Tom Page

With the Redford news please do go and watch Sneakers. Few films in which he seems to be having more fun.

That Melanie Phillips is a lunatic conspiracist bigot and racist is not remotely shocking. But the fact that the Times continues to employ her should be.

The response from Israel to the fairly meek Starmer plan on recognising Palestine if Israel sort of behaves shows just how fucking horrific the state of Israel has become. Apparently taking a stand against Israel starving an entire people is "rewarding Hamas". They are not our ally.

With a authoritarian regime starving a people, the UK and US flew 250,000 flights in 1948-49 to air drop aid to Berlin, a city we had been at war with just three years earlier. Where the hell are we in Gaza, and why aren't we calling out the aggressor in the language we used against the Soviets.

We should all denounce and be appalled by Israel, a country hell bent on genocide and without even the most basic shred of decency

Worksop Fish Bar

Rufford Abbey Country Park

This is the most incredible bit of writing I have read this year.

Top half of image: July 2016 Guardian article by Simon Jenkins titled: “ignore the prophets of doom: Brexit will be good for Britain”. Bottom half of image: May 2026 Guardian article by Simon Jenkins titled “From the day Britain left the EU, this reset was inevitable. What a pointless waste of time, money and effort”

The top image:
The Guardian, July 2016
The article:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The bottom image:
The Guardian, May 2025
The article:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is what happens when you only view things through the lens of "political benefit" rather than actually improving people's lives.

Scrapping the two child limit would lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. That's the benefit!

Claude 4 prompt engineering best practices - Anthropic

There's a lot for us to learn about LLMs. Claude 4's prompt guide notes that when you really want a good output it might help to encourage the model, and provides the example

"Don't hold back. Give it your all."

We don't really understand how they work, do we.

docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/buil...

Rishi Sunak walking into Downing Street. Soaked.

1 year on. Doesn't time fly.

You have to give him credit: Starmer is tough on Labour support *and* tough on the causes of Labour support.

@jonnelledge.bsky.social ‘s newsletter is always worth reading, but this one in particular is very good

every now and again I remember that thirty years ago britain and france built the longest underwater tunnel in the world, still not beaten, and the thing that limits how many people we can shove through it is the tiny cellar underneath the train station that we use for security theatre

A new DLR train on a road in the depot at Beckton

Great weekend of train testing completed, all moving us closer to introducing the new trains this year. Here's a photo of one from the depot this morning. They're amazing!

"addicted to hiring cheap Labour" okay great looking forward to the white paper about reforming the funding of social care, and the tax rises necessary to pay for it

I'm sure that Labour talking "tough" on migration and making life more miserable for those who do jobs people in the UK don't want to do will result in more Labour votes because Reform will pack their bags and go home and not at all just take a more extreme position

Happy birthday!

Coming soon: Labour responds to the failure of its Nigel Farage tribute act by trying even harder to be a Nigel Farage tribute act whilst closing its eyes to the evidence of where that path led the Tories.

I was in Ottawa last week. I love Canada; a fascinating, beautiful country which always comes across so friendly. Jean Chrétien addressed our meeting and spoke of optimism, resolve and hard work in the future. Looking forward to the results of today's election. 🇨🇦

Post a photo of a bus from your camera roll

The Economist cover today is a huge photo of Farage labelled "The Man Britain Cannot Ignore".

He's got here because we've not learned the lesson that the more we pander to him, the stronger he gets.

Brexit has been an utter disaster but no one says so. So of course he looks like a winner.

I would prefer it if people were kind on BlueSky. If that's not why we came here then why did we? I'm with you. You criticised the issue without tearing into the human.

"Gen AI is early 1900s spiritualism for digital moderns" prediction stays winning

That's fair, and good luck to them. I just can't see any way it's scalable. Any relying on a tool that bad actors can abuse or just not bother to use seems a very fragile and unreliable choice. I hope everyone gets what they want out of BlueSky and it can save from become what Twitter ended up being

I don't think it's a meaningful sign of an author's strength of argument or moral conviction if they haven't used alt text. Let's fight for tools to make everything more acceptable rather than criticising users who want to share a funny photo of a cat, or an image that moved them

I mean that's nice, but if we truly want a widely used social network (I appreciate there are arguments against wider adoption, but I think the benefits outweigh these arguments) then we're just not going to get people to do this. And that's saying nothing of often useless alt text.

Surely alt text is exactly the sort of problem that we're not going to get people to diligently add to every photo so need to look at automation and, yes, machine learning. In the same way the semantic web failed or at least was very different than imagined.