Meri 8x💉“Exiled for Good of the Realm” Williams

Incredibly honoured to feature on this year's Pride Power List. Honestly taken aback by being included amongst such illustrious and impactful company -- thank you! #PPL2024

And every covid infection *adds* to the risk. So the more covid infections people have, the more vulnerable our population will be to these outbreaks.

Don't you get it? If lots of people in your population have lower ability to fight infection, it doesn't just mean those people are more likely to *catch* infections. It means they are more likely to *spread* them too. Let me explain. This is important.

Healthy life expectancy here is now 61 years and falling. Retirement age is up to 68 and rising. Do the maths.

At the beginning of the pandemic disabled people felt hope We saw inclusion & accessibility improve overnight We saw accommodations put in place that we spent years begging for We saw the world adapt That hope was ripped away during the rush back to normal It still hurts

The central difficulty with getting your head round it is that there are *two* scandals detailed here: 👉The first is that key advice by experts was ignored in 2020. 👉The second is that a huge amount of money seems to have been spent covering that up.

When you become disabled and unable to work, you mourn your independence. Most disabled people want to work. They don’t want to beg for meagre handouts that keep them in legislated poverty. They don’t want to be sick. It’s not a choice & better social supports are needed.

I once had a boyfriend tell me that if I tried, I could force my period out in one day, because the uterus is a muscle. This is why men shouldn't be legislating women's reproductive health.

Are people 'sicker' now than in 2019? In the most recent year for which we have data here, 2024, infections were the main underlying cause of nearly *THREE TIMES* the share of deaths that they caused before the pandemic. Yes. By every objective measure, we are sicker.

Anyone can become disabled at any time. Your life can change in an instant, no matter how strong and healthy you think you are. People will leave you. Funds will dry up. Life will get tougher. It’s not a moral failing. Very few people are the “exception”

People are afraid of disability They can’t comprehend getting sick and never getting better They tell us to try harder They blame it on lifestyle choices. They label us expendable and tell themselves they’ll be the exception No one is the exception. It can happen to anyone.

In a meeting at the office one time, this dude fully repeated something I had said almost word for word, just slightly changed. After he finished, my coworker raised her hand and said, “I don’t have anything to add, but I just wanted to point out he basically repeated exactly what Natalie said like it was his own idea.” Happy Women’s History Month to her.

Them: Anyone who thinks that Covid infections made us all more ill is a scaremongering conspiracy nut. Is anyone even more ill? Are there really more disabled people?? Where's their evidence?? Where's the proof??! Me: The rise in deaths as a result of infections, as published by the ONS. The rise in the number of infections, as published by the UKHSA. The rise in sickness absence of *young* doctors, as published by the NHS. The rise in sickness absence of *young* civil servants, as published by the Civil Service. The millions of 'why is everyone sick right now' posts on social media, published everywhere. The rise in the number of deaths while working, as published by the NHS. The rise in the number of people retiring from healthcare due to ill health, as published by the NHS. The huge number of infections that follow covid infections as opposed to the number of infections that follow flu infections, as published by the UKHSA. The rise in economic inactivity due to sickness, as published by the ONS. The rise in infections that exploit immune deficiency, as published by the UKHSA and NHS. The rise in the number of secondary conditions like psychiatric and cardiovascular disorders that Covid infection can cause, as published by the ONS, NHS, and UKHSA. The increase in delays to healthcare, as published by the NHS. The drop in healthy life expectancy, as published by the ONS. The excess death burden, as published by the ONS. But other than that, yeah, everything's fine. All fine.

@HarryHo26956660 @bmj_latest Like what? I’m autistic & ADHD and in the UK and having both costs me a huge amount every month rather than anyone giving me financial support

@Geek_Manager @bmj_latest UK

Autism and ADHD: does the global rise in diagnosed neurodivergence reflect increased awareness of undiagnosed cases? bmj.com/content/392/bm…

@HarryHo26956660 @bmj_latest Which countries have financial benefits for autism and/or ADHD?

@bmj_latest It is a delicate subtopic to raise, but there is a not-insignificant number of people who wish to obtain a diagnosis in order to receive extra financial benefits.

@illegallygay @fallingflxwer Arcane. Seriously. Also watch Wentworth — sort of similar to OITNB in setting but not in vibe.

@fallingflxwer All my favorite lesbian shows. Any advice for a queer guy looking for a lesbian show that will fundamentally break me? Love Supergirl, legends of tomorrow, pretty little liars, how to get away with murder, skins, orange is the new black, glee, Degrassi, etc, TLOK

🧵 very unnecessary but deeply important public service: a huge wlw tv show guide no one asked for. if i forgot something it’s because there are approximately 4 billion wlw shows now and i am only one person (feel free to mention)

Karpathy is telling you something most product teams haven’t internalized yet. The new distribution channel for software is agents. Agents don’t browse your marketing site, watch your demo video, or click through your onboarding flow. They call your CLI. They hit your MCP server. They read your docs programmatically. If none of those surface areas exist, your product is invisible to them. Look at how fast this moved. MCP went from zero to 97 million monthly SDK downloads in twelve months. 10,000+ active servers. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Cloudflare all adopted it. By December 2025, Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation because the standard had already won. Running an MCP server is now compared to running a web server. That’s the new baseline for product discovery. 85% of enterprises are expected to have AI agents deployed. Those agents need structured, programmatic access to your product. They need CLIs, MCP endpoints, and machine-readable documentation. A beautiful React dashboard is worthless to an agent trying to pull data into a workflow at 3am. This tells you everything about why Karpathy’s framing of CLIs as “legacy” technology is so precise. Legacy means battle-tested, standardized, universally parseable. stdin/stdout, flags, JSON output. The entire Unix philosophy was accidentally designed for AI agents decades before they existed. Your competitor ships an MCP server and suddenly every Claude Code user, every Cursor session, every autonomous workflow can discover and use their product. No human ever visits the website. No sales call. No onboarding email. The agent just finds the tool and starts using it. The companies that win the next 24 months are the ones building agent-accessible surface area right now. The ones that lose are still optimizing their landing page above the fold.

Never let anyone tell you humanities degrees are wasted.

Soon all the people who still remember the horror of life for working class people before the creation of the NHS will be dead... and their testimony will become hearsay to those who would strive to capitalise on ill health. Harry Leslie Smith reminds us:

@GergelyOrosz Yes, this is why I went to Uni of Bath instead of Cambridge — full year of work experience as part of the degree. And in fact I got a summer internship in my first year (at P&G) and worked part time during term time so graduated with equivalent of 3 years experience!!

They apparently have an amazing co-op program that makes a massive difference. And new grads thus have far far more real-world experience under their belt than most universities (at good companies!) Ty for all the comments x.com/astuyve/status…

Inside a group of ~50 CTOs + founders. Talking about hiring new grads. 4 of them violently agreeing to how amazing University of Waterloo [Canada] is doing something so right - and their goto place to hire standout interns + new grads. What is Waterloo doing others are not?