Don Syme

Some balancing perspective on the harms being prevented might be useful.

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Sam Bright | Substack Investigative journalist and writer.

I'm now supporting Sam Bright on Substack.

Sam is an investigative journalist focusing on Reform UK's lies and manipulations.

His latest digging into Reform's lies about Kent County Council convinced me to support his work to help protect the integrity of our democracy.

substack.com/@writesbright

They want the violence so badly.

Famine under way in Gaza, UN-backed experts say IPC alert says ‘worst-case scenario of famine’ is playing out, as death toll from Israeli attacks passes 60,000 Middle East crisis – live updates

The actions and inaction of the Israeli government and extremists utterly disgust me. They are victorious in this war and this is what they do as victors.

Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Netanyahu, Gantz and many more belong in prison. They are among the worst of humanity.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

And yes, I detest Hamas, though so little is left of them that whatever genocidal aggression remains it hardly needs the starvation of children and never-ending murder to be "managed" by the might of Israel.

‘We faced hunger before, but never like this’: skeletal children fill hospital wards as starvation grips Gaza For months Israel kept food shipments to Gaza far below starvation rations. Now the death toll is rising rapidly

The government and whole present functioning of the state of Israel utterly disgusts me.

Enough. Even the violent, vengeful God of the Old Testament shows mercy now and then. End the lust for revenge and the cruel torture of starvation.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

I don't get it. UBI would just obviously lead to an entitlement trap and put citizens in an eternal bind with the state, encouraging a culture of receiving not contributing. And I don't want populists like Farage advocating higher UBI for everyone except immigrants, driving hate, which they would do

TLDR: We need more comedy, to fight this endless tidal wave of cruelty.

That said humour can be used by all and is the greatest weapon against tyrants.

The problem is not the humour, it's the cruelty and the pleasure derived from it. That can itself be mocked by humour. We should not let these ghouls own humour or drive us from it.

Performative cruelty is at the heart of the New Right. The cruelty is the point.

It helps define the boundary of their humanity - those who admire the cruelty and are protected by it versus those who seek to defend the supposed enemy.

Glad you liked it!

Danger Close: Why Types Matter F# Units Of Measure With Zero Runtime Cost Can Save Money and Lives

🧬 Gene samples nearly melted because someone mixed °F and °C. 🫠 With #AI proliferating, every system is now safety-critical. F# units of measure catch these potential errors at compile time with ZERO runtime cost. New #fsharp #mlir #llvm #systemsprogramming #aisafety blog: speakez.ai/blog/danger-...

Love this. Such an improvement to daily life in London.

Automated distortion, filtering, "correcting" and "completion" of factual data may in very small amounts be legitimate (eg filtering obviously fraudulent or badly referenced articles). But will always raise ethical questions and yes likely end with Musk hacking history.

Please be more nuanced.

For factual information, of course, yes, it's illegitimate.

It is not illegitimate for, say, an LLM to write math or logic or coding problems for another LLM to try to solve. As long as the results can be checked otherwise.

"An incompetent warning shot or the act of a coward, either way it needs to be properly investigated... how is it okay for your police force to be firing at unarmed Australian journalists?"

Karl Stefanovic, an anchor for the Australian broadcast channel that @laurentomasi.bsky.social works for.

I'm skeptical.

What worked against Johnson was a relentless focus on corruption - not least by yourself and Bylines. That brought the UK back to its senses, for a time.

It was like a pressure building, scandal after scandal. He seemed like Teflon, then suddenly he was gone.

That's the lesson.

He'll be in the reality TV show about instigating riots

What on earth is going on with Live Facial Profiling in London?

Deeply concerned that the recent deployment at Richmond Station was against guidelines and illegal.

Instruct the Met to follow their guidelines. This is not currently policing by consent.

bsky.app/profile/dsym...

Cc @peterjukes.bsky.social @hardeepmatharu.bsky.social @adambienkov.bsky.social @josiah.writes.news

Would love continuing Bylines eyes on this issue 💕

Cc @libertyhq.bsky.social 👆👆👆

Liberty Liberty challenges injustice, defends freedom and campaigns to make sure everyone in the UK is treated fairly. Join us. Stand up to power.

In 4 years this technology may be in the hands of Richard Tice and Nigel Farage. It must be held in check, and not become normalised.

As a result I donated £500 to Liberty, the UK charity for Civil Liberties today, as counterbalance.

www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk

We need good, consensual policing in London, but this was so overt, so intimidating, so clearly saying "we don't care about your privacy rights", that it is beyond any acceptable limit.

In the guidelines, the assumption is that the privacy rights of the public are _always_ infringed when LFR is used, and so there must be no alternative, proportionate way to achieve policing goals.

The deployment felt more like a public presence operation, to make policing presence felt.

Under the guidelines LFR can only be deployed in very specific circumstances, the only applicable one here is at "crime hot-spots".

Richmond Station on a Friday lunch in June is not a crime hot-spot. To the extent it is, a more proportionate policing approach is possible.

Live Facial Recognition Facial Recognition is technology that can be used to help identify people who’ve broken the law. Find out what it is, how it works and how we use it.

Today London Met Police @metpolice.bsky.social had a very overt deployment of a Live Facial Recognition van outside Richmond Station in London. About 30 officers were present.

Looking at the guidelines this deployment of LFR looks illegal.

www.met.police.uk/advice/advic...

cc @london.gov.uk

Check for C# extension dependencies at runtime by dbrattli · Pull Request #2088 · ionide/ionide-vscode-fsharp Why We should not have a hard dependency on ms-dotnettools.csharp since that makes it impossible to use Ionide with forks os VScode e.g Cursor. This PR does the check at runtime instead adding reco...

You can now use F# and Ionide with @cursor.com.web.brid.gy 🥰 #fsharp #fable github.com/ionide/ionid...

That's reasonable, and nuanced.

The Blue Labour mavericks are horribly OTT but I hope there's a reasonable conversation to be had here about the nature of a fair society and the limits of fairness-engineering.

The Australian political experience shows that a deep rooted commitment to fairness of opportunity ("a fair go") enjoys consistent, widespread support. Fairness of outcome does not.

Sadly I don't think EDI's foundations in manifest, clear, irrefutable "fairness" are anywhere near robust enough.