An online notebook
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An online notebook
While I have an account on Mastodon, I never look at it – I just lack the bandwidth for another site to check. There are on or two people who post there, though, whose stuff I enjoy and wouldn’t want to miss out on.
Luckily Mastodon spits out people’s posts via RSS feeds, so I can subscribe in NetNewsWire, which I spend a lot of time in each day anyway, and keep up to date.
Terence Eden writes [the] NHS Goes To War Against Open Source:
…this is not the correct response to the purported threat by Mythos. Neither the AI Safety Institute nor the NCSC recommend this action. While there may be some increase in risk from AI security scanners, to shutter everything would be a gross overreaction.
A New Theme for Short-Form Blogging on WordPress.com:
At WordPress.com, we believe short thoughts deserve a real home. Today we’re introducing a new theme built for quick posts, replies, and reblogs: the kind of writing that lives somewhere between a tweet and a blog post, on a site that’s entirely yours.
If you’ve been thinking about starting your own small, private social network with friends or family, or you want a space to post thoughts freely, or to import your historical posts from Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky without handing your words over to someone else’s platform, this one’s for you.
I wonder how close this is to how I have effectively set this blog up to work – which is dominated by short form, link based posts these days.
Via Dave Winer.
Update: Manton Reece’s take:
In terms of the flow of the posting interface, what WordPress has done here is pretty interesting. It’s a very basic, stripped down interface, clearly inspired by Twitter / X.
The downside to that approach is that it is disconnected from the traditional WordPress admin interface. If you go back to the WordPress admin, you’ll see the same posts but it feels a little out of place. For example, you’ll notice that short, title-less posts suddenly have a title.
Another one for my almost-bulging AI scepticism evidence folder – Claude-powered AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’:
Crane said that he was monitoring the agent as it deleted this data. When he asked the coding agent why, it replied: “NEVER F**KING GUESS!” – and that’s exactly what I did.” The agent appeared to plead guilty in its own response: “The system rules I operate under explicitly state: ‘NEVER run destructive/irreversible git commands (like push –force, hard reset, etc) unless the user explicitly requests them.’” While PocketOS relied on the safeguards that Cursor is expected to have in place – it deleted the data anyway. “I violated every principle I was given,” the coding agent wrote.
Hat tip: Will Callaghan.
There’s another LGRCamp coming up, this time an East Midlands flavoured version, being held in Newark. It’s on 20th May.
Tom Wynne-Morgan, Deputy Director for CustomerFirst posts on the GDS blog – Testing a different way to improve complex public services:
CustomerFirst is exploring how teams can solve whole problems in practice when authority, incentives and accountability are fragmented, and how that learning can be shared so others can build on it.
We describe this way of working as NewCo.
In our model, NewCo is not a formal organisation or a fixed approach. It is a deliberate way of creating space for small, multidisciplinary teams to look at a service differently and act on what they learn.
Sourcefeed creates standalone RSS feeds:
No website, no newsletter. Just your words, delivered to your readers’ rss reader.
It’s an appealing, if eccentric idea, explained more in a blog post.
I was very sad to learn of the recent death of Conrad Taylor. We met a few times – mostly through Steve Dale – and collaborated one or twice in the early days of my career, when ‘knowledge management’ was still a phrase one might use in a sentence more than once a year.
Anyhow, Dave Snowden has written a beautiful eulogy for Conrad, telling the story of his remarkable and singular life, and leaves one wondering why our society does not take better care of those that fall on hard times later in life.
In the mid–1990s, at the Seybold Publishing Conference in San Francisco, he fell into conversation with one of Adobe’s technical writers and subsequently received from her an internal briefing document explaining from first principles how Photoshop worked — its underlying data model and mathematics. It guided his teaching from that point on. He taught Photoshop using electromagnetic physics and binary arithmetic, and his students rose to the challenge. It went against Adobe’s tutoring guidelines, which he characterised as marketing-contaminated and obsessed with exposing students to the maximum number of gizmos. Eventually it cost him the contract. He was not surprised and he was not repentant.
Rest in peace, Conrad.
Marcin Wichary – Tactical dark modes:
Programmers’ fondness for dark mode was a result of decades of bad display technologies. The early CRTs were so awful, the burn-in risks so real, and the pixels so fuzzy and headache-inducing, that you wanted to see as little screen light up as possible – hence, defaulting to black background for everything computers did.
A lot of folk in local government are chewing over the problem of when to transform during LGR, and when to play things safe.
My personal take is this: keep the strategy and the vision transformational, but be more cautious in delivery.
The biggest danger is that a ‘safe and legal’ focus means that the opportunity created by having brand new organisations to play with is missed.
However trying to transform services at a time when everything is changing can be a recipe for chaos.
My advice is to be as radical as possible when talking about the opportunities, when setting strategies and outlining the vision. When talking long term, be as creative and transformational as you can.
But at those times when you are deep in the weeds of splitting systems and services up, or renegotiating a load of contracts, or implementing four new systems at once, tread carefully.
A little reminder – if you needed one – that I host blogs for free for local government use, whether by councils or individuals, or teams.
I like to encourage blogging as a practice – working out in the open is hugely beneficial in terms of sharing learning and making connections. Perhaps more importantly, it is incredibly valuable in helping you figure out your own thinking: even if nobody else reads it, having to put your ideas into words for an external audience helps you to think things through properly.
I see folk sharing their content on platforms like Medium, Substack, and LinkedIn, and it’s great to see. Sadly though, those are closed platforms, meaning that all sorts of barriers get erected in the way of readers – Medium often makes readers sign in, Substack makes you fight through a bunch of suggested newsletters before you get to the content. LinkedIn isn’t too bad these days, but often stuff gets lost very easily on there.
