Rob Lang

Stirrings of dawn with Orion still visible above Glastonbury Tor. Hand held phone pic.

I don't think you need AGI for AI to have broad consequences. You could do COVID-like damage by affecting relatively few technical systems all at once. Not world ending but "no-one can work for a week" damage. Like COVID, the long term effect would be increased wealth gap.

share.google/AWA0QowotTF2... The RNLI is one of those institutions that make me proud to be British - join me in donating to show your support

Rise of Piracy is a delightful romp of huge scope. Piratical Mount and Blade. Ship battles, RTS land battles, trading, shenanigans! Really enjoy pootling about causing mischief. Was a bargain at full price. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Good morning Bluesky ☀️ This is one of the last coal powered sheep. The vast majority of UK sheep are now all electric ⚡️

Air pollution stunts children’s lung growth. New Queen Mary research found that improvements in air quality after the introduction of London’s ULEZ are associated with accelerated lung growth in children. Read more: shorturl.at/Jx86o

I bought my first #Dell in 1996, I've used them at work for 20+ years but the support recently was so appalling that I'm done. Endless grovelling platitudes, terrible automation and failure to actually deal with my case properly.

I have a Herman Miller chair, which I like very much except for one thing. All the hex bolts are imperial. It's 2026 and I have to keep hold of imperial hex keys now?

I read a lot of "AI is fine when it's taking other people's jobs" posts. Especially amongst the creative industries. While hypocritical, it's quite understandable. I'm after the human connection in the art I consume and now spend time sifting out prompt generated art.

Some real characters running in Clacton. 34 candidates, now with pics & info (thanks to the work of Democracy Club). Just 5 are registered to vote in the seat, according to DC. Lots of earnest independents, and a few spiritual types. There are more joke candidates standing than there are women...

Here it is. My manifesto for the 2026 Clacton By-Election. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Join me, clean up Clacton and let's make 13th August Bin Day! #VoteBinface #VoteyMcVoteface #YesWeTinCan

10 years on from Brexit, there are still no rules to stop lies in election ads. We’ve tabled amendments to prevent ads like the Brexit bus misleading voters again. Email your MP and ask them to sponsor them. 16 MPs have so far. It takes 30 seconds 👇 reformpoliticaladvertising.org/take-action/...

The @ncsc.gov.uk blog on vibe coding is full of issues and I expect it to be used by senior managers for justifying horrific shortcuts. Internal tools and demos have a habit of suddenly becoming production code. What then? Get another model to check it? www.ncsc.gov.uk/blogs/the-vi...

A wonderful read.

In 1997 I was a Cybernetics undergrad at dept of Cybernetics at Uni of Reading, UK. Back then I pithily wrote on a webpage: "AI has the potential to tell us what human consciousness is by showing what it isn't." Sadly all the recent efforts are going into replacing people, not understanding them.

This man is a megastar of diligent code delivery. Tirelessly pouring his soul into Rise of Piracy. I salute him!

Bit harsh, Toyota.

Really miss Tech Bugs and Rock-n-Roll @dylanbeatt.ie, @rendle.dev, @eli.holderness.dev. I hope it's on pause because you're all super busy and everyone is doing as fabulously as possible! Sending love, peeps. 🩵

They used the CRT oscillator, which tx 10 -> 15khz. That with loop antennas, you could pick up a TV user's location pretty easily. I had a crystal radio it could tell whether the TV was on downstairs. My dad (GPO/BT man) reckoned they were more of scare story than realistic enforcement.

I only fully disagree with #20. Don't trade your time. Work as you're being paid and enjoy your youth. If you're planning on a typical life trajectory, when you get old your outside responsibilities will pile up and your free time will be gone. 60hr weeks aren't clever or 10x, they're toxic.

I remember "clean code" explained as a Cybernetics UG in the mid-1990s. IIRC the lecturer (post doc?) explained that your future self was a different person. "Don't make future you hate you!" Really love this from Kevlin: kevlinhenney.medium.com/code-cleanli...

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

🗺️ Bing Maps no longer has the Ordnance Survey overlay. In the UK that was the USP of Bing Maps. Now there is absolutely no reason to visit Bing Maps. Ordnance Survey is a government organisation, I've already paid for the data collection, feels mean that they now want me to pay for it again.

And it's up! All together now... 🎶 Somebody told me the user provider should use an adaptor to proxy the query factory builder... 🎶 www.youtube.com/watch?v=p03o...

✏️ Blog: Using GnuPG and Bouncy Castle in .NET for some delicious asymmetric payload encryption. Needed to work this out for work, leaving here as a public aide memoire. brainwipe.github.io/2025-11-19-g...

So many companies keep adding complexity to their products, endlessly growing that it becomes so complex that the basics get screwed. Cloudflare can't even serve a Proxy or DNS right now. That's like basic shit. Trello (Atlassian) also adding so much faff to what was a perfect product.

Cloudflare: bet you it's DNS. It's always DNS. And yet there's no concerted effort to fix it - just load it up with more features.

I know I'm old and all that but it's still astounding to me that I can have a native linux terminal window in Windows without all that cyg-win works-alright-except. WSL is cool. And then I can run docker containers in that there sub system. That's also really cool.

What you’re witnessing is a populist assault on the BBC. This is not an institutional scandal in any meaningful sense of the word. It is an attack on public service broadcasting. iandunt.substack.com/p/extra-edit...

website: hey we need all your data for security person: for security? website: for security yeah person: and is it gonna leak website: of course it's not gonna leak do you think we're idiots website: so hey promise not to get mad

It's DNS. It's always DNS.

Post hog ergo propter hog #aws

It's DNS, of course it is. It's always DNS. The world needs to replace DNS because it's utter shit. health.aws.amazon.com/health/statu...

The internet appears to be broken. Can someone switch it off and on again? At least Downdetector can tell us it's bad: downdetector.co.uk All the sites I'm responsible for are still up but 🫂 going out to my tech brethren that are having a hard time right now.

Future people are going to look back at F12 dev tools, setting breakpoints and running ad-hoc code in the console and wonder why everything didn't just fall apart.

I'm not saying that healthcare data exchange standards are a worry but also this:

Follow this account, it's hilarious! Also 10 minutes walk from my front door. ♥️ And I've been drunk in that building but before it was MERL. 😉

Tried connections for the first time because of @josemonkey.com Quite fun, happy to have got it. Connections Puzzle #788 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟦🟦🟦 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪

Once in a while I'm reminded of a senior manager who, when faced with a looming deadline, wanted to cut out all the QA. When we pointed out that there would be bugs in prod as a result, he asked dead-seriously: "Can you code without putting bugs in?"

Built in app LLMs seem to have a cycle: 1. There's a meeting summary "wow, that's amazing!" 2. Ah, but there's important detail missing 3. QA <> Kuwait 😂 4. Spent 30 minutes laughing at it 5. Leave it switched off From actual Slack experience this morning.

I just published a blog post about the OpenCLI initiative. I think it's time we had a way to standardize CLI automation! Feedback, suggestions, and thoughts are more than welcome. patriksvensson.se/posts/2025/0...

Friends have been to see Linkin Park so I thought I'd give Hybrid Theory a listen again after many years and it's all killer. Such a fantastic album - and a debut too.

The more I read the NHS Plan, the more excited I get. There's a lot of good stuff in there.