Picture of the Mission & Mountain View concrete
Entry: 2025-04-02 23:12:52.792512+02 Better terms for "slop" by Dan Lyke comments 0
Rock Paper Shotgun: We need some better terms for GenAI output - "slop" is too benign
I think we can do better. "Slop" evokes a tepid cylinder of condensed cream of mushroom soup, glumly wibbling in a chipped bowl. When I think of GenAI, I picture something closer to tropical insects laying eggs beneath soft flesh of victims. There's something parasitical and sinister about flaying the skin of artists who've explicitly spoken out against GenAI and then gleefully parading around in that stolen flesh. Slop sounds like Soft sounds like Plop sounds like Globule. It slides down too easy; gets off too lightly.
[ related topics: Bay Area Art & Culture Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-04-02 17:45:08.802232+02 Congestion pricing saves lives by Dan Lyke comments 0
Jeff Baker @jwbee.bsky.social
Manhattan congestion charge = fewest traffic deaths in recorded history.
[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events Work, productivity and environment Currency ]
Entry: 2025-03-21 16:39:13.911508+01 Raw Ricci Wynne by Dan Lyke comments 0
I'm not sure I need to be noting every MAGAt busted for sex abuse, but it seems like we've got a cluster of 'em recently, and this asshole made his popularity through particularly heinous means to start with: MAGA Influencer And Fox News Guest "Raw" Ricci Wynne Indicted On Child Sex Abuse Charges
The influencer was already being investigated by San Francisco police at the time of his November arrest and was named a suspect in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old, according to The San Francisco Standard. Authorities say they found evidence on Wynne’s cellphones and at his luxury apartment that indicated he was facilitating a sex work operation that spanned multiple cities.
Wynne pleaded not guilty to those charges, according to the</span> San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.
On Tuesday, however, a federal grand jury indicted Wynne on two counts of producing child pornography, according to an indictment obtained by HuffPost.
[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Bay Area Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement California Culture Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-03-17 21:20:02.880408+01 OH on the Chuck Schumer book tour If by Dan Lyke comments 0
OH on the Chuck Schumer book tour: “If he doesn’t have the balls to stand up to MAGA, how was he gonna have the balls to stand up to the Corte Madera moms?”
And, I mean, sure, it's a burn, but have you been to a reading at Book Passage? That can be a rough crowd.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Bay Area ]
Entry: 2025-03-14 17:10:02.799041+01 Comment on a Sheriff's Dept Facebook by Dan Lyke comments 0
Comment on a Sheriff's Dept Facebook post about a fentanyl related bust thanking them for "keeping us safe", and...
So, you're just gonna come right out and tell the popo that you're scoring pills at a shady hotel and want them monitoring the supply?
[ related topics: Bay Area Travel ]
Entry: 2025-03-11 18:22:14.148939+01 The Cone People by Dan Lyke comments 2
We need to start ticketing people who claim public parking space for their own exclusive parking.
'The cone people have gone too far': Chaos is brewing on SF's Billionaires' Row
[ related topics: Bay Area Space & Astronomy ]
Entry: 2025-02-26 17:59:55.412698+01 Apple Advanced Data Protection by Dan Lyke comments 0
Why bother rephrasing, I'll just quote: Chris is. @offby1@wandering.shop
Bruce Schneier, on the demand by the UK that Apple build a back door into their end to end encryption: https://www.schneier.com/blog/...d-make-our-phones-less-safe.html
The key takeaway here is that if you use an Apple device you should immediately enable Advanced Data Protection: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108756
Apple may be forced to disable it in the future, but if they do they can't do so in secret; it will be immediately obvious to you that it's happening.
[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Weblogs Bay Area Macintosh Cryptography Archival ]
Entry: 2025-02-25 00:56:30.613797+01 "I care about serving veterans." by Dan Lyke comments 0
Wired: DOGE’s USDS Purge Included the Guy Who Keeps Veterans’ Data Safe Online:
“There were these interviews we all had to do with the DOGE people the day after the inauguration,” he says. “In mine, one of them asked me to describe what I was doing at VA and then said something like, ‘If you’re doing all that work, why aren’t you working in the private sector where you could be making twice as much money?’ And I said, ‘Because I don’t care about the money. I care about serving veterans.’
“I think the fact that someone asked me that question at all is really telling.”
