Matt Gibson

I'm fascinated by the 1914 #Bristol International Exhibition, the great "White City" that lives on in the name of the local White City Allotments. I made a website that shows you @bristolarchives' plan of the Exhibition in a modern context: exhibition.gothick.org.uk #history

@ellie_huxtable @ImmaZoni I still do it to SQL Server because our abusive relationship is now 30 years old and I'm too set in my ways to change.

@ImmaZoni don't shout at your database, that will make it sad

spot the error from a younger, dumber me

@OliverKamm SS-GB is my most recently-read. It's the perfect British detail that makes it so scary. A bit like Threads: show a generic city blown up by a nuclear bomb, that's *awful*; show a Woolworths, a council office and a traffic warden blown up by a nuclear bomb, that's *real*.

What a terrific writer. Among his many masterpieces, SS-GB is the sole really convincing dystopia ever written of Nazi-occupied Britain. RIP.

@ShippersUnbound Hear hear. And the James Lailey-narrated audiobook versions of the Bernard Samson series are excellent, by the way. His voice is definitely "my Bernard" now.

Very sad to learn of the death of Len Deighton, who was one of the two greatest spy thriller writers of all time and in some regards was Le Carre’s superior. Anyone who has not read Deighton should try Funeral in Berlin, Bomber or SSGB. Most of all they should seek out Berlin Game, the start of an epic 10 book Cold War series focused on Bernard Samson. Deighton’s writing was sharp, satirical, gripping and often amusing. His office infighting in the intelligence services was delicious and his characters are beautifully drawn. The Samson cycle starts with a meticulously plotted run of five books (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match, Spy Hook and Spy Line) which all stand alone but tell one big story from the jaded but dedicated perspective Bernard a brilliant field operative. Len’s genius idea was to use the sixth, Spy Sinker, to retell the whole cycle from the perspective of everyone else, exposing what Bernard didn’t know and misunderstood. There is then an origin story about Bernard’s dad during the war, Winter, and then a concluding trilogy of Faith, Hope and Charity, which is not as high quality but deals with the fallout from the events of books 1-5. It’s an epic achievement and the greatest long series in spy fiction, accepting that the Smiley series is the greatest short series. Do yourself a favour, give it a try

I’m on week five of trying to vibe code a replacement for some dumb saas that we use and it’s so incredibly frustrating that I’m slowly realizing it’s actually a quite complex and thoughtful piece of software.

On Friday we revealed the Companies House vulnerability letting anyone access the private dashboard of any UK company. This is the moment I first saw it demonstrated. My reaction says it all. What do we know? What don't we know? What should companies do now?

@benkbullock @WeirdBristol Yes, that's definitely the turn from Regent Street into Hensmans Hill. Recognised it immediately. At 24 seconds, though, I think we're careering up Cornwallis Crescent and that's the Paragon we're seeing, not Royal York. maps.app.goo.gl/f5BpxWtSZAHh3M…

@WeirdBristol Checking against the video, it definitely is the end of Regent Street, the gates to the park are the same.

A 1979 episode of the Bristol-based BBC drama series “Shoestring” (series 1, episode 2: Knock for Knock) featured a daring car chase across Bristol, culminating in a spectacular sequence on Vale Street (the steepest residential street in England) 1/2

Emacs IS an age verification scheme. Nobody under 40 uses it.

The market panicking because AI can rewrite COBOL ignores two things: 1-Tools that rewrite COBOL have existed for decades 2-That's not the hard part

@pappapez @burkeholland Plays really beautifully with fzf, too. With fzf's zsh integration, this is my ctrl-R:

@burkeholland You were trolling? 😀 Well, it’s what you need until you learn how to do history command line manipulation using !, ^ and such things.

hitting the up arrow 26 times looking for a 4 character command in my history

@codexeditor SUCH IMMEDIATE FLASHBACKS 🅺

Why don't programming book covers look like this anymore?

@bdkjones I considered the Studio and ended up with a 32GB M2 Mini and the only times I notice performance issues are when I'm doing single-threaded stuff that I should really get around to doing in parallel anyway. But your workloads aren't my workloads, I'm sure.

Has anyone made the switch from a MacBook Pro to a Mac Studio? If so, do you have regrets? I'm tired of paying $6,000 for a screen+keyboard I don't use 95% of the time, so I'm thinking about jumping ship.

We've lost common sense in infrastructure automation. I've been implementing Azure infrastructure solutions for enterprise customers for years. Thousands of servers. Security baselines. Compliance monitoring. The real stuff. Out of all the automation I've built and delivered, I can count on one hand the cases where an AI agent actually made sense. One hand. The rest? Scripts. Queries. Scheduled tasks. Deterministic logic that does exactly what it's supposed to do, every single time, at a fraction of the cost. Yet everywhere I look, people are wrapping basic automation in agent frameworks. Diagnostic settings rollout? Agent. Tag compliance? Agent. Resource Graph queries? Somehow, also agent. Why? Because agents are the shiny new thing. Because it looks good on a slide deck. Because nobody wants to present "we wrote a PowerShell script" at the next team meeting. Let me be clear: learning new technology is great. Experimenting is great. But shipping unnecessary complexity into production because it feels modern? That's not engineering. That's ego. Every agent you deploy where a script would do is: → More cost (tokens aren't free) → More failure modes (now you're debugging AI behavior, not logic) → More operational overhead you'll be dealing with for years Infrastructure automation is about reliability and predictability. Most of these tasks have known inputs, known outputs, and known logic. That's the opposite of where agents add value. Agents belong where you need genuine reasoning over ambiguous, dynamic problems. Not where a foreach loop gets the job done. Think before you architect. Common sense still applies.

Remember when Windows added a new “Notepad” app with CoPilot and forced the good old notepad.exe to open the new app instead of itself even if you don’t want it? Well, a new feature just dropped.

@goddexvicious @TheCinesthetic That's a Cray Y-MP, I believe. Went to see this at the time with a row of friends from Warwick University's Computer Science department and I seem to remember a few little gasps when the guys just casually sat down on about $15m of supercomputer.

@TheCinesthetic hey, aren’t they sitting on a legendary early super computer in this scene?

Sneakers (1992) got buried by a goofy title and clumsy marketing, but underneath it is a ridiculously well cast, sharply written caper with real wit and gorgeous early 90s craft. People are only now catching on to how good it always was.

I was prompted to sign into mspaint today. @Microsoft when you look back and wonder what went wrong for Windows... It was this. This is what went wrong.

@TheDimmeh Dear Peter,

Skimming through the PDFs for Remembrance of the Daleks on the blu-ray and stumbled upon this letter of the effects designer getting a bollocking for going over budget

Tailwind lays of 75% of their team. the reason is so ironic: > their css framework became extremely popular w AI coding agents, 75m downloads/mo > that meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings > resulting in 40% drop in traffic & 80% revenue loss

⚠️Burst main in Hotwells , BS9⚠️ 08:50 Due to a burst main in Hotwells (BS8) area, you may experience no water or very poor pressure. Our crew is on route to investigate this. We will endeavour to restore your water as soon as possible. Thank you very much for your patience. ^Riley