Jen

Formerly @JetlagJen

Queer disabled mum of a queer neurodivergent family.

Likes games, the planet, equalitea, general geekery.

Doesn't like TERFs, SWERFs, Nazis, and other bigots.

Profile pic: an old Space Invaders game, only it's a cake and the aliens are sweets.

Banner: winter trees, bare of leaves, silhouetted against a watery sunrise of blue-grey and pink.

Public Key

npub15k8enej98g55ytfzgghyhsvp5xerjyurwd9jtv6d534wrv8yrahqgxz62c

NIP-05 Address

jetlagjen@gts-phillipsuk-org.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs2trueuezn522z953yytjtcxq6rv3ezwphxje9kdx6g6hpkrjp7mspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qxjpseq

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

Author Public Key

npub15k8enej98g55ytfzgghyhsvp5xerjyurwd9jtv6d534wrv8yrahqgxz62c

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Last Notes

2026-05-26 19:28:21 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq a report says, "for every £1 spent on employment support for young people, around £25 was spent on benefits." To fix this do you:
A. Increase employment support, knowing the knock-on effects will reduce benefit spend.
B. Cut benefits, knowing it will allow the current decline in employment to continue and overall benefit spend to increase.

2026-05-22 06:00:12 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq on the whole, I lean towards rehabilitation in favour of incarceration. But this case feels off.
Where is the desire to avoid criminalising grannies with signs? Why have people having miscarriages had to fight so hard against the weight of the criminal justice system? Why are women harmed so regularly by police-turned-perpetrators? Why is police brutality so prevalent? Why are the prisons bursting at the seams?
The fact that this case has been dealt with so gently against that backdrop feels like a slap in the face. It doesn't feel like "rehabilitation above incarceration" so much as "boys matter more than girls."
I really do hope those boys can be rehabilitated and be better people in future. But will the girls be given as much support to rebuild their lives?

2026-05-14 16:43:43 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq I wonder how quickly care plans would be agreed if the NHS billed social care for excess nights in hospital?
It would prevent them both desperately trying to make each other bear the costs for as long as possible.
No doubt it would create a perverse incentive to assess people fit for discharge before they were, though. And the right fix is to tackle the scarcity of carers and everything they need. But it might go some way to joining up the counting and therefore the thinking.

2026-05-05 00:14:54 UTC

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@nprofile…awd8 there is a fascinating bit of perspective involved here, I think.
People typically make deliberate presentation choices when going to a meeting (online or otherwise). We decide which clothes to wear, how to do our hair, and (online) what to do with what's behind us. We make these choices to give signals.
But at the same time, we assume others don't do this. We somehow think that what other people look like is random chance. And chance is easy to dismiss as unimportant.
I was once in a meeting between developers for two companies that were thinking about working together. Several of our devs took their brews to the meeting room. We didn't notice until too late that one of the mugs was sweary. When we did, we worried it could have a major detrimental impact on how things went. But someone from the other company joked about it. It broke the ice, both sides saw the humanity in each other, and recognised that the content of the meeting was more important than the slickness of presentation. Instead of posturing, everyone started collaborating. All because of a small visual cue as to who a person in the room really was.
So it seems to me like they can be pretty important. We shouldn't block some people from them just because most don't need help to perceive them. That sounds suspiciously like "we don't need a ramp because most people are fine with the steps."

2026-05-05 00:14:54 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq I don't understand why steel matters enough to pour cash in and re-re-re-nationalise, but other vital-to-industry sectors like water, energy, and public transit are left to rot.

2026-05-05 00:14:54 UTC

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@nprofile…emk6 do you mean The Typewriter by Leroy Anderson?

2026-04-24 05:29:48 UTC

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@nprofile…65q8 I am a big fan of an intermission.
Which is why I rarely see films outside home, and when I do it's at the local cult film club. They always have an intermission, usually at a well-chosen point, and the cafe serves tea and cake. It's very civilised and £5 a ticket, including a brief introduction on the making of the film. Why would I go anywhere else?

2026-04-24 05:29:48 UTC

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@nprofile…awd8 I sincerely hope that something as big as a country's civil service can demand it and then it becomes standard.

2026-04-19 23:53:52 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq that makes a lot of sense.
But none of the smoking related measures have required all adult customers to hand over copies of their ID to shady, unregulated companies who cannot be trusted not to store, leak or sell it. The proposed age gating is not analogous to flashing a card at a human staff member who promptly forgets it entirely.
Now, if there were regulations limiting the addictive elements, filtering out actually harmful content, banning invasive advertising (of or on platforms), etc, then maybe we could reduce harms to everyone.

2026-04-19 23:53:52 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq yes, absolutely.
Seatbelts, smoking, drink driving... Many behaviours and attitudes have been changed for the better by regulation and public information. But we must get the right regulation in the right place and enforce it appropriately - people can only wear seatbelts if they're fitted as standard.

2026-04-15 22:35:10 UTC

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@nprofile…65q8 @nprofile…jz7n the most ridiculous thing I've been invited to review was a jar of herbs.
No, Asda, I am not spending time or spoons reviewing my grocery shop, and especially not a single 83p purchase that happened to be part of it.

2026-04-05 08:56:43 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq I've had similar thoughts in a desperate attempt to find a silver lining to the awful situation and evil acts.
Unfortunately, I always end up wondering how much general environmental damage is being done by all the planes and explosions releasing enormous amounts of pollution. How much will this war accelerate global environmental collapse? Will any acceleration of green transition balance that?
In lieu of any answers, I have simply concluded that it is one more reason to do everything we can.

