My neighborhood is like a third of the way to "The Italian Job"
Entry: 2025-04-28 03:30:03.209222+02 My neighborhood is like a third of the by Dan Lyke comments 0
My neighborhood is like a third of the way to "The Italian Job"
[ related topics: Photography Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-04-27 00:00:38.429241+02 instant technical debt by Dan Lyke comments 0
Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town
Just described model-generated code as "instant technical debt" and I have to make sure not to use that in a job interview.
[ related topics: Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-04-21 17:33:01.79891+02 ex-pope by Dan Lyke comments 0
Something in the air... Rick Gualtieri @rickgualtieri.bsky.social
So, reading between the lines, the Pope basically decided he would rather die than meet with JD Vance.
We get it, Pope Francis. Trust me, we do.
Soatok Dreamseeker @soatok@furry.engineer
Pope Francis met with JD Vance and then literally fucking died of cringe.
Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone (accompanied by a picture)
this meeting could have been a (leaked) signal chat
Newsthump: Pope loses will to live after meeting JD Vance
A White House spokesperson told us, “This President is all about creating jobs for Americans, and just hours after a visit from the Vice President, we find yet another top global job has become available.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social
I find it pretty interesting that US Vice President keeps referring to the late Pope as "Francis" instead of Jorge Mario Bergoglio – I thought James Donald Bowman had pretty strong opinions on birthnames. 🤔
[ related topics: Theater & Plays Heinlein Race Gambling Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-04-09 18:27:53.256126+02 Border Patrol lying by Dan Lyke comments 0
Nationwide there are roughly four times more Border Patrol than ICE agents. In El Centro, there are five Border Patrol agents whose job it is to produce videos.
Their latest project is a series of fictionalized videos portraying migrants crossing the border as menaces with a bloodlust to commit crimes. Bovino shared the first video on social media with the caption: “Any town. Any neighborhood. Any family. When heartless criminals, sex offenders, and human traffickers illegally enter the United States and get away, they prey on our children, the most vulnerable members of our communities.”
We know, of course, that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, statistically are less likely to engage in criminal activity than citizens.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Journalism and Media Heinlein Community Video Economics ]
Entry: 2025-04-03 23:36:03.238695+02 Today's tariff news by Dan Lyke comments 0
Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff.” The White House objected to this claim and published the formula it says that it used, but as Politico points out, the formula looks like a dressed-up version of Surowiecki’s method.
The price level from all 2025 tariffs rises by 2.3% in the short-run, the equivalent of an average per household consumer loss of $3,800 in 2024$. Annual losses for households at the bottom of the income distribution are $1,700.
As others have pointed out, in the face of an 11½% effective percentage point increase, it's perhaps worth looking back to previous tariff disasters
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff remains a cautionary example of protectionist economic policy, frequently cited in debates over the risks and consequences of trade restrictions in modern economic discourse.[3] Excluding duty-free imports, the tariffs under the act were the third highest in U.S. history, after the tariffs imposed on the world by Trump in 2025 and Tariff of 1828.[4]
[ related topics: Dave Winer Invention and Design Current Events Consumerism and advertising Heinlein Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Race Economics Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-03-27 17:50:02.340999+01 I think it's becoming more and more by Dan Lyke comments 0
I think it's becoming more and more clear that the "AI job skills" for the future will not be focused on using AI as an assistant, but in understanding and mitigating the impacts of AI as an adversary.
[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-03-25 15:25:02.92101+01 Heard someone yesterday who's part of a by Dan Lyke comments 0
Heard someone yesterday who's part of a healthcare startup bemoan that their IT group isn't approving use of Microsoft's LLM product, and... We as an industry have done a really bad job educating people about privacy, security, *and* LLMs.
[ related topics: Humor Privacy Microsoft moron Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-03-22 00:59:52.10654+01 ChatGPT and loneliness by Dan Lyke comments 0
OpenAI has released its first research into how using ChatGPT affects people’s emotional wellbeing
The researchers found some intriguing differences between how men and women respond to using ChatGPT. After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialize with people than their male counterparts who did the same. Meanwhile, participants who set ChatGPT’s voice mode to a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment. OpenAI currently has no plans to publish either study.
OpenAI Study Finds Links Between ChatGPT Use and Loneliness
Those who spent more time typing or speaking with ChatGPT each day tended to report higher levels of emotional dependence on, and problematic use of, the chatbot, as well as heightened levels of loneliness, according to research released Friday. The findings were part of a pair of studies conducted by researchers at the two organizations and have not been peer reviewed.
