I'm currently working on tooling to ingest results for the 2029 UK general election - providing random results for test purposes. In order to see the site work "properly" (as opposed to just on my personal laptop), I'm planning on running this on staging.election2029.uk.

"Dragon" is to "pile of gold" as "cat" is to "coffee machine".

This is a really excellent post, even by the normal Freedman high standards. The timeline of September meetings and events is particularly interesting.

Why do studios pay so little attention to subtitles? I'm just watching something on Disney+, and the subtitles included "H&R". Where's the quality control?

BBC news: "Denmark says 'professional actor' behind drone incursions over its airports" Me: I bet AmDram societies all over Europe are breathing a sigh of relief. ... Me: Oh, *that* kind of professional actor.

One of my favorite poems since childhood, and a poem I share every #autumnequinox. By the 12thc warrior poet Xin Qiji 辛棄疾, sidelined during peacetime, demoted, drifting through a decade of minor posts in remote lands. Poetry, then, is that which is left unsaid. “My, what a cool and lovely autumn.”

@janschne1der.bsky.social Found your account while looking for the #FindingHester tag. Reading it now. It's a small world...

Lib Dems: We have 12x Reform's MPs, can we have the same coverage? BBC: But Reform has 2x your poll rating. If there were an election tomorrow, they'd be running the country. Lib Dems: So you're putting their people and policies under scrutiny, right? BBC: Lib Dems: Right?

On a long weekend away with friends, with a lot of boardgames. (It's so lovely.) I'm considering a variant on Splendor - exactly as normal, but with the top card on each card pile face up, so you know what *will* be available to buy once one of the current cards has gone.

Listening to "Dear Bill" from Operation Mincemeat and crying all over again... and at the same time I'm utterly frustrated that it's tickling some memory of a song from another musical, and I absolutely *cannot* figure out what.

Well that was a fun day. Another theatre double bill - this time "Stranger Things: The First Shadow" and then "Operation Mincemeat". Both excellent - and very, very different from each other...

@moreincommonuk.bsky.social Gentle nudge for the VI tables for August 22nd-26th :)

@wobblygoose.bsky.social Our church (Tilehurst Methodist Church) is going to have four services on Radical Welcome soon - I'm mulling/planning at the moment, and I think some of the linocuts from your web site could be really useful. Would like to discussion permission/licensing.

I'm not a fan of insomnia, but as I was only going to work a half day today anyway, working from 4am to 7:30am where my internal log ends with "Holy mackerel, it works!" feels like a good start to the day. (Admittedly the code that "works" is pretty horrible, and I want to remove it ASAP, but...)

Hint for those submitting a bug report to open source projects: writing "please prioritize" while only providing a repro which contains hundreds of lines of test code with zero explanation does not go down well. (Having the repro is a good thing, of course. Long and unexplained - not so much.)

One for followers who are interested in elections/polling: currently, election2029.uk has navigation items for "Map" and "Sankey". Election geeks might know what to expect from that, but I suspect most folks wouldn't. Do you think "Seat Map" and "Seat Flow" would be better? Any other suggestions?

Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada together in Cabaret in London from late September? Sign me up...

Watching Brie Larson in The Bear and picturing what would happen if she got the parts of Francie Fak and Elektra mixed up (either way round). (Gotta say, enjoying her more as Francie than as Elektra. That probably says terrible things about me.)

Just watching The Bear (S4E4), and Ayo Edebiri is just amazing. Sure, she's working with a great script etc - but wow is she watchable.

Doing a double again today: Hadestown this afternoon (it feels like it's been *ages*) and then Stereophonic this evening. What a day!

Oh joy, I've started the "once every three years" process of getting a personal code signing certificate. Of course, every three years the process has changed a bit - and it's all business-oriented (which is somewhat reasonable) making it a pain to do as an individual...

Follow-up blog post to my previous one about C# records and the "with" operator... now with added Roslyn analyzers: codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2025/07/29/r...

We're watching the presentation at the end of the Euros, and @hollywebb.bsky.social just can't stop being a Girlguiding leader: "They've all just left their water bottles in a pile!" Cue comments of "I hope they've all got their names on..."

I hadn't thought about this before, but I assume that from now on, programming language designers will consider "how easily will AI models be able to use this new feature?" when thinking of language evolution.

First pass at Roslyn analyzers for the "record/with footgun" is now available, albeit very hacky. Two analyzers, one of which requires that you annotate any record parameter used in an initializer with [DangerousWithTarget] (an attribute you declare yourself as DangerousWithTargetAttribute).

Blogged: Unexpected inconsistency in records - codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2025/07/19/u... - if you use C# records and the "with" operator, I'd suggest reading this to avoid a footgun you may be unaware of

So, assuming Musk goes ahead and actually starts a real party, and keeps it going as far as the midterms... I'm guessing it takes more votes from Republicans than Democrats - does that put any House/Senate seats in play that would otherwise be safe Rep?

