I always hate having my headphones on ANC on the street. It makes me feel really exposed and disconnected. I tend to use transparency when out and about.

This is always an odd one, as it’s the people who look like they just found a bike in a skip and decided to ride around here that cycle on the pavements.

In the roads near my office (central London), which are seldom used by cars, several pedestrians at a time very often walk down the road or diagonally cross the road head in phone. You can get very close and the still don’t notice (the slower you are, the quieter you become so even less likely to hear you).

I’m not sure arguing against a bell is helpful - people need to look on any road, especially with the advent of quiet electric cars.

Sure is helpful, because it goes like this: pedestrians first -> then cyclists -> then motorists.

You may notice that in this worldview (one which I find very hard to argue against) cyclists should give priority to pedestrians, no questions asked. I don't care about fancy bells or whatever, no-one takes those into consideration even when we (us, pedestrians, that is) can hear them because, and I repeat, cyclists are not as important as pedestrians are.

I think that’s probably quite a selfish world view (and also quite arrogant to claim your own view is hard to argue against - of course you would find it hard to argue against, that is moot…)

When there is infrastructure to support all 3 kinds of users, it seems a lot more equitable for everyone to use the space cooperatively.

I absolutely agree one should give way to more vulnerable road users, but that all 3 can have better outcomes (safety, speed of journey, efficiency etc) it all use it cooperatively and conscientiously.

To labour the point, on shared cycle and pedestrian paths with a line down the middle, does a bell ring combined with slowing down to a safe speed not seem like an appropriate warning?

Where I live, generally if you're allowed to use a road or a lane, you have equal rights to others using it. On a road, cyclists have equal rights to motorists; on shared lanes, pedestrians don't have special rights and are expected to walk near the edge.

Your worldview (mostly) applies to pedestrian crossings but that's the extent of it.

You may not care about fancy bells but you will care about loud honking close to your ears in my very recent experience from the streets of Shanghai. You don't have absolute priority just because you are a pedestrian.

> Why can't the cyclists slow down when they see that there's a human obstacle in front of them?

Because if the space is limited and they actually want to get somewhere, they just don't have time for that? And slowing down often means stopping and causing a traffic jam.

Note that I mostly agree with what you wrote (and I give priority to pedestrians when I'm riding my bike) but there are different situations that have to be taken into account.

It’s really odd to listen to - the vocals seem like they’ve been recorded at a really low nitrate.

1999? You sure?

The point is that Nvidia popularized the term, Id guess.

Nvidia called the Geforce 256 the first ever GPU.

Surprised PUBG was the defining game for so many. I don’t recall it being a demanding one.

It was just unjustifiably popular.

Love ESP boards, and with Raspberry pi pricing though the roof, I’m hoping more will discover the love of getting the job done on a 10mm2 package.

I suspect a lot of the things people are using RPi for are better served by things like this (and virtualisation for the heavier end)

This would have been much nicer than suffering my dad’s 12 year old iMac I found in the loft.

I find some programmers (and this is presumably true of any industry) very narrow in their expertise within technology.

Yeah, most programmers are not curious hackers anymore. They are 9-5 white collar workers with hobbies far outside of programming, systems, hardware, etc. It shows very much as soon as you meet one of them. But, like you said, this is true of any industry.

Oh, and pointy jab: these folks are also, in my opinion/experience, the most eager to vibecode shit. Make of that what you will.

"anymore"? Over a decade ago, a coworker had a path for updating some app's files to a database, and it was taking something like 10 minutes on certain test inputs.

Swore blind it couldn't be improved.

By next morning's stand-up, I'd found it was doing something pointless, confirmed with the CTO that the thing it was doing was genuinely pointless and I'd not missed anything surprising, removed the pointless thing, and gotten the 10 minutes down to 200 milliseconds.

I'm not sure if you're right or wrong about the correlation with vibe-coding here, but I will say that co-workers's code was significantly worse than Claude on the one hand, and that on the other I have managed to convince Codex to recompute an Isochrone map of Berlin at 13 fps in a web browser.

I do feel like the industry has taken a nosedive quality wise over covid in particular. Lots of new people only in tech for the money, no deep idea about computers.

But I know stories like yours from a decade past as well. A tale old as time, but compounding in recent years - IMHO.

Could be, but I think the rot I see now predates the pandemic, possibly with reactive, possibly even before then: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html

I blame it on "software eating the world" (in general) - at some point, about two decades ago, it started to become obvious to everyone that programming is the golden ticket to life - an easy desk job paying stupid amounts of money, with no barriers to entry. So very quickly the pool of students, and then employees, became dominated by people who joined in for the pay, not because of interest in technology itself.

Obligatory link: https://thedailywtf.com/. It's full of stories like this.

That’s quite a simplistic one unfortunately - USB 2 and 3 use different controllers in the PC, which it can indeed detect. The sub-flavours of 3/4 less so.