[ related topics: Current Events Heinlein Gambling ]
Entry: 2025-03-17 22:04:31.839321+01 Willing to take that risk by Dan Lyke comments 0
The great thing about this story isn't the guy who's willing to go to jail for destruction of evidence rather than cop to corporate espionage, it's that the Deel executive team was so bloody inept in their spying when they fell for the Rippling honeypot: Lawsuit Alleges $12 Billion "Unicorn" Deel Cultivated Spy, Orchestrated Long-Running Trade-Secret Theft & Corporate Espionage Against Competitor
Deel’s Alleged Spy Locked Himself in Bathroom When Confronted by Court-Appointed Solicitors Friday
“I’m Willing to Take that Risk [of Violating the Court Order]” Alleged Deel Spy Declared When Served with Legal Papers to Hand Over His Phone
[ related topics: Weblogs Law Heinlein Sports ]
Entry: 2025-03-11 18:02:09.715832+01 AI Search has a citation problem by Dan Lyke comments 0
Columbia Journalism Review: AI Search Has A Citation Problem
Chatbots’ responses to our queries were often confidently wrong
Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.
TechMeme rounds up coverage, got this from Their Fediverse feed.
[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-01-27 19:35:02.903451+01 OH Keeping up with React changes is a by Dan Lyke comments 2
OH: "Keeping up with React changes is a full-time job".
So, uh, tell me again what this framework is offering?
[ related topics: Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-01-18 00:50:43.213564+01 Is cinema sexy again? by Dan Lyke comments 0
I'm trending remarkably vanilla, but this is interesting: Is cinema sexy again? How 'Babygirl' is inspiring important conversations about kink
“I think that Babygirl does an excellent job of portraying two people, new to BDSM/kink, trying to understand and act on their desires,” Dr. Stefani Goerlich, a clinical sexologist and award-winning author, says.
“Unfortunately, it does an excellent job of showing the risks, dangers, and pitfalls of trying to stumble into kink - without calling them out as such in the film. So the end result is a film that accurately depicts the ways in which people new-to-BDSM can get themselves into trouble (physical and emotional) but it is NOT a positive portrayal of BDSM, because it shows these negative outcomes without critical analysis or discussion of how to do things correctly.”
[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design Sociology Television Heinlein California Culture Community ]
Entry: 2024-11-26 18:35:02.615631+01 One Petaluma podcast feels like it by Dan Lyke comments 0
The One Petaluma podcast feels like it sometimes struggles to get its feet, but I'm really enjoying episode #4 where city staff talk about what drew them to and keeps them in the job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRoDNtyyzdM
[ related topics: Movies Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-11-07 19:25:42.097752+01 Automate that gold farming! by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Merry Jerry 🎄🎅🕎⛄️❄️ @jerry@infosec.exchange
I think i stumbled on the next billion dollar idea: AI bots to play video games for you. Playing video games can be mentally taxing - wouldn’t it be nice to offload that work to AI so you can do other things, like get a 3rd job to help pay for my game playing AI bot?
[ related topics: Games Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Currency Artificial Intelligence Video ]
Entry: 2024-11-05 20:18:22.39178+01 Strategy by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT RolloTreadway @RolloTreadway@beige.party
@davej @RickiTarr There's an old trade unionist saying here in the UK, which I bring up quite often but it often bears repeating:
Vote Labour on Thursday, fight Labour on Friday.
And I think that works in most countries, replacing Labour with the name of the relevant party. You vote for the people you're most able to influence, you do everything you can to help them win, and when they do win, that's when you get to work.
[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-10-29 22:35:02.02242+01 Julia Evans does a great job of by Dan Lyke comments 2
Julia Evans does a great job of demystifying things like Git, and recontextualizing a lot of technologies that olds like me take for granted for the kids these days.
It's fascinating to see this "what do the control characters do" chart, because there's so much "yeah, but, and...", and yet it's kinda mostly right and I can see that contextualization.
https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/113392535388687769
[ related topics: Children and growing up Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-10-29 21:14:43.618+01 Virtual interviewee by Dan Lyke comments 0
What I’m really not sure about though is what the endgame is for this person? How will they pass 3-4 rounds of interviews? What will they achieve if offered a job? When does the time spent on this pay off?
