Mary Branscombe

@marypcbuk.bsky.social

11435 Followers 1858 Following

Omnivorous technology journalist. girl with the USB earring; author of the Cassidy At Large technomysteries. Like my writing? Buy me a ☕ https://ko-fi.com/marybranscombe. she/her. Warning: contains opinions. signal marypcbuk.44

Photo of an open air stage and trees with a crowd; the screens either side of the stage show the blonde singer in a black dress with a red background, the screen behind the stage shows seven pale hands reaching out to form a circle and starting to grip
Do you want Bluesky to have the reputation it has? Do you want it to get bigger? Do you think that the right answer is someone starts a MAGA Bluesky and it interoperates the way that it needs to? This is the perception of the consumer product. Do you want that to change, and how would you change it? Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people. It works for anyone. What we see is there is a lot of political discourse on Bluesky and any of these open networks. People are very engaged. What we’ve seen in the lead up to the election so far – we’ve hosted a lot of live election feeds, and we see a lot of really good feedback from our users, a lot of engagement, a lot of, “This is actually really interesting content about this topic.” Whereas on other platforms, I think these election topics just get completely overwhelmed by slop and spam. It’s just noise and chaos. What we’re focusing on is to deliver a live experience. We do it around elections. We do it around sports as well, very successfully, where the people on the network that participate get a really good experience and get really good content. Once we have that, then hopefully we can just keep expanding to more and more types of users and use cases. We’re an open network for anyone and we don’t want to serve just one type of user base. I’ve seen it already in the last few months, really trend in the right direction where we just have more and more people show up and build their own corners of the network. It sort of balances out over time. We don’t just have a few topics you’re super deep on, but it just gets more and more diverse.
A screenshot of an iPhone screen at 21:44 with a giant floofy calico Maine coon sprawled on a white bathmat
Two cardboard cups of coffee ice cream and cherry ice cream on a wooden table
Screenshot of bluesky posts; above the post I’m replying to is a post with a sketchy diagram of a stick figure shooting the words “AI isn’t intelligent” at a stick figure labelled AI user but the ricochet hits a d third stick figure labelled your friend with worse reading comprehension skills and logical reasoning skills than an open weight Chinese model from 6 months ago
A man in a grey t shirt sitting on an outdoor chair looking at his phone. A giant floofy calico Maine Coon cat has her shoulders and front paws draped over one leg but her back legs are so straight so her butt is up and her tails curls around his neck and reaches his cheek
Multiple daily UK newspapers on shelves nearly all with headlines about Count Binface
Photo taken at an angle of wooden bookshelves stacked to the ceiling with books running across a short wall at the top of a flight of stairs then running around the corner towards the viewer, with a mirror and an Apple poster of an astronaut visible on the wall
Satya Nadella in front of a slide headed Our community-first Al infrastructure plan We will pay our way to ensure our datacenters don't increase your electricity prices We will minimize our water use and replenish more of your water than we use We will create jobs for your residents We will add to the tax base that funds local hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries We will strengthen your community by investing in local Al training and non-profits
Screenshot saying Mary Branscombe British technology journalist 735 strength top 4% gpt 5.5 says technology journalist and writer known for covering Microsoft, windy, cloud computing, AI and enterprise technology Then a list of models with colour bars and the url in the weights.com
comic frame of Dark Knight Batman breaking a gun apart saying "THIS is the weapon of the ENEMY, we do not NEED it. we will not USE it."
