Cars in SF are mowing over people and killing people all over. But yep the city decides to ticket.. cyclists https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1s3dpc9/psa_traffic_police_is_doing_a_cyclist_enforcement/ #BikeTooter #sanfrancisco

There's been no significant litigation to establish case law on FOSS licensing. That's always bugged me, but I get it -- we behave as if the licenses are valid (and, yeah, I think so?), and folks who consume the code have mostly caved when threatened with lawsuits. But now it gets interesting […]

Been a while since I mentioned this so I am allowed to rail about it once again: Holy moly, Xcode on MacOS needs the most frequent updates of the most ginormous size of any piece of code I interact with. What I want to do is make some pull requests. What I'm gonna do is wait for Xcode to suck […]

All corruption, all the time in Trump world, exhibit 56,703: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/23/volume-in-stock-and-oil-futures-surged-minutes-before-trumps-market-turning-post.html

Topical: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

Hey guys, I built this clock. I had a friend help me with the woodworking for the case. I used an Arduino board as the compute platform and designed and 3D-printed the display components using several LED strips. I wrote all the code. It shows hours and […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I had a really good day you guys.

Charles Bennett and Giles Brassard have won the Turing Award for their work on quantum information science. It's very much not my field -- I don't know the winners or their work. It's an interesting choice by the ACM, highlighting the near-term importance of quantum cryptography and (happily!) […]

Molly White, @molly0xfff, does consistently excellent work reporting on cryptocurrency grift. Latest edition of Citation Needed is out: https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-102/

Last night, outside Fairbanks.

Sloppelganger, mofo: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/892750/your-word-of-the-day-is-sloppelganger Via @emckean.

Love this: https://oaklandside.org/2026/03/11/an-oakland-sports-fans-guide-to-the-2026-season/

When I build stuff, I'm as careful as I can reasonably be, but I'm often a millimeter or three off on my measurements, my drill bit walks a bit before it bites, and parts are a few percent out of true. I want to celebrate folks who manufacture for slop: A little tolerance, let you get stuff […]

You guys mercury is a liquid metal because of speed-of-light travel: https://www.livescience.com/chemistry/why-is-mercury-a-liquid Via 3QD

This is a good piece by Scott Aaronson on the Pentagon's intent to classify Anthropic as a supply chain risk: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9627

[NYT Sunday Crossword spoiler] Today's puzzle was fun, and a really impressive job of construction. *All* of the theme answer (INTERNATiONAL WOMENS DAY) crosses were names of notable women. Twenty-two crosses!

Somebody somewhere owes me an hour of sleep.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have studied defecation properties of various species and I didn't know I wanted to know about that until I read this: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/takes-elephant-amount-time-poop Scientists are the best.

If you "vibe code" something, or otherwise get a GenAI system to provide an output (image, code, text, whatever) based on your prompting, you ought to understand that you do not have any ownership in either the copyright or patent sense of that output. You didn't make it! This means that you […]

Anthropic's Claude solves one of Knuth's open problems from AoCP: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf I think a whole bunch of the hype around AI is thoughtless and misplaced. Nevertheless, these systems are interesting -- and getting more so.

I subscribe to @pluralistic's RSS feed. His daily posts are mostly interesting -- one long and informative piece and a whole bunch of curated links to stuff that makes you laugh, scowl, think. Today's is especially worth a read. Until you get close to the end of Blowtorching the Frog, you're […]

Are you suffering from information underload? Here's your solution: https://www.worldmonitor.app/ Learned about this site just now via @jkottke. Live display collated from a huge number of feeds.