2026-04-05 08:56:43 UTC

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@nprofile…eqsh yet again, "AI" steps in to solve a problem by fixing the wrong part of the process.
Calls can get triaged by humans in seconds with a standard script that starts with urgent questions like whether the patient is breathing. Are there then ambulance crews ready and available to attend? Can they physically get to and find the patient quickly? Is the emergency department ready to take over care on arrival? Can the tests, reviews, treatments all be provided quickly?
LLMs don't make software production quicker, because writing code is not the slow bit. They won't make emergency response quicker, because prioritising is not the slow bit.

2026-04-02 21:08:59 UTC

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@nprofile…65q8 yes. See also every kind of insurance, recurring subscriptions that never check if they should continue, free trials that require signing up for a subscription...

2026-04-02 21:08:59 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq I'd ask the construction industry.
They've gone from having a reputation for street harassment to being a pretty reasonable employer of women. I don't really know what they've done, but it seems to have worked. Perhaps their path can be a model for other parts of society?

2026-03-31 17:06:51 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq almost every job I've ever had required me to learn new specialist software. It's just a standard facet of modern work.
So expecting people to learn things like LibreOffice or Vivaldi or whatever really isn't that big a deal. Moving to a user-friendly Linux isn't a bigger jump than moving between major versions of Windows.
The biggest barrier is fear and attitude.

2026-03-31 17:06:51 UTC

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@nprofile…8mxe @nprofile…x9tq arguably that's covered in my final statement as it's an attitude that stokes fear.
But, yes, Linux snobs are worth calling out specifically. They absolutely need to shoulder some of the blame for the current situation and I'd love to see them shoulder some of the responsibility for helping the world out of it.
An ordinary office space should be somewhat insulated from that kind of Linux snob, who tend to gravitate towards dev teams. But having one in the support team might be problematic.

2026-03-21 15:57:57 UTC

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@nprofile…apm9 I heard a similar story about cancer samples a few years ago.
The predictive model seemed very good. Until they realised that all the sample specimens were labelled positive / negative and that's what the machine had learned to recognise.
ML has some extraordinary pattern matching skills that could be very useful in this kind of work. But people have to be very aware of what data they're training it on.

2026-03-08 10:57:29 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq if AI were more attuned to the needs of women and girls it wouldn't exist in its current form.
Everything about how generative AI has been built, trained, and forced into everything is founded on the idea that consent isn't important. Which is also fundamental to almost all the problems women and girls face in society.

2026-02-22 08:51:26 UTC

If your writing matters, it's worth getting a real person to check it and make sure your message is clear.
If it's not important enough for that, it's not worth using software built on stolen work and destructive practices.

2026-02-20 07:30:39 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq moving to secondary school is already a cliff edge for SEN kids.
Firstly, you've got to find a secondary school that can provide appropriate support. Then you've got to get your kid into it. Then the fight starts.
Whatever support you managed to persuade the primary school to put in place evaporates overnight. Even with EHCP, you have to fight for everything to be put in place anew.
Without the legal documents to support you, you have to prove all over again that your child needs support. Between a "new start", huge pressure to conform (ie, pretend everything is fine, at enormous physical and psychological cost), and large pupil numbers with low engagement time, parents are frequently told there's "no evidence" of the child's needs. Then starts the often years-long evidence gathering process that could be done in a week if staff took parent concerns seriously.
And all this against a backdrop of vastly increased complexity and pressure on the child, from overwhelming crowds, to silent corridors, to busy timetables, to having a dozen teachers to please, to getting detention for forgetting a pen.
Really, it is a testament to the determination (and desperation) of parents that any children get any support at second school.

2025-11-26 14:40:28 UTC

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@nprofile…lx0q I've noticed the weird forced-metaphore thing. To me, it makes LLM writing sound like a noir parody, only not funny. And it's all homogenous. I want to read real human voices with real human quirks and thoughts and ideas.

2025-11-23 11:04:16 UTC

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@nprofile…e4ry this is the sort of thing I usually find easy, but it threw me for a second. Then I realised the numbers were *labels* and not any kind of measurement.

2025-11-21 07:53:15 UTC

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@nprofile…xujg @nprofile…qy2x there's a lot of talk in that article about whether you should judge a book by its cover. There are arguments both ways on whether it should be in the criteria of a writing prize. But if the cover doesn't represent the book well, then someone hasn't done their job right.

2025-10-28 07:44:20 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj I've said for a while that more data doesn't mean better results, it just means more work for overstretched and underfunded people and systems. That always leads to more mistakes.

2025-10-13 22:40:58 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj I think a lot of people have been watching and waiting: who would be leading GPEW and how? What is this new Corbyn/Sultana thing going to be? What stance will either take on issues like trans rights and inequality?
We have very clear answers to all of those, now. And people are choosing strong, trans-positive, anticapitalist, people-first, Polanski-led Greens over the weak, unclear, utterly depressing shambles Your Party has been so far.

2025-05-23 22:49:18 UTC

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@nprofile…60lz @nprofile…y32x a few possible scenarios that I, personally, have encountered:
1. It's a group chat including people who aren't there, possibly also offering directions so they can join.
2. They're looking at the menu, because of course that has to be online now.
3. They're neurodivergent and need to decompress between bouts of socialising.
4. They're playing a game together.
5. They've fallen out and are taking a break from each other so they can sort it out.
6. They've had a very active few hours and need to switch off for a bit now they're sitting down.
7. They're looking up things to do when their meal is finished.
8. They're checking in on a friend who is going through a major life event.
9. They're looking up something that one of them mentioned so they can discuss it among the group.
In all cases, try mentally replacing the phones with books, newspapers, or other printed media. Does it still look like a problem?
All too often, people assume that whatever is going on on the screen has little value purely because it's on a screen. The assumption is that it *must* be time-wasting, attention-draining tripe. That isn't always the case.