Anyone who has ridden a bike in a city knows something else about speeding cars: it doesn't even help! We all end up together at the next red light anyway, but not all of us needed to travel at killing speeds to do it

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

Art and writing is done by robots but measuring the speed of a hunk of metal must be hand crafted by artisinal police officers.

Some things we can learn from this: - posted speed limits are basically meaningless - speed camera enforcement works

1 in 4 drivers on Parkside are now exceeding 50 km/h. The speed limit is 40 km/h. Reminder: 80% of pedestrians will not survive a crash at 50 km/h.

Thread #uspol

AI firms exploit this contradiction by invoking the collective character of culture when they extract from artists, while relying on private enclosure when they monetize the resulting systems.

LLMs intensify a tension in the present political economy of authorship. On the one hand, cultural production is obviously collective, citational, iterative, and infrastructural. On the other hand, the only durable mechanisms many artists have for surviving are individualizing property forms.

I'm not generally in the habit of posting links to LinkedIn here, but I've got to recommend @randyhart.bsky.social's long, important piece about the problems of government software projects that are compelled to optimize for the status quo, and thus fail. I wish I'd written this.

It's not just the US, although they're particularly bad. Every foreign affairs bilateral and even multilateral looks similar to this now. We joke about 'spot the interpreter' (she's the one woman)

Ok, no. This is not cool. Glad to see @althiaraj.bsky.social use appropriately direct framing here. www.thestar.com/politics/fed...

“This year, reporters were identifiable by red or pink stripes on our badges, literal scarlet letters warning attendees about our presence. Hundreds of millions of dollars were on the line. No one wanted to get caught talking out of turn.” @gabydvj.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/report/92872...

At this year’s Border Security Expo, the most insidious surveillance tools were the ones you couldn’t see. Read more from @gabydvj.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/report/92872...

Ontario's Auditor General finds that private career colleges are falsifying truck driver training records and skipping lessons like "left turns at major intersections, reverse parking and emergency stopping" www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... #onpoli

Damn this guy is amazing at messaging holy shit.

So it used to be Winnipeg, but in the past 2 years they have become an amazing supporter of our research so I need a new one. So Moose Jaw, I guess?

Starmer has never been able to answer the question of fundamentally why he’s in politics. What vision does he have for the UK (outside of small boats)? What should the country look like in five years? He’s a technocratic implementer of the wishes of whichever group shouts loudest

What a waste. It didn’t have to be like this. Labour could have pushed through a progressive vision on the back of a massive majority Instead, its few achievements are overshadowed by its relentless chasing of anti-immigration votes, making its own problems worse, and multiple tepid resets

Unspoken in this piece is the fact that hydro generation has been declining in much of the country because of droughts and reduced water levels in rivers. StatsCan data has been pretty clear about it.

I have still not yet lived the true Canadian nerd dream and received the long form census.

This Canvas outage across campuses reminds me of an opinion that I have which is that universities should run off homemade software maintained by two people for 50 years at a time that does one specific thing well and otherwise has no commercial value.

What European governments still are using legacy social media? mgifford.github.io/eu-plus-gove...

hating ai is a pro-social activity

For Global #Accessibility Awareness Day, I should finally print these colour variations of the brilliant ‘accessibility is usability‘ / ‘usability is accessibility’ sticker. Original design by @officeofwilson.com, re-set in ‘Inter’. I still need to fix the kerning, though.

As a public servant, I write weekly notes to let people see what I do. I celebrated 4 years at @digitalservice.bund.de this week. I also continued interviewing candidates, preparing new roles, planning May and June events, and I participated in an open exchange with our CTO Erik.

84% of working-age Canadians with disabilities lack Disability Tax Credit certification — meaning most can't access the Canada Disability Benefit or 12 other federal supports the DTC has come to gate. New report by @gillianpetit.bsky.social: inclusiecon.ca/announcement-broken-links.html

Sad but powerful: “Department of Government Waste is an ongoing documentary portrait project examining the personal impact of federal workforce reductions, contract terminations, and program cuts across the United States.” www.departmentofgovernmentwaste.com

Folks! Who do you think can apply for a low paying, high prestige job? It's neither average people (representative) nor salaried technical experts (massive pay cut). It's people who don't need the income!

