If you are a resident of California, the state now has a portal where you can demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers with a single request form, for free. consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov

Mamdani setting up a permitting reform and land inventory task force is some real sickos yes stuff.

A local IT services firm tried to donate a drone to the City of White Salmon, WA. I pestered them about what model, what its data capabilities were etc because the consent agenda had no details. Pried out that it was a DJI, which was banned by the FCC a few days ago, like I warned them it would be!

get in loser we're doing day one permitting reform

Never forget, to authority one of the most threatening things you can do is to genuinely Love Thy Neighbor.

Watch Lucy Dacus perform the women's suffrage and workers' rights anthem "Bread And Roses" at @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social's NYC mayoral inauguration

Without getting too sappy, he really does embody the traits I consider most "American," and which factored in heavily when I chose to return here nearly four years ago.

Mamdani: We will transform City Hall from one of "no" to one of "how" "I was elected as a democratic socialist and will govern as a democratic socialist"

Bernie Wagenblast, best known as the “please stand away from the closing doors” voice is the announcer for Mamdani’s inauguration.

Got an electric adapter for my Addi knitting machine, and now I can whip out a hat in like 8 minutes. Had our weekly crafting group bring me all their unused yarn that has been clogging up their stashes, so it can now become hats and scarves for the local warming shelters!

We have a friend who cleverly keeps a closet of assorted things to assemble into gift bags to bring to birthdays, fun socks, candles, weird stationary, fancy hand cream. May take a leaf out of her book and start keeping a cabinet of fun bottles (our friends are wine people) with my knit wine socks.

I organized my neighbors to successfully annoy our county sheriff into never wanting to even hear the words "Flock cameras" ever again.

There are many fine nature docs on Netflix but Puff is one of my favorites because it focuses on the tiniest creatures on the reef, using stunning macro cinematography. “Would you like to see a very small shrimp? Look at the speck by its claw, it is an EVEN SMALLER shrimp.” youtu.be/duEIDnbZHaU

Please first behold the typical size of a tug that pushes barges down the Columbia River in front of my house every day, so you can fully appreciate how much I freaked out when I spotted the second pocket-sized one.

A slow motion Christmas sea angel 👼🪽taken by Jamie with some of our dive-collected specimens from the Gulf of California #zooplankton #oceanography 🌊

If ur having a bad Christmas I on behalf of all Jews am giving you permission to get Chinese food and see a movie today. It’s not too late to pivot

When I was an exec assistant over a decade and a half ago, it was fairly obvious even then that I could have been replaced with 2 chrome extensions. It’s why I maintain suspicion that anything automated that still has to be operated by the person being assisted is doomed to have… challenges.

I wonder often why my email inbox feels so overwhelming. Then I remember a few decades ago we had rooms of people to simultaneously work on individual pieces of correspondence on their typewriters. Now all the women in the typing pool is me.

Not now, haunted Victorian shoes

We found that on one portal, camera settings could be changed, diagnostics could be run, and text logs of what the camera was doing were being streamed, too. 30 days of the camera’s archive was left available for anyone to watch or download. LINK: www.404media.co/flock-expose...

This is 404 Media's @jasonkoebler.bsky.social waving at himself through a Flock camera; one of 60 we learned was left exposed to the open internet. Not only could anyone with a link livestream it, but some admin portals were open with no login credentials required. www.404media.co/flock-expose...

How to make the bureaucracy/corruption/paper avalanche-eradicating uses of LLMs affordable for ex: journalists, researchers, activists, the average person is IMO more interesting than most AI discourse. Ex: I can’t afford a zillion compute tokens. I run most tasks on my own machine, which is slow.

One day for the curious I will give a workshop on how to use LLMs to parse enormous piles of public records, like the thousands of pages on how certain federal agencies are screwing my tiny broke rural county. The kind of investigative reporting possible doesn’t require AI to write the article.

Development of more accurate timekeeping changed most of science as we know it, especially optics, physics, computing and so much more. Can’t wait to buy this book.