A sketch of a crow dramatically flinging its arms wide; it’s wearing a white robe with wide slo
A sketch in purple ink. Three characters standing together and another sitting apart all look up and backwards
A four panel comic strip about two characters recommitting Cathartic Comics to focusing on women’s issues, the lesbian and gay community and the perspective of people of colour; in each panel a white man complains that the comics don’t centre him and declares that white is a colour too. The two characters suggest he could be a person of pigment
A six panel black and white comic page in a frame: the panels illustrate the words Keep your freak flag flying high finishing with a panel that says And get the fascists off our streets
a leg with a purple sock in a silver shoe; the mid-calf sock has a silver fringe; inset picture of the pair of socks
SAtya holding a Majorana 2 QPU in front of a slide about it showing the gold backplate aka.ms/Majorana2 Reliability, speed, and size for scalable quantum computing 20-second mean lifetime I-microsecond operations 1/100th of a millimeter
red box highlighting a code comment // NB: we will only ever be reused with the same engine, so no need // to clear out our tracing info just to fill it back in with the // same exact stuff. trace infos:
3 charts Pull requests merged 90M Commits 1.4B New repos per month 20M Record acceleration
Satya in front of a slide saying Microsoft Execution Containers Process container Application container Virtual machine container aka.ms/MicrosoftExecutionContainers
Satya stands in front of a slide reading: Our community-first Al infrastructure plan We will pay our way to ensure our datacenters don't increase your electricity prices We will minimize our water use and replenish more of your water than we use We will create jobs for your residents We will add to the tax base that funds local hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries We will strengthen your community by investing in local Al training and non-profits
Satya wearing grey and black lifting his hands to chest height in front of a slide reading: security & observability agent runtime models context tools infra[structure]
New apps and their usage across app stores three charts for iOS (strong sharp peak), Android (shallow rise), Chrome (fast consistent rise with an immediate sub peak when AI coding starts) New iOS applications run between roughly 30,000 and 50,000 per month from 2023 through early 2025,then rise sharply over the course of 2025, reaching approximately 100,000 per month by April 2026. The acceleration also gathers pace as we enter 2026, consistent with the Claude Code effect rising over time as the underlying model improves. The Google Play Store shows a different pattern. Monthly new releases had been declining steadily from over 120,000 in mid-2020 to about 42,000 in January 2025, and the trajectory then breaks: releases stabilize and recover modestly through the end of our sample, reaching about 60,000 per month by mid-2026.20 The Chrome Web Store shows a slower but visible acceleration: new extensions roughly double from around 5,000 per month in 2023 to about 13,000 per month by mid-2026. The acceleration also starts earlier than for iOS; growth picks up in 2025 but the trend already breaks from a stable period in 2024.
MicrosoftData WeuseconfidentialdatafromMicrosoftonGitHubCopilotusage. These data report, for all GitHub Copilot subscribers, the number of requests made to each tool included in the Copilot subscription, including autocompletion, the use of sync coding agents in VS Code and other platforms, and the use of the async coding agent on GitHub, between April and December 2025. We use these data to construct adoption events for different AI coding tools by identifying each user’s first observed usage and to analyze 10See GitHub—Octoverse 2025. 11We rely ontheGitHubRESTAPIratherthanGHArchivebecausewedetectedissuesintheGHArchivedata, including missing dates and incomplete coverage of commitactivity, especially after mid-2024. We therefore conclude that GHArchive is useful for identifying active developers but not for measuring their activity. 18 subsequent usage patterns over time. In addition, we use subscription data for two GitHub products—GitHub Copilot and GitHubPro—coveringtheperiod from2021onward. Thesedatainclude thestart and end dates of each user’s subscription and are used to identify the adoption of autocomplete and GitHub Pro.
To take this framework to the data, we combine public GitHub data with internal Microsoft telemetry to construct activity measures that correspond to each layer of the production hierarchy—from lines of code through releases—and to identify when devel opers first adopt each tool. Combining publicly observable AI usage on GitHub with internal subscription data lets us track multiple tools across different vendors: autocom plete from GitHub Copilot, sync agents from GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Codex, and async agents from GitHubCopilot andCodex. Tomeasuretheproductivityeffectsof each tool, we implement an event-study design in which each treated user is matched with a control user in the same calendar week one year earlier, avoiding contamination from widespread private adoption of AI tools among contemporaneous non-adopters. Weuseseveralstrategiestoaddresstheendogeneityconcernsinherentinobservational data. First, to mitigate activity bias, we require control users to be similarly active on the treated user’s adoption date and match on pre-treatment activity over the prior 12 weeks. Second, we validate our results with placebo tests that apply the same event-study design to non-AI coding tools. Third, we document the absence of differential pre-trends between treated and control users across all outcomes, supporting the parallel trends assumption. Fourth,wecompareourautocompleteestimates with the prio rfield-experimental evidence
