John Biscuits

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John Biscuits

John Biscuits

@diskoBiscuits

QA stuff and chair of CycleSheffield. Sheffield should be the ebike capital of the UK. You should get one, they're great.

Sheffield, England Katılım Ocak 2019
320 Takip Edilen148 Takipçiler
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
Essential thread and perspective. The difficulty not addressed being that cars and roads take up so much public space, any attempt to create more space for walking/cycling can be pitted against driving, so even the smallest incremental change can be a struggle.
Nicholas Boys Smith@boys_nicholas

Cars are great. They give the population huge liberty to move around the country, the countryside & the suburbs with comfort, ease & relative safety. They empower & liberate their users. They can particularly help those with goods to deliver or physical challenges to overcome…

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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@OldSheffield Cor. Hoped they were going to build something that made people want to go and dwell there on a sunny day, this looks as inviting as a petrol station!
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Aidan Stones
Aidan Stones@OldSheffield·
Family walk at Rother Valley Country Park today , a chance to check progress on the new lakeside cafe
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@HCH_Hill Yeah the example from that other tweet is insane, nobody could support doing that. But plenty of use of 2 min educational videos in lessons to illustrate a point. Unfortunately all with 10 secs of ads.
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@Birdyword @northerngoat Investing in anything else other than housing feels more like gambling and lower priority. Pretty much everyone I know with spare cash puts it into paying off their mortgage sooner. Or home improvements & extra childcare.
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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
What’s the single best purchase under £1000 that actually improved your daily life? Not ‘invest it’ answers, purely materialism.
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@Layo_FH This is a problem I have with getting better wifi on trains, it's one of the few places I can totally switch off not having the ability/expectations to be able to scroll or work on the journey, and forces people into conversation to pass the time!
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Leo Gibbons
Leo Gibbons@Layo_FH·
Recently I had to stand in a luggage compartment for over 2 hours between Sheffield and London on an East Midlands Railway train. I got talking to a middle aged woman on her way down from a trip to Edinburgh and young couple on their way down from a weekend hiking in the Peak District. Because we began chatting, it went from what would’ve been one of the worst train journeys I’ve had in a long time, to one of the best. We started off talking about the overcrowding, our journeys so far that day, and then asked each other what we had been up to that weekend. We discussed various towns and cities in the U.K we recommend visiting, we discussed the highlands and the beauty (and midges) of Glencoe, and cos it’s 2026, we discussed our experiences with AI and some of our anxieties around it.
Adele Bloch@adele_bloch

talk to strangers - you'll realize they are surprisingly excited to interact with you too and the world is a lot more friendly than you realized

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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@Michael_J_Hil But seriously cycling advocates aren't looking at shoehorned-in things to new builds and thinking 'that's the best use of time and money'. Like anything, joined up infrastructure makes the most impact.
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@Michael_J_Hil London has seen a huge increase in cycling though. So there's the argument for build it first and they will come.
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Michael Hill
Michael Hill@Michael_J_Hil·
Picked up my bike from the otherwise completely empty bike storage in my building. Dropped it off at the half empty bike storage at work. Lovely sunny day. Are we subsidising a not particularly popular form of transport too much?
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@Layo_FH I think it's simpler and well-intended: central bodies giving out highly contested funds want to ensure the spending plans are as comprehensive as possible. I would if I was giving out public money. But when most stuff involves these funding pots, nothing gets done quickly.
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Leo Gibbons
Leo Gibbons@Layo_FH·
Really interesting stuff on how local and regional government is so profoundly nobbled. To try and do anything, you need to go cap in hand to central government for a grant, but to win said grant, you need to demonstrate just how extensively you will "consult" the public. Due to peoples’ inherent negativity-bias, consultation hold-up, smother, downgrade, or destroy any step towards a better world. People generally don’t like change, and the only people energised to respond to consultations are those most strongly opposed to change. It gives me pause for thought when I try to argue that politicians can ‘just do things’ in this country. We’ve built a great web on bureaucracy to prevent politicians from making change happen. The lever is rarely connected to anything.
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits

@Layo_FH That's exactly how I used to expect things to be. But I have since learnt to get the funds to do the smallest of things, they need to bid for funds. To win the bids, they need to show that they meet standards of comprehensive rounds of consultations, eg: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67ab354a…

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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@Layo_FH When money is tight it seems that there's so much pressure to ensure everything is spent as effectively as possible. And for funding pots to cover multiple jobs. Which understandably then requires consultations to reduce mistakes. But this then seems to lead to glacial progress.
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@Layo_FH That's exactly how I used to expect things to be. But I have since learnt to get the funds to do the smallest of things, they need to bid for funds. To win the bids, they need to show that they meet standards of comprehensive rounds of consultations, eg: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67ab354a…
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James
James@Jameschris179·
@Euan_A_C What it ultimately comes down to is who was there first. If the nightclub was there first and you moved there, you have no right to complain. If you’ve been living there for years and suddenly a nightclub opens then you have every right to be pissed.
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College Court
College Court@court_college·
@boys_nicholas It is not for a few rooms Nicholas, the 39 billion is for the restoration of the palace. Why r u people so surprised this has been discussed for 15 years. It has cross party support and reviewed by international companies all agreeing similar costs.
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Nicholas Boys Smith
Nicholas Boys Smith@boys_nicholas·
This looks like an indefensible scam. Total scope-creep. Utterly out of control. Conceptually confusing the necessary with the needless & jolly ugly to boot. The doctrine that new interventions in old buildings must look “different” here has disastrous consequences for the …
Nicholas Boys Smith tweet mediaNicholas Boys Smith tweet mediaNicholas Boys Smith tweet mediaNicholas Boys Smith tweet media
Politics UK@PolitlcsUK

