New paper from team @aial.ie! aial.ie/research/gpa...
EU's AI Act Article 53(1)(d) is an obligation for GPAI model providers to publicly provide a 'summary' on their model’s training data. The team assessed published summaries along 6 dimensions & found that all big providers failed on all 6.
1/
4000 users on Eurosky
💥 It took 37 hours to register the fourth thousand accounts on @eurosky.social 🎉
The first thousand (a slow, cautious launch) took a couple of weeks, the second 72 hours, the third 31.
Eurosky — EU-hosted AT Protocol infrastructure run by the Modal Foundation, a Dutch public interest non-profit. Independent moderation, relays, PDS hosting, governed in the public interest rather than by VCs. Read more
openfuture.eu/blog/eurosky-d...
The eu haul migration tool destination selection screen. It lists blacksky and Bluesky as defaults
BTW: EU-Haul is not restricted to migrating your account to @eurosky.social - you can use it to migrate FROM any hoster TO any hoster. E.g. to @blackskyweb.xyz or even back to @bsky.app
Teams can feel busy but still slow. Team Topologies, 2nd Edition helps rethink flow: cut hand-offs, clarify responsibilities, let support teams help, and use small feedback loops. Explore how flow could change the way your teams work ➡️ https://www.teamtopologies.com/book
Teams can feel busy but still slow. Team Topologies, 2nd Edition helps rethink flow: cut hand-offs, clarify responsibilities, let support teams help, and use small feedback loops. Explore how flow could change the way your teams work ➡️ https://www.teamtopologies.com/book
Not sure that’s the right link?
Some bot account complaining about pronouns in bio shit. I asked the bot to write a poem about pangolins and it did
It happened again
Opaque shell companies in British Overseas Territories used for $8bn trade to bust sanctions against Russia.
BVI, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Gibraltar are key nodes, as in illicit financial flows.
Banks, accountants, lawyers involved.
UK govts pretend not to know.
Good discussion here on Relational Practice and Place-Based working, including budgeting, which does seem to be developing deep roots.
I was interested to hear about the relational approach being applied within council operations, not just with citizens. (Perhaps obvious in retrospect though!)
AGREED! I discovered this several years ago when wanting to cite the Finch Report in a paper. I put a call out - someone located it on the Wayback machine for me. The Finch Report can be accessed in the APO repository apo.org.au/node/29938
I use this now as an example of the value of repositories.
Well, hello world!
State of the Future is a new think tank (from @gavinfreeguard.com) for public servants and others who believe data, digital, openness and innovation can deliver better policy, better services and better outcomes for people.
sotf.org.uk
(Quiet news day to soft launch, eh?)
There’s one other standardisation opportunity. Platforms like Pay
consume upstream services, acting as an abstraction layer over the market. If there were a standard interface for payment providers there could (in theory) be a competitive market for suppliers meeting the api (and quality bar)
🆕 Governments need to build the capacity to become digital market shapers
In his recent @techpolicypress.bsky.social article, IIPP Co-Deputy Director @eaves.ca outlines how governments can shape the digital cloud market, drawing on historical examples.
🔗 Read more here: buff.ly/HRCM8Yt
Do you make drag-and-drop interfaces? Or do you wish you did, but they're just too hard?
We're working on a new way to drag & drop! Wanna try it out? Join our study – we'll ask you about your drag-and-drop experiences, and get your hands on the prototype.
Join here: forms.gle/J82tFtu6DqS8.... 🙏!
Double spread of an open book showing the GOV.UK website on different devices and 2 typographic posters; one says: “Do the hard work to make it simple”, the other: “This is for everyone”
Great to see the posters of Government Design Principles printed and included in @designcouncil.bsky.social’s ‘Eight Decades of British Design’ book, and the GOV.UK featured as a highlight of the 2010s in a spotlight on ‘Design in the public sector’.
Wow.
😢
Trauma playing out repeatedly? In his Reith lecture Bregman mentioned Jared Diamond’s “farming was the worst innovation— led to wars” (paraphrasing) on some level we’re still in this tug between controlling resources because they’re controllable vs our cooperative nature. 🤔
"You don't need to understand the code you're shipping to production, you can have guardrails" is my new favourite mechanistic, linear way folks are trying to reduce complex reality to something it's not.
A UK student in the US went to a protest for five minutes. ICE subpoenaed Google for his private details. Google complied.
theintercept.com/2026/02/10/g...
I’m running a survey to ask researchers what they want the UK Government Web Archive to offer in the future to enable wider use of the collection. If you’re a web archive user, or you would like to be, please take ten minutes to complete this survey: www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/UKGWA-Rese...
Don’t let transparency damage science Stephan Lewandowsky and Dorothy Bishop explain how the research community should protect its members from harassment, while encouraging the openness that has become essential to science.
🧪 It's been 10 years since Dorothy Bishop and I published a commentary in Nature about the risks of transparency. doi.org/10.1038/529459a
1/10
Chart by Neil Kaye showing the lengthening and shortening of daylight hours in southern Britain each week through the year. Each bar represents how much daylight is gained or lost each week. The line is roughly a sine curve (head blown emoji), with the fastest daylight gains in Feb, March and April, and the fastest losses in Aug, Sep and October.
A quick reminder of what #BigFebruary is about…
Thanks to the magic of the cosmos, we start gaining daylight much faster in Feb than in Jan. Over 20 mins a week - setting us up for Spring.
This chart is by @neilrkaye.bsky.social and is one of my all time favourites.
I think iCloud the only option is to sync to a local device and then copy off the local device (I looked into it a bit but haven’t done). Lmk if you find another way!
Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Directed by Thom Zimny
Edited by Thom Zimny and Samuel Shapiro
Production Footage: Pam Springsteen and Thom Zimny
This is absolutely shocking. Something has to be done about this appalling situation in which so many now find themselves. The government needs to act
Microsoft dropped -10% today despite a revenue beat ($81.27B vs. $80.27B expected) because
1. Data center spending growing faster than revenue because they have a growing customer backlog.
2. 45% of that customer backlog is OpenAI who everyone is skeptical of their ability to pay in the long run.
Every time someone tells me that interoperable protocols are too complicated for the average person, I point out that they use email and the web.
The goal needs to be to get atproto to the point that it is just "how the internet works" and the details fade into the background like https & smtp.
Here's the first in a series of instalments from my book ‘Fracture' in which I'm going to explore:
— why decades of digital initiatives have failed to deliver the desired modernisation of government
— what a modern, adaptive democracy could look like
— what changes are needed to get us there
Populist, conspiratorial, & authoritarian stacks perform very well in the new information environment. They deliver speed, certainty, & identity coherence where traditional democratic institutions deliver delay, complexity, & opacity, assuming they're performing in a substantial way to being with.
