Trucking companies sue California, seeking a release from Clean Truck Partnership
They include Daimler, which manufactures about 40% of U.S. trucks, and Volvo, which makes about 15%, along with Paccar and Traton.
Those are among the companies suing California for the right to damage our air and our breathing. They are also among the companies whose vehicles I will never, ever consider buying. They can go rot for all I care.
Def Con was amazing and exhausting and fascinating and terrifying and just all around exhilarating and energizing. Thank you to everyone to helped make it possible, and also delightfully weird.
Time to pour some coffee, take a deep breath, exhale, and start working on next year’s project.
If you get on a plane, stick your carry-on at the very front, then walk to the very back so that there’s no room for the frontward peoples’ luggage when they board and everyone has to wait for them to trek to the back and stow it and return to the front, you are a bad person and should feel bad.
PHP: Not exactly bad, but still a strange one
PHP is so hard for me to describe. I used it a lot in the late 90s when we were migrating off mod_perl because it was a great way to add dynamic data to otherwise static pages, and no one really knew how to develop large sites yet. We were making it up as we went along. But ye gods, the language was bad. “A poor craftsman blames his tools” and all that, but imagine a screwdriver with 2 handles and 3 tips projecting at random angles. Sure, you could assemble an IKEA desk with it, but would you want to? And would you look suspiciously at anyone who claimed to love that weird screwdriver when the equivalent of a Snap-On was available for free from the same place they got the weirdo?
I think that’s the root of much of the horror. No one would bat an eye at using PHP to add little bits of server-side content here and there. It’s great for that! But then you see the giant castles of non-Euclidean horror built with it, and people pointing to them and saying “see what you can make with that weird screwdriver?”, and parts of the castles randomly fall off and kill their owners. No! While that’s impressive, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the screwdriver, or in the people who keep using it to build things larger than it was clearly able to do well. But heaven help you if you point out that there are saner screwdrivers. “You’re just being close minded and out of touch! We added another handle to it and removed the razor blade so it’s much better now!”
Maybe so, but wow, it’s still one hell of an odd screwdriver. reply
I’m about to head to Def Con where I’ll be hosting a mobile Frozen BBS. I’m carrying it into work in SF this morning as a trial run, and also to make sure people don’t call the cops on it.
I just cut The Def Con Release of Frozen BBS, and updated the little radio and Rasperry Pi boxes that are going to be strapped onto my backpack next week.
Target followed up on my compromised credit card, which again, has never left my house except to go on Target runs. They mailed me a long fraud investigation questionnaire that asks for fun data like the PII of everyone who’s been around my house for the last year.
Yeah, no. The compromise was on their end. Go fix that. I’m not triggering an investigation into my friends and family for Target’s mistakes.
The emergency room I went to a couple weeks ago texted me a link to pay the bill. It’s to some generic payment system called “Papapapay”, which couldn’t sound scammier if it tried, and it shows a white screen if you open it in Safari.
Sometimes I’d swear they’re trying to train us to open phishing emails.
Pollito is still a photogenic little fellow.
It’s been a busy week at work. Our coffee maker broke and had to be sent for repairs. Engineering speed suffers when devs are low on caffeine.
I ordered a cheap coffee pot from an online store and had it next-day delivered to the office, then unboxed it and brewed a pot. This was very well received.
Banner over the street on my commute.
I think someone at Target’s having a bad day. I got a store credit card there a while back. It’s never left my house except to take it to Target. Today I got an unauthorized transaction message. Now I’m on the phone with their fraud department, with a wait time of 15 minutes.
Bathroom poster, Brickhouse, SF.
I did not add that sticker.
SF BART stations have restrooms with keys that have expiration dates.
The GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 travel router I bought a year ago is on sale today for 38% off. If you’ve been on the fence, get this now.
Summary: check into a hotel and connect this, instead of your phone, to the paid WiFi instead. Then connect your phone, laptop, Switch, whatever to the router’s WiFi. Only pay for the one device, have your own firewall in place, and route everything through your own VPN if you want (we watched American Netflix from Germany).
I’ll never travel without one again.
Brendan Barker Obituary (1974 - 2025) - Legacy Remembers
Oh man, this hurts. Brendan umped our kids’ baseball games and he was wonderful, both MLB-level good and unfailingly fair. We’d chat and joke with him before games and during slow parts, but it didn’t matter: he’d still call our kid out a minute later.
RIP Brendan. You were a true role model for hundreds of kids.
Bob, being dogsat, likes to perch on the back of the couch behind my head.
She stood a cautious distance from the racked spamcannon, its GPUs glowing with malice and infrared as LLMs cranked out personalized spells. The tokens oozed out to the fediverse through a web of fake egirl accounts: “OMG… You would… look so cute… in these Skechers! ”
It was as profitable as it was horrible.
Because my ex-employer pays for a “platinum plan” health insurance policy, with family premiums of like $6000 per month, when I had a routine medical procedure last week, my out of pocket expense was “only” about $2000.
‘Murica. Shit yeah.
I’ve been using Just for a while as a task runner. It’s similar to Make, but optimized for developer ergonomics with a vastly simpler syntax and a wonderful CLI. I’d also been using Mise for other environment management things, such as installing specific versions of Python and NPM and other tools in a project directory.
Someone introduced me to Mise’s own newish task runner, and it just might win me over from Just for most things:
- Instead of using 2 tools, I can use 1.
- Just still feels nicer to me, perhaps because I’m more used to it, but Mise is good enough that I don’t think I’d miss the extra features.
- Mise lets you write tasks in separate files, which lets any editor handle them well without having to support justfile syntax, but still shares a CLI with inline tasks.
I like it.