Flutterby™!: Topic : California Culture

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Entry: 2026-09-27 04:20:02.677747+02 I'm reading Conor Dougherty's book by Dan Lyke comments 0

I'm reading Conor Dougherty's book "Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America". One of the stories he tells is of a development near a BART station in Lafayette, California getting scaled back from dense multifamily to single family detached homes. There is lots of drama, and I don't want to spoil the punchline, but the epilogue is of Steven Falk, the City Manager, resigning rather than holding on for a few weeks to take advantage of a half-million dollar termination bonus.

His resignation letter is well worth reading, especially for those of us who are looking at how other towns, like Petaluma, are fighting growth and celebrating freeway widenings.

https://www.lovelafayette.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=5499

Entry: 2026-09-16 21:35:02.94961+02 It only took a few years of living in by Dan Lyke comments 0

It only took a few years of living in Petaluma, where much of "American Grafitti" was shot, to just get over car culture, and to start to see classic car nostalgia as propaganda for the smell of gasoline and so many automobile deaths.

Anyway: Governor Newsom visits Jay Lenoâ€™s Garage to sign legislation celebrating and preserving Californiaâ€™s classic car and lowrider heritage

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09...assic-car-and-lowrider-heritage/

[ related topics: Sociology California Culture Automobiles ]

Entry: 2026-09-11 20:43:35.713219+02 Nostalgia is an attack surface by Dan Lyke comments 0

Started reading Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America last night, and thinking about how preservationists often fight to increase homelessness, and reminded of "tradition is peer pressure from dead people", and...

mhoye @mhoye@cosocial.ca

@scruss Nostalgia is an attack surface.

Irenes (many) @ireneista@irenes.space

we read this academic paper a while back which mentioned in passing that it's apparently well-known (if you're in the right field of study...) that fascists and authoritarians always have a very backwards-looking idea of culture, they define their aesthetics in ways which only allow nostalgia and never new ideas, predictably and repeatedly

and once we had that idea, we've started seeing it everywhere ><

Entry: 2026-09-09 18:42:32.046971+02 AI toys by Dan Lyke comments 0

I went to a Waldorf school from kindergarten through 7^th grade. Some years ago at a North Bay Python, there was a cluster of people talking about tech in education, and someone acknowledged me with "ah, another Waldorf survivor", and that framing has helped me view aspects of my experiences in a different light.

But one of the notions that sticks with me from that experience is that "the only thing an intelligent child can do with a complete toy is take it apart." That what's important about toys are the stories that kids bring to to the toys and generate with the toys, and the more narrative completeness or single-purpose a toy is, the less opportunity that there is for the child to bring something of themselves into play.

Anyway, Tara Calishain linked to University of Washington: Video: Curiosity, frustration and antipathy: How kids play with AI toys

From the video: "I think it's going to destroy my dreams as a tiny kid."

So, yeah, it sounds like the kids get it, the only thing to do with these things is push the boundaries.

Entry: 2026-09-04 18:05:02.163838+02 Yeah haven't lived there since by Dan Lyke comments 0

Yeah, haven't lived there since 1986... https://mydialect.us/quiz-standard.html

From the summary:

What gave you away
Answers that point most strongly to Massachusetts.

How do you pronounce Mary/merry/marry? all 3 are different
flourish[ʌ] as in "sun" ("fluh-rish")
the first vowel in "Florida" [ɒ] as in "saw" ("flaw-ri-da")
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining? sunshower

Alt text: A map of the US with the northeastern US, starting from New York City and the Hudson Valley to the northeast, in red (legend: "Most Like You"), a big blue swatch up the biddle of the country for "least like you", with hints of orange along the eastern seaboard and central California coast.

Entry: 2026-09-02 19:21:29.34113+02 fake pollling data by Dan Lyke comments 0

PBS Newshour: What to know about the fake election poll numbers shared and retracted by a mysterious company

The California results were among at least three "polls" across three states posted online this month by Median Strategies, a previously unknown organization that admitted to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the purported results were fake. The company wrote before shuttering its website this week that it "was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification."

Sounds like it was someone in cahoots with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, most credible news outlets did not run with the numbers unquestioned, but as it becomes easier and easier to fake plausible "news", worth watching out for.

Via.

[ related topics: Politics Music moron Current Events California Culture ]

Entry: 2026-08-22 17:35:13.016141+02 London Falling by Dan Lyke comments 0

A neighbor left a copy of London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe.

