At work we're using the Antikythera device as a topic for a demo, so I went on to Google Maps to find the location of the shipwreck, and... along with finding a "shipwrack", got someone's baby pictures...
How the Fediverse differs from Bluesky: 70 minutes after my "paste unformatted" post, the former has given it 54 retoots and 103 likes, the latter... crickets.
It only took a few years of living in Petaluma, where much of "American Grafitti" was shot, to just get over car culture, and to start to see classic car nostalgia as propaganda for the smell of gasoline and so many automobile deaths.
Anyway: Governor Newsom visits Jay Leno’s Garage to sign legislation celebrating and preserving California’s classic car and lowrider heritage
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09/16/governor-newsom-visits-jay-lenos-garage-to-sign-legislation-celebrating-and-preserving-californias-classic-car-and-lowrider-heritage/
When I am lord high ruler of the universe, "Paste Unformatted" will be the default, and if applications have a "Paste Formatted" option at all, it will be two clicks to get there.
"The center turn lane is where people go to make terrible decisions."
https://bikestreets.com/podcast/tony-cherolis-amp-leslie-schulte-tactical-urbanism-in-indianapolis
Hilarity is people who have lectured me at great length on the need to abide by extensive municipal processes (that led to plans that weren't implementable) using the Nextdoor mob to second-guess the General Plan.
Guess it only counts when it's your "right people" making the decisions?
Went to the theater to see Coyote vs. Acme last night. Gotta admit we were kinda underwhelmed. I mean, not a bad movie, but we'd both have been happy to catch it streaming and felt like they could have spent a bit more time punching up the script.
I'm getting super suspicious of anything that posits "AI" as actually intelligent. Anyone know anything about stoptheracetoreplace(dot)org or futureoflife(dot)org?
Oh, wait... David Gerard got there already: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/09/02/your-guide-to-astroturf-fake-anti-ai-groups/
Remembering today, that pause when the US was attacked, and for a brief moment we all rallied around the flag. And then Bush did what the terrorists wantedand the US killed half a million Iraqis and we all hid our flags in shame.
Scott Bernstein talking to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow last night, on the topic of bundling Housing + Transportation in discussions of costs
https://youtu.be/1F5RLgyZlCA
Follow on to yesterday's whine about tracking people's identities on Signal groups vs IRL, great that ya have a profile pic on Signal to make it easier to do that, but the picture of your face might kinda make the alias in this group irrelevant...
Listening to Scott Bernstein talk to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow about valuing Housing + Transportation, rather than just housing alone, and it's fantastic. The video will be online in a bit, but the H+T Affordability Map is super cool: https://htaindex.cnt.org/
Aigh. Not only am I stuck in nvm/pnpm hell, now XCode is refusing to show me the log for the SwiftGeneratePch errors.
Yes, modern software is going great.
Seems worth mentioning that friend who had an Android folding phone found that the unfolded aspect ratio wasn't really usable for anything video or picture related, and the foldingness made it tough to use for reading.
It's a solution looking for a problem that's yet to be found.
I totally appreciate that people on Signal groups use aliases, lots of reasons to want anonymity. And that they're now also using aliases, but different ones, in oldover Slack groups.
But the number of "oh right, person X in this context is Y in that one" mappings I now have to keep straight...
Lovecraft posited that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
I've been watching & reading AI user stuff, about how they're using LLMs to correlate information from a variety of data sources.
Not yet sure what this means.
Square Dance family: Sandie Bryant had a brain hemorrhage while calling in Germany, and her family is running a GoFundMe to help pay the costs...
https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-sandie
Member of the Petaluma old guard writes about the candidate who's lied, and had a restraining order for domestic violence filed against her, that "She threatens what is wrong with Petaluma."
Yeah, that's why we're voting against the old guard, dude, because y'all think that's okay.
More reason we need to move beyond DNS for identity: https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
Referencing Verisign https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2026013-name-request-15-04-2026-en.pdf and ICANN https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/fessenden-to-kane-2-28-07-2026-en.pdf
destroying the 3rd level of .name.
Yeah, haven't lived there since 1986...
https://mydialect.us/quiz-standard.html
From the summary:
What gave you away
Answers that point most strongly to Massachusetts.
How do you pronounce Mary/merry/marry? all 3 are different
flourish [ʌ] as in "sun" ("fluh-rish")
the first vowel in "Florida" [ɒ] as in "saw" ("flaw-ri-da")
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining? sunshower
Alt text: A map of the US with the northeastern US, starting from New York City and the Hudson Valley to the northeast, in red (legend: "Most Like You"), a big blue swatch up the biddle of the country for "least like you", with hints of orange along the eastern seaboard and central California coast.
Sitting here mashing reload on the PG&E outage map, noting that the two addresses I have real-time data on aren't in the outage map yet, and all of the little disconnected areas seem implausible...
https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/
Petaluma PD just sent a "Advisory: Power Outage: Please treat non-functioning stoplights as four-way stops" Nixle alert, and dear deities I hope that drivers take these more seriously than they take stop signs...