🚨 NEW: MPs and peers must vote on two options to restore the Palace of Westminster 1: Fully move-out for 19–24 years (£11-15bn) 2: Phased works over 38–61 years, in which the Lords move out to a conference centre and MPs use their chamber for 2 years from 2041 (£19-39bn)

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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
I thought this looking for growth gang sounded exciting to begin with. But they seem to have become bogged down on niche London issues of tidying up tube trains and complaining about old bridges. Perhaps they've confused growth with trolls
Looking for Growth@lfg_uk

"ABSOLUTELY ANTI-GROWTH" Britain should be a country where taxis, buses and ambulances can cross a bridge. Hammersmith Bridge has been shut for SEVEN YEARS. The Government can choose to REOPEN it. We spoke to local residents last week about the impact on them 👇

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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@cblatts Promoters I see: 1. Programmers who enjoy this as a hobby as well as seeing genuine work efficiencies, very different use cases to most people; 2. PKM software fans just reinventing the wheel; 2. Influencers monetising the hype train; 3. The same old crypto/NFT scammers/suckers.
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Chris Blattman
Chris Blattman@cblatts·
All right you boosters—after experimenting on and off for a week with the chrome browser extension and the coworker desktop app on my MacBook, Claude managed to do a bunch of agentic tasks slowly and poorly while taking a GREAT deal of effort. I’m still willing to believe there are use cases for me (outside of statistical code), and I’m going to dive into using the terminal today. Claude probably did not enslave all of you to slavishly promote it on X so any suggestions welcome.
Chris Blattman@cblatts

Approximately 1/3 of my X feed is people gushing about Claude code. I’m already an intensive ChatGPT user so I am open minded. And I will try it. I can't help but wonder: 1. Why do most of these posts sound like they were written by their AI? 2. Is this a viral marketing campaign? 3. Is this just the Twitter algorithm running wild? 4. Why don't I understand from these posts what these people are actually doing with Claude? Why is it all in vague gobbledygook? They talk about tasks in weird jargon, and it's like they're speaking a different language. I really don't understand what 5. Can someone explain in plain English what I would as an academic would do concretely with Claude code? We are already testing it out to clean and analyze basic survey data where it does okay. I'm going to be trying to play around with some new theoretical models, adapting IO models to criminal firms where ChatGPT has been doing ok. Will Claude code do better? Anything else I should be thinking about kind of work they're doing.

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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@LabourTogether @dsquareddigest Labour had a decade considering reports just like this to formulate a plan of what to do about it immediately in power. That they seem to be only now starting to think about this, along with so many similar problems, is the most frustratingly disappointing thing about this Gov.
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Labour Together
Labour Together@LabourTogether·
NEW PAPER: Why does British infrastructure cost so much and take so long? Our new paper by @dsquareddigest argues the problem isn't just the fault of regulation, NIMBYs, JR, or risk-averse civil servants – it's an adversarial planning system that manufactures objections 🧵
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@thomasforth Feels like the problem is that buses are also expected to act as a social/active lifeline for elderly people requiring stops being easy to access rather than the speed of the journey, and personal interaction with the driver rather than efficient boarding. Any articles on this?
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Tom Forth
Tom Forth@thomasforth·
As per usual, it is very hard and expensive for local government to remove bus stops in England. Because the UK government has a swathe of laws to make it so. Franchising will hopefully make this easier. See this Gemini summary.
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Tom Forth
Tom Forth@thomasforth·
Good piece in @WorksInProgMag on why fewer bus stops is usually better. Back in 2017 we tracked every bus in Birmingham to show that removing bus stops made journeys faster and more reliable and increased passengers. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-unit…
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@aligreen9999 @thomasforth @shivmalik These all appear to be far smaller in scope/planned population. At least half of them aren't even creating any new towns, just making existing towns and cities bigger, which is definitely good news but seems misleading to be included in the context of 'new towns'.
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Tom Forth
Tom Forth@thomasforth·
An important point, very well made.
Shiv Malik@shivmalik

From your own book @NJ_Timothy … “Increasing the number of houses we build is vital. This will inevitably mean changes to planning laws, but it need not mean sacrificing the green belt nor standards in our built environment. Strategically located new towns will need to be built, especially in the South East of England. There and elsewhere, new towns can be constructed around new rail lines, with revenues from the new housing contributing towards the costs of new infrastructure. In city centres, we need to build upwards, with higher-density housing developments. Outside city centres, we need clean, green and attractive street-based housing that families with children would love to own.”

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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@LukeTryl I expected this government to be 'we will boringly deliver things that will make us prosperous in 2040' but instead it feels like it's been 'we will cancel everything to balance the budget and that will make you feel more optimistic somehow'
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John Biscuits
John Biscuits@diskoBiscuits·
@LukeTryl It also sounds like a lie when we have repeatedly seen them cancel, water down or stall major projects (eg. HS2, rail electrification, Leeds tram, efficiencies to infra/housing planning and powers) that are the sensible, long-term things we expected this government to deliver.
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Luke Tryl
Luke Tryl@LukeTryl·
Reading Starmer’s New Year piece in @thetimes its strength is signalling cost of living will become a unifocus of the Government. It has consistently been the public’s top issue since the pandemic (and it was weird it dropped off the political agenda in 2024/early 2025). But…
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Keşfet

@OldSheffield @HCH_Hill @Birdyword @northerngoat @dioscuri @Layo_FH @Michael_J_Hil @elonmusk