I live in a rural area where many people like to pretend their life looks the way it is because they can live without computer. Computer is in everything from farm tractors to the grocery store to the solar panels for your off grid house to ER you’ll go to when you have an accident chopping wood.

I feel a lot of ineffectual discussion of AI (esp as a catch-all term when people are thinking of Gen AI) is part of the problem of how invisible all compute that runs your life is, how quickly your world would fall apart without it. It’s a utility, people die without it. Demands better criticism.

Optical Character Recognition, or translating print to digital text, is nearly a century old. The integration of AI more than 2 decades ago has already reshaped the world as you know it for the better. Like it or not, integration of LLMs has driven another leap in this essential, daily use tech.

I really don’t want to see advocacy for better tech fail because people who are upset about generative AI don’t know or have as part of their conception that AI has existed in the stuff you use daily in some form, core to its functioning for 20+ years. What’s new is the scale of these models.

No fan of the companies, people, or exploitative structures of their making, but people really are going to have to come to grips with the fact that, no matter how you feel about ChatGPT et al, these models will be largely integrated in and synonymous with the computing you depend on daily.

Nebuchadnezzar, by William Blake, 1795-1805 (flipped) #NetflixPartner

I had a little meltdown today when I managed to get a difficult but pretty yarn I had been saving for years to work on my knitting machine, and it was not right for the pattern, and then I couldn’t frog it because it is too fuzzy. So it’s stuck that way. What is the German word for “yarn rage.”

Going to use my knitting machine to do something I never do and make this cuddle sack for my friend expecting a baby. It will take all my self control to not present it to her as “a sack for your young!”

Sometimes I love SF so much my eyes get suspiciously watery: The faith leaders, wearing religious garb from various denominations, had earlier stood in front of the courthouse doors, singing, “If you come for them, you’ll have to go through us.” missionlocal.org/2025/12/fait...

Yes!! I'm so glad you liked it!

Huge props to Women Help Women. What a victory! msmagazine.com/2025/12/14/g...

I'm self-conscious about my Hannukah gifts I got my nieces and need reassurance. I have a sticker organizer binder for each of the 3 of them, and for months I've been hand-selecting stickers, stationary bits and bobs, scrapbooking ephemera to fill them. I'm worried bc it's not a toy or something.

Here's a pretty incomplete list of YouTube channels owned or funded by private equity.

the contents of a soup or stew should be cut to spoon-sized morsels (ramen is exempt, as a dual-tool meal)

I hate the name, but this has easily been one of the best gifts I’ve gotten: a car tray that levels the seat so you can strap takeout or whatever other item securely to your seat. www.stupidtech.com

This is an achewood plotline

Got to introduce friends today to the wondrousness of using panettone to make French toast. Forgot even myself how good it is, should have bought two.

gravy boats imply the existence of gravy maritime law

Getting set up for our multi-holiday party/celebration of the completion of my 10 year public service loan forgiveness term. Gonna pile it high with party bites, Hannukah gelt, and my many menorahs. I maintain that our Christmas Carol/Scrooged! theme is an especially Jewish-compatible party vibe.

I feel like so much of why we don’t host parties as much as we used to is exemplified by how I put out a sign-up sheet and 1/3 of the slots are not to cook or bring anything but help with like 30 min of setup or cleanup. Guess which slots are always last to be filled and often stay empty. 🫠

404 Media zine has apparently outsold American Canto. Help continue that trend here: 404media.myshopify.com/products/pre... www.404media.co/behind-the-b...

Former studio and home of ceramicists Otto and Gertrud Netzler for sale for the first time in 80 years. Absolute dream home. 7837 Woodrow Wilson Dr Los Angeles, CA 90046

The state of American infrastructure: an ailing rural school in neighboring town has to cancel its "Breakfast With Santa" fundraiser, because the aging, undersized water treatment plant is on the fritz again. So that whole section of the county is on a boil water notice. Merry Christmas!

I successfully got through most of my yarn stash by using my knitting machine to crunch through hats and scarves to donate. So I’m of course rewarding myself with More Yarn. Using this to make a weird cyberpunk chromatic shift glitch sweater: www.michaels.com/product/caro...