I know one shouldn't anthropomorphise chatbots. But I think Claude Code gets into a bit of a sulk if I nitpick its code for too long. It's not what it says, but the tone of voice it says it in.

My level of interest in the opinions of former Prime Ministers: Major, Brown: hmmm, maybe Cameron, May, Sunak: no thank you Blair, Johnson, Truss: get to fuck

You'll need to go for a long walk to calm down after you read how the UK got to here on trans rights. If you're only ever going to read one piece on trans people, this would be the one.

Just a reminder that both seasons of A Very Peculiar Practice are now available on iPlayer. Once you've seen the series, please consider taking a look at our recent podcast about it: youtu.be/FFxzLa67PC0?...

There are days when I miss being an editor. I loved writing headlines. Whoever did this, I hope they took the rest of the day off.

Surprised to discover this morning that if UK users of X report hate crimes as "hate, abuse or harassment", the new X commitments to Ofcom to assess illegal hate and terror content do NOT apply! They only apply when users choose the option "UK Illegal Content or Content Harmful to Children"

I was struck by these buildings when I passed them while visiting Vienna several years ago (a city that is not short of impressive sights).

Downright exhausted

Current bugbear: hack writers using the term "math" to embellish straightforward quantitative reasoning.

have British politics nerds properly absorbed the fact that Steve Hilton is going to be the Republican nominee for Governor of California? like, David Cameron's Steve Hilton. Steve "what if we didn't wear shoes to cabinet meetings" Hilton. anyway he's a full-on ethnofascist now. and also Californian

"Inequality" can refer to different things. One could agree that the UK does well in p10 vs p90 income, while considering the concentration of wealth in the top 1% or 0.1% to be problematic.

Experts found that the White House budget request for the upcoming fiscal year could defund 54 NASA science missions, including a spacecraft currently studying Jupiter and two planned Venus missions: www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

I assumed that the Panama Canal runs east-west. But Panama is located with the Atlantic (Caribbean sea) to the North and the Pacific to the South. The Pacific end of the canal is east of the Atlantic end!

Has anyone written a deep-dive article into the UK gov's Making Tax Digital program? UK freelancers complaining about it is a recurring topic in my feed.

TIL that the island of Java has 63% the land area of the island of Great Britain, and more than double the population. The Jakarta metropolitan area alone has 42 million residents (it's currently the world's most populous city).

I am sceptical about aspects of the Artemis program, and about manned spaceflight in general. But it is still inspiring to see Artemis II preparing to launch, and I hope it goes smoothly.

So Kier Starmer held a press conference to announce that Yvette Cooper is setting up a Zoom call?

How many people that read this on supermarket shelves will find out it was all bullshit?

Gershon Kingsley's original "Pop Corn" from 1969 has a slightly different melody to the later versions that were hits in the 70s: open.spotify.com/track/3J0qpj...

This is the most compelling analysis of the UK's housing supply issues I've seen yet. substack.com/@chriscollin...

"February" sees the same effect in many British accents that "mirror" exhibits in rhotic American accents: two 'r' consonants separated by unstressed vowels tend to merge into a lengthened voiced 'r' ("febrrrry", "mirrrr"). Hence this spelling error.

I never eat cinema popcorn myself, but I assumed they still made it fresh on site.

NEW BLOGPOST: Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty For any MP unsure of how to vote on the government’s proposals to restrict trial by jury.

"Sometimes you've got to cut a little piece of yourself off, no matter how much it hurts, in order to grow."

You probably guessed where this is going: the entire "anti-woke moral panic of the last five years is an absolutely *textbook* example of how horrors happen. It was never going to stop with bathrooms or sports or HR policies.

I accidentally bought "no added sugar" baked beans, and now I appreciate why they add sugar.

Might hedge Butlerian Jihad risk by founding a mentat school.

Not long now

This is a real Stafford Beer example; you can't problems of low standards with regulation, the variety matching just doesn't work. Of course you can't solve them with deregulation either... www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“The Times newspaper horks up a terrifying national panic using a few dubious examples and an avalanche of roaring wingnut pundit insanity, with appalling consequences” is the type of thing you could say and have people ask, “I don’t know which one you mean, can you be much more specific than that”.

Settlement is a right that should not take decades. Please read our full statement and sign on in solidarity to raise your voice against these racist and classist "proposals". jcwi.org.uk/updates/stat...

So tired of court intrigue bullshit dominating Westminster politics.

So did Elon buy the twitter debt back from the banks at a discount, before turduckenning it into SpaceX at face value? Probably impossible to confirm, but hilarious if so. Of course, $13B seems like peanuts when trillion dollar valuations are being thrown around.

Sunlit uplands youtu.be/kGNgTz1Rqfw?...

Morning-me filing a lawsuit against nighttime-me for 10 billion dollars.

I will be attending #fosdem this weekend! Turns out it's been ten years since my last time...

TIL the USA recognised Denmark's claim to Greenland in the 1916 treaty that gave it control of the US Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_...

So is the interim report about the West Midlands Police Chief Constable publicly available so I can read what it actually says, or is UK politics just doing its usual thing?

The part of immigration that they do control, they strangle - squeezing the people who staff care homes, schools & hospitality. The part they don’t control - the boats - they REFUSE to do the one thing that would give them control - establishing regulated alternative routes🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Thinking of the Linda Smith line from the time of the Iraq war: The problem is somehow our oil has ended up under their sand.

Reminds me of my post from the old place.

I have wondered how hard it would be to replace that list of words with "polluting", "incinerating", "despoiling", etc.

Shout out to the 80s software company called Arnor that made the best assembler for the Amstrad CPC line of home computers. They were, as far as I know, not evil. www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Ar...

Nobody can read this from @davidallengreen.bsky.social and not think the UK's unwritten constitution is fit for purpose. The UK is more exposed to authoritarianism that any established Western democracy. Wake up! You need a constitution. Even a revolution. 1

"Sometimes you've got to cut a little piece of yourself off, no matter how much it hurts, in order to grow."

HOW IS THIS REAL

We have managed to send an object 6 basis points of the way to the nearest star (or the second nearest, if you like). That's pretty good! As the guide says: Space is big. Really big.

Not sure if I'm in a low mood because I've got Clannad's "Theme from Harry's Game" stuck in my head, or if I've got Clannad's "Theme from Harry's Game" stuck in my head because I'm in a low mood.

So is FIFA gonna give out a second peace prize in four years time? Or pretend this never happened. Or lean in and award a FIFA prize for literature too?