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Ben Sauer

@bensauer.net
333 followers 438 following 49 posts

Author of deathbyscreens.co / Speaker / Product+Design Leader / ex-Clearleft, Babylon Health. Current mission: helping designers tell better stories about their work. bensauer.net

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Reposted by Ben Sauer
Jason Kitcat @jasonkitcat.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
More pondering on AI as I wrangle with what it means for public servants... Here's where I've got to so far: There is a useful path to take between hype and doom. It's time to keep experimenting and learning as nobody knows what the future will bring. jasonkitcat.com/2026/03/02/s...
jasonkitcat.com
Some thoughts on AI
“Anyone who tries to tell us they know the future is simply trying to own it.” — Margaret Heffernan in her introduction to Uncharted Take a deep breath. Nobody knows what is going to happen with AI…
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 23/01/2026
Outcomes over outputs...
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Reposted by Ben Sauer
qntm @qntm.org · 14/01/2026
THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION ebook is discounted to £1.99 for one day only, get in there 🐆
amazon.co.uk
There Is No Antimemetics Division: The thrilling new sci-fi horror novel, 'mind-bendingly brilliant' Guardian
There Is No Antimemetics Division: The thrilling new sci-fi horror novel, 'mind-bendingly brilliant' Guardian eBook : qntm: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 10/01/2026
Randy Newman’s “Political Science”, on repeat.
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 12/10/2025
This is why Germans are more concerned about how their personal data is used.
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 09/10/2025
WTF is the point of supplier portals like SAP Ariba, if you have to enter the same information every time for each client? Anyone know?
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 25/09/2025
Putting an idea out there that just occurred to me while chatting about 'The Thick of It' with @tomdkerwin.bsky.social - I think the UK needs a 'Silicon Valley' type satire. A British startup trying to be ambitious, but hampered by insecurities and class differences.
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Reposted by Ben Sauer
Gavin Freeguard @gavinfreeguard.com · 23/09/2025
There's still time to sign up for tomorrow's @transformgovtalks.bsky.social (MoJ/online) with: - @moiranics.bsky.social/Holly Marquez (Cab Office) on Why Planning for AI Disasters Unlocks Breakthrough Innovation ​- @bensauer.net on Always Be Creating Clarity: Daily habits for strategic storytelling
luma.com
TransformGov Talks : September 2025 · Luma
Dr Moira Nicolson, Lead Behavioural Scientist (Cabinet Office) and Honorary Research Fellow (UCL) plus Holly Marquez, Senior Behavioural Scientist, (Cabinet…
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 05/08/2025
Slow, sarcastic clap for rac.co.uk . Classic roach motel move: can’t cancel the service without calling them. So much self-serve is possible online, but not that. Almost like you can never leave… cc/ @deceptive.design
rac.co.uk
RAC Breakdown Cover & Car Insurance | Route Planner | RAC
Become an RAC member and get trusted breakdown cover – our patrols fix 4/5 on the spot. From servicing & repairs to insurance, we’ll handle all your driving needs.
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Reposted by Ben Sauer
Akbar Shahid Ahmed @akbarshahidahmed.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
NEW— "A lot of children have passed the point of no return...The gut lining has started to auto-digest & will no longer [absorb] water or nutrition. Death is imminent for 1000s" An American doctor who just returned from Gaza on where US-Israeli policy is taking us: www.huffpost.com/entry/gaza-s...
huffpost.com
‘Past The Point Of No Return’: Doctor Describes How Starvation In Gaza Is Driving Mass Death
"In August and September, there are probably still going to be ... large numbers of deaths because children have already passed the tipping point," Mark Brauner, who volunteered in Gaza last month, to...
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
The comments suggest "Sendetastenverunsicherung"
Hey Germans, please come up with a word that means "the fear of typing `return` vs `shift-return` because you don't know which inserts newline and which sends the message"
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 02/07/2025
hey GDS/UK GOV folks. I just verified my ID for companies house. That process... was not fun. Got lost multiple times, ended up on help pages that didn't link me to the right place.
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 01/05/2025
OK folks, help needed. Search engines and AI are coming up blank. Who said something like... "great works are great not because they are free of flaws, but because they have mastered their own perspective" ? I thought this was Virginia Woolf but can't find it....
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 29/04/2025
😘 Canada
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 24/04/2025
Cursor just rickrolled me when I asked for some "HTML with an example youtube video embedded". 🤷
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 11/04/2025
This is the story of my time at a well-funded yet disastrous startup
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 25/03/2025
I've been running my 'Practical Strategic Storytelling' workshop at conferences and for orgs like Monzo for a while now, and the response has been unexpected...
