I've never been up in this San Rafael neighborhood before.
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.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Music Nature and environment Invention and Design Food Bay Area Space & Astronomy Writing Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture California Culture Boats Education Birds ]
Entry: 2026-07-26 22:30:04.93334+02 I've never been up in this San Rafael by Dan Lyke comments 0
I've never been up in this San Rafael neighborhood before.
[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]
Entry: 2026-07-21 19:46:58.213128+02 Chuck Tingle at the Internet Archive by Dan Lyke comments 0
Sorry I missed this: Doctor M. Popular: Chuck Tingle at the Internet Archive in SF.
[ related topics: Health Bay Area Net Culture ]
Entry: 2026-07-21 19:20:17.210922+02 Tuesday morning LLM links by Dan Lyke comments 0
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.
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.
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.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Photography Weblogs Movies Food Bay Area Theater & Plays Sociology Writing Law Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Graphics Civil Liberties California Culture Graphic Design Currency Skating Artificial Intelligence ]
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: 2026-07-01 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.
[ related topics: tolkien Bay Area Law Current Events California Culture Education Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-06-24 18:50:03.042532+02 Nothing makes me sadder than to by Dan Lyke comments 0
Nothing makes me sadder than to carefully use a safe browser to follow the link in a scammy looking spam text, only to discover that it actually does legitimately end up at ActBlue.
[ related topics: Spam Bay Area Monty Python ]
Entry: 2026-06-15 18:22:28.13438+02 Lead Paint Theory of Anti Gentrification by Dan Lyke comments 0
We see this a lot in arguments about
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 @maxdubler.com
The Lead Paint Theory of Anti Gentrification holds that activists can prevent displacement and preserve housing affordability by preserving neighborhood disamenities and blocking investment in quality of life improvements like parks, bike lanes, and libraries. It does not work.
is quoting Sam Gould @form67.bsky.social
I attended an urban infrastructure panel where a UC Berkeley professor argued that libraries were gentrification. I am really struggling to see how this is different from a Republican position of denying knowledge, tools, and technology to low income, disadvantaged neighborhoods.
And has a screenshot of a tweet from X user @AllisonB916 “rent controller OG”:
Taking down freeways in some situations would open the community to gentrification—what protects the community is the damn freeway.
[ related topics: Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Community Bicycling Economics Archival Real Estate ]
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: 2026-06-11 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: 2026-05-27 00:18:41.689236+02 Don’t Call It Kids’ Safety if Kids Aren’t Safe by Dan Lyke comments 0
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!)
[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Sexual Culture Bay Area Law Current Events Journalism and Media California Culture Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Government ]
Entry: 2026-05-22 19:50:56.659809+02 Billionaires around Mars by Dan Lyke comments 0
If we can send one crypto-billionaire to Mars, why can't we send them all? SpaceX Taps Crypto Billionaire to Lead First Crewed Mission to Mars
During the live webcast, SpaceX played a video of cryptocurrency billionaire and civilian astronaut Chun Wang speaking from Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Wang, who has gone to space one time before, explained that he will embark on a Starship flyby of the Moon and Mars. SpaceX has not shared a target launch date for the mission, but it could be the world’s first interplanetary human spaceflight.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Astronomy Cryptography Video ]
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.”
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.
[ related topics: Bay Area Law Current Events California Culture Automobiles Pedal Power Race Bicycling ]
Entry: 2026-04-20 19:55:13.705868+02 Are Waymos making SF safer? by Dan Lyke comments 0
i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
i mean, there is a slight increase over the last two years but there's sufficient variance to avoid suggesting a trend
as i understand it, waymos tend to take people off busses and other forms of transit, rather than out of their own cars
so i'm doubtful it will lower deaths on the road, just the number of busses
[ related topics: Bay Area Mathematics Public Transportation ]
Entry: 2026-04-18 23:20:02.975565+02 Down to Sausalito for the community by Dan Lyke comments 0
Down to Sausalito for the community garage sale this morning, and we're taking the slow way home. Stopped in Roy's Redwoods, first time we've been there since they refinishef the trail revamp.
Miss the old sense of wandering through forest but, given the increase in visitors, it's really nice.
