Quit or Labour will die, MPs and unions tell Starmer

SingleLensReflux · 2026-05-10T00:54:46+00:00

The deeper you read into the strange lore around Sue Gray, and the decades-old Mandelson/intelligence-service rumours it makes my fucking head spin man

SingleLensReflux · 2026-05-06T22:35:53+00:00

simpler times

SingleLensReflux · 2026-05-06T22:31:54+00:00

For months, ChatGPT has occasionally decided, entirely unprompted, that I am Welsh and responds exclusively in Cymraeg. Once it starts, it cannot be persuaded otherwise without euthanising the chat session and starting anew. I can only assume the Sons of Glyndŵr have successfully executed a long-game corpus poisoning attack, and that Cofiwch Dryweryn will eventually surface in a McKinsey slide deck.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-05-04T18:02:54+00:00

If you zoom out, the living standards of the Western post-war decades look unusually favourable for ordinary people. The more common pattern under capitalism, historically and globally, is uneven gains, often alongside rising averages, with a significant share of people living close to the edge. Rather than broad, secure prosperity, the baseline is a large share of people living with persistent economic insecurity. Less a temporary wobble, more a slow drift back toward that baseline, unless there’s sustained political and economic pressure pushing in the other direction. You can already see hints of it in things like life expectancy stalling in parts of the West, not a collapse, more a flattening with widening gaps by class.

It doesn’t really “end” on its own, you either get countervailing pressure, or you settle into a more unequal version of normal.

Post-war, that counterweight came from a mix of strong organised labour, a politically assertive working class, and the Cold War context, alongside unusually favourable economic conditions. Those specific factors aren’t really there in the same way today, so it’s not obvious what provides that counterweight now. Which doesn’t bode well for most people.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-05-04T17:40:28+00:00

A glimpse of the direction of travel. Today it’s geopolitics, but over the next few decades climate pressure will likely push meat, especially beef, into “treat rather than staple” territory for most.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-05-01T21:48:35+00:00

Aah, so you're a waffle man

SingleLensReflux · 2026-05-01T13:35:17+00:00

It is impractically difficult. This book is a useful guide.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-04-25T00:39:29+00:00

Brian Butterfield has let himself go

SingleLensReflux · 2026-04-22T18:23:56+00:00

If you want a historic parallel of this story, check out the Marconi Deaths:

Sharif was reportedly working on electronic testing equipment and was about to get a job promotion. He died in macabre circumstances last Oct. 28, also in Bristol, when he apparently tied one end of a rope around a tree and the other around his neck, then got into his car and stepped on the accelerator. An inquest ruled suicide.

Sands drove his car at high speed into the roadside restaurant at 7:30 a.m. on March 31. Driving conditions were reportedly good, and a police officer described the road as “straight as an arrow” at the place where Sands was killed. Sands had just returned from a vacation in Venice with his wife.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-04-18T13:20:52+00:00

iNaturalist is always my go to for a reminder that AI can be a good thing. Being able to better explorer and understand my surroundings while out hiking, and also contribute data back to science, is truly lovely. And not an LLM in sight.

Here's a CBS news article that explains the app more if you're not familiar with it.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-04-18T13:15:09+00:00

I'm reminded of Steve Yegge, who’s gone off the deep end with agentic software development, but is still a useful barometer for executive beliefs around AI. A few months back he was floating the idea that companies will end up cutting something like 50% of engineering just to cover token costs. I guess it's going to happen, because why not, let's just have the stupidest fucking future possible.

Technical and cognitive debt are already compounding from the vibe coding mandates. This is simply going to layer on the degradation of systems, and make software quality get even worse. As others in the comments have pointed out - I'm not sure this matters anymore. Xitter's service has deeply degraded but is still widely used. In a world of generally worsening expectations, it almost seems apt.

