I think that the greatest cities on Earth have DEEP histories, offer diversity, and have been at the crossroads of the human condition.

Not sure how you can say all that, exclude London and then put Montreal on there… place is less then 400 years old!

The only Russian economists who disagree accidentally fell out of a bunch of windows

The Nokia 7110 was possibly the coolest dumbphone.

I think the iPhone X may have been peak smartphone in terms of aesthetics, but I’ve never tried a folding phone.

In the UK I’d suggest anyone who owns their own home get solar panels, a battery and some form of air conditioning (if not a full heat pump/boiler replacement) ASAP.

You can’t directly stop the government doing terrible things, but you can dramatically slash your own energy bills and make sure you can survive heat waves in comfort.

I’m sorry but that’s absolutely not true

I have to use Windows 11, New Outlook and Excel for work, so… frequently.

No. But we’re not trying to encourage people to drive more motorcycles.

We want to reduce the barrier to someone using a pedal bike, and if they have to fart around trying to find a helmet or worry about getting a ticket, they’re more likely to just not bother and use a car instead.

No. Obviously I think if you can wear them you should, but making them required reduces the willingness of people to cycle, so as a strategy for swapping from car to bike, it is less effective.

I had a great discussion on Mastodon about the logic of making bike helmets a legal requirement or not. I learned a lot and actually changed my mind on the subject…

The Core

I ran into a girl I went to school with in New Zealand (school was in the UK). Didn’t know she was there working for a year, and even if I had, what were the odds I’d end up in the exact bar she was working in?

Brexet (pronounced “Bridget”)

😐

Sure, but the reason isn’t always just security.

We have government contracts and want more. But to get those, they insist on us doing a bunch of security things.

So it sucks for the users, but if we don’t implement the restrictions, we lose the contracts and thus the income.

And as a side benefit, holy shit we are pretty secure. Next annual pentest soon and I’m expecting good things from it!

Die Hard and Violent Night

Yeah, but the non-Nazis need somewhere to go as well…

I completely agree.

You could almost say that my reply… lacked nuance 😉

Part of it is microblogging. Part is the ubiquity of internet access and lack of general education in critical thinking. Part of it is a concerted effort by hostile actors (whether corporations, nations or other groups, such as oligarchs) to discourage long form media because it’s easier to push out Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that way than it is to be positive.

I think a lot of people have always wanted easy answers to complicated problems. Now they’re getting messages saying that they exist, and the people saying “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that” are the ones trying to twist them to an agenda.

Easy solutions are comforting. Why think hard if you can just blame someone else and not have to do anything?

Twitter and its 160 character limit.

Given how people deify billionaires, I’d imagine there would be plenty of people that would defend a real life Cave Johnson.

Hell, he does get shit done. His company came up with the red and blue gels, and THE FRICKIN’ PORTAL GUN.

He actually solved the energy problem (run water over a dynamo into a blue portal, then open an orange portal above it so the same water powers the dynamo forever, and that’s just the easiest one I thought of!).

People love Jeff Bezos, and he’s done a lot less and treated more people worse!

I don’t support murder, but when people who do call for it like checks notes Charlie Kirk get murdered, I’ll enjoy the irony.

There are some people who the world would be better off without. Can anyone honestly say the US would be a worse place now if Trump had been killed instead of “wounded” at his own shooting?

It’s easy to do that and then say “whoops, mistake!” if Taylor Swift isn’t going to use her billionaire status to crush them with lawsuits.

She didn’t do it with Twitter when it was generating nudes of “her”, so I doubt she’ll do it with chatbots.

So they’ll keep doing it.