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Video ]
Entry: 2024-10-22 21:25:02.855833+02 Realization by Dan Lyke comments 0
Realization: LLMs are automating Malcolm Gladwell's job.
[ related topics: Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-10-12 17:46:43.349261+02 Limited Federation by Dan Lyke comments 0
Shades of the old Elf Sternberg "Balkanize Usenet" proposal: The Oliphant: Islands
Islands are opt-in federated networks consisting of a chain of allowlist or “limited federation” servers linked together. Everyone in the network federates with each other, and as such the entire network is more resilient and able to handle moderation challenges simply impossible in the wider fediverse.
Although I think Tara is doing an amazing job at moderating the Mastodon instance I use.
[ related topics: broadband tolkien Writing Heinlein Net Culture ]
Entry: 2024-09-30 03:45:02.533712+02 And Friday was miserable yesterday I by Dan Lyke comments 0
And Friday was miserable, yesterday I was a total lump, today I got out in the shop and did some stuff (built some fixtures for bandsaw bearings, still don't know why the blade is drifting like it is, need to get work sorted so I feel justified in springing for the Carter upgrade rather than something I built myself with a file and a hack saw and skate bearings).
But I'm definitely testing positive for COVID now. Ugh.
[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Skating Woodworking ]
Entry: 2024-09-10 00:51:41.23322+02 Square dance community musings by Dan Lyke comments 0
As I won't shut up about, Charlene and I obviously had a good time at Sactown Stomp this last weekend. Re-energized us on much of what we love about square dancing and the square dance community. Some good conversations there, and the drive home involved discussion about what we could do short of trying to start a club again to help bring more of the energy we love to our participation in square dancing. Which made us ask what makes the square dance fly-in format so much more sense of community than the club event, and I think we settled on a few things:
So we're trying to think about what this means. Would it draw anyone, for instance, to rent a hall for the day before an evening dance and inviting some callers you may not have experienced before to play? Are two rooms important for that?
Is there a way to get the sense of "sitting down with friends for dinner" without completely overwhelming a single kitchen by bringing 3 squares of people into a restaurant at one time? Does catering work? (This is where a few hundred people and a walkable region around a hotel works.)
No answers, just brainstorming. Thinking about venues (a walkable downtown would be cool for so many reasons, so could ya, like, rent Out West Garage for a weekend?). Thinking about ways to piggyback on existing events. Thinking about the SCVSDA Jubilee and other similar events...
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Food Space & Astronomy Law Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Travel Community ]
Entry: 2024-09-09 19:18:53.203986+02 Weekend by Dan Lyke comments 0
Friday we went up to Sacramento, plugged the car into an L2 charger in a garage in old town Sacramento, wandered through the heat towards downtown, eventually found Capital Books, came back via a snack at Salud restaurant on Cesar Chavez plaza, to discover that the L2 charger was running about 3kW. Sigh. Anyway, fun party that evening, danced 'til I couldn't see straight at Sactown Stomp, hosted by Capital City Squares. First time seeing so many of those folks since COVID started, some bumps 'cause this was an attempt to reboot Stumptown Stomp in a new venue (that wasn't as walkable as Guerneville, both from geography and heat) and carpet in one of the dance venues.
Sunday we went up to Grass Valley on Sunday, saw those kids, but/and... trying to keep to L2 charging, in the afternoon we parked the car up at the campus, hung out at the koi pond, and walked down to Briarpatch Co-op to refill water and use the bathroom and stuff. So we bought a container of gelato and sat in the AC and I noticed that there, in the community ownership locally grown whatever and so forth (with, let's be fair, prices to match)... that it was a Unilever brand.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Invention and Design Food Heinlein Sports Automobiles Community Fashion Maps and Mapping Woodworking ]
Entry: 2024-07-19 17:39:22.678587+02 Recruiting, with visas and champagne by Dan Lyke comments 0
SpaceX rivals are trying to capitalize on Elon Musk’s move to Texas by poaching his employees. Stanislas Maximin, of Latitude:
"For SpaceX employees misaligned with these values and looking to join an inclusive and highly ambitious rocket company in a great living city near Paris, my DMs are open," he wrote on X.
"We take care of everything for you; moving out, visas, full healthcare, your house/apartment, finding your spouse a job… a few have already taken the plunge, join them!" Maximin said. He added that he would offer 12 bottles of champagne to every engineer making the move.
