Redecorating I spent the weekend redecorating my workspace to remove the last few reminders of my last job - do not believe the claims that white tack doesn’t mark the walls. I think the sun must h...

Testing frontier AI models is getting harder as they are now able to ace practically every task that used to rely on to benchmark performance. The pace of innovation still feels to be accelerating,...

I’ve been spending some time making things with clay recently, both to unwind and to finally use up some of the stash of sea glass that we have accumulated over the years. There are only so many co...

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the time I’ve spent helping to run WhatDoTheyKnow, first as a volunteer and then as an employee, as is common during life transitions. To help me contextualis...

Disclosure logs My disclosure log scraping project is now well underway. Interestingly, the percentage of requests made to English local government via WhatDoTheyKnow is much higher than I’d previo...

Public authorities answer hundreds of thousands of FOI and EIR requests every year, but most of the information that is released is not searchable or available for wider use. Some authorities do pu...

It is perhaps a sign of the times we live in that many local councils now run commercial advertising on their websites. I couldn’t quite place why that bothered me until today. I was browsing Wals...

Small Things Claude I was testing different models for NER and needed to add two columns to a table and adjust my pipeline a bit. I decided to use Claude code in the CLI, and in an effort to be he...

I’ve been thinking about outliers a lot this week, after a hypothetical scenario came true. UK FOI law requires that you use an acceptable form of your real name when making a request - John Smith ...

The impact of AI on UK FOI requests For a while now, I’ve noticed a steady increase in FOI requests that appeared to me to have been written almost entirely by AI. This weekend, I thought I’d look...