In news that will shock precisely 0% of women, MET Police still not dealing with rotten apples.

The Boring Fund will be open for applications in November. If your small UK charity needs (up to) £200 to cover something boring like insurance or web hosting, take a look. They welcome donations too.

Who do I know in gov digital land currently running a service that they are proud of? You could be product, delivery or service owner. Looking to get some exposure to what good looks like, for a team who are still finding their feet.

But I never thought leopards would eat my face? Thinking of all the unbelievably anxious pregnant women in the US today.

Useful reminder from Peter Kellner on the problems we refuse to acknowledge are getting better, and the politics of hopelessness that this breeds open.substack.com/pub/kellnerp...

Labour sleaze is BACK baby!!! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

What about the men who were died of rape injuries in Israeli prisons? The many men and women shot when trying to collect flour? The children who have died from starvation. What about, what about, what about... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Extremely strange deep sea creatures are my bag so I'm delighted to read: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

30 people murdered by the IDF whilst trying to get aid yesterday. 30 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Former supreme court justice Jonathan Sumption in the New Statesman: Israel's conduct in Gaza is a war crime www.newstatesman.com/world/middle...

Virtue signalling but screw it, just cancelled Spotify premium, interested to feel the real impact. Tips on where to stream music welcome (only real time I get to listen to music or audiobooks is on long solo drives nowadays)

Israel decided to kill 15 men, women and children in Gaza who were queuing up for nutritional supplements today. One witness asked, 'for what sin were they killed?' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Where do all the scouse hipsters go for glasses then? In need of a new optician now I no longer have www.eyeyesheffield.co.uk round the corner :(

I really felt for Rachel Reeves in tears today. To not be able to show emotion when (no doubt) exhausted is an unreal standard to hold people to.

The worst egg www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Can you possibly even imagine enduring the horror of being displaced many times throughout Gaza for the past eighteen months. To see your family and friends perish. To not have enough to eat or drink. To live in a tent at best. And then die from IDF gunfire whilst queueing for militarized aid.

Here is what can happen when we design with and around the people who use and look after government services Note the considerations of maintenance costs #GovDesign

On the summer going-to-local-park-with-toddler-every-day beat

I don't usually consider myself outright anti-capitalist. Until I read something like this, and then I want to grab a sledgehammer

I keep catching strays from "technology is neutral" people, so let's set things straight. 1) Technology is not neutral, especially the subset of technology called "algorithms" 2) The form-factor that makes a technology into a tool is not neutral 3) How tools are productized is not neutral [rant]

Often the places I visit to write my Guardian Country Diary pieces impact on me, but none more so than this urban orchard. There was a special spirit to the place & I cannot find the words to convey that fully. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

African workers labeling data and providing content moderation are the invisible backbone of AI development. They perform critical labor under challenging conditions, often for minimal pay, yet remain absent from our conversations about the AI value chain.

'Don't use biology to support your views in the same way racists do'

I support assisted dying in principle, even though every article I read about people's stories leaves me in tears. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Moving house, selling some stuff. Why does every interaction with Facebook Marketplace feel like putting a blender in my brain? Two scammers so far already.

Each individual’s action to resist fascism feels small and insignificant — such as switching from a shop that collaborates with Trump to one that stands up to him — but together all these individual actions make a big impact. So each small act by each individual matters.

There’s a real link between AI writing and Silicon Valley meal replacement drinks and the entire fuckin swath of maximizing the human experience and it’s that they view pleasure as being unhelpful to life. I don’t want a drink that replaces a meal, I don’t want a book summary, I want to savor things

Clean energy powered 40% of global electricity in 2024, report finds

German media I beg you one day just please go just one day without being obsessed with migration. One day. I promise it won’t kill you. You have lakes and mountains and good football and good healthcare and asparagus. You’ll be fine.

Anyone who thinks the UK can negotiate with Trump and still thinks there is a "Special Relationship" should pay close attention to this.

Deeply strange entering middle-age at a time in world history where things are getting measurably worse. Just a continual psychic struggle of “is this fogeyism or are things just not what they used to be?”

In December, I wrote a piece about people's declining ability to process information, to distinguish fact from opinion, etc, and how this might soften us up to become overly-dependent on AI. You could read it, but this guy just summarised it in two tweets!

The rollback of DEI is really wild to me. All these bigs orgs put so much energy into this stuff and now they're just folding instantly without the slightest resistance. It just shows that it was all fake. It wasn't a reflection of values at all if they just retreat immediately.

Find someone who wants to reach out to you like your local storage facility.

We aren't exaggerating that this is resegregation. www.npr.org/sections/sho...

'Mums say' makes the individuals involved seem so diminutive. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Listening to the Tim Harford radio 4 doc about how children suffered from a lockdown imposed to protect adults, straight after a news bulletin full of 'young people with MH problems need to get back to work to save us all a fortune' is I have to say fairly jarring

prediction vs reality

My son's nursery has been hosting some eggs that have now hatched into baby chicks, which is all just charming. However, the chicks are being collected at the end of this week by the company providing the 'paid package'. The outlook for the chicks is... not good, is it

Great essay on what's going on in GDS Platforms, even with a misleading title (I'll wait to see quite how ruthlessly DOGE focuses on user needs) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/login-to-a...

Only a minority of employees have ‘extremely’ or ‘highly’ stable earnings across the year. Read 'Unstable pay' now to learn more 👉 buff.ly/o82JiA4

Sowerby Bridge Mouse Show, St John's Ambulance rooms, West Yorkshire, 1978, by Martin Parr.

I will say it’s refreshing to have a supervillain create a fleet of actual things (cars, dealerships, chargers) out and about that we can get our anger out on. Deleting your Facebook account does not feel nearly as satisfying.

Ursula le Guin, on the accusation that fantasy is an escape from reality

Wish I were one of Elon's kids so I'd never see him again

Alternative headline - house prices become more affordable for local young people and young families? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Businesses: "Our users will use our product exactly the way we think they will, and it will always work as we intended". Humans: Hold my beer.... youtube.com/shorts/CWE41...

The end of 20/25 year PFI contracts - and the hundreds of schools, prisons and hospitals' future that is uncertain is a result - is going to be a huge wake up call. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'm afraid what risks 'hollowing out' London is property prices, foreign consortia owning countless empty buildings, rental costs, the decimation of nightlife, gentrification and Pretification and the demise of in person shopping. It should be somewhere we want to go not have to.

Sheffield city centre on a Sunday afternoon in February is a hostile level of depressing