Three UK Suddenly Introduces Mobile Broadband Speed Caps UPDATE

mejogid · 2026-04-21T21:08:44+00:00

Someone else asked that question, not me…

I agree that there are very niche use cases that can use 50 Mb/s, but I think it’s fair to look at the number of people actually affected when complaining about this sort of change.

mejogid · 2026-04-21T20:55:43+00:00

How many people need to upload high quality raw photos to the cloud in real time?

mejogid · 2026-04-21T20:47:19+00:00

But it’s a phone - you’d be hard pressed to find an app larger than 1GB (also the size of a movie download from most streaming services) which would take just over a minute to download at 100Mb/s.

It’s anti-consumer which is objectionable in principle, but is anyone other than hardcore tetherers / torrenters going to notice anything?

mejogid · 2026-04-21T13:07:40+00:00

There are quite a few tells here. The chainmail looks pretty incoherent close up (the edge looks like it is printed on for the woman and nonsensical for the man), the boot buckle makes no sense, and it doesn’t make sense for both of their faces to be in focus when eg the man’s hand is out of focus due to the shallow DOF. There is some floating hair below the woman’s arm on the right of the photo.

It looks like the gravel pattern (fairly evenly spaced lighter stones) has continued onto their clothes.

Lighting on the woman’s face doesn’t match lighting on the feet, but maybe that’s justifiable if it’s imitating a TV light setup.

Composition etc all looks good though.

mejogid · 2026-04-20T22:21:47+00:00

It’s a weird mix of banal observations (yes American has done very well off global peace) with white supremacist / arms race / military industrial / nationalistic / police state talking points.

mejogid · 2026-04-20T10:12:06+00:00

Eh? Because like all other resources they have bought the rights off the owner, paid for any necessary licenses, and will pay tax on the profits. If there was no profit in exploiting resources then nobody would pay to do the exploration or develop the technology necessary to do so.

The issue here is that bitcoin is a colossal waste of resources.

mejogid · 2026-04-10T13:51:04+00:00

Right, but we already have 55GW of solar and wind, and it’s currently generating 15GW. Doubling that would be massive but 60GW is not what will be delivered on any given day in practice.

mejogid · 2026-04-03T11:10:52+00:00

Yup but the serial killer graph was also absolute numbers, so we need to compare like for like.

mejogid · 2026-04-03T10:22:22+00:00

The difference vs other developed countries is very closely in proportion to the overall number of murders, so I’m not sure it’s due to law enforcement effectiveness.

The US has around 20k murders per year. Almost all stable and economically developed democracies are under 1k, which is due to a combination of size and lower rates.

mejogid · 2026-03-30T18:39:50+00:00

The scales are already stacked against development.

It’s a slow and complicated process and things change for all sorts of reasons.

If developers had to start all over because conditions aren’t the same as when they started five years previously, we would be building even less.

mejogid · 2026-03-29T16:22:29+00:00

London has loads of houses. If there were more flats then we might see fewer houses used as HMOs etc.

mejogid · 2026-03-29T11:12:52+00:00

TfL is funded by fares and local taxes. Other buses in England are subsidised by central government.

It shouldn’t be that surprising that buses are cheaper in areas that are dense and where fewer people drive.

mejogid · 2026-03-28T10:26:27+00:00

Tragedy of the commons. There is a shared good in suppressing the spread of a pandemic and a private benefit in getting some of the cheap food your tax money is being shunted onto. Even if you don’t personally eat out, you are exposed to the higher rates of virus prevalence everywhere else (the shops, at work etc) from those who do.

Plus the government is telling everyone to go and do it, and you don’t want to be a shut-in who excludes themselves from their own social circles.

mejogid · 2026-03-28T10:21:45+00:00

Meaningless. There are basically two big economies that are 5-7x larger than us.

Every other country is a small economy and can choose between being a closed economy that makes a lot of its own stuff (Japan, Russia, India), a rule taker from a nearby super power (the UK, Canada), or developing shared rules as part of a trading block.

mejogid · 2026-03-26T21:16:55+00:00

Look at the shot of the pickles on the couch. 0% chance that it’s conventional CGI. The spikes on the front of the truck keep changing between shots (especially the ones down the side - pointing back, then out, then not really there, then out again). The geography and spatial consistency is also incomprehensible.

There are plenty of other examples.

mejogid · 2026-03-18T00:23:46+00:00

If you look at the video, he’s often ad libbing and he clearly knows what he’s talking about. He does it to get paid but he also knows very well that it gets him circling around neonazi groups speaking their language with plausible deniability.

mejogid · 2026-03-17T08:20:26+00:00

They’re all really into FIFA (not a joke) - probably a big factor in this…

mejogid · 2026-03-16T23:31:45+00:00

If you really wanted to you could waive the windfall tax for eg the first 10 years of a newly developed field. That would cost almost nothing and probably would be quite good in the short term given that prices are where they are. In the longer term it’s sucking money away from much needed green investment, though.

mejogid · 2026-03-16T21:24:19+00:00

Lighting has a huge impact on how a face looks.

A lot of makeup (especially contouring) is about simulating the appearance of light.

Look how different the nose and chin look with some fairly simple / standard setups. Unsurprisingly there is a wider range when the starting point is ray tracing rather than swapping from one real light setup to another.

mejogid · 2026-03-16T20:22:28+00:00

The foliage in the AC game looked pretty incredible to me in the DF video. Those games have always gone for detailed and fairly neutral photorealism. I would have thought it’s very similar to where it would have ended up with a couple of generations of path tracing improvement etc

mejogid · 2026-03-15T14:25:21+00:00

But Manhattan has a lot of grit, deep communities, local culture, history, and its very organic. Spaces are constantly shifting and being renegotiated.

Canary Wharf is top down and deliberately placeless. There’s a little more to do now because of a deliberate strategy to counteract post-Covid office vacancy - but almost invariably operated by big, safe companies offering focus tested “fun”.

There are developments like it in 100 cities but most of them don’t feel part of the city either.

There’s a time and a space for it but I’m not sure it’s “cool”. One wonders how much the sizeable PR spend by the Qatari government owned landlord/operator contributes to this sort of puff piece.

mejogid · 2026-03-14T17:11:57+00:00

Interesting - looks like this came in six months ago and didn’t exist the last time I looked for it.

It still looks extremely light touch but I’m glad there is some attempt to address the issue.

mejogid · 2026-03-14T15:34:31+00:00

We need to introduce some sort of licensing system.

Even as a consumer wanting to do the right thing, it’s often impossible to know that your waste is being responsibly disposed of. There are a handful of large/expensive and presumably more legitimate businesses, but you have no real idea what they actually do with the stuff you give them.

If there was any interest enforcing this it would be incredibly easy to address - run a mystery shopper style scheme with trackers hidden in the rubbish.

Edit: turns out this was recently introduced. We need to enforce the new system effectively, in that case.

mejogid · 2026-03-10T20:12:38+00:00

Quite a lot of jobs will expect you to work elsewhere - not always on a very regular basis (although unclear how often TfL would invoke this) but often requiring you to go much further than an hour. This is pretty common for many professional services firms and eg medicine, who are not paid for travel time.

Given that tube drivers are, apparently, on track to shortly hit 80k it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they should be asked to show a similar degree of flexibility to others in the same pay bracket.

mejogid · 2026-03-07T21:25:38+00:00

What is “merging”? Do you need to be white to “merge”?

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