Via Jonathan Kamens (the subject of the piece).
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Currency ]
Entry: 2025-02-24 18:06:24.82443+01 Goodbye cybersecurity by Dan Lyke comments 0
The politicization of the federal workforce continues: DOGE’s USDS Purge Included the Guy Who Keeps Veterans’ Data Safe Online
The dozens of USDS cuts last week hit teams like product management, design, and procurement. Kamens and other sources told WIRED that he is the only person from the USDS engineering team who was fired. He and others speculate that he was targeted because he had been publicly critical of DOGE in the weeks before the USDS cuts. DOGE did not return a request for comment about his removal.
[ related topics: Bay Area Graphic Design ]
Entry: 2025-02-15 01:07:11.892631+01 DOGE news OTD by Dan Lyke comments 0
In San Francisco, Men claiming to be DOGE enter City Hall and demand records on wasteful spending, fraud
“City Hall Building Management has received multiple reports of individuals entering public and private specs in City Hall through unlocked doors, while [filming] their interactions,” the manager wrote. “The individuals told occupants they are from the Department of Government Accountability and that they want to insert flash drives to download evidence of corruption. They did not present a judicial warrant, and therefore, had no authority to access computers or non public spaces.”
Elon Musk’s DOGE Posts Classified Data On Its New Website (Same content on Huffington Post)
But an easy search shows that DOGE’s database provides details on the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal agency that designs, builds and maintains U.S. intelligence satellites. Not only are NRO’s budgets and head counts classified, but the prospect of Musk’s tech team meddling in sensitive personnel information is setting off alarms for some in the intelligence community.
It's here, currently claiming 1,097 Headcount and a $165.9M total wages.
Interestingly, the About NRO page at Intelligence Careers dot gov says:
We're a hybrid organization of 3,000 personnel from the Intelligence Community, members of the armed services and Department of Defense civilian personnel.
[ related topics: Privacy Invention and Design Bay Area moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Television California Culture Community Databases ]
Entry: 2025-01-30 05:54:53.966894+01 California AG warns AI companies by Dan Lyke comments 0
Attorney General Rob Bonta rocks: California’s AG Tells AI Companies Practically Everything They’re Doing Might Be Illegal
On January 13th, California AG Rob Bonta issued two legal advisories that illustrate all of the myriad areas where the AI industry could be getting itself into trouble. “The AGO encourages the responsible use of AI in ways that are safe, ethical, and consistent with human dignity,” the advisory says. “For AI systems to achieve their positive potential without doing harm, they must be developed and used ethically and legally,” it continues, before dovetailing into the many ways in which AI companies could, potentially, be breaking the law.
[ related topics: Ethics Bay Area Law California Culture Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-01-23 05:33:29.025205+01 Fake daylighting in San Francisco by Dan Lyke comments 0
Oooh, I hadn't thought about using the new California curb daylighting law to sneak in excess red curbs while corners are getting cleared...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf...king-law-fake-curbs-20050123.php
[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area California Culture ]
Entry: 2025-01-15 19:10:03.517803+01 Seeing various commentary around this by Dan Lyke comments 0
Seeing various commentary around this article on how insufficient "in-lieu" fees from developers mean San Jose is having trouble paying for infastructure, so...
Impact fees are a Ponzi scheme, housing responds to supply and demand, and this is mostly an issue because of Prop 13. If you're gonna hate on someone, hate on Howard Jarvis.
https://sanjosespotlight.com/i...ose-with-infrastructure-backlog/
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-01-09 01:40:02.551308+01 Picture of the Mission Mountain View by Dan Lyke comments 0
Picture of the Mission & Mountain View concrete
[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]
Entry: 2024-12-27 06:00:02.480982+01 Driver crashes into Golden Gate Bridge by Dan Lyke comments 0
Driver crashes into Golden Gate Bridge toll collection booth. If only they could have painted the building bright orange or something so that drivers could see it...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea...oll-booth-christmas-20000931.php
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Automobiles ]
Entry: 2024-12-25 18:45:03.186251+01 Okay starting to see what people mean by Dan Lyke comments 0
Okay, starting to see what people mean about refactoring to satisfy the borrow checker in Rust, because, yeah, i can't figure out how to tell it that the "Chars" I'm passing around have an str that's safe.
