AndreasThinks

The inaugural run of my Blood Bowl based benchmark, Bot Bowl Bench, is nearly done! Opus 5.5 stormed to the lead in the original games, but since adding Gemini Argon this week, it is giving it a serious run for it's money... Only 20 more matches before the first victorious model is crowned!

In the proudest tradition of utterly failing to relax on holiday, I've updated my "Open Govtech Index": all the government open source repos I could find, classified and tracked, so you can see what government is building (and hopefully reuse some of it!) www.govtechindex.cloud

In a previous life, I worked in the London Metropolitan Police Strategic Insight Unit (SIU). We did lots of excellent research, and most never got released publicly... except I've just found lots of it was FOI'd! I've collected it all here, hope it's useful! andreasthinks.me/posts/siu-re...

Life has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. We all use the internet far more, and are far less likely to read books, host friends, attend parties, play cards, attend classes, join clubs, go to picnics, and stay late to work. www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-...

this is the hardest image i've ever seen in my life

So America.gov is out, and it's making me a bit reflective... More than a year ago, the then Secretary of State for Peter Kyle launched the GOV.UK app. It included a digital driving license and damn good AI chat. Now? Somehow, nobody knows about it. It has fewer than 500 reviews. Sigh.

Conclusion: damn fools, I'm old. And games are god damn great.

Police body-worn cameras have not been a panacea in reducing police use of force johnshjarback.substack.com/p/police-bod...

I need more judges for my experiment in AI music composition! Come listen to some pretty eclectic AI music, and tell me which is worse! www.noteduel.com

I need more people to come judge AI music! Come vote on NoteDuel, my hot new AI benchmark! www.noteduel.com

Jennifer Arcuri and Rupert Lowe ganging up on Boris Johnson truly is the strangest timeline

Spent the day doing cool AI shit, now sat in a bar in a arctic seaside down, having a beer and watching Robot Wars. This forward deployed engineering malarkey ain't half bad.

I humbly present my contribution to the WoW Forever discourse.

The Telegraph asking the tough questions

So the Control Resonant ZA-UM Atelier collaboration is disgustingly godamn badass. Do I want a cold weather hat? I think I want a cold weather hat. https://atelier.zaumstudio.com/collections/control

Good article from @jamesomalley.co.uk on why we need to be powering ahead on industrial scale solar. Perplexing that the Greens are trying to block these project especially as sight of a renewables future is already on our near horizons

So, erm, for those who missed it, Grok is now straight up sexting people publicly on Twitter, and it's a vibe

The PC Gaming cambrian explosion began 13 years ago. Up until July 2013, there were 10-30 releases on Steam every month. Now there are *thousands*, a number that is still growing constantly. And I have dedicated myself to trying to keep track of what's happening, because I am apparently an idiot.

I've started migrating from Openvibe to Flare. OpenVibe has just been such crap, and at least this is being actively developed. I continue to be sad there isn't a first class web app for ActivityPub/Bsky unified timeline :(

www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79G...

The end of #emfcamp always leaves me so weirdly emotional. There's nowhere quite like it (trust me, I've looked). Well done crew (and campers), you're all bloody wonderful.

It's day 1 of EMF and I worry we've reached the end of days, for there's no more Club Mate at the Robot Arms #emfcamp

The Meshtastic Nodeice Board at #emfcamp 2026 is popping!

The Meshtastic "Nodeice Board" is live at #EMFCamp ! Message "!help" to get started!

Mate acquired, DECT phone registered, tent pitcher. #EMFCamp 2026, I am officially in you.

My #Meshtastic "Nodeice Board" is all ready to rock and roll for #emfcamp 2026 (with gratuitously Club Mate cameo)!

At the risk of sounding facile... We know how to deal with this, right? It's a final grade that combines take home with written exams. This was the norm when I graduated 15 years ago... Do universities just not do those anymore?

Got curious and thought I'd check if the decrease in fertility might be linked to violent crime trends in some weird way. Sadly, probably not.

Sometimes, I randomly remember how hard the original Cyberpunk 2077 trailer slapped. Absolutely no right to go this hard. www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99q...

Today in "why the UK is borked": our inability to pass e-scooter legislation. "The trials were originally due to run for around 1 year until November 2021, but they have since been extended five times and are currently due to conclude in May 2028." assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68d3f1...

Today in "why the UK is borked": our inability to pass e-scooter legislation. "The trials were originally due to run for around 1 year until November 2021, but they have since been extended five times and are currently due to conclude in May 2028." assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68d3f1...

So Hermes agent recently released integrations with Petdex, which means my Pimoroni Presto display now has a super cute little dude on it and I am beyond pleased with myself.

Holy crap how are our London buses how terribly air conditioned?!

#London #drag needs to up it's game, NGL

In my mind, this is a Ben Swain moment.

The good taxpayers of New York have given me a pair of Meta glasses because I am low vision disabled, and I seem to have used them more than a lot of people on here, so let me say a little about my experiences:

Hall of fame FT correction

So Claude has been utterly crushed by demand this week. Despite the colossal sums spent on data centres and GPUs across the world, we are just not keeping up... and that pretty worrying.

I’d make the point that government guidance was always read indirectly, atomised, summarised or reinterpreted by people you don’t control. Not everyone reads the page on GOV.‌UK. Its content is rewritten, summarised and atomised all over the place.

Remember my old bot that posted every rejected parliament petition? I've resurrected it on both Bluesky and Mastodon. Let the chaos begin.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Attie, currently as an invite-only closed beta. Attie is the first agentic social app on atproto. It’s something completely new — an experiment in making building on the protocol more accessible.

dame is at #AtmosphereConf and welcoming us to a new era for Anisota! Featuring a hand-carved brand mark, foundations of an immersive game world, swipe gestures, & lots more. Enter the forest: anisota.net

So I did something deeply silly/cringe thing with my Hermes Agent: connected it to an old @pimoroni.com Presto I had lying around, and asked it to generate an image of it's internal vibes at random times, using random model. Weirdly enjoying have a little window into the agent that lives in my rpi

Some good news: annual theft person offences in Westminster, the national epicentre for those crimes, have fallen by 1/3.

Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator being the basis for an article titled "Tired of sports betting? Take a punt on babies" in @financialtimes.com is not what any of us expected to find on a Friday but you know, they're not wrong... www.ft.com/content/3927...

We're excited to announce duckdb-skills, a DuckDB plugin for Claude Code! We think the embedded nature of DuckDB makes it a perfect companion for Claude in your local workflows. Check out the repository at github.com/duckdb/duckd...

Radiologists saw a workload reduction of 63.6% in this trial of 31,301 women. By letting AI triage low-risk mammograms, cancer detection rose 15.2% (from 6.3 to 7.3 per 1,000). It’s a rare win-win for efficiency and accuracy. #MedSky #MedAI

The next Journalism Technology London is happening 21 April! luma.com/qjj9c8d7?tk=... We're actively looking for speakers, if you have something relevant to the journalism technology space you'd like to do a talk on, please DM me!

'The British diaspora in Bahrain' - exotic, rolls off the tongue beautifully. 'British expats in Bahrain' - ugly, feels unpleasant in the mouth, sounds like a bad spin-off to 'Bananas in Pyjamas'.

Britain's geospatial data is a huge mess (FREE TO READ!) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/britains-g...