iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yeah, fundamentally they’re sending the prompt to another computer which needs to read it. Unless the providers provide some e2e cryptography to somehow allow the sending of a prompt that they can decrypt only at their end (but that would then presumably be tied to the account, so would kibosh this)

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The internet does not appear to have any evidence of the musical I took part in as a teenager, reenacting the build up to the foundation of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. “Co-operation is the key / Build a better future for you and me” are the only lyrics I remember :)

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Same thing: github.com/graze-social... That’s not really a proper co-op, is it, only pooled ownership; feels a bit cheeky of them to use “Rochdale-tradition” for the divi ;)

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Yeah, we do have an old Chromecast dongle that works well for casting from a device. Maybe the solution is just to ditch the aerial (looks like you can get a Freeview app which links to all the other apps, what a great new world we live in) and run everything through Chromecast...

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Lovely boring dumb 37" LG TV, purchased from @richersounds.com in 2011 (and carried all the way down Broad Street, that was fun) giving up the ghost. What is this world I now find myself in? There’s no TV between 32" and 40", and TVs all monitor everything you do and sell it for ads/data?

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In that 2003 concert with the flash flood, we also played Carwithen’s One Damn Thing After Another, so a nice link that they’ve played her piece “Bishop Rock” about the lighthouse @petroc.bsky.social also visited today

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I’ve cleared the cache, and I do get a two split BHM/CWM now at e.g. split.traintimes.org.uk/COV/CDF/n/09... so I guess something a bit off got cached somewhere

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Also took the opportunity to fix my now/recently played page intunemixtapefanclub.dracos.co.uk/on-now/ Which I regularly find handy

I assume he’s on his way to Bishop Rock. Reminds me of our summer 2023 concert where we performed Bridge’s The Sea; a member of the Elgar Society: “no sooner had we parked than it was if a tropical monsoon storm tap was turned on [...] the front door footpath by now running with fast flowing water“

register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/sector-da... Do you know, I think Second Chance Headway Centre probably doesn’t have 484,577 employees

Top 10 charities in England and Wales - 26 September 2026
Here you can see the top 10 charities based on information contained in the annual return. The top 10 charities can be displayed for different categories by selecting from the drop-down menu. Lists are ordered with charities having the highest figures shown first. This information is updated daily.

Show charities by: Employees

Charity name Employees
SECOND CHANCE HEADWAY CENTRE 484577
Brixton House Limited 65170
NUFFIELD HEALTH 18566
SAVE THE CHILDREN INTERNATIONAL 16153
United Learning LTD 11294
THE HALO TRUST 11216
THE BRITISH COUNCIL 9446
THE NATIONAL TRUST FOR PLACES OF HISTORIC INTEREST OR NATURAL BEAUTY 8746
MSI REPRODUCTIVE CHOICES 8724
BARNARDO'S 7404

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Transmit data using high-latency molecular vibration technology using the latest Stello-Matic and Decho-Matic devices.

This is lovely – send a piece of text or a small file from one device to another, via the medium of sound waves: vrugtehagel.nl/transmit/

vrugtehagel.nl

Transmission

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 25/09/2026

I watched a random Bill Oddie documentary over the summer - www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis... - he mentioned somewhere near Bromsgrove I'd never heard of (Upton Warren), so a short while afer I had a day trip (3 buses there), and I saw a lapwing, a sandpiper, and a kingfisher!

bbc.co.uk

Birding with Bill Oddie - Series 2: 4. Bill's Beginnings

Bill Oddie revisits his childhood birding haunts to discover how they have changed over 50 years.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 21/09/2026

I saw Transformers (1986) at the weekend, and they too had some robots that combined to form a bigger robot. They seemed to argue about it more. Feels like the opposite way to England, the upper tier sounds a lot like a county council (but with planning, so perhaps a combo county and national park)

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 19/09/2026

Having a very rare triple cinema day. Have seen Transformers (1986) 40th anniversary rerelease (dont think I saw it at the time; what an 80s soundtrack!), next up Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, and then Pressure

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Reposted by Matthew Somerville

Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This is going around as essential reading and for very good reason. Honestly the most incisive and full summary of the longtermism/x-risk pathology I have seen. Every stanza is a gem, and the closing is genius, but my personal favorite, because I have had this exact conversation almost verbatim:

[nitter.app post excerpt from banteg]

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
> expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
> extremely thoughtfully

›reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
›still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
›epistemic robustness achieved

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 19/09/2026

I was travelling to Hitchin for a memorial on Sunday, all trains to London were cancelled, and so it was somewhat annoying that on that day I was getting over 2 million bot hits to my little server, from over 1.3 million different IP addresses, slowing down or timing out traintimes.org.uk

Graph showing hits to my honeypot in September. Starts off slowly, building up after a few day to the 500k to 1 million daily level, spiking to 2 million/1.5 million on Sunday/Monday, dropping down to "only" 300-700k daily since.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 19/09/2026

I’m not scared, I’m angry. My sites still work, as I have spent a lot of time dealing with the issue (especially last week when scrapers started to overload the server). I wouldn’t even care about them scraping (for my specific things) if they had any indication of community, care or consideration

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 17/09/2026

@paulclarke.com Here you go, was passing on my way to Mahler 2. Lovely to see you

The Baskerville sculpture outside Baskerville House, Centenary Square, Birmingham. The word Virgil is typeset in Baskerville, backwards for printing, one plinth per letter

A slightly closer picture of the same thing

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 17/09/2026

Pizza Express is almost £100 now for the three of us! Mini egg small bag is £2!

Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 16/09/2026

I was early enough coming home that the Milton Keynes to London part turned out to be £43.20 total. £108.40, a 57% saving overall. Sadly no ice cream stop

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 16/09/2026

Talking of which - off to Stevenage for the day, £252 return… or: 🍍to Rugby : £15 return To Milton Keynes : £21.40 return To London : £48.80 two singles To Stevenage : £28.80 two singles Total: £114 Annoyingly due to changes etc you have to work that out in bits on split.traintimes.org.uk

split.traintimes.org.uk

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 16/09/2026

The keyboard at New Street says from 7am but it is switched off so you are all saved my poor half remembered Williams, Einaudi, Bach

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Odd, as people accused of assault normally get lauded and promised legal help from the Reform leader on their conference stage www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

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When I saw the grey background didn’t get down to the bottom of the container, and you couldn’t scroll to the bottom (only in Safari) my first thought was – is this a float bug? Surely it can’t be a float bug! And lo, it is a float bug! In 2026!

A bit of a flytipping form, where you are unable to scroll to the bottom to select No

Pre-emptive Preparatory Predictive Postulatatory Procatalepsis

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 14/09/2026

You will be pleased to know this is (hopefully) the last message I shall send about the awful Tax-free Childcare system. Mine has now aged out, so I closed the account on 3rd August. They sent me a few notifications. And yet, this morning, I received the quarterly “confirm your details” email!

Lots of identical messages about someone reaching the age limit for Tax Free Childcare

Dear MATTHEW

Childcare service reminder - confirm your details are up to date

To continue getting Tax-Free Childcare or Free Childcare For Working Parents, you must confirm your details are up to date with us by 12 October 2026.

You can do this in your childcare account. To sign in, go to www.gov.uk/childcareaccount. Then select 'Reconfirmation' and follow the instructions. It's easy to do and will only take a few minutes.

0100

FixMyStreet still uses input type=image to allow non-JavaScript map clicks :) Not sure if that’s CSS pixels or not, but think it’s okay

020

Reposted by Matthew Somerville

Jukesie @jukes.ie · 14/09/2026

Dates have been saved as this will be a wonderful event from @mysociety.org

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 13/09/2026

Ticket machine does not let you buy the £33.50 super off peak to London because of how it works. Trebles all round. Thankfully the ticket office is very nice, and also can help you when all trains to London are then cancelled due to a fatality

Ticket machine offering £72 tickets only

Ticket machine offering more expensive tickets

030

Justin Fletcher is the voice of Shaun the Sheep?!

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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 11/09/2026

Not sure I can picture where the birch is! What was the third? ;) We made the Honey Show and popped into Bournville on the way back, avoided the rain.

000

Reposted by Matthew Somerville

Listen you sound nuts if you try to explain that a bunch of silicon valley luminaries are involved in a weird cult that started with a harry potter fanfic and that their weird bboard flame war has spilled over into the real world That's absurd is what that is But also... It's true

4548116

Google mistreated their heritage and lost all of the newsgroups, e.g. groups.google.com/g/uk.railway So I thought I’d lost the post where I announced the first version of traintimes.org.uk (the live departure boards, in 2001). But I’ve tracked a copy down :) traintimes.org.uk/announcement

Google Groups web page for uk.railway: "429 Too Many Requests"

In message <>
"Alan J. Flavell" <> wrote:

> Since the offering from North West Trains (as they then were IIRC) some
> considerable time back, where a contributor to this group provided an
> alternative access page to remove the usability impediments that had been
> misguidedly designed-in (pointlessly, as the alternative acces page
> demonstrated in a very practical way), things seem to have only got worse
> with the user interface.

But a contributor has hopefully done it again. :-)
<http://www.dracos.co.uk/railway/> takes the information from the National
Rail site, but removes all the JavaScript and frames, adds text links and alt
tags for the imagemap, stops all this opening in new windows rubbish, and
works for all the regional pages as well. I'm open to suggestions on how to
improve it further (it's a bit late and I'm sure I've missed something), and
I hope it's of use to someone.

ATB,
Matthew
--
Inigo Montoya: You seem a decent fellow, I hate to kill you.
Westley: You seem a decent fellow, I hate to die.

http://www.dracos.co.uk/

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As @infrequently.org noted in infrequently.org/2023/02/the-..., and the same applies with AI coding

The complexity merchants knew their environments weren't typical, but sold their highly specialised tools to folks shopping for general purpose solutions anyway. They understood most sites lack latency budgeting, dedicated performance teams, hawkish management reviews, ship gates to prevent regressions, and end-to-end measurements of critical user journeys. They grasped that massive investment in controlling complexity is the only way to scale JS-driven frontends, but warned none of their customers.

Production code written by Claude should have a higher bar than if it was written by a human. At Anthropic, we have many guardrails in place to make sure this is happening: lots of lint rules, lots of tests, Claude-driven end to end tests, Claude-powered fuzzers running daily, automated code reviews and security reviews, automated code refactoring, and so on. Without these, you can end up with a mess that is hard to maintain down the line.
– Boris Cherny

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You always hear oh, they’re good at coding, and if you throw infinite compute and don’t implement guardrails then unsurprisingly it does stuff, but these are all, to be blunt, crap: my.diffend.io/gems/wandtmp... socket.dev/rubygems/pac... my.diffend.io/gems/zzsouth...

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Afraid I don’t know, sorry. Bit of secondary school freshers flu going round here, plus it’s the honey show, and I have to prep for a memorial tomorrow. You are welcome to be my proxy if you’re there :) 🌸

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