But now I'm in the "how does one keep generic behavior when structuring code like this?", and maybe the answer is one doesn't?
I can see making a bunch of cheat sheets and trying to make notes about ways to think about data structures differently as I move forward.
[ related topics: Bay Area ]
Entry: 2024-12-20 18:46:50.577667+01 Black Plastic cooking utensils by Dan Lyke comments 0
Skepchick: Why Did We Throw Away Our Black Plastic Utensils?
But here’s where we get to the same old story that I see again and again with these environmental watchdog groups: the hyperbole. And in this case, it wasn’t just the organization saying that your spatula is going to give you cancer. The study specifically noted that the levels of DecaBDE they found in the utensils could result in a person consuming 34,700 nanograms per day, which they said approached the EPA’s safety limit, which is 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight. They claimed that for a 60-kilogram (or 130-pound) adult, that was 42,000 nanograms per day. Which…it isn’t. It’s 420,000 nanograms per day. The levels they found actually didn’t even hit 10% of the EPA’s limit.
I mean, lots of reasons plastics aren't great, but...
[ related topics: Health Bay Area Law ]
Entry: 2024-12-05 17:23:40.849388+01 Use encryption by Dan Lyke comments 1
Oh look, the FBI is back on the "use encryption" side of the swing, rather than the "we should be able to backdoor everything" side, because their backdoor got pwned: U.S. officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid unprecedented cyberattack — FBI and CISA officials said it was impossible to predict when the telecommunications companies would be fully safe from interlopers.
(Via, but a number of other places too)
[ related topics: Bay Area Law Enforcement Cryptography ]
Entry: 2024-11-20 19:26:29.294894+01 On Safe C++ by Dan Lyke comments 0
I'm doing a lot of thinking about career direction, and trying to figure out languages to commit to, and whatnot, and I love C, and have enjoyed the expressiveness of C++, but boy the direction of the latter appears to be a total shitshow, both in terms of the language, and the culture. I was aware of the Patricia Aas thread, this follows up a bit: On "Safe" C++
[ related topics: Bay Area Sociology California Culture ]
Entry: 2024-10-31 15:21:42.071566+01 Amanda Strong stop motion animation by Dan Lyke comments 0
This screen shot looks amazing: Stop-motion animator Amanda Strong creates immersive worlds for Indigenous stories
Inkwo for When the Starving Return trailer. Some video of process at Behind the Scenes with Amanda Strong | X Company | CBC resulting in Breaking Point | X Company | CBC
[ related topics: Movies Bay Area Current Events Video ]
Entry: 2024-10-25 16:25:02.760471+02 Good morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
Good morning, San Francisco Bay!
[ related topics: Photography Bay Area California Culture ]
Entry: 2024-10-13 18:40:03.310188+02 I try to avoid Amazon but ended up by Dan Lyke comments 0
I try to avoid Amazon, but ended up signing up for a free Prime trial to watch a movie last night, and... I could either, on Tuesday, drive 25 miles to hope that Electronics Plus in San Rafael has what I want in stock, or have 20 of them delivered for ten bucks tomorrow.
And given the number of things delivered in my neighborhood, I'm sure that that's dramatically fewer vehicle miles traveled.
[ related topics: Books Movies Bay Area Economics ]
Entry: 2024-09-18 21:01:03.397076+02 Clean-record agreements by Dan Lyke comments 0
This is a devastating piece of reporting and an incredible read: SF Chronicle: This is the secret system that covers up police misconduct — and ensures problem officers can get hired again
In many cases, police departments hid alleged misconduct even while maintaining it occurred. In every case where reporters could establish the outcome of a department’s internal investigation through documents or interviews, they found that clean-record agreements were given after police agencies had fired the officer, or had begun the process of doing so, based on what they saw as clear evidence of wrongdoing.
[ related topics: Bay Area Law Law Enforcement Woodworking ]
Entry: 2024-09-17 16:37:35.091392+02 Giant chicken costume by Dan Lyke comments 0
Awesome: San Francisco cops are using a silly stunt to catch crosswalk violators
“If you don’t see someone in a giant chicken costume, then we really have a problem,” he said.
