Flutterby™! From 2023-09-01 to 2023-09-30

Covid brain fog looks like it comes from brain clots... Nature Medicine: Acute blood biomarker profiles predict cognitive deficits 6 and 12 months after COVID-19 hospitalization

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-023-02525-y

By way of The Messenger: Long COVID Brain Fog Linked to Blood Clots: Study from this toot.

[ related topics: Health Nature and environment ]

Lesson from tonight: proactively vary the energy. Bring the energy back down while the audience is amped, don't wait for them to crash.

But damn it's fun to call square dance when the floor is moving flat out and the energy is way up.

And I got a full two and a half hours out of them.

Nothing makes me feel happier to be operating and electric vehicles than driving miles out of my way to try to find a working fast charger.

And if GM had given us our new battery already this would have been a single shot trip. Anyway, at some point I'm going to have to clean these various apps I've installed on my phone in the hopes that this charger finally will work.

Anyway, this one finally did...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Travel ]

I have a business proposal. I'm going to install a bunch of dummy charging stations that don't work. I'll make people install a privacy stealing app, have them put down a $10 deposit, and then make them sit forever on hold until they give up.

I'll call it "Electrify America"... oh, no, wait, apparently that name is already associated with that business model.

[ related topics: Privacy Work, productivity and environment ]

To prove that you are not an automobile driver, identify all of the squares in this picture that contain a stop sign or speed limit sign.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

There is... something... about being in Fresno mall hell (waiting for a charge), and running across a tattoo removal store front. Like this is a level Dante could never conceive of.

[ related topics: Photography California Culture Sports ]

Walking is good for you, so we're going to add chicanes and detours to triple the distance to your destination. If you wanted to get from point A to point B you should have gotten in the car to go across the parking lot like a normal person

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Automobiles ]

What are they keeping in?

[ related topics: Photography ]

When did Google Maps + Android Auto become "Simon Says"? "I'm sorry, you didn't say 'navigate to', so here's a random Wikipedia article..."

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

I think I got the right domain name....

[ related topics: Photography ]

Got to hold some mahogany pieces cut from The Tree today. I see what the myth is about now... I expect they'll end up in an instrument that does them justice, even though they are just about big enough for a ukulele.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Washington Post: "The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website : The anonymous forum, known as Kiwi Farms, keeps popping back online despite a relentless campaign by transgender activists and a former insider"

https://www.washingtonpost.com...09/03/kiwifarms-website-offline/

https://wapo.st/3EqVLXO #GiftLink

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Community ]

Looking at assorted studies suggesting that maybe low income kids had some educational delays because of COVID school changes, and others that are pretty conclusive that those changes definitely decreased childhood suicides and improved family happiness, and now I'm wondering about the income patterns in those later studies...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Sociology ]

Highly recommend episode 27 of Where The Stars Fell, especially because it's paying off the previous 26 so well....

On the one hand it's very interesting that the LastPass breach has apparently lead to some cracked vaults which are being used to steal cryptocurrency, on the other hand "stealing cryptocurrency" has me going all :nelson_haha.gif: and "code is law, baby".

https://krebsonsecurity.com/20...-keys-stolen-in-lastpass-breach/

As I hit new tab in Firefox and was once again faced with the Pocket suggested links, I was reminded of how awesome Tara's Gift Article Gazette is. I mean, sure, it's gift links, but even if, like me, you're subscribed to many of those sources it's a good way to find the current cool articles that are in the zeitgeist.

https://mastogizmos.com/gag.html

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design ]

Missy Cummings, George Mason University: Assessing Readiness of Self-Driving Vehicles (preprint)

State agencies are increasingly faced with self-driving permit and licensing requests as self-driving operations expand. However, these expansions have led to congestion and problematic interactions with first responders, as well as increasing public distrust. To respond to these self-driving permit requests with evidence-based recommendations, government agencies need straightforward tools to help them objectively and holistically assess such requests. To this end, using self-driving disengagement data from California, as well as federal non-fatal and CA transportation network companies’ crash reports, this effort demonstrates how the combination of human- and autonomy-initiated disengagements, coupled with non-fatal crash rates, can provide insight into assessing self-driving vehicle readiness for commercial operations. Additional results show that Cruise’s and Waymo’s robo-taxis in San Francisco are 4-8x morelikely to be involved in non-fatal crashes, equivalent to the CA crash rates of Uber and Lyft. One major drawback to this approach is a lack of reporting by the majority of companies conducting self-driving operations on public roads in CA. This lack of reporting and companies’ avoidance of publicly address emerging problems, while simultaneously claiming their technologies are superior to human drivers, suggests there are systemic problematic safety cultures in the self-driving community. If self-driving companies do not adopt more transparent and responsive safety practices, their non-fatal crash rates could continue to exceed that of human drivers. They also risk further eroding public sentiment, which could lead to further public rejection of what otherwise could have been a promising technology.

