ambulant.bsky.social
Multidisciplinary hobbyist, tech worker, infrequent social media poster. SE3.
56 posts
144 followers
1,165 following
Discussion Master
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London though is completely different in having concentrations of such extreme wealth and extreme poverty close together. There are literally millions of people living in poverty within a few miles of that sign in Highgate.
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Yes, the kind of towns you get in the midlands and the north which depended heavily on a single, now defunct industry don’t exist in the same way in the south. You do see something similar in eg coastal areas where the fishing industry has declined, but I agree it’s primarily a northern phenomenon.
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Not disputing your point about inequality, but you do see things like this in York and other well-to-do northern towns. It’s just a signifier of a certain kind of slightly old-fashioned middle-class population - you wouldn’t see it in more deprived areas of London or the south either.
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I wondered about this - thank you for posting! I really liked the playful naming of some of the other characters, so it’s good this one was well researched too.
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Blackheath has quite a lot of interesting modernist homes. They don't all have quite that view, but some of them cost a lot less than £3m! www.ribaj.com/culture/why-...
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This started happening longer ago than people seem to think. As someone who was once ‘good at Google’ I’ve always seen the switch to the Hummingbird algorithm in 2013 as the biggest single downward step in perceptible quality and usefulness: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_...
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Sadly I’m not even the most famous person in the room, and I’m the only one here.
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*I* want *your* argument to be about something else! That is pretty rich, but good luck to you, anonymous online person.
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I said cynicism is unwarranted, then I started a different sentence where I described what kind of company Signal is and what it does. I mentioned nonprofit status to emphasise that it’s not a publicly traded company run to maximise shareholder value, not to make any wider point about nonprofits.
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To be less facetious: People in 2025 are justifiably v. cynical about big tech and tech CEOs. I find it depressing when this cynicism gets blanket applied to people trying to do tech in a different way, just because they’re caught up in a news story about dislikable characters doing bad things. 2/2
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Isn’t this just innuendo built on the association fallacy though? ‘Some nonprofits engage in despicable conduct. Signal is a nonprofit. Therefore Signal is engaged in despicable conduct’. Or is there a specific allegation of despicable conduct you’re being opaque about? 1/2
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Their website gives salary ranges on job ads, so if you think it's relevant you can decide if those are 'big money' or not. I mentioned nonprofit status to emphasise that they're trying to build a socially useful product outside the corporate tech model, not to imply they're martyrs on poverty wages
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Cynicism here is unwarranted. Signal is a nonprofit organisation that builds one of the most private communications mechanisms available to consumers. They're understandably trying to avert PR blowback caused by stupid people very publicly doing illegal things with their software.
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Not denying we have a lot of people prepared to vote for truly awful politicians, but they definitely are not a majority.
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Musk is v unpopular in Europe, but especially the UK, Germany and Denmark where >70% of people view him unfavourably. Boris Johnson’s party won 42% of the popular vote in 2019 on a 67% turnout. Farage has a net favourability rating of -30 and his party holds 5 seats out of 650 (same as the Greens).
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She's a bit like the Zoe Gardner of data privacy, if that helps convince anyone...
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No, you miss my point - I mentioned those people/orgs precisely because they’re *not* big tech, and are actively critical of it. I worry that it suits the Home Office for people to see this issue as a battle against big tech overreach, when there is much more at stake for ordinary UK citizens.
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On the encryption point, please try to interview someone like Meredith Whittaker from Signal or a representative of an organisation like the ORG or the EFF. I hope they’d be able to persuade Alex that what the Home Office is doing is actively damaging digital safety for UK citizens.
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I think in this case it just means the agent is trying to market an ‘exclusive architect-designed property in gated community near Hampstead Heath’ rather than ‘former Camden Council maisonette next to busy road’ and thinks his target audience expects more Farrow & Ball and flashy sanitary ware.
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They're shown in the actual listing though and for London housing I'd say they're in pretty decent condition, particularly the kitchen: daymorris.co.uk/property/dun...
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You mention Musk. What is he doing? He's having people enter the systems of US govt agencies and copy their data who knows where. If he shows up at Apple and demands everyone's iCloud backups by authority of King Donald, even if they give the data to him he can't read it because it's encrypted.
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We're not talking about surveillance in public places though! This is like pervasive surveillance in your own home. I'm not pleading the case of any private company, just that of individuals to have control over their own data, including the right to withhold it from representatives of the state.
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Policing by consent means citizens having the right to refuse to divulge private communications. You are talking about pervasive surveillance of the whole population regardless of individual consent. 'Tech bros' are a red herring here - the only person who should have power over your data is you.
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Our previous government was happy to flout constitutional norms, break international law, and block experts from participating in public bodies based on their private opinions in social media posts. Even if the current govt is less likely to do this, I do not share your trust.