Via.
[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Marriage Real Estate ]
Entry: 2024-07-08 23:24:06.794119+02 Productivity and hours worked by Dan Lyke comments 0
Good to see DeMarco & Lister mentioned in this. It's amazing how much modern software development stuff ignores things that we knew back in 1987: RT david_chisnall @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
@bbbhltz @hacks4pancakes When people join my team, I tell them to go and look at productivity studies. Across different industries (I originally thought this was solely for knowledge workers, but I recently chatted to a researcher who has reproduced the same result in the construction industry), they all show roughly the same shape:
Productivity increases up to 20 hours a week.
It then plateaus up to 40.
It then starts to decrease and is typically negative by about 60.
This is the total net productivity, not the delta. If you are working 60 hour weeks, you would probably be more productive if you just stayed in bed all day.
For programmers, just think about how long it takes to fix a bug that you introduced when you were tired. Fixing mistakes (in any field) is often slow and expensive. Reducing the likelihood of making mistakes is usually much cheaper.
This is for sustained periods. People can often be productive for a 60-hour week if they are well rested, so if you have a one-off urgent deadline, it *may*be okay to work longer hours to meet it, as long as you take enough time off to recover. Averaged out (factoring in the recovery time), this tends to be less productive overall (ignoring the secondary impacts on people who have other commitments, like to see their families, and so on), so it’s generally a bad idea.
I want the most productive 20 hours of each employee each week. I don’t care when they happen (I’ve worked with some people who find they are most productive 2-4am, and that’s fine). Employees are responsible for getting enough rest to make sure that they can be productive for 20 hours each week.
I wrote our vacation policy to be explicit about the point of leave. It is not a gift from the company. It is not a reward for good behaviour. It is an obligation from the employees to the company to ensure that their brains are taken care of so that they can be productive. My contract (which is the model for new employees) has a minimum amount of leave I must take each year and a maximum time I can go without taking at least two days of leave.
The book I most recommend to new managers is PeopleWare and the most important point in that book is that, as a manager, it is not your job to make people work. Most people take pride in their work and want to do it well. Your job is to remove obstacles that stop them from being able to do good work. I don’t think it goes quite far enough because sometimes the biggest obstacle is the employee. If you’re hiring smart and motivated people, the most likely failure mode is that they work too hard and don’t notice their productivity dropping off. Sometimes you have to force them to take a week off (and you need a leave policy that supports you in doing so).
Sorry for the long rant, I haven’t had coffee yet and bad management annoys me, even when it’s depressingly accurate satire.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Invention and Design Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Machinery Fabrication Model Building Furniture ]
Entry: 2024-07-02 18:08:38.169261+02 "AI" cynicism of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
Goldman Sachs: Gen AI: too much spend, too little benefit? Turns out $50B for $3B in revenue might not be a great trade-off.
Business Insider: Goldman Sachs says the return on investment for AI might be disappointing
Via @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange who points out that, among other things:
Experienced developers using Copilot are 20% less productive.
Which I think we knew, we also know that Copilot generated code creates technical debt. And that training costs are going up faster than capability increases.
RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social
An AI thing I'm watching play out at another org:
1: Expert A, with a deep understanding of a nuanced and difficult problem answers a question they've been given, offering several options.
2: Director B, recipient, uses an AI to summarize it and then runs it up to leadership saying, "A says this." That generated summary is subtly and very wrong.
3: A is now being held responsible for plans made based on B's AI-generated and very wrong rewriting of his recommendations.
Fun times.
To which Amelia Bellamy-Royds @AmeliaBR@front-end.social replied:
@mhoye New addendum to "A computer can never be held accountable, so a computer should never make a management decision":
Managers who think their job can be replaced by a computer, and who will do anything to avoid being held to account, they should never make a management decision, either.
Edit, just because I needed a place to hang it 'cause I don't think it's actually worth following, but it's nice to have: Vox: What, if anything, is AI search good for? (tl;dr: nobody knows)
[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Economics ]
Entry: 2024-06-19 19:55:01.893718+02 Because it's fire season way by Dan Lyke comments 0
Because it's fire season, way early, another shout out to https://www.watchduty.org/ . In a world where "local journalism" seems to be "republishing Nixle alerts, but with typos", Watch Duty does an *amazing* job of integrating public data, crowd-sourced information, and official updates.
