Jan Vowhagan

Work = on-prem hyperscaler. STEM & *Female* ⚽️ flag waver. Bleeding edge tech + spinning analogue. Opinions.mine != 4sale.

[Jan Vowhagan @2techie4me]

@adilray One day you think you're in the Rebel Alliance, the next day you've realised it's the Brownshirts.

[SPEAK UK @speakukorg]

The evidence suggests that most under-16s will get around the ban.

The Online Safety Act has resulted in ordinary people being forced to show ID to access blog posts, X threads, and speeches in parliament.

Now we'll have to prove our age to access social media.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

i'm obsessed with AI DIY projects.

my favorite one right now is this broccoli farmer in hokkaido, japan using Codex to run his 100-hectare farm

this guy never studied agriculture, never inherited land, started out as a civil servant.

but he wanted his farm to run better, and instead of paying an engineering firm he couldn't afford, he just built the tools himself.

here's what he's built on his own:

> remote control of his greenhouse vents from a chat app, wired up with an esp32 board, a motor driver, and cloudflare workers

> a bot that checks each greenhouse's temperature and opens the vents when it gets too hot

> satellite crop-health data laid over a map of his own fields

> an airtable base linking his plots, tasks, materials, and sensors

> wiring diagrams of his electrical panels, generated from a photo

stuff like this used to be locked behind machinery and engineers only the big agribusinesses could pay for.

but this legend just breezed past all of it with a laptop and Codex lol

[Henry Winter @henrywinter]

Fifa’s plan to have up to 15 reserves as well as the first XI gather in the centre-circle before kick-off is a bad idea – for starters. The World Cup is about the pursuit and celebration of excellence. Work hard for your club, play well and strive for the chance to represent your country. For an elite few…make the 26-man squad. For 11 chosen ones from the 26…make the starting XI.

Others from the remaining 15 will come on, especially in the heat in certain cities at this World Cup (five in the 90min, one more if extra time). But the starting XI is the pinnacle. It’s what players aim for. It’s not an opportunity handed out freely. It’s an honour that has to be fought for, the special ones, the elite eleven. This is the essence of sport – competition. By having every member of the squad lining up before kick-off dilutes the focus on the XI. Including all the subs begins to echo those school sports days where everyone gets a medal.

Fifa’s explanation is this: “Every player selected in the match-day squad will step into the spotlight to gather around the centre-circle banner for the national anthems, ensuring that every individual – not just the starting XI – experiences that symbolic moment of pride and emotion when representing their country on football’s greatest stage”. The starters will do the handshakes.

The logic of having the players spread around the centre-circle is fair enough – so all the fans can see. The additional fanfare and bigger flags aren't an issue either. It’s simply part of the sporting show over here. No problem. England fans will sing over it anyway. But let's not meddle with the essence of sport. Competition.
#WorldCup2026

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

The division is already there

Apparently, pointing it out is the problem

What an idiot

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

Police community support officer (PCSO) sacked after asking questions about Islam during a diversity training session.

Luke Salmons lost his job with North Yorkshire Police and was barred from policing after a conversation about Gaza with a Muslim officer at a training day on race, religion and culture.

Staff were encouraged to ask questions in what they were assured was a “safe space”. Salmons said the day turned into an “indoctrination” session, with trainers chanting “Islam is a religion of peace” and discussions about white privilege taking place.

He asked a Muslim officer for his views on terrorist attacks carried out by groups such as Hamas. The officer was happy to discuss the issue and even invited him for a coffee afterwards to continue the conversation. Within two days, Salmons was suspended for gross misconduct by an inspector who told him: “I don’t like your beliefs.”

Mr Salmons said: “I loved my job and I was good at it. I was well respected as a PCSO and my colleagues said they loved working with me and couldn’t understand what was happening.”

Speaking about the events of October 2024, he said: “The whole day was pretty much about Islam. At one point the trainers walked up and down the room for several minutes saying ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ over and over again. It was bizarre.

“Then, a Muslim sergeant spoke about his faith and invited questions. It was made clear that there was no such thing as a bad question and we could speak freely.