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It is impossible to add a back door for the ‘good guys’ without also letting the bad guys in. You are not protected by the FBI, FSB, MSS, GCHQ etc etc all having access to your email. People living in autocracies are directly put in danger by governments having access to supposedly secure comms.
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By definition, the only people in this case who can possibly add a backdoor to data backed up in iCloud are Apple. Sure, bad actors might attempt to push malware onto your phone to scrape the screen or whatever, but there is no way for them to access encrypted data on Apple’s servers or in transit.
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It’s a mistake to assume Apple will comply with an order of this kind from the UK Home Office when they’ve already successfully pushed back similar requests from the FBI. See en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E...
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The ship categorically has not sailed though! What we’re discussing is an order from the Home Office asking Apple to install a back door to currently encrypted data, ie data that is private to the user alone. It’s the act of adding this back door that creates the vulnerabilities I’m talking about.
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You might well disagree with them on the subject of a right to digital privacy, but it’s important to understand that they’re making both principled and a practical arguments and have zero profit motive. Most people you see here arguing against backdoors will be coming from this position. (3/3)
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Sure, tech companies don’t like this because it creates significant additional costs and risk for them, but they’re really a side issue here. The primary tech people to pay attention to on this topic are nonprofits like the EFF and Signal, who don’t like tech bros any more than you do. (2/3)
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This analogy really doesn’t work though. It’s more like having hidden cameras compulsorily installed *inside* every room in every home, with law enforcement agencies, spooks, and potentially criminals from all round the world being able to tune in at any time without your knowledge. (1/3)
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The worst thing about him is the relentless way he pops up shirtless and smirking every couple of months, just to make sure none of our brains can ever flush the image of his soapy pallor. Ugh.
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bsky.app/profile/gone...
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They're in hyper-growth mode though and give the strong impression they're working almost every waking hour. That obviously isn't sustainable.
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It requires a doctorate, so the minimum skill level is roughly equivalent to a new junior doctor. There are so few jobs in the sector though that *much* more experienced people will apply. I’d argue it’s also just as important socially unless you think cultural artefacts should be left to rot.
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Amazing! So glad it all finally got sorted out!
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You’re finally moving?! Is this the new place, or the old place packed up? Congratulations anyway, and hope she gets the hang of it before too long…
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It just comes over as unbelievably self-serving to campaign for everyone in the relevant age group to be compensated. £1-3K would be meaningless to anyone who suffered genuine financial hardship, and meanwhile the state would be losing >£10bn to provide pocket money to an already privileged group.
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It’s worse than that though! These aren’t high quality items people wear year after year - they’re mostly yet more single-use seasonal tat bound for landfill. I was once sent one (unsolicited) as ‘swag’ that was so egregiously polyester cats I know rejected it as bedding/general shredding material.
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This is so cathartic! In my office, there is a day every year where people are encouraged to wear a ‘Christmas jumper’, and this is somehow positioned as ‘fun’ and also ‘for charity’. Luckily I don’t go to the office very often, but even just knowing this is happening is reliably infuriating.
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If you've deleted your account chez Elmo here are a couple of links from the thread: dannybate.com/2020/09/21/w...
etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/8031/
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I've by no means been following this closely, but I got the impression that 'wealh' meaning simply 'foreigner' was discredited these days. There's a thread about it on the bad place here: x.com/garicgymro/s...
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For Bedford, the decline of local industries didn’t help. Texas Instruments had a big factory there from the 60s to the early 90s - so lots of cutting edge jobs - and there was also the brick industry in the surrounding area. Growing up near there in the 80s it seemed prosperous and bustling to me.
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In the interests of science I just searched for “just joined” and found a few new accounts - they all seem to have the sun icon. I only recently had dinner though and could really have done without some of the pr0n results 🤢
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I wondered that too. I *think* it means it’s a new account, but how new I cannot say…
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No. The connector is the only thing that’s fixed - it can support different power and data transfer capabilities, and these improve as new standards are released (eg Thunderbolt 5 is the latest). You need a newer cable to get eg. the fastest data speeds available, but your old one will still work.
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The counterpoint is that new MacBooks (like Android phones) have had USB-C since around 2015, and iPad Pros have had it since 2018. It was infuriating to buy an Apple trackpad and keyboard a while back and find they only came with USB-A to Lightning cables, which don’t connect to any recent Mac…
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Yes. You can also see the very visible chimney at the back of one of the houses on your Google Earth screenshot. If you count the houses to the left of that, I think the tip of the triangle was more blunt ~50 years ago - there was nothing where the block of flats at the end now stands.
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It’s definitely changed a lot. If you look at the other photo I posted of the same three shops from a different angle, you can see it was quite close to the tip of the triangle, because the distinctive roofline of the brick mansion block on Vauxhall Bridge Road is in shot.
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This looks like the same shops a few years later in 1978