(Compromise position: SF goes all the way down to redwood city so that it incorporates the Pulgas Water Temple and SFO, SJ goes up to Redwood City, Santa Cruz extends to Pacifica and is renamed Long Chile)
Programmer-turned-lawyer, trying to build human(e) futures. Day job: SonarSource. Boards: Creative Commons, OpenET (open water data), CA Housing Defense. Also: 415, dad. Past: Wikipedia, Moz, 305 Also: https://lu.is + https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief
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(Compromise position: SF goes all the way down to redwood city so that it incorporates the Pulgas Water Temple and SFO, SJ goes up to Redwood City, Santa Cruz extends to Pacifica and is renamed Long Chile)
If your goal is enlightenment thought, the bible, isolation from modern politics, and remote islands, might I recommend the outer hebrides, sir
(Hottest CA urbanism take: make SF extend all the way to SJ again)
Given the pace of Sacramento rule-making, I am unclear how any city management who aren’t 1️⃣ full-time and 2️⃣ supported by large-ish legal teams are supposed to stay in compliance. This is not an excuse—it definitely means we should be doing a lot more consolidation.
this sucks.
Yes, though increasingly I’m convinced they are a must-have anyway. Too many small-ish-town city leaders simply aren’t resourced to keep up with changes in state law. Providing this information doesn’t fix bad faith, but at least some operate in good faith and others DTRT in the face of a threat.
🔥 the letter-sending work @housingdefense.bsky.social does is boring but vital: in the best case, we help busy city leaders know what state law is, and in the worst case, we remind them it is enforced. You can help fund that work and get more housing, like this, built: calhdf.org/donate/
Compare and contrast the last Miami-ND game opening with Phil Collins bringing peak 1980s sad
He was 4/11 last season. In total. (Per other skeets, I haven’t looked it up to confirm, it’s so bad it is hard to believe)
He was hanging out with the governor before the game in case you needed a reason to dislike Jim Kelly
They of course get married at Burning Man on Dip’s birthday, and in honor of Dip’s parents everyone trips absolute dots^W balls
2025 techno remix of A Boy Named Sue, “An Ambiguously Gendered Child Named Dip”
“But you can call me Dip”
Odds they name the child “Spontaneous” are what, 50-50?
*surprisingly* born at burning man
the next owner
Trying to picture what Miami’s response to this next year could be. The LatAm studies program must have someone who writes on the role of the Church in any number of oppressive regimes but uh that might be a little too on the nose. Someone who studies the ecological damage from gold mining?
Grew up in Coral Gables in the 1980s so I have feelings about this game but still gotta respect the A++++ trolling there.
You will be seeing replays of that catch forever more or less, so don’t sweat it
Update: Notre Dame uses their free ad space to go hard on… how destructive and bad hurricanes are and how they have a prof who is dropping drones into them to measure them and reduce the damage from them. A++++ trolling.
Have not told my wife but definitely thinking that a reason I want to switch to a front box from a long tail is the signs I will absolutely slather it with
Kid getting screamed at by one of the GOATs: who is grandpa
They showed him (without saying who he was) in a box next to a very Jim Kelly, and I did not know Jim Kelly could be more dead to me but! apparently he can.
they showed a t-shirt with that within 15 seconds of the opening, but the voiceover of the opening closed very carefully with “Catholics versus canes”
Watching college football obviously
cyberpunk future (positive)(?)
Public service remember: muting works very well and makes this place more pleasant (goes to mute the name of Yet Another F’ing Guy)
Reminder: almost every American votes with a paper ballot. Louisiana is the only remaining state that uses paperless voting machines statewide, and they're already actively working to update their voting system. verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mo...
A Northern Irish friend pointed out years ago that there are playbooks for disassembling untrusted violent sectarian police orgs and restarting from scratch and… ever since I’ve both been curious to read more and horrified to think how much awful violence it would take for that to be palatable here.
Violation of the categorical imperative
It’s a little button on the lower left on the civilization selection screen between ages, with zero color contrast. So very easy not to notice (or forget about, 95% of the time).
Glad it isn’t just broken for me. When I’m back at my box I’ll ask the author if it could gain this feature.
It’s a photoshop, the car owner didn’t do it either bsky.app/profile/lu.i...
There is an add-on that makes it impossible to forget in the first age (how is it possible that isn’t mandatory?!?!) but not sure if it doesn’t work or doesn’t try to work in later ages. steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/...
The WORST.
this is calzone erasure cuberule.com
I mean I think she’s a real squid fan, though perhaps her artist is not en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_M...
Preparing new memes for my TOS formation module in Internet Law. I'm hoping to explain courts' valorization of clickwraps in a way that 5 year olds might understand
Don’t know if better or worse but bsky.app/profile/rfks...
