Inside the Return of Legendary MPLS FTW Alleycat Babes in Bikeland - Racket

i totally missed this earlier this year. clearly my racket reading is not what it should be. this is a wonderful love letter to the minneapolis biking scene.

Empire of Grift - The Atlantic

this is a rather eye popping rundown of the activities and the engagements of the current administration. it’s sobering to see all of the bullshit of the past couple of years laid out like this. but, there it is. with the firehose of shit we’ve endured i forgot about a few of these. oh shit, yeah … there’s a purported, “board of peace”.

what’s clear these days is that only power matters. the pretense of doing anything good or a larger more civically minded undertaking has been tossed out the window. the notion of being a city on the hill is poof … gone.

your tax dollars at work.

• Make Your First Edit to OpenStreetMap in the Next 15 Minutes | Website Wizard JOSM Plugin

ok, this was something that, for some reason, i could not turn away from. this is a delightfully quick little diversion and there’s even a homebrew recipe for josm. which makes the process that much simpler. the hardest thing in this little writeup is finding the filter panel in the JOSM tool.

sidebar, this is a peek into a very cool world where software meets built reality and all sorts of data sources and layers and cool shit. that i had the time to poke at this in earnest.

Protecting Engineers’ Skills in the AI Era

An operator who only ever supervises automation slowly stops being an operator. The hands go cold. The mental model of what the plant is actually doing gets fuzzy. Then comes the day the automation hands control back. It’s always the worst day, because automation only quits when it’s confused or in trouble. But by then, you have a person in the chair who hasn’t truly operated the thing in years. The manual steps were there to keep the human current. It was inefficient by design, on purpose.

insert snarky comment about vs code fans.

Voters Have a Message for Democrats - The Atlantic there are some interesting bits in here: Julie, a Democrat from Arizona, said this about her party’s leaders in an April 2025 focus group: “They didn’t make people connect to them emotionally enough. And we need that emotio...

work with me here what if the watcher is really a story about america’s dysfunctional relationship with safety and real estate? i’m really trying to find some sort of justification for having wasted time watching this stupid series on netflix. what if instead of being a whod...

So you want to use OpenRouter? — Mo Moustafa

this is a great compendium of the various nits and gremlins that exist within openrouter and more specifically the backing providers. well worth the read.

random reactions / notes i forgot how disorienting this book was when i read it years ago. it takes a solid 30% of the book before the place setting and the character relationships really start to sink in. the descriptive text is incredibly dense. it’s been interesting to...

i was listening to this esquire interview with emily st. john mandel. there’s a lot to dig into this interview and it’s a great conversation that i wholeheartedly endorse listening to in its entirety. but there was a couple of minutes of discussion in here regarding t...

The truth in political advertising: ‘You’re allowed to lie’ : NPR i’m in the middle of reading rewiring democracy by bruce schneier, et al, this was linked as a reference. i’ve suspected, but didn’t know, that lying is in acceptable in political advertising as the speech wo...

Patagonia Sues the Trump Administration — Again | GearJunkie - this GearJunkie article was the first trip down this rabbit hole of bears ears lawsuit news.

• here’s the word from the horse’s mouth - Patagonia sues Trump administration again to defend Bears Ears — Patagonia Works
• the NYT weighs in - Patagonia Sues Trump Over Reduction of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah - The New York Times

oh and, fuck yeah, i’m in for a “buy-cott”. buy-cott, divas and shopping is the new BDS.

Mole: system cleaner

this was a recent discovery and in a little less than 5 minutes it had cleaned up a solid 50G of cruft from various locations and eliminated stale/dead caches fron uninstalled apps. highly recommended. i forget how i ran across this, but i’m glad i did.

Why Broadcom should buy Arista (and why it won’t) - SDxCentral

convulsive eye roll emoji.

Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed - The Atlantic

here’s a thought … waste the minimum of time on the socials.

What Happened in Minneapolis | The New Yorker

a balanced, albeit high-level, review of what happened with operation metro surge and some of the activity since.

it’s going to take me a long time before i don’t have a visceral enraged reaction when i read about this time in minneapolis history.

it’s not a doomburger, honest! this was a really solid run at rallying the troops and driving a positive spin on the economic inertia behind renewable energy. i’ll be honest, it’s tough to read this as the trump administration is asserting control over venezuela’s oil reser...

this is for future me. these are things that i’ve taken up that just make me happier. if future me is unhappy, check this list. when i get in the truck don’t listen to podcasts - listen to music. listen to interesting and fun music. hell, listen to the shit you’ve been l...

Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism? - The Atlantic A teacher who has to buy his own school supplies, an adjunct professor who works at three universities to make ends meet, a social worker who assists the disadvantaged, a nurse whose hospital was bought by private equity, a fe...

Silicon Valley Doesn’t Get Why You Hate AI | WIRED

it speaks volumes that these guys can be so tone deaf and so smart at the same time. see also, public hatred of data centers.

We Bought a $500 Counterfeit Luxury Watch. Nobody Could Spot the Difference | WIRED

there’s this part of me that wants to buy one of these to appreciate the craft of the fake. there’s a part of me that wishes i still cared about mechanical watches like i used to. i miss that guy inside.

Designing the Dream House of an 87-Year-Old Tech Visionary

here’s a heartwarming write up and video short about a house/condo that stewart brand and his wife built on their land in petaluma.

i pulled snow crash off the shelf a couple of weeks ago. i’d been meaning to re-read this but … other things. i have to say, this has not aged well. it’s still an amusing and fun read, but it’s definitely grounded in the milieu of the late 80s early 90s. this novel had l...

Shopping is Impossible

this is the running joke in our house. if the phone is out … “you must be shopping”.

there’s never been more retail, but retail is dead. we have more forms of X to consumer than ever before and oh, so. many. options. and yet, it all sucks.

last week was apparently dominated by gossiping about the departures from google. SemiAnalysis and plenty of others spilled a lot of metaphorical ink in the topic. the SA take, Gemini is Cooked but GCP is Cooking reeks of gossip and twitter tea leaf reading with their usua...

Plunder and Danger on Argentina’s Sea Shelf

this is one of the most fascinating things i’ve read in a while.

The great wealth transfer reality check

here’s an interesting writeup from that great bastion of progressive thought, visa. a couple of things to take away from this article.

• there’s not as much trickling down as folks might think there is. it’s going to be siphoned off at various stages in the process
• there’s wealth transfer and propping up taking place right now
• this will keep the economic disparities locked in for the next few generations
• consumer spending bumps are likely to be modest. of particular interest to visa who’s keen to get a couple points of fees on all of those transactions.

All of WPD’s Flock cameras stolen | Crime & Justice | winonapost.com

well played winona.

Trump administration to pay German firm to halt US wind projects

The Future Of Knowledge Workers In An AI-Driven World this is a great writeup. there’s a fair amount that i’ve discussed with friends and coworkers over the years. having worked in tech for my entire career, i don’t even bother trying to explain to people what i do, it’s w...

AI model achieves breakthrough in forecasting cyclones — Google DeepMind

this is some of the best AI related news i’ve seen in a while. too bad it’s lost in the noise of google staff departures and misc. political dreck.