Gripping read about the intersection of oligarchs, Instagram culture, the blurred lines between cops and their informants and the criminals, and... in the end I'm happy to have read it because as a mood piece it makes me happy that I wasn't caught up in the crypto craze, and makes me feel better about not diving into the "AI" land rush either.

Also makes me glad that, as a late teen, I had trouble lying, 'cause that desire to be a part of deals....

Anyway, if you've ever watched a British heist film and thought "this is too far fetched", a compelling read.

Entry: 2026-08-17 03:41:01.275695+02 Cannabis and Heart Health by Dan Lyke comments 0

Unexpected Findings Add New Insight on Cannabis and Heart Health

Habitual cannabis users experienced about 9% fewer premature heartbeats on days they inhaled cannabis compared with days they abstained, a counterintuitive finding that adds to the complex and evolving understanding of how cannabis affects the heart, new UC San Francisco-led research found.

Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Acute Effects of Cannabis Inhalation on Cardiac Ectopy, Physical Activity, Sleep, and Glucose

Entry: 2026-08-12 19:01:03.310253+02 Gen AI links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0

Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’. Apparently Time started serving pages as markdown for the consumption of AI agents, started serving ads in that markdown, and...

The ads work by having ad tech firm Mobian generate FAQ-formatted content based on a brand brief, then insert it into Time’s markdown pages and track how often AI search engines surface it, and how favorably. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute had their brand-written, brand-approved messaging sit in the same markdown version of the page an agent reads as fact. If a page’s markdown version can be quietly seeded with paid content, users have no way of knowing whether an answer reflects a publisher’s reporting or a client’s brief, appears Perplexity’s logic.

One of the big problems with LLMs is that there is no control channel. Sure, the "system" prompt may get weighted more heavily, but everything is data.

Kinda like humans, come to think of it...🤔 [goes and updates ad blocker]

Via.

Queen’s Brian May outraged by AI version of album cover and tells UK PM Andy Burnham: ‘You must stop it now’

May used Meta AI to make the cover, which resurrects late frontman Freddie Mercury. He did so in order to make a “very serious” point about the environmental impact of AI to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

Instagram link

But I'm now very serious. I believe the price we are about to pay for this 'inevitable' development is way too high. We must not allow these hideous Data Centres to be built in the UK.

Science Alert: 'Virtually Absent': AI Models Practically Erase Female Characters From Kids' Stories

Neutrality Bites: Gender Representation in AI-Generated Animal Stories Imani Finkley, Yuanxi Li, Melanie Walsh </>

In this paper, we use anthropomorphic fiction as a stress test for gender representation in contemporary LLMs. Across 23.8K story completions, we find that models frequently respond to gender ambiguity through avoidance, either by repeating the animal noun or using neutral pronouns. This surface-level neutrality does not translate into equitable representation. When the models do explicitly assign gender, they overwhelmingly default to masculine protagonists, while feminine protagonists are nearly absent. This experiment leads us to a broader claim about AI alignment with regard to gender and broader social representation: neutrality bites. In other words, we argue that prioritizing neutrality with regard to representations of gender, race, sexuality, or other identity categories, above all else, can function less as inclusion and more as erasure. <?blockquote>

Via.

David Culley has some thoughts on Transformers and human susceptibility.

Great Scott Gadgets: LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects

Our communities are already noticing a shift away from collaborative stewardship and toward transactional interactions with projects, and we’re seeing open source project maintainers left to deal with increasing volumes of generated code. When people interact privately with systems trained on communities, it gradually weakens the shared understanding of how projects work and redistributes the burden more heavily onto (often underfunded) project owners.

Via.

Entry: 2026-07-27 18:50:37.958976+02 A few notes on Zombie Caller School by Dan Lyke comments 0

Way back in 2016, at the Maple Leafs Regroup square dance convention on Toronto, a bunch of us newer callers let ourselves into a room after the normal dancing started, and called to each other until we couldn't stand up any more. The 2017 Palm Springs organizers got wind of this, asked me if I'd take responsibility for a room, and the tradition was born.

