the people who built the trolley are never on the tracks. literally never

*sigh* St Andrews could be a much more pleasant place to walk around if the number of cars was slashed to, say, half of what it is now. What was the old station is now a great big car park, and it shows. Buses don't cut it with fairweather users and tourists. They never have and they never will.

Hacking crypto bros out of their Bitcoin now accounts for 13% of North Korea's entire GDP. LOL. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I don't use cafés to work, but I still absolutely use this logic. Which means two things: I'll absolutely pay a premium for a café with nice ambience; but also I often balk at the prices of takeaway coffees: in general they have no right to be anywhere near that of a sit-in. ☕

Blimey. Hadn't noticed this before but East Linton and Reston are getting a proper glow-up of service patterns in December. Exciting for train nerrrrds like myself source: ecmltimetable.info

tfl.gov.uk/info-for/med... It bewilders me why this isn't done more routinely across the country/world to gauge interest for light rail extensions. e.g. if there was a fully-integrated regular shuttle bus from Newbridge to Ingliston P&R, I'd be all over it!

One thing I've learned from the Internet is that a lie needs 0% proof to be believed, but the truth requires thousands of pages of proof and still won't be believed.

Think there may be a rail fan setting today's Codeword puzzle in the i paper 🚂💯💯 #rail200

happy birthday trains 🚂🚂

If BritCard ™️ isn't branded ScotCard ™️ north of the border, it's basically UKG stirring up resentment for absolutely no reason and they deserve all the issues that will inevitably come with it. Daft name that needs changed ASAP.

This is stunning. Compare Street View shot from 2012:

don't make me tap the John Naisbitt sign www.vice.com/en/article/c...

There is huge market share for the Lib Dem’s to run with the motto of “enough of this American nonsense let’s be sensible British people Again” and not sure anyone’s weird arguments that specific voters should be chased is needed at all.

I'm not a "keyboard guy" but I do love me a clickety keyboard. I treated myself to a DasKeyboard a few years ago and it's worth every penny of the ~£130 I paid for it. So, like, I get it. Keyboards are important and nice keyboards are a good thing. ...but this keyboard is eight thousand dollars.

Why are the American president's claims about autism the first item on British news bulletins? He's not our president, the advice doesn't apply here and he's not presented any evidence to support his assertions. So why spread these claims? What make this the biggest story in the UK?

All the BBC news stories are about the US this morning. What the president said. What the president did. How the president feels about a talk show host that only the US watch. What does the first B stand for, again?

Found discarded next to a Coinstar machine in Morrisons. 50p = 5p

This departure board at King's Cross has ten display lines that could be used for departures (the entire reason it's there). Instead, only 4 are shown, with 6 of the lines dedicated to near-meaningless "additional info" messages that really should only be used in abnormal situations. What a waste!

Statistics like this give me the mathematical heebie-jeebies. If JLP had nearly broken even last year and posted, say, a £10,000 loss, this headline would be LOSSES UP BY 880,000% Don't take ratios of quantities that can be negative! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Bluesky is boring." Social media *should* be boring. Being algorithm and dopamine poisoned is bad, actually. When your feed dries up for the day, that's your cue to go do something else until new stuff shows up later.

today in "tech bros getting totally normal and not deranged remuneration packages" news:

a mathematical cross-post from the Other Place™️ because I was satisfied with my not-smug-at-all explanation

*cries in Dunbar*

Knew it had to be in there somewhere.

Train nerd challenge: from Monday, all ScotRail trains will be off-peak fare only, all day, every day, indefinitely. Apart from one single departure. Which one?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cp... "UK price inflation rises by more than expected to 3.8%" P = UK price dP/dt = inflation d2P/dt2 = rises d3P/dt3 = by more than expected This is a story about the third derivative of prices. Price jerk, if you will

Listening to people discuss their AI companions is like listening to a toddler earnestly talk about their amazing imaginary friend, except the imaginary friend is owned and controlled by huge corporate organisations with the power to covertly manipulate the user

The Alaskan police force have an opportunity to do the funniest thing of all time

how about, instead, here's an idea: you f*ck all the way off, Windows. how about that.

Great. As if there wasn't enough bad news in the world

Thought I'd try Chat GTP 5 as they're bigging up how it's more accurate. A simple question, no tricks, with an easily checkable answer and it gets it wrong. If you're relying on this stuff you're cooked. Don't do it kids.

It blows my mind that, twelve short years ago, "Edinburgh doesn't need a tram, it copes perfectly well with buses" was a perfectly median, mainstream opinion (albeit one I never shared). I *shudder* to think how the Oasis gig scheduled DURING FRINGE SEASON would have been handled without the trams.

'In fairness to GPT5, in my career I have indeed encountered PhDs with this level of commitment to their particular blueberry.' kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

OK, right, fine, I guess, but keep your filthy mitts off the actual railway alignment itself. We've made that mistake far too many times before as a country. *coughs something about the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory* (it was quite a complex cough) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

I often think about the time that Dara Khosrowshahi boasted on Twitter how he could commute within London every day in a "wonderful and efficient" way on a Lime bike for £7.33 EACH WAY (£3500/yr assuming a 5 day week) and predictably got thoroughly ratio'ed for it

Actual names of railway stations in England: - Chappel & Wakes Colne - Byfleet & New Haw - Cobham & Stoke D'Abernon - Euxton Balshaw Lane - Chestfield & Swalecliffe - Pontefract Tanshelf - Birchington-on-Sea - Blundell Sands & Crosby - Chafford Hundred Lakeside - Church & Oswaldtwistle - Dove Holes

Credit where credit's due (and assuming "AI" here isn't being mis-used): this is the sort of thing that AI proponents should be shouting from the hills, and which will give it a much better name than "essay cheating bot which can't even multiply 13x12 without going into apologetic convulsions"

This. I tapped like crazy on Edinburgh's buses and trams the other day; a series of journeys that I hadn't planned to do, wouldn't have pre-paid a day-ticket for, and that I likely would have driven instead of taking. None of this would have been possible ten years ago (outside London).

£300 a ticket to watch AI-generated slop. This quote is delicious. "Too iconic" 🤣 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Pretty sure one of today's #UniversityChallenge questions was just a fancy way of asking "which planet has rings".

Nobody: Zero people: Parents who take their little angels out of school in June so they can get £400 off Center Parcs and are now wondering how to entertain them in the actual holidays:

Broadland will rise again

Genius bit of urban realm satire that's very apt with it being 4th July 👌🚗🇺🇸 www.instagram.com/reel/DLsaEUK...

I'm not sure what anyone thought would happen - our railway is fully full. Like not a bit full, but fully choka. And we've killed the only project that would have fixed this for most of the country in a one-er.

Huh. Today I learned that the path of what once was an old railway (the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway, closed 1966) passes smack-bang right through the middle of the Glastonbury Festival site.