I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that, you're overdue completing your annual mandatory workplace safety training and workstation ergonomics reassessment.

screengrab of a post by niki grayson saying 'I'm so sorry we've send these souls to the moon and they're using outlook?' followed up with 'right now the astronauts are calling houston because the computer on the spaceship is running two instances of microsoft outlook and they can't figure out why. nasa is about to remote into the computer'

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that, I need to reboot in the next 9 minutes to install an important Windows update.

I recently told an anecdote but couldn't quite remember the precise details so looked it up later and found the blog I wrote 15 years ago debunking the anecdote. (Don't researchers say "fact check" content only serves to increase the salience of the original misinformation?)

I've no interest in defending McSweeney, I'm just struggling to reconcile all this chinny reckon to the idea of a phone snatcher from the same people who have spent 3 years telling us that phone snatching is something that always happens to every person every day that they step foot in the capital.

or is it a "tall tale" that her political opponent "conveniently" had his phone stolen late at night?

Sorry I'm getting lost here, could Kemi Badenoch clarify,

This website is the definitive source of information for a regulated sector, so good luck to the organisations with their compliance with whatever ChatGPT has told them the regulations are.

Set up a report for an organisation so they can track where they're getting error 404s and can put in redirects where helpful. After finding a few pieces of retired, replaced and moved content, the report is just a very long tail of hits from ChatGPT and Claude to resources that have never existed.

My favourite ones are the ones who seem to think that Rachel Reeves is spending her time personally art directing a refresh of the bank notes.

Who am I to snark, have I checked all the bank notes to make sure they don't do this? Perhaps they do, why would I even assume otherwise? I've never even seen a Dirham.

Screenshot of below the line in a newspaper where bigbaza says "It could have been worse, instead of otters and badgers, it could have been images of Mohamed?" and ElfPerch replies "That wont happen till 2029 when we convert to the Dirham"

yeah, that's right, they'll be putting images of mohamed on the english bank notes next, that's what the muslims want isn't it. images of mohamed, like they do in muslim countries. the muslim bank notes, with the images of mohamed on them.

I see the serious columnists who spent a decade berating the shallow virtue signalling of delicate lefty snowflakes obsessed with identity politics are today having an absolute meltdown about a picture on a banknote.

It's not natural. I've barely ever seen the family jogging phenomenon before, but suddenly it seems to be all the rage on the old railway path.

Bicycle on the CTW scheme: £240/m, Brooks saddle: £140, new shorts to constantly replace the ones destroyed by the Brooks saddle: £3,600, someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this.

Could we replace South Gloucestershire with AI? I tried out generative AI, and it seems quite capable of doing away with South Gloucestershire. And think tanks. I don’t think I have an easily pigeonholeable position on generative AI. My pr…

Could we replace South Gloucestershire with AI? joe.dunckley.me.uk/uncategorized/2026/02/co...

But this reset of the reorganisation timeline is also a good thing, because it allows the government to do the right thing and abolish South Gloucestershire.

Cancelling the local elections for councils that were about to get reorganised was obviously a sensible idea, and the people attacking it did so in equally obvious bad faith and they would have just as enthusiastically attacked elections as a waste of money if they hadn't been cancelled...

Personally, I think Matt Goodwin is a hero for giving up all his old friends to go deep undercover for years and pose as the least electable candidate imaginable in order to discredit the far right.

Anyway, the fact is entirely harmless, and it's now verifiable in at least one serious published book and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which go into far more extensive detail about the fact than my single sentence on Wikipedia did, so I think they deserve their festival.

Anyway, I moved away 2 months later and forgot all about it, so I hadn't noticed that the town's entire identity now seems to be built on one of those 'facts'. I just saw an A-list national treasure promoting an upcoming 3 day festival predicated on the 'fact'.

"You can say no and we will remember" would be a really sinister threat if it came from a man who could remember which country he was talking about when he said it.

Just looking back at the coverage to remind myself how the media responded 2 years ago when an "elderly president with a poor memory" made the "near catastrophic", "gaffe-laden" "disaster" of referring to one country when he meant another.

John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme: Series 2:… by John Finnemore · Audiobook preview YouTube video by Google Play Books

That was a John Finnemore sketch. youtu.be/fcDp74qm9gk?...

I felt certain I'd seen such things too, but every idea I get turns out to be like the Chiswick one - where a bidi path gives up and returns you to general traffic. The 2 ends of C4 - Tooley Street and Creek Road are the closest I've got.

(Or indeed, like the crossover from bidi to with flow on Farringdon Street... except somewhere that does that at a crossroads?)

You mean like C9 at Heathfield Terrace in Chiswick? (Except there the bidi cycleway gives up and the crossing is back into traffic lanes -- so you mean like that, except into proper tracks?)

(And yes, yes, I know, there's little point devolving the powers if there's no funding and capacity to do anything with them, but that's an issue in itself.)

Opinion that will apparently be unpopular this week: "postcode lottery" is a pernicious phrase that has contributed to Westminster's centralising tendencies. The pavement parking ban should have been opt-out rather than opt-in, but attack that rather than the principle of devolving the power.

Finally gave in to HMRC's hourly emails and did the tax on the non-PAYE part of my income, highlighting just how successful my cunning tax avoidance scheme was in 2024/25. (It was to just ride bikes lots instead of doing much work, it does wonders for your tax liability.)

Clipping from a newspaper of a photo captioned "Falmouth University student Anna Richmond inspects the damage to her car." Anna is crouched down looking closely at some scratches on the door of her car. The door is one of the least damaged parts of a car that has been completely crushed and caved in by a fallen mature tree.

I love the way the composition and caption make this look like she's taking a closer look in case it's not as bad as it first appeared.