I'm fascinated by the 1914 #Bristol International Exhibition, the great "White City" that lives on in the name of the local White City Allotments. I made a website that shows you @bristolarchives' plan of the Exhibition in a modern context: exhibition.gothick.org.uk #history

Apparently researching 100 years of her life wasn't enough for the Bristol Post (or I'm guessing some child at Reach) to figure out how to spell her name.

All electrons in the universe but one are just pointers to the original, which is kept at room temperature in a very small glass jar at the BIPM in Sèvres, France.

For a flagship service it’s amazing how often Bristol’s MetroBus simply doesn’t bother turning up, while its electronic boards carry on lying.

Everyone

Never stop saying "dozen" and "half dozen". Never stop using the word you read in an old novella. Never stop using your regional jargon. Don't succumb to an internationalized English stripped of its whimsy and romanticism in the name of streamlining global commerce.

Just seen this programme on iPlayer called #Threads I'm hoping it will take my mind off current global affairs. I like a drama about 80's fashion

🚨 CRITICAL: Active supply chain attack on axios -- one of npm's most depended-on packages. The latest axios@1.14.1 now pulls in plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, a package that did not exist before today. This is a live compromise. This is textbook supply chain installer malware. axios has 100M weekly downloads. Every npm install pulling the latest version is potentially compromised right now. Socket AI analysis confirms this is malware. plain-crypto-js is an obfuscated dropper/loader that: • Deobfuscates embedded payloads and operational strings at runtime • Dynamically loads fs, os, and execSync to evade static analysis • Executes decoded shell commands • Stages and copies payload files into OS temp and Windows ProgramData directories • Deletes and renames artifacts post-execution to destroy forensic evidence If you use axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lockfiles. Do not upgrade.

Merchants Arms AGAIN!

What a terrific writer. Among his many masterpieces, SS-GB is the sole really convincing dystopia ever written of Nazi-occupied Britain. RIP.

Very sad to learn of the death of Len Deighton, who was one of the two greatest spy thriller writers of all time and in some regards was Le Carre’s superior. Anyone who has not read Deighton should try Funeral in Berlin, Bomber or SSGB. Most of all they should seek out Berlin Game, the start of an epic 10 book Cold War series focused on Bernard Samson. Deighton’s writing was sharp, satirical, gripping and often amusing. His office infighting in the intelligence services was delicious and his characters are beautifully drawn. The Samson cycle starts with a meticulously plotted run of five books (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match, Spy Hook and Spy Line) which all stand alone but tell one big story from the jaded but dedicated perspective Bernard a brilliant field operative. Len’s genius idea was to use the sixth, Spy Sinker, to retell the whole cycle from the perspective of everyone else, exposing what Bernard didn’t know and misunderstood. There is then an origin story about Bernard’s dad during the war, Winter, and then a concluding trilogy of Faith, Hope and Charity, which is not as high quality but deals with the fallout from the events of books 1-5. It’s an epic achievement and the greatest long series in spy fiction, accepting that the Smiley series is the greatest short series. Do yourself a favour, give it a try

I’m on week five of trying to vibe code a replacement for some dumb saas that we use and it’s so incredibly frustrating that I’m slowly realizing it’s actually a quite complex and thoughtful piece of software.

On Friday we revealed the Companies House vulnerability letting anyone access the private dashboard of any UK company. This is the moment I first saw it demonstrated. My reaction says it all. What do we know? What don't we know? What should companies do now?

Emacs IS an age verification scheme. Nobody under 40 uses it.

The market panicking because AI can rewrite COBOL ignores two things: 1-Tools that rewrite COBOL have existed for decades 2-That's not the hard part

We've lost common sense in infrastructure automation. I've been implementing Azure infrastructure solutions for enterprise customers for years. Thousands of servers. Security baselines. Compliance monitoring. The real stuff. Out of all the automation I've built and delivered, I can count on one hand the cases where an AI agent actually made sense. One hand. The rest? Scripts. Queries. Scheduled tasks. Deterministic logic that does exactly what it's supposed to do, every single time, at a fraction of the cost. Yet everywhere I look, people are wrapping basic automation in agent frameworks. Diagnostic settings rollout? Agent. Tag compliance? Agent. Resource Graph queries? Somehow, also agent. Why? Because agents are the shiny new thing. Because it looks good on a slide deck. Because nobody wants to present "we wrote a PowerShell script" at the next team meeting. Let me be clear: learning new technology is great. Experimenting is great. But shipping unnecessary complexity into production because it feels modern? That's not engineering. That's ego. Every agent you deploy where a script would do is: → More cost (tokens aren't free) → More failure modes (now you're debugging AI behavior, not logic) → More operational overhead you'll be dealing with for years Infrastructure automation is about reliability and predictability. Most of these tasks have known inputs, known outputs, and known logic. That's the opposite of where agents add value. Agents belong where you need genuine reasoning over ambiguous, dynamic problems. Not where a foreach loop gets the job done. Think before you architect. Common sense still applies.

Remember when Windows added a new “Notepad” app with CoPilot and forced the good old notepad.exe to open the new app instead of itself even if you don’t want it? Well, a new feature just dropped.

I was prompted to sign into mspaint today. @Microsoft when you look back and wonder what went wrong for Windows... It was this. This is what went wrong.

Tailwind lays of 75% of their team. the reason is so ironic: > their css framework became extremely popular w AI coding agents, 75m downloads/mo > that meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings > resulting in 40% drop in traffic & 80% revenue loss