I'mma just repeat that in bold: "Cruise’s and Waymo’s robo-taxis in San Francisco are 4-8x morelikely to be involved in non-fatal crashes, equivalent to the CA crash rates of Uber and Lyft"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband Bay Area moron California Culture Community Education ]

Eros Blog: Pornocalypse Comes For Kink Education, talking about Pandora Blake getting kicked off of YouTube:

None of the videos on my channel included sex or nudity. I avoided posting links to any adult sites in the video descriptions, linking to Patreon and mxblake.com instead. Since the talky trailers were my most viewed videos, and opportunities to promote adult content are few and far between, I thought that keeping them up with an age-restriction label in place was a risk worth taking, and that by giving up the opportunity to monetise the channel I was reducing it to an acceptable level. The gamble didn't pay off.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Nudity Education Video Gambling ]

Darrell Owens: Berkeley Rents Fall Amid Construction Boom

The city's government rental registry reveals that rent controlled apartments are declining in price as Berkeley undergoes a housing boom.

[ related topics: Bay Area moron Machinery Fabrication Real Estate Model Building ]

Back when the Internet was much younger than it is now, Johannes Ernst published a mechanism for allowing someone to use a website to log into another website, called LID. Much like "log in with Google or Facebook" is today. I saw it, thought it was a good idea, and implemented it for my blog. Shortly afterwards, Brad Fitzpatrick at Six Apart implemented something similar for LiveJournal, and discussions about creating standards started happening.

I was part of these discussions, and remember asking for a single feature to support a single use case, one that I thought was the most immediate and obvious use case. The conversation wheeled into places I didn't care about, that I thought were way overly complex and byzantine, but I thought "there's no way that my one feature won't make it into the spec".

So I tuned out. Ended up writing some authentication software for a portion of the spec that had been finalized, published that, got a whole lot of "but that's not how it should work!" feedback, said "well, that's what the spec so far says, and y'all are part of that process, so..."

Anyway, the short(!) version is that by the time the OpenID spec came out, it didn't have my one feature, the one thing that would have made the use case of "use this identity to comment on a blog" super easy. Had a *whole* lot of other complexity though.

So I think about this a lot as one of the failures of my career, of not wading through all of the social bullshit and maneuvering, and of failing to get my feature in, and how that lack of a feature led to slowed adoption and to my mind the failure of OpenID to create the sort of meaningful change I thought it should have.

And I think a lot about the mechanisms and processes by which the successful products and standards of my career have occurred.

I had lunch yesterday with someone who has way more experience in local politics than I do. Who's been in the trenches for years, in multiple places, with some pretty challenging projects. The discussion was great, and went on for a long time, and it's bringing up a lot of questions for me.

Measure U has given Petaluma a brief respite, but sales taxes are a crappy way to fund a city, and the city is cash-flow negative without it. There are a number of reasons for this, probably more complexity than I understand.

The core one is the basic issue with American sprawl: lots of people bought into the racist auto-oriented suburb development pattern propaganda, and as a result we have a lot of geometry that's impractical to navigate without an automobile, with all of the costs of infrastructure per resident that stems from that.

A contributing factor is Prop 13. Beyond screwing individual ownership and young people, it specifies how funds get split between cities, counties, and schools in a way that if a city was doing fairly well at the time it was passed, the city got a smaller proportion of the property taxes relative to those other two. Petaluma was doing *great*. It doesn't get much of the property taxes these days.

The culture of Petaluma is also one of activism and consensus. I've often commented that if you've got 3 Petalumans interested in a cause, you've probably got 4 non-profits. Many of these efforts are successful. The moratorium on new gas stations is something that I didn't think was practical, and yet it happened.

Projects here get studied to death. Getting change enacted takes decades, and wears people the fuck out. Charlene and I are currently involved in Mountain View Ave safety improvements, and as we knock on doors and go up and down the street we hear "oh, yeah, I've been asking for [X] for 30 years, and we've only gotten an increased speed limit. But good luck on your efforts."

There was a recent Grand Jury report over how the city has structured its Planning Department for outsourcing, the conclusion of which was that the city has created an incentive for the Planning Commission to create too much opportunity for public comment and feedback, to bill the developers for endless public meetings.

And Petaluma lately does not have a good record on development. Before we got here, the city got screwed by a bunch of car lots in a deal so complex nobody knows what actually happened. We have two big-box developments that got watered way down by consensus, created a lot of traffic and haven't brought the promised revenue,. One large residential development that was supposed to be mixed-use with a walkable retail core has been watered down to a hotel in a sea of single-family homes in with an exit from the area that crosses a railroad track, but somehow we're gonna build a bridge that dumps some huge number of cars into this residential area.

Petaluma does have a fantastic asset: Back in the day of the automobile, a very popular mayor proposed bulldozing a bunch of downtown in order to widen the main drag, there was pushback, and eventually some city assistance in restoring the iron fronts to the downtown buildings created a quaint downtown district. The sidewalks aren't as wide as they once were, but it's there. And even more recently, during my time here, the main drag was reconfigured from two lanes each direction to one lane, which makes it more pleasant to walk downtown.