I haven't been back to many IAGSDC Conventions since COVID, we went to San Francisco, but missed Montreal this year. Apparently, though, the activity is ongoing, and one of the callers who's carrying on this tradition and is writing something up emailed me for a quote, and I'm not sure I gave her anything pithy or quotable, but I'm copying what I wrote here:

I think people give me credit for Zombie Caller School in the same way that neighborhood parents might wonder about the thought process that led the sewing machine to be tied to the clothesline and dangled from the barn roof, and know that I must have been involved somehow. Aside from being the usual bad influence, I think the only "push" I gave it is that I said "yes" when people asked if I'd be willing to take responsibility for the room to reprise what we, collectively and without a clear leader, did guerrilla style in Toronto.

And if I'm going to have any influence going forward, 'cause at this point me referring to myself as a newer caller or student is like the thirty-something hanging out with high school kids, it's that...

Along with going down to the Sunnyvale caller workshops, Charlene and I have been participating in singing circles recently. They're generally led by someone, often there's a "big" name, but the song leaders make a lot of space for people who have a song idea they want to share with the group, It's tough, because you don't want to turn it into an open mic for everyone who has a trauma issue, but it's also about fostering new leaders, and reinforcing that this isn't a constructed experience, it's a strongly participatory one. We're co-creating these spaces.

This is something that bugs me about square dancing, that it is so hierarchical. One of the things I love about the Sunnyvale caller workshops is that there's a lot of "I think I see what you're trying to do, let me show you what I think would work", and there's much more of a sense of working with peers, rather than the caller being somehow on a different tier than the dancers.

I don't know what it looks like to the activity at large. There are some people who will only ever dance and that's fine, but we *need* more callers, and I really want to foster the idea that we're all bringing something more to guiding and shaping this, and co- creating it, not just dancing.

So if the original Zombie Callers was us saying "I missed caller school this year, how are y'all progressing?" to each other (and learning things, I remember Diana's "aha" that night about Chicken Pluckers after *how* many caller schools?), what I hope it's becoming is a place to foster that square dancing as a collaborative activity, rather than an experience that the "Callers" deliver to the "Dancers".

There's this idea that I've seen floating around in various essays since at least the '90s, it probably goes back further, that synchronized dance is the art form of fascism. That the masses of troops marching in synchrony in Red Square or Pyongyang are a symptom of a hierarchy that's pretty disturbing. And I've often wondered about the post WWII rise of square dancing, and the ways in which MWSD is very much tied to recorded music and amplified voice, and tried to deconstruct how it fits into that.

Obviously, I love square dancing. But, as a domme friend once suggested, calling does sometimes feel like topping in a group scene. Maybe there's room for it to be something more as a conversation between equals, a coordination of anarchy.

Anyway, if I can get back into the habit of going to convention, that's the direction I'd like to see it evolve. Zombie Callers feels like dipping a toe in.

Entry: 2026-07-21 19:20:17.210922+02 Tuesday morning LLM links by Dan Lyke comments 0

Mass-Driver: From human hands. — We don’t use AI in any of our design or production processes. Here’s why.

The writing we use, the very substrate of our culture, is the result of a process older than we can comprehend. Who are we to decide that process is finished? That the time of invention and human input is done, and every letter created from now on should be a remix of what came before?

Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’

"The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in… If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two."

Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies

From divination and horoscopes and from ELIZA to present-day large language models, I document how people have been thinking with things, outsourcing judgement, and making sense of interactively presented non-sense. Following the lead of Lucy Suchman to “slow down discourses of the ‘smart’ machines”, I consider the interactional foundations of our engagement with technologies of language. I make the case that the fluid output, fine-tuned overconfidence, and interactive design of these computational artefacts conspire to exploit our interpretive processes and interactional infrastructure, rendering them irresistible to lay people and researchers alike.

Via

Semgrep: You Can't Reverse Engineer Your Way Out of the AI Supply Chain Problem. The pitch is for "trusted third parties", which, great, spend some money on that, but horse and barn and all.

Via

Restaurant in Major Trouble After Posting AI Pictures of “Its Food” links to SFGate: San Francisco restaurant gets angry backlash for AI menu images and Reddit: Yum, slop. The place is called Grind & Unwind, proprietors AJ and Lyndsey Lozano, no links 'cause they're not gonna be around long enough to matter.

Via A. Rivera who introduced me to the term "cogsucker".

I Watched a 55-Year-Old Law Break the AI Hiring Industry — And It Was Overdue, on how the lawsuit against Eightfold AI rests on the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970:

The legal theory in Kistler v. Eightfold is elegant: if Eightfold generates match scores based on harvested data, and those scores are used by employers to filter candidates, then Eightfold is functioning as a consumer reporting agency. Full stop. And every candidate it scored was entitled to disclosure, access, and dispute rights that they never received.

