ben

Shocked to discover that the Online Safety Act has had no measurable effect on the problem it’s supposed to address https://www.theguardian.

com/society/2026/oct/23/uk-children-just-as-likely-to-have-suffered-harm-on-social-media-despite-crackdown-ofcom-online-safety-act if only someone had said this at the time

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mikemcquaid/117449868024029491 it's a little bit embarrassing to see someone who seemed to be presenting themselves as a 'sensible' voice on LLMs repeat the same tired nonsense like 'left behind'. (see also simon willison)

it's not even that it's wrong to say 'most developers who think they are above average are not'. (by definition most developers are not above average.) but the conclusion to that doesn't have to be 'so just let the LLM do it'.

I seem to be on a minor streak of reimplementing shell tools that I use regularly but have started accepting slop. Turns out none of them were irreplaceable. 🤷

oh great, now i have some random ‘AI’ startup asking for permission to include ‘my’ work in their slop machine firstly it's MIT licenced, which the email references and should be sufficient answer; secondly it's not my decision anyway, which should have been obvious from the very same file.

an llm tic I’ve been noticing recently is something like ‘a phrase: one X, no Y, no Z’. it’s a bit more specific than the grouping of three things, but it’s also so vague that it obviously could just be (and presumably does) appear in non-LLM writing too.

Took a peek at a thread on Bluesky about support for Palestine by the Green Party and somehow every single one of the people taking Israel’s side was someone I had muted via a shared blocklist of transphobes. Weird coincidence! But convenient.

just saw someone refering to ‘Nobel-winning economists’. I wonder what they won their Nobels in.

amazing, i can't access github because copilot throws an exception that causes the whole page to unload*. i don't even use copilot but it's blocking everything else, marvellous * i say unload because the page clearly loads first and then is replaced by the error message after half a second.

that's not strictly true. all sorts of random things are not working, because there's no end to the list of basic browser functionality that react weirdos will unnecessarily override and break.

amazing, i can't access github because copilot throws an exception that causes the whole page to unload*. i don't even use copilot but it's blocking everything else, marvellous * i say unload because the page clearly loads first and then is replaced by the error message after half a second.

In two minds about the Firefox redesign. It’s a little tiresome that every time something gets redesigned people instantly hate it for made-up reasons, and I think some of that is probably going on here.