Notification from ASOS telling me they’ve been hacked. If they haven’t then this is an interesting choice for advertising…
I have included the top of the notification below to (hopefully) lend veracity to my screenshot.
Text reads
ASOS HACKED Dear Asos DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with us, or we will leak it: [link]
I have left the link in the screenshot but not the transcription. I take no responsibility if you choose to go there.
10/4/26
This is not the first anecdote1 I’ve read about how AI can help support people with complex medical issues solve them, though it may be the most dramatic. Our AI Midwife is the tale of a couple struggling with infertility who discovered, after an MRI conducted and analysed by humans, that the issue was caused by a large, previously undetected, fibroid that happened to be right in prime implantation territory.
10/2/26
That LLMs are trained on proprietary information isn’t news. That they are not as capable as the creators marketing departments would have you believe shouldn’t come as a surprise. Unless you explicitly turn it off (and probably even if you explicitly turn it off) the models injest all the information you give them and add it to their stores. Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at New York University’s Courant Institute, published a bombshell statement suggesting that OpenAI had stolen other people’s work and improperly attributed it.
9/30/26
This is the thing that people seem to have forgotten (or maybe never knew) about “AI”. It’s just averages. It gives you the most statistically likely outcome, and that is always going to lead to mediocrity. The spread of this is the thing that’s worrying though. Human authors have been censoring themselves for a while now, removing words from their writing that are suggestive of AI authorship regardless of whether those words are ones they would have used freely only a couple of years ago.
This is not surprising. But damn. How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
9/12/26
Last year John Deere responded to the call for the right to repair their tractors by introducing a subscription service which diagnoses the problem for you then sends you to their shop to buy any parts you need to repair it. Baby steps may still be movement but this really isn’t enough. Wired: I Fixed a Tractor Using John Deere’s Self-Repair Service. Farmers Aren’t Sold on It
#sketch #colouredpencil
Some of the code output by this is absolutely wild: Armin Ronacher: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
I Don’t Think I Can Stay in Tech
I don’t work for anyone as large and distructive as the companies named and shamed here but it’s getting increasingly difficult even to use tech without supporting fascists.
2026-09-01 potted plant #watercolours #sketch
Interesting if predictable observation from Cal Newport On AI Coding and its Discontents
Probably satire. Probably written without the use of an LLM. Probably.
Nobody wants old and dirty food that’s been actuated everywhere.
Catching up on some old @embedded FM (that’s all the context you’re getting).
Nobody clicks your share buttons
If I want to share something I copy the link or use my browsers share button (on mobile). Apparently I’m not the only one.
11yo: ooh what are you printing?
Me: bits of printer
Them: still???!!!
5/9/26
Again for those who weren’t paying attention: no one goes to your website for the ux. They go there to do a job, to find information. This is “olds” and yet needs constant restating: All my clients wanted a carousel, now it’s an AI chatbot Most of the stuff a bespoke AI chatbot can do (find the opening times, tell you the price of a product, find the customer service email address) can be done just as easily with an LLM that has internet access.
I am furious about how good cartoon birds are at getting me to do things.
Farmers have won the right to repair their John Deere Tractors.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/john-deere-to-pay-99-million-in-monumental-right-to-repair-settlement
4/5/26
Reading this editorial about the publication of Careless People reminds me in no small way of the plot of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest. The difference, and it is as worrying as it as stark, is that in Larson’s book the danger is from a state actor not a corporation. It may feel like hyperbole for Mike Harpley to state that “[c]ompanies like Meta are wealthier than some countries and more powerful too.
3/28/26
According to a report in the MIT Technology Review1 la human uterus has been kept alive outside the body for the first time. The uterus survived for “1 day”2 though the scientists behind the experiment hope to extend that to a month in order to “study the menstrual cycle”. At the end of the piece they state that they hope to be able to gestate a whole person eventually. The machine keeping it alive resembles (according to the reporter) a metal box on the wheels and strictly speaking the uterus lives on top of rather than in it.