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Dominic Mitchell

@dom.happygiraffe.net
322 followers 786 following 690 posts

he/him. Hacker-at-large. Occasional Brightonian. Googler. @happygiraffe@mastodonapp.uk happygiraffe.net DMs unavailable due to OSA, sorry

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Reposted by Dominic Mitchell
Bruce Lawson @brucel.bsky.social · 13h
definitelynotwindows.com
definitelynotwindows.com
Definitely Not Windows — Windows 11½
The operating system Microsoft definitely did not make. An interactive parody of Windows 11, Microsoft 365, Copilot, updates, ads, and subscriptions.
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videogame history @vghistory.bsky.social · 16h
illustration, creative computing, magazine (1977) archive.org/details/Crea...
computer equipment stacked high. a very excited looking dude with wavy hair, has a foot and a hand on a keyboard and another foot and a hand on joysticks/controllers. a printer is spitting out paper with indecipherable text.
text font box: the ultimate computer freak
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 29/09/2026
... wombling free
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 28/09/2026
I've published detailed notes and an annotated transcript to accompany the video of the keynote I gave at @wearedevelopers.bsky.social World Congress North America in San Jose on Friday - here's my rundown of everything that's happened with LLMs in 2026 so far simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/27/...
simonwillison.net
2026 in LLMs (so far)
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological …
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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
More hugging face details derived from public urls. swarmtraces.org
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 25/09/2026
Camping
The moon above a tree
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 25/09/2026
A nice intro to passkeys. I've been slower to come around to these than I would have liked (mumble, mumble dasher accounts). But where I've used them they have been simpler.
whatarepasskeys.info
Passkeys Explained: The Easier, Safer Way to Sign In
Passkeys replace your password with a unique digital key. Easier and safer to use — no passwords to remember, no codes to wait for.
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Brian Jay Jones @brianjayjones.com · 24/09/2026
Jim Henson would have been 90 (yup, you read that right: NINETY) years old today. You can celebrate his life by celebrating creativity, diversity, peace, imagination, and silliness.
A tuxedoed Jim Henson sits in a sea of Muppets.
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Colin Smith @colinsmith.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
“Illogical”, a 1975 Heineken ad featuring Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock, by Philip Castle et al.
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 23/09/2026
"Broken down train in Balcombe tunnel" — just what you need to hear late at night on your way home 😭
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 23/09/2026
A fab show, thanks so much for telling a marvellous tale!
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 20/09/2026
Very surprised to hear @rafaelbehr.bsky.social while queuing for coffee on my dog "walk" this morning, especially as I wasn't listening to a podcast at the time 😂 Anyway I hope you enjoy the conference!
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Ken Tindell @kentindell.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This! This is how AI will kill us: with the connivance of humans. Douglas Adams nailed all this years ago with the Electric Monk.
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 19/09/2026
So did not need to hear from this gobshite on the radio today
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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Friends! It's the feast day of St. Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess, polymath, mystic, & eel truth-teller. Medieval thinkers agreed that eels reproduce asexually. But Hildegard suggested that eels mate at sea, where we can't watch. No one listened to her. But she was right! 1/2 🗃️🧪
Meme. Painting of St. Hildegard, from the shoulders up. She is dressed up in her nunnish finery. Her wimple is white and very creased, so that she looks a bit like a mummy and her veil is the dusky black of that suggests it's been through the wash many times. She has something like a crown on her head, with little spikes that look for all the world like duck feet. The saint's eyebrows are hard lines like windshield wipers, & her nose is ski-jump smooth.

Her head is surrounded by a nimbus of blue with a white outline, set against an orange background. She is looking up and towards your right, as if she's watching a possum that's about to drop onto the person sitting next to you. Her mouth is set in a tight smile. She's likely thinking about sex again. And maybe not just eel sex.

Hildegard provided us with the first written description of the female orgasm, so it's quite possible that she's got that on her mind.