Gosh. We've just seen Assassins at the Royal Academy of Music - outstanding. Really imaginative costume and makeup, stunningly well acted and sung, wonderful orchestra... just fabulous. I'd urge folks to see it, but tomorrow is the last night and it's sold out.

On the substack this week we have a 25% off for a year offer (ending tomorrow). samf.substack.com/p/special-su...

I believe there are people who believe a cupboard under the stairs doesn't really need a Dante-based speaker and conference room microphone. I'm not one of those people.

Half way through Here We Are, and this by far the oddest Sondheim I've seen. Very funny though, and the cast are magnificent. Could do with a better vocals/orchestra balance, but hey. I'm aware the second act has fewer songs (or none?) - at the moment I've very little idea what will happen.

I'm so fed up of rebooting a Windows machine and having to tell it *yet again* that I don't want to sync my Android device with it, I don't want to move off Chrome to Edge etc. Maybe it only happens once per quarter - but when that's once per quarter *per device* it becomes a more regular annoyance.

Signed Hadestown poster is now framed and hanging in my home office / shed. (In the one space left that isn't taken up with Miro lithographs...)

First time I've seen The Frogs (the Sondheim musical), at Southwark Playhouse. Very, very funny. Just what I needed. (Still laughing at "less fussy, less Fosse...")

Today we found "Years and Years" on Netflix - a near future drama from 2019 about how the UK could slip into authoritarianism. We're half way through the third episode. Obviously plenty of things are a bit off, but there's quite a bit that's uncanny. How have I not heard of this before?

This is a great read - not exactly cheerful Sunday morning fodder, but a really interesting analysis, as ever. (It's a paywalled post, but I've never regretted buying a subscription to Comment is Freed.)

Just had a genuinely positive AI interaction. I copied a Wireshark TCP stream (as hex) into Gemini, explained that the left hand side was a client and the right hand side was a Yamaha audio mixer, and asked me to examine the protocol. It did a really pretty good job, as a starting point.

Interval at Hadestown with Allie Daniel as Hermes. Ooh, she's very good :) (I've been looking forward to seeing her as Hermes since Feb 2024...)

Just out! Our peer-reviewed critique of the Cass Review has been published by BMC Medical Research Methodology. Please read and share. We show that the Cass Review is fatally flawed and should not be the basis for policy or practice in transgender healthcare. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

This is amazing. Long, but amazing. Grab your beverage of choice, get comfortable, and dive in...

I'm having *yet another* go at writing a table of contents for a potential book on diagnostics/troubleshooting. (I've tried several times.) I'm thinking of having a chapter that is the TL;DR of the whole book - the short version of every chapter. Does that sound useful, or ridiculous?

I’ve an appointment with my Lib Dem MP this afternoon. On the basis that an MPs role is to support their constituents, I am taking the approach, how can she support me, the bereaved cis mother of a trans person?

At this point I feel I need to acknowledge that Hadestown is my comfort blanket. I'm on my own today. Could see whatever I want within reason. Quite tempted by The Crucible. But no, it's back to the Lyric theatre for me. (And that's despite seeing it again next Saturday.) It just calls to me...

I'm sure I did clock this last Friday, but I'm struck again by just how many votes were cast for "not one of the five main parties" in Runcorn - 1774 by my reckoning. And a majority of 6. Oh for a transferrable vote system. election2029.uk/constituenci...

First pass at a page showing how seats transitioned between parties in the local elections. Data is partial for reasons explained on the page. election2029.uk/local-electi... Would welcome suggestions/critiques from folks such as @samfr.bsky.social @dylandifford.bsky.social @markpackuk.bsky.social

I'm sure I saw an article (about 48 hours ago) by *someone* on what would constitute a good/bad/meh local election result on a per party basis, but I can't remember who it was. Usual suspects are @samfr.bsky.social, @dylandifford.bsky.social and @lewisgoodall.com but I can't find it. Any ideas?

PSA to anyone with a Behringer Wing who uses Dante. There's a new firmware update available for the Wing, v3.0.6. The release notes say you need to update the Dante firmware - and give fairly scary instructions. Take them seriously. I found that Dante worked a mixer input, but not output.

Watching "The Rubber-Keyed Wonder". About 90 minutes in, there's a montage of *loads* of games, just about a second of each of them. It's like an assault on my memory. I'd forgotten *just* how much I must have played with my ZX Spectrum as a kid. Wow.

Thank you @naomialderman.bsky.social for highlighting the importance of the Spectrum manual on BBCR4 earlier. I learned trigonometry from the manual about 3-4 years before doing it in school - in order to implement Logo on the Spectrum. The Spectrum changed my life.

Okay, so now I have a rather large Dante-enabled pendant speaker (admittedly without the hanging accessories). It sounds great, I love that it only needs a network cable. Absolute bargain (about $60) so I couldn't resist. Not actually sure what I'm going to do with it though...