ben

i'm sure they'll love it

Yeah, no, let's do national heroes. We can put Aneurin Bevan on one, and quote him:

"…no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party…. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin."

Can’t tell if this is the fault of #fprintd or if the #thinkpad fingerprint reader is just less reliable than the ones in macbooks, or what.

(Seems to occur cross-distro: #debian mainly but was no better in others.)

Fingerprint scanning on Linux seems very unreliable. I have it set up, and it can definitely recognise a fingerprint and authenticate based on that, but there seem to be far more false negatives than I’m used to.

"There were some ethical concerns about using AI but we decided to set those aside"

oh that's all right then

Sure, LLMs are useful for:

1. Fraud
2. Plagiarism
3. Cognitive off-loading

Which of those use-cases are you promoting?

I've found utilitarianism etc increasingly unsatisfying over the last few years but I can't always put my finger on why. I think this is part of it though. The trolley problem is a last resort where there's literally no other option. It's not meant to be representative of all real decisions.

CW: gbpol

fundamentally blair should not have made this compromise in the first place, but if we're going to list all the things blair should not have done we'll be here all day

Hereditary peers to lose their seats in the House of Lords Upper chamber accepts final draft of bill, which offers life peerages to some of those who would otherwise be removed

CW: gbpol

This has taken far too long, and frankly doesn't go far enough in terms of Lords reform, but it's better than nothing. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/10/hereditary-peers-to-lose-their-seats-in-the-house-of-lords

I know I’ve got some Labour local gov’t types following me, so I want to say this clearly so that you can share it internally as appropriate: I will never again vote Labour while these policies, or Wes Streeting, are in place. I will not vote Labour at any level because of this.

in particular ‘novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established’ is bullshit

the best practices are established, they’re the same as ever, you’re just too lazy/greedy to apply them

After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes AWS has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants.

“LLMs are shit at writing software” news at eleven arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/a...

“LLM users are lazy and fail to take responsibility for the tools they use, with predictable consequences”

The default attitude seems to be ‘you just need to find the way in which they’re useful for you’, and saying there are none is not acceptable.

It’s the same logic as ‘okay’ / ‘maybe later’ as the only options on popups. Saying no isn’t an option.

I didn’t have to use ChatGPT to know it tells you that you’re right even when you’re wrong. I’ve talked to people about their LLM usage, read reporting and studies about it, and seen what people have shared online. The idea that you HAVE to use something yourself to critique it is not always true

Meta acquires Moltbook, the Reddit-like network for AI agents Moltbook meets Facebook.

I don’t know why I ever try to be good at my job when I could just build stupid bullshit that nobody needs and that makes the world a worse place and the worst people in the world would line up to throw stupid amounts of money at me www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Well, known bugs anyway.

Has there been any progress on the Angerstein roundabout? It feels a little silly to have two sections of cycle route separated by an absolute death trap.

setting the 'days since a bug was caused by vibecoding' counter back to 0

@cwunews.bsky.social Just got my membership email (thanks!) and noticed that you list twitter in the contact details but not bluesky — maybe someone should update that :)

(also it seems like you have a mastodon account but don't actually post there?)

maybe I'm focusing on the wrong thing here but this is the wildest shit I've ever heard a white South African say and I study racism for a living

And then on the other hand, the more expensive AI is the better, from my perspective, because that just increases the likelihood of work deciding that it’s not worth it for the (obviously mediocre at best) results.

Yeah I have occasionally tried asking things like ‘does this work? how do we know?’ and generally trying to subject it to the minimum level of review that any other code would be expected, to little avail.

(I’m not required to use AI at work but other people use it, on codebases I work on.!

love to go to a programming meetup and be told that programming is obsolete and i should just get clyde to do it all instead 🙃

(to be fair in this case the effect would be mainly tone of voice, not quality of output. but i’m always suspicious of ‘you are a…’)

“You are an expert security analyst …”

this fills me with confidence

claude absolutely is not conscious though, so there's that

it might even be true that people genuinely find it useful (i haven't but sure, whatever)

but there are other factors to consider than personal convenience

‘but I find it really useful for boilerplate code!’

Environmental impact, mass plagiarism, deskilling, mental health risks, plus a tidal wave of slop engulfing FOSS projects and the internet in general? Not to mention centralising dependency on a handful of US corporations, all of whom are complicit in crimes against humanity?

Investors: "Anyway, we were so impressed that we invested the entire planets' economy in this, if it fails you're all cooked."