It was fascinating people watching at this conference when he’d come out with stuff like this - reactions were doubtful all the way to outraged, and a bunch of us were in glee.
I’m pro balsamiq because when the founder was still on the interview circuit he’d basically disown the “growth at all costs” that had just come into fashion and said his goal is to be the local 4th generation Italian butcher.
“We have a horizontal hierarchy here”
Sir, everything looks flat when you look at the top downwards.
"what do you mean it's a putdown when an posh person calls you clever?"
These people often have no idea the weird ways classism gets enforced here through coded phrases and tone.
I found showing them examples of hun culture has helped, fwiw.
🤦♀️ Oh my goodness - they are all still here. I don't notice them because I spend a lot of time where there are bugs or data issues, and those bugs don't seem to be in normal places where trains are frequently running. This is so silly, now I can't UNSEE all of them.
Ok 🤯 moment - I spend a good chunk of my work day looking at satellite imagery, notably track. I only ever see trains in depots or sidings/storage areas.
That means someone is removing them as part of cleanup and map tile production!
It's individuals not institutions - the latter are not trusted. www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-how-m...
But India does trust their institutions a lot more than the uk.
www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-insti...
I find the comparison interesting - brits trust strangers, but not if that stranger is fulfilling some sort of institutional role.
I believe trust in strangers is still high, but trust in institutions has been declining out of whack with that. But I will check, I am not an arse about this.
I don’t think it’s going to be via the facts on their own. Something has to fit into the narrative. I can imagine something ridiculous like “Gordon Brown/name spent it all” might actually work 🙃
FWIW, I say this whenever my grandfather takes the piss too much in the conversation.
“Well I paid into that?!”
“That money got spent decades ago. We are paying for you now.”
Can verify it doesn’t work.
(For full immersion imagine his bit in brick top’s accent, but North London)
Fwiw, I’m picking up on the social parallels here not equating the two from a clinical perspective - the fact that you can also see these sorts of thoughts in other areas means I believe the problem isn’t about the disorder - it’s about how clinicians approach patients that don’t fit their mould.
“We all vary in average blood sugar levels, therefore a medical diagnosis of diabetes is completely meaningless”
Actually, lots of parallels here. Not well known yet, unknown cause, new types that aren’t as obvious as we thought, people assuming that one type can only be dx in childhood, etc.
A workflow diagram: Have great idea Finish project Start project Tell everyone The finish project is missed out.
Morning
Screenshot of an email, name details blanked out. Message is a "thumbs up" email, then the name of the person, then "reacted to your message"
These emails feel like emoticons did before emoji in the worst possible way.
Fun fact, SMS also does something like this when you "like" a message in iMessage, and I've been experimenting to find out what actually gets sent. It's a fascinating lesson in human adaptation, as usual.
I'm just gonna die over here, thanks.
I find it interesting that people claim London gets all this bias but in this case the bias here on the cultural narrative is outside of London.
This is social fabric that connects people - my mum had a taxi driver out of his cab at 3am after our trip (late flight then train to Victoria then taxi) sharing pics of his 70s club outfits and then his kids (he was a rude boy). All started on a Chopper reference, then the clubs kicked in...
I never managed to finish it in time for the actual day, (Chris Hill died close to the day so I found a bunch of new stuff linked to the Caister Weekenders which are adjacent) but I am still going at this and I'm still recruiting people to interview on the topic (or if you have links, send them).
London had its own version of the Northern Soul movement where the kids of the Windrush generation combined their awesome sound systems into something quite different. It seems to have been forgotten outside of London and as part of researching for my mum's 60th I started to map it out.
a figure standing shrouded in mist seen through an arch
A figure laying on the back underneath an archway, surrounded by ethereal flowers
A towering figure amidst trees in a sea of sun
A dark figure amidst the trees, wearing what seems to be a black robe with golden highlights
Hello #portfolioday!
I make oneiric digital art enshrouded in mist! I love to imagine a world in-between with these 😶🌫️
Absolutely anti AI
Screenshot of tumblr, image of stunned looking white haired cat covered in lipstick kiss marks. Text: “came home drunk last night and got way too excited to see my cat”
I have an image for this
- the cross of disciplines is great too eg even telco people may not know about default fake phone numbers (more of a writing for tv/film sort of thing) but a C# dev in an MVC app in 2012 working with web FE when they’re used to winforms very likely doesn’t. 😅
I like:
- the assumption that a made up number would remain fake
- the desire to make it look plausible so it followed the pattern
- the process failure that left the numbers there
- the lack of a single source of data (install per customer)
- the underlying question of what *is* config vs data
It often didn’t, and then, *wavy lines* that phone number came into real use so all these calls were heading to a random residential address somewhere in the uk.
Mine is less technical but similar theme - ex colleague used a fake phone number on initial installs of a website that was reused by lots of public sector orgs. The phone number should have been replaced with the real customer helpline each install.
I have wondered why we are always able to make conversation so easily over the years - I suspect our mutual love for real behaviour breaking people’s assumptions in a Rube Goldberg machine sort of way is a big part of it. 😅
Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...
That moment when a random thread talks about your project.
I did most of the original porting of KDE 3 and then 4 to OSX almost entirely because Apple terminal was a piece of crap and I wanted KTerm instead.
Niche reasons are the best reasons.
They so are! Looking at both UI elements did look trippy to me though…
I think the terminal port was appreciated too, fwiw. The macOS terminal client really really sucked in those days. Even I, a casual irssi user used iTerm.