And right before we moved to town, downtown was expanded with a movie theater, some more retail, a parking garage, and a little bit of residential. And is configured in a way that does provide some more public gathering and foot traffic spaces, the sorts of spaces that build community, where you might walk and run into people you know.

Of course there's also still a lot of downtown that's a remnant of the old days: many buildings that were there in the early '60s were demolished or burned down, and redeveloped into large parking lots with one story buildings. A lot of banks.

Back to the lunch conversation: There's a vacant lot in between old downtown and new downtown. Used to be a gas station. I believe that the first hotel proposal on this site went before the Planning Commission in 2008, and that developer is a local who was pitching his idea for several years prior. It's been around for a while. Meanwhile, the lot has been vacant. Various aspects of the city jerked the developer around for a long time, some wrangling over parking aspects that weren't openly documented. The developer finally said (as developers often do), fuck it, I'm gonna sell to someone who has the assets to fight this project through.

That developer came back and said "yeah, I can't make it work unless it goes up a story", and started writing checks to the outsourced (remember that Grand Jury report that suggests too much public engagement) city Planning Department to write up a proposal for a Zoning Overlay that would create an incentive, in the form of height, for that lot, and some of the other ugly asphalt and one story buildings, to be developed.

The Planning Department folks aren't political, they saw a catalyst for change and brought forward a proposal. And *all* of the ugly came out.

So the conversation was about the processes of building city plans for an area. How to do public consensus building. How the Central Petaluma Specific Plan was developed. And as I went to sleep with all of this in my head, I started wrapping back to that OpenID discussion.

Because it's great to have a goal of public consensus, but that also privileges the people who have time and resources to spend endless meetings going back and forth. It's great for everyone to feel included, but after a while the people who actually do stuff go off and start doing stuff in the places they can do stuff.

And how in the end what we end up with may not be great.

Anyway, Charlene and I are going to sit down and read the Central Petaluma Specific Plan closely, because that's a plan that covers the Theater District, which I believe has a far too low residential to retail ratio but generally feels like an okay direction, and Riverfront, which I see as a massive failure for the city, and a bunch of vacant lots with proposals that aren't inspiring.

But I'm also interested in learning more about municipal decision-making processes in cities that work. Because I like the story of the big consensus building process, but does it give us a city with character? A livable city? Or does it give us a city in which it takes decades to improve livability, and bland out the culture such that it really doesn't matter if you get a Round Table or a Pieology?

What creates a culture in a city? If you create more retail, does that really drive the price of retail up as everybody wants to open a wine bar, or does the higher supply mean that nobody wants to rent in the old buildings that still don't have good fire suppression systems and other modern amenities, and lead to a downtown slum?

I mean, I realize that this is a complex system, that the macroeconomic effects of creating a vibrant city mean that housing and retail interact in ways that simple supply and demand don't apply in obvious ways.

But I find myself looking at a mess, with a bunch of different narratives of what's wrong, how to fix it, how different portions of the residents of the city get served, and how various former residents get driven out, and am trying to see what kinds of processes will actually build the kind of city I aspire to live in.

And whether I was right, in my earlier years, to just treat a place to live as a commodity to be bought, and be prepared to pick up my roots and go find a place on what I see as a saner path, or if I ask my neighbors to give up substantial portions of their leisure time to try to set this city on a stronger path.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Weblogs Movies Invention and Design Software Engineering moron Theater & Plays Sociology Writing Law Wines and Spirits Work, productivity and environment California Culture Travel Net Culture Automobiles Pyrotechnics Machinery Community Trains Education Architecture Real Estate Rocky Horror Picture Show LID (Lightweight IDentity) Furniture Woodworking Government ]

Okay there Klein borescope that advertises itself as "waterproof" and "IP67", but then says "do not immerse in water" once you open up the package. Bastards.

So, yeah, if anyone's got a favorite borescope with at least a 3m tether, I'm all ears. We need something we can put in the pool and look for leaks, 'cause being in there ourselves stirs up the water too much.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Also, a special "fuck you" to every single search box which is fuzzy matching "IP68" to IP67 devices.

I mean, Amazon will drop your shit on the floor for a single character out of place, but the critical bits it'll just shove crap that has no bearing on your search at you.

[ related topics: Books ]

am sadly listening to a friend, reading aloud from a book, who was an excellent reader.. fade away. The artifacts, pauses, pacing, repeats, and stutters are hard for me to listen to. Sure, he's 70+, and it's considered normal as we get older.

But I also spent a lot of time in speech therapy as a young man. It's triggering. It hurts my brain in ways I can't explain and it wants to fall back into those habits. Which makes me not want to listen to him, and that's sad.

And makes me realize, as I fade into the end of good life, I'll probably do/have the same issues.

[ related topics: Books Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Pop Culture ]

When the neighbor's trees deliver apples... This is applesauce batch 2, hope we have enough jars still left.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

We're trying to find a hole in the swim spa. Had a miss with a Klein borescope that was advertised as waterproof but then in the instructions said "do not immerse in water", so while we wait for an IP68 camera I milled some HDPE and slid it on to some screen door extrusion to make an arm that we could attach a dye syringe and the camera to.

