It feels like Twitter did 12 years ago - in my experience it’s a really engaged place with high-quality conversations. It really highlights how far Twitter has fallen, and after the last couple of years on Twitter I had to re-learn how to have civil conversations with people who are acting in good faith, because I’d grown so unused to that

Any vaguely recent car is constantly reporting its location back to its manufacturer.

I’d be very intrigued in a system that lets me leave my phone in my (waterproof) pocket and access audio and navigation on Bluetooth. Let’s get this on bikes asap

Now imagine that, but onions

One of my big worries with the way people are using LLMs is that they’re being trained to trust whatever they spit out. Hey Google, what’s the nutritional content of peanuts? And people are learning not to ask where the information came from or to check sources.

One of the many reasons this worries me is that very soon these businesses are going to need to recoup the billions they’re spending, and I wonder how long until these systems start feeding paid promotions to a population that’s been trained to accept whatever they’re told. imagine what some businesses, or governments, would pay to have exactly their choice of words produced on demand in response to knowledge queries.

Interestingly, my family subscription more or less halved a few months ago, which I was NOT expecting, but which was very welcome

It would have a massive effect. Transport (car) emissions are one of the larger - and growing - sources of emissions.

And we can’t hide behind “But the corporations…” because ultimately what they produce gets used by us.

So to answer your question: riding a bike when Global Capital wants you to keep buying cars and pumping oil into them is one of the best acts of defiance you can make

2 and 3 are massive. I’m on Mastodon, but am having a much better time on Bluesky. Mastodon is full of gatekeeping and policing and people complaining - Bluesky is just fun and interesting, like Twitter 12 years ago

Also meanwhile…

Meanwhile…

At this stage it’s a trope that people imitate, perhaps without really thinking about it. Originally it was almost certainly an ironic joke about the value of the medals, playing on the old-fashioned bite tests that would be used for for items of dubious worth

I know. But I was satirising GPT’s bland writing style, not providing facts

“Shits are frequently classified into three basic types…” and then gives 5 paragraphs of bland guff

It suits oil companies to pretend allowing them to drill is apolitical. In reality very few things are apolitical, and oil extraction certainly isn’t

How surprising - an artificially subsidised industry wants more subsidy

“can be” is doing some heavy lifting here. I confidently predict the amount actually recycled is a fraction of one percent

It would make a lot more sense if humans could just lay some sort of egg sac which we could keep in the garage for 9 months until it hatches. I honestly don’t know why biologists and geneticists haven’t dealt with this by now

These things only become meaningful when you look at emissions per capita AND remember that China manufactures large amounts of the world’s stuff. All your iPhone emissions count as China’s because it was manufactured there, but they really belong to your country. Same for loads of other stuff. Careful you don’t fall for the tenor of this article, because it’s probably intended to distract you (“Why should I bother when China is really bad?”) and keep you consuming

Important to know that real-world testing shows that PHEVs are rarely plugged in and just burn oil much of the time

Except people don’t plug in their hybrids and run them on fossil fuels. Hybrids are yet another way the FF industry keeps itself going while pretending things are being fixed