Overloaded
Someone was trying to move boulders on wooden pallets for landscaping, and they seem to have been a bit much for the pallets to handle…
#ImportedPost
Bird, Bird, Bird
They were everywhere. But at least most of them were out of the way.
That’s Not Your Conscience
If your conscience is telling you to refuse someone medical care because you think they’re icky, maybe it’s not your conscience that you’re listening to.
Curves of Morro Bay
Morro Bay lies along the central California Coast near San Luis Obispo, and is known for two major landmarks: Morro Rock, a large volcanic dome right near the shoreline, and a power plant with three very tall smokestacks.
Some miles north, Highway 46 cuts through the coastal mountains from Cambria to Paso Robles, revealing cattle ranches, wineries, and empty hills. There’s one spot along the road where the hills part, revealing a perfect view of the bay and the rock. Better yet, there’s a turnout, making it easy to stop and look.
The first time I drove this way, it was gray and overcast, and might actually have been raining. A year later I took the same drive again on an sunny day, unable to remember how far along the turnout was but watching for it the whole way. The result: this shot.
The curves of the dome, the bay, the rolling hills and the patch of heavier vegetation all fit in with this week’s theme.
Photo Challenge (WordPress): Curves
#CACoastTrip2009 #California #coastline #curves #FromParallelLines #ImportedPost #PhotoChallenge
Lamppost Forest
Urban Light at LACMA is a large square filled with over 200 lamp posts that the artist collected from various locations over several years, spaced wide enough to walk through comfortably. It’s like being in a forest of lamp posts — perfect for this week’s challenge.
The funny thing is, I wasn’t even planning on going there. We went to see the La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum at the other end of the park. Oil has been seeping out of the ground for thousands of years, trapping animals and preserving their bones in an incredible collection of ice age fossils. But the parking lot on that side of the park was full, so we parked in the LACMA structure at the other end.
Photo challenge (WordPress): Light
Update: I also took a photo with my phone for Instagram. It’s not as good quality of course, but I like the way it came out.
#FromParallelLines #ImportedPost #LACMA #light #night #PhotoChallenge #SeeAlsoInstagram
Coronawhere?
A lot of the maps I see showing coronavirus cases, even from sources like the CDC, have a problem: They’re labeled by country, or by state. It’s too big to be useful.
- Labeling the number of cases reported in the US doesn’t tell you that they’re mostly in clusters in Washington and California.
- Labeling the number of cases in California doesn’t tell you that they’re mostly in northern California.
What matters for tracking its spread is actual location and transportation links, not jurisdiction.
Note: Cleaned up a bit from my original post on Mastodon.
Update 2024: It’s weird to look back at this now that the virus is literally everywhere (except maybe still Antarctica and the International Space Station?) and will be with us forever. That there was a time when it was still on the horizon but hadn’t arrived here (for whatever your value of “here” might have been) yet.
Hammers and Kneecaps
It’s one thing to say “I make hammers, and can’t be responsible for the fact that some people use them to break people’s kneecaps.”
It’s another thing to hand out free hammers to the kneecap-breakers, or pay them to use your hammers instead of someone else’s, or hire them as spokespeople, or use their testimonials to promote your business. “So-and-So’s hammer is the best for breaking kneecaps! And you can quote me on that!”
Under those circumstances, claiming to be opposed to kneecap-breaking wears a bit thin.
Related: I canceled my paid subscriptions to newsletters on Substack, leaving this note (minus the links) on each:
I’m disappointed in Substack’s response to the Substackers Against Nazis letter. I’ll find some other way to support the author without using Substack as a middleman.
Originally posted on my test GoToSocial site.
Update: I should point out that this was a last-straw situation, as the writing was already on the wall in April when the CEO repeatedly refused to answer an interviewer who asked point blank if they’d allow overt racism on Substack Notes.
#business #deplatforming #ethics #ImportedPost #Substack #tools
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/12/hammers-and-kneecaps/
The Firehose and the Jetpack
I’ve been meaning to disconnect from Jetpack for a while now. This seems like a good time to do it, and to finally clear out the older Tumblr and WordPress.com blogs I don’t use anymore.
Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — 404 Media
It’s the kind of thing that you expect from Google or Facebook, or from any number of start-ups, but there’s been this sense that Automattic should know better — and with Tumblr being login-walled and ad-saturated, and the push to upsell in their WordPress plugins, and now this…it’s looking like they don’t.
I don’t think they’ve hit the “trust thermocline” yet, but selling user data is a pretty clear line.
As for AI access to the Firehose: My previous understanding of the firehose is that it’s basically an aggregation of what you’d see in a bunch of blogs’ public RSS feeds. Which, OK, fine. Analyze your heart out. Display my posts in your RSS reader. Just make sure private posts and comments don’t leak.
But LLM training isn’t the same as analytics, or showing a properly attributed post in a reader. And quietly changing the terms to allow more kinds of re-use on something most people using the service don’t know about? Not cool.
And not making it clear what is and isn’t included for which purposes? That breaks down trust.
Before this, I wasn’t worried about the Firehose. But now I’m not sure I can trust Akismet, never mind Jetpack, and I’m looking for a new spam filter.
Originally posted across several threads through my GoToSocial test site.
Update: Automattic did clarify that self-hosted blogs with Jetpack are not included in the training data. Only company-hosted blogs on Tumblr and WordPress.com. But I still uninstalled Jetpack from this site, just to be sure. Like I said, I’d been meaning to for a while.
#AI #Automattic #blogging #ImportedPost #privacy #Tumblr #WordPress
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/03/firehose-and-jetpack/
Not Cruel Enough
The “bipartisan” immigration bill currently in Congress is a right-winger’s dream, but since Trump wants to run on anti-immigration, the GOP is suddenly opposed to it, arguing that it’s not draconian enough.
Nothing will ever be cruel enough for them, no matter how much Democrats do to appease them. Biden could do everything they asked for, and they’d still insist he was being soft on border control. They need it as a wedge issue. Appeasing them won’t win any points with their base, and it’ll alienate those on the left who want asylum seekers and immigrants in general treated like the actual human beings they are.
This bill is probably DOA at this point. But just in case, I sent a message to my rep advocating for more protections for asylum seekers, not less.
Sun Halos: Always Look Up
Have you ever seen a ring around the sun? Or a pair of bright spots flanking it? Or a rainbow-colored cloud? Just as sunlight reflecting and refracting inside raindrops can create a rainbow, sunlight reflecting off of ice crystals can form fascinating and beautiful halos. It doesn’t even have to be cold at ground level: if the ice crystals are high up in the atmosphere, spread in a thin layer of cirrus cloud, you can still see them… even in places known for warm weather like Los Angeles. I have a whole gallery of halo photos I’ve taken in southern California. (Edit: Most of them here on this blog too!) You’ll see them more often than you expect. You just have to look up.
Photo Challenge (WordPress): Look Up
#FromParallelLines #halo #ImportedPost #palm #PhotoChallenge
Locked Out at the Boundary
Behind this gate, a path leads up a narrow access way to a railroad bridge. Clearly people do get in there from time to time based on the trash – or maybe they just throw it over the fence from the sidewalk. Once I saw two people up on the bridge doing a photo shoot. They probably didn’t get there through here — a block south, there’s an at-grade crossing without any gates, and anyone could easily walk along next to the tracks as long as they keep alert for trains.
It got me thinking about how some boundaries are there to block access, and some are there purely for organizational purposes — consider the property line between two neighbors, defining responsibility for upkeep on each side — and while some of the obstacles we put up are intended to keep people out, sometimes they’re only meant to slow people down or send them down another path.
And then there are the boundaries like the tracks themselves: Structures that aren’t intended to separate regions, but nonetheless just by existing define a near and a far side. Railroads, highways, even natural features like rivers and mountains split communities, climate zones, ecosystems, and nations.
But people are also good at getting past obstacles. We build bridges and tunnels. We find places to ford streams. We find mountain passes, and blast them out to make them easier to cross.
And sometimes? We just go around.
Photo challenge (WordPress): Boundaries
Caught the Superb Owl
Props to Niantic for both the timing on the raid day and for letting the players connect the dots themselves.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/02/caught-the-superb-owl/
Oh, Hi There!
Saw this while walking around the neighborhood the other day.
Last Tweets Standing
Popped over to Twitter to delete the last handful of posts I left there when I deleted most of them back in December. Decided to leave two for now, though I might still delete them before the new TOS takes effect.