[ related topics: Photography ]

We're trying to find a hole in the swim spa. Had a miss with a Klein borescope that was advertised as waterproof but then in the instructions said "do not immerse in water", so while we wait for an IP68 camera I milled some HDPE and slid it on to some screen door extrusion to make an arm that we could attach a dye syringe and the camera to. (With picture)

[ related topics: Photography ]

Petition to use "avoid it like the plague" as a term for enthusiastic adoption.

Because that seems to be the direction.

The City of Petaluma asked for some feedback on the Howard Street Improvement project. I'm posting my feedback in various other places too. Since switching dentists I don't ride up that street beyond Washington often, but I do find myself riding on the stretch east/south of Washington surprisingly often.

Starting from where 6th St turns into Howard, that west bound Howard right turn on to Liberty St just past A St needs a bulb-out with a pass-through for cyclists who choose to turn right. A cyclist trying to go straight on Howard is taking their life into their hands as drivers cut right at full speed.

The intersection at Washington Street is terrifying. There's no good reason why Washington needs to be 2 lanes here and narrow shortly afterwards. Taking the available space and going to 1 lane with a pedestrian island would dramatically improve the sense of those long diagonal crosswalks.

We just got back from walking the stretch from Washington to Kent this afternoon. During the time we were there we probably saw 15-20 motor vehicles go through these intersections. None of them came to a full stop. This suggests that all of those intersections could be replaced by traffic circles or other designs that slowed drivers and made them proceed cautiously instead of stop signs that everyone is ignoring anyway.

And we'd love to have a traffic engineer explain why that crosswalk at Oak St across Howard is diagonal like that. Seems like it stops eastbound traffic long before a driver there can see what's actually happening in the intersection, and keeps pedestrians downhill from the entrance to Oak Hill Park, but I'm sure there are factors I don't see.

And, of course, there are sharrows. We've known for a decade and a half that sharrows anywhere but on the left side of the lane (which in this case would be the center of the pavement) kill cyclists. If there are going to be sharrows put down as part of the rework, they should be on the left side of the travel lane.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment History Space & Astronomy Law Bicycling Woodworking ]

Thinking about this comment linking to a Bloomberg article titled "The Electric Vehicle That Suburbia Needs Could Be A Golf Cart", and how I've thought about it, but a device that takes up a full lane sounds terrifying for getting through town vs a bicycle that's narrower and can be squeezed on to the shoulder.

And how that exposes some serious connectivity issues.

https://theatl.social/@ShmosKnows/111038858596545022

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Well this is fascinating: jj — a git compatible distributed version control system. Can use a git back-end or its own native back-end (that can be replicated via rsync and cloud file systems like Dropbox).

Current confusion: I have a Zoom H4n Pro audio recorder that I'm using as a microphone, and I have to not choose "Zoom Audio Device" to record from, because that's not the same Zoom...

[ related topics: Music ]

Sure, people used to mock IE for always being 15 minutes behind, but have these folks experienced the Mac crash reporter that offers to re-open the app long after that app has been restarted and the new project is being worked on?

[ related topics: Invention and Design Macintosh ]

Well, there's a bit of a surprise: same mic and interface (Zoom H4n built-in), Audacity using 32 bit floats, Logic Pro using whatever it defaults to, it sure seems like Logic sounds a lot better and isn't doing some sort of squelching...

And Logic's EQ to fall off some of the hiss sounds *way* better, even through this MBP's speakers.

RT acdha@code4lib.social Chris Adams @acdha@code4lib.social

Something to think about when criticizing browser teams for not wanting to add support for new image formats. WebP is a marginal improvement over JPEG which has largely failed in the market but it got exploits in iOS, macOS, Chrome, and Firefox so far. https://chromereleases.googleb...annel-update-for-desktop_11.html

[ related topics: Invention and Design Macintosh Economics ]

A question I've been pondering recently, in light of street design that's dictated by fire department requirements for minimum lane widths and other details which encourage motor vehicle operators to speed is "how many people are we willing to kill in the name of public safety".

Of course it's one thing when it's health and fire response, it's another when it's police... In this particular case, the Seattle PD, which was already pretty sus...

Investigation launched into tape of Seattle police guild leaders downplaying death of woman struck by officer

Officer Daniel Auderer, vice president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, inadvertently left his body camera running after responding Jan. 23 to South Lake Union, where another officer, Kevin Dave, struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula while driving 74 mph on the way to a report of an overdose.

Kandula, who had been in a crosswalk at Thomas Street and Dexter Avenue North, was thrown over 100 feet. The 23-year-old died later that night.

Reading through the various news reports of this sounds like it's a huge web of prevarication on the part of the police department, trying to spin things in ways that... well... ugh.

