*"Darth Vader" comes out in favor of Flock cameras at San Diego city council meeting.

The dark lord – or someone dressed like him – said the technology would aid the empire in tracking "rebel scum".*

Ever since most Democratic officials abandoned New Deal-style support for the non-rich, environmental protection, climate defense, and equal rights, the candidates who seek to return the party to those causes have been tarred as "divisive".

We can't make the US livable for non-rich Americans by electing politicians who serve mainly the elites. Better to have a division over these issues than to ignore them.

Hong Kong freedom activist Chow Hang-tung as been jailed for five years for trying to talk publicly about the Tien An Men square massacre in Beijing.She keeps her spirits up by writing about being in prison. Her motive:

A stubborn freak like me can only march on and fight my case till the end … Having a chance to exhaust oneself is better than living a purposeless life, isn’t it?

*[UK] Ministers are in denial about the scale of the [local climate] crises we face.*

*Having just 20 Defra staff working on climate adaptations show the government is not taking the challenges of heatwaves, wildfires and droughts seriously.*

A wind-driven fire near Reno, Nevada is spreading so fast that it is hard for people to evacuate fast enough to get away. It is even spreading across fire trucks, carried I suppose by blowing embers.

This is part of the consequences of global heating, and if we don't curb greenhouse emissions fast, fire will become a frequent danger.

Global heating is an intentional outrage, not a natural calamity.

It is being done to us knowingly.

The bully's henchmen have fired the publisher and editor of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes for defending its traditional editorial independence.

The bully wants to convert every news medium in the US into his own house organ.

*Top US firms that backed Voting Rights Act [(in 2021) now] donate to groups working to undermine it.*

Many countries have imposed, or tolerated, practices of lawfare that make it possible to crush journalists that question the official line.

* Wildfires are projected to burn 39% more of Europe by the end of the century even in the best-case scenario for stopping the planet from heating, a study has found, unless action is taken to manage them better.*

It just █i█ it again, 5 minutes later, go█ █ammit.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Therefore:

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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

I downloaded the zip, did "compileAndBuildVLCKit.sh -x", which took like 4 hours but eventually completed seemingly-successfully. But then BasicPlayerWithPlaylist.xcodeproj can't find VLCkit.framework or VLCKit/VLCKit.h. This sounds like a build settings problem (Framework Search Paths had "../../../build/Release" on it but it seems to be in "../../../build/macOS" instead? But adding that didn't help it find the .h). Trying to build VLCKit.xcodeproj instead gets me complaints about missing static-libvlc and/or install-iphone-device/libvlc-device-static.a (I am not interested in iOS at all.)

Maximal Fences

I got nerd sniped by this video and with some help from my friend Claude was able to optimize some of the existing records and set some new ones.1

Infinite Tetration

There are a bunch of videos talking about how the infinite tetration function is only defined in a specific range and strangely only hits finite values at the ends of the range, but they don’t show what it actually looks like as a function, so here it is:

You might wonder what’s going on at the end points here. On the right it’s going completely vertical. There’s nothing actually funny happening on the left, that’s just where the formula for it using the W function splits into two value. But we can make an analytic continuation of it like so:2

Since we’re defining tetration we can make the rules and there’s no reason to limit it to the happenstance constraints of W. But this still leaves the question of what’s going on on the right. It turns out it does extend, but going up, like this:

Looking at it this way raises the question of what the inverse of this function is. It turns out it’s y=x^(1/x). So the natural way of defining this stuff is to start with that function then wonder what happens if we take its inverse and wonder what happens at the points where the W function splits. But in that direction it seems like a bunch of bizarre leaps and generalizations which require justification, where if we instead work backwards from infinite tetration they’re strange phenomena which need explanation.

The big lesson to take away is that if you see W turn up you’re probably looking at the inverse of something, and being able to support that is how W has worked its way into the canon of standard functions.

Unit Distances

After thinking about the unit distance conjecture I came to the surprising realization that for any asymptotic bound it must be possible to constrain the points to being in a ‘barbell’ of two discs exactly a unit distance apart and only take a constant factor hit based on the diameters of the discs. Writeup over here3. I was hoping that this would result in better bounds but it works out that the amount of constant factor on tightening the disc radii exactly cancels out the reduction in number of points covered by their areas. But it does seem to imply that you can find solutions whose points are within arbitrarily tight disc pairs by taking subsets of ever larger solutions. So maybe the optimal solutions all have this form and have some parameterizable epsilon how big the discs can be where any value works.

I don’t know if this observation is novel or is something obvious to people actively studying the problem and they just haven’t written it up because it hasn’t lead anywhere. But I found it interesting and surprisingand hopefully you do too.

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?"

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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.