Oct 2008:
If only the super high-tech jet fighters had identified, clarified & classified, they’d have seen the attack for what it really was.
Nov 2022:
Weird, it’s almost like the needs of a “town square” for people to communicate and exchange ideas aren’t compatible with the incentives for a single for-profit entity to maintain it.
#ImportedPost #socialNetworking #Twitter
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/09/last-tweets-standing/
SubdoMailing
Interesting spam/phish technique: Look for subdomains with CNAMEs or SPF records that point to abandoned domains that you can then register…and effectively take control of the subdomain or SPF.
They haven’t seen any cases where it’s been used to host a phishing site at, say, an msn.com subdomain, but they’ve seen thousands of cases where it’s been used to pass email verification checks.
The article describing “SubdoMailing” gives a detailed example of a spam that made use of an msn.com subdomain that was used for a sweepstakes way back in in 2001, with a CNAME pointing to the long-abandoned domain name for the contest, but the subdomain was never actually deleted.
Lesson: check your DNS for any dangling references to outside domains that might not exist anymore!
Not the Same
Option 1: will do some things you want, and some things you don’t.
Option 2: won’t do anything you want, will do all the same things you don’t want that option 1 will do, has promised to do more things you don’t want, undo the things you wanted that have already happened, make it more difficult for you to even have these choices in the future, and has previously demonstrated that they’re willing to go through with all of the above.
And yet I keep seeing people say they’re the same picture???
Really????
It’s like…you need to hire someone to fix your heater. One contractor will fix your heater for the advertised price, but break some of your windows in the process and stop taking your phone calls. The other will rip out your entire heating system and your plumbing, and steal the copper phone lines to make it hard for you to call someone else (I know, outdated metaphor), insist that you broke it yourself and charge extra. And they’ll break your windows too.
A bunch of reviews point out that both of them will break your windows, so they can’t be all that different, right?
It would be great to find someone who would fix your heat without breaking your windows! But there’s a glass factory in town that wants more business and gives all the local contractors kickbacks, so your best bet for that is to hire someone from out of town…but they’re booked until summer.
So you can either go with the one who’ll break things even more, or the one who will fix some things and break others, and then deal with the breakage while you still have heating, plumbing, and a working phone.
They’re Made of Meth
You know the old joke about “drugs would be cheaper?”
The Adderal shortage has gotten so bad that Mexican pharmacies are selling counterfeit pills to tourists…made of meth.
(I should clarify that it’s the counterfeit pills, not the tourists that are made of meth.)
—
Update: Sadly, science fiction author Terry Bisson (who wrote “They’re Made of Meat” among many other stories) died a few weeks later.
2020: Overachiever (The Monoliths)
November 23: Helicopter pilot finds ‘strange’ monolith in remote part of Utah
November 25: Using Google Earth to look for the Utah monolith site. One candidate that matches the landscape seems to have something vertical that appeared between the 2015 and 2016 images.
No coordinates in the article. Attempt no landings there.
December 7: After the Utah Monolith was found, everyone was making comments about 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as more have popped up, I’m starting to think about The Chronoliths. It’s a novel by Robert Charles Wilson in which obelisks appear out of nowhere, commemorating future military victories by someone no one has heard of – yet.
The monolith in Atascadero, California, was installed by a group of local artists who, on hearing about the one in Romania, figured, someone’s going to make a third one, so why not us?
It was meant to be something fun, a change of pace from the kind of conversations 2020 has been plagued with
After a group traveled five hours to tear it down on video, the town rallied around rebuilding the obelisk and putting it back up on the mountain.
December 27: I…what????? Gingerbread monolith appears — then collapses — on San Francisco hilltop
In true pop-up-art fashion, a nearly 7-foot-tall monolith made of gingerbread mysteriously appeared on a San Francisco hilltop on Christmas Day and collapsed the next day.
Where do you keep the euphemism?
Someone walked into the restroom talking on a cell phone, explaining, “it’s going to sound really bad now, because I’m in the executive washroom.”
Executive washroom?
Sure, if by “executive washroom” you mean first-floor lobby restroom that’s available to anyone who walks into the building.
I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, or trying to impress the person on the other end of the call.
#bathroom #imported-post #overheard #phone #see-also-livejournal
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
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