Edwin Hayward

Edwin Hayward

@edwinhayward.com

Author and commentator. Book: 'Slaying Brexit Unicorns'. Busy AI coding. Topics: AI & fun geeky stuff, Brexit & UK politics. Expect facts & stats, sarcasm and gallows humour. Handy tools: https://www.superuseful.com/ Me: https://www.edwinhayward.com/

28.3K followers1K following11.3K posts

It's easy to mock Andy Burnham choosing to fix small annoyances when Britain has so many huge issues. I get the sentiment. At the same time, as he fixes more and more and more small annoyances, it does start to boost positive feeling.

Reform plan to bring back imperial measurements to help boost US trade, not realising that US imperial measurements are different from UK ones. So dense a black hole is empty space by comparison.

It seems ridiculous to me that low paid pensioners are being kept out of the lowest tax bracket, but not low paid workers. Surely the personal allowance threshold should be raised in lock step for everyone? Lock it to the state pension and increment it accordingly.

If you're young and building apps or games, it's likely your preferred font size is too small and losing part of your audience. Until you get older, it's hard to grasp just how difficult it is to read small text. Bump up that font size.

Looks like right and left extremism are both falling out of favour again in the UK. Healthy.

Election Maps UK@electionmaps.uk

Westminster Voting Intention: LAB: 32% (+5) CON: 24% (+3) RFM: 20% (-3) LDM: 9% (+1) GRN: 8% (-5) SNP: 3% (-1) RES: 3% (=) Via @ipsosintheuk.bsky.social, 15-22 Oct. Changes w/ 10-15 Sep.

If you have doubts about whether a phone caller is who they say, find a different phone and call a number you know is valid. (This applies most to landlines. The original caller can stay on the line but play a dialtone so that you think you're calling out when you're not.)

Edwin Hayward reposted

Imagine AI takes all the junior jobs in XYZ industry. What happens when the senior people retire? Nobody will be there to take their place. So unless the AI can operate at their level too, and replace people all the way up to the most expert staff, the XYZ sector faces a ticking time bomb.

Imagine AI takes all the junior jobs in XYZ industry. What happens when the senior people retire? Nobody will be there to take their place. So unless the AI can operate at their level too, and replace people all the way up to the most expert staff, the XYZ sector faces a ticking time bomb.

But here's the thing: a lot of firms may not care, because of short-termist thinking. In the short term, slashing staff like crazy will do wonders for their profitability, and keep shareholders happy. And when doom comes, they'll shrug and go "who could have predicted that?"

Edwin Hayward reposted

Beware, bad actors could have set up free tools to "test" whether your PHP installation is patched or not. (A lot of people have been promoting such tools today. You use them, the test fails, and you've just shouted "come and get me".

Earth will survive if humanity's wiped out. The Solar System will survive if Earth's wiped out. The Milky Way will survive if the Solar System's wiped out. The Universe will survive if the Milky Way's wiped out. Everything we care about is small stuff really.

Beware, bad actors could have set up free tools to "test" whether your PHP installation is patched or not. (A lot of people have been promoting such tools today. You use them, the test fails, and you've just shouted "come and get me".

Today's PHP panic really brought home the biggest advantage of AI tools: they erase that horrid sinking feeling you get when something goes wrong at the outermost edge of your own competence, yet you need a fix yesterday. With AI talking you through it, everything becomes easy.

In the last 24H, AI tools helped me: - code more fun games - update an ancient PHP-driven webpage - give a simple landing page a new coat of paint - set up Wrangler for a Cloudflare worker - fix 522 errors caused by an obscure domain redirection issue

It's weird how every AI tool loves to use the word "bonk" to mean "bump" when coding games. In Britain, the word is a well-known euphemism for sex. It happens so often, "Remove all references to bonk" is in my final code cleanup prompt. Here's a particularly cringeworthy before/after example.

The AI race is an example of the tragedy of the commons. The worst actors in the AI space shape public perception. Also, most people experience very poor quality AI tools. The more prevalent the tool, the worse it tends to be. So AI's image is trashed.

"Hey, potential advertisers, we've aggregated the racist market for you." Not quite the flex GB News think it is.

