David Heath

A photo of Anas Al-Sharif and his Al Jazeera colleague Mohammad Qrere in their press bullet proof vests looking at their phones. Both are reported killed. Photo credit to Motassem A Dalloul.

BREAKING: One of the most important and prominent reporters on the ground in Gaza has been Anas Al Sharif.

He - and several other Al Jazeera journalists - have just been assassinated by Israelis forces whilst in their press tent in central Gaza.

Speechless.

Appetite for public service reform isn’t new. But something has shifted. Buried in the last Spending Review were three quiet commitments:

👥 Integrate services around people’s lives
🛑 Shift from crisis to prevention
🌍 Devolve power and design with communities

They point to a bigger change.

🧵1/8

What Is a Language Model, and Why Should You Care? An explainer of language models and how they work, and their limits.

logicmag.io/policy/what-...

When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.

Anas Al-Sharif نس الشريف @AnasAlSharifo 85% of Gaza's population have entered the "fifth stage" of malnutrition - the most critical and dangerous phase, which is often irreversible even if food becomes available in the future. 16:06 18 Jul 25 1.4M Views

Advocates, journalists and humanitarians have consistently warned about famine as Israel has blocked food from entering Gaza for the past 4 months. We are on the brink of thousands of Palestinians starving to death in a 21st century holocaust — and most of the world does nothing.

Said it before - procurement teams across government are being treated like unreproachable Gods and it's absolutely ruining multiple policy areas because they'd don't know what they're doing.

Investigate your dependencies with Deptective Deptective, our new open-source tool, automatically finds the packages needed to install software dependencies. It does so not based on the software’s self-reported requirements, but by observing what the software needs at runtime.

Investigate your dependencies with Deptective #SuggestedRead #devopsish blog.trailofbits.com...

Incredibly important report on AI training & copyright released today by the European Commission. It gets lots right, slamming the idea that creators should be required to opt-out of having their works used for free by AI companies.

It says:

- Generative AI must be based on opt-in consent

🧵 1/n

This blog is a good illustration of the difference between actual science and techno-utopian hype

I think you’ve got an extra “P”

Post Office scandal may have led to more than 13 suicides, inquiry finds First report from Horizon IT hearings lays bare ‘disastrous’ human impact as 10,000 people seek compensation

The scale of human suffering arising from institutional and corporate arrogance is vast www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Open space is a simple, powerful way to invite real conversations in groups.

a16z raising fresh $20b to keep the AI bubble pumping Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, affectionately known as a16z, is looking for investors to put a fresh $20 billion into AI startups. [Reuters] For perspective, that’s more than all US vent…

A cautionary article on the AI bubble 🫧

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/04/10/a...

'You need to know a bit about the tech to say “wait, ..., these large language models literally don’t work for what you’re claiming.” But mainly, you need to understand that the point is to build a bubble machine.'

I think this highlights a few interesting trends. Firstly, the era of VC-subsidized tokens may be coming to an end, especially for products like Cursor which are way past demonstrating product-market fit. Secondly, that $200/month plan for 20x the usage of the $20/month plan is an emerging pattern: Anthropic offers the exact same deal for Claude Code, with the same 10x price for 20x usage multiplier. Professional software engineers may be able to justify one $200/month subscription, but I expect most will be unable to justify two. The pricing here becomes a significant form of lock-in - once you've picked your $200/month coding assistant you are less likely to evaluate the alternatives.

Wrote up a few thoughts on Cursor's new $200/month Ultra plan and changes to their $20/month Pro plan https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/5/cursor-clarifying-our-pricing/

My mom and stepdad are from the same diaspora group as Zohran Mamdani’s dad (same like “my stepdad was kicked out of the same town and knows some of his classmates”) and apparently the New York Times doesn’t understand how diaspora works, so I am going to tell you a little about my mom’s people!

What do people generally mean when they say continuous integration? Has the definition changed over time? What about trunk based development? What difference can these techniques make to your ability to deliver software quickly, safely and reliably?

Hilarious! Nice one Alex!

Realised today that there are many who have not heard of nor read the cluetrain manifesto. I remember reading it in maybe 2001/2002. It made a lot of sense to me then. Imho it’s still a key signpost for companies aspiring to be “of the internet” web.archive.org/web/20250116...

I got one at lean agile Scotland a few years ago! :-)

The whole idea of Trump as antiwar rests on a confused reading of his hatred of multilateralism, the international order and the Deep State. He doesn't hate those things for good "dovish" reasons. He hates them for degenerate, corrupt reasons. Here's a corrective. 5/

newrepublic.com/article/1969...

Features & Options Revisited Tidy Together chapter

“Time value of money pulls us toward features now, options later. But options become more valuable in uncertain environments, and software development is nothing if not uncertain” @kentbeck.com powerfully and succinctly sums up this fundamental tension in open.substack.com/pub/tidyfirs...

How is this happening:

GCP major outage; Cloudflare major outage… at the same time!

Never seen this before

Their infra is fully independent AFAIK

(The outage taking other services like Supabase with them)

Fair point.. I can’t imagine “embrace and extend” ever disappearing from their playbook

Super interesting podcast here. Microsoft have always had an edge in developer ergonomics. Listening to the first few minutes I’ve learned that’s probably no coincidence given their origins making a BASIC interpreter for the Altair. I look forward to listening to the rest of this episode!

Product for the People #8 · Luma It’s almost summer and it is time for the second Product for the People of the year, and we’re hosting it in Birmingham for the first time. You know the deal…

More tickets available for the next Product for the People in Birmingham, 20 June. lu.ma/xjlliuqd

Liberating Structures Global Gathering 2025 | Brussels Join us in Brussels for the Liberating Structures Global Gathering 2025. A 2-day event on June 19-20 for facilitators, changemakers, and curious minds worldwide.

Just booked my hotel for the LS gathering in Belgium on 19&20 June (still need to book conference ticket!). Who else is coming? www.liberatingstructuresgathering.com #liberatingstructures

Cofounder of Cucumber Ltd. on RSpec, Cucumber, and legacy systems In this episode of the Distributed podcast features Matt Wynne, staff software engineer at Mechanical Orchard and a longtime advocate for Agile and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)

I'm featured in the latest episode of @tuple.app's #distributed podcast talking about remote work, loneliness, legacy system modernization and why relationships matter.

tuple.app/distributed/...

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