BoxOfRain

Yeah I live in Oxford and bike theft is rampant. I like the idea of an ebike but I'm going to keep riding a piece of rubbish I won't be devastated by when it inevitably gets stolen.

It's a moot point in the UK at least, sadly we're binning off even the mighty Radio 4 longwave signal in a year or so as part of the latest round of cost-cutting measures at the BBC. Most of…

That C.S. Lewis quote is among my favourites, he put a key pillar of my beliefs into words better than I ever could.

I wonder what Franz Kafka himself would have to say about this very Kafkaesque potential future?

So much of the presumed negative consequences of improving AI are actually the negative consequences of the power structures they're going to exist in I think.

Perhaps it interpreted it as more along the lines of 'write a story exhibiting features that are Kafkaesque'.

If I was obscenely wealthy I'd do the same for the seas and oceans, there's got to be so many fascinating wrecks out there as well as natural formations we know nothing about yet that sonar …

That rant gets better every time I read it.

I've found valerian root extract can be helpful sometimes but it doesn't seem to work for particularly long, whatever the underlying compound is it must have a short half-life.

I have a complicated relationship with Reddit but it really depends on what you're subscribed to I think. A lot of the direction you're nudged in is consumerist rubbish and the whole platfor…

Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands (among a few other places) aren't crown dependencies or part of the UK, they're the vestigial remnants of the British Empire that rejected full independenc…

I was on a course last year and one of my fellow pupils was a Russian man who'd moved to the UK a decade or so prior. When we were in the pub after one of the day's sessions he told me somet…

I wonder if there's a more formalised system of thought that amounts to 'only use what technology you actually need to achieve a goal' or 'use the lowest-tech solution that reasona…

Isn't that just the Victorian workhouse all over again?

To be fair I think I've seen a £50 note in the wild perhaps twice or three times. They're really uncommon in practice and most public-facing businesses are loathe to accept them because they…

I know what you mean, I used to think about this as I went through the Elan Valley quite often. The Victorians dammed the valley to supply water to Birmingham and even though being in a rural part of …

George Orwell had a lot to say on this sort of subject in his essay England your England , a lot of it rings true even to this day.

Best practices in Python: Always look on the bright side of life.

The Puritan influence on America is really fascinating in my opinion, it's strange to think how the sociopolitical trauma of the English Reformation echoes to this day completely removed from its…