iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

alt text a chart showing flu test levels starting to rise earlier than other years but still 5x lower than the worst peak levels and only a third of the best years of peak levels the NHS isn't under pressure from flu nearly as much as covid because we pretend it went away

010

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

alt text coloured map of the UK where you can spot London easily because it's such a dark colour indicating a ~40% positivity rate

220

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

where did he stand on Boris hald-American Johnson?

010

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

I met a Rosicrucian all dressed up in their fancy gear at the San Jose temple and he told me *all about* their past life as a priestess of Isis, but he wasn't going to be rolling up one trouser leg

100

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

I mean the evolution of cultural and religious things is fascinating! it's just that the valences of what they represented in earlier cultures doesn't particularly survive in what inherits them. modern cynics don't bark much!

110

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

yes, the difference between deterministic code and stochastic goal-driven code is that the first will fail with an error and the second will follow alternative code paths to attempt to complete the task. that's 1 the whole point of using an agent instead of a script 2 not a sign of anything

110

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

I suppose the YouGov survey results might be more useful representations of what people really think if everyone showed a third-party site their passport before being able to do surveys for points (and points mean prizes!) but personally I'm not going to

yougov.zendesk.com

About ID Verification

What is ID Verification?ID Verification is the process of confirming that a person is who they claim to be. For our members at YouGov, this involves completing a short task via Yoti, our trusted th...

020

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

that's not vibe coding either; that's actual human web developers making stupid decisions that suggest they hate and despise their users

040

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

and when you finally get to the My Phillips site to tell them that yet another Sonicaire toothpaste fell apart while in warranty, it's a blank grey page that times out. that's after doing three levels of security verification to get the damn thing to even try opening

110

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

while I'm at it, Phillips has one of the worst consumer web sites *ever*; most of their support links on their site on 404 when you *click on the buttons on the site*

120

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 15h

the modern catholic view of Mary doesn't incorporate any Isis worship and the Masons especially don't like when you bring that up

110

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Kaleidotrope @kaleidotrope.bsky.social · 16h

Moreover, a publisher who only removes unfair clauses from contracts when they get pushback from more experienced writers or artists isn’t to be trusted.

15113

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 16h

oh, just me resetting a strong password I have securely stored to a weak password I can type in on mobile for a financial service that disables password sync on their mobile app turning off the affordances makes people *less* secure, InvestEngine and you should feel bad for your antipatterns

2161

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 16h

might be worth asking them what processes they have in place; they don't always want the dead hardware back if you can show it's dead without them getting it back

110

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 16h

worst I managed with Palmer Fucking Luckey was when he crashed the table of journalists at a Dell event asking if we wanted to talk to him about VR headsets, I stared blankly, shook my head and shushed him when the presentation started

070

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 16h

'banned by the thin skinned VCs' remains one of my proudest badges of honour

120

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

if you want a source for how badly people can misunderstand passkeys, there's a sub-thread on a github issue about npm security improvements (maybe trusted publishing, maybe switching off TOTP) where someone describes it as 'DRM for passwords' and my brain melted out of my skull at that point

020

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

if it's that dead, does it matter if it wasn't?

100

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

I absolutely grant that Musk and Oracle have ripped up the pollution and planning rules to build crappy data centres, but the majority of OpenAI compute today is still in Azure data centres that were built to run on renewables with closed loop cooling

010

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

and from the UK end of things, what we see the building developers pushing isn't affordable housing; they want to build luxury flats Chinese buyers will leave empty and they refuse to build in London where they are required to include even a small level of affordable housing

110

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

see if you can find something more than just temporal correlation: I wouldn't be surprised if investment advisors were pushing people who would have invested in REITs into tech stocks but property has been a pretty poor investment vehicle since before the capex boom, so they'd have been out anyway

210

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Norman Wilson (⚠️Ontario is not America) 🔵 @oclsc.bsky.social · 17h

ICE will just pave Paradise, put up a parking lot, a concentration camp, and a place for people to be shot Don't it always seem to go

011

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

that's exactly what they did!

000

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

patak @patak.cat · 17h

Respecting the ecosystem and the users is going to be fundamental. How is the API of the project evolved? What are the security, stability, and backward compatibility stories? There will be very interesting tension in a lot of project between their scope and its downstream and upstream.

121

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Ross @rossengineer.bsky.social · 19h

Southern California is facing a second tropical storm in the span of 3 years, after nearly a century without such activity. Climate change is not a future problem, it is a right now problem.

1165

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

@octopus.energy hey, when the power hour T&Cs say 'use by November 1' does that include using *on* November 1 which is a Sunday? having been away two sundays in a row we now have more power hours banked than we can use 2 at a time unless we can use 2 on November 1

010

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

so I think by asking if there are examples that people who aren't already powerful do find valuable and then suggesting that they don't count if *you* don't find them valuable, you're always going to be able to claim that; is there anything that would actually change your mind?

