Thursday March 28th, 2024

Society is broken

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Streetsblog SF: Guest Commentary: Traffic Engineers Must Put Safety Over Driver Throughput

No other field would tolerate this level of death and destruction. The tragedy of West Portal is more evidence that the traffic engineering profession is fundamentally broken

I mean, yes, in most other engineering-adjacent professions designing systems like we do for traffic would be career limiting, but... City of Petaluma has two traffic engineers who come out and do walk arounds, point out all of the ways that our roads are awful and deadly, and that our relative lack of pedestrian and cyclist deaths comes primarily from suppressing those activities and ceding our public spaces to automobiles, but they're also hampered by budget and public will.

We need to fix society, not just traffic engineering.

Wednesday March 27th, 2024

Star Spangled Banner

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Because the collapse of the Key bridge is bringing up Francis Scott Key's slave-owning and other problematic aspects, here's the Complete version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" showing spelling and punctuation from Francis Scott Key's manuscript in the Maryland Historical Society collection.

Yeah, that third verse in context makes "land of the free" read a little differently.

For completeness, The Anacreontic Song as Sung at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, the words by Ralph Tomlinson Esquire, the late President of that Society.

...
And long may the Sons of ANACREON intwine
The Myrtle of VENUS with BACCHUS'S Vine.

Easter Approaches. Be Afraid.

Dan Lyke comments (0)

RT Inertial Invites @intransitivelie@beige.party

Jesus: impossible to kill, reproduced asexually. Jesus is canonically a fungus. Clearly the part the Romans crucified was a fruiting body of some kind, leaving the bulk of the organism below ground, safe and secure. And every Easter, we find Jesus' multi-colored spores hidden in dark places. The rabbits tried to warn us. But now it's too late. He's metastasized across the whole planet. Soon enough, he will come again, and when he does, no cross in the world will be big enough to keep him at bay.

*Twilight Zone music intensifies*

Today I learned about W State Rd

Dan Lyke comments (1)

Today I learned about W State Rd 84, near Fort Lauderdale Florida. As one wag commented, "it looks like a road sine".

I wonder what the lane width vs general travel speeds on it are, and collision rates, especially vs the sorts of straight rural roads that often connect these sorts of places...

https://www.google.com/maps/pl...1373174!16zL20vMHJqMHo?entry=ttu

And Seminole Tribune on groundbreaking on efforts to straighten it.

code is harder to read than to write

Dan Lyke comments (1)

RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

Every developer in the world thinks reading code is harder than writing code and every devtools vendor in the world is trying to charge you money for a button you can click that lets you read code instead of writing it.

aww i ε> you too

Dan Lyke comments (0)

RT c-side cassette :ms_cassette: @aronia@tech.lgbt

analysis textbooks'll be like "let ε>0" and i'll just go "aww i ε> you too"

buy it in tins

Dan Lyke comments (0)

RT Tess dot exe @diffractie@glitterkitten.co.uk

Confession: Whilst I know what testosterone does, and I know progesterone does, I still don't know what minestrone does, or why they let you buy it in tins.

Vision Pro discounted already?

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Ben O'Matic @bennomatic@appdot.net

Since Amazon bought it, Woot! is a different site from what it used to be. It's no longer just a one-deal-a-day overstock clearance place. It's a high velocity funnel for Amazon.

That said, I still feel like it's not a great look for the Apple Vision Pro to be turning up there this soon after its initial release, with a... 4%???... discount?

Weird.

https://electronics.woot.com/o...apple-mql83ll-a-vision-pro-256gb

Maersk shipping

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Apropos of current events, July 14, 2023 letter from the US Department of Labor/OSHA to Maersk shipping on their findings regarding the firing of a Seaman whistleblower (PDF).

I hope that the layers of subcontractedness with the Dali can be cut through and those actually responsible can be held to account.

I have a bunch of Makrut limes and

Dan Lyke comments (0)

I have a bunch of Makrut limes and leaves. I could just freeze them, but any suggestions for a chutney or relish or other preserve that incorporates them?

(Particularly looking at @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io ...)

Saw the toot asking What coding

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Saw the toot asking "What coding practices do you implement in your day-to-day that help protect against bad actors?", and immediately started typing...

if (!strcmp("Paris Hilton", name)) {...

Facebook wiretapping Snapchat on your phone

Dan Lyke comments (2)

Project Ghostbusters: Facebook Accused of Using Your Phone to Wiretap Snapchat

Meta has lots of data through Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, but that’s not enough for them. Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called “Project Ghostbusters.” Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn’t private at all.

So, uh, mad props to the folks who bought a VPN for privacy. This kinda falls nicely on top of "anti-virus" software makers providing additional attack surface, and Mozilla hiring the foxes to guard the henhouse on privacy...

