rhamdu.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Next year, the EU will require cars to have buttons & dials -- not just touchscreens -- to get a top safety rating. This is a great move. Drivers can fiddle with knobs & buttons without taking their eyes off the road, but they can't do that with touchscreens. (Even better: Tesla will hate this)

submitted 1 day ago • 587 comments

The government could save households £100s a year on their energy bills by making these three changes ⬇️ Why wait?

submitted 3 days ago • 16 comments

Never trust a fossil fuel company like BP to develop the renewable energy that we need. They are too compromised. The only way is to de-invest from BP, Shell and the like - phase them out - and move funds into 100% renewable energy businesses.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

What will Ukraine get in return? Maybe the US tech industry should develop a swarm of 1M AI-equipped drones to give Ukraine an impregnable defensive shield against Russia?

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Oh wow. We've lost Roberta Flack. I was listening to Back Together Again (duet with Donny Hathaway) a few days ago and remembering what a fantastic, romantic song it is. Gets me every time.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Disgusting spectacle: the world's biggest thugs gather to carve up the corpse of Ukraine. May they choke on those rare earth minerals. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Many applications now ask for my birth date as part of my idea. As I get older, my year of birth becomes rarer in the population, and thus a stronger identifier. Eventually all my contemporaries are dead and my birth year becomes an actual personal identification number or PIN.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

In psychological and philosophical writing, why are apples always red🍎? In my life I have eaten many apples. Very few of them were red. More to the point, none of the nice ones were red.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

What JD Vance means by 'freedom of speech' is actually something pretty awful and not at all what the rest of the world means by those words.

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

Still internalising the Vance Munich speech. A sitting Vice President goes to Europe, barely says a word about the despotic murderous regime which has invaded its neighbour, and instead lectures his allies about freedom of speech. It’d be funny if it weren’t so serious.

submitted 13 days ago • 259 comments

Why do different styles of music make people move in different ways - e.g. punk vs funk? It's almost like a kind of synaesthesia - a physical action having the same quality as a sound. It's an obvious thing, but have any of you researchers in #music, #dance, or #embodied cognition looked into it?

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

"no-reply" email addresses are a bad idea. I want to know what organisation mail is from, but they all look the same in my inbox. Many of them are not actually for me. I have no way of telling the sender they got the address wrong. Meanwhile, the intended recipient's car is being repossessed.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

It’s real! Excited that the paperback of #AnotherEngland is out on 20 Feb - with a new chapter on how the Labour Govt needs to offer meaningful change & tell a far more inspiring, compelling story, if it’s to see off the threat posed by the increasingly populist Right penguin.co.uk/books/453710/a…

submitted 20 days ago • 18 comments

Besides CONTROL and SHIFT, the Texas Instruments Explorer (a 1980s AI workstation) had META, SUPER and HYPER keys. You could use them together in chords. Somebody must have been very fond of keyboard shortcuts. (Sadly I can't find a sufficiently hi-res image of the machine to confirm this.)

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

1980s researchers knew machine learning was crucial to #AI. They got stuck on the problem of knowledge representation: finding a machine-friendly formalism for facts and rules. 40 years on, #ML has gone postmodern. #LLMs follow Derrida's (supposed) dictum - there is nothing outside the text.

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

#Moon and #Venus looking terrific together in the evening sky. I shall let others with bigger lenses post photos. I promise not a single pixel from the Xiaomi Space Telescope, aka my phone. #astronomy

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

What email looked like in prehistory (1988)

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Crikey. The comments on here from the USA right now. Not many "This is fine" memes. It's getting beyond a joke.

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Anyone know the origin of the word "anachronym"? I found it in some old notes of mine from 1986. Examples were, if somebody called a spreadsheet program Abacus, or a text editor Quill.

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

"Intelligence is hard to reconcile with homeostasis. Why go to the moon?" - Igor Aleksander #cybernetics

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

Excruciating to hear Govt minister try to explain how expanding airport capacity won’t increase carbon emissions & drive #ClimateCrisis. It likely won’t even increase growth either given that corporate air travel is declining & 3 times as many tourists leave the country as come in. #BBCR4Today

submitted 30 days ago • 15 comments

So it's goodbye Bedfordshire, and hello to the Oxbridge Greyfields Linear Technopark #RachelReeves

submitted 30 days ago • 1 comment

Money isn't real stuff. Stock isn't real money. Tech stock isn't real stock. Tech stock is the square root of a unicorn fart.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

You may have an irrational prejudice about pizza toppings or wine-food pairing. In my case it's #lighting. People who buy cool-white light bulbs are monsters.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Crick's mind was brilliant but at times pretty weird. If anyone can make an intelligent, compelling read out of it, it would be Matthew Cobb.

submitted 32 days ago • 1 comment

Today people around the world are pledging themselves to peace and tolerance, and vowing that nothing like the Holocaust must ever happen again. Victims all too easily become oppressors. The bullied become bullies. Without naming names or countries, I urge all to look firmly in the mirror today.

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments