I dream of a Prop 65-style requirement that every site with likely contaminated soil or groundwater to post a plain-language description of what likely caused it, and when. "There was a gas station here for 7 years 80 years ago and now you can't touch the dirt" would radicalize people.
Been on this particular trip many times, but it never gets less crazy: Every single site that has ever handled fossil fuels, ever, is toxic. You are surrounded by this legacy, you see it every day, and if we labelled even a fraction of it, it would blow the politics of energy transition wide open.
The trick is that _picking_ a seat costs an additional fee. There should be an option to be assigned a seat later.
We had a fun argument that HR couldn’t have it both ways: either my general statement about “people working IRL sick is common and bad” didn’t relate to the company at all, or we did have an epidemic of people sick in the office and I wasn’t slandering.
At one former job, people showing up sick was so engrained that I was officially reprimanded for a comparable tweet that didn’t mention the company.
Yeah, that's bad. Dumb populism.
Think about it this way: If you had a pot of cash to hand out, who would you send it to? I'm guessing you wouldn't say: “Folks who drive a lot are obviously the neediest; that's who deserves my cash.. Also, I would love to subsidize reliance on foreign oil.”
Donating to online scammers posing as legitimate people in need is not morally neutral:
You potentially are giving money to brutal slavery and human trafficking networks:
www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2...
The standard map of the BART rail system.
An image of the moon Pan, shaped roughly like a round scraped-up piece of ravioli. There is a narrow yellow band drawn across it.
Fun fact: the BART yellow line, at 100.1 km long, could wrap around multiple major moons of Saturn.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_o...
I can’t wait for my 2 AM tornado emergency warning.
If increasingly overconfident autocorrect messes up my tax forms, I will have an entire cow.
If there’s ever a day to phone your US representatives, it’s today.
To pour a little cold water on the Bluesky dunking, AWS us-east-1, infamous backbone of internet services, is currently having problems.
Incredible
This much missing bus service is a tough pill to swallow when the justification for the AC transit “Realign“ cuts was shrinking service to match what understaffing was (then) providing.
Sorry to mention climate change here but we're all scurrying around in a thin film of atmosphere shared between all of us and we shouldn't overheat the thing keeping us alive!!
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Californians, don’t forget to complain to your supermarket if you see Raw Farm products.
Legiblization kills.
A view of Earth taken by NASA astronaut and Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft's four main windows after completing the translunar injection burn on April 2, 2026.
Here's the full quality of Earth's picture taken from inside Integrity and Artemis II.
images.nasa.gov/details/art0...
Growing food to make fuel might have seemed like a good idea in 1990 but in 2026 it is not. Replacing transportation fuel with electricity is the only sane approach.
Cal-ITP is a transit payment system made by California, that smaller agencies (eg Monterrey-Salinas Transit) use, instead of wasting scarce money on for-profit contracts and needlessly bespoke software from companies like Cubic.
More investment would make it fit more agencies’ needs
www.calitp.org
This whole story has been staggering as a software engineer, for how poor a job Cubic has done at a task that isn’t very hard by today’s tech standards. The MTC must hold Cubic accountable for utterly failing to deliver at the public’s expense.
California should also be investing more in Cal-ITP!
"but everyone's just laying off 'useless' roles like technical writing and marketing and support and product management!"
Babes, when you eliminate those roles your "critical" technical staff like SREs get pulled into those conversations. The work streams don't *stop* your platform just goes down
It fits, too.
"We've got a beautiful moonrise and we're headed right at it." -Wiseman
Screenshot from the NASA Artemis II launch livestream showing the core stage separation from a camera on the rocket.
What a fucking shot holy shit
“It looks like these tests fail if the database schema doesn’t match. I’ll skip tests if there’s a mismatch.”
This isn’t a fools day, ’tis a knaves day.