Alexis Richardson

incredible writing

Tom Stoppard, playwright of dazzling wit and playful erudition, dies aged 88 A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter

Damn.

Tom was, all round, a scholar and a gent. My dad envied his quietly perfect artist’s wardrobe and treasured his friendship. As did I.

Travel well. I hope the wine’s okay.

At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars...

Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools

This exactly

cc @monadic.bsky.social My brain is vividly recalling one Pat Kerpan standing on a stage circa 2009 saying "And remember - it's *always* a distributed state problem!"(for anything)

Too little too late. The truth is that to be right in tech, you often have to be willing to be badly wrong first. And for a long time. Hard for governments to admit to this.

Any configuration template becomes more complex than learning the untemplated config file

Post-mortem now published by Cloudflare.

Configuration is mentioned 19 times.

lnkd.in/e-HTsxgE

** welcome to config hell **

for me the NUMBER ONE ask from GitOps customers is here

DNS

Back from kubecon

London is comfortingly wet with rain

Good to run into you this week

👋

I (along with many others) was there!

ConfigHub: Why Your Internal Developer Platform Needs It See why GitOps often feels like a sprawl of configs, discover how to manage Configuration as Data for your Kubernetes platform, and learn…

Artem Lajko wrote a wonderful post about ConfigHub

Find out why and how to get started

itnext.io/confighub-wh...

Text: The only solution is to ensure a big expansion in the supply of housing. In retrospect, the destruction of council housing in the early 1980s was a big mistake. An alternative now could be for the government to borrow more to build houses: nobody can doubt, after all, that housing is an asset. The government could argue that investing in additional housing was a sensible reason for increasing its debts.

From an article in today's Financial Times. Such an obvious statement of fact. It's hard to understand why direct public investment in social rent housing - so successful for decades - is now unthinkable.

Not priority alas.... but airport v quiet in cbp

Well my kubecon flight landed early and the airport was a breeze

Probably a framing issue

4th millennium or later

Excellent for getting to sleep

Mars colony may be easier than fire and forget home printing

The words "FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE" placed over David Lynch's face (a still from TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN).

I feel like we have the opportunity to turn David Lynch's quote into this moment's "Keep Calm and Carry On" and it's a far better rallying cry too.

In Review: The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor by Bryan Talbot Gadzooks! Bryan Talbot’s latest graphic novel is, sir, another triumph!

Have you ordered your copy of "The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor" by @bryan-talbot.bsky.social yet? Out tomorrow - here's the downthetubes review: downthetubes.net/in-review-th...

Bucks, almost uniquely, favours mayonnaise with chips.* And rightly so.

* No, it really won't be salad cream.

My favorite comment on the FT story

Norweger stellen fest, dass China 850 ihrer Elektrobusse fernsteuern und sogar stoppen kann Etwa 850 in Norwegen eingesetzte Elektrobusse können aus China vollständig kontrolliert werden. Das hat ein geheimer Test der öffentlichen Verkehrsbetriebe ergeben.

😮
Norway finds out that its electric busses - produced by a Chinese firm - can be remotely controlled from China!

The good news of this is that the Norwegians realised this because they did a cybersecurity test. We need to think about, and test, stuff like this more.
www.focus.de/panorama/wel...

simulation hypothesis test

I had assumed Botha protected SM over the disgraceful COO situation. Didn't know the details. The "Saffia" again :-(