Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

Biked to the neighborhood grocery store, along a 1-mile painted bike lane. After I got home (safe!), posted 5 reports to 311 of illegal parking in that bike lane. Is this just what 🚴 life is like now?

(That doesn't count the illegally parked police car or the parents trying to grab parking spaces near the schools, where in each case I didn't think I could safely take a picture.)

it's a comfort to know that even in the 17th century people struggled to keep up with their email and felt tempted to blow off work
https://mastodon.social/@samuelpepys/101942547437024766

It is proven! I am npdoty on Keybase: https://keybase.io/npdoty/sigchain#8a5b44c5f58f674d805185f439ed152f360d0a05a821188f9c343e02ef426b990f

(a small subgame at the end: the "free file" software you're using quietly threatens that your state return might be delayed unless you pay them to file it, and, after a few minutes, you give in and pay them because the whole thing has taken too long anyway)

FILING YOUR TAXES, AS SHE IS PLAYED: a tedious game in which you copy numbers from a series of boxes into a series of other boxes, even though the other player has all the numbers already. Suspense is added because if you copy the wrong numbers or into the wrong boxes, you may accidentally be committing a crime or losing significant amounts of money.

The first of the blue-eyed grass has popped open. (Gilia capitatum is starting to bud in the same container.) #sisyrinchium #florespondence #wildflowers

to get my personal URL (annotated with rel=me, yay for XFN!) to show up in nice bright green with a checkmark, I had to hit "save" on my profile, even though I already had my URL in one of the fields. fyi.

Seek by iNaturalist is kind of amazing, it's a glimpse of the augmented reality magic I always hoped for, where you scan your phone over a plant and see a progressively improving classification until it tells you the exact species of the organism.
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/23075-real-time-computer-vision-predictions-in-seek-by-inaturalist-version-2-0
It's still a little buggy and it crashed on seeing Bermuda buttercup, but I was like, honestly, same.

all this "Creative Cloud" subscription stuff just means that, each time I sit down at my computer, I have no idea if I can use the software I ran last time, or if some issue with connectivity, logging in to an account, or any bug written in any piece of Adobe software will disable my installed software.

bonus: troubleshooting is especially hard, because it's not clear if they want me to use the software or they're trying to stop me from using the software

I'm glad to have it out, published, even though we still welcome feedback and can make more revisions and I'm sure it doesn't go far enough or isn't clear enough.

It's kind of exhausting how long it's taken to finish this and I'm still not sure what impact we are having with it. But also I guess it's an accomplishment? Privacy can be draining work.

It has three easy steps:
1. identify features that can be used for browser fingerprinting;
2. evaluate the severity of the fingerprinting surface based on these five factors; and,
3. apply mitigations described in the best practices

Updated guidance on mitigating browser fingerprinting as we design new Web features:
https://www.w3.org/TR/fingerprinting-guidance/

Active fingerprinting may be made detectable; we can minimize increases to the surface of passive fingerprinting; and cookie-like mechanisms can be made clearable.

Indicative votes can be informative even if non-binding, which seems like a useful principle in governance.

If negotiations are ongoing, would you start with the government's deal, which lost by 230 votes at first and 150 votes on the second attempt, or a customs union, which lost by only 8 votes? Or a confirmatory referendum, which got the most support of all options discussed, and more yay votes than the government's deal has ever received?

The UK parliament had indicative votes on 8 options and each had a majority against. That might seem disappointing, or it might seem not entirely unexpected as the topic is controversial and this is literally the first day that they've openly debated different options.

I'm curious as to whether a different way of voting would make a difference: if it were ranking choices rather than yea/nay on each. But even so, the customs union option lost by only 8 votes! Sounds like a starting point.

Investigation I don't like having to do when making air travel plans: is this plane actually a version of a plane that the FAA belatedly and reluctantly decided to ground because of poor safety decisions that the manufacturer self-certified were safe when in fact it seemed pretty obvious that it's an enormous and fatal flaw?

Sometimes I just like making a pretty graph to illustrate something, even if it's not dramatically insightful?

#socialscience #graphs #ietf #infoviz

"We are not against the construction at all", said the representative of the three neighborhood associations -- each of which are made up of wealthy, white, single-family homeowners -- who is suing the University to stop construction, on the grounds that it might affect their ample street parking.

In this case, the construction is a few new beach volleyball courts, so that UC Berkeley can more equitably invest in women's as well as men's participation in campus sports.