Kevin Webb
@kevinwebb.io
Tinkering with semiconductors and copper for ebikes, cargo bikes, and things slightly larger. Also curious about the pre/post-cloud internet (forecast: 🌤️).
Oh wow this is extraordinary on so many levels. Just brilliant writing to begin with. I kept thinking it was attempting to be hagiographic but that's just not possible given the subject.
Profile of Mark Zuckerberg
A journey to the heart of history’s largest nonterritorial empire
colossus.com
Amazing to see Star City set the bar for both sci-fi and Cold War/spy thrillers at the same time.
‘Star City’ Creators Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert Say Artemis II Has Reignited Excitement for Space Exploration Because ‘It Wasn’t About the Wealthy’: ‘This Is for All of Us’
‘Star City’ and 'For All Mankind' creators Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert discuss Artemis II, space exploration at French TV festival Canneseries.
variety.com
I’ve had a running test for multimodal models over the last ~year: extract the “Crss” values for each tick mark in this chart. GPT 5 makes up numbers, Claude 4.5 refuses to try, Qwen3 VL has a plausible guess. Gemini 3 pro pretty much nails it.
In concept I’m a huge fan of porting infrastructural code to Rust/memory safe languages, but shipping broken code — especially code that causes silent data loss — doesn’t help that cause.
`dd` incorrectly counts partial reads toward `count` limit, causing data loss in pipelines · Issue #9119 · uutils/coreutils
Summary uutils dd has a critical bug where partial reads from pipes are counted toward the count=N limit, causing premature termination and significant data loss. GNU dd correctly only counts full ...
github.com
Somebody at the body shop DIY’ed the compact pickup Detroit won’t build.
This is such an important conversation and mirrors where I'm at on LLM use/value. The critique got frozen in amber a 1-2 years ago, and is fueled by (valid) structural issues like energy, copyright, deepfakes, etc. But the tech continues to evolve in ways that are unrelated to these problems.
Adam Leventhal@ahl.bsky.social · last yr.Last week, our colleague (and frequent Oxide and Friends guest) @steveklabnik.com made some new friends on the Internet with a blog entry on AI discourse. @bcantrill.bsky.social and I were joined by Steve to try to de-polarize the discussion a little. youtu.be/Rpan3XUT3AE
Big lesson from the last several years: 4a law isn't equipped to handle the harms embedded in pervasive surveillance tech like ALPR. Also, lots of people (who don't support LE dragnets) ended up on the wrong side of the right to privacy in public fight because pervasive surveillance seemed useful.
Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · last yr.New from 404 Media: a cop in Texas performed a nationwide search of license plate reading cameras for a woman who got an abortion, according to multiple sets of data we've reviewed. Included cameras where abortion is legal, like Washington and Illinois www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-...
'For Tern, the new tariff is simply a non-starter. “I don’t want anything with 47% duty,” he said. “I have some inventory here, and I have one container we know is safe, several more (in transit) that might be safe. After that I don't know, I'm hoping something changes.”'
Bike maker takes steps to avert an unexpected million-dollar tariff charge
If Tern’s shipments don’t arrive from Vietnam before Wednesday, or get diverted, the cargo bike brand will be on the hook for about $1 million — cash — in tariff fees. Until this week, the company had...
bicycleretailer.com
A fantastic article the in the Institute of Navigation newsletter on something else of societal importance, held together only by norms and fraying international agreements: The invisible global infrastructure supporting GPS and other satnav systems.
The Rober painted wall video is pretty cool, but tbh, comparing Tesla to cartoons might be unfair to Wiley Coyote and co. Here's a 2020 white paper on the complexity of vision-only 3d perception. Has a great video of a Tesla ensemble model just driving up and booping a truck at low speed.
Restate is one of the coolest pieces of software I've encountered in quite awhile. Not often a tiny, well-crafted application comes along that forces you to fundamentally rethink software design.
Restate 1.2: a distributed durable execution engine, built from first principles
Restate 1.2 adds highly-available, distributed deployments and a graphical UI.
restate.dev
Was expecting NC to be at/near the top of the list of per capita impact from NIH cuts, but it's even worse given how geographically concentrated they are: NYT estimates a best case reduction of $175m just in Durham and Chapel Hill. That's ~$350/person, not even counting cuts at NIEHS HQ in Durham.
How Trump’s Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State
Changes to a key funding formula will reduce research grants at hospitals and universities by billions — and may discourage future research.
nytimes.com
An alternative lesson: while we need better technology in gov't, the work that needs to be done to fix our gov't isn't technical. Thinking we could engineer our way out of a constitutional crisis is partly responsible for how we got here.