Tuesday March 26th, 2024

On feeling like you're not a civilian

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

Technical Debt derivatives

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Key Bridge Collapse

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Holocaust Survivors Condemning Israel

Dan Lyke comments (0)

From 2014: NY Times Runs Ad From Holocaust Survivors Condemning Israel, Attacking Elie Wiesel

The statement was signed by more than 300 people and issued in response to an ad by Elie Wiesel.

Monday March 25th, 2024

Angus Deaton Rethinking Economics

Dan Lyke comments (2)

If you've been reading Flutterby for 26 years now, you've seen my personal evolution from big-O Objectivist big-L Libertarian, to raving left wing statist kook pragmatist. It's happened a bit at a time, first was realizing that Rand's essay on patents and creating artificial scarcity laid bare that most Libertarians are Monarchists who aren't smart enough to realize it (I think something made horribly clear in the past several years). Somewhere in there was reading A Farewell To Alms[Wiki] and realizing the ways in which the conclusion of that book was flawed.

Anyway, a few years ago I ran across Donald MacKenzie's observation that the study of economics is an engine, not a camera (I haven't yet read his book), and that shattered a few more neurons loose, and last night I started reading Kate Raworth's Donut Economics, and it's good to see that a lot of younger economists are questioning the institution.

So, yeah, unsurprising that Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton savages his own profession as clueless and unethical.

International Monetary Fund : Angus Deaton : Rethinking Economics

Bellard's projects

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Oooh, Fabrice Bellard, of FFMPEG fame, has a projects page, currently catching my eye are the QuickJS JavaScript engine, TinyGL (a small OpenGL subset), and TCC, "...a tiny but complete ISOC99 C compiler...".

US said the Moscow attacks were coming

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.

AI is strong medicine

Dan Lyke comments (0)

I'm thinking right now about all of those anecdotes that doctors, especially those who've done work in developing nations, tell about medicine with awful side effects, but that patients seek out because those side effects make them feel like it's working...

RT Ted Kaminski @tedinski@hachyderm.io

@inthehands This has been my near-universal experience with junior developers using ChatGPT.

It somehow *feels* amazingly productive and helpful to them. One mentee did a mini-postmortem on a project that didn't go well, and really, really, powerfully struggled with the cognitive dissonance between "chatgpt helped me be so productive, really useful!" and "I just spent 2 weeks instead of 2 hours on a task because I asked chatgpt instead of reading the documentation."

RT inthehands@hachyderm.io Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io

@tedinski It reminds me of a study I saw once (wish wish wish I had the link now) that compared lecture-based sit-and-listen classroom instruction with hands-on activity-based instruction. They found that the active, activity-based learning led to much better comprehension and retention (duh), but immediately after the class, students •felt• like they’d learned more from the lecture. There’s something infectious about passively listening to a voice with an air of confidence.

Automobile news OTD

Dan Lyke comments (0)

As our understanding of sources for environmental microplastics keep getting revised to indicate that even more of them come from car tires, further indication that we need to get away from automobiles: Hyundai — What Makes EV Tires Different from Regular Tires

The tires of electric vehicles wear 20% faster than those of internal combustion engines, which is due to the acceleration of electric vehicles that generate strong instantaneous power.

Also, in the EU, new sensors on cars are yielding data: First Commission report on real-world CO2 emissions of cars and vans using data from on-board fuel consumption monitoring devices

The first data from a sample of 600 000 cars indicates that the real-world fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from diesel and petrol vehicles on the road are around 20% higher than indicated by the official values from the standardised WLTP type-approval test used for regulatory purposes. This discrepancy is in line with what the Commission had anticipated.

For plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the real-world CO2 emissions were on average 3.5 times higher than the laboratory values, which confirms that these vehicles are currently not realising their potential, largely because they are not being charged and driven fully electrically as frequently as assumed.

In cities in civilized countries, garbage collection happens via underground pneumatic tubes... The future is not evenly distributed. The Envac Automated Waste Collection System

Just thinking about all of those kids

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Just thinking about all of those kids rotting in Riker's Island because they were merely accused of something...

Trump wins partial stay of fraud judgment, allowed to post $175 million https://wapo.st/3PB2eFC #GiftArticle

Sunday March 24th, 2024

Wow Really enjoying Lara Downes

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Wow. Really enjoying Lara Downes talking about Rhapsody in Blue in this latest episode of Switched on Pop. https://switchedonpop.com/episodes/rhapsody-in-blue-lara-downes

Tennessee Lawmakers Propose Legislation Banning ‘Chemtrails’

Dan Lyke comments (1)

Tennessee friends: Is there something in the water? Although if the language really is “the intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight …” maybe we can use this to address CO2 and PM2.5 emissions.

