jwz

For historical reasons, it is impossible for a Republican to get elected in this city, so all the Republicans register as Democrats and call themselves "moderates". What they actually are is "neoliberals", or, if you like, methane-breathing space zombie free-marketeers. The people to the left of them call themselves "progressives". And "centrist" means somewhere between "Libertarian" and "MAGA".

Therefore:

S.F. Dems vote to oppose billionaire tax, defying state party:

The vote fell along a neat progressive/moderate divide. The local chapter took the step two months ago to alter its bylaws to allow itself to diverge from the state party's endorsement on California ballot measures. Previously, the local chapter's convention was to follow the state party on statewide ballot measures and candidates.

Prop. 40, or the billionaire tax, would levy a one-time, 5 percent tax on some 200 billionaires who lived in California on Jan. 1, 2026. Most of the money would be spent on health care, patching up a $30 billion hole in Medi-Cal due to federal cuts after President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill." The rest would go to education and food assistance.

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Classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS:

Afterglow is an emulator built specifically for running After Dark modules -- the original 68k module code, not a remake or port -- with no dependencies on ROMs or classic Mac OS. [...] Powered by the Musashi 68k CPU emulator, Afterglow reimplements just enough of the Macintosh Toolbox and OS APIs to run After Dark modules. No Apple ROM or classic Mac OS installation is required.

You can also browse and install software releases directly from the Internet Archive without leaving the app.

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There's someone on eBay trying to sell unused tickets to our 2013 Prince shows for $700 each. (I don't begrudge them the effort, but I'm still not linking to it -- and I realize that "asking for" is not the same as "receiving".) But what they don't know is, I have around 2,000 of those tickets left, and any time someone signs up for our Patreon and I mail them their membership card, I usually toss into the envelope a bunch of stickers and a Prince ticket or two.

So, you know, if someone were tempted to give this guy $700, maybe instead they could give DNA Lounge $20 or $30 a month. Then in addition to maybe getting a little souvenir while supplies last, they'd also be helping keep this place alive so that memorable shows like that can keep happening.

I've got uncut sheets of these things too, so if that's your jam, make me an offer...

The reason I have so many extras is because of how big printers work. Or worked, at the time, anyway. We needed like 3,200 tickets, but these things were stamped in large galleys, so if you ordered 3,200 they ended up printing 5,000 and threw the rest away. And for a show like this, we did not want those discards falling into the wrong hands and ending up on the scalper market, so we had them send us the entire batch from the print run.

A couple of years ago I asked the World's Biggest Prince Fan whether this stuff was worth anything, and their answer was (my loose interpretation) "Yes definitely, but only if you put a bunch of effort in to trying to act like an auctioneer, and are cagey about how much you have" and that sounded like a bunch of work and also kind of dirty, so I never bothered. (It would require more finesse and salesmanship than just dropping them on our merch page, in other words.)

But hey, literally nobody but me currently possesses one of these uncut sheets, sooooo... Scarcity!

[ Butterfly meme ] "Is this... Captialism?"

You ever notice that Dale Gribble sounds like Jello Biafra?
I can't un-hear it now.

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Parked Waymos actively record 360-degree video and audio even without passengers aboard. Waymo discloses no fixed data retention schedule, storing footage for a vague "reasonable" timeframe.

Armed with 29 external cameras, LiDAR, radar, and microphones, each robotaxi stays powered up between rides so it can respond to emergencies and reposition when needed. What Waymo won't say: how long that footage is stored, whether a residential street gets treated differently than a public plaza, and what "reasonably appropriate amount of time" actually means in practice. That phrase is doing enormous work for a very small amount of transparency. [...]

Where Ring doorbells marked the first wave of consumer-grade street surveillance, autonomous fleets are the next layer -- and they connect. Waymo holds a research agreement with Nexar, the dash-cam network embedded in hundreds of thousands of Uber and Lyft vehicles. Flock Safety, the license plate reader company, previously explored accessing that same Nexar footage for its law-enforcement clients. That deal collapsed. The architecture still exists. Think of it less like a coordinated surveillance state and more like a surveillance potluck -- everyone brought a dish, nobody planned the menu, and you weren't invited.

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Handshake, not a drug deal: SFPD drone case falls apart:

DA officials did not say whether they agreed with Helvestine's argument that the footage showed only a handshake. But the DA's office subsequently motioned to dismiss the case ahead of its preliminary hearing, records show. That motion was granted on May 8 last year by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Michelle Tong. [...]

Deputy Public Defender Brian Cox, the head of the office's Integrity Unit, argued police officers regularly mischaracterize normal interactions as drug transactions, and that drones amplify those risks. [...]

"SFPD interprets otherwise innocent behavior as criminal because to a hammer, everything is a nail," said Cox. "Drones and other surveillance technologies simply give police more power -- and greater reach -- to do that." [...]

The police hub that deploys San Francisco's police drones is also backed by billionaires.

The Real Time Investigations Center, which helps the police department find suspects on the streets and aids arrests using drones and Flock Safety automatic license plate reading cameras, has bulked up through benefactors including Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Y Combinator partner Michael Seibel, and Michael Moritz's family foundation Crankstart.

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Meta glasses are a workplace menace:

The two customers were, in fact, recording Hinkle, and the entire exchange was turned into content for social media. Another Target manager came across the video while scrolling online, without even looking for it. [...]

There's little recourse for those who have been unknowingly recorded. In one of the videos posted to social media that Hinkle is featured in, the Meta glasses wearer is seen chumming it up and dancing with a police officer who arrived at the Target store.

"You boys stay out of trouble," the cop says as he fist bumps the person recording. [...]

"Are your glasses blinking?" she asks.

He responds that he's recording her.

"Oh, could you not?" she says.

"That's what they're there for," he says, defiantly. "I'm here to watch you, and you're here to perform for me." The audience member refuses to stop filming even after being asked to. Rather than argue back and forth, Telesford cuts her set short and walks offstage. [...]

"We know that when people are being watched, they feel less free. They chill their behavior, they feel pressure to conform. They worry about even minor deviations from norms being used against them," he says. "It's just a sort of suffocating atmosphere to be a part of."

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As I mentioned in my post on the 2.0 anniversary, what you knew of as "3.0" had internally been slated to be the "2.1" bugfix release, to be soon followed by a 3.0 release based on the Collabra rewrite, but that new team face-planted so badly that we had to pretend this bugfix release was a feature release instead, and the Collabra shitshow eventually became the disastrous "4.0" release (with intervening "3.01" and "3.02" bugfix releases nearly a year after the 3.0 release!)

Anyway, go read that post instead for the juicy gossip. No need to re-hash it all here.

We can see from the release notes that 3.0 contained such exciting new features as background colors in table cells, the attribute, and

US12711711-B1:

The illustrations in this patent are great, they read like a silent children's book about a smirking creeper.

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We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon's book buying operation, which hasn't been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination. [...]

We first learned that AI companies wanted to scan millions of books for training data because of a lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic, which revealed Anthropic's "Project Panama." The goal of the project was to acquire books from commercial bookselling marketplaces, cut the spines off the books, and scan them. It's possible to scan books without destroying them, but cutting the spine makes it cheaper and faster.

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