KING 5: Seattle officer captured on bodycam saying woman struck by another cop 'had limited value'

Seattle officer caught on bodycam laughing after collision that killed grad student

Publicola: Seattle Police Officer Was Driving 74 MPH When He Hit and Killed 23-Year-Old Pedestrian Overhead view of the intersection where SPD officer Kevin Dave struck and killed 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk in January

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Seattle ]

RT astrobri@mastodon.social astrobri @astrobri@mastodon.social

A pal noticed that Elsevier "cited" a hallucinated article for the origin of FINER recently. https://web.archive.org/web/20...rocess/finer-research-framework/ Because they are a super sleuth #medlib , they tracked it down to likely being related to Grammarly adopting AI in June. So editors, I think you are on your own for AI detection.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

As I pay 1.5x the going rate for a set of mid-grade rechargeable batteries vs ordering a set of the good ones online, I... really appreciate my local hardware store, but we have to figure out how to fix retail if we're gonna save it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Wow. The home Sonic fiber went down probably a little before 8 this morning, is still down. Network works at the office, but daaang, that's an outage.

[ related topics: broadband ]

Pondering that GPT is going to replace programming, and all of my LinkedIn spam recently is OpenAI positions... Amy Castor and David Gerard: Pivot to AI: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain:

Remember, the important AI use case is getting venture capital funding.

Nailed it.

[ related topics: Spam Software Engineering Law Monty Python Artificial Intelligence ]

RT Greg Knauss @gnkauss@mastodon.social

Since I’m new to JavaScript, I wrote:

    𝚒𝚏 (𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔) { 𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔(); }

…like an idiot. Then, I realized I should be adapting to JavaScript culture and make it inscrutable, so I re-wrote the line to:

    𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔 && 𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔();

But I suspected there was something even more nightmarish, and sure enough, of course. This is how real JavaScript developers do it:

    𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔?.();

And by “real JavaScript developers,” I mean “monsters”.

[ related topics: Invention and Design moron Sociology California Culture ]

And, it looks like Sonic's figured out the problem and my home network is back up. Just so I can find this outage stuff later.

[ related topics: broadband ]

If you want to read something heart wrenching that'll leave you with more questions than answers, may I recommend Slate: The Woman on the Line — Every day, the calls come. She can tell quickly who might die. About the "Never Use Alone" hotline, opiate and drug use, abuse, and overdose, harm reduction, and... yeah.

The "This American Life" episode, which I have not listened to.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Health ]

I remember a few years ago when the Mobility Bullshit Bingo cards all had "Personal Rapid Transit" in the center spot, because it'd *always* get filled in. A bunch of people have sent me this link on autonomous freight rail cars, and it's clear that we've moved on from the pipe dreams of the last decade, to the pipe dreams of this one...

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...-the-problem-of-underused-rails/

[ related topics: Machinery Trains Public Transportation ]

Wow. Bill Willingham sends Fables into the public domain

If I understand the law correctly (and be advised that copyright law is a mess; purposely vague and murky, and no two lawyers – not even those specializing in copyright and trademark law – agree on anything), you have the rights to make your Fables movies, and cartoons, and publish your Fables books, and manufacture your Fables toys, and do anything you want with your property, because it’s your property.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Interactive Drama Books Movies Television Civil Liberties Copyright/Trademark ]

Mood. Thanks to https://emoji.supply/kitchen

(Image description: Combination of the multiple hearts emoji and the Angry Face emoji, resulting in angry face floating hearts.)

[ related topics: Photography Boats ]

Pontevedra, Spain, offers some of the best evidence available about what happens when a city is reconfigured to accommodate people, rather than cars.

Some of Pontevedra’s car owners balked, but Mayor Fernandez Lores was unmoved. “It’s not my duty as mayor to make sure you have a parking spot,” he said at a 2020 conference. “For me, it’s the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you’re going to put them.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles Conferences ]

On the way home from calling a square dance last night I was listening to Words To Win By, which pointed out the framing of "Are we doing turnout or are we doing persuasion?" was false and often explicitly racist. Because both are changing minds, the better discussion is about whose mind we are putting energy into changing, and whose vote are we taking for granted.

When I first moved to Petaluma, the city was in the process of building an economic development plan. I had a very flexible work schedule at the time, so I went to a bunch of the meetings. I remember talking with so many people who got frustrated and walked away from the process. And I think anyone who's sat through general public comment for too long (and, yes, just two days ago I was before the Transit Advisory Committee) has started thinking about who the meetings are serving. Who has the time and energy, and privilege, to participate, who's being represented by the process?

And, of course, a conversation I've had many times is about having the leisure to participate in public process. Do we ask parents to forgo their kids activities so that their voices can be heard?

Just under a year ago, conversation at the monthly Petaluma Urban Chat lunch was led by someone who was excited about Switzerland's direct democracy. I have lots of questions, but I was excited by the notion of a process that created lots of public discussion about the topics of governance, and that resulted in a lot more actual representation. Yes, it costs money to run several referendums per year, but it helps figure out what the actual mood of the electorate is, rather than reflecting just the loudest voices in the room.

