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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)

@ashley.rolfmore.com

850 followers 2.4K following 2.5K posts

I help software teams navigate capitalism. I help capitalists understand software teams. Highly regulated sectors are my thing. Personal account but also nerd so 🤷‍♀️ 🇬🇧➡️🇵🇹🇪🇺 I only repost images with alt-text.

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · Nov 24

Fwiw, in fintech people tend to find it very obvious that you shouldn’t accidentally send 50000 EUR instead of 500 EUR, or let money disappear.

We currently find the equivalent harder to articulate for other types of software eg products, data or services that might affect the safety of others.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · Nov 18

We as software practitioners (professionals who design/make software) need to learn from adjacent fields like medicine and engineering and consider potential harm to other humans as a basic criteria for our decision making. Hiding it behind abstractions like “customer impact” is cowardly.

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Reposted by Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 11h

This is maybe my least pro-market position: the good thing about drinking in a pub is there is an adult who can cut you off, something which cannot happen when you are drinking alone with the booze you bought at Tesco.

Altreik @altreik.bsky.social · 11h

Should go further and tax supermarket beer at a higher rate than at the moment- raises revenue, targets the biggest source of binge drinking and might help get people back into pubs.

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Reposted by Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)

The Daily Tism @thedailytism.com · 5d

Fitzgerald said: “I thought that childhood was a game that I had to win, so I’ve been doggedly copying everyone around me. Now, everyone thinks I’m normal, except they all still seem to hate me a little bit, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.”

Autistic toddler hitting all developmental milestones realises she’s inadvertently fucked it

An autistic toddler who has hit all of her developmental milestones on time has realised she may have unintentionally shot herself in the foot. Lottie Fitzgerald, three, displays a number of typical…

thedailytism.com

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 1h

A primer on Taxonomies, Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs without any maths in it. I have tried to make this understandable for as wide an audience as feasible. (Mainly written as an excuse to use my cats as an example for something yet again) - ashley.rolfmore.com/taxonomies-o...

Taxonomies, Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs: a primer

I’ve lived in this world long enough that some of these ideas just feel obvious to me, but I’ve learned they often aren’t. In most workplaces I’ve been in, fluency in how these ideas connect between ...

ashley.rolfmore.com

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 4h

Reminds me of this classic: bash.rip?190832

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 1d

Well what can our darling Tarquin do if the English courses are full with those foreigners? He was so interested in reading, we bought him all those books. Given, he's mainly used them for rollups but he would be so more fulfilled if he can study English at university.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 1d

I appreciate criticising Badenoch’s announcements is like yelling into the void - pointless at best, sanity damaging at worst but we really REALLY need to kill this idea that education is only useful if you can think of a practical use immediately.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 1d

The database tech that most modern databases run on started in some obscure paper no one deemed useful at the time. Maybe even say… a rip off?

Then SSDs were invented and needed a different way to structure data. Voila!

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 1d

All of these subjects are extremely useful to society. (And honestly, we’re naff at predicting future useful, study it for the pursuit of knowledge anyway.)

Do I really have to bring back my “drama taught me more about working in modern tech than my IT lessons” again?

• POLITICS
Badenoch: Curb students taking 'rip-off' degrees such as English
The performing arts, sociology and anthropology are among the subjects the Conservatives would like to cut
Caption:
Kemi Badenoch will use her conference speech to argue that the current system leaves both students and taxpayers worse off (Photo: Nicola Tree/Getty Images)

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 2d

Also, this classic: www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db...

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Steve

www.smbc-comics.com

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 2d

If you are ND in some way, notably if you have those traits often associated with autistic peeps, often something "clicks" in your brain between the age of 26 and 33. It can make life a LOT less stressful.

essencesimmone.blacksky.app @essencesimmone.blacksky.app · 5d

Those who are 35+, what advice do you have for people just entering their 30s?

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 2d

What I do is pretty nice for me (find out what people need and can pay for then communicate that in a way that something can be built) but until a decade ago it was seen as a "reject bin" job for those people who didn't fit elsewhere. It's now fashionable and being ruined by snake oil.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 3d

Describe your Bluesky account in a single image

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 3d

The appearance of parsimony matters more than it should.

I’d visit these councils - no tea or coffee supplied - if I was very lucky someone had come to the office with a giant batch of homemade samosas. Less visible parts of publicly run orgs still supply hot drinks and a even a staff canteen…

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 3d

And when these councillors were voted in, we joked about their lack of knowledge of the basics of the reality of local government but honestly the average punter also has to get through this knowledge hump too.

When we say “try to understand Reform” I hope we mean this, not the, y’know, the racism

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 3d

As someone who looked after software that covered about 1/3 of this cost for most of the 2010s, I watched this decline in real time.

The below is not understood by the general public at all and honestly I come across unhinged trying to make this point to anyone not a politics nerd.

James Ball @jamesrball.com · 3d

*gasp*

“Everyone thought we’d come in and there were going to be these huge costs we could cut away but there just aren’t,” said a third senior Reform cabinet member in Kent.

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 3d

Conclusion - actually managed to keep my interest despite revolts eating a good chunk my progress mid-way.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 3d

It’s easy to laugh but I’m inside on a beautiful sunny island on a Sunday to play Civ VII’s new update 💀

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 3d

Right, that's it. I'm founding a new populist party of the centre called Go Outside!

Peter Walker @peterwalker99.bsky.social · 3d

The UK is “madly left, madly liberal, hyper-progressive”, Syed says. This is a deeply odd speech, seemingly from yet another person who spends a lot of time on X.

[I deleted earlier post which had the typo of saying, 'US' rather than 'UK'.]

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 5d

I wrote a thing defending Microsoft Teams. Probably my most controversial tech opinion 😅

It's a fascinating case study in understanding your market positioning and how it doesn't matter what the majority of the industry believes about you if you are right...

ashley.rolfmore.com/in-defence-o...

In defence of Microsoft Teams

Now, I suspect out of everything I write, this is potentially the most controversial opinion I have. Microsoft Teams is actually brilliant. Right. Let's try to explain this... The dark old ages I...

ashley.rolfmore.com

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 6d

This is your regular reminder that LLMs do not understand what they are writing... 😅😂

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 6d

my dad does phone systems, not IT (all blurred these days). he recently got a support call from a nuclear power plant. halfway through, the transcription notes switched to planning a murder and hiding the body.

after some panic - the host had just forgotten to hang up and was watching a crime drama

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 8d

yep, and the infra owners/operators are not the same entities as the train operators necessarily - that's a lot of cooperation from a lot of different organisations with a lot of cost and engineering time...

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 8d

I will say the British equivalent of this content is much more er... grimy looking?

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 8d

There's a reason we all lived on irc or usenet then.

Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 9d

every single person claiming to yearn for this would kill themselves if they were subjected to the tyranny of the 56k modem for one hour

grimm ☀️ @mugrimm.bsky.social · 9d

This is doing numbers on social media right now and it's so depressing how people truly yearn for this shit and want to preserve that feeling indefinitely like a mausoleum of false memories.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 9d

I was thinking about maybe some operators using older stock as one of their (plenty) of cost blockers for changing gauge

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 9d

Lovely this - thank you!

Wanted to add - For Portugal they’re refurbing a bunch of old Spanish stock as they get rid of it. Have you observed patterns like this elsewhere?

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