Some good recording on tying Tesla's highly redacted "FSD" collision data back to public records.
https://electrek.co/2026/09/01/tesla-autopilot-fsd-crashes-hidden-data/
Tesla has been so underhanded with their data it's hard to tell how safe their systems are. Good to see reporting digging into this.
Via https://bsky.app/profile/kayleadfoot.bsky.social/post/3mukflt6zqc2p
Stewmac email advertising tools for fretting, and I'm not sure my mental health can handle more efficient fretting.
Then it registers that this is for luthier work. But, yeah, my head is not in a good space.
Being frustrated with a lack of science fiction that's positive about the future, I get. Proposing using LLMs to write same... I think that's a symptom of why the human writers can't see a positive future.
Silly question: Anyone out there exploring the intersection between ear buds, in-ear monitors, and hearing aids? Charlene is getting frustrated with her hearing aids (fit and fragility), and ear buds are getting more socially accepted, and I have to think someone's ahead of the curve here.
Last night Charlene and I went to Evie Ladin calling Traditional square dances, with a mix of circles and longways, at Tara Firma. Lots I'm thinking about, but "this is how they used to do Tinder" is probably not a vibe I can bring to a Modern Western Square Dance club night.
At a celebration of life for J. Alistair Hamilton, mariner, and neighborhood character. Sailed with the Rainbow Warrior, among other adventures.
And owner of this amazing sextant.
Huh. At some point, I put "<meta name="geo.*"" tags into the HTML on my blog.
That some point was apparently over 20 years ago.
Anyway, don't know if I should update it, or remove it.
In honor of Dolly's passing, may I again strongly recommend the "Dolly Parton's America" podcast?
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america
Figured I should note that on Saturday we went to the Aqus Community's "Big Social" event, in which much conversing with people you didn't already know was encouraged.
I did find a bunch of people I didn't already know, but I learned that talking with random people isn't what I'm seeking.
I need a social filter other than "wants to socialize" to help find a larger proportion of interesting people to make a space worth putting energy into.
I never know how far to go in sanding and finishing outdoor furniture, I like texturing with an angle grinder, but the pores are gonna open, and some tooling marks give it character. Anyway, some scraps and a $20 piece of garage sale glass... And an awful lot of dust.
Aha! I finally understand what "Monster" energy drinks are for. Using the cans as a size comparison for dick pics on BlueSky. Kinda like those "5 Hour Energy" bottles, come to think of it.
Thanks, internet!
A Facebook friend posted about the endorphin high one gets from square dance calling. I replied "Yes. Sometimes I suspect that a cocaine habit would be cheaper and healthier, but...."
Of course Meta suspended my account for advocating drug use.
Good reminder I shouldn't be posting there anyway.
Whee! Friend reports that Thrifty's 800 number AI phone agent told him it was changing his reservation, and didn't actually.
Second time kinda worked (it didn't do other stuff).
So extra load on us, double check what portions of that the AI agent told you it actually did...
You have to get on the blockchain now. This is the least capable that the blockchain will ever be. I project that we'll have 99% of our data on the blockchain within two years.
At work we're using the Antikythera device as a topic for a demo, so I went on to Google Maps to find the location of the shipwreck, and... along with finding a "shipwrack", got someone's baby pictures...
If you have to explain your interface too deeply, it's a shitty interface.
Damn it, that Paul Simon reference was supposed to be accompanied by cat
Just when I thought Meta/Facebook ads couldn't get any stupider, the appeal to authority for a light bulb is "so effective an AI startup ordered 90".
Yeah, haven't lived there since 1986...
https://mydialect.us/quiz-standard.html
From the summary:
What gave you away
Answers that point most strongly to Massachusetts.
How do you pronounce Mary/merry/marry? all 3 are different
flourish [ʌ] as in "sun" ("fluh-rish")
the first vowel in "Florida" [ɒ] as in "saw" ("flaw-ri-da")
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining? sunshower
Alt text: A map of the US with the northeastern US, starting from New York City and the Hudson Valley to the northeast, in red (legend: "Most Like You"), a big blue swatch up the biddle of the country for "least like you", with hints of orange along the eastern seaboard and central California coast.
1930s comparisons intensify...
At a celebration of life for J. Alistair Hamilton, mariner, and neighborhood character. Sailed with the Rainbow Warrior, among other adventures.
And owner of this amazing sextant.
Sunset, reflected in the living room window, with cat.
I never know how far to go in sanding and finishing outdoor furniture, I like texturing with an angle grinder, but the pores are gonna open, and some tooling marks give it character. Anyway, some scraps and a $20 piece of garage sale glass... And an awful lot of dust.
It was around this time that I opened the windows and turned on the fans...
A Facebook friend posted about the endorphin high one gets from square dance calling. I replied "Yes. Sometimes I suspect that a cocaine habit would be cheaper and healthier, but...."
Of course Meta suspended my account for advocating drug use.
Good reminder I shouldn't be posting there anyway.