built this instead of Writing The Post) github.com/AndreasThink...

BBC apologises for false claim about Tony Blair's son's company being awarded a govt contract for digital ID www.politicshome.com/news/article...

So had to contact my local police Safer Neighbourhood Team this week, and had *A Bad Time*, so built a thing: Your Police Events, a service that automatically updates your calendar with events from your local policing team. Would welcome some testers! yourpolice.events

Jaw-dropping error – and not just a throwaway quip but part of the script. Someone is getting a massive telling-off for this. (I bet it will be chopped out of the iPlayer edit too.) Here‘s how the digital ID system will actually work: takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/how-the-uk...

This is astonishingly poor. How does @vcorenmitchell.bsky.social the *host* of @hignfy.bsky.social say something so verifiably, obviously wrong?!

Absolutely astonished @hignfy.bsky.social just stated that Multiverse will be running the government's digital ID scheme An incredibly basic failure of fact-checking fullfact.org/technology/d...

Lots of discussion on this trends on X. So what's going on here? I totally understand not investing in UK equities (US returns are better) but why the large increase in bonds? Investing in US equities for last decade has been good free money. Why are pension funds turning their nose at that?

On a linked note, I continue to find it deeply depressing there isn't a nice web-based client for my laptop like @openvibe.social that lets me see and post on Bsky and Mastodon (and ideally X).

I'm sometimes reminded how good Twitter (and online discourse more broadly) was in the Good Old Days, and it makes me sad. X is wonderful for some AI content, but I miss being on hopeful platforms that brought everyone together. I suspect the economics never really made sense, but it's still sad.

New Policy Brief! Domestic abuse: improving risk assessment and response by the police? Evidence and recommendations from Tom Kirchmaier, @drekaterinaoparina.bsky.social, Jeffrey Grogger, and @riaivandic.bsky.social Written by @aadyabahl.bsky.social Read more at: cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/d...

Nobody asked for it. We did it anyway. If you ever used Winamp during the later years, it had an awesome, awesome visualizer called Milkdrop. The Webamp people implemented a workalike called Butterchurn. Internet Archive now supports Webamp and Butterchurn. Just click on the llama!

academy award contending tiktok

The amount of disinformation around the proposed UK electronic id is striking. The combination of TBI globalist paranoia/big tech leading to general tech distrust is striking. The below is total disinformation, but of course has millions of views.

Tomorrows World report about the internet from 1994 is fascinating while dealing me 100 points of psychic damage per second www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZ5...

Hey. It’s my birthday. If you’d like to make my day, you could sign up as a paid subscriber to my substack. I’m building back up after a couple of years of burnout, and I’m excited to be back writing- and your support would mean a lot. lauriepenny.substack.com

Just wanted to mention here that I wrote an ENTIRE BOOK about a future utopian society based on perpetual mass migration. You should read it :)

Also damn I love @openvibe.social

I'm jetlagged and visiting #Montreal, and my first impression is very much "i wish London had stuff open this early in the morning". Thank you Tim Horton, whoever you are, for this blessed coffee.

The Rogue Trader gateway drug is real.

How the government's new digital ID will work… and why I’ve changed my mind on ID cards (FREE TO READ!) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/how-the-uk...

Feels like UK tech has found itself in a potentially interesting space this week - if you want to work for big US tech companies, London might be the best place to do it. (And also if they want to hire top tier talent without paying an ever growing wage premium)

It's the 30th anniversary of the hackeriest movie of all time. Hack the planet! Original post: masto.hackers.town/@phaedr0s/11...

🧵 Big news, we've just released our first update! Lots of improvements, including... - Hugely atproto integration and querying! - Book comments + pages! Leave comments everywhere - Cross-post books to other shelves! And lots more!

How much are phones and social media to blame for mental health struggles in adolescence? go.nature.com/4gmdbXL

Well, this seems deeply silly and unintended.