iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Ah, I have a better name for the hatched area of road on his diagram: 'The Meat Grinder Zone'

Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

The old cycleway was definitely a flawed design but it was there & I didn't expect any changes for many years to come, given the size of the city & many needs. Warsaw planners thought, nah, get the shovels out. Looks like they'll be done in under 2 months of work. Wspaniała.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

After the whole Chat control fiasco I've lost any faith in the EU to protect data privacy. @fightchatcontrol.bsky.social

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Sympathy with the campaigners in Toronto, but glad I don't live in Canada. Here in Warsaw they started ripping out a cycleway near my home last month. Because they're now installing a massively improved one. It's looking great, almost done.

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Tom Flood @tomflood.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Here is what Ford wants to rip out. In a city stuck in debilitating gridlock, nothing better than removing bike lanes and getting more people driving. 🙌🙌

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Even the Dutch wait until lunch for their haring met uitjes.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

They also own more boats per capita than Poland & Romania. My general feeling on this is that Nederlanders enjoy transport in all its forms 😂 But yes, they are a rich country and have high car ownership as a result, yet also world leading (by far) cycling rates. And not just in cities.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I learned a lot on IRC coding channels and also fed my interest in type theory and programming languages which led to my PhD. I haven't been in a while, but stackoverflow didn't kill them, not completely anyway. Also, Usenet, which Google did kill.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This is called computability theory.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yeah, I don't see these problems when using LLMs for code.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Funny, since the MA architectural access board regulations are even more stringent than ADA, and older too.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

EU wants to scan all chat messages for crimes. All, even end to end encrypted. So their rhetoric about privacy is hot air.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

They recognised that the car industry is unusually impervious to accountability, especially in the US: ~100 people per day die on American roads due to car usage in some way. With any other product or industry, such carnage would trigger massive investigations. With cars, hardly anyone makes a fuss.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I inspected a lot of building plans and it's astonishing just how ridiculous architects can get with bike parking when not scrutinised. Steep stairs, switch backs, multiple doors, vertical racks, little aisle space. One might wonder if many British architects have ever seen a bike much less a trike.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

More like, vertical and semi vertical cycle parking are difficult or downright impossible to use, especially with heavier e bikes. Story is illustrated with an example of such. That's why Cambridge bans such cycle racks. They're inaccessible to all but the strongest people.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It's cool, the story of its restoration kinda neat. It's definitely on the beaten track though, virtually everyone recommends it.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

In 8 years living there I always asked the bus driver (but I always had a bus pass from my employer). I think this is basically the rule though, avoiding crowding in the busiest part of the route.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Do they come z okrasą and with a vat of śmietanka?

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Gemini still manages, mostly. It answered my mixed language question despite transcribing kwiecień as kvetching. ChatGPT live is making a frustrating hash of such a question, though it is code switching. Too much maybe, one time it responded in Portuguese to an opening question I asked in Spanish.

Gemini live session, at the top it says Kwiecień es el mes de abril en polaco. At the bottom, the speech transcript thinks I said 'Cuál mes de año es kvetching?'

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I found Gemini, for all its other flaws, quite good at this early on. Since I'm often asking mixed language questions (Polish, Dutch, Spanish, English). The transcript would actually get it wrong (e.g. mangled English instead of Polish word) but the LLM would respond correctly to what I had said.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Honestly I stopped hating Schiphol so much after flying back to PL thru CDG. So much worse.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Making more custom apps for myself in the past year than in the previous 10

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

3 weeks ago this was a T junction. Now it's an almost completed roundabout, with a nicely renovated cycleway, sidewalk and relocated(!!!) school fence. This kind of project would take years in UK or US (and forget about shifting the fence). The pace of change is stunning here in Warsaw.

Roundabout under construction, new tarmac surface for cycleway running around it, new tile surface for sidewalk, curve of fence visible on the right. Tactile paving at the bottom of the screen. Apartments in the distance.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Great news, now get the already imported monsters off the roads.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Train journeys in Europe would be a lot less stressful if they could simply provide correct info about platforms and train departures. This is strangely problematic in various EU countries, with broken signs, or wrong destination shown, or simply not showing anything until the very last minute.

