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  Got a request to schedule some calling gigs next year, and I realized that... maybe I'm over square dance calling? Maybe it's time to find something else to do with the voice? I have a few dances scheduled, I'll renew CALLERLAB, but pondering what I give this community vs what I get back.

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  This is an awesome example of induced demand: Person moves from San Rafael to Novato to take advantage of the 101 widening, can't understand why the congestion got exponentially worse. https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1wksk31/101_commute_is_it_just_me_or_has_traffic_doubled/ Via https://bsky.app/profile/warrenjwells.bsky.social/post/3mw25bcmzzc26

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  When I am lord high ruler of the universe, "Paste Unformatted" will be the default, and if applications have a "Paste Formatted" option at all, it will be two clicks to get there.

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  RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/117004310940800283 Can you say "legislative value capture"? I thought you could...

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  Holy crap. Apple signing keys, and the management structure and user interface around them. That is all.

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  RE: https://mast.hpc.social/@Elwell/117005765102919342 Wikipedia says 79m tons of steel in 2024, https://www.srfurnace.com/how-much-power-does-an-electric-arc-furnace-require.html says 400-500kWh/ton, so if I have my orders of magnitude right, US steel production is about 4.5 gigawatts?

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  Looked into the details of "The Reality Network", and suddenly had the uncomfortable realization that WASM means that every one of those "checking to see if you're a human" pauses could be stealing compute for proof-of-work (like ads likely already are). JavaScript was a mistake.

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  RE: https://werd.social/@ben/117003494260821180 The other side of this is: pretty clear that Microsoft's software development processes are horrendously broken.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@brouhaha/116961777595818023 Lemme tell you about the day we got X and Emacs running on the Chattanooga Online DNS server, 4mb of RAM. And it kept serving queries, too. Kids these days and their "only" 4 meg...

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  RE: https://mastodon.online/@mwichary/116952836351215165 As an emacs user, this was especially annoying, and I resented installing this thing for work.

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  Is there a way to generate a large corpus of bad code in a variety of languages? Right now my web site is serving zip bombs to overly aggressive bots, but I'm thinking LLM poisoning needs to evolve...

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  Back in the early naughts I had an elderly friend who hung out at the same coffee shop as me. Journalist with many cool experiences. He became convinced that he'd finally figured out a mechanism for betting on horses. This is also a post about conversations with people on how they use LLMs.

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  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116539164078873733 The act of writing software, and of maintaining software, is that of building a mental model that understands the processes that it is sitting in. Agile means the process understanding is built simultaneously with the coding. AI generated code means the process understanding is never built.

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  Trying to help and elderly friend with his iPhone, and holy shit Apple's standards have dropped. Apple apps/screens that pop the keyboard over the password and won't let me paste, inconsistent placement of "next" buttons and permissions stuff. What happened to this company?

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  Saving this point in the May 4th Petaluma City Council meeting so that when my city council member comes up for re-election I can gather all of my neighbors and have them watch this exchange and replace this guy with someone competent. https://www.youtube.com/live/F_mKQBORNcM?t=16831s

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  RE: https://exquisite.social/@thomholwerda/116535410248869526 Feels like time to move to one of the BSDs.

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  Facebook Marketplace rarely disappoints... https://www.flutterby.net/Image%3a2026-05-09MaritalGrinder.png

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  Anyone know who's running PetalumaCivic(dot)org? It appears to have some pretty misleading AI generated slop, and I'm wondering what the motivations behind it are.

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  RE: https://raggedfeathers.com/@lilithsaintcrow/116545502669822723 This helped me understand why I found "Wake Up Dead Man" so unengaging that we turned it off midway through...

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  Yeah, I know, everyone else is sharing the article, but we need this message in the public consciousness: Working from home may reduce a person's carbon footprint by 50%. #GiftArticle https://wapo.st/3Rr7Eot

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  "The laser pointer does not own you." - @baconandcoconut #NBPy

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  My talk on Modern Western Square Dancing at North Bay Python this weekend is live... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJVvaz8eFwA #NBPy

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  @rothko some years ago a friend of mine was shooting an indie film, and he got a community orchestra (I think it was Berkeley, but I'm not sure) to record the score for essentially the price of the recording hall. Which may have been a couple of mics in an auditorium mid-afternoon. Listening to it, I'm not sure what you'd use the whole symphony for, but I am not an arranger...

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  Oh eeenteresting: Google's models respect Anthropic's poison pill constants. At work we just tried to use the Gemini API to summarize Flutterby, and it kept throwing errors. Bwahahahaha!

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  This is, indeed, pure genius: https://puregenius.education via the similarly very good https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-resisting is really good, but it links to https://puregenius.education

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  Lucy, the office pup, eyes deep in a Penry Park gopher hole.

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  Lucy, the office pup, eyes deep in a Penry Park gopher hole. With picture. https://www.flutterby.net/Image%3a2026-04-17Lucy.jpg

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  The boats have arrived for Butter and Egg Days. https://www.flutterby.net/Image%3a2026-04-17TurningBasin.jpg

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  SMS with a verification code from a 5 digit phone number I don't recognize. Moment of panic, then I search for the number and discover it's the Safeway Rewards login process. Sorry, evildoer, you will not hijack my grocery coupons today!

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  Is there either a really good intro to Rust's libcosmic, or a better/more mature widget set for Rust that isn't Qt? I'd love something lightweight, but a table that doesn't appear to have edit in place capabilities, or truncate/wrap for long fields, seems... more archaic than I want.