C'mon San Francisco wonks! Get in there and edit out all the propaganda. sfstandard.com/2025/08/27/s...
I frequently ponder showing up at SF city meetings and saying “while we were debating Valencia Street here’s what Paris did” but at the very least my own BoS member would probably label me a gentrifier for saying “Europe is cool”, and if I use New York instead I get “Sanhattan” hurled at me.
I see beavers pausing while chewing trees to listen for movements so that the tree doesn't fall on them, I share beavers pausing while chewing trees to listen for movements so that the tree doesn't fall on them. Those are the rules.
A library book 76 years overdue is an anxiety-ridden prospect. Is someone in trouble? About to go broke? With 10-cent daily late fees, the overdue book accumulated $2,774 in fines. But new rules have changed the landscape of “library book shame.”
Yup yup, not true scotsmen, I get it. Have a great weekend!
It literally has. Langchain, eleutherai, various Allen Institute joints, Simon Willison’s `llm`, Harvard’s 1M public domain books. I could go on and on and on but it’s a beautiful weekend and I should stop arguing with people who have already made up their minds.
That might or might not happen here (lots of material and cultural conditions are different) but I’m much more interested in reading analysis of those differences and similarities than engaging with “it’s not creative” or “it’s just chat”.
If you prefer a computing metaphor, the obvious one is the proprietary Unices, in light of which the BSDs were usually considered toys, but which birthed a creative ferment that eventually exploded into GNU, gcc, and Linux and now the toys run the world.
(And that’s setting aside both open models and fine-tuning.) I don’t want to belabor the imperfect metaphor! But bottom line is just because the large platform LLMs are very closed doesn’t mean they aren’t the site of a lot of generativity.
Because people built all kinds of elaborate, complex, custom, creative things (and cultural signifiers) around those engines they couldn’t manufacture, just as people are building elaborate, complex, interesting, creative things (and processes and products) around engines they couldn’t manufacture.
It’s both true that the models themselves aren’t open, and that very real tinkering is happening here. People couldn’t manufacture V8s either and yet a whole culture grew up around them. I really urge curiosity about what’s happening here. We need a better class of critic.
Hi! I am such a FOSS guy that I’m the only person (other than Lessig?) to have served on the boards of both the Open Source Initiative and Creative Commons. I’ve spoken repeatedly on ethics at FSF’s annual conf. I can talk tinkering with software, and its moral and practical nuances, all day long.
Think (most creatively, and not coincidentally most ultimately destructively) hot rodding as precursor of modern car culture, or the intensely craft/techne-driven relationship of early printers to the author and the printed book.
But also I would love to see some historically informed discussion of this, because “it should be perfectly predictable and reliable” is a very recent mode of thinking about machines? The overwhelming history of “tech” is that it’s a finicky beast that requires attention and rewards tinkering.
I don’t entirely disagree, and this is part of why the most interesting parts of the industry are moving away from chat as the dominant model.
“It is extremely easy to use a chatbot” is… pretty dismissive? To be generous, I suppose this is dismissive of the user and not the tool, in much the same way “it is extremely easy to use a saw” is dismissive of the skill of the carpenter rather than the tool. So 🤷🏽 Anyway, have a fine morning!
Anyway I realize pushing back like this invites a block, and that’s a bummer. But I really would urge you to dive in with people who are going beyond “just chat”. We need good critique of that, and being so dismissive of the genuine techne being developed here is not a good start.
But you can’t do 2️⃣ (LLMs and academia) or 3️⃣ (LLMs as situated historical tech) properly if there’s no curiosity about 1️⃣.
I responded because 1️⃣ dismissing it as “just chat” is very different from 2️⃣“as faculty we’re being set up to fail” or 3️⃣ “we need to teach why it is unethical even though useful”. 2️⃣ is an important discussion; 3️⃣ is an important multidisciplinary course or even a degree.
Yeah academics are certainly not being given the tools or training to do this right (and I’m not even sure it can be usefully done in an American higher ed setting, which often struggles to evaluate student process, mostly for good reasons).
That said, to learn that skill you have to have good teachers who can plan good assignments and evaluate output, or have to have relevant work experience (so that you can plan, and evaluate and iterate on outputs) and toothy work problems.
Yeah. Chatting is easy, actually getting useful work-quality things out of one is a skill, just like good project management and people management are skills. Eg lots of experienced software developers passed around this post because it discussed skills and strategies: harper.blog/2025/05/08/b...
I assume this gentleman did not benefit from one-size-fits-all highway funding, education spending, social security spending, environmental laws. Must be nice to live on an island with no relationships outside one’s town!
Raiding the ruins . . . www.kjzz.org/business/202...