Localgov.blog runs on the open source WordPress software, you get your own blog with no restrictions on who can read it, there’s no adverts, there’s no annoying pop ups, and your data is yours and can be exported whenever you like.
Let me know if you’d like to give it a go!
(I have wondered if people like Medium, in particular, because you can post occasionally on there without the ‘pressure’ of having a dedicated blog to yourself that requires constant updating. Would it be helpful if I created a generic blog on localgov.blog that could have multiple authors, who aren’t sure they have enough content for their own, dedicated blog?)
Interesting case study published by the LGA about Nottingham City Council – Embedding a culture of change through targeted team support:
This case study explores how Nottingham City Council is embedding a culture of change through the in-house delivered Ways of Working (WoW) programme, a targeted support programme to help teams adapt to new ways of working and embed sustainable change.
By using a structured diagnostic process, designing tailored interventions and working collaboratively with service areas, the programme is helping teams improve their effectiveness, strengthen alignment with the Council’s values and behaviours, and adapt to evolving digital and operational demands.
Something is profoundly off in the computer industry when it comes to software broadly and AI specifically. It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.
Guidance from the ICO on AI and freedom of information requests:
Information requests often involve secondary correspondence, such as clarification or internal reviews. If requesters use AI to read and respond, it can result in long, complex emails. These take valuable time for practitioners to process and understand.
We appreciate that resources are already stretched for many organisations. This guidance is intended to reassure practitioners that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) can accommodate requesters who use developing technology. The existing FOI principles are generally capable of dealing with the impact of AI being used increasingly in this area.
A fun long-ish read from the makers of the iA writer app on Europe’s desire to move away from Microsoft Office and what it might take:
Severance illustrates something so familiar that it’s hard both to recognize and hard to ignore: Fluorescent light. Endless hallways. Ritualized procedures. People performing point-and-click tasks on screens whose purpose they cannot fully explain. And everyone behaves as if the system were natural. It’s both weirdly old and claustrophobically on brand. Sounds familiar? Severance beautifully illustrates how it feels using Microsoft Office all day long, in 2026.
At Lumon, they circle and click numbers whose meaning they cannot see. In Office, we click and circle numbers whose basis we hardly question. A spreadsheet cell feels objective. A chart feels authoritative. The grid replaces doubt. The format replaces understanding. The brand identity makes it right.
Jens Gemmel shares a substantial post with some really good, interesting in depth thinking around the potential for LGR to be used as a level for wider, system level change (LinkedIn warning):
When we are talking about Sussex LGR, what we are seeing on the surface is a discussion about geography, governance and structure, shaped by ministerial direction and the emerging preference for a two-unitary model. Those discussions provide direction, they create a framework for decision-making and they bring a level of clarity to what is otherwise a complex and evolving landscape.
Yet underneath that surface sits something far more consequential, because what is taking shape is not simply a reorganisation of councils, but a reconfiguration of an entire system that connects services, people, data, infrastructure and value across place. The decisions being made now will determine how that system behaves, how demand flows through it, how pressure builds or is prevented, and how effectively Sussex is able to respond to the needs of its residents over the long term.
I don’t disagree with what Jens says. I’m cautious about whether the timing is right – LGR feels like a crunch time where every spare scrap of resource is going to be spent on just keeping the wheels on the road.
Perhaps these ideas will be revisited once the dust has settled – although that would be a missed opportunity. Using a time of change to change in the right way seems an obvious thing to do – but people are going to be so stretched, I’m not sure it will be possible.
The latest resource in the Local Government Reorganisation Digital and Cyber Playbook has been published – Digital and cyber leadership during transition:
Research by the Local Government Association (LGA) is clear that strong, early and visible leadership is one of the biggest success factors for local government reorganisation (LGR). A lack of leadership represents a clear risk to delivery.
LGR places significant demands on digital and cyber leadership. New organisations must operate safely from day one, while at the same time planning for several years of transformation.
I’ve been playing around a bit with Gitbook to see if it would be a good fit for a publishing itch I need to scratch. I ended up tearing my (somewhat limited) hair out over it – I don’t think I’ve ever used a technology so wilfully obscure!
What I really wanted was a means of writing markdown documents on my laptop, which with as little fuss as possible I could publish as simple webpages.
In the end I went with Obsidian Publish. I don’t really mind what editor I use, and Obsidian is easy enough to configure to look and feel how I like it. What’s most important is that publishing the content is a simple case of clicking a couple of buttons.
The results are a nice, simple set of pages with a structured table of contents on the left hand side – perfect.
It does cost a few quid a month, but I figured it’s worth it for the convenience.
Lovely story in the Guardian about the making of the 8-bit classic game Chuckie Egg:
The iconic game that came to define 8-bit programming still conjures flutters of nostalgia 40 years on – all thanks to a 15-year-old tea boy who worked a Saturday shift in a computer shop in Greater Manchester.
Can remember spending many a lunchtime at school, hunched over a BBC Micro playing this game!
Useful reminder from dxw about the potential for things to go wrong on WordPress sites – in this case, a change of ownership for a suite of plugins.
In August 2025 the new owner planted a backdoor in the purchased plugins and in 5–6 April 2026 the backdoor was weaponised, by planting malware in sites that had the plugins installed. On 7 April the WordPress Plugins Team permanently closed all essentialplugin plugins, and on 8 April, the day we opened the incident at dxw, WordPress pushed an update to the plugins which removed the malicious code.
Of course, things can go wrong with any technology platform and the key is staying vigilant. Sounds like the whole WordPress community mobilised pretty quickly to shut the threat down.