This country’s morals are based on Christian… biblical values? Oh silly me, somehow I’d forgotten our national and time-honoured rejections of cheeseburgers and prawns.

The nonsense these people speak.

Why can't they all just fuck off back to Saxony and leave the place to us Welsh?

Hahaha i know that feeling far too well :)

Gotcha. While I get the distinction, if we’re talking within the context of unintended consequences, I think this particular battle is long over.

Is this happening already? I can’t think of a car maker without a cloud + phone app that uploads all movement data as a matter of routine, for their electric cars at least.

I’m under the impression that if the police asked, they’d have to hand it over?

and the signalling staff , in under 4 minutes they had to reroute the train and make sure that didnt lead to it hitting another train that was scheduled to be on that line.

(Also, I would point out that he wasn't a crank, he was one of the leading scholars of his day working on one of its most important topics, and he should be a constant memorial to modern researchers: one day all this will be a punchline.)

Counterpoint: the markets reacted and priced-in acts of madness a while ago. It’s easy to miss quite how much money professional investors have lost since January, especially anything that touches on exchange rates.

I mean…. and the home invasion assasination of the leader of the opposition party in a divided state house, by a christian nationalist goon, whose actions the right is trying to gaslight at massive scale.

In my neck of the woods, the bus company keeps trying to drag down the less profitable routes by throwing progressively worse buses at them, driven by their most problematic drivers. And they never realise: it’s the only route to the train station and commuters will never stop taking it, lose/lose.

Yeah, that’s fair (and thanks for taking my reply in the spirit intended, just did a little eek reading it back)

I kinda see the OS stuff as a good warning beacon for future attempts. Like, the time and effort they must put into tweaking coordinates so that nothing aligns with UPRNs *rants to self*

A glorified vanity project that goes out of its way to harm its users and make any useful analysis pretty much well impossible? :-p

... slowly losing my marbles thanks to Open UPRN, USN, Roads, Names, Vector + Local Map trying to get them to play nicely with the lovely datasets from ONS 🤦‍♀️

While there's a lot of good data out there, even stuff from the OS is prone to being unreliable - or not as in-depth as a surface glance might lead you to believe *pointed stare at AddressBase Premium*. I think tidying up + validating will need some love - possibly even from obsessives like me.

Brilliant post, thanks for writing! I'm deep in public data for my crime stats site, and the constantly unreliable data is destroying me. E.g. the VOA's public NDR lists: incorrect addresses; wrong postcodes; typos everywhere. I have to handle 40 separate misspellings of the word "conveniences."

I’d argue not the -whole- thing. The small dull and largely ignored tech that ultimate powers these things - BERTs - work incredibly well, are reliable and cheap to run and train etc etc. But they’re hard for programmers to use; and LLMs make it -briefly look- like you’re an amazing developer so 🤷‍♀️

The LLM obsession is so interesting - and I suspect you’re right, btw - because it casts a huge shadow over the core technological innovation (BERTs) which are tiny and trainable and run on minimal hardware AND do a great job on often boring tasks. And funnily enough, not where the core interest is.

I think this and the winter fuel payments criticisms miss a crucial point: Labour are in power for the next 4-5 years, and the popularity of what they do right now won’t change that.

Doing stuff that annoys people unlikely to vote for you, at the start of your term? IMO Q should be why not!

Well damn, gonna have to come set a cow army on you.