Late-posting, but one of my favourite things every year is the Market Street lights.

fourth photo of these is one of my fav photos ive ever taken for sure, very excited to make a print of it in the near future

Transit riders throughout the Bay stepped up and together we won BIG! @transbaycoalition.bsky.social @sftru.bsky.social @streetsforallsf.org

I’m so energized by today’s rally to save transit! I spoke about how dependent El Cerrito is on transit. We’re one of the most pro-housing cities in the Bay Area, and almost all of it is being built near transit. We need robust transit. Gov Newsom: approve the $750 mil transit loan immediately!

Fantastic last-minute turnout for the Bay Area transit funding rally this morning with @transbaycoalition.bsky.social. We need @governor.ca.gov to follow through on a promised 750 million for transit, or risk devastating service cuts and a spiral of traffic nightmares.

Les fleurs de mon jardin en papier 🌱 #paperflower

It’s gaslighting, in the classic sense. Of course the car can drive itself. It’s right there in the name. No the car can’t drive itself. Why would you ever say anything so ridiculous? Didn’t you read the owner’s manual?

Earlier this evening at Market and Montgomery streets, transit, pedestrian and bike advocates denounced Mayor Daniel Lurie's decision to allow Waymo, Uber Black and Lyft Black to drive on parts of Market Street that had been "car-free" since 2020.

Thinking about how much of the process of long term learning is repetition plus immersion, and how you completely lose that by reading a LLM summary.

Muni buses are packed even for routes not connecting to downtown SF (i.e. 22 Fillmore, 28/28R 19th Ave, 44 O'Shaughnessy). this should be a point of SF's pride! hope AC Transit's new realign reorg will help with improving this metric, even if some new good routes come with terrible headways

HUGE HUGE victory for San Mateo County, for anyone who rides transit in the Bay Area, anyone who drives & hates traffic, people who like breathing clean air and a growing economy. San Mateo County will be joining IN to the regional measure for funding transit! Big group win & lots of work ahead!

As part of @muniforever.bsky.social's campaign to fund Muni, we invite you to the Muni Forever Summit on 8/20. We need to form a citywide vision to fund Muni. This summit will create the building blocks to create that vision and a way to achieve it. RSVP here: buff.ly/gUt28Nb

I’ve been cooling on film for sunrises/sunsets because the expose range is so limited, but this was a nice exception. Sunset on treasure island, shot on (I think) Portra 400.

I think it’s really funny that running shadow health infrastructure for VaccinateCA taught me far more about how to be a staff+ engineer than any senior engineering job.

One would hope the obvious fact that a crazy racist billionaire can reprogram an AI bot to also be crazy racist in the blink of an eye will make anyone pause just a sec before they open up any other AI tool and treat it as gospel.

Regular reminder that California has an open-source fare payment tech option. I've used it in Monterey and Salinas and it works instantly and perfectly. It's been getting passed over by large agencies for not being featureful enough, but a little investment could rid us of Cubic forever.

Newsom's clawback of 2023 funding for public transit: reversed. $750m loan for Bay Area agencies to get us to revenue from the Nov 2026 ballot initiatives: secured. Now we just need to pass the regional measure (and local measure, in SF), and we stabilize transit funding.

RALLY TO SAVE BART & CALTRAIN IN SAN MATEO COUNTY Community groups and local advocates are rallying on July 1st with a clear message: San Mateo County elected officials must sign on to the regional transportation funding measure to save BART, Caltrain, and all Bay Area public transit!

Putting PagerDuty as my emergency contact to make it mutual.

Made all the more worse by the constant sociopolitical churn about the optics spending money stabilizing the future, when costs have already gotten so high and uncertain today. As if we’ll be less pinched and a better able to spend on generational climate change mitigation in another generation.

Good news! California legislators are: -REJECTING Gov Newsom's proposed transit cuts -Proposing a $750M in loans to Bay Area transit agencies to prevent immediate service cuts Call Newsom & tell him to take the deal! Let's save transit! www.movecalifornia.org/state-funding

We need to build some real social stigma around being afraid of cities. You don't have to like them or live there, but a politics built this strongly around watching TV and going "ewww" is embarrassing, and people should be embarrassed by it. It's like "fear of werewolves" being your top issue.

