Is there a site where I can see which lobbyists have funded who across the United States? https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/LD/default.aspx?lyi=11&tci=-1 gives me stuff for Florida, as a first party source.

Why isn't this coming from the Onion? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/what-can-go-wrong-when-police-use-ai-write-reports

And HE WAS LYING ABOUT IT! https://www.mediaite.com/news/rfk-jr-claims-a-worm-ate-part-of-his-brain-and-then-died/

Dude got a dead worm in his head from (potentially) eating shit in pork? Could NOT BE ME, astaghfirullah!!!!!!!!!!!

Ahhh I see what you're saying! Yeah, talk about pulling your own plug

It was moreso on the evolution of commerce (not so much tech as in like VC-backed SVB kinda tech). This quote is more of the "tech" I'm thinking of (so more like VISA and Mastercard):

AM: This is another one of those situations where I think it’s useful to look back at what was actually happening at the time and how people thought about things at the time. Because the delivery regime that we have is convenient in a lot of ways for people that can afford to interface with it. It’s really easy to get used to it, especially since other options for more traditional types of commerce, in a lot of places have dwindled, especially in places with poorer populations. In the late 90s when Amazon was founded and you get a lot of other dot-com startups that were trying to figure out what this model would be to sell things online. It was met by a population that was largely pretty skeptical of having to buy something on the internet. It was a novel technology; it seemed like the Wild West. It seemed like buying something online was probably a great way to get your credit card stolen. There wasn’t a lot of trust.

Someone reminded me of this netcast episode, https://techwontsave.us/episode/170_the_online_shopping_boom_is_over_w_amanda_mull with the focus on how online shopping is slowly coming to an end (in the ways we've grown accustomed to). What I found more interesting was the lore of malls — growing up in Brooklyn, Atlantic Terminal and Kings Plaza were the malls of my mind. The way people spoke of Sears (of which there was one in Brooklyn but was defunct when I had shopping autonomy) made me wonder how it got crushed so quickly. And everything points back to tech.

About to be a decade since this https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/notetoself/episodes/deep-problem-deep-learning. A decade is a long time. Ironically, I do think things have gotten better (in the sense that fewer people are buying the bullshit line that AI is going to save us or elevate life beyond belief - let alone replace/augment the work of pointing someone out in a photo). But there's still a large contingent (largely the upper managerial wing of industry) that are digging their heels in, dragging society into this (more) computationally predictable future. Let's see what happens by next year before I continue on this.

There's a underlying benefit to not having to change this portion of the WikiTravel page at https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Sarasota#Stay_safe. Less tourists will disturb the non-white communities (as it's a predominant region of the such and has had bad experiences with racism in the past).

WikiTravel could kinda serve as a inverse "green book" tbh with gaps of knowledge like this.

I got a thing where running Zoom and Podman containers will lock up my machine (at times — it's not consistent when it happens). Could I just nice down Podman containers (or run them under a different user with different rlimits)? We'll see.

Not shocking that another prominent Black person has left a part of the decentralized social Web experiment. https://bsky.app/profile/theferocity.bsky.social/post/3krw7ecoi7p2r. I'm still of the mind (and this was hinted at my other post) that this isn't really the route (especially if we keep operating from this world-readable, tack-on-moderation-and-consent-enforcing approach). And the more time that goes on, the less interested in trying to find something else I become because it will require more effort than engaging people offline or via other means. It (kind of) lost its value (for me).

It's either one holds a webinar or someone pays for everyone to colocate when it comes to holding events. But then it's "online can't match offline" with events. This is case-by-case but at this point, I'd imagine that we could imagine some sort of "rubric" on when an event should be in-person only, hybrid or remote-only.

That'd reduce the need to manage a separate source of docs if it's kept close to the code (which I'm just going to read). Eh, kinda babbling but also don't have enough time to play with a PoC.

Biggest pet peeve is the use of a README file as the only comprehensive API documentation. This is common for JavaScript and TypeScript projects but I'd figure with the advent of things like LanguageServer or Treesitter, someone could make something like https://docs.rs/ or the Python documentation site to surface APIs a lot easier. Sigh.

Another day, another instance of Microsoft "shedding weight" to "focus resources on high impact titles". None of that AI or military money can't be used to at least distract the populace longer? The MET Gala did it.

Microsoft's leadership, like Google, is allegeric to everything but the whim of shareholders and it's BORING (to say softly). https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xbox-reportedly-shutting-down-four-bethesda-studios

The students are showing us what to do.

It's worth noting which companies advertise what kind of additional services they provide. For example, DigitalOcean focuses on how their infrastructure folds into your product, Google's immediately listing all of the expected options one would find and Amazon rounds it out by mentioning the brute force necessary to physically get into their centers. No, seriously, Amazon really takes the cake for even being proud of policing their data center workers heavily, like walking through a living ACL machine. It takes the crown for physical security.

Finally getting to read "Let This Radicalize You" and I'm kind of wishing I started it sooner (no point on chronopity, though). I'm hoping there are things I can pull out to use in other lines of work. Also, another reminder to actually publish my reading notes somewhere.

My Stack Overflow account is currently filling out applications for college.