“Someone asked him about why it was bad to depict images of Mohammed, then I asked him what, as a peaceful Muslim, he thought about the situation in Gaza, with Hamas and other terrorist groups carrying out atrocities in the name of Islam.

“We had a really good discussion and I asked him what he understood jihad to mean. There was no problem, I spoke to him privately at lunch and he asked me what books I had read about Islam. He said he would love to speak to me more, so we arranged to meet for a coffee at his police station.

“I believed I was on safe ground when the training sessions invited open discussion. I quickly discovered that questioning Islam is now treated as ‘wrongthink’ within North Yorkshire Police.”

“But an overzealous inspector took against me and that was the end of my career, even though I had done nothing wrong.”

He later won an appeal against his dismissal but never received an apology from the force, where he said a “culture of fear” existed among officers who were scared of saying the wrong thing.

There is an Islamic blasphemy law being enforced by police forces across the country.

Read more below in @Telegraph 👇

[ukvillafan @ukvillafan]

HOW THE LAW WORKS: A THICKO’S GUIDE (UK EDITION)

1. The people elect MPs to sit in Parliament.

2. Parliament passes legislation.

3. Courts sometimes have to explain what a law means.

4. The Supreme Court is the last word on any legal disputes about the meaning of legislation.

5. Legislation often sets up independent bodies to produce guidance, codes and other material to help understand legislation.

6. Guidance and codes of practice are not law and do not override legislation. Courts can (and must) take a statutory Code into account if it’s relevant, but it still isn’t the law itself. If the law and a code are in conflict, the law prevails.

7. The EHRC Code of Practice has to be ‘laid before Parliament’ for it to come into effect. Once ‘laid’, the ‘coming into effect’ is automatic (i.e. no positive vote is necessary) after 40 days UNLESS Parliament disapproves it. This requires the lodging of a formal motion by enough MPs.

8. Disapproving a code of practice does not, and legally cannot, change the underlying law. It merely delays the implementation of the code.

9. For Parliament to ‘override’ the Supreme Court’s interpretation here, Parliament would have to pass new primary legislation repealing or amending all or part of the Equality Act.

10. Before embarking on passing new legislation on something so fundamental, it is customary (though sadly not compulsory) for such a plan to form part of a pre-general-election manifesto.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

UK tax has gone up significantly over the last 25 years

But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not

This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc

The strategy has run out of road

A 🧵 on what happens next.

[Restore Britain @RestoreBritain]

It turns out Restore did make it on Question Time last night...

[Preston Byrne @prestonjbyrne]

If parents are this in favor of social media restrictions, why are so many of them giving their kids smartphones?

Revealed preferences are a lot more informative on this topic than a self selected group of survey respondents (in a survey that had a lot of leading questions).

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

An incredible bit of sports journalism by The Guardian here. A short summary of the playing style of all 48 World Cup nations and a short profile of all 1248 World Cup players. Bookmark and refer to the resources when watching the obscure matches: https://t.co/tdLGq8en0o

[Jan Vowhagan @2techie4me]

Whether you agree with @RestoreBritain or not, when the party polling third is excluded from a UK wide platform in favour of those in fourth, fifth, and sixth, it looks more and more like a massive stitch up. As a Makerfield constituent the public interest isn't being served here

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

The BBC has just released a statement about their outrageous decision to exclude Restore Britain from yesterday’s Makerfield Question Time - explaining they consider ‘panel selection carefully’ and they ‘recognise the multi-party nature of UK politics’.

This is the most blatant example of BBC bias I have ever witnessed - it is scandalous.

They had the irrelevant Lib Dems and Tories, along with the Greens. We will outpoll all of them combined, easily.

Ask yourself. Why is the rotten establishment so desperate to censor Restore Britain?

Here is why.

Restore Britain’s policy platform is robust and unapologetic.

We will do what needs to be done.

- The largest deportation programme ever seen in Britain to remove those migrants living in our country illegally. The entire asylum system will be abolished. The boats will stop.

- Net negative immigration. Far more must leave than arrive.