Definitely worth donating to and using if you're in fire country.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Journalism and Media Heinlein Pyrotechnics ]
Entry: 2024-06-17 23:31:58.9238+02 Ants on Caffeine by Dan Lyke comments 0
Sure, let's give ants drugs, what could go wrong? Pest Management Professional: Caffeine experiment poses new strategies for ant control
Ants given caffeine do an even better job of locating food
The focus here seems to be not on weaponized picnic destruction, but on getting ants to carry poisons back to their nests faster, but...
iScience: Acute exposure to caffeine improves foraging in an invasive ant
Without caffeine, we found no effect of consecutive foraging visits on the time the ants take to reach a reward, suggesting a failure to learn the reward’s location. However, under low to intermediate caffeine concentrations ants were 38% faster with each consecutive visit, implying that caffeine boosts learning. Interestingly, such improvements were lost at high doses.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.109935
[ related topics: Drugs Health Invention and Design Food Current Events Heinlein Education ]
Entry: 2024-06-17 18:52:40.824644+02 Ride that hype machine! by Dan Lyke comments 0
Financial Times, June 16 2024: AI in finance is like ‘moving from typewriters to word processors’
Simon Stephens, AI lead for audit and assurance at Deloitte UK, says: “One way it will help is by automating large portions of manual data entry, saving time whilst allowing people to focus on more value-added and often more interesting tasks.”
“There is not really going to be a blockchain team any longer,” said a person familiar with the situation.
[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2024-06-03 18:39:51.561738+02 Moving debugging from 90% of programming to 100% of it by Dan Lyke comments 1
How does AI impact my job as a programmer:
Remember; already, the overwhelming majority of our time in the programming tools goes into tasks that require the investigative skill set rather than the building skill set. Large language models shift even more of that time into investigation, because the moment the team gets a chance to build, they turn around and ask ChatGPT (or Copilot, or Devin, or Gemini) to do it. When we learn that we need to integrate with Google Cloud Storage, or spaCy, or SQS Queue, or Firebase? Same thing: turn around and ask the LLM to draft the integration.
[ related topics: Software Engineering Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2024-04-13 01:01:18.689613+02 Grok AI bullshit generation from Twitter by Dan Lyke comments 0
Elon Musk's Grok [AI] Creates Bizarre Fake News About the Solar Eclipse Thanks to Jokes on X
[ related topics: Astronomy Current Events Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Java Photovoltaics ]
Entry: 2024-04-03 01:05:02.72663+02 LinkedIn just emailed me offering a by Dan Lyke comments 0
LinkedIn just emailed me offering a "Financial Fraud job at AirBNB", and some jokes just write themselves...
[ related topics: Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-03-26 23:42:54.741789+01 On feeling like you're not a civilian by Dan Lyke comments 0
Reposted from FB:
Everybody's linking to some aspect of the key bridge collapse today, and everyone's suddenly a bridge and shipping expert, but one thing gave me chills. So when I was a whitewater guide, the *first* thing we tell the crew in our opening speech is "if you fall out of the boat, *do* *not* stand up. The bottom of the river has lots of crevices in it, and if your foot gets caught in one of those, you can drown in a foot of water and there is nothing we can do fast enough to save you." And then we talk about the right way to swim in whitewater, and how there's never been a case of buttock entrapment.
One busy day, I may have been second boat, or just the guy on the scene, but another guide's boat lost the angle coming out of the put-in eddy spun downstream and slammed into Whiteface and pinned hard. Pulled a swimmer or two on shore, but then we had a guide and most of a boat's full of guests stranded in the middle of the river, right above the ledge, and I went running up the bank and started to wade out into the river to get on scene, and I remember slipping on a rock and thinking "crap, I hope we don't have to evac the customers out of here, because we don't want any of them walking in this."
And then I had that moment of "Oh shit. I'm walking in this. I'm standing up."
And then this moment of "but it's okay, because I'm a guide. I know better."
And then this moment of "uuhhhh. I know better. Right. Uhhhh." So, yeah, I repositioned myself, and swam out to help unstick the boat.
Among the many incidents in my teens and twenties where I slowly learned I was not, in fact, a superhero, that's one of them.
So I was listening to the police radio of the response to the out of control boat, and heard the one officer say "Once you get here I'll go grab the workers on the Key bridge, and then stop the outer loop."