A giant floofy calico Maine Coon asleep on red stairs by a pile of books. Her white front legs are stretched out straight from her curled up body holding down the end of the fluffy tail curled around her
Yellow flowers on a succulent seen through a green fence with wide mesh. A bee is settling on one flower
Not all CPU operations are created equal Operation Cost in CPU Cycles list of operations with their latency cost shown as bars "Simple" register-register op Memory write Bypass delay: switch between integer and floating-point units "Right" branch of "if" Floating-point/vector addition Multiplication (integer/float/vector Ll read L2 read "Wrong" branch of "if" (branch misprediction) Floating-point division 128-bit vector division C function direct call Integer division C function indirect call C++ virtual function call L3 read Main RAM read NUMA: different-socket 1-3 read Allocation+deallocation pair (small objects) NIJMA: different-socket main RAM read Kernel call Thread context switch (direct costs C++ Exception thrown+caught Thread context switch (total costs, includin cache invalidation below the chart is a list of icons labelled: Distance which light travels while the operation is performed the icons: the diagonal of a laptop screen, the height of a house, the length of a blue whale, the length of a running track around a stadium, a 3km rally circuit, a 30km wide city
a seat in a corridor train carriage that runs most of the width of the carriage, upholstered in a dark grey fabric with squares of red, blue and white as alternating strips; the white squares are crossed by black bars that resemble train tracks
Donnie Darko 3 panel friends meme: 1 Donnie claims AI RUINED SOMETHING AGAIN 2 therapist asks AI OR GOODHART'S LAW 3 Donnie makes a face and admits GOODHART'S LAW BECAUSE PEOPLE
npm did stand for Node Package Manager. It absolutely did. But later someone decided they wanted to give the appearance that it could or should be used for software not related to Node, so they had to strip it of its meaning. Just like DVD, which was Digital Video Disc until manufacturers decided to market it for things other than video. Likewise KFC and BP now insist their names are meaningless, in efforts to sidestep negative connotations (respectively Fried and British). For more on this, see: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003555.html answered Aug 6 2017 John Zwink
Two men set up a tree trunk on a steam powered sawmill; partway through the video pans to the traction engine and back. At the end the first slice from the trunk is removed showing a clean cut through the wood.
Giant floofy calico Maine Coon cat against a grey jersey duvet cover
a long floofy calico Maine Coon stretched on by a door with her front and back legs pointing in oppositions directions
A red Irish passport on a wooden countertop with a folded white piece of paper underneath
London night skyline with a tower block on the left and Telecom Tower in the middle distance
a skeet header for Jerry Chen with two labels, one of which shows Jerry to be Unjerrified
A panorama of dozens of apartment blocks
A dart board on a wall covered in beer labels. One dark is stuck in the narrow red quadrant of the inner ring in the 12 o clock position under the 20
https//booksky.ink Apps on device Blocked
A brick wall with a casement window open; the painted wood is worn and overfilled with epoxy putty and two hands are visible on the windowsill one holding sandpaper. The photo is taken out of another window where the photographer is ready to shout feedback on where to sand down the putty so the window will shut properly.
Two giant floofy calico Maine Coon cats squashed down under a sofa on a wooden floor they are very pointedly not looking at anything
a floofy calico maine coon sleeping on the shoulder of a woman with blue and orange braids sitting in a brown leather chair
A shop front with large glass windows in a wooden frame with a curved top; there are tables and chairs outside, vases inside and the sign says Ginger & Magia, elixir coffee, Gingembre & Hibiscus, vins nature
screenshot of M365 copilot showing it's a beta last updated august 2025
A OneNote error over a skeleton page saying the notes couldn't be opened
A theee story painting on the wall of a house with trees mountains and a woman dressed in red
Wooden door with pink graffiti Anarchist symbol Caca contre le patriarca A drawing of a steaming turn with a line through it (not sure why the line is there unless it means save your ammunition)
A wooden picnic table on a tiled patio with two bottles of water and two green cushions piled up, and an absolute potato of a tortie cat sleeping on the pile of cushions
A full size giraffe in yellow and rainbow colours made out of LEGO bricks, outside a large modern building
An ornate brass door handle and lock plate
A bridge with a central arch for bikes and two lines of shallow steps for pedestrians
A boat with pots and tubs of plants tied up next to a larger barge
A small footbridge across a narrow canal between modern houses; the bridge has metal arcs and curves
Two grebes face each other in the water, the one on the left is looking down while the other squawks with their beak wide open and maybe some tongue
A display box behind a window holds a cardboard box with a packet of ramen balanced on it but the ramen packet is a light
Brick pillars and arches decorated with angled white stone encrustations on an area of grass; a metro train is passing beside it
A large plastic bag full of coffee beans spread out on a work surface
A glass of pale rose wine catching the reflections of a flame in an arc that goes from violet to blue to white to yellow to orange to red
Steak and ribs and a chicken skewer piled up on a wooden platter on a metal stand. In the background a white man with white hair and glasses is laughing