Instead of HS2 east, the UK government should invest in gigawatt-scale laser arrays in London and Edinburgh in order to launch suborbital passenger rockets between the two cities with several km/s of Δv.
Real scaling has never been tried.
I wonder how much stolen parcels add to the costs of online retail and/or delivery services. It must be at least a percent or so.
I like how physically delivering this government project is an afterthought at the end of the description of what they're doing.
Prank idea: secretly collect DNA samples from someone's dog, keep the DNA on file, use the DNA to make a clone upon the death of the original, and style the new dog to look like the original did in its youth.
London currently has 2 Crossrails: Crossrail (Paddington/Liverpool Street) and Thameslink (St Pancras/London Bridge). However, there are 14 terminal stations, leaving us an entire 5 Crossrails short. I think every terminal should be paired with one on the opposite side of the city, with all trains rescheduled to run through to the other side. This may require massive disruption and tunnelling and hugely complicate the timetables, but it would be very funny.
Modern AR optics are designed to minimize eye glow, and I'm told it's mostly gone from Meta's new display glasses. However, it's correct for glasses to glow ominously when you're accessing the internet, as it looks cool. I urge designers to reconsider.
Amusing that Goldman Sachs, the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity", has apparently lost billions of dollars to fairly basic consumer lending because of Apple.
Natural languages use tree structures, reminiscent of Lisp or also mainstream programming languages. A conlang from a science fiction webcomic I once saw used a stack. Who's building the register machine language?
Train signalling changes can improve throughput a lot, but are very slow and expensive to install/execute. However, it's just a software problem, if you ignore all the complex nonsoftware problems involved which train people probably know about and I don't. Someone should make the SF people do a startup.
My plan to make some a news feed composed entirely of graphs without context is running into the issue that, at least as far as my script can tell by invoking some random LLM, the vast majority of the news doesn't have graphs in it. Very sad.
It's frustrating how much of PSR MR22/1.10 is redacted (especially the annexes). Certainly it would be much harder to get useful feedback if it was all released publicly, but regulations being written based on nonpublic information is not ideal, and it makes the documents significantly less interesting to read.
It's rather distressing that you can't have dark orange. It's just brown.
Specialization of labour has gone too far now that people can unironically say "a resident expert on [Minecraft] pearl stasis and alignment systems".
Zips are weird. "Yes, my bag is held closed by hundreds of millimetre-sized metal/plastic pieces which will interleave themselves securely if I pull a thing through them. This will most likely work thousands of times. This cost me £3."
I might have to migrate this off microblog.pub onto other software. This is going to be awkward.
Video (compression) killed the radio star (WiGig). Also arguably much of the impetus for faster networks.
I am going to replace Openreach with bees.