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Tim “Positive Subway” Smith @positivesubway.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It tells you all you need to know about the role of policing in general that the people who are constantly shrieking about low-level crime and homelessness and bike lanes (lol) as intolerable intrusions on our quality of life have no problem with this

Private cars completely blocking a public sidewalk near a Bronx station house, rendering it unusable

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David Zipper @davidzipper.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Yet again, traffic engineers are gobsmacked that a road closure didn't create crippling gridlock: "You’d never know that a massive highway project, ominously dubbed 'carmageddon,' was underway seven miles away...cars [were] speeding across the Interstate Bridge at their usual clip."

opb.org

Vancouver traffic largely unaffected by start of I-5 Rose Quarter project

Washington transportation officials warn commute time could increase in the coming days.

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Hassinator @hassinator.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

a great letter in the times today. perhaps worth sharing in these troubled times. #RNLI #heroes

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Biking around Warsaw is nice because you can pass a random ice cream shop with the word 'Porter' on the menu, pull a quick U turn and go see if yes, they really do have beer flavoured ice cream. 😂

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

The CEO of Ryanair knows a lot about sucking.

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Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan @london.gov.uk · 10/09/2026

A dark blizzard of disinformation is warping the public’s perception of our great city. But we know the truth: our homicide rate is lower than every major US city, neighbourhood crimes are down and we’ve been ranked #1 city in the world 11 years in a row. My piece for The Times.

thetimes.com

We must fight back against troll army’s lies about London

There is a dark blizzard of disinformation online, where our capital is described as a lawless dystopia in decline — this couldn’t be further from the truth

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A random bartender in Amsterdam told me the same.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Nice work. Finally someone remembered that GPUs are amazing for rendering graphics 🤓

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SwiftOnSecurity @swiftonsecurity.com · 06/09/2026

Everything makes sense once you realize all environmental organizations in the US are people who want the thing on the left but only for boomers.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I did not have 'SkyNet gets started on obscure German wiki' on my bingo card but here we are.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The Dutch junctions to which he refers are also give-way-to-right, though for the 'opposite' reason as a mini roundabout.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

How do we explain to Californians, specifically residents of the nasty unrepentant sprawl known as silicon valley, that street width being less than 50 metres does not make it 'narrow'.

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Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Another reminder that firefighter/police/emt opposition to policies like congestion pricing, bike lanes, road diets, pedestrianization, etc. typically have nothing to do with legitimate public safety concerns and everything to do with maintaining personal driving and parking privileges.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I also remember it from just about 10 years ago. It's remarkable every time I walk by now.

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Peter Flax @pflax1.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I think folks who ride for transit or on busy roads know this on a deep level. Every complaint about helmets or rolling stop signs or riding two abreast or empty bike lanes or entitled riders is pure misdirection. The core issue: They don't want riders on the road. The entitlement claim is batshit.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Hi, I've been a postdoc in two different countries. Both have unions for postdocs and other academic staff. It's fine. Maybe do a bit of research before writing. And look outside the USA too.

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Gravel Influencer @gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

This awful story is another reminder that helmets and high-viz will never be enough to fill the massive safety gaps left by insufficient infrastructure. A traffic calming device before the crosswalk likely would have prevented this death by forcing Knapp to stop, or at the very least, slow down.

Police used video footage from nearby buildings to calculate that Knapp had about 150 feet to stop from the time that Skalka first activated the pedestrian lights, according to the affidavit from detective corporal Padric Hartnett.

But Knapp, who police estimate was driving a few miles per hour over Pine Street’s 25 mph speed limit, does not appear to have hit the brakes until just before hitting Skalka, the charging documents say.

“An attentive, prudent and careful operator would have yielded,” Hartnett wrote.

Knapp told responding officers that he did not remember seeing the flashing lights. He said it seemed Skalka was in front of him all of a sudden. He denied having consumed alcohol.

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Diego @ryukyu-hsr.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Bike helmet discourse is so funny. Yes, it would be safer to wear a helmet all the time, whether cycling, walking, sitting at home or *driving* for that matter. But there's a trade off between safety and comfort and who knew it, we make it all the time.

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Florian Stöger @fdms.eu · 26/08/2026

Helmet PSAs have been extremely successful in mostly convincing anyone's friends and family who don't bike, and who love to spread the gospel that unless you're carrying around a large piece of equipment wherever you go, you shouldn't even consider getting on a bike

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I saw the above sarcastic quote about the double standard re safety. Helmets may increase safety for both driving & cycling, but the (USA) social tolerance of danger for driving is much higher. The politics of helmets are interesting/infuriating but I have no time/space here to really discuss them.

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Matt @notdanish.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

US should have just adopted EU like regs. Up to 15.5mph power assist, with pedals, it's legally equivalent to a bicycle. More powerful, and it's a motorbike. That's all.

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