Via.

Entry: 2026-07-17 17:25:02.400059+02 I wanna see a pedestrian and transit by Dan Lyke comments 0

I wanna see a pedestrian and transit first city, and I'm pretty sure that the only way for that to happen in the US is something like California Forever, so I'm bummed that they lost the shipyard deal to Texas, but Trump era war spending also seems like a shakey foundation.

https://sfist.com/2026/07/16/c...rnia-forever-loses-shipbuilding/

[ related topics: History California Culture Public Transportation ]

Entry: 2026-07-14 23:45:02.514282+02 Went down to the Marin Civic Center for by Dan Lyke comments 0

Went down to the Marin Civic Center for the "Surf, Skate, Street" exhibit, and discovered a collage and acrylic artist I wish I'd had a chance to meet, "Dickens 44": https://www.dickens44.com/

[ related topics: Bay Area Art & Culture California Culture Skating ]

Entry: 2026-07-03 06:20:02.994174+02 Stumbled upon Miss Magnolia Beaumont by Dan Lyke comments 0

Stumbled upon Miss Magnolia Beaumont Goes To Provincetown, written and performed by Joe Hutcheson, and bummed that it was the last night cause I wanna recommend it.

Definitely gonna pay attention to what's going on at The California theater in Santa Rosa.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays California Culture ]

Entry: 2026-07-01 03:30:32.21292+02 SF city code rewrite not approved by Dan Lyke comments 0

San Francisco supervisors balk at 362-page city code rewrite

‘I ran it through Claude,’ San Francisco supervisor says of lengthy legislation

JFC.

The ordinance is itself a product of AI research — the result of a collaboration between the city attorney’s office and the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab, or RegLab, at Stanford University. The research group used AI tools to identify and analyze redundancies, which were then manually reviewed by city attorney staff.

That's not terror inducing at all.

I mean, sounds like there's some stuff that needs to get cleaned up, but this appears to be an epic clusterfuck.

Via.

Entry: 2026-06-24 20:15:02.909719+02 Dead 41foot whale washes up on north by Dan Lyke comments 0

Dead 41-foot whale washes up on north Oregon coast.

ODOT has the opportunity to do the funniest thing right now...

https://www.oregonlive.com/pac...shore-on-north-oregon-coast.html

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture ]

Entry: 2026-06-22 19:07:09.807878+02 Getting up to change the music by Dan Lyke comments 2

When I was in my late teens, or perhaps very early 20s, there was a used book store along Hixson Pike in Chattanooga, and I read and read and read, trying to catch up with all of the culture I'd felt like I missed. One of those was B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. At the time I was in my Objectivist phase, so when I got to the last page, and read:

A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

I hated it. The notion that we not only could, but should as society engineer the future of people felt horrendously dystopian.

But years passed, I moved across the country, and then a friend came back from Burning Man with a baggy of 'shrooms left over, and offered them to me. I was, at the time, an incredible control freak, so I set up the environment for the trip carefully, lighting, visible art, picked a series of CDs for the 5 CD changer(!) to carefully control the mood, made sure there was sufficient water and whatnot available, and settled in for the trip.

The colored fringes along the shadows were amazing, the joy in the details of the room made me conscious of elements I'd never taken time to observe, and the CD player switched over to Marcus Robert's album Alone With Three Giants. I was overcome with this immense sense of lethargy. My trip partner and I talked about how we had no energy, how sitting there was like swimming in molasses, and then I realized: I could get up and change the music.

I realize that, as life changing epiphanies go, "I can get up and change the music" doesn't sound earth-shaking, but it's a moment that sticks with me. It is also not just "I can get up and change the music", it's "I need to be actively monitoring and guiding what I expose myself to", so that I know when to get up and change the music.

Relatedly, A phrase from S.L.A. Marshall's Men Against Fire sticks with me: "more than life itself, we value the approval of our peers".

It's easy to dismiss statements like this: "I don't care what anyone thinks, I'm my own person." And, yes, I know that Marshall's history and scholarship is problematic. However, that realization that I could be influenced to destroy myself based on the approval of those around me made me conscious that I should work to surround myself with good people. Perhaps not conscious enough, but, heck, I'll be second-guessing decisions for the rest of my life.