Also awesome because after several years of apparently not enforcing traffic laws, SFPD has decided to start again.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Bay Area Law Enforcement California Culture Birds Government ]
Entry: 2024-09-16 20:02:15.299518+02 Transbay Tube by Dan Lyke comments 0
BART's PR folks are having fun (and it's a neat article): The Transbay Tube turns 50: Inside the groundbreaking history and future of the Bay's underwater crossing
To some, it was a preposterous notion – train rides under the ocean?!? -- but the nonbelievers quickly hushed on that fateful day in 1974. They, too, wanted to take an underwater voyage from Oakland to San Francisco.
[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events California Culture Machinery Trains Public Transportation ]
Entry: 2024-08-12 20:08:07.662806+02 SMS spam via network injection by Dan Lyke comments 0
Google: Keeping your Android device safe from text message fraud, in which we learn that cell site simulators (usually driven around, or carried around in a backpack) are being used to send SMS spam.
The method is straightforward and replicates known techniques to trick mobile devices to an attacker-controlled 2G network. SMS Blasters expose a fake LTE or 5G network which executes a single function: downgrading the user’s connection to a legacy 2G protocol. The same device also exposes a fake 2G network, which lures all the devices to connect to it. At this point, attackers abuse the well known lack of mutual authentication in 2G and force connections to be unencrypted, which enables a complete Person-in-the-Middle (PitM) position to inject SMS payloads.
[ related topics: Politics Spam broadband Bay Area Monty Python Mathematics ]
Entry: 2024-07-12 21:31:51.397696+02 Not all heroes wear... anything by Dan Lyke comments 0
San Francisco is healing: ‘Nailed the guy’: Nudists tackle ‘pirate’ after random attack on tourist in the Castro
The naked samaritans—Pete Sferra of San Jose and Lloyd Fishback of San Francisco—were letting it all hang out on a July 2 stroll through the neighborhood when they spotted a “crazy kind of pirate guy” threatening a man with a blowtorch.
[ related topics: Bay Area Nudity California Culture ]
Entry: 2024-07-10 20:08:35.196238+02 Cybertruck review by Dan Lyke comments 0
Giggle: SFGate: I drove a Cybertruck around SF because I am a smart, cool alpha male
SFGATE columnist Drew Magary drove the (in)famous Tesla vehicle around the city and lived to tell the tale
Shades of the 2002 Car & Driver review of the Cadillac Escalade EXT that I've mentioned previously.
[ related topics: Humor Bay Area Automobiles Archival ]
Entry: 2024-06-06 01:57:30.553885+02 DJ Illenium & AI poster art by Dan Lyke comments 0
JFC people, it's freakin' June of 2024, the whole AI image generation thing is pretty played at this point, y'all should know better. Stadium-filling DJ Illenium is getting roasted for his SF concert poster
“My mgmt ended up using the ai art because they’re stupid and have no taste,” he wrote, adding that a new piece of artwork would be coming soon.
But, hey, dude got an SFGate article about his upcoming shows out of it...
[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area Sociology Art & Culture Television California Culture Artificial Intelligence hubris ]
Entry: 2024-05-19 02:55:02.373666+02 We had some glass butterflies and a by Dan Lyke comments 0
We had some glass butterflies and a hummingbird that we picked up somewhere, and a piece of lemon verbena that came from Charlene's grandmother's house in San Francisco, so I made a lamp
[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Bay Area California Culture Real Estate ]
Entry: 2024-04-27 03:15:02.956025+02 The idea he said is to do to San by Dan Lyke comments 0
”The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter." Wait, I thought London Breed was trying to do this already.
The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco
[ related topics: broadband Bay Area California Culture ]
Entry: 2024-04-15 18:40:03.311367+02 So Oakland airport is renaming by Dan Lyke comments 0
So Oakland airport is renaming themselves to include "San Francisco" in the name, and... if you can figure out how to get people from one airport to the other in less than 30 minutes or so, I bet you can print money.
Those travelers showing up at the wrong airport who *need* to get across the bay...
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Aviation Bay Area California Culture Currency ]
Entry: 2024-04-10 19:59:25.967316+02 Hoodline "local news" generated by LLM by Dan Lyke comments 0
Gazetteer: Hoodline using AI to generate news stories and journalist profiles
Following a Gazetteer SF inquiry, the neighborhood news site publicly confirmed its use of artificial intelligence to power an 'In-House Writing Collective'
Broke Ass Stuart: Hoodline caught using AI generated writers to make AI generated articles
To be fair, it seems like maybe they're feeding it things like police press releases and getting overly flowery summaries out, and unlike some other recent breaks, don't appear to be outright spreading lies.