AvWeb: Tennessee Lawmakers Propose Legislation Banning ‘Chemtrails’

Saturday March 23rd, 2024

Friday March 22nd, 2024

Working through my West Coast Shaving

Dan Lyke comments (6)

Working through my West Coast Shaving sampler pack: Derby blades were nice, but didn't last super long. The Barco ones were better on that. Opened a pack of Personna, and first shave was super smooth. We'll see how that lasts, but I may prefer these to the Barco.

Thursday March 21st, 2024

Oh, Apple, the GNU versions of your command line tools have had this option since 1999, why am I having to `brew install coreutils` and prefix regular commands with "g" to make things work?

Edit: It's worse than that, Apple's date -Iseconds is equivalent to GNU's date --iso8601=seconds.

Edit Edit: It has been pointed out to me that this boils down to FreeBSD vs GNU.

Bwahahahaha! No

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Bwahahahaha! No, I'm not gonna edit PDFs in Firefox when I can't even save, let alone print, my proof of insurance cards in Firefox, and I don't shop for music on MusicNotes in Firefox because PDF rendering, and...

Some days on https

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Some days on https://rootlgame.net/ I'm like "yeah, that took me 5 guesses, no shame", today I took two guesses on the last one and am all "doh!".

individual actions vs "AI"

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Why, yes, I have been diving back into GPT 4 at the encouragement of coworkers to try to get useful output from it that might augment how our software helps people explore information.

RT jimray @jimray@mastodon.social

Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”

VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”

The Real C++ Killers

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Yes, Kenwood, the things I most want when pulling up your app to turn on noise cancellation because the on earbud controls for this suuuuck is to have to click through "fuck no I don't want Alexa" and then have a firmware update start.

Confession When I read

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Confession: When I read "Jenkins", "automation server" is waaaay down my semantic associations.

Far far beyond "Leroy".

Wednesday March 20th, 2024

When you go to the corporatespeak

Dan Lyke comments (0)

When you go to the corporate-speak single sign-on integrator's web site and want to create a test account, and it says "Sign up with Google", so you think "Hey, SSO is kinda cool, I should do that", and click that button, and... Nothing. Yeah, this looks like middleware we should *definitely* integrate, huh...

Ugh I have an NSScrollView that

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Ugh. I have an NSScrollView that contains other views. Two finger panning works. There are some views that interfere with this. In my simplified test app, I cannot recreate the interference, in our app this includes all scroll views, and a few other views outside of the hierarchy (but that track inside scroll view motion, so can end up under the cursor).

And I am out of ideas for debugging this.

Julia Evans has a great series of posts

Dan Lyke comments (0)

Julia Evans has a great series of posts talking about her experience in how she interacts with people on the fediverse, from phrasing questions, to responding to responses. It's in the context of "talking about git", but there's a lot of good stuff here:

https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/112128313009699377

If you missed the Know Before You Grow

Dan Lyke comments (0)

If you missed the Know Before You Grow forum last Wednesday in which folks from David Baker Architects talked about 9 ways to design housing for people, it's here: https://youtu.be/qP2MXz8jbco

Tuesday March 19th, 2024

100% Bafflegab

Dan Lyke comments (0)

People following my frustrations and

Dan Lyke comments (0)

People following my frustrations and grumblings closely may have realized that in the past year or two I've implemented most of browser password management. And it has a couple of flaws, isn't the most seamless thing in the world, but it mostly works.

And it's not Safari, and holy crap does Apple manage to get password management incredibly wrong. I just spent a few minutes untangling Charlene's Amazon password change, and: annoying handholding that makes it difficult to do the right thing...

Jessamyn's question about giving her

Dan Lyke comments (1)

Jessamyn's question about giving her What 3 Words location as activating.potato.noodle or groans.accompanying.hugs made me realize I'm sitting at entire.agenda.bleat...

https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/112123493551763005

Recessions, Pollution, and Life Expectancy

Dan Lyke comments (0)

The upside of recessions: New research confirms it: The worse the economy gets, the longer we live. But why?

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.

National Bureau of Economic Research: Lives vs. Livelihoods: The Impact of the Great Recession on Mortality and Welfare Amy Finkelstein, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, Frank Schilbach & Jonathan Zhang

Via.

How far has the net fallen I'm trying

Dan Lyke comments (4)

How far has the net fallen? I'm trying to find an old comic, it was about mixing Christianity, and the punchline was on the order of "There's no wrong way to eat a Jesus™". It was of the era of Bob the Angry Flower, but I'm pretty sure was another comic.

Google, Bing, Stract and Marginalia are being of no help here.