Location: UK
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Java, React, Javascript, Shell, Python, SQL and NoSQL, AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Lambda, Terraform - it becomes too much to list, my background is principally as a Java dev who's turned their hand to most things to get the job done over the last 20 years.
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardmidwinter/
Email: richard.midwinter@gmail.com
I've architected and developed software systems professionally across healthcare, media and secure government. Startups to multinational defence consultancies. Project CTO / technical lead roles, lots of experience leading dozens of projects, through the entire SDLC in highly technical environments with significant legal requirements. Greenfield and legacy systems. Often been the person brought in to fix the difficult projects.
Particularly interested in roles where people are passionate that they have real world value to deliver. Any technical obstacles that follow that, we can fix.
The same Starmer who's cancelled local elections? Who's not looked at the polls and thought maybe it's time to go, because the demos clearly don't want me? The same Starmer who said no rise in NI in the manifesto, only to increase NI? The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?
He's no proper democrat. People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
> The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?
From 10% of the MPs to 20% of the MPs. As challengers would have to, you know, get more MPs than him to win, the only thing going from 10% to 20% is to have less pointless drama.
> People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
First I've heard of that. Would be exceptionally dumb for a UK politician to do on purpose for the same reason that it would be correct to cancel elections in the event of such a war: the UK is not even remotely close to being ready to battle Russia. UK armed forces are just about big enough to keep the nuclear weapons safe, not much more besides that.
It only becomes false to say they've been cancelled if they happen. They're planning on postponing them again, and if that continues to happen indefinitely, they've been cancelled.
Starmer doesn't just have negative approval ratings. His are through the floor. The last voting intention poll from YouGov (which has been relatively favourable for Labour) would have given them just 69 seats - fewer than the Lib Dems currently have.
2. "Postponed" is entirely normal within British politics. For most of my life, even the timing of general elections were at the whim of the government.
3. Given how Starmer polls, the delay is almost certainly going to make things un-favourable for him. Also unfavourable for Labour, unless they kick him out first.
Not that it would matter much if your conspiracy theory held water, given that one of the many constitutional problems the UK has is that local councils have negligible power (options are tied all over the place) and therefore local elections are functionally little more than opinion polls done in a voting booth.
"My conspiracy theory" is a set of facts that you and the source you cited (whose so-called "fact check" was mostly attempting to put into context) find really inconvenient. Fact 1: Starmer and his party are polling badly. Fact 2: Starmer and his party delayed several local elections, many of which were in constituencies where they currently hold power and won't afterward. This is not a good set of facts, regardless of how little those elections matter.
Your conspiracy theory is that Starmer got anything out of delaying, which you overstated as "cancelled", a thing commonly delayed in British politics.
I literally agreed with you in my original post (i.e. before you replied to me, unless you're both accounts) that he's not popular.
> The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table?
I've no idea about rug pile depth, but I'd have thought a simple link between square footage and location would be a reasonable proxy for that affluency.
Not sure that works though for flogging, say, client IP to affluency data to advertisers, unless they can already reliably pinpoint the client IP to an address (which for all I know, maybe they can).
The roombas with cameras don't need an internet connection to work-- they need it if you want the app control features like scheduling. The imagery based navigation is still local.
When I got one in ~2019, I covered the camera and connected it long enough for it to get firmware updates (which annoyingly you can't trigger and it takes a few days)... then I firewalled it off to get no internet access.
I later figured out that if you let it connect and firewall it off it just sits in a tight loop trying to connect again hundreds of times per second which meaningfully depletes the battery faster.
Changing the SSID name so it couldn't connect to the wifi solved the problem.
I'd like to get a new one-- the old one still runs well (with some maintenance, of course) but the latest robot vacuums are obviously better. Unfortunately at least some are more cloud dependent and I can't tell which are and to what degree.
Amazes me that the Russians always seem to have the capacity for this sort of, I can't think of a clean word, let's inadequately say gamesmanship. When I'd have thought they have enough on their plate in Ukraine.
They have a strange attitude to the world and have had government funded people dedicated to attacking much of the world for decades. See this book review:
>“This must be the essence of our greatness. . . enemies everywhere” (p.20). The central thesis of Russia’s War on Everybody is that the Kremlin defines its enemies sweepingly, such that only a fraction of these “enemies” consider Russia to be their enemy. As Giles documents, “the Kremlin’s daily business” includes what some in the West would consider “acts of war” – poisoning dissidents, shooting down planes, election meddling, cyberattacks, and blatant political assassinations. Giles describes the Kremlin’s zero-sum worldview, in which anything benefitting others is a threat to Russia, and demonstrates that the Kremlin’s ambitions are far broader, and its methods more pervasive, than most realise. https://www.e-ir.info/2025/11/18/review-russias-war-on-every...
Anything necessary to keep up the sharades and appearance. He likes to play in the league of the big. Let's see for how long, until more cracks start showing up.
I've seen AI image generation models described as being able to combine multiple subjects into a novel (or novel enough) output e.g. "pineapple" and "skateboarding" becomes an image of a skateboarding pineapple. It doesn't seem like a reach to assume it can do what GP suggests.
A lot I expect. There were stories about VPNs being top of the App Store, etc. when the law kicked in.
Lots of people using Brave's Tor or Opera's VPN in their browsers, and free VPNs like Proton (which seems like a negative security outcome for the country to me).
I'd have thought the intel agencies would be pissed at all that data going dark, but haven't heard a peep in the media.
Particularly interested in roles where people are passionate that they have real world value to deliver. Any technical obstacles that follow that, we can fix.
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