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Polly Thompson

@pollyrt.bsky.social
301 followers 269 following 159 posts

"surprisingly people focussed for a tech person" | "stronger than you look" | "so embarrassing"

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Polly Thompson
selene ⚢ @ms.juneever.green · 30/09/2026
i’m not like other girls. i am other girls and they are me. we share a collective consciousness. we’re angry
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natemare before christmas @natescape.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Do you know how much has to have gone wrong for me to not like the internet
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Dr Rob @robheighton.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Xanadu-du-du push pineapple, shake the tree Xanadu-du-du stately pleasure dome decree
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Polly Thompson @pollyrt.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
hmm might need a rethink of how alerts are managed bilingually. Separate alerts in each language is weird unless they're targeted www.gov.uk/alerts/curre...
gov.uk
Current alerts
A list of the emergency alerts currently being sent in the UK
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Jonty Wareing @jonty.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
I updated my total eclipse webcam viewer for today's eclipse! Once totality begins you'll see a live-updating umbra, so you can race to the next webcam and see the eclipse happen over and over again. jonty.github.io/2026_eclipse...
A map showing the path of the 2026 total eclipse over Iceland and Spain, with markers showing webcams and a countdown until the eclipse begins, and it hitting the first webcam.
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Polly Thompson @pollyrt.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Commonwealth games womens +86 reminding me what a compelling spectator sport olympic lifting is. Emily Campbell looking confident despite missing 2nd snatch. Everything to play for in the C&J 💪❤️💪❤️💪
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Polly Thompson @pollyrt.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
This is good (although I'd like to see it touch in the impact on local gov, ofc) I'm surprised that "about a third of English voters wrongly think that social care is free"
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Coleen Murphy @ctmurphy1.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband
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Russell Garner @rgarner.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Entirely related, because nobody does effective policy around tech. Nobody.
A Natalie Horburg black-and-white cartoon.

A passenger on the right speaks to the driver on the left:

"Remember, it's illegal to use your phone while driving. Instead, use
the giant iPad built into the car."
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Letters of Note @lettersofnote.com · 12/06/2026
RIP David Hockney
I’m 82, I’m going to die. We die because we are born. The only things that matter in life are food and love, in that order, and also our little dog Ruby. I truly believe this, and for me, the basis of art is love. I love life.

David Hockney
Letter to Ruth Mackenzie
April 2020
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Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing.org.uk · 12/06/2026
I'm sure this would have made David Hockney laugh
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David Whitley @mrdavidwhitley.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Treating any communication platform that algorithmically selects which content to put in front of a user as a publisher, and legally responsible for that content, is the screamingly obvious solution that will deeply upset maybe seven companies and make life considerably better.
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Andrew Greenway @andrewgreenway.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
How does a small central programme become a national movement for public service reform? I've written about what next for Test, Learn and Grow - and what it will take to scale a way of working across every corner of the state. 👇 andrewgreenway.substack.com/p/from-metho...
andrewgreenway.substack.com
From method to movement
The second act of Test, Learn and Grow
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💀 skeletori amos 💀 @rivalconga.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
A story I love about Anthony Stewart Head. Thank you to this person for sharing it on Tumblr. What a mensch.
A photo of Tony Head with a fan, standing in a barn near a horse. Tumblr post from dracofidus: If you EVER think Anthony Head is anything less than an angel then you'd best remember that I have always been a huge fan of his and we've always had a little contact over the years and he heard I'd come out as Trans and was having a hard time and that I was kind of sad that the photos I had from conventions with him were of me with long hair and no binder and they were all signed to "Sarah" and so he invited me to spend the day with him at his farm and he picked me up from the station and we just hung out and had lunch and he insisted on paying and look loads of photos and had them printed on photo paper the same day so he could sign them to Jay, along with other photos of him as Giles and Utger and he literally spent five hours chatting with me and got all the pronoun stuff right every time and then he dropped me off at the station, gave me a massive hug. Waved me through the ticket barrier and insisted I message him when I got home so he knew I was back safe.
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Polly Thompson @pollyrt.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
This song is wonderful but totally heartbreaking and my stupid brain has decided that heartbreak is great earworm material. open.spotify.com/track/7I5YEo...
open.spotify.com
Love You So Bad
Ezra Furman · Transangelic Exodus · Song · 2018
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Gavin Freeguard @gavinfreeguard.com · 21/05/2026
Thrilled that @policycamp.bsky.social, a one-day unconference for policy practitioners, is happening! - Thursday 23 July, 1000-1630 - University College London Apply for tickets now: policycamp.org.uk A massive thank you to everyone who helped shape our thinking. Please share widely!
Logo for Policy Camp. A stylised P is made up of sticky note-coloured shapes (a triangle and thin rectangle) in pink, a C with two yellow triangles, and there is a green triangle in the gap between the stalk of the P and the bottom of the C. There is white space between each of the shapes. 'Policy Camp' is written next to the logo.
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Shaun @sconner.net · 15/05/2026
Yay! I'm hiring two Senior Accessibility Specialists to join my team on GOV.UK One Login. You'll be working with great people, solving complex problems for tens of millions of users. Salary of £70,834 - £74,317 (London) / £63,240 - £66,610 (National). Please share!
civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk
Quick Check Needed
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Ross Floate @rossfloate.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Oh my. This is spectacular. sinceyouarrived.world/taken
sinceyouarrived.world
taken.
A web page that tells you what your browser gave away the moment you arrived. No login, no form, no permission. Most pages do this. None of them tell you.
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Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
i made an app for tracking whether the oligarchs are actually fleeing city centers ews.kylemcdonald.net
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Not In Our Name (NION) Women @nionwomen.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
We believe everyone belongs in parkrun 🩷 🏃‍➡️ 🏃‍♀️‍➡️ 🏃‍♂️‍➡️ We’ve written about why this matters, not just for trans people, but for all of us. Read our blog: notinourname.org.uk/everyone-belongs-in-parkrun
notinourname.org.uk
Everyone belongs in parkrun - Why trans-inclusive community sport matters for everyone
Legal pressure to exclude trans people from parkrun threatens one of the UK’s most inclusive community spaces. Here’s why it matters for everyone.
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Polly Thompson @pollyrt.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
Totally normal: My mum's list of things she wanted to talk to me about today.
Monday 6 April 26

