It’s an actual Dream Come True for me! Today I am driving a Muni Bus wearing the iconic Landor Livery, the true colors Muni is meant to display, designed by the great Walter Landor in 1975, introduced alongside the greatest logo in transit history, the Muni Worm.

Taylor Farms also owns and runs Earthbound Organics, which is available in nearly every grocery store across the US

Increasingly suspecting it’s not possible to send SMS messages for any hobby projects anymore. Been going back and forth with inscrutable A2P 10DLC rejections, which at this point feel more like rejection quota roulette than reasons.

Getting agreement on KPIs drives me up the wall because of the pressure to present simple-looking statistics that tremendously mislead, because to more accurately represent reality would be to define/measure statistics that require context to interpret.

Join us and @transbaycoalition.bsky.social and @streetsforallsf.org for an SF Happy Hour to meet your fellow transit riders and advocates interested in upcoming rail projects in SF! More info and RSVP: actionnetwork.org/events/san-f...

A surge of monsoon moisture this weekend could bring a few showers to the Bay Area, but most of the rain will evaporate before reaching the ground. This is called virga and can lead to some stunning cloud displays that resemble jellyfish. Sunsets should be epic!

“Run more buses” is almost always the first answer to making transit better in the US and Canada. Many don’t want to hear it because of the appeal of trains (and that buses aren’t capex projects), but it’s true. Ability to just show up, and transfers not breaking trips, does wonders.

it's been over a week since venezuela got hit by earthquakes. >30k people are still missing. it's really easy to feel hopeless right now. i've made this post to share how you can help from canada by supporting (1) trusted orgs & (2) local donation drives if you're in canada, pls share :) 🇻🇪🇨🇦 (1)

Which is the worst desk chair: IKEA folding chair or target camping chair?

Fable feels like what I'd expect from an Opus 4.10 so far - definitely a big step up in large contexts with a lot of noise, but the cost is dubious for something that is still liable to run amok burning tokens on a bad path.

bernie wagenblast, whose voice new yorkers hear every time they ride the train www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/n...

The SFMTA puts the trans in transit. @sfmta.com

The California Coastal Commission is frequently guilty of nimbying and catering to rich coastal homeowners, but the base fact that everyone has the legal right to enjoy and access California’s coastline is massive.

I was watching a video where the speaker argued that there’s no modern change/trend being homes having too much junk and clutter. It felt increasingly unanalytic for how much research had gone into the specifics... then concluded with a confession that the video was born from a cleaning breakdown.

Social media that simply serves up Whatever the Algorithim Wants in automatic play-mode is a parasite upon human attention, degrading our own ability to identify what we even actually WANT at any given time: discuss?

The switch from the age of confronting an empty browser search box - which forced you to identify your own desires - to the age of auto-playing content social media platforms has harmed our psyches: discuss.

Best reporting I've seen to date on what last week's @airresources.bsky.social vote could mean for Muni: cuts to free and reduced-fare programs, and a big gap in capital funding for the upgrades to the train control system.

I can’t believe you can successfully win bids as a contractor when you’re doing business out of the year 2005.

“Who cares about bus purchasing credits and requirement?” “Hey why does my transit agency have even more dire funding needs and why are they running fewer buses that are less reliable? It must be the agency’s fault.”

CARB has been a repeat villain in quiet wonky policy choices that actually have big consequences for pollution and getting things done in California. Two prior examples: - Dis-incentivizing electric trolly-buses - Pushing hydrogen/battery train incentives (a scam) over proven electrified trains

Throwback to that time, in the middle of helping a friend move, I found a stray kitten and had to carry it in a pathetically mewing uhaul box down to SF Animal Care. Pictured

I keep thinking about one moment from last night's walk audit. Someone asked how disabled people deal with so much inaccessbility. Without missing a beat, a blind woman said, "I just don't go out. I stay home." When we ignore nondrivers we limit their mobility and cut off access to the world.

A measure that'd inject some $310M into BART and keep it (and other Bay Area transit agencies) from potentially collapsing has reached its signature-gathering goal. Yes, you'll be voting on this in November. missionlocal.org/2026/05/bart...

Emergency Rally Wednesday in SF to save California's biggest program for affordable housing and public transit from getting gutted and fed to Big Oil companies. We have 3 days to spread the word as far and wide as possible for the rally the day before the vote! actionnetwork.org/events/emerg...

