things

The non-use of collected data is the most ridiculous part of all this. I work with many companies that collect tons of data and only use a small percentage of it. All they're doing is building a bigger haystack.

This is partially due to the fact that Google Analytics is free and the default for most website/app builders. But, still, it's ridiculous.

Ken Kesey of merry pranksters fame "discovered" LSD via being a volunteer in the CIA's MKUltra experiments. So, interestingly, the CIA's experiments were one of the major triggers for the whole 60s counterculture.

I believe the issue isn't specifically with anonymised IP addresses in GA. The problem is that the Google Analytics code is loaded from a third party server and, to do that, this server gets your IP address even if the data sent by the GA code itself contains an anonymised one.

I've seen people enter their email into those intrusive "sign up for our newsletter" popovers because they think that's the only way to bypass them. Which is probably one reason why sites keep using them. Not everyone is as web savvy as we like to think.

I found reading "Whole Body Barefoot" by Katy Bowman was a good primer.

I get that cycling is complex to route but when I ask Google Maps for directions to the city centre from my apartment, it sends me over a huge row of stairs.

I notified them of the issue a couple of years ago and it got fixed a few months later, but it came back again. At that point I gave up as I don't really use the service for cycling anyway. I know my city well enough and when I cycle outside of it, I use Strava.

It's not super clear but, if I'm reading it correctly, the 7 days are 7 days of use. So if you don't open the site for 3 days, the counter is still at 0.

Brings back great memories of long nights spent making ansi screens in TheDraw. I still have the muscle memory for all the keyboard shortcuts (it seems weird nowadays to imagine drawing with the keyboard).

I was even a minor member of iCE for a while. My first experience of impostor syndrome :)

There is a human looking at the photos. When you take the Eurostar you can see them sitting in a booth after the gates. If you look into the booth as you pass, you'll see a grid of photos on screen. I'm assuming they're overseeing it all rather than checking everything manually.

I noticed that these gates were quite slow ID'ing me the first couple of times I went through them but now I hardly have the time to see my face flash on the screen before the gates open. Maybe there's a human check on initial passes. Either that or their code has gotten way better or they store data that helps matching after a few uses.

It also seems to reset fixes. One example: when asking for cycling directions into the city from where I live, Google maps tried to send me down a staircase in a local park. I notified google and it was fixed a few months later. Now it's back… I've seen it for other fixes too.