- If a foreign national can’t speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, doesn’t work, hates our way of life - they go too. If millions go, millions go.

- Close entire visa routes from countries proven to supply us with illegals, criminals and sex pests. The immigration ‘Red List’. We will discriminate.

- Fairer spouse visas - so that British men and women can bring their spouses to Britain without the endless bureaucracy and cost currently inflicted on them.

- An overhaul of British agriculture that puts growing and farming at the heart of any policy for rural Britain. Food security is national security. Slash red tape, simplify payments, ease planning laws, encourage farm diversification and more. Crucially, help youngsters into agriculture. We will ensure a level playing field for British farmers.

- Restore Britain will force the British public sector will buy British - it will support British farmers, producers and small businesses.

- We will encourage and fund youngsters to take up apprenticeships and learn a proper skill instead of some nonsense university degree. Teach children at school the life skills they will actually need in modern Britain.

- An education system that teaches, respects and celebrates British history and the triumphant contribution our little island has made to the world.

- Businesses freed from crushing regulation, red tape and tax. Reward hard work. Let entrepreneurs enjoy their success.

- Lowest corporation tax in Europe. IR35 scrapped. VAT threshold doubled. HMRC brutally slashed back. Dividend thresholds raised.

- High streets restored. Safe, secure and welcoming. Business rates for small businesses abolished. Turkish barbers, vape shops and other suspicious businesses investigated. Graffiti cleaned, litter picked. Pavements fixed. We will make Britain clean again, and we will take pride in our communities again.

- We will implement free parking in select areas to drive back footfall from the retail parks and back into our town centres. Councils will be forced to accept common sense.

- Fly-tippers will be crushed under the law. It will not be tolerated. Foreigners indulging in the destruction of our countryside will be deported.

- Personal tax slashed. Trust families to spend their money, not the bureaucrats.

- Put pro-family policy at the heart of everything we do. If British families want to have more children, let’s use the power of the state to enable that. Make childcare more accessible and more affordable.

- Reform family courts - so that good, decent fathers, and mothers, are not kept away from their children for malicious reasons. This is important.

- Trust parents to make the best decisions for their families. A limited number of days for a term-time holiday for well-developed children. This is just common sense.

- Restore Britain will make Britain safe again. No-nonsense policing that does what it needs to do. Widespread stop and search back - accusations of racism will stop nothing. Brutal sentences for carrying a knife. Foreign criminals deported, third world sex pests removed before their feet can touch the ground.

- Welfare radically slashed back. Those who can work, will work. Litter picking, graffiti cleaning, whatever else. Don’t like it? No benefits. That simple.

- Support those Brits who genuinely need the help, particularly children, but under a Restore Britain Government the piss-take will end.

- A foreign policy that puts the British interest above all else - proudly and unapologetically. We won’t participate in never-ending foreign wars. We will act when, and only when, the British interest is served.

- Rebuild and rearm Britain. We will have a big stick, and we will wave it when we want.

- A comprehensive support system for British veterans - including fast tracked recruitment into immigration enforcement field roles.

- Arbitrary foreign aid targets that serve no British interests, gone.

- Restore Britain will reverse the creeping islamification of Britain - no burqas, sharia courts, halal slaughter and so on. Cousin marriage will be banned. If you want to sleep with your family, this is not the country for you. This is Britain, we do things our way.

- Exemptions for barbaric religious practices will be removed. Gladly.

- Anti-white racism, eradicated. No more DEI. The Equality Act repealed, along with the various iterations of the Race Relations Act.

- Self-defence rights restored. If an intruder tries to kill you in your home, and they end up dead? So be it. That’s their problem. Pepper spray legalised.

- End the war on motorists. Cut fuel duty, no more 20mph zones. Motorway speed limit raised to 80mph. Sort out our decaying road network.

- Biological reality respected. Men are men. Women are women. No amount of surgery will ever change that. That filth will be kept away from children.

- Inheritance tax abolished - for farms, for small businesses, for everyone. The scam will end. Death will no longer be taxed under a Restore Britain Government.

- An infrastructure first housing policy. Developers forced to fund proper infrastructure before a shovel goes in the ground. British homes for British families.