[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Community Sausalito ]
Entry: 2026-04-10 16:52:06.504169+02 Anti AI rant by Dan Lyke comments 0
I wrote a kid's homework for them over on Reddit
My complaints center mostly around LLMs, with a slight diversion into generative AI for music and images:
My first complaint is just the quality of the output. I keep having... you know, the kinds of friends who DM you random whackadoodle Substack articles, only now they're DMing acres and acres of LLM generated slop and saying "this is so insightful" and it isn't. It's mediocre writing that often doesn't actually make sense. Really, when you use an LLM to generate prose it's doing the metaphorical equivalent of seven fingered humans, you're just not smart enough to see it.
The second complaint is the outsourcing of thinking. I mean, sure, you can make the argument that these things are analogous to calculators and you don't actually need to do arithmetic, but a lot of what I'm seeing is that people have stopped critically reading the output altogether. Or, if they're coding, they're losing the mental model of the code they're writing. Turning out stuff that appears to work, sure, but they're quickly dropping into delusions about what the LLM can and can't know, and they have no mental model for the code that's actually being generated.
Which, you know, is fine if you don't actually care how things work, but understanding how things work is how we figure out new and novel and interesting ways to use technologies, and that's not coming out of LLMs.
The third is how that ties into the anthropormophization of these things. The literature refers to this as "epistemia", but I see a lot of thinking that the LLM is thinking, and because of the "slot machine" payoff nature of these things that may be often enough to actually be really compelling, but then they use it for something where they get a grievously wrong answer, and the crater is pretty big. And because of well known issues of attention and operator fatigue, there's really no good way to outsource the kind of attention that's necessary to get good output from these things to humans. Use of them will bite you.
(Cue all of the cocky kids saying "skill issue". Dude, if that skill issue could be solved, C would be a safe programming language. Fuck all the way off with that argument.)
Then we get into the ethics of how these things are trained.
The theft of content. I don't even get that cranky about the huge percentage of traffic that's hitting my web servers from AI vendors and making it harder to have personal sites, the use of pirated materials, and remixing of intellectual properties in ways that individual humans would never get away with feels like a different set of rules. Anthropic and OpenAI pirated how many books? And they're getting a slap on the wrist, after huge efforts.
I'm old enough to remember when the record industry went after Napster users. If there were justice applied equally... well...
The power use, from local pollution to climate change to just electricity prices. If there were some sort of good coming out of it, sure, but, as pointed out up-thread, the LLMs are overhyped stupidity (every claim for success from these things has been a lie stemming from overtraining on test data or randomness), and the images are just stupid. Sure, they now mostly get the right number of fingers, but we're gonna burn down the planet for those aesthetics. Eeewww.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Books Music Cool Science Ethics Nature and environment Invention and Design Bay Area Software Engineering Space & Astronomy Writing Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Gambling Global Warming hubris ]
Entry: 2026-04-08 19:00:03.637866+02 Unpopular opinion Rust is the C of by Dan Lyke comments 0
Unpopular opinion: Rust is the C of memory safe languages.
I'd really like a performant language that lets me not have all sorts of ugly boilerplate code when representing reasonable data structures.
[ related topics: Bay Area ]
Entry: 2026-03-31 08:05:03.629377+02 Every time I think fuuuu why did I by Dan Lyke comments 0
Every time I think "fuuuu, why did I sign up for another gig this week?", and then I go call a square dance, and I'm like "oh, yeah, that's why".
Tonight the Caper Cutters in San Francisco.
[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]
Entry: 2026-03-24 00:23:09.301991+01 a collective-level fail-safe feature by Dan Lyke comments 0
Psychology Today: Epistemic Injustice: The Great Gaslighting of Autistic Lives
Via and via, in linking to the latter post Manuèle Ducret @Filambulle@mastodon.social observed:
Instead of empathy deficit, autistic people demonstrate a broader moral concern, extending fairness beyond their tribes. Where researchers had assumed impairment, they found autistic people applying moral principles more consistently—even to strangers, even when costly. In a world increasingly damaged by in-group bias, this isn't a deficit; it's a collective-level fail-safe feature.
