Flutterby™! (short)

Started reading Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America last night, and thinking about how preservationists often fight to increase homelessness, and reminded of "tradition is peer pressure from dead people", and...

mhoye @mhoye@cosocial.ca

@scruss Nostalgia is an attack surface.

Irenes (many) @ireneista@irenes.space

we read this academic paper a while back which mentioned in passing that it's apparently well-known (if you're in the right field of study...) that fascists and authoritarians always have a very backwards-looking idea of culture, they define their aesthetics in ways which only allow nostalgia and never new ideas, predictably and repeatedly

and once we had that idea, we've started seeing it everywhere ><

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.

"Give me a wrench, maybe it needs to be scared." is my new answer to misbehaving machines.

https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5915

One of the points of Scott Bernstein's talk last night was that Petalumans currently pay on the order of $323M annually to drive. This paper suggests (inline with previous looks at the topic) that "77% of the cost of automobility is currently externalized".

Back of the envelope, waving over trips into and out of Petaluma and who pays for parking, that's, what, $1.4B annually?

Imagine what we could do with *that* surplus if we could redirect those automobile trips to Active Transportation and public transit.

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice Volume 214, December 2026, 105235 The global cost of automobility Nadja Schweiggart, Stefan Gössling, Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Felix Creutzig

Lead Dev: Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI — it backfired (coercive "you have 1 article left this month, register for more" tomfoolery).

Summarized by Sasha @sashag@anarres.family

„Meta thought it had cracked the future of engineering teams: shrink 10-20 person groups down to pods of 3-5, backed by AI, and let the technology carry the rest.

Code changes jumped 220% year-on-year, but features reaching users rose just 36%, while major incidents climbed 40% and firefighting time rose 70%.

The lesson is that AI can make a team produce more output without making the organization produce more value, and the right-sized team for the AI era might not be smaller at all.“

Color me surprised :blobcatjoy:

Impressed by Zohran Mamdani and the rest on AI policy in New York City schools.

https://youtu.be/lvyXuTvW5vA

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

Clean Technica: Research Suggests Auto Loans Should Account for Vehicle Efficiency

A new report from Atlas Public Policy found that drivers purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles are at lower risk of defaulting on their auto loans, with electric vehicle (EV) drivers—whose cars are the most efficient—leading the pack with a 50 percent lower default rate when compared to drivers of average fuel economy cars. Perplexingly, however, EV drivers consistently face higher loan rates than drivers of less efficient vehicles who default on their auto loans more frequently.

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...

Ashu rTakmenn1987

I just downloaded porn but the file is compressed

sigh.... unzips

Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.

To address what he sees as a bad situation getting worse, he has asked a court to order OpenAI to implement a range of protections for ChatGPT users who may be vulnerable to mania or psychosis. Last fall, OpenAI estimated that about a million users experience those symptoms while using ChatGPT each week, and ChatGPT’s popularity has only grown since then, Lines’ lawsuit noted.

Via.

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/

Also, Petalumans are paying $300M/year in direct automobile costs (and a hell of a lot more than that in external costs and land for parking), if we can convince folks that maybe they wanna lower those costs by ... pooling transportation via transit...

The Register: AI models don't kill people – people kill people

AI fearmongers forget we could just jail tech execs until morale and model safety improve

And stop excusing shitty sandboxes and lack of oversight as "the model did it".