Jonty

@jontyfairless.bsky.social

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Designer, researcher, & active travel charity trustee in Edinburgh. Frustrated urbanist, clumsy bike mechanic, long-distance runner. Used to work night shift.

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DeBeers: *starts sweating*

You guys.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Reading @austinkleon.bsky.social 's newsletter this morning, and DAMN the state flag of New Mexico is good. Not only an outstanding right-first-time flag design (by Harry Mera, 1923), but doubly remarkable given *how bad* the unofficial one was (by Santa Fe Mayor, Ralph Emerson Twitchell, 1915)

North is uphill. Anon is right.

I've always thought the Nile flows the wrong way. I appreciate rivers start inland and end at the sea, but flowing due north just seems wrong.

Me, but with misspelling my name signing off emails. Yeah that's right you got Jongy here what's good

A jazz musician once told me “If I make a mistake while performing I make sure to do it at least twice more, so people will assume I’m just being avant garde.”

'Jay you have big hands' 'Jonty your hands are massive' 'Yo what's going on with them meat shovels' no shut up these are normal appendages

Aaaand done! After a year of evening wrenching, several burns, and a stack of technical manuals, I've got this old 1987 Transalp from ready-to-scrap to ready-to-ride. Pretty chuffed with that. It's a beautiful machine, inside and out - a pleasure to work on.

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My FAVOURITE thing about Adobe Indesign is when you draw a text box and try to paste some copy into it, and it draws another text box two miles away on the wall of an abandoned barn, and drops the text into that instead.

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This is how I learned to ride in the city and if you are young and strong and fast and aggressive it works pretty okay. Guess what selecting for young, fast aggressiveness in cyclists does to general perception of cycling?

NEW EPISODE: "John Forester and Vehicular Cycling, Part 1." John Forester's influence shaped bicycle safety in the U.S. for decades. We take a deep dive into his 1976 book, Effective Cycling, and the idea that cyclists should "act like drivers of vehicles." thewaroncars.org/2024/07/09/1...

Sorry I missed the team call this afternoon, I was re-reading the emails I sent yesterday to make sure I sounded cool and easygoing and didn't use any exclamation marks

I'm really enjoying seeing little indie cargo bike builders break cover doing good builds. Across my desk this week: Ariel bikes. Cool local Scottish builder, making steel e-cargo bikes. They look great, too. arielbikes.com

*Jamming this into an overflowing bin labelled 'Better Ways Of Doing Things'* dammit who put all this UBI research in here

Largest UK public sector trial of four-day week sees huge benefits, research findswww.theguardian.com Exclusive: South Cambridgeshire experiment led to fewer refuse collectors quitting and faster planning decisions

Don't forget your anti fraud / low-key voter suppression photo ID everyone

How to votewww.gov.uk An overview of voting in the UK, including voting in person, postal and proxy voting, and voting if you're abroad.

Congrats to Cav. I had my fingers crossed! #TDF2024 🚴‍♂️

Mark Cavendish powers to record-breaking 35th Tour de France stage winwww.theguardian.com Mark Cavendish has overtaken Eddy Merckx as the Tour de France’s stage win record-holder with 35 wins after triumphing on stage five of this year’s race

The police station in a nearby village has just gone up for sale. I am this close to selling everything I own to set up a beloved local cycle workshop / yoga studio / cafe / nightclub? / cinema hybrid community interest company. That's cheap and easy to do, right?

Bill's reminded me of two useful quotes. Tobias Revell: "Here's my advice; any time anyone tells you what something *could* do, ask them why it *isn't*." And @danmcquillan.bsky.social : "the social benefits are still speculative, but the harms have been empirically demonstrated."

Bill Gates says artificial intelligence will "pay for itself" when it comes to its associated greenhouse gas emissions as the technology will help push forward the energy transition

Bill Gates Says AI’s Green Benefits Will Outweigh Its Emissionswww.bloomberg.com The Microsoft Corp. co-founder says data centers will be less energy-intensive in the future as artificial intelligence makes computations more efficient.

Predicted benefits, proven harms: How AI’s algorithmic violence emerged from our own social matrixthesociologicalreview.org AI’s social benefits are unproven but its harms are clear. We must kick out the bad politics and mould a better future, says Dan McQuillan.

