You're on a bus that's not going to DC. The bus company does nothing but shout into phones and promise to pick you up in another bus whenever the driver finishes doing whatever he's doing.

hypothesis: the difference between interesting people and non- is that the former, when someone says a thing, wonder, "hmm, is that true?" and have some idea how they might find out. the latter just add it to their ledger of "things I have heard people say" that they use to decide what to believe.

27 Million Fewer Car Trips could also be the title of the autobiography of any American who moved to the city for the first time after college.* *offer void in Texas

Diminish a band They Probably Aren't Giants

"and a loose community of hyper-intellectually curious posters on X" what a polite way to say "likely marks"

At a certain point the whole construct of a lie breaks down because they don't understand the truth enough to misrepresent it.

I have a different reading of this. Miller is implicitly — in a way that's hard to see without the benefit of hindsight — saying "Trump will only invade countries in the western hemisphere, abandoning the rest of the world to Russia and China" and everyone just read it as "We're anti-war".

hacker news is consistently awful on politics. in today's thread on Venezuela, really striking how "America bad because imperialism" is wielded both as a reason to vote against Dems and as exculpatory for Trump when he does "the same".

Seems like a good time to repost the Trumpiest Baby Names gregat.es/baby-names-t...

Moorean Trump

Ok Stranger Things s5e4, sorcerers weren't introduced until 3e, in 2000.

"Navarro’s mother gave the book four stars, but not five, on Amazon."

Something I think about is how anything with the appearance of systematic rigor can easily seem true and authoritative to an uncritical mind. Like the virtue system from Ultima IV.

I didn't write as much on my blog this year, but here's a thread of a few posts, starting with an explanation of how Excel orders numeric options in its filter control (riveting stuff!) gregat.es/excel-numeri...

The Expanse is just GoT in space. Even written by the same guy!* (*This is the one conspiracy theory I indulge in, which also happens to be at least partially true. And maybe isn't a proper conspiracy theory because I think I am the only one who believes it.)

I did another quick analysis in Row Zero of the SSA baby name data: the trumpiest (and least trumpy) baby names of 2024!

Finally got around to updating the SSA baby name spreadsheet linked in rowzero.com/blog/baby-na... -n names for boys continue their downward trend in popularity!

What happens when it's nine times out of ten? You fire them (after a drawn out PIP process of course), unless they're the CEO's nephew, Claude.

I will reiterate that joining WA's 36th LD Dems as a PCO has been the most rewarding way to get involved in politics I have ever tried (there have been a few). And also a great way to make connections in your community!

Not in the energy world, but in general I have needed to update my views about what things could possibly happen, not about how bad the Republicans are. Exception: USAID. E.g.: I didn’t predict DOGE kids getting into the US payments system, but that was because I didn’t realize that was a thing.

This is nuts. Abolish golf? One of those slogans that makes you sound like a crazy person but is sensible and correct.

Ah, the height of British culinary achievement — a factory-made sandwich that alleges to be seafood yet is somehow shelf stable, sold in drug stores wrapped in plastic, which dares to declare itself superior to a fast food hamburger by pretending to be in a different category.

Let's stipulate that at least some software engineers who claim AI tools make them vastly more productive are neither lying nor misjudging their own productivity. This is not true for all or even most, even among people who happily adopt the tools. So what can explain the difference?

a bit of professional news I'm very proud to share: AWS is officially a Row Zero customer!

There's been a lot of discussion in recent days about the influence of the Stranger in local elections. I had a lot to say about their impact in school board races, which is so decisive that we could say they now effectively appoint the board:

How do whales hydrate? My old favorite counterexample to the claim that everything you might want to know is googleable turns out to also be a useful demonstration of why you shouldn't trust LLM chat bot output.

The Status Interview – Or How To Write Up a Senate Purge List talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-s...

It's a shame that the ST:TNG episode "Conspiracy" came in s1, when multi-episode arcs were still not really a thing. It could have made a very good arc!

Still waiting for Chuck Schumer's "wait for Republicans to do something once Trump's approval is low enough" strategy to bear fruit.

Yeah, the entire caucus is responsible for this, regardless of their vote

Primary all of them everywhere. Hound them at town halls. Show up at their offices. Call or write to them about every issue. That cadre of this party has to go. Clean house.

Since the Democrats worked extra hard to hide who actually supported this, I think the No Kings/Resistance position should be to primary every Democrat unless they publicly call for Schumer's ouster this week Either they go into total rebellion mode, which they won't, or the people will

Will you be moving to replace the current party leadership in the Senate, or are these just empty words while other retiring senators take the heat for the rest?

The Stranger got one endorsement really wrong this year. As @lisarivera.bsky.social points out, they should have endorsed Sarah Clark for school board. Rivera, herself endorsed by the Stranger when she was on the board and a 2020 delegate for Bernie Sanders to the DNC, makes an excellent case:

PSA for Seattle procrastinators: If you're voting today or tomorrow, USE A DROP BOX, NOT THE MAIL! The USPS won't guarantee your timely ballot is postmarked on time. Locations of ballot boxes: cd.kingcounty.gov/en/dept/elec... More details: publicola.com/2025/10/03/p...

At Row Zero we get amazing speeds ingesting data from Snowflake and other databases that can export column-oriented data. But there's a long tail of data stores that we're forced to slow down for, because they only allow row-oriented export. Here's hoping we can change that!

Seattle Voters: King County elections has recommended (in an email, for some reason they haven't posted this on their website) that you place your ballot in a drop box after Oct. 28, due to concerns that USPS may not postmark your ballot in time to be counted.

Fun to see which services I rely on are overly dependent on us-east-1

Wondering who to choose for Seattle school board? All Together for Seattle Schools, the parent org that came together to successfully fight the mass school closure plan in 2024, did the research and knows the inside story -- and trusts Sarah Clark, Joe Mizrahi, Vivian Song, and Jen LaVallee.

This is the slate!

Took my 3yo to No Kings Seattle. 1 hour each way and 3 hrs at the event. Not one complaint. Usually shy kid feeling the protest energy and striking up convos with strangers. Demanded I "say it!" whenever a chant started up. Dozens of compliments on her sign. My shoulders so tired. So, so worth it.

Saw Erika Evans out today, too!

Seattle No Kings from the monorail

So difficult not to violate my rule against posting my kid online. The video of her holding her protest sign and shouting, "No Kings! Yes Democracy!" is sooooo cute.

AAUP v. Rubio is out, and look at how it starts. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

every time an amazon linux update shows me this I get a little heartburn

I was told the people of Italy were going to be paying these tariffs.

Watching the Star Trek TOS episode "Patterns of Force" and there's a bit where Kirk is shaking a sleeping old man. "Professor! You've got to speak!" he says, trying to get him to take a stand against literal Nazis. A little too on the nose for the current day.