Alistair Davidson

Democratic #Socialist.

Lead developer

Amateur #synth musician. Big fan of #urbanism and #cycling. Love a bit of political economy. #Buddhist. Sometimes write for Bella Caledonia.

#Glasgow #Scotland

Anwar Shaikh stan account.

Public Key

npub1v4k0w68853a4gu4k9trj8nm26qg43et5pllsppz27akyt8xf5spqjrxc2f

NIP-05 Address

moh_kohn@mastodon-scot.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsx2m8hdrn6g765w2mz43erea4dqy2cu46qllcqs390wmz9nny6gqspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qs2ymdn

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

Author Public Key

npub1v4k0w68853a4gu4k9trj8nm26qg43et5pllsppz27akyt8xf5spqjrxc2f

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Last Notes

2026-06-10 20:49:29 UTC

https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/116/727/779/593/235/448/original/0b82cf39164147ec.jpg

2026-06-10 11:10:03 UTC

Blogged about the time I doubled our users by doing proper engineering instead of React slop
https://www.mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/

2025-11-28 19:30:45 UTC

This is the kind of demographic catastrophe you usually see after a major military defeat. For Britain, it's entirely self-inflicted.
First graph: migration set to turn negative in 2026, with more people leaving the country than enter.
Second graph: British young people are leaving in droves.
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/115/628/979/682/906/426/original/31e31a26fad5a17d.png
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/115/628/979/737/555/429/original/81e9934a03b9b7e5.png

2025-11-13 03:33:18 UTC

I've been trying to express exactly this discomfort with modern interface design and especially LLM design and this lady nailed it back in *1993*
("A Small Matter of Programming", Bonnie A. Nardi)
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/115/540/277/514/715/628/original/d4ba53792057b6a5.png

2025-08-01 11:54:55 UTC

It's downright bizarre the extent to which some subreddits only exist to denigrate the thing they are meant to be fans of. "I hate everything about this podcast. Also I have listened to 1000 hours of it." what are you doing???

2025-07-24 11:46:29 UTC

https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/114/908/041/646/874/841/original/5900aad1fe0ef0af.png

2025-07-03 15:45:25 UTC

Treat articles about what gen z are doing with the same disdain you treated articles about what millennials were doing in 2011, or accept that you have become Yer Da.

2025-06-26 19:32:57 UTC

A way of thinking about ~the present day~: the internet has exactly the printing-press-scale liberatory potential boosters claimed; it was (naturally!) seized on by minoritised groups; the powerful are trying to work out how to get the genie back in the bottle.

2025-06-16 14:15:38 UTC

Scotland made buses free for under 23s and it's driven record attendance at soccer games and a decade+ reduction in average age of attendees.
Free public transport has huge ramifications for society and the economy.

2025-06-08 22:14:27 UTC

Has anyone told Gen Z / young millennials about this album yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOG68FTpVdE

2025-05-12 20:23:02 UTC

They call it perfidious Albion for a reason. Jesus christ. This general denied asylum to Afghan soldiers who fought alongside the British army because they were witnesses to war crimes by British forces and might testify. Some were then tortured by the Taliban.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3q5xl9wqwo

2025-05-02 11:25:35 UTC

Holy shit, there are hundreds of people at this trans rights demo outside the EHRC in Glasgow. On a Friday lunchtime!
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/114/437/988/965/140/165/original/05402a493a71d17f.jpg

2025-04-22 18:09:44 UTC

I know I have liberal American followers with good jobs. Your conservative counterparts are funding all sorts of hate in the UK. Why not give them a taste of their own medicine?
https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/fighting-fund-for-trans-rights/

2025-04-19 14:56:02 UTC

Thousands here in Glasgow, one of 22 trans rights protests across the UK today
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/114/365/206/426/104/476/original/b798e4fad7f4a3c4.jpg

2025-04-16 16:02:24 UTC

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We endure because we have no other choice; we fight because we have to.
We share community and solidarity and they have never, not even in the darkest days when it was illegal to be a gay man, never have they been able to take that from us.
They imagine that with some law or some court ruling they can wish us away. We shall have to teach them the hard lesson once again.

