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.

Website: https://mohkohn.co.uk
Pronouns: He/Him
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/moh-kohn.bsky.social

Public Key

npub19rdyutfscxdzwcm7hnc22vn773n8m0sw967z39jxgt5scvh23erqrh89ye

NIP-05 Address

moh_kohn_at_mastodon.scot@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsz3kjw95cvrx38vdlteu99xfl0genahc8za0pgjery96gvxt4gu3sprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqnz5a7

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub19rdyutfscxdzwcm7hnc22vn773n8m0sw967z39jxgt5scvh23erqrh89ye

Show more details

Last Notes

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/

2026-04-28 18:06:38 UTC

Thread: the Active Travel Hustings in Glasgow.
Holly Bruce, Green
Ross Clark, SNP
Peter McLaughlin, Lib Dem
Kyle Park (waiting for him to arrive), Conservative
Graham Simpson, Reform
Labour, who want to abolish the active travel budget, sent apologies

2026-04-17 17:37:43 UTC

Good news for federation: bluesky had an outage and because my data is on eurosky and blacksky have their own app, I was able to keep using it. ATPro has hit the point where bluesky-the-company could collapse and we could just carry on without them.

2026-02-23 21:05:54 UTC

What if I told you'd I'd written a web validation framework in 878 bytes (minified and gzipped)

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

2025-10-30 16:44:54 UTC

- reply

This is what knits together the financial crisis, the rise of social media, all the people who run social media getting into Christian Nationalism, the American right's response to a black president being elected, Marc Andreesen's absolute terror at his workers striking, MeToo, and BLM.

2025-10-30 16:44:47 UTC

- reply

And of course it is very appealing - a world view where the nation is a family needing violent discipline by its fathers, and the industrialist is one of the fathers. All the pissed off workers are just kids who weren't raised right, but Mr Reactionary is ready to mete out discipline.

2025-10-30 16:44:35 UTC

- reply

But what if there was some charismatic man who could somehow command a part of these masses for them, and violently suppress the rest? Many of the masses are women, or from ethnic or sexual minorities. Enough of the rest want power over those groups. It solves your whole problem.

2025-10-30 16:44:29 UTC

- reply

Their margins are being squeeze by the crisis, and as their wealth is debt secured against the paper values of assets, it is existential for them.
AT THE SAME MOMENT the working and middle classes are demanding relief, FROM THEM! It's unbearable!

2025-10-30 16:44:08 UTC

- reply

So periodically, even in a very wealthy economy, everyone's margins get squeezed. This leads to class conflict. These days we all *anticipate* that conflict.
The reactionary tendencies already present in a society, which always take a local form (anti-blackness in 2020s US vs anti-semitism in 1930s Germany for example), then appear as valuable tools to industrialists, especially financiers and financialised industrialists.

2025-10-30 16:43:44 UTC

My rough view of fascism's rise 🧵
There are always reactionaries, in every human society
They disproportionately benefit from early phases of new media technologies because mis/disinformation helps them and institutional and cultural antibodies haven't been developed
Capitalist economies have cycles, the short term business cycle is a famous one, there are also longer-term cycles in investment and profits

2025-09-29 13:25:59 UTC

- reply

A clarification on this: trans women are women, trans men are men. I just mean it's not been productive to argue with Helen Lewis about gender metaphysics, leaving the horrendous consequences underextrapolated.

2025-09-29 11:06:56 UTC

- reply

Similar to my position on who counts as a woman, I would rather say "trans segregation policies mean more sexual assault - why are you campaigning for more sexual assault? No don't try to wriggle out of it, the studies are clear on what your policies mean."

2025-09-29 11:04:30 UTC

I would like us to talk more about concrete harms of policy. "Are Reform voters racist?" - well, mostly yes, but this is very abstract. How about "this policy means families being split up, children crying because their mother is gone, it is unconscionable" ?

2025-08-05 08:32:30 UTC

Even if defending trans people's rights wasn't a vital cause in itself, any socialist should be able to see that transphobia is the leading edge of the anti-feminist backlash against advances in the 2010s. If you don't call that out clearly you lack the strategic nous to lead the left.

2025-07-27 00:45:10 UTC

If you have the power to, anything short of ordering warship-escorted aid convoys to Gaza is complicity

2025-07-13 14:04:03 UTC

- reply

Nerds really believe in the power of computers but don't have the skillset or incentives to truly democratise them. Oligarchs will fund UX work but are only interested in control and profit.

2025-07-13 14:03:49 UTC

- reply

We have lost the heroic vibe of early computing, when we believed in putting power at our users' fingertips. That sort of thing is just for technicians employed by oligarchs, apparently. No! We could demand a radically different computing. It needs the touchy feely UX people to provide expertise.

2025-07-13 14:03:35 UTC

- reply

Computers can be instructed to do almost anything using composition of small tools using grammars. We have not invested in building composable tools and grammars that the average citizen can use.
This might be a valid and powerful use for LLMs, actually.

2025-07-13 14:03:20 UTC

User Experience (my profession) has taken us in the wrong direction. We have become brilliant at producing "frictionless" experiences full of "nudges" so that computers can be used to control people. We called that ease of use.
We should be making the full power of computing accessible to people.

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.

2025-05-12 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

2024-12-29 22:46:27 UTC

- reply

First two attempts were web development, my job / expert area with almost 20 years of professional experience. LLM did very badly here. I know exactly what I want from the code and if I can't solve a problem by googling, neither can the LLM. It will however make up solutions that don't exist.

2024-12-29 22:44:48 UTC

Thoughts after 3 attempts using AI to assist coding. tl;dr it's an incredible learning tool, with some dangers. Short🧵

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.