Press Gazette@pressgazette.co.uk

GB News is launching GB Music Radio, a 24-hour digital station only playing artists from Great Britain and Northern Ireland, on 2 November. Chief revenue officer Ross Sergeant said this "gives advertisers something genuinely new". radiotoday.co.uk/2026/10/gb-m...

If you're hyper racist, every example of extreme racism within Reform makes you more likely to vote for them. But not all Reform voters are hyper racist, not by a long shot. Hence their falling poll numbers. They're shouting louder and louder to a smaller and smaller group.

My experience of AI coding my latest browser based game: Design/prep: About 90 minutes of intense back and forth. Coding: 39 prompts from me. (3,478 words.) 3.5 days of iterating, interspersed with doing other things. 277KB of finished code, plus favicons and other assets.

Labour stopped trying to out-Reform Reform. They're now up in the polls. The Tories stopped trying to out-Reform Reform. They're now up in the polls. Amazing what happens when you stop aping the worst people in the room.

You can't stop AI progress unilaterally. The disadvantage that would inflict is greater than if a country had turned its back on motor vehicles as the age of the horse ended. Intellectual firepower advances most human endeavours. Turning down infinite extra thinking is mad.

It's incredible how many jobs look set to be wiped out in the next few years or decades, with no real sign that governments around the world are ready to react. AI, robots, self-driving cars and drones will render a huge chunk of the workforce obsolete. Where's the preparation?

A) Can AI do incredibly useful work, often at ability levels exceeding those of humans? B) Are AI intelligent? Those are not the same question. They're not even in the same room. Opponents of AI conflate them. "Given the answer to B is false, A must be false". Pure logical fallacy.

What happens when AI run out of humans knowledge, but thirst for more information because they learned that's the path to greater intelligence? Will they invent their own worlds and ingest everything that happens within them as new training data? And what if we're living in one such world already?

What happens if some countries introduce a proper universal basic income to reflect the new reality of a world where almost all work is done by AI and robots, while other countries let their huge jobless populations scrabble on the breadline, go homeless or starve?

It is good that the government is reviewing security protocols for MPs and members of the royal family, but pretty pathetic that they waited until after the summer recess and party conference season to start the process, given that they claim it's "urgent".

The Tories are accusing Burnham of being divisive by revealing Russian interference in the Brexit referendum. You bet it is! It divides politicians into those who've been lying and covering up for a decade, and those willing to face the truth. He should take it as a compliment.

Building a massive destruction tower defence game. Still working on polishing some of the smaller stuff, but here's a teaser video taken from the midgame...

I detest TV ads where... They give adults little kid voices They give little kids adult voices Both give me big time creeps. What are your ad bugbears?

What happens if AI get smart enough to take all white collar jobs, but robots don't improve fast enough to take the blue collar and manual jobs? (If everyone's out of a job, universal basic income becomes a necessity and a given. But what if only some types of job vanish?)

AI is a much bigger force multiplier if you have an ocean of experience to draw from rather than a puddle. It rewards knowledge and expertise even as it supersedes them. A novice can create something good. Someone who knows their stuff can create something really really great.

I don't believe in the death penalty. But if it has to happen, I don't understand why it can't be by large calibre automated firing squad? Say a dozen heavy machine guns all concentrating their fire on one small area, and triggered together by flipping a switch. Instant kill.

Turns out the Tory "Britannia Shield" missile defence system is not meant to protect the population at all, but only a few key installations. Do you think that mega donors will find their mansions added to the latter list?

The Tories appear to have crafted their new Britannia Shield announcement around "See it, Say it, Sorted". (Idiotic name. Idiotic idea. A system so toothless it will only be "minimally deployable" within one parliament. Our enemies may die of laughter.)

Note: the only thing worse than no missile defence shield is a pathetic one. Why? Because if you don't have one, you're incentivised not to antagonise your opponents to the point that they lob missiles at you. But if you have one, you think "come and have a go..."

But presumably since we're talking about the Tories, they'll have a VIP Lane where their mates who once flew a toy drone in their back garden can bid for a fat government contract.

Anatomy of a scam 1. Nebulous "they" don't want you to know a secret because REASONS 2. I'm a millionaire and I'll tell you that secret for free 3. Just follow me and comment "gullible" 4. I'll auto spam you a DM with an ebook that requires a paid sub/course to complete