Yet.
But this sure is a consequence of the Google created SEO environment.
[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area Writing Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Artificial Intelligence Real Estate Aviation - Helicopters ]
Entry: 2024-04-01 19:05:00.187621+02 Infrastrucutre & inadvertent eugenics by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT squifish @thesquirrelfish@sfba.social
One of the things about caring about infrastructure, particularly transportation but really all of it, is how quickly people reveal ideas based in eugenics. They don't even connect it.
Ultimately when you hear people say that pedestrians and cyclists need to look where they're going instead of drivers driving more carefully that effectively means people of limited capabilities shouldn't be safe in public.
Not everyone can look where they're going. Brains aren't developed for that kind of responsibility for like a decade or more! And then that capability gets intermittently lost again on the other side of life. Then there's stuff like medication, drunkenness, blindness, distractions, being tired, etc etc.
These are all reasons people shouldn't be driving, and if they're also excuses for why people aren't safe walking, people with these conditions aren't safe anywhere.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area ]
Entry: 2024-03-28 17:07:05.828244+01 Society is broken by 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.
[ related topics: Bay Area Automobiles ]
Entry: 2024-03-27 18:09:15.697783+01 Easter Approaches. Be Afraid. by 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*
[ related topics: Religion Humor Music Bay Area Space & Astronomy California Culture ]
Entry: 2024-03-16 20:30:01.905228+01 I love how staff and consultants put by Dan Lyke comments 0
I love how staff and consultants put subtext into contextual documents.. "The downtown was a mix of commercial and residential uses during the late-nineteenth century, as lack of easy transportation led people to live near their place of business or job."
This Berkeley Shattuck Avenue Commercial Corridor Historic Context and Survey is a thing of beauty.
https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/pages...ttuck%20context%2005-28-2015.pdf
[ related topics: Bay Area Theater & Plays Heinlein ]
Entry: 2024-03-13 00:41:43.194164+01 New Orleans PD "losing" evidence by Dan Lyke comments 2
Y'all have read about this New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick complaining about the conditions in headquarters, and that rats are eating evidence?
"Golly, I don't know where that cannabis went, the rats must have eaten it" is about the most bullshit line a cop can deliver.
[ related topics: Drugs Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events Law Enforcement Hurricane Katrina ]
Entry: 2024-03-08 19:02:59.40213+01 If our science is right, this will be fine. by Dan Lyke comments 0
U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board: Tank Explosions at Midland Resource Recovery
Before starting the MP odorizer draining operation, SPSI’s business development and special project manager, a former DuPont employee with 30 years of emergency response experience and at that time a governor-appointed officer on the West Virginia State Fire Commission, conducted a briefing for MRR and agency representatives. When asked by a representative from a state agency why SPSI thought this operation would be safe – given that a similar approach to draining the MP odorizer had resulted in the May 24, 2017, explosion – the SPSI manager asserted, “If our science is right, this will be fine.”
Unable to directly engage SPSI about the safety issues regarding its plan and lacking confidence that MRR or SPSI understood either the cause of the May 24, 2017 incident or the full range of possible reactive chemistry involved, CSB investigators took shelter behind a shipping container (conex box) located behind a building more than 150 feet away from the SPSI operation.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Pyrotechnics ]
Entry: 2024-03-08 18:45:03.64606+01 SF Downtown by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io
Tired of the SF Downtown is dying stories when (1) downtown has always been dead (2) it was planned that way (3) most of the businesses complaining about crime and poor sales are simply not relevant (4) no SF resident goes downtown for fun or voluntarily (even me, and I'm only a mile away)
It's so easy to blame homeless people, when imho it's much clearer to blame poor planning and poor business people for most of it
RT Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io
Homeless people are not gathering in Union Square in great numbers. Have you seen the number of police cars there?
You can't build a downtown with little to no housing, fill it with bad restaurants, and then say no one's coming
No one was going to Macy's even pre-pandemic except tourists
I always had to explain to my European and Asian friends that American downtowns are not... downtowns you think of. SF downtown was already underwhelming before any of these breathless stories
[ related topics: Food Bay Area Law Enforcement Fashion Real Estate ]
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