2025-04-16 16:02:06 UTC

When I was growing up, it was the law of the land that gay and trans people could not be mentioned in school. Gay people could not get married. Trans people had a hard time changing their legal paperwork.
We're living through another of those backlashes, times when our rights as LGBT people are peeled back.
But what the people who hate us cannot understand is that we are who we are. It's not a belief, or an ideology, or a perversion. It's not something that can be changed by their laws.

2025-04-05 12:19:54 UTC

It's interesting and weird that for the last while you don't get grouped as part of "the left" in popular consciousness if you're not pious about language. eg RTJ released an album that excoriated money as the root of racism and imperialism but it's also sweary so it didn't go in the "woke" bucket.

2025-03-13 17:40:57 UTC

Why is all American governance words like "comptroller" and "cloture"

2025-03-07 18:39:46 UTC

should I buy this tshirt
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/114/122/606/859/066/900/original/98edd7ccfd80fdde.jpg

2025-02-27 16:09:26 UTC

Reagan and Thatcher both caused deliberate recessions to break working class power then won big at the next election. Don't assume Musk's madness will translate to defeat all by itself.

2025-02-16 14:39:02 UTC

I think it's actually crucial whether "social media" refers to just post-Facebook corporate forms, or also to technologies with different political economy (eg usenet, blogs, forums, mastodon).
imo the internet was always a social medium and Facebook etc al were an enclosure of a commons.

2025-02-11 11:30:54 UTC

Americans, the way you stop a gang of Nazi dweebs illegally entering the department of education to shut it down is with a picket line. Unions made democracy and you need unions to defend it. That's the force you're missing.

2025-02-06 17:17:52 UTC

Our ~200 person queer events whatsapp community has voted to move to Signal. People educating each other about how to do that. Wonderful to see!

2025-02-02 15:06:59 UTC

Now is a good time to read "IBM and the Holocaust"
To kill on that scale, you need computers. It was the first digital genocide. IBM, the Solutions Company, built custom punchcard computers to categorise Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Gays and so on.

2025-01-27 15:55:09 UTC

Anyone looking for a top class web developer? UK based

2025-01-22 18:55:21 UTC

US tarriffs will be like Brexit. No big bang collapse the opposition might point to. Just a slow grinding worsening of everything that leaves voters clueless about where to place the blame.

2025-01-20 19:00:56 UTC

The annoying nerds who said you should install Linux, use decentralised social media, use Signal secure messenger were right.
Control of our own computing is a prerequisite for freedom.
The internet *is* real life.
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/862/223/820/966/640/original/b9832a8dcfb17ec9.jpg

2025-01-19 15:44:43 UTC

There's fun to be had on bluesky but dear god is it full of smug middle aged liberal academics, just dunking on anyone different - young people, anyone who doesn't fear China, anyone who orders takeaway and on. In their imaginary, everyone in America is well-off and petulant and only turning to extreme politics out of boredom at their comfortable lives. I've never seen anything like it.

2025-01-13 01:28:01 UTC

Caught a clip of the Zuckerberg/Rogan interview and Zuckerberg was saying it's not fair that any of the countries Meta trades in can threaten to put him in prison if his company breaks the law. It's a lot of countries therefore that's not fair!

2025-01-08 19:36:15 UTC

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"Don't worry, 100 years from now we'll have a culture war about acknowledging your existence and we'll make a sad movie about you"

2025-01-08 19:35:14 UTC

Watching some Americans threaten and others joke about annexing a nation (Greenland) with a 90% indigenous/mixed population like what century is this? Appalling.

2024-12-26 20:09:05 UTC

It's fun how you can label anything woke now. Britain is even deciding that semi-skimmed milk is woke.
What else could we do? Orange juice (fancy foreign fruit). Oven gloves (you coward). Garlic. Lemsip. Friendship. The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Ray tracing. The eufa conference league.

2024-12-25 11:25:04 UTC

https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/713/211/194/321/904/original/d95a7137ad7612ec.jpg

2024-12-16 08:35:06 UTC

Mastodon should ask you to pick a "moderator" not an "instance".
The latter is obscure technical detail. The former is about people, and power, and explainable to anyone.
"You pick which person or organisation you want to decide who and what is banned. You can change it later."

2024-11-22 19:38:29 UTC

In part the current moment is a ruling class backlash to the very real threat of rising worker militancy and political awareness. Times can feel very dark, but the billionaires are acting out of fear right now - fear of us.