That representation is, of course, a double-edged sword: More voting, or polling, or whatever, isn't enough without more public conversation about the issues, more education. "The electorate" can definitely be skewed. Part of the reason for representative democracy is that keeping up with the details of the issues is a lot of freakin' work, and I'm super grateful to our elected representatives for the efforts they put in, especially at the local level where they're not compensated for all of the work (and abuse) that they take on.

But I think it's very worth looking at who we think the "turnout" is, and who we think we're "persuading", and whether those we think might be open to persuading are just sucking the energy out of the room and moving the conversation towards less equity and a less flourishing future.

https://wordstowinby-pod.com/season-2-episode-1/

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment Pop Culture Community Currency Education Economics Public Transportation ]

Knowledge is power, power corrupts, if I don't know then I won't be corrupted....

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

"Is this dishwasher safe?", I ask, as I approach in a submissive posture, eyes averted, offering a dirty saucer in an outstretched hand as greeting, hoping that in time I will be able to give it scritches.

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Spurred by this StrongTowns video on how assessment differences end up functionally leading to regressive tax rates (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MjjHKIlKko) a neighbor tracked down An Evaluation of Property Tax Regressivity in Sonoma County, California, and... this graph...

(Wondering about that little blip around where our house falls...)

[ related topics: Politics Photography Movies Nature and environment California Culture Video Real Estate ]

I can hear the announcer warming up the Malicious Monster Truck event over at the fairgrounds, and I'm quite conscious that there is no Benevolent Monster Truck event.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

My favorite political activity is reading the Nextdoor meltdowns and Facebook tantrums from people complaining that they're being treated like children.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics moron ]

https://social.treehouse.syste...oNinaAnalyzes/111081194382126713

Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don't care if AI doesn't work.

They really don't. They're pot-committed; these dudes aren't tech pioneers, they're money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it's literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it's not real and they don't care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made.

The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don't know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it's total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised.

Particularly in the media, it's all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games moron Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Currency Artificial Intelligence Pedal Power Bicycling Economics ]

I stopped and adjusted, just in case.

(Image is of a building under construction where the words "fix bulge" have been spray painted on the sheathing.)

[ related topics: Photography Law Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

US searching for F35 fighter jet lost in South Carolina

Twitter: Joint Base Charleston @TeamCharleston

We’re working with @MCASBeaufortSC to locate an F-35 that was involved in a mishap this afternoon. The pilot ejected safely. If you have any information that may help our recovery teams locate the F-35, please call the Base Defense Operations Center at 843-963-3600.

RT jack @JackEric@strangeobject.space

guess the F-35's stealth features actually work then

Adriano @adriano@lile.cl

@babe

Me: “people armed in case they have to overthrow their government grossly underestimate the capability of their armed forces”

Their armed forces: “uwu pwease hewp us find our pwane”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Space & Astronomy Law Work, productivity and environment ]

Yeah, I know, everyone else is sharing the article, but we need this message in the public consciousness: Working from home may reduce a person's carbon footprint by 50%. Washington Post: Working from home now has another powerful benefit #GiftArticle https://wapo.st/3Rr7Eot

Fully remote workers could produce less than half the climate-warming emissions of people who spend their days in offices, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Listening to public comment at tonight's city council meeting, and I'm sympathetic to the idea of moving to electric racing, however harping on fossil fuels at the racetrack is kind of a tell: most of the races use alcohol as fuel. If you've got a cause, please do the homework...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sports Pop Culture Race ]

Charlene and I are watching the Oyster Cove proposal to the City Council, and at one point we looked at each other and said "I wonder if we can swing selling this place and moving there".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Decided o needed to beat myself up on the bicycle a bit this morning, but abridged the abuse. Usually I don't come back from Novato along this route, so I've completely missed this barn mural on previous trips.

[ related topics: Photography Pedal Power Bicycling ]

I don't know that I can capture the extent to which the designated "bike lane" here is covered in debris, but....

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling ]

a search engine for Oglaf!

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Thread on tactics for fighting insurers on Long Term Disability, probably of use to folks suffering from long Covid.

CDC's bridge access program to help those whose insurers won't pay for the current booster shot

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

It's amazing how much people apparently enjoy hearing themselves talk at visioning exercises.

And I'm struggling with yet another one of these. Why do I subject myself to this? I should have known that this event was going to be like this, but I hoped that this time...

It was interesting hearing people "Brought to you by Healthy Petaluma" talk about being post-Covid...

But then the Blue Zones website did just tell me that I needed to raise my alcohol consumption, so, uh.

[ related topics: Health ]

Fetterman for President: Fetterman pledges to wear suit if government avoids shutdown

“If those jagoffs in the House stop trying to shut our government down, and fully support Ukraine, then I will save democracy by wearing a suit on the Senate floor next week,” said the first term Senator.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics moron Real Estate ]

Yow. Yesterday we were concerned about trying to fill two theaters, today we were concerned about overflow. Petaluma's Better Cities Film Fest is a success! Get your tickets now for next Thursday's event. https://www.urbanchat.org/upco...g-events/film-festival-2023-0928

Oh snap: SF Streetsblog: City has Concrete Barriers for Salesforce But Not to Stop Traffic Violence?

