Thanks!

Thank you - that’s a really useful answer. I’ll check them out

Thank you - I’ll have a look at that

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.

Drivers

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

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

This is greenwashing. Global aviation uses almost 100 billion gallons of fuel per year. If we even began to address a fraction of that with magic new fuels (which won’t happen) it would require incredible amounts of growing, and if we had that sort of amount of agricultural capacity available on this planet, capable of producing crops at a price the aviation industry is prepared to pay, we wouldn’t have any hunger on the world.

Don’t fall for this. There isn’t such a thing as green aviation. I’m not saying there should be no flying, but we can’t carry on as we are and magic away the consequences. In particular, don’t fall for the snake oil salesmen trying to distract you with appealing non-solutions

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

If people are driving with appropriate skill and care, the number driving into large, well-lit buildings should be approximately zero per year. It sounds like you’re willing to excuse a lot of bad driving

Plumbers don’t carry massive heavy plant. But I know you were just picking a concrete example of a business there so let’s not dwell on that particular case. The real point is that if a business causes damage to the roads that has to be repaired, it should contribute an appropriate amount. If that makes the cost of doing business more expensive, that just has to get passed on to the customer - who, ultimately, is the one having the heavy stuff transported

Here in the UK, I’ve seen bloody sushi restaurants and hairdressers drive branded pickup trucks FFS. No tax exemptions for businesses. As another poster noted, the damage is being done and needs to be paid for - it doesn’t magically not matter because it was done in the course of somebody using the road for their business

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

Rain Alarm! It’s great, and you can customise alerts too

The other annoying thing they (esp. MS) do is pop up messages like “The whole process of saving files has changed while you were asleep [learn more][got it]” and here, when you need it, there’s never an option for “remind me later”. So you either have to stop what you’re doing and go and read a massive blog entry that’s not actually relevant to the task in hand or you need to dismiss the message and never be able to find it when it’s actually relevant

Got to say, I’d be tempted by the carbon of the two. It’s going to be an open mould Chinese frame, but there are lots of good ones of those around. The big consideration at this point is getting a good frame and wheels - you’ll slowly upgrade other components over time anyway. Both bikes are 9 speed (one is definitely Sora and the other sounds like Sora too). The Triban is heavier and, although the wheel weight isn’t given for the other bike, I suspect they’ll be a bit lighter.

Ultimately, the right bike is the one that would put the biggest smile on your face, and without testing both it’ll be hard to know which that is. But do have a good look at the carbon bike, and consider upgrading the brakes to Spyre hydro calipers before long

Always good to get the US perspective on an article about Amsterdam

Ironically this article reads like GPT output