A lot of "cooking at home is too expensive" is people Just Saying Things for an accepted out, but I think the consequences of not having meal planning skills are under-scrutinized when talking cost. If you need 1/4th of a cabbage and can't plan a use for the rest, the unit economics are indeed bad.

as someone on the zoomer/millennial boundary i feel there's a legit problem with people not knowing how to purchase groceries

We are so not ready for LLMs to break containment from “tools that people seek out for specific uses” to “mainstream chatbots that ~everyone is exposed to”. In the absence of domain technical literacy, people walk away with WILD conclusions about their experience & we aren’t ready for that.

I think social media's chief function now is as a tailings pond for energy that might otherwise be directed toward real activism. Going online and getting mad about stuff feels like being active and engaged but it isn't. You just get tired out for nothing. This is the apogee of that.

It should be easier to get rid of perfectly useable items without throwing them away.

Starting to realize that Bluesky/Twitter isn't what I want out of social media anymore. There's <50 people in the world who I want a stream of "everything they post". I'd largely like to follow specific topics and discussions. But there's tremendous noise, scope increase, and distraction with it.

West Portal

Every story about home insurance is like “the insurance commissioner has found a new way to subsidize homes in wildfire zones at everyone else’s expense. ‘Consumer advocates’ slammed the plan”

No. A program allowing *solo drivers* in EVs to use carpool lanes is set to expire. Arguably that could *increase* actual carpooling (Casual Carpool rides again!), with enforcement of lane policies. Chron headlines are carbrained garbage. www.sfchronicle.com/california/a...

Norovirus spreads by coming in contact with 💩 (usually tiny amounts) or 🤮. Norovirus is not killed by hand sanitizer; you really have to wash your hands with 🧼 and warm 💧 to prevent transmission. I know we've all gone a little feral lately, but it's so easy to wash your hands to reduce infection.

2025 is the year of telling MTC over and over again that the public demands they fund public transit

great article about the devaluation of absolutely anything where women achieve 50%. which is a thing.

Updated ismunifree.com for New Year's Eve! Like last year, Muni, SamTrans, AC Transit, and Caltrain will all be free from at least 10pm-3am, but BART will only extend service til 1am at full fares.

A Dorothy Parker annual classic.

I think we’ve lost the battle over “gaslighting means deliberately making someone doubt their ability to understand reality”, but I’ll be damned if gaslighting descends to just meaning “a lie I don’t like”.

For all the pubtrans lovers out there, someone created a guessing game for Muni routes www.muniroutle.com

Ford presents the F-150 as an enduring American icon, but its bloated design is a recent phenomenon. In the 1970s, the bed comprised 2/3 of a F-150's length. Now it's just 1/3. Axios: "Pickups transitioned from workhorses to lifestyle vehicles." www.axios.com/2023/01/23/p...

It’s exhausting how crank behavior poisons entire wells by association. If some high profile percent of an org, movement, topic, etc seems to not be operating in reality, it leaves a big impression on outsiders and insiders.

We’re slowly approaching a 2nd Y2K event in 2038. Unix systems (most servers) represent time as seconds since 1970. In 2038, that number will be too big for a 32-bit integer, the once-standard. “Use more space to store bigger number” is again simple on paper but massive across all running software.

I see we are doing “immigration is bad” from the left as a reaction to tech characters being vocally pro H1B.

Really? Someone who I’ve never heard of said something shitty on another website? I’m so glad that you took a screenshot and posted it here, you are performing a valuable service.

Another hydrogen bus explosion. Let's invest in proven overhead wires instead, please. www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2...

It’s a little unfair that we are asking transit buses, of all vehicles, to carry the water for decarbonizing transportation. The technology is there for private autos which are a much bigger source of pollution but it is not nearly as good for buses which have a much more demanding service pattern.

Full on bus electrification and electrification mandates for the bus industry are probably one of the worst things to happen for transit in the last 20 ish years, because then you end up with conundrums like this which always don’t end well.

Bluesky is suddenly swimming in “zero personality” accounts, and I’m having trouble filtering a lot of them into bot/human. Accounts posting only vague pro-Dem content are the most common & bot-like example, but think that level of focus without a clear voice, posting about 1-2 other topics.

If your graph looks like this, your website is down. 🎄