Tom Hughes

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97

RIP Tom Lehrer, a seriously underappreciated genius. Poking fun at the idiots in power before many of us were even born.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

And congratulations and thanks to Paul Norman, Martin Zdila and the osm.org maintainers who did the work on this (mysteriously not mentioned in this rather corporate-sounding blog post)

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Geo-double-whammy!:

Next Wednesday it's #geomob. Presentations this time include one about OSMUK! Details & sign up: https://thegeomob.com/post/june-18th-2025-geomoblon-details

And then the Wednesday after, 25th June, we've got an OpenStreetMap London social pub meet-up. Don't miss it! […]

It is very very funny that one of the few genuine ways we have diverged from EU law since Brexit is VAT on private schools.

Karmic punishment for Telegraph readers.

A reminder that we have no idea how to make an AI smarter than a human, no current or pending technology that even begins to address how we would do it, no data to train such a system if it existed, and statistical language models are fundamentally incapable of the reasoning required.

This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?

A cautionary tale about using AI in mapping. #OpenStreetMap folks take note...

It's What3Words accounts filing day 🎉

The good news! They reduced yearly losses to £10.6m from £16.4m, and turnover increased from £1m to £2.1m!

The bad news! They achieved this by laying off 36 staff, and that £1m increase is probably from a single EU client.

They have £15m in assets remaining

A photo of the digital display screen inside a bus, showing a software update in progress

do not turn off the bus.

Huge win! Government announces plan to open up Land Registry This post is by Guy Shrubsole. Today the UK Government has announced plans to open up the Land Registry – which, if delivered, will finally reveal more about who owns land in England and Wale…

Huge win! Government announces plans to open up the Land Registry.

If delivered, will finally reveal more about who owns land in England and Wales.

Read my blog post for more details & how you can write to the Minister to make sure this now happens:

whoownsengland.org/2025/03/06/h...

🧵1/

Map of London in 1901 showing percentage of people born overseas by street.

So pleased my article on geo-coding addresses of 121 million + people in British censuses 1851-1911 is now out with Historical Methods! #openaccess

- map any census info (ages, occupations, birthplaces etc) by address

- link census to other spatial datasets

Get the code and data 👇

The Government Digital Service taking over the Geospatial Commission?! 👀

#FreeThePAF

What even the one by Schildt 🤣

This is miserable behaviour, @transportforlondon.bsky.social
Miserable.
traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/

Deeply terrible action from TfL here. I hope the decision is reversed and @dracos.co.uk can revive his live maps.

A logo with SS in the middle

The history of Jaguar cars started in 1922 with the Swallow Sidecar Company which then grew into SS Cars that advertised with such slogans as ‘Wait… the S.S. is coming’. In 1945 the name was changed to Jaguar because it couldn’t be ‘confused with any similar foreign name’.

Portugal’s late dictator António de Oliveira Salazar was fed an “absurd” fantasy by aides to make him believe that he still governed the country for two years after he was replaced because of failing health, a new book claims. Mr Salazar ruled Portugal from 1932 until 1968 when he suffered a series of health problems and was replaced as head of state by Marcelo Caetano. Until his death in 1970, aides gave Mr Salazar a fake version of the newspaper Diario do Noticias each day which carried fictional stories to make it seem like he was still in charge. Each night, the editor would create a special edition of the newspaper - just for Mr Salazar - to remove any reference to Mr Caetano and his government. Ministers would attend meetings with the ailing dictator and even make disparaging comments against Mr Caetano, according to the newly-released book

Just reading up on the former dictator of Portugal, and, what? www.independent.co.uk/news/world/e...

To be fair(?) this was the followup to them making Farage Newcomer of the Year which only requires you to ignore about 25 years of history...

The first financial scandal/crisis to defeat all attempts at satire. There's nothing to say

I see Robert Kennedy's campaign to make America healthy again by ridding it of the poison of fast food is off to a good start...
Also, how cold must that food be and why do they have cutlery on their trays?