Rob Watts

Councils must publish number of potholes fixed or lose roads cash By Gareth Roberts | 24 March 2025 " SMR For the first time, every council in England must publish how many potholes they have filled or face losing cash. Local authorities in England will start to receive their share of the Government's £1.6 billion highway maintenance funding from next month (April), including an extra £500 million, which is enough to fill

now they know how many holes it takes to fill the albert hall

Fantastic work

It seems like The Times is becoming more unserious by the day

good day for the London coding scene

here's a thread of upcoming events that got announced today. please share!

Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content Mark Zuckerberg says company will ‘dramatically reduce censorship’ across Facebook, Instagram and Threads

Come home old Clegg, all is forgiven

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Great article, thank you.

🎉 Happy New Year 🎉

As we step into 2025, we’re filled with excitement and fresh energy for the year ahead. This year, we’re dreaming bigger than ever! More workshops (in-person and virtual), new locations, helping more people to learn coding, and continuing to break down barriers in tech ✨✨

The UK government just needs to leave the X platform entirely to further marginalise it from mainstream public. The best alternative is right here

100% agree. Can they just not

I needed this today.
You may too.

That moment when you ask something of ChatGPT with a tiny amount of context and it comes up with something better than you ever would with all the context

If Not React, Then What? - Infrequently Noted Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to...

infrequently.org/2024/11/if-n...

Great piece on how we’ve gone too far with React and is (somewhat provocatively) calling it legacy software

Strong Dick Tracy vibes

I love that new Jag

Yes please. A few otherwise sensible people I know getting themselves in a lather

Need to up my Bluesky game

Truth

In times like these it’s best to put on some old slippers and listen to BBC Radio 4

the meetings will continue until morale improves

Simplicity nearly always beats complexity. This thread is no exception

what does being on top of their game mean? in my experience it’s about being comfortable a few layers lower than the commoditized stack. for example competency to rewrite a critical piece from scratch that used to be third party. most teams don’t need that! but it’s a huge multiplier when you can

Installing arch on my mac. Why do I do this to myself

This is how I started - copying someone else’s code into my own computer. Nothing has changed

Sad to see all these people pandering to new Brazilian users instead of doing what I’m doing: enjoying a nice Saturday afternoon sipping a caipirinha and vibing to the bossa nova stylings of João Gilberto.

Reminder that there's a healthy list of good opportunities for the UK/EU relationship in the next few years, as @efta4uk.bsky.social has been saying for a long time.

my cynical take is that facebook is embracing AP *because* it doesn’t help deliver the kind of user experiences (algos, global search) expected by a global mainstream userbase. AP doesn’t threaten fb’s position so it’s happy to play nice with the smalls. atproto is actually subversive in this sense

Ok can the press pls stop using “definitely, maybe” in everything now

Extract from Daily Telegraph email: "Last month a leaked video showed Charlotte Dujardin, an Olympic equestrian, whipping a horse. Boudicca Fox-Leonard explains why this incident and other equine controversies are part of a much wider debate over whether we should ride horses at all."

I think the most obvious use for generative AI is coming up with names for Daily Telegraph journalists.

Neovim makes me feel like a fresh young dev and at same time very old

Agree new tone is welcome. The UK/EU red lines may result in a small but meaningful optimisation with the EU, anything helps. Makes sense to target for similar outcomes around the world at the same time.