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Leo McArdle 🇺🇦

@leo.mca.is

240 followers 662 following 244 posts

xkcd.com/386 London based software engineer. Working on Firefox and MDN. Views obviously my own. Keen cyclist, interested in active travel policy. A fan of almost all sports. leo.mca.is

Posts Replies Media

Leo McArdle 🇺🇦 @leo.mca.is · 17/09/2026

No, it's an aspiration. Pedestrians should be able to walk across cities with very little need to stop. Then bikes. Then buses. Then cars. All too often its exactly the opposite way round.

Illustration by Karl Jilg depicting the road as a cavern with crossings as narrow planks of wood spanning them.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/motoring/ingenious-illustration-reveals-how-much-space-we-give-to-cars-a7713056.html

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Leo McArdle 🇺🇦 @leo.mca.is · 16/09/2026

Someone blocked someone in this thread so it's all messed up, but I presume you're responding to the "pedestrians shouldn't cross on red" point? It is in the highway code! Rule 21!

Image from highway code rule 21 showing a red man with the instruction "do not cross".

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Leo McArdle 🇺🇦 @leo.mca.is · 16/09/2026

Yeah but they hide the actual reasoning so other models can't train on it. If you run a model locally, you see the actual tokens it generates before responding. This is qwen3.5:0.8b - an older, and very small model - when asked "do you think"? I cut off the start because it "thinks" a *lot*!

Screenshot of an AI chatbot interface showing a long internal “thinking” trace in grey text, with repeated self-corrections such as “Wait! Actually…”, “Let’s simplify”, and “Is this a test of ‘system instructions’?”, as it reasons about whether it can express opinions and how to answer safely. The trace ends with “…done thinking.” The final response in white says that, as an AI model, it does not have personal opinions or feelings, but can provide analysis based on its training data, and invites the user to give a specific topic or question.

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Leo McArdle 🇺🇦 @leo.mca.is · 28/04/2025

If I'm reading the charts right (very possible I'm not), looks like the power outages in Spain & Portugal are somewhere on the demand side, rather than supply side (i.e. a power plant didn't fail, something transmitting energy did). Here's the forecast vs actual load for Spain today:

Graph of load on Spain's energy grid over time, showing actual load deviate from forecast load enormously around 12:00: going from around 25GW to around 11GW

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Leo McArdle 🇺🇦 @leo.mca.is · 03/01/2025

Planned to test the resilience of bcachefs at some point on my new home-server before fully migrating: excitingly one of my nvme drives has decided to do that for me! Time to actually eat lunch and attempt to fix after work

linux kernel log showing my nvme controller disappearing, likely due to faulty power saving

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Leo McArdle 🇺🇦 @leo.mca.is · 28/11/2024

Phew

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