[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Ethics Bay Area Aviation - Helicopters ]
Entry: 2026-03-20 17:23:53.344997+01 a woman math major at the University of Chicago circa 2004 by Dan Lyke comments 0
Megan Wachspress: A Fuller Statement About My Bluesky Posts
The fuller version of Megan Wachspress @meganwachspress.bsky.social
If he's going to get a national profile on the strength of a younger woman's campaign, I'm going to come out and say it: during his short-lived tenure as a math professor, Biss had an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his undergraduate students. I was that student.
about NPR: A race for a safe blue seat tests how far left Democrats want new leaders to go that includes coverage of Evanston Illinois mayor Daniel Biss in the run for the state's 9th congressional district.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Invention and Design Bay Area Journalism and Media Mathematics ]
Entry: 2026-03-11 20:16:58.23136+01 Let's get together and sing! by Dan Lyke comments 0
We've been singing with various local community song circle groups for a while, Marv Zauderer's group down in Marin, Janice Hardy's group here in Petaluma with Janice Hardy (I've been collecting those songs here).
I mentioned that Marv's hosting Riomas was super powerful, and we came home and immediately pre-ordered Gather Your Resilience: Medicine for Liberation by Riomas.
We've seen this movement blossom with the media coverage of the singing resistance in Minneapolis, there's gonna be a lot of song at the next No Kings rally, and seems like in a lot of other places.
Anyway, as awesome as it is to have all of this modern music flowing through song leaders, it's useful to keep track of the history: Elaine Kolb's 1981 Let's Get Together has been published, with her agreement, on Archive.org.
[ related topics: Music Bay Area Journalism and Media Community Archival ]
Entry: 2026-03-02 15:25:28.002824+01 by Dan Lyke comments 0
On Saturday evening, Charlene and I were sitting out on our front patio eating dinner and watching drivers run the Mission & Mountain View stop signs (spending some more time gathering video of this in order to make a montage to post to Facebook and NextDoor titled "those fucking bicyclists" is a fantasy project).
The social media comments on the news of two recent killings of cyclists on rural roads around Petaluma are filled with "yeah, that road isn't safe for bicycles, I don't know what they were doing there".
We hear that the city has over 200 requests for traffic calming and safety improvements in their barely funded safe streets programs.
But here we have an example of where a metropolitan region of 1.5 million people has decided that killing people for convenience is not acceptable.
Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death.
[ related topics: Erotic Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media Video Bicycling ]
Entry: 2026-02-26 18:11:41.359263+01 US has net emigration by Dan Lyke comments 0
WSJ on MSN: Americans are leaving the US in record numbers
Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.
Direct WSJ link, both via.
[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events ]
Entry: 2026-02-20 18:04:16.753444+01 Please Explain Your Genocide by Dan Lyke comments 0
Just catching up on saved links: Pass the Rice, and Please Explain Your Genocide
At a thoughtfully organized dinner in Oakland, Palestinian culinary activists shared more than just food — they offered their stories, their resilience, and their patience
[ related topics: Food Bay Area ]
Entry: 2026-02-20 00:03:24.837493+01 Protest Music by Dan Lyke comments 0
Just gathering more protest songs here...
Willie Nelson - Heart Of America (From The Gray House Original Soundtrack) (Not sure I like this trend of AI generated video)
"Minnesota" - Marsh Family adaptation of "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"
From back in January, but it was still marked as pending in my queue MPR News: How Minnesota musicians are responding in real time to federal shootings.
[ related topics: Movies Bay Area Sociology Current Events Civil Liberties California Culture Artificial Intelligence Video Real Estate ]
Entry: 2026-02-19 18:33:09.249727+01 Tesla Robotaxi 4x worse than human drivers by Dan Lyke comments 0
An elderly friend of mine recently splurged on a Tesla with FSD. YouTubers have made him a Musk fanboy, and he's wanted something like this, and he's also of the opinion that his age and health mean that he's less safe to drive, and...
I took a ride with him in his car, and it is, indeed, pretty amazing. Had a little trouble in parking lots, though that may have been because he got impatient and overrode it, but it's managing most standard driving tasks pretty well.
However, he's also ordering dark glasses from Zenni so that he doesn't have to be quite so attentive, to fool the gaze direction stuff. And I wonder about attention fatigue. Anyway, this is with safety drivers, I suspect attention fatigue is a real thing. I hope that said friend manages to avoid this problem, and if he doesn't that he doesn't harm anyone...
