I really enjoyed this article on segregation in NYC schools: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/m...

In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? (Gift Article)

A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.

nytimes.com

I read Into the Wild benkettle.xyz/books/into-t...

Pretty sure I saw a forced blowup in R^3 and T^3 watching the waves on my bikepacking trip this weekend, not sure what the big deal is with this OpenAI drama

Build the hydrofoiling catamaran using rctestflight’s PCB hydrofoil kit. The PCBAs each sense the water level capacitively and control their own servos. It was amazingly easy to get working and was fun! Shrinking it a little even let it fit on my bike :) www.rctestflight.com/store/p/pcb-...

I read Killers of the Flower Moon (in two days!). It was great, you should read it. benkettle.xyz/books/killer...

Denormalize cold water in workplace bathroom sinks

Life is a never ending battle against marketers misusing their powers of the Push Notification OpenAI, I will never want this. No one will ever want this. Please stop

I really enjoyed reading this: missionlocal.org/2026/07/dean... Mission Local is really great.

Q&A: New York Times editor Dean Baquet on the good (and bad) old days, and why journalists shouldn't reject AI

Dean Baquet spent two days with Mission Local. He talked about the future of journalism, AI, and what he misses about the old days.

missionlocal.org

I read Shop Class as Soulcraft. To my surprise, I did not like it. benkettle.xyz/books/shop-c...

Petition to ban the rocket emoji 🚀

The number of dark patterns in TurboTax is astounding. I am very ashamed to have given Intuit money this year :(

I bought a little photo printer. It’s been pretty fun!

Hiring cars and trucks to drive around and advertise your company is in such incredibly poor taste. Not only shoving more ads down everyone’s throats, as if the buses and billboards weren’t enough, but causing pollution, reducing safety, and making traffic worse for your audience while you’re at it.

Went biking by the pipelines that used to carry water from Hetch Hetchy across the bay to SF. Really enjoyed this article about the bored tunnel that replaced them in 2014: waterpowersewer.wordpress.com/2019/09/25/a.... I’m on a bit of a water-infrastructure obsession right now so this fits nicely.

Pretty happy with this little script I wrote to automatically publish a photo to my website via Darktable’s export dialog benkettle.xyz/posts/darkta...

A friend and I were thinking about NYT Pips and a Fibonacci fell out: benkettle.xyz/posts/fibona...

Okay, folks. I’ve been asked by a lot of friends who aren’t following the AI discourse to sort of clarify what the main camps are arguing, how they approach the issues, etc. As a thoughtful observer, I’m happy to provide this orienting service. No questions or comments, please. Hope it helps!

Edited some pics tonight that I took at home in 2022, here’s one that I liked:

i! do! not! like! merge! commits!!!!

Missing this bridge today

Peter Cheung@bostonaruban.bsky.social · last yr.

Bicycles Deliver the Freedom that Auto Ads Promise.

New bike! Featuring this cool @bart.gov bike permit sticker that I can’t find anything info about online.

What if AI devalues online content so much that print media comes back? Maybe the cost of printing will set some quality bar and people will be willing to pay again because the internet is now useless

“You have Robert Moses, an unelected bureaucrat who is able to build without anyone able to stop him. And now we have unelected bureaucrats who are not allowed to build but are allowed to stop building, at least when it comes to transit.” @CirculateSD cal.streetsblog.org/2025/08/08/p...

Powerless Brokers: New Reports Puts Blame on Local Permitting for Cost Overruns, Slow Delivery Time, for State Mega-Projects - Streetsblog California

No third party permitting? A permit "shot clock?" These are just some of the solutions discussed in Powerless Brokers.

cal.streetsblog.org

I just had a class reunion in Vegas, which consisted mostly of going from one strip hotel to another, and to and from the airport. The lack of decent transit to get us around was as disappointing as expected. It was more surprising, though, how much Ubering sucked and how much better taxis were:

While I’m sure Switzerland does it better, these parks deserve a lot of credit for how well they do interconnect. My girlfriend and I just did a 50-mile trip connecting 10 of these preserves (across Palo Alto, Midpen, State, and County parks) with zero road-walking. The connections are fantastic.

tschuy 🏳️‍🌈@tsch.uy · last yr.

Here are official trail maps for three contiguous parks owned by three different public agencies in the Santa Cruz mountains. Each shows basically the same info, but with a dramatically different style guide that makes regional routefinding difficult.

I thought this video from @hankgreen.bsky.social was a perfect summary of everything that is so frustrating to me about Twitter and today’s social media environment: youtu.be/3u8_fp1TtJE?...

Six Lies Elon Musk Believed (in the last 24 hours)

YouTube video by hankschannel

youtu.be

From The Power Broker: “[Robert Moses] loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It’s a great amorphous mass to him, it… needs recreation, but not for personal reasons—just to make it a better public” I’m only halfway through the book, but keep seeing more Moses in Musk.

Ryan Mac 🙃@rmac.bsky.social · 2y ago

This reminds me of something an exec who worked under Musk told me: "Musk cares about humanity, but not much about his fellow human."

Let's look at each one. Traffic: The Bay Bridge carries ~118k round-trips a day. Bart carries ~200k through the Transbay Tube. If 50% of those BART riders took a car instead, the average commuter could expect 1-6 hours more of their lives a week to be eaten up sitting in traffic.