Meme text reads:
"Medieval Eel Truth:
It's all about the Bingen's, baby!"
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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 17/09/2026
This is the best articulation of what LLMs are doing to programming and security that I've seen
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Ben Schwarz @benschwarz.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Qatar Airways was voted the world’s best airline in 2025. Its booking site ranks 79th out of 111. Cathay Pacific, five stars, ranks dead last. I spent a while digging into why airline websites are so slow, and what the fast ones (Ryanair, Frontier) do differently. calibreapp.com/blog/airline...
Slope chart comparing Skytrax 2025 service ranking with Calibre's website performance ranking for the ten highest-rated airlines. Lines connect each airline's service rank on the left to its performance rank out of 111 on the right. Nearly all lines plunge downward: Qatar Airways drops from 1st to 79th, Singapore Airlines 2nd to 31st, Cathay Pacific 3rd to 109th, Air France 8th to 95th, Japan Airlines 9th to 106th. Only Hainan Airlines rises, from 10th to 6th.
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Jason Buck Storyteller @jasonstoryteller.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
From next week: London, Brighton, Exeter and onwards across the UK! Sláine: The Horned God. Ticket and details here: 2000ad.com/news/dont-mi... @2000ad.bsky.social #2000AD #storyteller #storytellingforgrownups #mythology #comics
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Dreadnought Holiday @dreadships.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Coventry was a hotbed of bicycle manufacture, which naturally led to it becoming one of the British centres of motor vehicle manufacture as well, and in wartime also produced aircraft engines - hence the reason it was targeted in November 1940.
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The Onion @theonion.com · 09/09/2026
Experts Advise Against Throwing Laptop Across Office Even Though It Will Feel Incredible theonion.com/experts-advise-against…
Experts Advise Against Throwing Laptop Across Office Even Though It Will Feel Incredible
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Brandon Downey @bdowney.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I'm a little more sober now, but it's weird that I think that even if LLMs were leading us to a singularity, I don't think the tech itself is changing the nature of humanity by its existence. Instead I think it's closer to: "This is a lens for some questions about who we are and what we do."
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Standplaats Kraków could really use some cash! @standplaatskrk.pl · 07/09/2026
["QUACKS" vertically alongside a 2x3 grid of white ducks labeled: up, charm, top, down, strange, bottom. Strange wears a propeller hat.]
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 06/09/2026
Rewatching "Nausicaä of the valley of the wind" and not only is it such a beautiful film but so _timely_
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 04/09/2026
“We really do need an official opposition which can be surgical, pragmatic, and reality-based. But that is not the opposition we have. We have a moron and her little moron circus.” @iandunt.bsky.social firing on all cylinders today
iandunt.substack.com
Three specific and highly regrettable instances of Kemi Badenoch being dumb as fuck
In just a few days, the Tory leader managed to demonstrate her inadequacy in an impressive variety of ways.
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 03/09/2026
Developers who name their code "utils", "helpers" or "common" … what is wrong with you. Buy a thesaurus! Stop inflicting this meaningless verbiage on everyone else
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Nigel Auchterlounie @n-auchterlounie.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Look at this Giles cartoon from 1978 We have foreground & background. The foreground is on a different level to the background. The architecture of the house, the ceiling & the landing are in service to that. The subject in the foreground is framed. The subjects in the background are also framed...
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 03/09/2026
A great interview with Doug McIlroy, Unix pioneer. tmpout.sh/5/2.html
tmpout.sh
Interview: Doug McIlroy ~ tmp.0ut Staff
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 03/09/2026
🔥🥵 combined in emoji kitchen
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 02/09/2026
Nobody do this, so I can get tickets plz
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Esther Schindler @estherschindler.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I honestly don't know
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 26/08/2026
This mirrors my experiences: the LLMs are _really_ good at tying together disparate bits of debug logs, and they are relentless at doing so. I've fixed bugs that I wouldn't even have taken on previously.
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Dr Stylite @columnist.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
The idea of ‘the’ singularity, as used in AI context, really is irritatingly stupid.
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Goblins and Gardens @goblinsandgardens.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
After 9 years of playing Caves of Qud I’ve decided to finally write about it goblinsandgardens.com/blog/the-eve...
goblinsandgardens.com
The Ever Ending Story — Goblins & Gardens
Yesterday, I was crushed by the weight of a thousand suns.
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Jen Gentleman @jenmsft.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Optimist: The glass is half full Pessimist: The glass is half empty Software Engineer: //TODO Come back and finish the glass
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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
A year ago I wrote one of my most popular posts: "the financial crisis theory of everything". It looks at how the 2008 crash led to Trump, the rise of the radical right, Brexit, the war in Ukraine etc... I've taken off the paywall so it's now free to read. samf.substack.com/p/the-financ...
samf.substack.com
The financial crisis theory of everything
Last month there was a fascinating poll from More in Common asking people to pick the main reason Britain is “on the wrong track”.
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 22/08/2026
Review of "masters of the universe" halfway through... "Did we pay for this? No? Good."
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MꙬse Allain @mooseallain.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Fibonacci Sequins - clusters of sequins forming a fibonacci sequence.
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The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) @themerl.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
So, we found a live bat in our galleries. 🦇 a thread🦇
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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
bad idea
photo of lighthouse with headline about giving them away because gps makes them unnecessary then image of Archer with words do you want area x because this is how you get area x