But morally confused bureaucrats and careerist officials believe, correctly, that it's in their interest to temporarily erect concrete barriers to protect those attending a $90 million conference, while residents and commuters are left with plastic bollards, and green and white paint. So they just did it.

In other words, Salesforce's Mark Benioff draws a lot of proverbial water in this town.

Cyclists and pedestrians, including dead children apparently, not so much.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Bay Area Race Conferences Bicycling ]

Holy fuck, Nextdoor, the *last* thing I want is more Nextdoor users reading my web site.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Pondering when it's appropriate to deal with pollution through dilution by placing facilities far from cities, or when we should be aware of our impacts on the world around us by putting the processes which keep our lifestyle practical close in, so we're aware of what's really happening. Also thinking about the 101 widening.

In other news, if anyone has good data on cleanup situations and actual operations emissions and enforcement of those from modern enclosed asphalt plants, I'm interested.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Gardening ]

Neighbors just demoed their garage, and the crew has the corner coned off, and wow what a traffic improvement. Makes me even more convinced that what we're need is a length or two of K rail a little further into that corner.

[ related topics: Photography Trains ]

Takeaway from last night's General Plan Advisory Committee meeting: developers are using the 2100 .5% likely worst case scenario, the city is using the 1% scenario. There was concern about how quickly guidance is filtering from the scientific community to the IPCC to the state guidelines, and it's interesting to see who's responding to what.

[ related topics: Law Community ]

I'm seeing all of these articles about "almost all NFTs completely worthless", and I think the real news here is that someone found any value at all in some small fraction of NFTs. Like that's the real story here: why aren't *all* NFTs completely worthless? What did you find?

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Evidence of a Wooden Structure That Predates Our Species Uncovered. The speculation (and it sounds like there's a lot of "well, this kinda looks like") is that the half-a-million year old evidence is of logs that were apparently carved to be interlocking.

RT Swiff @swiff@wizzzard.online

Remembering, once again, that Victor Hugo was well known to the sex worker community of Paris at the time and his death was so mourned by them, so beloved was he, that brothels were closed city wide so their workers could grieve.

Which, personally, i take as the single best marker of the man's character that I could imagine.

To not only treat sex workers well but be lionized by a city's worth of them, i cannot imagine that being the case without good reason

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law Community ]

Thinking about how my car has better battery charge management options than my laptop...

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Butterfly!

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography ]

Idea shamelessly stolen from a picture on Facebook. I may redo it because my attempt at waterproofing soaked through the paper.

Image is of a sign next to our driveway which reads:

There may be trouble ahead

All site visitors please note that

while there is:

• Moonlight
• Music
• Love
• Romance

It is advised that you:

• Face the music
• Dance

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Can I just say fuck this latest XCode release? Every single project I work on is breaking in some weird-ass way because of it. Currently trying to figure out why qmake has decided to hork up a hairball on building SquareDesk.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Priming cardboard and plywood for the slow streets sign painting party next weekend.

[ related topics: Photography ]

It's getting to where I don't even notice when it's a Rapture weekend any more....

Some glue ups are weirder than others

[ related topics: Photography ]

Listening to Kitty Stryker with the Multiamory folks talking about consent (and how we've all violated it), and, combined with recent discussions about the decision making process in local politics, I'm having all of the "huh"s with no good answers. But I'm appreciating the questions.

[ related topics: Politics Pop Culture ]

Just playing with Unicode... ⸮?

Not as cool as I thought it was going to look.

Daaang: Ahmed Eltantawy Targeted with Predator Spyware After Announcing Presidential Ambitions

In August and September 2023, Eltantawy’s Vodafone Egypt mobile connection was persistently selected for targeting via network injection; when Eltantawy visited certain websites not using HTTPS, a device installed at the border of Vodafone Egypt’s network automatically redirected him to a malicious website to infect his phone with Cytrox’s Predator spyware.

Of course the recent WebP bug is further evidence that all you have to do is visit a malicious website, and HTTPS is no guarantee that the website itself isn't malicious, but here's proof in the wild that one can definitely not trust the network.

Via @evacide@hachyderm.io

[ related topics: virus broadband ]

How Oliver Tester named Higgins' Tester Park after himself. Interesting look at the power of names for places (and abusing Google Maps).

Via

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Thinking about how the contractors presenting to the Petaluma GPAC on climate change are using sea level rise guidelines from California, how long it takes IPCC data to filter down into those guidelines, and how developers were, a year ago, voluntarily planning for what those guidelines say is the 0.5% likely worst-case.

Anyway, the prediction is that sea level rise won't impact runoff issues here in Petaluma too much, so at least look at elevation when you're buying.

[ related topics: Law California Culture Global Warming ]

Just imagining what it would cost to create an LLM of it had to pay for ingested text at the same rate as humans pay for textbooks.