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 27/02/2025
So close... just 3 days and 10% to go! Watch the trailer, and immediately throw some cash at @daviddylanthomas.bsky.social's brilliant movie idea (zombies that only eat white people...)
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 24/02/2025
Pony up people! This is such a great project
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 12/02/2025
America is becoming one *giant* Chesterton's Fence, isn't it?
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 03/02/2025
Make America Taste Great Again! bsky.app/profile/davi...
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Reposted by Ben Sauer
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 31/01/2025
Finally got this prototype to work after 1000 years of debugging. Sweet release 🥲 The idea is I dump a bunch of unstructured notes on a topic in, feed that into gpt-4o-mini, ask it to label sections with a set of types – claim, evidence, assumption, etc. – and display them as coloured highlights
A text editor with sentences highlighted in different colors. Below the text editor is a set of buttons that allows you to label the text as claims, evidence, assumptions, and other types of argument structures. Below that is a debugging info section where you can see some visible JSON.
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 22/01/2025
Hey. You. Yes you. Do you know what 'deadcatting' is? You should! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_ca...
en.wikipedia.org
Dead cat strategy - Wikipedia
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 10/01/2025
Realising that ChatGPT's appeal is not just intelligence. It's providing a cleaned-up version of the web that's been missing for years. No crappy search results. No guessing which one's right. No cookie / mailing list popups or distracting ads. It's a return to what the web used to be.
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Reposted by Ben Sauer
Spongefile @spongefile.com · 10/01/2025
Shameless plug! I made an indie calendar app for people with #adhd . Check it out here and repost if you like it. www.weelplanner.app
weelplanner.app
Weel Planner | ADHD Calendar App for iOS
No more missed events. Weel is an ADHD calendar that gets how you think. Discover tools to address time blindness, dyscalculia, alarm numbness, and more.
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 07/01/2025
I just wrote "forgetababble" instead of "forgettable", and I think that's a much better description of what I was trying to describe. Forgetababble: When someone goes into so much detail, you don't remember a thing they've said.
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Reposted by Ben Sauer
David Dylan Thomas @daviddylanthomas.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Beneath a quiet park in Philly lie the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people (true). What if, one night, they all came back from the dead as zombies but only ate white people? That's the premise of my new film, White Meat. Will you help make it a reality? whitemeatmovie.com
Movie poster with the title White Meat in reddish orange letters over a Black power fist bursting out of the ground as if it belonged to the undead rising from the earth with trees and buildings in the background
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 17/12/2024
Soooo.... to fix my phone <> laptop hotspot, Gemini is recommending that I... *checks notes*.... wipe my phone. 🫣
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 16/12/2024
This is very good - subtle distinction between interacting with "AI as person" and "AI as computer." I've been arguing in recent talks that there's also a serious confusion generally between AI as mode of interaction (voice and chat), and AI as material (the intelligent plumbing behind the scenes)
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 29/11/2024
Folks, I'm trying really hard to take the train instead of flying to Berlin next week. Don't mind working on a train for a whole day. But the booking process is a shitshow, the changovers are risky, the middlemen are slow + unhelpful, and the rail operators unreliable, then inflexible. 😱
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Reposted by Ben Sauer
Daniel Fosco @danielfos.co · 23/11/2024
I’ve said this before, but at a certain level of design your ability to write a doc is likely to have more impact than your ability to design interfaces. Not because you won’t design screens, but because your ability to convey an architecture, idea, or approach and get folks buy in is essential.
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 23/11/2024
Well, this is a first: lost my voice. I'm doing four weeks of training / talks / events around Europe. WUD in Tallinn yesterday was a blast. Presented AM, rest of the day talking to people buying my book. Voice now defunct. Enforced silence for next couple of days. Kind of like it.
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 18/11/2024
Discovering today that GenAI can't do maps. And comes up with pretty stupid icons for countries. See below...
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 18/11/2024
OK. So this feels like a revival now - a real one. Glad to hear about the blocking / reporting working well on bluesky. What else would we like to be different this time?
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Ben Sauer @bensauer.net · 04/10/2023
Well hello all. and arrrg... so hard to make an image work right across different sizes in your profile!
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