OTD 1975: First meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club See https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102740021/

RE: https://zirk.us/@Doomscroll/116176974306670223 Attn @aglimme

Holy moly. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/us/hot-air-balloon-rescue-texas-cell-tower.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QlA.bJgH.zshYRiFmHD7k&smid=url-share (NYT gift link)

Hey bike folks (including @notjustbikes), I'm talking with Berkeley city staff regarding bicycle safety on a busy shopping street near my home. They've asked whether there are any good studies of how making cyclist access safer affects commercial traffic and revenue at businesses along those […]

Here's an excellent NYT gift link article on the firms that capitulated to, and those that stood up to, Donald Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/opinion/law-firms-resistance-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QVA.P3O3.SVHJ8CjcuEnT&smid=nytcore-ios-share Link is courtesy of @walterolson […]

THE LIGHTS ARE BACK

A doozy of a doublethink: Trump's bombing completely eliminated Iran's nuclear program, it's wrong if anyone says otherwise, AND Iran today has such an advanced active nuclear program that Trump had to bomb them a lot more, it's wrong if anyone says otherwise.

Latest Citation Needed by @molly0xfff just dropped: https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-101/

DORKWAD should be a legal Spelling Bee word.

You can fit a surprising amount of lint in an iPhone 15 USB-C port.

Ticketmaster SUCKS.

This is (a) interesting and (b) a nice piece of interactive web data visualization. You can mouse over the subjects on the right, highlight the curve the describes each on the left. https://flowingdata.com/2026/02/19/fields-of-study-ranked-by-bachelors-degrees-since-1970/

Good bike stuff happening in Oakland. https://oaklandside.org/2026/02/19/east-bay-greenway-oakland-protected-bike-lanes-lake-merritt-fruitvale/

Listen up, people. Jessie and Woody have a message for us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c51ND9Hdbw0

Judd Legum with a banger of a post about TMTG and Truth Social: https://popular.info/p/how-trump-media-collapsed?r=s7h

Space people: Why is the Artemis test called a "wet" dress rehearsal? During my time in the messaging trenches, we tried to avoid the adjective "wet." In cop novels, "wet work" is, uh, wet. As a parent, "wet" is hardly ever good. Three letters, one short syllable, but it packs a lot of baggage […]

Kind of a SPAC-y deal -- Eric Trump is helping to finance the merger of an Israeli drone maker with a (previously!) successful Florida-based construction firm. The business combination makes no sense, but the short path to public investor money is no doubt valuable to the drone maker and the […]

The Oaklandside's investigations of elected officials' behavior using public information laws, and its challenge and defeat of a "presumptively unconstitutional" law that criminalized reporting, have been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists […]

Wordle 1,706 2/6* ⬜⬜🟨🟩⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Played my usual strategy. Lucky guesses both times.

Before transistors, relays were widely used in telephony switches. They were much slower, but much more reliable than vacuum tubes. This 1951 booklet, "NO. 5 CROSSBAR" from Bell Labs describes the bad-ass mainframe of relays. Lots of photos and diagrams […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Cold, wet day in the Bay. Last week would have been a fine time to see to the gutters.

Hey nerds, I've got some code open source code I'd like to publish on a good site for sharing. I've always used Github for that, but note the Copilot backlash of late. What's a good place instead of that?

Great story on the Quad God, by way of @jkottke: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/ilia-malinin-olympic-figure-skating/685766/?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZ-f0uIN6_rGx1n0bRpeI4hA

I’m on the board of directors of Cityside Journalism, non-profit parent company of the newsrooms Berkeleyside, The Oaklandside and Richmondside. Enormously proud that two of our newsrooms have been ranked among the top 25 in the nation by Nieman Lab. Honestly I think it should be all three! […]

I'm working on a project that required three or four tiny little magnets. Turns out they're cheapest in boxes of 400, various sizes. I currently have ten or twenty cylinder magnets, 1-3mmmm in diameter and 1-2mm tall, scattered around on the floor of my office. They're invisible. Later, I'll […]

While AI hype teeters, folks working in quantum computing are making steady, measurable progress toward genuinely useful systems. This Nature article is pay-walled, but you can read a fair bit before you get to the gate. Briefly, there's been great progress in making qubits fault-tolerant and […]

Time for a Winky Dinky you guys.