Blown away by the roses in the garden this year 🌱. No idea what we did, but clearly they liked it.

Sorry I missed the team call this afternoon, I was watching videos of myself from that Q&A I did to check I didn't look as dumb on the outside as I felt on the inside

I'm doing all in my power to bring about a possible future I call Solarpunk Thriftshop Library Socialism. It's a world of energy abundance, but material conservation. We luxuriate in oceans of free power - yes - but you're gonna borrow the powersaw you need from the local tool library.

People said Greenpeace was nuts in 2009 to predict 921GW of installed solar by 2030. Last year there was 1,419GW. Cost dropped 95% from 2008-20 and it’s dropping faster. There will be vast amounts of cheap clean energy in the future; we just need to use it. www.economist.com/interactive/...

Sun Machineswww.economist.com Solar, an energy source that gets cheaper and cheaper, is going to be huge

#Luddism suffered from a challenge that - despite the harms & injustices - the new machines made more goods for less money. Most people liked that. But as the harms & injustices of AI are racking up, it's still kinda hard to find the piles of extenuating 'goods'. Ned Ludd may rise again...

hi, i wrote a post - "destroy AI". ali-alkhatib.com/blog/fuck-up...

Destroy AIali-alkhatib.com I’ve been struggling to articulate this idea, and maybe the problem is that it’s actually kind of simple once you put it out there, and there’s really no good reason to unpack a whole case for it once...

For me, the most effective inoculation against 'shadow org / deep state' conspiracy thinking comes whenever i try to accomplish something - anything - in or around a large organisation or bureaucracy.

I think one of the biggest distinctions between left- and right-wing conspiracy theories is that the right is like “everything shadow orgs do is a total secret and that’s how you know it’s working” and the left is more “we think they’re doing this because they keep saying so in major media.”

The Tory gambling scandal is pitch-perfect for this damp grey bigoted sewage island we live on. A series of mid level political bureaucrats do something unethical and illegal for a small payoff and at huge cost if (when) they're easily discovered. Even the corruption is shit.

Fourth Tory official investigated over election bets allegationswww.bbc.co.uk A fourth Tory is being investigated for allegedly placing dozens of bets on the general election date.

I spoke at a city council meeting today, and was very brave and not too sweaty and answered some hard questions and didn't say anything too stupid... and they granted our motion! Am now a democracy fan. Reckon it's great.

I laughed. I cried. I punched a hole in my wall. @michaelhobbes.bsky.social and @yrfatfriend.bsky.social's deep review of the sources and evidence around ROGD and the Cass Report is an *outstanding* piece of reporting. Essential listening (It's a two-parter)

"Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria" Part 1: The Cooties Theory of Transgender Identity - Maintenance Phasepca.st Debunking the junk science behind health fads, wellness scams and nonsensical nutrition advice.

Guess what kind of hot morning drink this half-asleep idiot made today

"...the ongoing activity of LLMs is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs." I got some challenge when I called LLMs bullshit at work. But now I got SOURCES baby.

Can we just admire the title (and sentiment) of this new journal article for a minute link.springer.com/article/10.1...

ChatGPT is bullshit - Ethics and Information Technologylink.springer.com Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persist...

In perhaps my most dad-coded move to date, I spent the afternoon overhauling carburettors while supervising the kids with a level of benign neglect only previously seen in the 70s.

1 in the morning yesterday, #Edinburgh. We're not *that* far north, but I'm still surprised how not dark it gets around midsummer.

@lornaslater.bsky.social dropped by the Cargo Bike Movement HQ last week to see how we're getting on, and was kind enough to head out to the meadows to meet some of the team and take a picture. Love this shot

A great, clear-eyed piece in the Edinburgh Evening News this week from @lornaslater.bsky.social - with some kind (& accurate!) words about our cool lil cargo bike charity, shifting hearts, minds and other stuff around the city ♥️🚴

The Low Emission Zone is a key step to cutting pollution - Lorna Slaterwww.edinburghnews.scotsman.com For people who live and work in central Edinburgh, Saturday was a big day. The enforcement of the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) has been a long time coming and is an important step on our journey to a clean...