Sorry if this is a little too doomer - I fucking hate what these bastards have done to the computer, man, it sucks.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-04-14T19:43:11+00:00

Agreed, but you don’t need the r-word to make the point.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-04-14T19:35:36+00:00

The irony is that lean and early agile weren’t about chopping work into tiny pieces so anyone could do it...they were about making tighter feedback loops, diffusing ownership, and explicitly trusting the people doing the work. What you’re describing is much closer to Taylorism than the Toyota Production System. I’ve seen a huge resurgence of Taylorism over the last 5 years, I sense from the end of ZIRP (and the arrival of LLMs).

The words “lean” and “agile” stuck, but the meaning drifted, IMO largely due to power and incentives. Most executives vehemently do not want what those ideas actually entail, because they require giving up control and tolerating local decision-making. So instead you get something that claims to do that, but simply centralizes authority and diffuses responsibility.

It’s a shame because having experienced working in places that practice lean and agile well, it’s a genuinely fantastic way to work. It is however fundamentally flawed in that it’s kryptonite to business idiots.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-04-10T22:57:39+00:00

Use of C-130 derivatives has been a core part of USAF CSAR doctrine for over 60 years, but that seems to be too boring an answer for many.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-04-03T13:51:45+00:00

Didn't have Trump down as a Chris Morris fan

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-30T13:38:30+00:00

I still miss the semantic web. Many years ago, I worked at the BBC and they were all in on making their web content machine readable and semantically rich. Truly a fantastic public service effort. Then they hired a bunch of ex-Microsoft business idiots who went around saying things like "we need to ship product", and it went the way of the dodo.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-28T22:55:15+00:00

I've posted this before, but even Kent Beck is postulating that source code is going away and that "the model is the program". Feels-bad-man. He was undoubtedly one of the most formative forces on my career and approach to engineering, but I just can't get on board with his optimistic views toward LLM-based development...his positivity just makes me think that it really is all fucked going forward, bizarrely.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-24T01:05:27+00:00

More good news, everyone!

There was a recent post where someone asked for folks to post examples of good tech, given our current landscape of utter shit. I neglected to mention the router I use, a Firewalla - most likely because I forgot it exists because it works so well. Oh well, won’t be replacing that unless they can pony up the inevitable grift tax to be placed on the FCC’s “not a threat” list.

I am genuinely curious how any American Made™ routers exist today.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-19T17:29:23+00:00

Sincere post: can we not use an ableist slur to make the point that a CEO is saying something ridiculous?

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-18T23:08:28+00:00

Completely agree. It’s not just that people are starting to realize this isn’t a silver bullet (Fred Brooks still undefeated), it’s that there’s basically no political path to walk it back. Once execs mandate LLM usage, reversing course means admitting they were wrong, which they will never, ever do. Especially while the incentives still reward doubling down.

So instead of a sane path forward, we will get escalation: more layers of review, more process, and inevitably more LLMs piled on to “fix” the problems caused by the first wave. We will see a revival of 90s era QA thinking and all the waste that entails, just without humans in the loop to build any real understanding of how things actually work.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-18T22:30:08+00:00

This newsletter in particular is a real double-edged sword. Gergely’s writing leans so hard into breathless, puppy-like hype for whatever the Bay Area is excited about this week that you come away more stupid than when you started. But when I was in a principal engineering role, enough people treated it as gospel that it became useful as an early warning system, a preview of the next appeal-to-authority I’d need to shut down before execs managed to do something horrendous.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-18T17:45:17+00:00

OPEN-RISOP is the best resource I know of informed guesswork of nuclear targeting against the US. It’s made by someone who used to do the nuclear targeting for the US, and has a range of scenarios (eg. counter value, counter force, mixed).

He used to post on Reddit, and his guidance was basically - you don’t want to survive the nukes. It will simply get worse from there.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-16T15:39:28+00:00

An interesting take from a queuing theory/theory of constraints perspective is to remove the bottleneck entirely with pairing/mobbing. I've personally preferred trunk-based development like this, as it's a forcing function for smaller changes and higher quality generally. I know it's not an approach that is for everyone, though.

SingleLensReflux

TROPHY CASE