WindyMiller

> Yesterday I was editing filenames in the file browser, and accidentally navigated down to the next file in the folder - still in filename editing mode! It was a feature I didn't even know I wanted. Suddenly, I could edit a whole list of files, just as if it were rows in a text file. Now it's Monday, and I'm back in Windows. I am unlikely to need to use that feature, but still wish I didn't know what I was missing.

In case you do ever need it - you can do this in Windows with the tab key.

Old e-readers were already usable. Generating extruded story-like product on them when they're already perfectly capable of displaying the vast majority of human literature doesn't make them any more usable.

Comaps can display your current speed and (if it's in the data) the speed limit for the road you're on - everything you need to avoid speeding tickets!

[It was also in direct reference to this comic.](https://www.overyourhead.co.uk/2011/01/rarely-connect.html)

[How confident are you that this writer uses AI?](https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-colonization-of-con...)

But you can't be on the cutting-edge of everything, and there are opportunity costs.

To be fair it wouldn't really be doing its job if it didn't come with any asterisks

The interface equivalent of ten sad fireworks and a pack of sparklers in a rainy back garden probably wouldn't have the same addictive effects, though.

> 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP

In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?

(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)

> all locations any given individual has been seen

This is perhaps another reason people in the UK might be more chill about ANPR: we're smaller and incrementally less carbrained, so to describe ANPR as tracking "all locations any given individual has been seen" sounds like wild hyperbole.

(Of course all our police forces are frothing at the mouth to roll out facial recognition everywhere they can, so kicking off a bit more about surveillance might not be a bad idea...)

Different words mean different things.

"Tall people can reach things on high shelves." Change "tall" for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.

On the other hand, I think short-scale millions and billions are used far more often than the larger numbers, and the starts of words tend to be more salient than the ends, so it's useful to have them distinguished by the first letter instead of the last syllable.

(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)

You can crowdfund for a project manager!

The comment said 'organizing this', not doing the development work. That could mean crowdfunding to fund development of the desired outcome.

A faff, of course, but perhaps a better deal than contributing monetarily to Microsoft to have Copilot shoved in your face instead of the features you actually want.

I was drawn to this idea but then I realised that the number of phone calls/texts I made/received was so low I would essentially be carrying the phone in case of emergencies. Or, more accurately, because I didn't feel comfortable being without a phone for any length of time. (Remember when people used to complain about all mobile phones, because they felt they shouldn't be contactable all the time? Kind of remarkable that the same device is now the 'disconnected' option!)

Now I carry an Android phone with an epaper display and a physical keyboard, which feels like a really good middle ground to me. It's good at the things that are important to me (reading, writing, communication), can do whatever other essentials I need it to in a scrape, and is absolute dogshit at scrolling through nonsense. The device itself feels rather less polished than the Pixel I was using before, but since I'm using it much less that doesn't seem like a problem. My old pre-smartphone phones always felt kind of janky too!

I think projects like this help you develop a felt understanding of the painting as a unique physical artifact that is not fully reproduced by prints or scans.

I don't see anything about interstates in your comment. But even roads reserved for motor vehicles have noise and pollution effects on people who don't use them. Plus, passengers exist.

> Laws should reflect the values of the democratic consensus, speed limits included. If almost everybody is traveling at a speed other than the posted speed limit, whether that's faster or slower, that is a strong signal that the speed limit needs to be adjusted.

Is democracy only for drivers?

What about the half of the remaining artists that are below the new median?

That could only obsolete fiction-writing if you take a very narrow, essentially commercial view of what fiction-writing is for.

I could build a machine that phones my mother and tells her I love her, but it wouldn't obsolete me doing it.

Of course, train drivers aren't the only rail workers, and pay isn't the only reason for strikes.

I think you really undervalue the pleasure of getting one over on our awful train system, and also overestimate how much money the young people of the UK have access to.

...IN MICE

Do you think kids who hang out at the mall really love the management of the mall?

That doesn't explain why the Cybertruck bothers people more than other expensive things. And the rich have always been ready to express horror at the tastes of the poor (and even more so, the tastes of the slightly less rich). It can't all be about feeling hard done by.

I think people tend to be grumpier about things they consider ugly if those things take up a large amount of public space. People get similarly riled by brutalist architecture.

But really, there's nothing new about people having strong feelings about other people's tastes. Fashion is as much about communication as personal pleasure.

> They’re articles of fashion.

Hard to square this with:

> There are legitimate criticisms of Musk and Tesla. "I don't like how someone else's car looks" is not one of them.

Whether or not other people like your look is of course not the be-all and end-all of fashion, but it's certainly relevant. "I don't like how it looks" is a legitimate criticism of an article of fashion.

> Similarly, we’ll see the rise of junk personalities – fawning and two-dimensional, without presenting the same challenges as flawed real people.

I believe the term is "Genuine People Personalities".

The experience of going car-free in a place designed around cars doesn't tell you much about what it would be like to live in a car-free city.

Still, if that's your worst fear, at least you must have a pretty good government.

It doesn't have to withold citizenship from anyone. In some ways it's more reasonable that I lost my EU citizenship through a democratic process in my country than that, say, a Turkish person doesn't have EU citizenship because the process of joining has taken so long.

I'd like to still be an EU citizen but I don't see how it's the EU's fault that I'm not.