Back-end developer looking for work: Perl or similar, Glasgow or UK remote. I write well-crafted and -commented code, not too clever, with an emphasis on getting names right, testing and maintainability. I like talking to other people in the team and wider business. https://illuminated.co.uk/cv.pdf #getfedihired
Remote
Sam Kington
@skington@glasgow.social
mastodon 4.4.25“Only Sam would make jokes that require footnotes”
Searchable by tootfinder.
52 Followers
149 Following
18 Posts
Joined November 25, 2022
Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @cstross@wandering.shop Jon Worth @jon@gruene.social did a whole bunch of research on this last year https://jonworth.eu/crosschannelrail-final-report-released-and-the-next-steps/ . The tl;dr is that, yes, you could get a Eurostar down to Bordeaux, but there are issues with a number of other stations along the way, because of having to physically segregate international non-Schengen customers.
Replying to
@ifixcoinops@retro.social This is the problem that the AI guys exposed unwittingly: why didn’t anybody make a GUI for static site generators; why didn’t anybody make a GUI for basically anything else people wanted to do?
And the answer is a combination of (a) there’s not enough money in making stuff that people want but that’s all you’re doing; and (b) the open source people have never embraced GUI people so they only understand terminal stuff.
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@ifixcoinops@retro.social … AND PRETEND YOUR NAME IS KEITH!
We bought our Akita puppy from some nice people near Keith in Aberdeenshire, some 10 years ago. *Every* time I looked at a map to plan driving there: *bam*, earwormed.
Replying to
Also: for years, I used to pay the TV licence fee, even though I didn't have a TV, because I thought the BBC was worth having. I'll grant you that that's weird, but I'd say no weirder than aggressively seeking out obscure tax avoidance schemes like the sorts Richard Tice likes.
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@ifixcoinops@retro.social @woe2you@beige.party I believe it’s genuine. I certainly remember seeing a clip of another comedian berating Jimmy Carr (in the audience) from disrupting the show, saying “Jimmy! I don’t come to *your* shows and laugh!”
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@beemoh@mastodonapp.uk @GlasWolf@mastodon.scot @Wen@mastodon.scot @MarkSquiresWine@mastodon.social @andrewducker@mastodon.scot Also the Conservatory Party. I don’t know why this doesn’t apply (more forcefully) to Scotland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_of_Political_Parties_Act_1998
LinkedIn badly needs to understand that (1) given that I'm British, the University of Glasgow is not my "school" and (2) the fact that a small handful of Glasgow Uni graduates now work at a potential job does not mean I can wander up to them in the pub we all go to and ask them to do me a solid. It's been 30 years since I graduated, and about 10,000 new folks get their sheepskin every year. This is not an exclusive club!
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@cstross@wandering.shop Almost agree, but AirDrop and ubiquitous sharing make it a *lot* easier to move files from one machine to another. Machines sharing the clipboard is similarly magic.
Welsh Labour source in the Guardian: “We heard people on the doors saying they’d usually vote Labour but wanted to stop Reform.” https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2026/may/09/may-elections-results-keir-starmer-labour-nigel-farage-reform-uk-politics-latest-news-updates?page=with%3Ablock-69ff5d3c8f087a8ca712eb7e#block-69ff5d3c8f087a8ca712eb7e
Welsh Senedd elections use list PR. Voting for *anyone* other than Reform is stopping Reform. And it was under AMS previously as well, at least when it came to the list vote. FPTP has rotted everybody's brains in this country and it needs to be taken out the back and shot.
Keir Starmer says "Time and again Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski have shown they are not fit to meet this moment of great global instability." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/06/starmer-late-pitch-voters-labour-greens-reform-elections
The thing is, Zack Polanski agrees: he's only been party leader for 8 months, and that's not enough. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/06/zack-polanski-says-he-was-wrong-to-call-himself-a-red-cross-spokesperson
Which is why it is in fact completely logical to give the minor parties a go at running local government: it (a) won't matter as much, but (b) could be indicative of what they'd be like nationally.
Never mind Unix vs Windows "line endings are LF" vs "line endings are CRLF". The modern text file incompatibility is between "a is a line feed" and "a is a paragraph break".
It’s nice in our garden today.
Electoral Commission says ministers should introduce clearer duties on AI platforms to protect voters against misinformation and ensure algorithms did not mislead voters, particularly during critical election periods. The problem is that AI platforms *can't do that*. LLMs can answer "what's the received wisdom about this programming topic?" because they've scraped all of Stack Overflow, but they don't *know* anything, especially not about news. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/20/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-replika-grok-gemini-misinformation-scottish-election-demos
Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Netflix has an adaptation which apparently (according to my wife, who also read the books ages ago) gets rid of some of the stupider stuff? https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81639986