The DOGE Squad Is Squandering a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity
Government tech experts say Elon Musk’s team could have seized the moment to make Washington work better.
wired.com
“I'm not being glib when I say that LA's leaders demonstrated more situational awareness for the "traffic nightmare" on the first night of the World Series than they did for this real-life nightmare.”
Alissa Walker@awalkerinla.bsky.social · 2y agoNot what I thought I'd be writing about when I picked the name Torched. Thanks to everyone for checking in. We're fine. Many of our friends are not fine. I tried my best to describe what's happening with the fires and what LA needs to do now www.torched.la/zero-percent...
Stopped by the Ionna EV charging launch event and helped increase the ratio of middle age white dudes, already well into the 98-99% range. I was one of the very few non-vloggers attending.
Nominating @bcantrill.bsky.social for CEO of Intel. Open sourcing their PDK is a brilliant move, and a great way to repay their debt to society for the billions they got from Chips Act flag waving.
Adam Leventhal@ahl.bsky.social · 2y agoPat Gelsinger "retired"... so clearly @bcantrill.bsky.social and I knew what we'd talk about on Oxide and Friends last night! We discuss how Intel got here and what their future might look like... and Bryan has some tantalizing picks for their next CEO www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMqr...
Typically thoughtful/thought provoking piece from @macwright.com on a topic anyone who programs has and will continue to grapple with.
On not using copilot
macwright.com
TIL the real bsky fandom is on Github. E.g:
Convert Starter Packs into Lists · Issue #5970 · bluesky-social/social-app
Describe the Feature A nice feature to have is a way to easily convert a starter pack into a list using a button like the "Follow All" on the top of the pack page (see image). I think lots of peopl...
github.com
If the panicked emails I’ve been getting from Chinese suppliers are any indication, the next couple years are going to be pretty weird. My guess is that the impending tariffs will put so much pressure on input costs that any US manufacture that can move production elsewhere won’t have a choice.
Great day to convert your WaPo subscription into a KYE sponsorship, and they've got a timely interview with @rickperlstein.bsky.social to celebrate: "We explore the failures of American media elites and the Democratic Party to reckon with Donald Trump and his antecedents on the far right."
The Infernal Triangle (w/ Rick Perlstein)
Podcast Episode · Know Your Enemy · 10/25/2024 · 1h
podcasts.apple.com
Mobility as a Service, IRL edition: Fisker EVs "cannot, as a technical matter, be 'ported' from the Fisker server to which the vehicles are currently linked to a distinct server owned and/or controlled by" a non-bankrupt vehicle operator. Tbh, this is just an early example for connected cars.
Fisker EVs can’t be ported to new server
The sale of 3,300 Fisker Oceans is now in doubt as they cannot be migrated away from Fisker’s server.
arstechnica.com
Here's the very tired fire chief from Pensacola, my favorite place in WNC, with an important message: "I ain't got time for this." He just spent his Saturday evening trying to tamp down Facebook rumors flooding his community with unneeded help and attacking FEMA. www.facebook.com/watch/live/?...
One under reported theme from Helene is the number of influencer militia member types that have turned up in WNC vlogging their DIY response efforts (and Starlink installs), and the decrying the lack of federal and state help. Not great if disaster response ends up as polarized as COVID response.
Faine Greenwood@faineg.com · 2y agoVapidly bad-mouthing federal disaster response based on nothing but vibes is in fact exactly what right wing extremists want us to be doing, and you’re a fucking idiot if you fall for it.
I always thought the mines in Spruce Pine, NC made kitchen countertops. TIL they made the Palomar Observatory, and pretty much every modern computer chip:
The Ultra-Pure, Super-Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible
The processor that makes your laptop or cell phone work was fabricated using quartz from this obscure Appalachian backwater.
wired.com
Just saw a Domino’s delivery guy on an ebike, rolling down the street straddling (and blocking) two lanes of traffic while casually smoking a cigarette. This dude needs a promotion to at least colonel in the @thewaroncars.bsky.social
Turns out it's hard to do an energy transition as industrial policy when the legislature is controlled by folks that don't want an energy transition.
Really appreciated the economic justice focus of this discussion. Walkable communities are a luxury good in the US.
The War on Cars@thewaroncars.bsky.social · 2y agoNEW EPISODE! We talk with activist Anna Letitia Zivarts about her book, "When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency" which addresses the needs of the one third of people in the U.S. who can not drive and argues for a system that works for all. thewaroncars.org/2024/05/07/1...