Poll-

shower edge

birthday food etc

plastics film

de-clutter progress

hot cross buns (with a little drawing of a hot cross bun)

guinea pigs
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alexis simpson is confused by display name changes @amutepiggy.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
this is art
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State of the Future @sotf.org.uk · 23/03/2026
Happy @transformgovtalks.bsky.social week! Join us for 6pm this Wednesday, online or at the MoJ in London SW1 👇
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 19/03/2026
This is grim, ghoulish, and nauseating. It also derives from an incredibly impoverished view of success.
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Tyler, from the Internet (Haunted) @tylerfromtheinternet.com · 17/03/2026
Phoebe Sanders on YouTube with a timeline cleanse.
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Sarah Z @sarahz.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
I know it's a silly jokey joke, but people REALLY need to stop anthropomorphizing their boyfriends. "My boyfriend told me" your boyfriend didn't "tell" you anything. "My boyfriend thinks..." your boyfriend can't actually think or feel; just output a convincing simulation of it based on probability 🙄
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steve @visitmy.website · 11/03/2026
Local government bods! Anyone with experience of getting permission for working in the open at your local authority? Need a couple of quotes from people who’ve done it before...
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Antóin Ó Floinn @teflondub.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
Alt text as a literary art form. Superb!
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Stef Walter @stephaniewalter.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Little reminder that axe-con, organised by @deque.com is this week!! It's a free online, two days (February 24 25) event, with a very nice line up of talks about accessibility and inclusive design. Want to learn about accessibility? Register, check them live, or catch the replays! #Accessibility
deque.com
axe-con Digital Accessibility Conference | Deque
Join us to learn how to build, test, monitor, and maintain digital accessibility. Hosted on February 24-25, 2026, axe-con is completely free and virtual.
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Polly Thompson @pollyrt.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
I've been thinking a lot about boldness this week, so revisited this classic post from @janethughes.bsky.social. I can't it's 10 years old! medium.com/public-innov...
medium.com
What if boldness were an explicit value of the civil service?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it takes to get difficult and meaningful things done. Why it’s hard, exhausting and incredibly…
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John Cutler @johncutle.fish · 07/02/2026
Techno-authoritarian thinkers elevate centralized, algorithmic control above humanistic complexity. People who bought into these areas (with their wallets and political donations) are on product podcasts talking about how great everything is. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-405-ho...
cutlefish.substack.com
TBM 405: Hope, Context, and Control
This essay is about hope, fear, AI, and the tension between control and collective sensemaking.
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Preeti Chhibber @runwithskizzers.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for gradient.horse
gradient.horse
gradient.horse
Draw a horse, watch it run!
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Arturo Magidin @magidin.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
This is a framing error, NYT. It's different technologies. Chatbots are not the same as the machine learning involved in reading scans (better defined inputs, clearer evaluation of outputs). Calling both AI is like conflating bombs dropped from planes with cars, because they both involve explosions.
From the NYT Evening newsletter, headline reads "A.I. bots are often wrong, but they're set to reshape medicine". Highlighted text reads: "A new study published today found that A.I. chatbots were no better than Google at guiding users towards correct or helpful health advice. The technology sometimes presented false information or dramatically changed its advice depending on slight changes in the wording of the question. But A.I. has already proved quite good at other tasks, like at reading scans and images - better than many doctor, in fact."
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Polly Thompson @pollyrt.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
LinkedIn needs to add a 🤮 response option.
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Ahhhhh @nerdjpg.com · 09/02/2026
Yeah I’m looking for my dog (girlfriend who has a restraining order against me and she has a dog) and here’s the picture of the dog (she walks this dog and I can use it to figure out her schedule) thanks for sending all footage my way
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Nick Pettigrew @nick-pettigrew.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.
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Terence Eden @edent.tel · 08/02/2026
endless.downward.spiral - is this the beginning of the end of What3Words? shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/02...
shkspr.mobi
endless.downward.spiral - is this the beginning of the end of What3Words?
Long-time readers know that I am not a fan of What Three Words. I think it is a closed, proprietary, and user-unfriendly attempt to enclose the commons. I consider that it has some dangerous failure m...