Elektrek: Tesla ‘Robotaxi’ adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month — 4x worse than humans
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Bay Area moron Automobiles ]
Entry: 2026-02-12 00:59:02.264969+01 The Internet's business model is betrayal. by Dan Lyke comments 0
Michael W Lucas @mwl@io.mwl.io:
Inspired by a discussion elsewhere:
I've been on the Internet since 1987, started a career building the commercial Internet in 1995, and have spent the last 25 years writing books about how to build foundational Internet infrastructure. I've consulted for and worked with any number of dot-coms, and the one lesson I've gotten over and over again?
The Internet's business model is betrayal.
We have no smart lights. No voice assistants. No Alexa or Siri. No video doorbell. Our thermostat and appliances constantly complain about their lack of Internet. None of this stuff is safe.
The Internet tech I do use? A desktop PC. Email on my phone is for travel only: airplane tickets, hotel reservations, hockey and concert tix. Location on my phone? Nope, we use a dedicated non-networked GPS in the car. The microphones are off.
How can a light bulb betray me? I don't know. I do know that the vendors have put a LOT of thought into it, though, and I can't out-think all of them.
[ related topics: Books Star Wars Aviation Bay Area Writing Sports Travel Net Culture Automobiles Community Maps and Mapping Video ]
Entry: 2026-02-09 21:30:01.445965+01 SFUSD shovels money at OpenAI by Dan Lyke comments 0
How do we know AI is a grift? School admins are bypassing sanity in order to shovel money into it. San Francisco Unified School District Approves OpenAI Contract, Bypassing Board and Raising Student Privacy Concerns.
Via.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Privacy Bay Area California Culture Currency Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-02-06 17:59:37.508384+01 units of sin by Dan Lyke comments 0
Mike Taylor 🦕 @mike@sauropods.win
I was thinking about how strange it is that the cupboard in a bathroom is called a "vanity unit", and then I got to thinking, what if all your furniture was named after the seven deadly sins?
* Bathroom cupboard = vanity unit
* Paid-work office = avarice unit
* Computer gaming station = anger unit
* Device running social media = envy unit
* Bed = lust unit
* Induction hob = gluttony unit
* Sofa = sloth unit
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Bay Area Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Sports Furniture Home Improvement ]
Entry: 2026-02-03 17:20:53.413689+01 burned alive by Kurt Russell by Dan Lyke comments 0
"Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it's safe to assume we've been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell," said a game design consultant in the US.
Via.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-01-24 00:40:19.738662+01 "The device, which Heyneman said does not work..." by Dan Lyke comments 0
The device, which Heyneman said does not work, is meant to recognize the unique characteristics of a silicon chip to prevent financial fraud.
Of course what's working is also vibe-coded.
Via.
[ related topics: Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Community Economics hubris ]
Entry: 2026-01-22 18:15:07.991943+01 Reading about Georgism and coercive by Dan Lyke comments 0
Reading about Georgism and coercive economics, and then I see more employer provided housing in the SF Bay Area (this about an SF restaurant, but context included a convenience store owner in Sebastopol), and...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/fo...tment-san-francisco-21291046.php
[ related topics: Food Bay Area Work, productivity and environment California Culture Economics Real Estate Furniture ]
Entry: 2026-01-22 00:52:59.512766+01 Mental illness and LLMs by Dan Lyke comments 0
"They straight up took my data and used it against me to capture me further and make me even more delusional."
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff calls out AI models as 'suicide coaches'
In three public appearances, the executive of San Francisco’s largest tech company used the phrase “suicide coach” to describe the chatbot from Character.AI — a Menlo Park startup sued by multiple families over their children’s mental health crises. Benioff discussed the issue with TV interviewers from CNBC and Bloomberg, then on stage with President Donald Trump’s AI czar David Sacks. Calling out the United States’ failure to regulate social media, the CEO advocated for new accountability measures aimed at chatbot companies.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Technology and Culture Health Movies Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media Television California Culture Artificial Intelligence Video Gambling ]
Entry: 2025-12-29 18:39:00.103486+01 ChatGPT tries to kill tourists by Dan Lyke comments 0
Wales Online: Restaurant boss saves two people's lives after desperately shouting for them to stop
One of them told her he had consulted ChatGPT to find tide times before deeming it safe to venture out to the island early on Wednesday. He said: “I made the mistake of using ChatGPT for research to see when the low tide was. It said 9.30am. So we were out on that side and then as soon as you come back over it was literally completely different. A lesson learned for me.”
Via.
