-
-
Another letter to the city council:
Hello. I'm a resident in North Cambridge.
I am greatly disappointed that, under strange and sudden pressure from City Manager DePasquale's representative, Councillor Denise Simmons, instead of just providing a written notice of interest of an extension to DePasquale, as a group, you immediately extended his contract for 1.5 years. This, after previously voting against extending his contract for a year earlier.
Further, even though you voiced concerns about revenue as a group, you gave him a 2.5% raise, letting this person fail up.
DePasquale's refusal to explain many of his decisions, combined with the city council's ability to get him to explain his decisions, essentially leaves us with a non-elected strong mayor. If the city council can't use the main leverage it has over the city manager's office in the face of a really basic negotiation tactic, then the city council is useless. We should have a strong mayor system, so that the people can simply vote for the strong mayor they want.
I don't think I'm alone in being at my wit's end about representatives in government with no backbone. We're tired of seeing Democrats in Congress caving at the slightest provocation, and it's incredibly sad to see councilors that formerly stated that they were against an extension immediately when presented with a narrative of fear, uncertainty, and despair. -
-
A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation
Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee, worked, mostly by herself, on stopping mass manipulation using fake accounts at scale by authoritarian politicians in Honduras, Brazil, Azerbaijian, India, and many other countries. Facebook, as an organization, didn't care about any of this.“It’s why I’ve seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space.”
I get depressed when I see the word 'impactful'.When she asked the company to do more in terms of finding and stopping malicious activity related to elections and political activity, she said she was told that “human resources are limited.” And when she was ordered to stop focusing on civic work, “I was told that Facebook would no longer have further need for my services if I refused.”
-
36-minute run, no hills. 11 pull-ups.
-
-
It turns out I don’t know how to draw children. They turn out like squat adults, like the depictions or baby Jesus in medieval paintings.
-
-
-
-
-
Devastator is America.
"Thinking and winning do not mix."
…
His mind is a melding together of hissix330,149,796 parts but limited by their competing thoughts.
…
Slow, awkward, not too bright. -
-
Also from Energy and Civilization:
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort Mcleod, Alberta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the more spectacular sites of this inventive hunting strategy, which was used at the site for about 5,700 years. “To start the hunt young men would entice the herd to follow them by imitating the bleating of a lost calf. As the buffalo moved closer to the drive lanes (long lines of stone cairns were built to help the hunters direct the buffalo to the cliff kill site), the hunters would circle behind and upwind of the herd and scare the animals by shouting and waving robes and stampeded the herd over the cliff (UNESCO 2015a). The net energy return in animal protein and fat was high. Late Pleistocene hunters may have become so skillful that many students of the Quaternary era concluded that hunting was largely (even completely) responsible for a relatively rapid disappearance of the late Paleolithic megafauna, animals with a body mass greater than 50 kg (Martin 1958, 2005; Fiedel and Haynes 2004), but the verdict remains uncertain (box 2.4).
Wow. -
I finally fixed an issue in OCR scanning in the client that I use to post to this weblog that I had been manually working around on my phone by doing all of this annoying tapping and deleting.
Of course, while doing that, I accidentally made the client 200K larger, which I then also had to fix. -
From Shalamov’s “Rain”:
I could see our horses getting worn out and dying—that’s the only way I can put it, there are no other verbs to apply to the horses’
existence. The horses were no different from the human beings. The north, the unbearable workload, the bad food, the beatings were killing them, and although they suffered only a thousandth of what the human beings suffered, they died first. I also understood the main thing: man was human not because he was God’s creation, or because he had an amazing thumb on both hands, but because he was physically stronger, more enduring than any other animal and, eventually, because he succeeded in making his spiritual side the effective servant of his physical side.
Vaclav Smil has a related but different idea in Energy and Civilization:The extraordinary human ability to thermoregulate rests on very high rates of sweating. Horses lose water at an hourly rate of 100 g/m2 of their skin, and camels lose up to 250 g/m2, but people lose more than 500 g/m2, With peak rates of more than 2 kg/hour (Torii 1995; Taylor and Machado-Moreira 2013). Perspiration rate translates to heat loss of 550—625 W, enough to regulate temperature even during extremely hard work. People can also drink less than they perspire, and make up for any temporary partial dehydration hours later.
Running turned humans into diurnal, high-temperature predators that could chase animals to exhaustion (Heinrich 2001; Liebenberg 2006). -
I’m waiting around at this outdoor park where they’re playing the radio or a radio-like stream.
I’ve read about a lot of user research about that finds that a lot of people really value radio DJs’ introductions and banter.
I can understand the reasons for this, but every time I actually hear it, it’s terrible. This guy read this long-ass thing about the Trolls movie and explained that this Justin Timberlake song was part of the success of the movie. And the voice! -
-
All public school staff working in-person will be provided with free Covid-19 testing twice a week, the Cambridge Public Schools and Cambridge Public Health Department said Friday.I am incredibly glad they are actually delivering on this.
-
-
The Astronomy Photograph of the Year winners are amazing. The site UI is really good, too. You get plenty of image space, while also being able to get the information about it.
-
When storing a user's data, there's a way you can ensure near total privacy: Encrypting their data and giving the user the only key to decrypt it.
This solves a lot of problems. They don't have to worry about you looking through their data or selling it to anyone else. They don't have to worry about your service getting hacked, as the data is worthless without the key. And as a result, you can use cheap commodity storage, like S3 or something.
However, if the user loses the key, then they lose the data forever. This is why no one does this. But it's good to keep this approach in mind, just in case some use case comes along in which this price is worth paying. -
Long day, but I spent a little time thinking about products. It gave me hope, even though I'll probably shoot these new ideas down tomorrow.
-
Had a discussion today with the guy about how he had not been able to read earlier. We got hit a sticking about whether or not he had previously found it hard to tap out sounds. (It's a technique in which you tap as you make the sounds of each letter in an unfamiliar word.)
I said that there was a time at which he used to find it hard to do that. He disagreed. The distinction he makes is that, back then (six months ago), it was in fact easy for him to do; he just never wanted to do it. I argued that if you don't want to do a thing, in practice, it is a hard thing to do.
An hour after his bedtime, I'm still working, and I now realize that I do think the way he does. The thing I have to do is a task I think of as "easy". But I don't want to do it. And so, it's taking far longer than it would had I wanted to do it. In practice, it's hard.