2024-11-15 16:38:53 UTC

Facebook memories reminded me of the one truly viral thing I ever made, this graph, circa 2011.
A cleaned up version appeared in the Guardian and it's now common to find versions of this graph for different countries.
To the very best of my knowledge, my janky copy and paste job was the first.
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/487/952/259/845/711/original/5a2a4dce0ffe0791.jpg

2024-09-04 12:43:21 UTC

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@npub1rkl…c3e0 dunno if you saw my post but I broke some code by upgrading Babel. The code was defining variables in the wrong order but old Babel turned consts into vars so they were all hoisted 😳

2024-08-31 15:39:40 UTC

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@npub16u7…uend was it you who was talking about react's advantage being labour fungibility a while ago? Feels like that also applies to LLM coders.

2024-08-18 15:19:48 UTC

Well done Bloc+, Glasgow
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/112/983/694/201/542/425/original/21e8e9845a5db9f6.jpg

2024-08-16 11:46:37 UTC

My wife has a complaint about the Time Bandits TV series. In the last episode they travel to Bingley in 1996 and visit a goth party. She says there were only 5 goths in Bingley in 1996, she was one of them, and they didn't have parties.

2024-08-14 20:02:01 UTC

When I see empty shop fronts in busy places, the only thing I can think is that the commercial rents are too high. Am I wrong? Surely there is a rent level that would fill every shop front. #urbanism

2024-07-28 17:05:23 UTC

If everything goes well I am about to buy a flat (4-in-a-block or "cottage" flat) that needs a new central heating system. It's on gas right now.
Obviously I would like to go green if I can, but it's all incomprehensible. Worst is that companies either do heat pumps or gas so you can't have a speculative conversation comparing the two really.
Anyone with any insight? #heatpump

2024-07-03 11:14:12 UTC

Wild stuff, "left" transphobe Nina Power sued a guy for saying she was a nazi but lost after these explicitly nazi communications showed up in disclosure
https://x.com/Luke_Turner/status/1808042378340499879

2024-06-16 14:15:09 UTC

Upon reaching Scotland, the Roman army encountered their first fish n chips shop. Seeing an ice cream sandwich for the first time, the general exclaimed "They have made a dessert, and called it a piece!"

2024-05-26 09:34:54 UTC

"Bring back national service" vs "We can't afford it" - what an awful election

2024-05-16 13:43:53 UTC

Can I detect clamp support using @supports? #css

2024-04-25 16:56:53 UTC

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 nobody knows at this time

2024-04-25 16:51:40 UTC

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 yeah they've been arguing for that since the day it was signed

2024-04-25 16:23:34 UTC

The right of the SNP are a real brain trust. Geniuses.

2023-10-25 22:39:44 UTC

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@npub1cpp…2uya I used to know a woman from the sabra refugee camp, living in Glasgow which sets off a lot of fireworks in October/November. This poem is simply accurate.

2023-09-04 13:25:16 UTC

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 Yeah I am an elder millenial and while I planned ahead to not do that myself it had not occurred to me that some of my once-progressive friends would trend reactionary!

2023-09-03 17:15:27 UTC

I keep coming back to this article about economic planning and the #ClimateCrisis
'It is no longer obvious that the Green New Deal framework—which ties inequality with climate policy—will offer success. In the unequal societies we inhabit, this strategy generates as many oppositional coalitions as it does supporters. Furthermore, given their track record and feeble plans, we cannot place hope in preemptive action by rationally long-termist elites.'
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/climate-planning/

2023-08-24 16:35:20 UTC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66492767

2023-08-24 15:23:09 UTC

I'm available for #contract #webdev work. Senior or lead, 15 years experience, can do any framework or none. DM for rates etc

2023-07-04 19:30:12 UTC

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@npub1ex3…c58j aaaaaaaaaaaaa

2023-07-04 18:50:14 UTC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66104822

2023-07-02 18:02:26 UTC

In the near future, there will be more trips happening by bike than car in Glasgow. We're going to make it happen.

2023-07-02 13:01:35 UTC

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 @npub1w5h…xmrz The minute that a province starts talking about independence, the Brits start planning a partition.

2023-06-16 16:38:49 UTC

Rain in Maryhill at last! It's been some job watering the allotment the last month.