[ related topics: Food Bay Area Current Events Woodworking ]
Entry: 2025-12-24 06:40:03.099458+01 Went into the city to hang with by Dan Lyke comments 0
Went into the city to hang with friends. Google Maps transit data has really gone to shit. From trying to direct me to non-existent bus stops, to sending me way out of my way for connections, it's... Not good.
And they still miss the feature I most want, a "maximize walking", because I know I'm gated through a once an hour bus, how many steps up Van Ness can I safely take before I risk being between stops?
[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Maps and Mapping Public Transportation ]
Entry: 2025-12-23 18:17:44.449072+01 growing vaccines with yeasts by Dan Lyke comments 0
Science News: He made beer that’s also a vaccine. Now controversy is brewing kinda buries the lede under the sensationalism, or maybe the sensationalism is the point:
Buck’s body made antibodies against several types of the virus after drinking the beer and he suffered no ill effects, he and his brother Andrew Buck reported December 17 at the data sharing platform Zenodo.org, along with colleagues from NIH and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Andrew and other family members have also consumed the beer with no ill effects, he says. The Buck brothers posted a method for making vaccine beer December 17 at Zenodo.org. Chris Buck announced both publications in his blog Viruses Must Die on the online publishing platform Substack, but neither has been peer-reviewed by other scientists.
because it's about generating oral vaccines cultured in yeasts using FDA "generally recognized as safe" ingredients to count as supplements rather than medicines, which seems like all sorts o' both cans o' worms, and fascinating evolutions of how the regulatory and public health environment are evolving.
Via.
[ related topics: Weblogs Health virus Nature and environment Bay Area Sociology Current Events Beer Education ]
Entry: 2025-12-15 18:21:00.465906+01 ICE cars no safer for pedestrians than EVs by Dan Lyke comments 0
University of Leeds: EVs 'just as safe for pedestrians'
The paper ‘Comparing pedestrian safety between electric and internal combustion engine vehicles’ by Zia Wadud, Professor of Mobility and Energy Futures at Leeds, was published on 9 December in Nature Communications.
They’re also no safer. Which reminds us that “better cars” aren’t the main answer to the consequences of cars. The main answer is fewer (and smaller) cars driven less frequently in better cities.
[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area Current Events Machinery Education Economics ]
Entry: 2025-12-15 18:20:12.848173+01 ICE cars no safer for pedestrians than EVs by Dan Lyke comments 0
University of Leeds: EVs 'just as safe for pedestrians'
The paper ‘Comparing pedestrian safety between electric and internal combustion engine vehicles’ by Zia Wadud, Professor of Mobility and Energy Futures at Leeds, was published on 9 December in Nature Communications.
They’re also no safer. Which reminds us that “better cars” aren’t the main answer to the consequences of cars. The main answer is fewer (and smaller) cars driven less frequently in better cities.
[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area Current Events Machinery Education Economics ]
Entry: 2025-12-05 17:50:42.104725+01 Reverse engineering Linux malware by Dan Lyke comments 0
LinkPro: eBPF rootkit analysis
LinkPro targets GNU/Linux systems and is developed in Golang. The Synacktiv CSIRT names it LinkPro in reference to the symbol defining its main module:
github.com/link-pro/link-client. The GitHub account link-pro has no public repositories or contributions. LinkPro uses eBPF technology to only activate upon receiving a "magic packet", and to conceal itself on the compromised system.
(eBPF is the "extended Berkeley Packet Filter")
[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Bay Area Clowns ]
Entry: 2025-12-01 17:48:29.639118+01 Fire Department vs Safety Advocates by Dan Lyke comments 0
Darrell Owens: The Fire Department vs. Traffic Safety Advocates
A firefighter sympathetic to the fire officials argued to me that traffic calming slowed the fire department’s ability to respond to fires. But firefighters and EMT affiliates spend far more time collecting bodies from car accidents enabled by car-oriented road design than they do fighting structural fires. Between 2010 and 2022, structural fires in Berkeley injured an average of 2 people per year, while between just 2017 and 2022, traffic accidents injured or killed an average of 694 people annually. (Report here). This is proportionally true of most cities in the United States. This month, a cyclist was hit and killed on one of the streets fire officials want to keep free of street festivals.
[ related topics: Bay Area Law Enforcement Automobiles Pyrotechnics Graphic Design ]
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