The retirement of the MetroCard at midnight tonight is bittersweet for me. In 1983, as a young lawyer, I took a year's leave of absence from my law firm to serve as special counsel to Richard Ravitch, chairman of the NY MTA. He gave me the task of leading a study ...

Yesterday @bootsmcgoot.bsky.social and I saw some techbro giving “30 pieces of advice for people under 30” over on Twitter and it was all grind culture bullshit. As adults of 38 and 43 respectively, we compiled 30 pieces of advice that people under 30 won’t have heard before:

remember having a /~name folder on a server a guy you knew had hooked up at uni and you could host websites from it and stuff? i miss that

Just starting a running thread for “once famous figures now slipping into recondite knowledge now that they’ve died and society moves on” to come back to as and when I remember =1 Peter Cook and/or Dudley Moore

I’ve been hyperfixated on Batman ‘66 lately. Here’s an incomplete list of reasons why this is my favorite show.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Liked Wikipedia's "Signs of AI writing": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped.... It's not just well-known tells like negative parallels and em dashes -- it's a tapestry of subtle yet powerful clues, from overused "AI vocabulary" to false ranges giving an illusion of depth from just a couple of examples.

The second rule of math club is we index lists by prime numbers

Rule 57 is an unfortunate error and should be disregarded

Liked "Color Engineering" at www.chartography.net/p/color-engi... by @infowetrust.com. I'd long known about the hue-saturation-lightness (HSV) model. But this post took me further in applying it for *collections* of colours: analysing the palette of a design, or choosing effective combination onself

on.ft.com/46M9mXI Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world. Free to Read.

Does economics use too much maths - or the wrong kind of maths? on.ft.com/3IqOgGb

A lovely essay by RJ Andrews on lucidity vs luminosity in information design: www.chartography.net/p/clarity-un...

New "Eclectic Stacks" blog post: Getting a Rubik's Cube again after 40 years, I look at how I solved it then (with trusty copy of "You Can Do The Cube" at my side) and the approaches available nowadays - for beginners, speedcubers, and omniscient entities. www.eclecticstacks.com/post/revisit...

NEW: Are migrants more likely to commit crimes than non-migrants? Here’s what the data does and doesn’t show. 1/8 @thetimes.com www.thetimes.com/article/72b6...

they should be taken to The Hague for this graph crime

I think Tesco and M&S are doing everything in their power to break the person in HMRC who decides which food should incur VAT.

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

How a mixed strategy in a game (adding randomness to your choices) can beat a deterministic one, from @kityates.bsky.social: open.substack.com/pub/kityates... (I'd pondered similar "Traitors" strategy of random murders to stop the choice of victim giving any hints, but that's not usually the issue!)

Enjoying John Caird's "Theatre Craft", a hefty A-Z on working as a director. I don't expect to be directing a play (or doing any more than sitting in a theatre watching one!), but liking the insights on how it all works, run through with entertaining anecdotes and dry humour. #theatre #books

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

Happy Spoonerism Day to all those who belly crate.

The sound of (well-played) trumpet practice drifted from a neighbour's windows this roastingly hot afternoon, and I was happy to recognise theme from classic BBC 1980s "Miss Marple" with Joan Hickson and music, the Internet tells me, by Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Knll...

fruity #philosophy #apples

On creating a #TextAdventure: discussion of breadth (many locations/objects but generically implemented vs smaller scope with more detail and interaction), technical challenges in writing a modern game, and a programmer's thoughts on the #Inform7 game engine: entropicthoughts.com/lessons-from...

If you reverse image search this with Google, the AI will tell you this is highlighting a "controversial past tweet" from Mamdani. It calls "his" tweet highly insensitive and says it trivializes what happens that day.

Why did it take so long for British bathroom design to realise that the single tap, which both hot and cold water flows through, was the best design? (Yes, this is a grumble that my old bathroom had a joint tap and here, our c2002-5 bathroom does not)

English People Encounter Pizza for the First Time 🧵

I was pleased to be able to include one of my favourite bits of very telling poll trivia.

