Woke 1 had a sense of real and primal terror, Woke 2 was fun but it was just space marines and power loaders and no orange cat.
Ian
@woolie.meowmeow.city
Visual urbanist. I like trains, buses, cities, and maps.
New academic study: Inclusionary zoning costs renters $800k per affordable unit created. This is more than the per-unit cost for the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program. While LIHTC which is largely funded by the rich via income taxes, IZOs are regressive because they place the burden on renters.
Learned about a cool QGIS failure mode, only caught it bc CI converts the template XML to json and diffs against main.
The only way the Reflecting Pool situation gets resolved is by hiring a construction & engineering firm staffed entirely by Muppets and one human Adam Driver.
Ron Filipkowski@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 18h agoThis might take longer to get resolved than the Iran War.
When you're talking to an LLM, you should picture C3PO. That's who you're talking to. It's fluent in six million forms of communication. It will tell you the odds of surviving an asteroid field when you least need that information. You will need to turn it off sometimes just to shut it up.
M4.1 #earthquake detected 3 km NE of San Leandro, California at 8/13/2026 8:30:04 AM PDT This reflects data from the U.S. Geological Survey that is subject to change. Visit the USGS page linked below for the latest #quake information
M4.1 - 3 km NE of San Leandro, California
A magnitude 4.1 earthquake located 3 km NE of San Leandro, California was detected at 8/13/2026 8:30:04 AM PDT. This information is subject to change. Please visit the USGS event page for up-to-date details.
earthquake.usgs.gov
TIL that some train timetables, like MTA LIRR, aren't strict timetables in a 'route' sense. E.g., '2xxx' trips are in the GTFS as 'Far Rockaway' route, but '8xx' trips are 'Long Beach Branch' route, and aren't easily merged into a single timetable. Hmm. www.mta.info/schedules/li...
I don't care if Threads clobbers Bluesky but I desperately need Threads to clobber Twitter.
Christopher Mims@mims.bsky.social · 2d agoSo I guess either Bluesky becomes a nonprofit or we all start sharing our Threads handles on here…?
You should be able to order cocaine and fentanyl, delivered straight to your door, from inside all of the gambling apps.
Fable seems much more willing to use Playwright to render UI elements to screenshots so it can inspect them, which doesn't seem like a big deal but it is.
Americans love to make chonky towers, quite specifically and with exacting requirements on dimensional ratios, extremely illegal.
Reece Martin@rmtransit.bsky.social · 2d agoBut then despite all of the talk of Transit first pro density attitudes, we don't actually build a train station unlike japan!
Once again it’s time to ask, “How many affordable homes did the Burger King have?”
Burger King Housing Planned at 2817 El Camino Real, San Mateo - San Francisco YIMBY
San Francisco YIMBY says "Yes In My Backyard" to positive new development in the San Francisco metropolitan region.
sfyimby.com
I feel like American vending machines in the 80's were constructed to survive a nuclear apocalypse and vending machines today only exist to show "card read error, try again later."
Displaying a bus timetable on a modern, skinny-tall phone screen is really challenging...
The 2027 UPC will be incorporated into some state plumbing codes within the next few months.
John Lansing@pipedreaming.bsky.social · 8mo agoIn an unlikely turn of events, I managed to convince the voting members of the UPC technical committee to accept my proposal, reversing the limits imposed on circuit venting. This will likely trickle down to California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Minnesota, Maine, Austin, Houston, and more.
FWIW, I've been ranting about forced municipal consolidation from Albany to San Leandro for over a decade.
It's not a zoning problem, really, we don't have tiny businesses in residential zones because Americans are obsessed with control and hierarchy in urban spaces. Japanese style retail is a cultural impossibility. thefreemanmag.substack.com/p/japan-is-n...
Japan Is Not a Magical Wonderland
Americans Could Run and Enjoy Micro-Businesses, Too
thefreemanmag.substack.com
if i had to distill my complex thoughts about posting on bluesky vs posting on twitter, threads, mastadon, etc it would be a picture of the two guys on the bus looking out the windows where one is happy and the other is sad but outside both windows it says "remember one day you will die"
TIL that Taiwan uses traditional Chinese characters, while mainland China generally uses simplified Chinese.
It’s depressing to scroll though the transportation planning or civil engineering CVs for California universities and see so much focus on micro mobility or AVs but no interest in construction costs or network planning.