The anonymous donor's collection"largely focused on his love of trains and canals..." yes we understand

We must pick our hottest process engineers and steer them towards politics.

Another (often unspoken) issue with buses in many US communities is social class. Outside of major metro areas, buses are often seen as transportation for folks who can't afford a car or have lost their license for DUI. They're not seen as transportation of choice, but of necessity.

RIP declarative code I guess

just received my new o'reilly technical book in the mail but, maybe a misprint? the wood-etching illustration on the front is an unknowable, unnameable ancient beast — we have not words in our tongue for such a fathom-defying anticreature. when i open the book, the pages howl impossible octaves

I'd like to cast my vote for Winter's Tale as well, highly recommended. Steampunk magical realism in Gilded Age New York.

It is Engineers Week! This week is an opportunity to celebrate the problem-solvers who shape the world. This includes the hundreds of BART engineers bringing to life ambitious projects that are redefining how the Bay Area moves.

Yes it's gold medalist Alysa Liu promoting Muni's L-Taraval relaunch in 2024 ❤️ ❤️ 🚋 ⛸️ ❤️ ❤️

I will not participate in this unwarranted and probably toxic celebration

Vendoring your dependencies is the best way to own the libs.

Where do we put Orinoco Flow in this hierarchy

Hotel guests are fleeing early because of the snowstorm. Traffic to the Bay Area and Reno is jammed due to gridlock, plows and crashes. Drivers are clearing snow off windshields and having to buy tire chains. But not us. Our Amtrak is on time. We'll relax in the dining car. The smart way to go.

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

I just started playing Cyberpunk 2077 last night and this is a plot point

Found another connection describing themselves as a "Principle Engineer" online and I'm starting to take the liberal arts advocates more seriously

Super Bowl weekend is here and traffic is picking up! Avoid traffic, and ride with us! 🏈🌴♥️

One of the reasons I so greatly dislike the “can men and women be friends?” nonsense (yes, full stop, shut up) is that it casts suspicion on people with opposite-sex friends instead of where it more often belongs: on people with no opposite-sex friends.

We should get rid of cars in cities. If that's impossible, we should get rid of human-driven cars[1] in cities. Advocating for a situation that results in an incredible number of preventable deaths per year is just fucking ludicrous. [1] Teslas count as human-driven

Makes sense, the two organizations were probably mortal enemies and rarely spoke

I also note that there's research in software engineering going back several decades that proves developer productivity falls off a cliff after 40 hours a week in the office, with extra hours worked introducing so many bugs that devs make negative progress. Work longer to work longer in other words.

For people with tech background concerned about the Clipper 2 upgrade/migration, check out the Cubic slides being presented today at Clipper Executive Board. Many of the problems are failures of basic scaling and QA missing predictable corner cases. mtc.legistar.com/LegislationD...

Thanks for the helpful auto-complete, Gmail.

bsky.app/profile/404m... Speaking in our role as the ultimate arbiters of eliteness, CULT OF THE DEAD COW would like to express that far from being "elite", the Palantir app, and anyone/anything that supports the gestapo, are K-Lame R0dentz who must be crushed by any means necessary.

Another edition of oddly aesthetic debug output (this time for a graph drawing package using geometric algebra)…

The only ICE I support:

The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. The day will come when all these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks and one single thing will break the siege.

for the sake of research I tried out claude code on my usual challenge: reimplement the escodb i/o scheduler. feeding it tests from the existing impl and getting them passing one by one. the results are... mixed

/3 Also, Trumpism is more or less collectivism for the benefit of a white male conservative affluent polity rather than other groups. It’s not like Trumpism is remotely individualistic in terms of thought, speech, or tolerance. So going with the “not gleefully bigoted” one is an easy choice.

All of the money that changed hands in the Teapot Dome scandal totaled less than $10 million after adjusting for inflation, and it was considered so corrupt we still teach it in high school government classes a century later.

// SAFETY: Copilot says it's fine

Amazing results in New York remind me how disappointing it is that congestion pricing efforts have stalled in San Francisco. With congestion pricing, Muni service could be robustly funded, transit ridership would climb, and traffic through much of the Bay Area would significantly decrease.

Calling Bay Area math enthusiasts interested in weekly sessions doing rigorous foundational mathematics the modern way - with computer-verified proofs in Lean. (An experiment in rigorous math education outside traditional academia)

started / going

Am I the only weirdo who is bugged by "Now is the winter of our discontent" being misconstrued or am I simply an irritating pedant?

It's a good read if you want to learn about RISC-V trap handling, and how LLVM turns Rust code into assembly and performs move elimination optimizations. Read more: destevez.net/2025/12/note...

Potentially my best YouTube video ever... www.youtube.com/watch?v=recw...

Unlike C++, Rust is a safe language [touches earpiece] uh, hold on... www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgPI...

I hadn't realized it before but #emacs syntax highlighting (font lock) can do a lot more than assign color. Here I'm parsing the string into a number, doing a calculation, then generating text to show the result

Re-upping for the people who quite sensibly stay off social media during the weekend: Watch as multiple "AI" fail a simple factual query!

whether or not Linux can be a mainstream desktop OS is immaterial to its future since there’s an embedded computer the size of a flea running linux somewhere next to you right now

the people of this great republic yearn for locomotive transport

What keeps pissing me off with the "AI" for technical jobs pitches is the promises that just boil down to flat out lies. Quilter out here claiming to have "designed a computer". Their product is an autorouter, it did shit all in terms of design. They took the NXP ref. design and let it re-route it 🤡

I had some tests failing and didn't feel like debugging it so I told claude code to figure it out and make suggestions. It suggested disabling the test.

As it turns out? Not all closures have the same design. It means they all don't perform the same under various usages, either! A quick dive into the performance differences of Closures in C, using an old Donald Knuth program. The Cost of a Closure in C | The Pasture | thephd.dev/the-cost-of-...

Had an idea last week to make a tool that shows what answers a model can give for a given prompt. Used this downtime day to explore the idea and the results are fun. This isn't sampling, it deterministically enumerates the search space. Prompt was: "In what year was Barack Obama born?"

men will literally write a bunch of if statements instead of implementing a state machine

The new rust `uutils` replacement for GNU coreutils in Ubuntu 25.10 has differences in behavior. So sort of extremely disastrous. Took me a while to track down that `dirname 'foo/bar/.' ` was returning "foo" not "foo/bar", several scripts removed from me. To revert:

*clears throat* California Forever is a freeway widening project. thank you for coming to my Ted talk

Starting next week, riding this bus and most other buses to BART will be FREE! Clipper 2 rolls out on December 10, including free and low cost transfers between all transit agencies. Riders will automatically receive discounts up to $2.85 when transferring within a two hour window.

Not all closures in C and C++ were made equal, unfortunately.