A few years ago, as Twitter/X was going completely to hell, I got on to the Fediverse. Beyond the ability to just show posts from the people you follow in reverse chronological order, Mastodon has the ability to filter out words, and put words behind content warnings, so I created the obvious filter sets, "Democrats", "Republicans", etc (One of those filters now has "ICE", and I'm amused at how infrequently it catches "ice cream" or discussions of winter weather).

It was amazing how my sense of well-being improved when I had to consciously say "okay, I'm going to have to click to expose myself to outrage-bait".

To have the control to get up and change the music.

And then this past weekend, I listened the Game Studies Study Buddies episode on Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. I'm... not sure that my mental health can take actually reading the book... but...

From Duncan J. Watts' book Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer through modern dynamic/context pricing, to all of the comparisons with LLMs and slot machines (previously 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and bonus observation about NYT journalism), it's obvious that we have automated the exploit of human perceptions and behavior, and are doing so in a way that's going to be building on itself, in many cases with minimal human intervention.

We have become the cogs. We are seeing what machines can do with man.

And with the social pressures to use LLMs in coding, and the flood of ads, I am losing control of the music. I am suddenly conscious that I am in the club and it's too loud.

Anyway, I have removed the Meta apps from my phone, which means it's difficult to send and receive Facebook Messenger messages, and though I mean to check back in there occasionally because of my square dancing community and a few other folks I want to keep up with, if you're interested in interacting with me on social media we should find other venues. Independent venues, in which the content isn't filtered and rearranged to maximize "engagement".

And I'm looking for career directions which involve interacting with LLMs less. At least until this bubble goes pop.

Now to tune some ad blocking.

Entry: 2026-06-14 22:25:03.247185+02 If anybody in the North SF Bay area is by Dan Lyke comments 0

If anybody in the North SF Bay area is interested in a late 1990a era Endless Pool (with some modern upgrades), hit me up before I write the whole Craigslist posting. It won't be cheap to move, but for the right DIYer with a plan it might be cool.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area California Culture ]

Entry: 2026-06-13 21:45:08.970018+02 SB 79 by Dan Lyke comments 0

Patrick Siegman‬ ‪@siegman.biz‬

SB 79, which allows apartments up to 9 stories tall near major transit stops, goes into effect on 7/1.

If you or someone you know is struggling to cope, help is here! Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you process strong emotions in a healthier way:

State law will put more housing near transit stops. This SoCal map finally shows where

Kaiser Permanenty: Self-guided CBT techniques to improve your mental health.

Entry: 2026-06-11 20:46:21.804558+02 San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum by Dan Lyke comments 0

Beth Winegarner: San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum. Including a listing of inmates and prisoners.

Same author: Mission Local: The hidden, painful history of SF’s Magdalen Asylum.

Via.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

Entry: 2026-06-10 17:31:24.931574+02 Mark McAfee knowingly poisoning kids by Dan Lyke comments 0

Pro Publica does a profile of Mark McAfee of Raw Farm, a raw milk producer that's been linked to various salmonella and e. coli poisonings, and a bird flu related recall.

“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”

Via Tara Calishain. Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social points out that the reason he sells everywhere but Minnesota is accountability, because the Minnesota Department of Health uniquely oversees a team of interviewers called Team Diarrhea who track down food poisoning cases fast enough to actually pin down fresh dairy products.

The thing is... I grew up on raw milk. I find pasteurized milk to be kinda yicky (though that could also be homogenization, and breed of cattle and what not). But the more I learn about aspects of the culture I grew up in, the more I realize how horrific some of it was.

Entry: 2026-05-27 17:23:14.474499+02 Brooke Vibber leaving Wikimedia by Dan Lyke comments 0

The lack of tech industry news coverage of Brooke Vibber leaving the Wikimedia Foundation (Fediverse post of screencap from the wikitech-l mailing list) shows how we don't really have news for this field any more.

(The general sentiment is that this is fallout from union busting as the new CEO for the Wikimedia Foundation brings experience and culture from J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers into the non-profit field.)