Just been a very fascinating labor market story over the last 25 years around computer programming: 1) Dotcom bust and trend towards outsourcing craters job markets for programmers in 2001 2) Pipeline of college grads in computer science starts drying up as no entry level jobs are available...

I had #Boggle in the 1980s: the game of shaking lettered dice into a 4x4 grid & making words from adjacent letters. Sometimes the grid was "nice", other times not! Now @danvdk.bsky.social proves, with neat explanation, the grid with 1045 words & the best possible score: www.danvk.org/2025/04/23/b...

For fans of The Thick of It (who isn't?!), now twenty years old, this is a great read...

I enjoyed childhood visits to its library. I like its cinema, galleries, & theatre (Shakespearean Julius Caesar, mathematical Ramanujan). I think I sang in a concert there, & certainly sat accountancy exams there. Now, I read a nice article on the Barbican (arslan.io/2025/05/12/b...) by @arslan.io

How easily can you tell if text such as a hotel review is by a human or AI? You can test your skill in this survey run by Lancaster University: lancasteruni.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... (Tried after fascinating talk on this by forensic linguist @drclaireh.bsky.social at CYBERUK 2025 last week.)

‘Don’t Go Faking My Art’?

www.smbc-comics.com/comic/plural-2 is fun - colleagues probably glad I shall resist calling multiple ".docx" documents ".docxen". (Some might have liked it: Jargon File discusses tradition of over-generalising linguistic quirks in early tech community it celebrates: www.catb.org/jargon/html/...)

You receive a call on your phone. The caller says they're from your bank and they're calling about a suspected fraudulent payment. "Oh yeah," you think. Obvious scam, right? The caller says "I'll send you an in-app notification to prove I'm calling from your bank." 🧵 1/4

one of the hard parts of being a game designer parent is seeing poor game design and staying in my fucking lane. “this local egg hunt requires toddlers to complete a 16-step scavenger hunt to get a goodie bag! wait why are all the kids crying in front of the prize table?” i am staying SO quiet rn

Updated two PCs to #Windows11. How did I know when it was done? The taskbar was in the centre instead to the left-hand side. What's the first thing I did? Set it back to being on the left, with the Start button in an easily-hit corner, as Fitts's law suggests :-) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%2...

One of my rules for life is that I don’t use references from art or media, if I haven’t read/seen where it is derived from. E.g. I never reference “Big Brother” because I haven’t read 1984. I don’t talk about “Faustian Pacts” because I’ve not seen The Faust And The Furious films

Weird observation: the /kθ/ cluster in Cthulu is completely unheard of in English phonology, but I think most people have no problem with it? Which is interesting, because if it's not so hard why doesn't it occur in the language?

I'm no photographer, but liked tale of taking perfect picture of lunar eclipse over Tenerife volcano Mount Teide - determining ideal spot (Planit app sounds handy!) & photographic technique (balancing bright moon/dark landscape), handling equipment issues, & more... lrtimelapse.com/news/total-l...

V interesting sub thread on the politics of law firm lawyers

🧵 It has become a given that voting intention polls (VI) at this stage are ignorable because they have such low predictive value. So I've decided to crunch the numbers and give my view...

The literal genie is a very common trope: when you "make a wish" you get exactly what you wish for. This is one of the explicit limits on the spell Wish from D&D - often called the most powerful spell in the game because its effect is "make a wish and it comes true." (this is a thread about tech)

Amusing on collaborative editing from The Economist: www.economist.com/business/202... From my experience when at organisations which used these tools, they *did* make life easier compared to traditional one-at-a-time, check-out-check-in approach - but maybe I was lucky :-)

I wish there were a way to do a little light math as a hobby, the way you get to keep reading for fun even after you stop taking classes (if you know that this exists, please share)