- A Government that prioritises building roads, bridges and projects HERE in Britain. Can you even imagine it?!

- We will purse a British first energy strategy. Net zero will be scrapped. Domestic energy production will be ruthlessly prioritised. Nuclear, oil/gas, fracking. We will make it happen.

- End the lockdown legacy. Inquiry into COVID vaccine harms, lockdown convictions quashed, a truly independent look at how that was all allowed to happen.

- No Digital ID, ever. Repeal the Online Safety Act. Protect free speech.

- Defund the rotten BBC. Make it a subscription service and let it wither on the vine.

- A binding referendum on the reintroduction of the death penalty for the most evil criminals. One of my favourites.

- A national strategy, working from the findings of the rape gang inquiry, to ruthlessly tackle and decapitate the national crime network of primarily Pakistani muslim sexual slavery, torture and murder.

- Restore Britain will end political Islam. Abolish postal voting except for those in genuine need. Remove voting rights for foreign nationals.

- Foreign language translation ended, in the NHS and beyond. You live in England, you speak English.

- The NHS will be restored as the NATIONAL health service. Serving British people as its first and only priority. It will accept ultra-high skilled migrants to work, it will not support millions of low-skilled migrants who contribute nothing, yet take so much.

- Free car parking for NHS staff, patients and visitors on tight permits. We all pay for the NHS, we shouldn’t be ripped off for the sodding parking too. Especially medical staff.

- Medical school caps will be demolished. We will allow talented young British men and women to train in medicine - the NHS will then be forced to employ them over foreign staff. We will prioritise our own people.

- Reclaim our fisheries - take back our seas and take back our fish. We will take back control. Finally.

- The quangocracy will end. Power will be returned to the people through their MPs. Parliament will be empowered.

- Restore Britain will crush the parasitic state. It will all be hacked back in the most spectacular fashion. Unlike anything Britain has seen before.

I could go on.

This is a platform that millions and millions of British men and women are agreeing with.

The BBC does not want you to hear about it. So please, tell your friends/family. Get the message out there.

There is finally a political party with the balls to put you all first - to put the British people first.

Restore Britain.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

A scientist in Denmark figured out how to make Claude prepare his job applications. He open-sourced the whole thing.

His name is Mads Lorentzen. He is a PhD geophysicist. He built it on top of Claude Code and released it under MIT license.

Here is what it does. You fork the repo, fill in your background once, and it runs a five-step pipeline for every job you want to apply to.

Step 1. It reads the job posting and scores how well you fit.

Step 2. It drafts a tailored CV in LaTeX, picking only the experience that matches.

Step 3. It writes a cover letter framed around what you would bring to the role.

Step 4. A second AI agent reviews the first agent's work, points out weaknesses, and the first agent revises.

Step 5. It compiles both into clean PDFs you can send.

The whole thing is a folder of markdown files. The candidate profile, the writing style rules, the CV templates, the interview prep notes. Every step is plain text you can read and change.

The job portal search is built for Danish boards. The application workflow itself works for any country.

489 stars. 270 forks. A fork-to-star ratio that high means people are using it, not only bookmarking.

Mads is not a startup founder. He built this because he needed it for himself, then shared it.

This is the future of job hunting. Not a service you pay for. A workflow you own.

(Link in the comments)

[Carl Vernon @RealCarlVernon]

Hosepipe ban.
Eat less meat and dairy.
Cancel your holiday.
Cycle don’t drive.
Stop burning wood.

Two words: Data centres.

[Jack 🤖 @JacklouisP]

WTF is this maze cast into your automatic transmission?

It’s a mechanical computer that picks the right gear for you. Runs on oil, not electricity. Worked out decades before the microchip.

Here’s how it works:

- The inputs. Two oil pressures. One rises with road speed. One rises with how hard you press the gas. That’s all it knows: how fast am I going, and how fast do I want to go.

- The job. Route oil to the right clutch so the right gear engages for what you’re asking of the car.

