While our construction costs are indeed ridiculous, this number is incorrect. It hard to decipher which £1.2bn figure you are actually talking about - but none of them are for just planning (for reference: the contract for the northern connecting highways and the contract for the actual tunnelling are both for a similar amount of money; the total spend as of 2025 is also around the same amount but it includes initial payments on all contracts etc).
At least in Germany public transport reaches into very deep countryside and it is used widely everywhere. This is certainly not about just supporting urban transportation.
I can partially understand this, as my family is from ex-USSR country (also went through repressions on one side) and we all shudder at the mentions of 'socialism' and 'communism' too. However it doesn't take a lot of research to realise that the modern Western understanding of those terms and actual things that the modern socialists want are in no way comparable to the realities of mid-20th century. In USSR socialist and communist ideas were subverted to facilitate repressions and totalitarian society. Modern socialism is basically Sweden or Denmark - no gulag there.
There is long history of extreme right wing trying to make people think that communist and "anyone more left them me" are the same.
Already in Germany before WWII Hitler used that to his advantage where he worked hard enough to make "Jew", "communist" and "social democrat" into synonyms. Meanwhile, social democrats were the biggest party that was openly pro-democracy. Other major party were anti-democracy.
The distinction is not between modern and old "socialism" like Sweden or Denmark. The distinction is whether you buy the "anyone not exactly right with is basically communist" framing.
I love searching for very American-looking fire hydrants or pedestrian crossings. Great case of US cultural imperialism - I suspect that the developers didn't even think it might not be the same thing abroad.
Took a lot of years for American developers to figure out that string inputs are not limited to ASCII. And even that is more due to emojis (bless them). It's a slow process.
Hm, trial period (3 months) is longer than non-trial payment cycle (1 month) for Apple Music, and in my experience, you can still use it after cancellation, until the trial period expires.
At the company I work for everyone gets a MagicMouse. The pattern is that after 2-3 months of usage everyone gives up and switches to one of those Logitech MX mouses - so did I. MagicMouse is so goddamn uncomfortable to use if you ever touched a good comfortable mouse. It is now resting in the back of my shelf.
I ditched it too but for the track pad, I seem to be in the minority here but I find the MacBook pro track pad more than enough for navigating the OS and only really falls short for gaming.
You have to bear in mind that the UK press was pushing the narrative that non-decentralized tracing was boneheaded British exceptionalism that ignored what every other country was doing even back when Germany, France, and various other countries were still basing their apps on that exact same solution. Because they had a narrative they wanted to push, that narrative was that the UK was a stupid backwards country that needed to copy the enlightened Europeans but was refusing to because it was run by Brexit-supporting idiots, and they weren't going to let contradictory details get in the way of that.
> They just took the turn sooner than the British and others.
Because of protests and massive intervention of experts and digital citizens rights group like the CCC.
Luckily, the government listened in this case. I am somewhat amazed how well different sectors of society can suddenly work together when the situation is serious.
tbf, everyone went for their own custom solution initially since apple/google only really announced their plans for a joined effort some time early/mid April or so
The decision to centralize the data collection was not due to a lack of a privacy-preserving API. Any country could have gone this route independent of Apple and Google.
I think there are times when the go it alone and keep calm carry on attitude works well, but this is not one of them. Hopefully lessons will be learned.
An actual blur that directly modifies multiple pixel values cannot be reversed. Things like swirls and motion "blurs" potentially can be - but I wouldn't even call those blurs as they are more of a directional transformations.
Hmm, given we know it's a face, and we know their skin tone from the rest of the photo, I wonder what a computer would be able to reconstruct... Any papers about this?
"For example, an algorithm may analyze the relative position, size, and/or shape of the eyes, nose, cheekbones, and jaw" etc, says Wikipedia.
You can reconstruct a plausible face by deblurring, ie. one that looks sharp and human. But if you want to identify someone having a plausible picture with a pair of eyes in a plausible position doesn't help, you need a fairly accurate assessment of the distance between the correct eyes, and that's susceptible to loss of information during blurring.