000

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

as usual, I think we're going to agree to differ

010

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

is the money going into this really money that would have been spent on anything else? it's an absurd amount of money but I'm not sure how much of it is either real money or money that would have gone on anything else actually useful

210

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Boris Journal Posts @bmannconsulting.com · 09/10/2026

New to me: Appmosphe.re "Little web apps, published to your own repo", another delightful @robin.berjon.com project. It's an aggregator for WebTiles, source on Tangled. @pyxorium.com is making some mixtapes that look lovely.

appmosphe.re

appmosphe.re — Web Tiles on the Atmosphere

Browse the Web Tiles published on the AT Protocol: find tiles by name, description, or author.

4418

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

absolutely mad set of choices about the start and end dates on some of those data sets

040

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 17h

I'm very much 'porque nos dos' because having 'solved' (for values of it's now very usable though far from perfect) natural language, there are so many ways we can make things easier by applying that lever carefully and with safeguards

000

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

the consumer adoption curve on this stuff has been remarkably broad as well as fast and while there are a lot of vocal complaints, there also seem to be a lot of people who are still using without talking much about the way they find it useful - and those ways are a real mixed bag

110

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

I've been telling consumers how to use technology for 36 years now (although I do much more enterprise these days) and the thing I've learned is that there's a leading edge of people who experiment a LOT and then the mainstream who pick up the benefits of that when it reaches them

210

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

equally unfortunately, many people have such poor experiences with healthcare that they still get better results from these things than the people who are paid to help them

120

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

Edge is *supposed* to remember that you want to keep content hidden and it's been slipping back with recent updates so I need to start shouting at @kylealden.bsky.social again, I think

000

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

otherwise sensible tech companies bend into moral pretzels as soon as they see the sweet sweet money for pushing headlines

010

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

I was doing the plant a tree thing on MSN Weather a while back and I actually can't remember what they did that was so egregious I stopped, I just remember that it was egregious. I run an ad blocker, privacy badger AND strict tracker blocking in Edge so it wasn't the vile ads

010

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

yeah, speaking as part of "The Media", all I can say is Palmer Fucking Luckey

050

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

the replies in that thread are such a good example of the naivety that means I just can't take the Greens seriously; lots of people who definitely care earnestly pointing out that they want the party to do better and no visible sign of how to achieve that

100

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Conor Caulfield @cptcorallis.bsky.social · 20h

Fascinating story about how the social dynamics of people who don't think of themselves as a management class torpedoed the unionisation efforts at Double Fine, and how that meant the majority of the staff fired this summer were attempted union members.

211648

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

someone is claiming that email addresses and other details are findable too

020

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Ricardo J. Méndez @ricardo.bsky.social · 20h

ATPProto: "repository data is public and anyone can read it" @wsocial.eu: "Hold my outrageously EC-overfunded beer"

1101

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 20h

I can’t stress enough that this notion of if and when It will gain consciousness is Bible fanfic. It’s not real.

27896126

Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 18h

sometimes deliberately low effort to weed out the people that catch that because then you're left with the real rubes - and older people with dementia

000

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Deth Veggie @dethveggie.bsky.social · 20h

I work in security and risk management, and have done in companies both large and small, for decades... every company has a business continuity/disaster recovery plan, but I've NEVER worked for one that had a "What if we spark a violent public uprising specifically against our company?" plan.

2226

Reposted by Mary Branscombe

Phoebe Barton 🚀🇺🇳 @phoebebarton.bsky.social · 20h

reposting with alt text. hollering works. though I am a bit 🤨, because to my knowledge this didn't appear to be an issue with the previous Dell contracts

A Statement on Copyright Retention Instead of "Work-for-Hire" Cover Illustrations at MRM

We previously commissioned illustrators to create covers as work-for-hire when they were asked to adapt authors' original stories for elements such as cover art.

This will be changing.

The rights granted to MRM by authors are limited, and therefore we can't protect the intellectual property and rights of the original author of the story, if we at the same time grant the authors' rights to the illustrator so that the illustrator can then retain an adaptation copyright. We don't acquire rights from authors that allow us to grant illustrators broad unencumbered use of the worlds, characters, and other elements created by the author.

We're planning to pause cover contracts based on specific stories for the foreseeable future while we figure out the best way forward with those kinds of commissions.

We prefer a process that will both feel fair to illustrators and protect the story authors' copyright.

To that end, we can license existing art or license new original art for our covers (not based on a story) with contracts for illustrators where the artist clearly retains the copyright in the underlying image, since there are no underlying rights owned by authors of the stories that are a part of these kinds of original works.

Regarding retention of "moral rights" in illustrations: our licensing agreements for original art and original fiction use language prepared by an international IP attorney based on notes we received from SFWA's contracts committee. These kinds of agreements no longer include a waiver of moral rights.

We always appreciate when contributors to the magazines express their concerns.

1104