And, of course, I knew what was coming, but holy shit, that feeling of "these people are in danger, I'm going to stabilize the situation", without thinking through the consequence.
I'm sad for the loss of life. In listening to the radio traffic I was relieved that the immediately following transmission was that the bridge just fell down, and the officer did not, in fact, get on the bridge. And that what sounded like him in the subsequent transmission wasn't completely freaked out.
But, yeah. Mad props to the dude doin' his job.
Anyway, #GiftArticle to the WaPo on the bridge collapse, that includes the recording. https://wapo.st/3VyBEAK
[ related topics: Nostalgia Interactive Drama Law Law Enforcement Heinlein Sports Pop Culture Boats Machinery Douglas Adams Whitewater ]
Entry: 2024-03-25 19:18:38.087195+01 US said the Moscow attacks were coming by Dan Lyke comments 0
ISIS-K Claims Credit After 137 Killed in Moscow Concert Attack; Russia Tries to Blame Ukraine
The U.S. Embassy had reportedly warned Russia earlier this month that it was, quote, “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow,” unquote, especially concert halls, and U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the U.S. government had, quote, “shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding 'duty to warn' policy.” Putin called the warnings, quote, “provocative” and “outright blackmail” in a speech last Tuesday. Today, a Kremlin spokesperson refused to respond to reporters who asked Friday — if Friday was an intelligence failure.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-03-19 18:23:34.091138+01 Recessions, Pollution, and Life Expectancy by Dan Lyke comments 0
The answer was pollution. Counties that experienced the biggest job losses in the Great Recession, the economists found, also saw the largest declines in air pollution, as measured by levels of the fine particulate matter PM2.5. It makes sense: During recessions, fewer people drive to work. Factories and offices slow down, and people cut back on their own energy use to save money. All that reduced activity leads to cleaner air. That would explain why workers without a college degree enjoyed the biggest drops in mortality: People with low-wage jobs tend to live in neighborhoods with more environmental toxins. It would also explain why the recession reduced mortality from heart disease, suicide, and car crashes — causes of death all linked to the physical and mental effects of PM2.5. Overall, the economists found, cleaner air was responsible for more than a third of the decline in mortality during the Great Recession.
Via.
[ related topics: Ziffle Nature and environment Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Automobiles Currency Education Economics Woodworking ]
Entry: 2024-03-16 20:30:01.905228+01 I love how staff and consultants put by Dan Lyke comments 0
I love how staff and consultants put subtext into contextual documents.. "The downtown was a mix of commercial and residential uses during the late-nineteenth century, as lack of easy transportation led people to live near their place of business or job."
This Berkeley Shattuck Avenue Commercial Corridor Historic Context and Survey is a thing of beauty.
https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/pages...ttuck%20context%2005-28-2015.pdf
[ related topics: Bay Area Theater & Plays Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-03-06 19:13:48.037743+01 St Vincent's restructuring by Dan Lyke comments 0
So far as I can tell, the Santa Rosa diocese, notoriously "conservative", is going through bankruptcy and restructuring in order to avoid paying for some of the damages they've done by sheltering abusers and encouraging abuse, and these aren't really layoffs as much as they are a shell game to move the operations of St Vincent's out from under those liabilities.
But the newspapers are doing a decent job of getting those sad face reacts. And the Argus Courier is doing a better job of reporting this than SFGate...
SFGate: Report: 106-year-old North Bay Catholic school set to close in May, 68 layoffs.
Petaluma 360 / Argus-Courier: St. Vincent readies for title change
A notice sent to the city, county and state regarding “layoffs” and “permanent closure” was just a “procedural step,” school leaders said.
[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Games Current Events Heinlein California Culture ]
Entry: 2024-02-09 18:26:38.888246+01 Square Dance Calling Musings by Dan Lyke comments 2
Fun night filling in for Gary Kendall at the Clutch Busters over in Concord last night, two or three squares (red light/green light) but as I got back home I realized... Conservatively, I loaded the car at, say, quarter after five yesterday, and left at 5:30, because Google gave a wide variety of arrival times. Got home at quarter to 11. Called from 7:30 to 9:30, but five and a half hours out of the house, ignoring any coordination and prep time and whatnot. 60 miles each way, so using IRS numbers, about $80 in mileage. Paid $120, so that leaves $40 to distribute between music licensing, music, gear depreciation, voice lessons, and... me. So including drive time, seven and a quarter an hour, before all of those other costs...
