Alex

The EC's fine of Reform is 0.003% of their £72m donations in the space of 2 days this summer

A winning morning sets you up for the day. catfishing.net #848 - 9/10 🎉 🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈 🐈🐈🐟🐈🐈

I'm calling for a ban on people saying they've refuted an argument when the thing they've done is disagreed with it.

is there anyone in the free software/open source movement who's writing *actually good* thoughts on how current AI issues intersect with the philosophical underpinnings of free software/open source?

"Today's AI summit brings together businesses, governments and civil society together" Minister Peter Burke TD (fact: there are no civil society representatives, not in the list of speakers) #AISummitIE

Today I discovered how much a ticket to Sydney purchased three hours before take off costs. Weirdly, not much less than one purchased three months before.

This is an argument for playing down anti-immigration and focusing on good services - often provided by immigrants, who then pay taxes to support those services, which could be a virtuous cycle.

Street Dance With Mark Zuckerberg

When the Father Ted generator delivers body horror:

We had to say goodbye to Bruce this afternoon after he went into liver failure with kidney disease. 13 years old, a decade with us. He was a proud, heraldic doofus who lived for chips. Calm, gentle, reserved. He will be missed greatly every day.

Disability doesn’t care how old you are. Specialist food is no cheaper if you’re 19. Employers don’t lose their prejudice if you’re 21. This is blatant intergenerational inequality from Labour. Younger disabled people of all severities deserve better. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I'm redoing my Ukulele Society's website (the previous WP-with-1000-carousels monstrosity crashed and burned a few months ago and I volunteered to fix things). I was just going to do something in Jekyll, but am I missing any particular new things in the world of static site generators?

I really, really admire Best Damn Pet Shop's commitment to The Bit. damn-pet-shop.myshopify.com/products/lee...

My new age metric is thinking about how, soon, I'll be the age that Dermot Morgan was at the start of Father Ted.

Interesting analysis of property ownership in Cambridge and Oxford. gaffon.com/blog/oxford-...

Keep seeing data as an acquisitive asset rather than a perishable service delivery consumable.

one of the things I find fascinating is that, even though I constantly hear about how AI (previously "big data") is going to improve everything, it's apparently no one's job to anticipate that the pavement will be full of bikes and the road full of holes at the same time as it's also bin day

I am glad I got put on to @catfishing.net, it is a great quiz. But the number of questions that are "name this incredibly obscure (to a non US & non NBA fan) basketball player - I'll make it easy for you by telling you which college team they played for" drives me nuts.

No link left behind should not be old hat.

A friend on here used to work in a building shared with a slightly notoriously antsy union where the door code was the date they'd ousted the last general secretary.

Got a bit of a feeling that I'm going to be upping my list of long-term things going on with my body the next time I get a GP appointment. I'd avoided ones where the main symptom was "pain" for quite a while so that is the obvious next step.

Finally a leaflet talking about the real issues in the constituency

I’m a dual national. I’m not planing on committing any crimes anytime soon, let alone ones with a sentence of 5+ years, but if I ever did I’m not sure why my second passport should disqualify me from facing the same British justice system as everyone else and instead strip me of my citizenship

Went out to the @dxw.com summer party last night and it's so nice to see a good company full of people you have time and respect for doing well. Also so many faces from the Old Days, was like being in 2013 again.

Reminds me of an old digital government hand telling me about the 80s/90s when they'd make fake people in the tax system and chat by appending notes to Mickey Mouse's record.

I'm working on the boy by reading this page with the additional line "you're going to get some hop-ons".

Be real though, he's been shit at things for years, Palantir are buying the UK equivalent of "Pokémon Go to the polls".

Keep thinking about the affordances of software. What does a new playbook of open work look like if the canvas it's drawn on is (almost always) Teams?

I just saw some thick as mince commentary (good point -> bad point -> worse point) and remembered "hey, this guy annoys me every single time someone earnestly reposts him. I can just mute and get on with things". Good stuff.

I made some soda bread at breakfast time and have now eaten half the loaf. It's just savoury cake. I may need some doors widening.

Omarchy is part of new fascism. But it's also a good case study about how little political resilience is built into FLOSS: The libertarian roots have not only made the whole movement ready for the taking by corporations but also by fascists.

Looks a bit too cheery on here. Have a moping greyhound.

One thing not getting as much attention re: Dario's essay. In it, he talks about the need for third party evaluators to review models for safety. But a few days before the essay, Anthropic... refused to submit its latest models to the UK's evaluator: www.ft.com/content/560e...