As part of my ongoing mission to replace myself with a robot intelligence, I've been playing with a new AI text generator. This one, called Grover, is designed to help readers detect fake news - but also has an option to generate it. Know your enemy, and so on. It's done a pretty good job … Continue reading Lumpy scarred clumps of empty seats
Tag: citymetric
This is mostly a traditional "I aten't dead" post, of the sort that you'll recognise if you're the sort of person who still looks at blogs that have been going for over a decade. I've been busy doing two day jobs at once, finishing up my often fun, sometimes frustrating, always interesting, and now finally … Continue reading One step short of Barking
I wrote a thing at CityMetric on the Melbourne rail-fail yesterday - go and read it. It turns out that 40-year-old state-of-the-art technology doesn't age super-well if you don't upgrade it, and that only having one train line through your city isn't a great idea either. Disappointingly, they rejected my suggested song-based title, so I'm … Continue reading Dumb Ways (for your train service) to Die
I did a thing at Citymetric on the interesting way folks are completely happy for Scottish companies to run the railways in southern England, but lose their minds when Hong Kong companies do the same thing. My favourite self-quote: The RMT, famous for being the least sensible or survival-oriented union in the UK since the National … Continue reading Depends on how foreign your Aberdeens are
I did a piece at Citymetric on why the disastrous shenanigans at Southern Railway are actually a resumption of a very old battle. They paid me a lot less than a Southern Railway guard gets for the same hours. I probably enjoyed it more, though. Image: an EMD E6A leading the US Southern Railway's The Tennessean … Continue reading Southern Railway, now arriving in 1973
I wrote a piece at the New Statesman's CityMetric on the current state of the UK's railways (spoiler: not that bad, you just don't like your commute), and a really stupid proposal by the government's Competition & Markets Authority to ruin them. Go and read it, if you like.