rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

Maybe you've had this experience when you walk into an empty room and see all kinds of possibilities, but when the room's furnished all you can see is "Sofa goes *there*", and it's hard to unsee it.

Perhaps if it was just a pile of cardboard boxes with "SOFA" written on them, we might find it easier to let go of that decision?

I've found that prototypes work best when they look like something we'd be happy throwing away.

Took me a while to realize this: All of our buttons and knobs being replaced by touchscreens is one (possibly subliminal) reason behind the rising obsession with mechanical keyboards.

Rayner made a mistake yes, but it also perfectly shows that the working class can't get away with anything while the rich keep avoiding tax like the plague. She avoided tax through negligence and pays a high price. Billionaires avoid tax intentionally and carry on as normal.

The most frustrating thing about the climate crisis is that we have a lot of the solutions already, they just need implementing at scale, and the only thing that's stopping that happening is the fact that it would make a few very rich people a bit less rich

I am cautiously pro-LLM in my own work, but collectively I fear the car is the predictive historical model: small wins for individuals + huge wins for a handful → massive externalities and collective action problems that will take generations to fix.
From: @straphanger
https://urbanists.social/@straphanger/115140521581949962

A litre of petrol should cost no less than £5. I know you'll think I'm a joyless prick for saying that but so be it. The world is literally on fire and we're sharting fossil fuels into the atmosphere like they're free and harmless.

You’re hosting a birthday party for your son, and the other kids are upset because he’s taken the entire cake and shut himself in his room, refusing to share it. Some kids are quietly collecting up the crumbs while others look like they’re about to riot.

You could demand he comes out of his room and shares the cake, but you have a different idea: ignore the chaos around you and try to bake another cake. You wouldn’t give the second cake to the other kids though: it’s your son’s birthday, so it should still be his cake. You’re sure that once he has two cakes he’d share some with the other kids.

You are a politician rejecting directly redistributive policies in the vain hope that encouraging economic growth alone might reduce inequality.

Constituencies in the UK are Waaaay too small. It inevitably means MP's get drawn in to hyper local, usually NIMBY campaigns. We should combine 4 or 5 constituencies together and let MPs focus on the big stuff. Improve resources for councillors to let them deal with the rest.

The worst invention in history is the mechanical metal plug with opening lever, as used in modern bathrooms. They always break, and even when they work they are less effective than a simple rubber plug on a chain.

We should have never allowed everyone to call typefaces "fonts"

I got sucked into running the numbers on that "delete emails to save water" thing. Best estimates I can find are that live datacentre storage in the UK has a median water usage of ~80ml/GB/year. So a terabyte of cloud storage consumes 80 litres a year.

Network losses from leaks are on the order of 10-15,000 litres per person per year.

Glad we can see the culprit is definitely old forwarded cat photos.

Unless you pay an exorbitant price for tomatoes they are a tasteless waste of money. Growing my own next year.

The biggest problem facing this country is paying for the ageing and sick population. No government will fix it because cutting state pension and healthcare will make them unelectable.

Keeping the UK's pioneering work on computers and coding secret after WW2 was one of the stupidest decisions in our history. We had a 10-20 year head start on things that have literally changed the world. Instead we allowed others to take the credit and fell into terminal decline

Email is the best form of communication we ever invented. Instant, yet no instant reply is expected. Works universally outside of any app or ecosystem. The gold standard