iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I'm helping with an FOI project to collate a list of Copilot agents being used by local authorities, including the full prompts. Early responses have raised questions, with disability benefit applications and children's social care casework being run through Copilot. The prompts themselves are bad.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I really wish there was a decent UK version of this, ideally that covered service delivery by private providers: servicesuche.bund.de#/en/ Germany also has a helpline you can call to work out who does what: www.115.de Our system is not so simple that it is always obvious.

servicesuche.bund.de

Suchen & Finden – Verwaltungsleistungen suchen & finden

Finden Sie Leistungen der Bundesländer im Portalverbund mit suchen & finden

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

The Welsh Government has released some videos of big cat sightings, one of which, looks suspiciously like a badger to me: www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/big_...

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Getting close to finishing collating the council spend data. I now have details of 107,240,699 transactions by 297 Councils covering a net spend of £555bn sat in one neat(ish) table. The remaining ones will be trickier. Only ~550 bouncy castle related transactions so far! 🏰

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

I managed to track down the song from the events page of that Parish Council site. It is firmly stuck in my head this morning: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekF8...

youtube.com

Empires

YouTube video by Broom Bezzums

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

I've visited hundreds of parish council websites today and this is the only one with background music. www.carperbyparishcouncil.co.uk/villageevent... www.carperbyparishcouncil.co.uk/parishnews.htm

carperbyparishcouncil.co.uk

Village Events

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

We've always described failed PDF redaction as "copying the text from behind the black boxes". I just ran a z-order analysis on 14,007 failed redactions and only 4% had the text underneath. The text has been IN FRONT of the box this whole time 🤯

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Went out to eat tonight, and was sat at a table next to someone famous enough for me clock other people helf recognising them. Obviously I had no idea who they were 🙈 I eventually worked it out from clues about a charity. That's probably the right amount of famous to be, if you wanted such a thing.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Something @zarino.co.uk said at the end of the AI session at TICTeC last year stuck with me and continues to inspire. Currently doing exactly what was described to get a new tool online. I wanted to say that out loud, as people don't always get to know that they've motivated someone in that way :)

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

I'm building a refusal advice tool for FOISA requesters and you can tell that I'm an eternal optimist.

Screenshot of a form asking 'Does your request have a serious purpose or value?' with three radio button options: 'Yes - it's about a matter of genuine concern', 'I think so, but I can see how the authority might disagree', and 'Honestly, I'm not sure - I might have got carried away' with the third option selected.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Every time I think it's safe to use a boolean, the edge cases come and say hi. 36(2) of FOISA is absolute, but the public interest can decide whether a breach is actionable. The extraction logic captures the public interest arguments, but validation says it's absolute, so pit_conducted should be 0

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

I’ve extracted and analysed all the Public Interest arguments made in every decision ever issued by the Scottish Information Commissioner. It's completely changed my understanding of how PITs work in practice. Looking at the 25 most common "winning" factors, there were some I'd not thought of.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

TIL that over the years, I have added or updated 34,724 unique public authorities on WhatDoTheyKnow. That's 74% of the total. It's all my fault 😅

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

The decision by a number of local councils to run adverts on their websites didn't quite sit right with me. I couldn't quite work out why until I saw an advert for a credit card on the crisis loan page.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

When I find failed redactions or accidental releases of PII in FOI responses I will usually notify the authority. The response is mixed, but far too often there is just silence. Often the only way I know they've got my message is by seeing if the file has disappeared. You'd think they'd want to know

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

Microsoft seems to have pulled the larger vibevoice TTS model from huggingface, and the github repo 404s github.com/microsoft/Vi.... It's not been out for long, but I can't be alone in having both downloaded and it's MIT licensed, so there is nothing to stop mirrors. I wonder what the issue is? 🤔

github.com

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

The SSD drive of shame has hit 2,752,077 files. Of course I haven't plugged in a new one rather than face clearing it 😅

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

As a bit of fun, I used some of the WDTK keywords that I created last week to create synthetic FOI requests using mistral-small. I then finetuned SmolLM2-360M-Instruct on those outputs to generate requests from 3 keywords and the authority name: huggingface.co/HMC83/reques...

huggingface.co

HMC83/request_writer_smol · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

I've uploaded descriptive keywords for over 1 million public FOI requests. I have left it at with request_id, keywords and the name of the public authority for now: github.com/FOIMonkey/fo...

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

As a side effect of this, I have generated keywords for over 1 million FOI requests. Figuring out how to do that well in the most lightweight way was a journey in and of itself. I've not looked yet, but combined with authority and outcome data, it should be possible to spot some interesting trends.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Turns out you don't need to read an FOI response to start to be able to guess the outcome. I trained a TF-IDF classifier with a 73% macro F1-score in predicting success using just 3 keywords about the request and metadata. Adding the full request text hits 76% & a snippet of the response email 84%.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Made it back to Cowes in 11 hours 39 minutes. Taking the floating bridge x 2, a double decker bus, a Hovercraft, a single decker bus, a tram, the overground, DLR X 2 (got on the wrong train), the cable car, a catamaran, the underground, an automatic people mover, 3 x trains, and the vehicle ferry.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Going to see how many different forms of public transport it is possible to take in one day today. First up Floating bridge.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

I took 40,000 images from emails in the WhatDoTheyKnow archive and extracted the five most dominant colours from each (excluding monochrome/shades of grey). Behold the palette of the UK public sector.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

Then I'm going to have another go at teaching it Welsh. Did the 1B version on the weekend, which showed promising results in terms of picking up the vocab/grammar vs the base model. A larger, more capable model and a more curated dataset seem like the way to go there if it is to be useful.

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FOIMonkey @foimonkey.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

I'm starting a couple of new projects today. First up, trying to make OLMo-2 better at reasoning. I want to have a go at teaching it to generate <think> tokens showing its chain-of-thought as it answers. It will be a couple of days before I know if it has worked.

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