While I was driving, Eric Henerlau called, and we talked about how we need more callers in our area or this activity is going to drop below the critical mass threshold for lack of callers before it drops for lack of dancers.
Last Friday, Charlene and I wandered down to Aqus and there was a band playing there. Good musicians, good harmonies, but it was hard to hear the band over the conversation. We left after a little bit, walked to get groceries, and talked about why, and she pointed out that the band was having fun with each other, rather than having fun connecting with the audience.
As a caller, the only thing I've got is connecting with the floor, and that's a very hierarchical relationship. I realize that this is part of why Charlene and I find caller workshops so much fun even though the calling is often rudimentary and uneven; we're hanging out, and dancing, with other people who are experiencing the form in the same way that we do.
No good answers (except that we're definitely gonna work to support our friend who's trying to get a regular song circle going in Petaluma, 'cause that's something we can do together that's a less uneven way to build community), but further little dots in trying to figure out how we might find something that looks enough like square dancing that we get similar things out of it, but one that doesn't require so much effort on the part of just a very few to sustain.
[ related topics: Politics Music Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Automobiles Community Currency Real Estate ]
Entry: 2024-02-06 20:22:44.684586+01 Who really runs San Francisco? by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Dan Morris @coldfish@sfba.social
@scott This is no "trend". Chesa Boudin was elected in Jan of 2020 and (according to my one remaining sfpd friend) the work stoppage started when he announced he would prosecute that cop who shot the guy through the window while he was running away - on his 3rd day on the job.
So, they basically got together with a bunch of people and started a recall campaign, and stopped arresting shoplifters. Then, when Jenkins was "elected" she promised there was no quid-pro-quo, and then the cops suddenly tripled shoplifting arrests and then she let the arrested cop go, saying the arresting officer didn't mean it - and he later sued her for defamation (because he never said that) and got a private settlement, because the suit vanished.
Honestly, I never thought this city was corrupt (at least not too much) until I watched that all go down.
Even if you HATE and DESPISE that Chesa guy, when cops don't arrest people intentionally, in order to get rid of an elected official, to free their buddy, that's really bad.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Heinlein Sports ]
Entry: 2024-01-26 17:41:26.613902+01 January Doom by Dan Lyke comments 0
Wreckage Systems 65daysofstatic/65 Labs on Patreon: JANUARY DOOM
Here is a major issue we are currently tussling with. Since we started work on Wreckage Systems, the notions of generative/procedural art and, in particular, 'A.I.' have become increasingly loaded terms. As we hopefully made clear in various posts over the last few years (this one comes to mind), we are deeply, deeply sceptical about A.I. and all the algorithmic and technological answers being carelessly thrown at what are actually political and structural problems in the name of progress/infinite growth/capitalism-is-fine-actually-and-will-save-us-from-climate-change-honest. 65LABS has picked a side, and it is Team Luddite. Against us, these tech bros are not only destroying the internet, not only devaluing art, not only making the already-precarious lives for creative workers even more precarious, not only failing to understand that the meaning and magic of art is not contained in its particular combination of pixels or samples but rather created in the ripples of social relations that any piece of art makes as it pushes its way into the world, not only are they failing to understand that making art is, at best, to clumsily capture a snapshot of something larger, a fragile, flawed, always-incomplete communication of intent from one/some humans to others, NOT ONLY ALL THAT, but also (and yes, admittedly more trivially), they have tarnished this curious little space of computer-based art that uses generative tools to make itself. Because they do not use these tools in the name of exploring liquid, impermanent art that flutters around a recognisable core but never achieves a single, fixed state. They are employing them solely to be able to dig faster to the bottom of lowest common denominator Generic Internet Content.
[ related topics: Politics moron Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Heinlein Net Culture Clowns Global Warming ]
Entry: 2023-12-29 23:29:31.387186+01 exploit by job interview by Dan Lyke comments 1
Bleeping Computer: Blockchain dev's wallet emptied in "job interview" using npm package
As a part of the job interview, the recruiter asked Çeliktepe to download and debug the code in two npm packages—"web3_nextjs" and "web3_nextjs_backend" hosted on a GitHub repository. However, moments later, the developer discovered that his MetaMask wallet had been drained—with upwards of $500 siphoned out of his account, based on the information seen by BleepingComputer.
[ related topics: Current Events Heinlein ]
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