2024-12-21 16:34:09 UTC

- reply

a few years ago I joined a team who were using a react form library that assumed it would catch submit events. But they didn't understand forms and were using onclicks and never triggering a submit event. I had to rewrite the whole core of the app. It took a whole team half a year to build an 8 step wizard.

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."

2024-12-15 18:59:46 UTC

Today I am mostly sad about straight friends preferring getting along with bigots to the social inclusion of targets of bigotry. They don't even really register it as their friend group sheds its queer people. If you make noise about it, you're causing trouble and they won't help you.

2024-12-13 18:00:57 UTC

Apple have rolled out an AI that sends push notifications with inaccurate headlines appearing to come from BBC and NYT.
This is appalling! What happened to ethics???
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0elzk24dno

2024-11-22 00:42:32 UTC

- reply

Caveat: 12.4% turnout in this one

2024-11-22 00:40:11 UTC

- reply

"Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution." - Walter Benjamin
The 2014 independence revolution failed; so too Corbyn. Every attempt to break from neoliberalism has been beaten back for the time being. Here comes the bosses' preferred alternative.

2024-11-22 00:38:30 UTC

First glance it looks like Reform have taken votes from both the SNP and Labour (as well as the Tories, which is more expected). If this happens elsewhere in Glasgow the far right are arriving as a force in Scottish electoral politics for the first time (ever?)
"North East (Glasgow) by-election:
Labour: 630 (34.3%, -9.7)
SNP: 591 (32.2%, -10.4)
Reform UK: 336 (18.3%, new)
Conservative: 99 (5.4%, -3.3)
Green: 77 (4.2%, +1.2)
TUSC: 68 (3.7%, +2.5)
Lib Dem: 36 (2%, new) Labour elected stage 7."

2024-11-16 14:26:02 UTC

- reply

It's somehow still not widely understood that the architecture of the internet posed a huge threat to capital, especially to media monopoly, and it took a huge and expensive re-engineering effort to turn the internet into what it is today. I still believe in the promise of the old internet.

2024-11-16 14:25:56 UTC

- reply

There's no shortage of issues with Mastodon and good reasons why Bluesky finds itself ahead.
IF Bluesky implements full federation, and a lively ecosystem of servers is established, this will be all to the good! Given where we are now, this is the outcome we should fight for.

2024-11-16 14:25:45 UTC

- reply

My bluesky fear:
1. Twitter implodes
2. The alternative is Mastodon, a low budget anti-corporate political project. It has federation.
3. Bluesky appears, venture capitalist funded, hence much slicker, promises but doesn't actually have federation. I hope we're not being played.

2024-11-16 14:25:27 UTC

- reply

My Bluesky Hope: that it can be user friendly enough for a mass userbase and open enough to bring back a bit of the older inernet.

2024-11-16 14:20:49 UTC

Bluesky is looking pretty hot and I think it's good to engage with it. There's still an opening for it to go truly federated, and the fediverse is the only political movement likely to fight for that. I am posting pretty much the same stuff both places.

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

2024-11-11 14:36:44 UTC

Very torn on bluesky between not wanting to make myself unpopular and strongly wanting to point out that the company's monetisation plan is incompatible with taking VC money.
It's exactly the same trick everyone fell for the last 5 times 😭

2024-11-10 20:59:31 UTC

- reply

expertise is not neutral however; I could hire an expert web developer who would build me some unmaintainable react app of doom, or an expert web developer who would build me a modern performance and accessible site. Dem party is full of "experts" in polling etc who are where they are because of a mix of ideological compatibility with the needs of capital and moral flexibility. Not because they are the best at winning elections.

2024-11-10 16:07:08 UTC

The American habit of understanding themselves and others and their politics as polling and marketing demographic categories - boomer, millennial, gen z, Latino men, white women - is quite insane. "White women voted X" - no they didn't, some percent of them did, but there are huge differences within any of these categories, they're the map not the territory, please be normal.

2024-11-08 16:10:30 UTC

- reply

"Knowing our fear, intimately, with the studied contempt of centuries, understanding we your serfs and our hatred of the plutocracy, better than Labour, we become the victims of Tory chicanery, of this ancient party of governance and experience."

2024-11-08 16:09:37 UTC

My friend, a trade unionist, wrote this astonishing essay after UKIP did unexpectedly well in the UK elections a decade ago.
https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2015/05/09/builders-of-the-future/

2024-11-06 14:28:01 UTC

- reply

I'm posting this everywhere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJkh0HrDICA

2024-10-17 13:41:03 UTC

- reply

Human sociality works because of our powerful drive to join the consensus; these people can fabricate a consensus, hacking our prosocial instincts

2024-10-17 13:39:51 UTC

- reply

The power is hidden by a user interface. If the election isn't in the papers, you might think to hold the editor accountable. If it's not on your insta feed, you think "my friends aren't interested in the election" which is a strong prompt to not be interested yourself

2024-10-17 13:38:06 UTC

This is exactly what we were warning people about for years. Platform owners have absurd power, beyond that of traditional media owners.
https://journa.host/@w7voa/113322434539993615

2024-08-29 19:35:07 UTC

My dad took up photography when he retired and his photo of an atlantic #salmon is a finalist at the British Wildlife #Photography Awards!! #fish
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/046/980/163/420/988/original/1ec932b94dd923ec.jpg

2024-08-28 13:45:45 UTC

- reply

I know!! There's a fair few shops shut down in Sauchiehall St but across the rest of the centre the restaurants and pubs are all busy. The works look like a building site because they are a building site. Art school area aside I have no idea what they're talking about.

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.

2024-08-10 17:36:48 UTC

- reply

the TV adaptation is v good too