Entry: 2026-05-27 00:18:41.689236+02 Don’t Call It Kids’ Safety if Kids Aren’t Safe by Dan Lyke comments 0

California Attorney General Rob Bonta: Don’t Call It Kids’ Safety if Kids Aren’t Safe: Attorney General Bonta Joins Bipartisan Coalition in Opposing KIDS Act

OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today joined a bipartisan coalition of 44 attorneys general in sending a letter to Congress opposing the passage of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act). The KIDS Act would broadly preempt state laws governing major online safety and technology issues — including online obscenity and regulation of artificial intelligence chatbots — while replacing them with ineffective federal standards. The letter argues that passage of the KIDS Act would threaten the progress states across the country have made in addressing the harms social media platforms pose to children, both by suing some of these platforms for acting illegally and by enacting landmark legislation designed to address the same harms targeted by the KIDS Act.

(Bonus for cool use of the   character!)

Via

Entry: 2026-05-23 00:15:02.73056+02 Woohoo Got my first I saw your North by Dan Lyke comments 0

Woohoo! Got my first "I saw your North Bay Python square dancing talk, I want to talk about gender and learning to call" message.

Entry: 2026-05-19 18:41:46.8534+02 Tunemah Peak by Dan Lyke comments 0

I'm gonna have to pay special attention to this next time we're down in the mountains of that area: Wikipedia: Tunemah Peak

Tunemah Peak is a mountain in Fresno County, California, located in the southwestern United States, with an elevation of 11,158 feet. The mountain gets its name from the nearby Tunemah Trail, which originated in 1878 when a Cantonese cook and a shepherd uttered the Cantonese curse "屌你阿媽" (Jyutping: diu² nei⁵ aa³ maa¹; lit. 'fuck your mother') while walking along the rugged trail.

Via

[ related topics: Food California Culture Hong Kong ]

Entry: 2026-05-16 18:00:02.93439+02 Reading the Suisun Expansion Specific by Dan Lyke comments 0

Reading the Suisun Expansion Specific Plan ("California Forever"), and mostly it's a look at how we could have beautiful things in our own cities if we could balance out the voices of the older NIMBY automobile violence advocates.

And maybe allow a little less emphasis on the voices of people who live in sprawl outside the city...

Entry: 2026-05-01 17:33:32.123376+02 North Bay Python 2026 Recap by Dan Lyke comments 0

Python By Night: North Bay Python 2026 Recap

[ related topics: Weblogs Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2026-04-29 21:12:17.159327+02 What is correct? by Dan Lyke comments 0

Lots of stuff I'm struggling with in this, and I need to rewatch it:

North Bay Python: "What is Correct?" and is that even the right question any more? - Christopher Neugebauer - 2026 (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Movies Monty Python California Culture Video Python ]

Entry: 2026-04-28 19:15:02.112043+02 Wow So this weekend at North Bay by Dan Lyke comments 0

Wow. So this weekend at North Bay Python, the Apify folks were doing a "try out our API, win something". I'd had a glass of wine, so I fired up my phone, did a few queries to enter myself in the raffle, and carried on.

I'm not sure what I did that's ongoing, but just got the "you hit your $100 intro bonus API cost" email.

So clearly there was something I didn't understand. Another entry in the "I'm scared of cloud billing" bucket.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2026-04-28 19:00:03.183429+02 My talk on Modern Western Square by Dan Lyke comments 0

My talk on Modern Western Square Dancing at North Bay Python this weekend is live...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJVvaz8eFwA

#NBPy

Entry: 2026-04-27 17:53:08.631121+02 An Economy of Empathy by Dan Lyke comments 0

Mario Munoz has put the text of his Sunday morning talk at North Bay Python online. I'm waiting for the recording to experience it again, but it was exactly the Sunday morning angry sermon I needed: https://pythonbynight.com/talks/empathy

Via his Fediverse post

[ related topics: Religion Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2026-04-27 00:25:03.233021+02 If you believe that the best part of a by Dan Lyke comments 0

If you believe that the best part of a conference is the hallway track, this year's North Bay Python feels like that. The conversations and presentations feel like the sort of thought provoking topics I want from a conference.

#NBPy

Entry: 2026-04-26 19:20:02.437011+02 Repeat of yesterday's picture now with by Dan Lyke comments 0

Repeat of yesterday's picture, now with more sky texture. You should be at North Bay Python.

#NBPy

[ related topics: Photography Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2026-04-25 20:15:02.491541+02 Fantastic talk from Christopher by Dan Lyke comments 0

Fantastic talk from Christopher Neugebauer to open North Bay Python: ""What is Correct?" and is that even the right question any more?"

I'm gonna have to rewatch this to let the lessons sink in.

