Sam Kington

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

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!

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