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Rusty Foster @rusty.todayintabs.com · 01/02/2026
I’m starting to think the people who are excited about “AI agents” have literally never used a computer in their lives
Benjamin De Kraker O
@BenjaminDEKR
Follow
OpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you aren't careful.
Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed.
When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O.
Opus was checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night."
Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How?The "Heartbeat" cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, ("remind me tomorrow to get milk")
1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus
4.5
2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders
3. Replied "HEARTBEAT_OK"
4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes)
The damage:
- Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
- 25 × $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
- Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total
The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking
"is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night."
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Stamanfar @stamanfar.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
In 2026 we are reinstating the regular One Team Gov breakfast club in London and also running a virtual one for anybody who doesn't have a meetup near them. If you're interested you can sign up for both using the link (and please retweet/skeet!) www.linkedin.com/posts/onetea...
linkedin.com
Between 2017 and 2021 One Team Gov held space weekly for people working across government to come together, connect, reflect and support each others work. Some local meetups like in Manchester have… |...
Between 2017 and 2021 One Team Gov held space weekly for people working across government to come together, connect, reflect and support each others work. Some local meetups like in Manchester have be...
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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
Data protection, as a concept, grew out of post-war legal scholarship in Germany which reflected on the use of data about people by the Nazi Govt, and formulated a set of limits on data use which recognised that to collect and use data about people was to impact the people’s lives.
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Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 30/01/2026
❤️
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Russell Garner @rgarner.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Reading a thread in the other place about resistance, and a sentence sticks with me: "It is ok to be discouraged, but don't discourage others." That applies to so much more than just resistance.
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Anna Dent @annadent.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Bluesky hivemind - views please! If you were writing an academic-adjacent piece and needed to include clear but accessible stuff on AI / algorithmic bias and its societal impacts, what are your go-to texts? I have lots but want to make sure I'm not missing a classic! RTs welcome 🙂
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Polly Thompson @pollyrt.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Thanks for giving us some practice at #ukgc26 @jacattell.bsky.social and @mikerose.co.uk This would make a good sticker ❤️
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Kilu von Prince @kilinguistics.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
For fans of profound wisdoms gleaned from colexifications: A lot of languages do not make a difference between "lazy" and "tired".
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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 21/01/2026
The idea that data is objective and good data practice means eliminating bias has it backwards. Data is subjective, and good data practice means tracing and identifying how the biases inherent to the data we construct serve or don’t serve specific peoples and ends to which that data is put to use.
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Connected by Data @connectedbydata.org · 20/01/2026
We are running a conference on 'Power and participation in public tech' and registration is now open to all. 📆 Friday 6th March 🕰️ 10:00 - 17:00 🏢 Manchester, UK 🔗 connectedbydata.org/events/2026... (1/X)
connectedbydata.org
Power and participation in public tech
This conference is for anyone interested in how to achieve better outcomes in the delivery of digital, data and AI work in the public sector through the involvement of the public, communities and workers. Come if you’re a public servant trying to engage or involve the public in your work on technology. Come if you’re working in civil society, in the union movement, or with grassroots groups, trying to be heard. Come to share what you’re up to, and to learn from others; leave with new insights, ideas, and connections.
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transformgovtalks.bsky.social @transformgovtalks.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
🚨 6PM, WED 28 January 🚨 At TPXImpact or online Matt Wood-Hill, MHCLG, and Linda O’Halloran, TPXimpact on public service market-shaping. ​Patrick Diamond, Professor in Public Policy, Queen Mary, University of London, on government effectiveness luma.com/pc7ji8sg Please share! Thanks 🙏
luma.com
TransformGov Talks: January 2026 · Luma
Join us at 5.30pm for a 6pm start. Matt Wood-Hill, MHCLG, and Linda O'Halloran, TPXimpact on public service market-shaping Patrick Diamond, Professor in Public…
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