#NBPy

[ related topics: Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2026-04-25 19:20:03.193838+02 You could be somewhere else by Dan Lyke comments 0

You could be somewhere else, or you could be at North Bay Python this weekend.

[ related topics: Photography Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2026-04-24 20:12:19.757284+02 Lots of e-dirt-bikes out there by Dan Lyke comments 0

Minetta Transportation Institute — MTI Electric Bicycle Safety Study Identifies Illegal, Over-Powered Devices as Key Problem

While nobody knows how many of these illegal electric bicycles are on the road, the percentage might be quite high. Counts of electric two-wheelers parked at a dozen northern California middle and high schools found that almost 90% may not meet the standards for legal electric bicycles. Some of these devices have as much as eight times more power than legal limits.

Entry: 2026-04-24 18:42:42.062738+02 Waymo doesn't help safety, hates cyclists by Dan Lyke comments 0

Waymo Is Not In The ‘Vision Zero’ Toolbox: Data

Waymo has told advocates that expecting it to respect bike lanes is “too high a bar” because customers expect to be dropped off in them, said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition.

“People always point out that unlike human driven cars, the AVs stop at lights and obey the speed limit. However, they are really only as good and effective and safe as they are programmed to be,” White said. “Waymos pull over into bike lanes all the time for pickups and drop-offs and that’s neither legal nor safe but the companies say that is a normal practice and that’s what customers expect.”

Expecting driverless taxis to respect bike lanes “too high a bar” – because customers want to be dropped off in them, autonomous vehicle firm Waymo tells cyclists

Last June, a cyclist in San Francisco sued the Google-owned company after she was seriously injured when one of the brand’s driverless taxis stopped in a cycle lane and a passenger opened its back door, striking the cyclist and causing her to smash into another Waymo car that was also illegally blocking the bike path.

Entry: 2026-04-18 01:26:51.810536+02 John Eastman disbarred by Dan Lyke comments 0

State Bar of California: Attorney John Eastman Disbarred by the California Supreme Court.

Context for this Bluesky thread debunking the various people attempting to exonerate him.

Via.

[ related topics: Law Current Events California Culture ]

Entry: 2026-04-17 20:39:21.542022+02 Fake bear mauls luxury automobiles by Dan Lyke comments 0

3 sentenced in 'unbelievable' bear attack insurance scam:

But the video and photos from the scene didn’t look quite right. During the investigation, detectives sent the footage to a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who “concluded the animal shown was clearly a human in a bear suit,” according to the news release from the California Department of Insurance. The team then realized similar claims had been made about damage to two Mercedes vehicles.

The news release includes a link to a Flickr image set that includes a picture of the bear suit. No human in it, alas.

Entry: 2026-04-14 17:39:29.599667+02 CHAOS by Dan Lyke comments 0

Finished CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring last night. Read it on the suggestion of a friend. I forget the context in which it came up, but...

It makes a compelling case that the LAPD and DA's office told a story about what happened that wasn't consistent with the facts, and that there was a lot of bumbling between the LASD and the LAPD. It raised a lot of questions about why Manson and his entourage may have been treated very leniently before the murders by both law enforcement and the judiciary. It points out a whole lot of intersections between the CIA's MKUltra program and various aspects of the '60s counterculture that intersected with Mason and crowd.

What I don't know after reading this is how out of the norm these various connections are. We know from so many cases in the intervening years that the LAPD and the LASD as institutions have practices of altering crime scenes and reports to fit a DA's narrative, and that judges are wont to, say, give young women who are having their first interactions with the court a little leniency in hopes that they can straighten themselves out without punishment (since, let's be fair, that's the main remedy courts have).

We also know that various US federal agencies engage in some sketchy shit in terms of internal US policies, and what university research gets funded, and a lot of this stuff may have been cleaned up a bit in the intervening years, with IRBs and all.

And the book acknowledges all of this.

So, yeah, a good read in understanding how, for instance, "conservative" factions act to make sure that the counter-culture acts in the ways that they fear, in seeing a lot of how prosecutors and "law" enforcement act to reinforce their initial suspicions, in how so much of society is intertwined. I recommend it from that front.

But frustrating (and, again, the author acknowledges this) that in the end this is the tangled yarn of a connection board without a clear picture emerging. It's the tale of the decisions a society makes, without an overarching story.

Fascinating read, I'm glad I went through it, but still trying to figure out what it means.

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