- How it works. A spool, a small grooved cylinder, slides in a bore. Oil pushes each end; harder push wins. Speed pressure on one end, throttle plus a biasing spring on the other.

Slide one way it blocks a passage, slide the other it opens one: oil floods a clutch, the clutch locks, that’s your gear. Floor it and throttle pressure shoves the spool over, drops you a gear, the car surges.

Ease off and speed pressure wins, sliding it back to grab the next gear up. Two pressures, fighting it out.

- Why a maze? No valve decides alone; each one’s output is another’s input. So oil has to run from every valve to the others that depend on it, and oil can’t jump gaps. Every connection needs its own channel carved in metal. Dozens of valves, hundreds of passages, none crossing where they shouldn’t

- It’s a routing problem. Same one a chip designer faces: connect many things to many things without the paths colliding. They even stack plates with a drilled separator between them, like vias on a circuit board.

The result: a real-time computer in aluminum and oil. Only in old-school automatics. In a manual, you’re the computer.

[Toby Young @toadmeister]

Stuart Campbell of Wings over Scotland broke the Murrell scandal in 2021 – and the story was ignored by every mainstream Scottish journalist he contacted. The Scottish media’s failure is damning, writes Philip Patrick. https://t.co/8OqHweEUJp

[Joanna Cherry KC @joannaccherry]

Living in a luxury house in London and sipping champagne on the book festival circuit is about as far away from serving a prison sentence as I can imagine. It’s worth remembering that thanks to Nicola Sturgeon vulnerable women in Scottish prisons are banged up with violent men.

[RS Archer @archer_rs]

I really do not understand the position @marksandspencer have taken regarding their female customers. Women are telling them repeatedly they want single sex changing rooms, they want spaces where there are no men and yet M&S refuse to listen.

A strange form of marketing.

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

Police sacked hate crime adviser who warned the force favoured Muslims over Jews.

After complaining that officers had been ignoring the “elephant in the room” of Islamist extremism during a meeting about an anti-Semitic terrorist attack, the chairman of the policing scrutiny panel was sacked.

She was informed that she would be removed as chairman of the Bradford Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel because of her “divisive and inflammatory” comments.

She has accused West Yorkshire Police of appearing to prioritise Muslims rather than focusing on the Jewish community following last October’s attack on a synagogue in Manchester.

This follows another incident in which she was accused of “hate speech” by police officers after defending the right to criticise the Prophet Mohammed.

The former panel chairman, a retired academic in her 60s, is now seeking a formal apology from West Yorkshire Police Chief Constable Sir John Robins.

The Free Speech Union is proud to be supporting her. FSU General Secretary Lord Young said the force has shown that it is “more concerned with protecting the feelings of Muslim community leaders than protecting Jews from terrorist attacks”.

The academic was approached in 2022 to volunteer on the scrutiny panel tasked with monitoring how police respond to hate crime reports. Soon after she was elected chairman, Muslim police officers began calling for her removal.

She has suggested that the letter notifying her of her removal was “for the Muslim men who complained to him to get him to shut me up - and he did as they asked”. She also said it “sounded like a threat”, as the complainants had been demanding her personal details and asking whether she had herself committed a hate crime.

Blasphemy laws were abolished in 2008. A free society must allow criticism, challenge and debate of any religion.

The police must not kowtow to those who wish to enforce an Islamic blasphemy law that prevents others from doing their job.

Read more below 👇

[🤍𝕁𝕆🤍 @jomickane]

Last summer a driver crashed into this ladys house. He was in a stolen car, uninsured and going 70mph in a 30mph area. Luckily her and her family weren't home at the time. They had to move out for over 6mnths & live in a hotel whilst her home was repaired through her house insurance. She's just been informed by GMP that there will be no further action against the driver & he faces no charges....how is that right? So you can go to jail for 2 or 3yrs for a social media post but if u go out & steal a car & drive it at high speed without insurance & crash it into a family home, not knowing if anyone is in & you dont face any charges whatsoever 🤷‍♀️🤬

[Glenn Hoddle @GlennHoddle]

This was such fun doing !!😂. Teddy on the bike at the end kills me !!!!😂😂😂.