Tickling cat neurons I did not even recall existed
It is certainly a cat response I have not seen in 30 years
I can hear this screencap
only correct response
Just in time for Labour Day, our list of stories depicting labour unions in science fiction and fantasy has reached 250 entries. Thanks to @joachimboaz.bsky.social for all the help on this. List as HTML: hugoclub.blogspot.com/2018/12/orga... List as Google Doc: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... 1/
I first read this as “philanthropy” and… I think maybe it’s still true. Definitely my team at Wikimedia was at least 10% sexy murder poets and the rest pleasant-verging-on-avoidant bureaucrats. (Hi, it’s me, I’m the bureaucrat)
The 20th Anniversary of the 16th Avenue Steps - new post up now! open.substack.com/pub/njudah/p...
People say some very, very dumb things on stands.
I grew up snorkeling and the dynamics of how seagrass moved in Finding Nemo was uncanny, told my wife “must have been at least one snorkeler or scuba diver on the team”. Years later watched a making of, the entire team had gotten scuba certified.
And the Red Bull scene at the end of s1 is set at the hotel where I… drank a lot of Red Bull during the Oracle-Google trial. Too real.
You two know Dan Berlin at Google, right? I mentioned to him how real the legal stuff was and his response was an offhand “oh yeah I was a consultant”. Said they’d had him write briefs that were visible on desks in s2. ISTR @cdibona.bsky.social was also a consultant on at least some eps?
Let me complete the trifecta: doing anything fun with AI?
OH: “like many middle-aged men, I am destined for a hip replacement; and like many middle-aged men, I am destined to host a podcast”
I have a nerd crush on Dave Flemming. Earlier this season: discussing e-bike commuting. Last night: nerding out about Wordle (also a hilarious discussion of it last year). Tonight: discussing the non-meat options at the ballpark. Also, he’s a great announcer. #sfgiants
Honestly at this point even actual Tom Clancy books are ruined by it Tom Clancy’s Hunt For Red October Do you want to read that? No you do not
Tom Clancy’s Mythical Man Month
Instead, the rot (which was obvious to anyone paying attention to Cruise’s poor response to previous accidents) killed the company and now we just have to hope that Waymo stays on a morally even keel (there are bad signs on that already, which again CPUC is not able to manage at all).
TLDR on the competition thing is that a more competent regulator would have uncovered the moral rot at Cruise’s leadership before someone got nearly killed. Then Cruise’s tech and capital investment would still be on the street, providing a viable competitor to Google (which is important).
I would really like to write more about this but I’m sick and it isn’t my day job…
Unfortunately (and I’m pro-Waymo!) that’s mostly down to luck, not regulatory design or regulatory competence. If Cruise hadn’t been owned by GM, they’d still be operating (bad), Tesla is about to start operating (worse), and there is no viable competitor (partially a regulatory problem).
The Founders, especially the Boston Founders, would have been aghast that we’ve not only abandoned the practice but now spread the calumny that the central role of the English jury isn’t “legal”.
(slides glasses down nose, finds notes from English Legal History at a school whose name should be damnatio memoriae) It’s very much a legal concept, just that the people who define “what is legal” ahistorically think only high priests can define the law, with juries “mere” finders of fact.
Added to the pile! Love stories of people doing radical things in the shadow of modernity.
Yay Copper! We love ours.
ART bsky.app/profile/duni...
(this is not a defense of OpenAI, who I’m happy to roast as the amoral monsters they are, but the car industry were also amoral monsters and we also let them get away with it in exchange for ruining our cities, killing millions, and uh… the Ford Foundation?)
we did find brakes (and steering and everything else) hard to get right, that’s why car drivers kill tens of thousands of Americans a year (globally another order of magnitude or two) and have more or less since before living memory 🤷🏽
The thing that is bonkers about this article is that “swimming from the Farallons to the mainland” might be only the third craziest thing in here, after swimming a *lap of lake tahoe* (already done) and swimming *the entire length of California* (planned for next year) 🤯
I used to fund more or less this through solar-aid.org But to their credit their hope was always that markets would overtake their work, given the scale they could hope to reach. And this has happened in most of their “markets”.
Refuse to believe they exist anywhere other than I-95 exits
$1 of PV imported into Africa today can displace ~$50 of imported fuel over its operating life. "In Nigeria, a 420 Watt solar panel retails for ~$60 USD and would produce 550 KWh in a year. [...] $60 USD of diesel would make only 275 KWh of electricity, implying a payback time of just six months."
I am really glad I have avoided reading this because this is unraveling me secondhand, i just can’t even
“When replacing a parking space a single parking space can hold 8-12 spots” lets see how the recent daylighting corral on my block scores ooooooooh
Which ironically made my hair turn the color of a tv turned to a dead channel, right there on the spot