Chris Hodges

Migrating everything I can from twitter, where I'm https://twitter.com/ChrisH_Bristol

Last Notes

2026-09-04 15:17:36 UTC

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But that has been the case for a long time - I remember looking for a basic home/office "colour laser printer" about 15 years ago; around 1% of the search results met both criteria.

2026-09-04 15:14:44 UTC

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Yes, I don't buy from Amazon for the same reason*. That's not because I don't like them as a company, though I don't, but because they're too frustrating to deal with. Bike and the occasional van parts are far better found on eBay, or proper online shops.
*With very few exceptions - they're the only way to get cheap rugged Chinese mobile phones, and a brand of bike gear I get on with. Also they are quick even though I refuse to get Prime, so I place maybe 2-3 orders/year.

2026-09-04 13:44:03 UTC

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Even when those platform sellers aren't selling through Amazon, all too often they're so trapped that the order still comes in an Amazon van and even from an Amazon warehouse. I'm no longer confused when my eBay order turns up in new Amazon packaging, but I certainly was at first - and I've just ordered from a shop's own website and it says it will come from Amazon.
But that did bring an example of how they're simultaneously stupid - todays order was shoes. Strangely enough I want them in my size. Amazon insists on trying to sell me "popular" options, i.e. the tiny sizes their captive sellers have overstocked

2026-07-17 07:51:21 UTC

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We're also seeing the other side of the coin: reviews produced using AI. Not just in the form of "turn my notes into a neatly-formatted review", but "chatGPT review this paper".
Interestingly, like any spellchecker, LLMs can find things the author should attend to and humans may have missed, but they can't judge whether there's merit in the work as a whole, let alone novelty

2026-06-06 18:32:28 UTC

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The silly thing is that there are AI-assisted medical advances being made. It's just that they use modest machine-learning setups any university can host, not hype-machines.

2026-05-22 08:27:28 UTC

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The corollary to shopping at places you like - don't shop at places you don't. There might be a bit of satisfaction in avoiding it, but also by treating Amazon as a last resort, you don't have to put up with the frustration of trying to find what you want to buy, when all they'll show you is what they want to sell you. The cost of getting tricked once into buying something unsuitable could outweigh any (probably fake anyway) savings.

2026-05-18 09:23:38 UTC

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Despite being very keen on your descriptions and coinages, there's something about this wording, old-fashioned even for its time, that's rather satisfying

2026-02-19 15:12:44 UTC

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The term, and the concept, date back 80 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex - a link that's its own example if ever there was one), but this modern and more open - in the sense of being public as well as its tools - approach makes for a very interesting successor

2026-01-14 14:50:56 UTC

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You might be interested in https://uk.bookshop.org - online ordering but with a good chunk of the profits going to independent bookshops (including the volunteer-run one where my parents are involved: https://kettsbooks.co.uk/). You can pick which shop to support, and the map to do so is also a nice listing of independents

2026-01-12 14:57:42 UTC

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A Google maps search for the full name of a local school returns , in random order, both that school (2 sites), and another school a few miles away, also with a name ending "community school". They haven't fixed it since I reported the error. They're in a very similar direction from my place, and I only really use Google maps for driving directions with live traffic info (OSM is far better for actual maps). All very confusing, and new in the last few months.

2026-01-12 14:39:48 UTC

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The UK's national rail enquiries system has a similar thing with station codes that are also substrings of other stations' names, but not this bad. It's also fairly new, along with their new "responsive" website that means more, longer, waits for things to load (and no longer encodes the station code in the URL, which was a nice workaround to avoid having to reload the search page for familiar stations)

2026-01-12 13:45:23 UTC

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What surprises me is that they're not using the (real) issue of e-bike battery fires as their lead excuse. Of course a dodgy rebuild of an existing battery becomes more attractive when a decent 3rd party replacement isn't an option

2025-09-17 08:51:57 UTC

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Even for those of us that don't post threads here, character limits make for a good writing exercise. It's beneficial for those of us writing instructions and similar technical work in other places; I've been both been criticised and complimented for using many short paragraphs in a similar way to Cory's stanzas