The thing about the US is that we can’t even build a single high-speed rail line and the department of transportation of the largest, wealthiest state wants to waste people’s time by studying a fake mode of transportation. These two facts are related.

I can’t believe that we are getting LLMs shoved into every half baked use case imaginable, yet when I search “vegan” on Google Maps, the typical restaurant that comes up is a restaurant with little to no vegan food that string-matched on a review complaining about it (“-no vegan-”).

I think this might be a new favourite angle for the bridge.

Others have analyzed this pitch in much more detail, but TLDR: it’s bonkers and never going to happen. The question is, is it a “conversation starter” about funding normal regional bus service? Or is it a plot to further boost highway expansion support and undermine HSR? Not real either way.

"e-bike shame" is a fascinating social dynamic. e-bikes are a kind of mobility aid. People don't use the term, but they recognize it. So e-biking gets a stigma, like walking with a walker gets a stigma. And like walkers, wheelchairs, etc, using a more-assistive car instead isn't stigmatized.

California clean energy advocates: thank you. 75% of you may now shift your efforts to transportation, ag and industrial, resilience, or electricity elsewhere.

as we all know, this week is FERRY WEEK And one of the stories we've put together is a deep look at a common question: who decides when to cancel a sailing, and why? Johanna Wagstaffe went to the operation centre where decisions get made, and put together this great feature

The old BART trains were my first introduction to San Francisco, fresh from the airport.

Was going through pictures from a few years ago… I can’t believe what a different era this feels like it’s from.

The irony of this behaviour in the homeowner voting bloc is, other than allowing more housing and decreasing scarcity, local spending on better stuff DOES boost property value! Who WANTS to buy a house somewhere with underfunded schools? But goodness forbid they pay $100 a year in some form for it.

”You weren’t there” is a hauntingly accurate way to describe local politics. Constituent power is dominated by: 1. Homeowners looking to minmax their property investment 2. Businesses lobby groups + select rich power players …and they tip the scales pretty hard against the needs of everyone else.

Something that’s fascinating me: current-gen LLMs wreck implicit assumptions about more ok-looking output meaning more effort. I didn’t realize how loadbearing “it likely took x hours for a person to produce this” was as a proxy for trust (of correctness, quality, being a good idea, etc).

Advances in AI-augmented vuln hunting were predicted years ago. The results are here. Linus’ Law must be understood in its inverse — given enough eyeballs, all software contains bugs. To respond, we should write less code, not more, and harden the open source commons as much as possible.

this chart was life altering to me

I think we have a pre-existing propaganda-induced cultural crisis where a perceived “inner truth” of things is equivalent to the literal outer truth. Ex: bad person does bad things so it’s OK to make up a fake bad thing, b/c it’s consistent with the inner truth and gets attention. Enter AI images.

the most annoying but, unfortunately, most consistently valuable contribution i bring to the meeting is asking "what's the goal we're trying to achieve with this project?" and sitting back to watch the chaos

I firmly believe presidents & people with control over medical agencies should understand percentages! If *you* don’t, no judgment; I will explain in the next couple posts how they work. The short version is that Senator Warren is correct in the clip, and there’s NO interpretation in which RFKJr is

Narratives on ”AI caused this bug/outage” will be muddy because: - Marketing blitzes going both ways (eg code gen vs review) - Correlation issues w/ increasing share of code from LLMs - Individual engineers incentivized to redirect responsibility - Tons of nuance on assigning “cause“ in software

I dream of a Prop 65-style requirement that every site with likely contaminated soil or groundwater to post a plain-language description of what likely caused it, and when. "There was a gas station here for 7 years 80 years ago and now you can't touch the dirt" would radicalize people.

Been on this particular trip many times, but it never gets less crazy: Every single site that has ever handled fossil fuels, ever, is toxic. You are surrounded by this legacy, you see it every day, and if we labelled even a fraction of it, it would blow the politics of energy transition wide open.

Yeah, that's bad. Dumb populism. Think about it this way: If you had a pot of cash to hand out, who would you send it to? I'm guessing you wouldn't say: “Folks who drive a lot are obviously the neediest; that's who deserves my cash.. Also, I would love to subsidize reliance on foreign oil.”

Donating to online scammers posing as legitimate people in need is not morally neutral: You potentially are giving money to brutal slavery and human trafficking networks: www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2...

Fun fact: the BART yellow line, at 100.1 km long, could wrap around multiple major moons of Saturn. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_o...