Sam Kington

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @cstross@wandering.shop Jon Worth @jon@gruene.social did a whole bunch of research on this last year https://jonworth.eu/crosschannelrail-final-report-released-and-the-next-steps/ . The tl;dr is that, yes, you could get a Eurostar down to Bordeaux, but there are issues with a number of other stations along the way, because of having to physically segregate international non-Schengen customers.

@ifixcoinops@retro.social @woe2you@beige.party I believe it’s genuine. I certainly remember seeing a clip of another comedian berating Jimmy Carr (in the audience) from disrupting the show, saying “Jimmy! I don’t come to *your* shows and laugh!”

@ifixcoinops@retro.social This is the problem that the AI guys exposed unwittingly: why didn’t anybody make a GUI for static site generators; why didn’t anybody make a GUI for basically anything else people wanted to do? And the answer is a combination of (a) there’s not enough money in making stuff that people want but that’s all you’re doing; and (b) the open source people have never embraced GUI people so they only understand terminal stuff.

Electoral Commission says ministers should introduce clearer duties on AI platforms to protect voters against misinformation and ensure algorithms did not mislead voters, particularly during critical election periods. The problem is that AI platforms *can't do that*. LLMs can answer "what's the received wisdom about this programming topic?" because they've scraped all of Stack Overflow, but they don't *know* anything, especially not about news. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/20/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-replika-grok-gemini-misinformation-scottish-election-demos

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Netflix has an adaptation which apparently (according to my wife, who also read the books ages ago) gets rid of some of the stupider stuff? https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81639986

Welsh Labour source in the Guardian: “We heard people on the doors saying they’d usually vote Labour but wanted to stop Reform.” https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2026/may/09/may-elections-results-keir-starmer-labour-nigel-farage-reform-uk-politics-latest-news-updates?page=with%3Ablock-69ff5d3c8f087a8ca712eb7e#block-69ff5d3c8f087a8ca712eb7e

Welsh Senedd elections use list PR. Voting for *anyone* other than Reform is stopping Reform. And it was under AMS previously as well, at least when it came to the list vote. FPTP has rotted everybody's brains in this country and it needs to be taken out the back and shot.

@ifixcoinops@retro.social … AND PRETEND YOUR NAME IS KEITH! We bought our Akita puppy from some nice people near Keith in Aberdeenshire, some 10 years ago. *Every* time I looked at a map to plan driving there: *bam*, earwormed.

@beemoh@mastodonapp.uk @GlasWolf@mastodon.scot @Wen@mastodon.scot @MarkSquiresWine@mastodon.social @andrewducker@mastodon.scot Also the Conservatory Party. I don’t know why this doesn’t apply (more forcefully) to Scotland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_of_Political_Parties_Act_1998

Keir Starmer says "Time and again Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski have shown they are not fit to meet this moment of great global instability." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/06/starmer-late-pitch-voters-labour-greens-reform-elections

The thing is, Zack Polanski agrees: he's only been party leader for 8 months, and that's not enough. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/06/zack-polanski-says-he-was-wrong-to-call-himself-a-red-cross-spokesperson

Which is why it is in fact completely logical to give the minor parties a go at running local government: it (a) won't matter as much, but (b) could be indicative of what they'd be like nationally.

Never mind Unix vs Windows "line endings are LF" vs "line endings are CRLF". The modern text file incompatibility is between "a is a line feed" and "a is a paragraph break".

It’s nice in our garden today.

LinkedIn badly needs to understand that (1) given that I'm British, the University of Glasgow is not my "school" and (2) the fact that a small handful of Glasgow Uni graduates now work at a potential job does not mean I can wander up to them in the pub we all go to and ask them to do me a solid. It's been 30 years since I graduated, and about 10,000 new folks get their sheepskin every year. This is not an exclusive club!

Back-end developer looking for work: Perl or similar, Glasgow or UK remote. I write well-crafted and -commented code, not too clever, with an emphasis on getting names right, testing and maintainability. I like talking to other people in the team and wider business. https://illuminated.co.uk/cv.pdf #getfedihired

@jonn_blanchard You don’t need a paid account to leave comments on GitHub.

Also: for years, I used to pay the TV licence fee, even though I didn't have a TV, because I thought the BBC was worth having. I'll grant you that that's weird, but I'd say no weirder than aggressively seeking out obscure tax avoidance schemes like the sorts Richard Tice likes.

When Reform deputy leader Richard Tice asks "How many friends and family do you have who voluntarily choose to pay more tax than they are legally obliged to do ...?" the answer is "almost all of them". https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/16/britons-should-strive-to-pay-minimum-tax-legally-possible-richard-tice-reform Maybe not by much! But we understand that taxes are there so we can all get decent public services, and constantly being a rules lawyer over taxes is a dick move. So unless something looks really off, we pay our fucking taxes.

@cstross@wandering.shop Almost agree, but AirDrop and ubiquitous sharing make it a *lot* easier to move files from one machine to another. Machines sharing the clipboard is similarly magic.