Ugh. Now I'm back to the "okay, how do I make the new Slack not suck" stage of finding all of those several day old Mastodon posts that walk me through this.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

British Museum asks public and experts to help recover stolen artifacts.

Via Jay Miller @kjaymiller@mastodon.social who asked the obvious question:

Wait the UK government is asking people to steal back from their museums?

[ related topics: moron Current Events Monty Python Art & Culture Beer ]

Just ordered one of these traffic counting devices. Kinda feeling like I need to get people all around my neighborhood to install them, because knowing how far up Mountain View that morning surge of traffic (that we assume is school related) goes, and how fast people really are going up Mission, could be super useful.

https://telraam.net/en/S2

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

As we were measuring the Upham and Basset roundabout to understand how such a thing at Mission and Middlefield might work, a guy stopped to tell us about the great deal he got on a car from someone who apparently drove over/through it at relatively high speed. Yay for speed enforcement through physical damage!

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Automobiles ]

I don't live in this neighborhood, just walk through it, but as I compare the only occasionally open fence here vs the impacts of utility system maintenance, the "stop the big dig" outrage starts to fall into perspective...

Though I do think we should have more discussions about parking *maximums*.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

I don't live in this neighborhood, just walk through it, but as I compare the only occasionally open fence here vs the impacts of utility system maintenance, the "stop the big dig" outrage starts to fall into perspective...

Though I do think we should have more discussions about parking *maximums*. (Added picture)

[ related topics: Photography Theater & Plays ]

Office is in a shared coworking space, and there was just the far-off laughter of little kids, and the office dog woke up, gave a low growl, and then settled back into her bed.

And I feel so much empathy right now...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Space & Astronomy Dogs Furniture ]

Charlene's CPAP was one of the ones affected by the recall, though we never saw the symptoms: ProPublica: Philips Kept Complaints About Dangerous Breathing Machines Secret While Company Profits Soared

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

It's interesting that we make a distinction between "the good shit" and "holy crap".

Well, Vibe Gallery in Petaluma is going out of business. If only there were an easy change the city could do that would bring more foot traffic to downtown, maybe while also raising quite a bit of revenue for the city?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Hindsight ins 2020, but if I could go back two and a half decades.... <ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llAZpNd5v44">Mayor John Bauters shows us some of Emeryville’s Best Streets (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Television Video ]

Trying to record an instructional video this morning. I can deal with the birds. And the neighbor's wind chimes, and all of the parents driving their kids to school past my house, and whatever that large truck backing up was, but if those airplanes keep circling around I am going to lose my shit.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Aviation History Machinery Birds Video Real Estate ]

Road Hazard: Evidence Mounts on Toxic Pollution from Tires

Both natural and synthetic rubber break down in the environment, but synthetic fragments last a lot longer. Seventy-eight percent of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust. These fragments are ingested by marine animals — particles have been found in gills and stomachs — and can cause a range of effects, from neurotoxicity to growth retardation and behavioral abnormalities.

“We found extremely high levels of microplastics in our stormwater,” said Rebecca Sutton, an environmental scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute who studied runoff. “Our estimated annual discharge of microplastics into San Francisco Bay from stormwater was 7 trillion particles, and half of that was suspected tire particles.”

Previously

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area California Culture Archival ]

Man's case reveals cars slam into storefronts like 7-Eleven with alarming frequency — "This accident doesn't happen if somebody had spent about $800," co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council said.

Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. - an average of 1.14 per day.

7-Eleven apparently fought in court to withhold that data from the public.

Suburban man's case reveals cars slam into storefronts like 7-Eleven with alarming frequency

Rob Reiter is co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council. He was retained as an expert by Carl's attorneys in this case.

"If you install bollards, you pretty much solve that problem," he said of the danger.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Current Events Automobiles ]

Work project is an information manager (among other things), and I came up with a demo scenario based on my voice teacher suggesting "The Silver Swan". So now I'm going back through and renaming all references to "The Reflective Waterfowl" so that my "oh, look, I don't have any references, let me create some!" of my how-to video actually works.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment Video ]

Don't trust app stores: RT Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox @thunderbird@mastodon.online

PSA: We've become aware of a fake Thunderbird app listing in the German Apple Store. Please DO NOT install this version.

Currently, the only trusted source for Thunderbird downloads on Apple hardware is through thunderbird.net.

#

Wir sind auf eine gefälschte Thunderbird-App aufmerksam geworden, die im deutschen Apple Store gelistet ist. Bitte installieren Sie diese Version NICHT.

Die einzige vertrauenswürdige Quelle für Thunderbird-Downloads auf Apple-Hardware ist derzeit thunderbird.net.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

A review of Number Go Up, on crypto shenanigans. Sounds like an exciting read, but like the reviewer, I think I want to read the book that isn't so much about the scammers running the grift, but the institutions which tried to keep them in check and the media context which gave them so much oxygen.

[ related topics: Books Journalism and Media Sports Cryptography ]