The fact that if I ran for local office and won, I would have to take a pay cut to manage a $1.3 billion budget and make decisions that directly impact the well-being of half a million people is kind of insane. Unpopular but true: we under-pay our often disappointing politicians.

"AI companies want the financial upside of mass adoption without the obligations that come with selling something that malfunctions. We are helping them by casually normalizing the adoption of AI products while letting the companies that produce & use them disclaim the most basic duty of care."

AI products are defective and dangerous. Why are we using them at all? The latest from the Globe's business commentary, by Vass Bednar: www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...

I Am An AI Hater is now available in French! I don't think Pablo Gille is on here, but thank you Pablo. And shout out to @sven.blacksky.app for editing assistance Seuls les humains peuvent haïr.

The international ai haters union has now translated I Am An AI Hater into Spanish! Thank you to @nsmckinnon.bsky.social (with editing support from @bugsybanana.bsky.social) Sólo siendo humano se puede odiar.

Thinking a lot at the moment about what it is to create technology that treads lightly. My go to is always the idea of "just enough", which is really what I want EF Schumacher's "appropriate technology" to be - and how the obsession with end-to-end digitisation/automation gets in the way of that

Good thread

Interesting proposal to update the Civil Service Code courtesy of @jo3hill.bsky.social et al at @re-state.bsky.social re-state.co.uk/publications... <-- values of courage, ownership and openness are very appealing

“Direct File is an extraordinary accomplishment that skillfully executes not a flexible formalization of the underlying statute and regulations, but rather a formalization of tax forms and informal guidance, designed to accomplish a particular task: allowing online return preparation.”

Genuinely have been in awe of them both for long before they occupied the most wildly difficult position in our current governance system - and their willingness to take it on only cements that admiration for me.

I know there’s a lot of complicated feelings on this, but man - what an amazing stretch for recognizing powerful women in the Governor General’s seat. Mary Simon is an icon who walked an impossible knife-edge with grace & humour. Louise Arbour is a force of nature and I love this for her and for us.

/* Compiler note: Fix any bugs */

Frame: people are committing food aid fraud Negation: no they aren't there's no evidence of that Kirby: THEY WANT PEOPLE TO STARVE. They think some people deserve to starve and feeding them is inherently illegitimate. they know calling it fraud will help them shut it down

“people did not trust themselves to think without a problem to solve” WHEW

The kid has dubbed the dystopian bathroom ageist and honestly, she's not wrong.

New nadir of everyday dystopia unlocked: the 8-year-old went to use the fancy high tech pilot bathroom at the park, but had to come back to get me because it won't let you in if you don't scan a QR code to send a text message.

It took about 16 months since I received recordings of my colleagues’ talks at the #ServiceDesign Drinks Berlin. Now, Charlotte’s and Marlene’s talks are up on YouTube.

Archiving and documenting our work is vital for allowing others in the German public sector to take a user-centred design approach, too. That’s why ‘Open by default’ is one of our organisational values. Practically, it means making sure our work becomes visible and accessible—like in public talks.

“It just makes me want to dig my heels into a career where I never have to use AI, even if that’s a career that isn’t going to pay as well” www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

For @thestar.com, I lean in to being a crotchety old curmudgeon to complain a perennial nuisance: how incredibly f'in annoying loud motorbikes and cars are. Cities are about balance. But one loud bike on a highway can disturb thousands, even tens of thousands of people. That's absurd.

same trajectory as carbon taxes. you can do emissions regulation or producer responsibility; a market for credits is more efficient or better yet tax everyone and redistribute and now we have none of those it was all in bad faith all along

Kind of an accidental, explicit acknowledgement that the people who said carbon capture was going to only ever be a bait-and-switch were... entirely correct.