created by reddit user lestratagefatale
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Association for Computing Machinery @acm.org · 13/08/2026
In this week’s People of ACM, Russ Cox, who was the technical lead at the Go programming language for over a decade, gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the popular programming environment. Read the full interview here: www.acm.org/articles/peo...
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John Bull @garius.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Many years ago, when I first started writing for The Dark Side (Britain's oldest horror mag) we had a bit of a friendly pub quiz rivalry with Empire magazine for a while. We kept losing though. Until one week we discovered a secret weapon. /1
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
The momentum of this issue is in the wrong direction. The line should be: We're roasting, we're exposed to wildfires, we're experiencing drought, and these nutters aren't prepared to keep British people safe.
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Matthew Green @matthewdgreen.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
I wrote up a new post about what AI software finding might mean for the backdoor debate. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/08/14/e...
blog.cryptographyengineering.com
Everything is about to “go dark”
I’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in my hometown of Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaini…
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Johnny Normality @probgobl.in · 14/08/2026
EVERY STORY ABOUT BEAVERS FOR THE LAST DECADE READS LIKE: WE RELEASED A DOZEN PADDLE TAILED LITTLE FREAKS AND THEY IMMEDIATELY BEGAN A TERRAFORMING PROJECT THAT REVERSED A CENTURY OF ECOLOGICAL DAMAGE IN THREE WEEKS.
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 14/08/2026
I absolutely love this. Every now and again I marvel to myself how we live in an age where I can just turn on a tap and have fresh water. There are so many commonplace things we have which would have been miracles previously.
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 13/08/2026
A sweaty flame
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Dominic Mitchell @dom.happygiraffe.net · 12/08/2026
A new low: I had to read the microwave instruction manual to figure out how to defrost something
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Jonty Wareing @jonty.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I always suspected a UK government would eventually reverse course on "coding in public". So I've been backing up all government code. For six years. Today I finally generated a report on what has been deleted. Its much worse than I realised. github.com/uk-gov-mirro...
Deleted UK Government code repositories

Total deleted repositories: 1526
Organisations affected: 56

See RECENTLY_DELETED.md for the most recently deleted repositories.

Organisation	Deleted Repos	% Deleted
hmrc	195	9.8%
nhsdigital	169	33.8%
SkillsFundingAgency	154	22.7%
informatics-lab	154	100.0%
UKHomeOffice	101	7.5%
ministryofjustice	74	2.8%
ONSdigital	66	4.3%
moj-analytical-services	65	75.6%
ukwa	47	46.1%
dwp	46	6.7%
UKGovernmentBEIS	43	27.4%
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Michael Stapelberg 🐧🐹😺 @zekjur.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
New blog post: Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug 🐞 For many years, I sometimes discovered that commands I was sure I had run were no longer present in my Z shell history file (~/.zsh_history). In this article, I will show you how I tracked down the bug michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-0...
screenshot of my blog post: Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug 🐞
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Jonathan Edwards @jontofski.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Tove Jansson. Born on this day in 1914.
Portrait of Tove Jansson
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