Category: Life

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Brightline West is ready to start breaking ground this week, according to The Washington Post. The southwest endpoint will be in Rancho Cucamonga, where it will connect to Metrolink. (Which is definitely better than Victorville, which I’d seen suggested a few years ago.) Connecting to the existing lines here will make it simpler to build than trying to connect all the way to Los Angeles proper. (gift link)

Electric trains will depart every 45 minutes from a Las Vegas station south of the city’s storied Strip and a Southern California station in Rancho Cucamonga, a Los Angeles suburb about 40 miles east of downtown.

Traveling at up to 186 mph — faster than any other train in the United States — Brightline West trains will make the 218-mile trip in about 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Cross-posted from Metafilter

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Yes, it turns out a colander *does* make a fun instrument for observing a solar eclipse! Also, thinking about how common eclipses actually are.

Circular shadow on the sidewalk, with lots of bright crescents inside, all facing the same direction.

For a lot of reasons, we didn’t arrange another road trip to see today’s total eclipse like we did in 2017 (which was amazing, by the way!). It was only partial out here in California, and not even with as high a magnitude as the one last October.

But we had clear skies, so we broke out the eclipse glasses from 2017 again. After testing them first by looking directly as a bright indoor lamp to make sure there were no scratches. And I’d heard that colanders make interesting patterns (each hole works as a pinhole camera) much like overlapping leaves do, so I brought that out — as you can see, it worked quite well!

I do kind of regret not being able to get out to see this one as total. Partial eclipses can be really cool, especially if you have multiple ways to observe them, but XKCD has a point. There really isn’t any comparison to experiencing totality, and it doesn’t come through very well in photos.

I bet northern Spain is already booked for 2026.

It is interesting to think that solar eclipses happen every year — usually twice! — but they’re not always total, and they’re only visible from a small part of the planet at a time. And sometimes that’s a slice of, say, Antarctica or Siberia or out in the middle of the ocean. Not rare for the planet, but definitely rare for any given location.

On one hand, it’s no wonder people used to see them as omens. With travel and communication slow (and in many cases impossible) in the ancient world, if you’re only going on what’s been seen in your area, it seems super-rare and unpredictable. On the other hand, cultures with sophisticated enough astronomy like the ancient Babylonians were able to calculate the eclipse cycle thousands of years ago!

One bit of funny timing: We’ve been catching up on the last season of The Magicians. Today we got up to an episode that…well, let’s just say the moon figures very prominently in it!

Update: Axios posted a nice map last week showing how fully booked AirBnBs are for the day in different parts of the US…which shows the path of totality *very* clearly!

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Me, driving a smallish gas-fueled car in the 2000s: Wow, gas has gotten expensive these days, but at least I’m not spending too much per tank.

Me, driving a hybrid car in the 2010s: Yeah, gas is still expensive, but I’m still not spending too much per tank, and I think I’m filling it less often than I used to.

Me, driving a plug-in hybrid to the grocery store and back during the first year of the pandemic: I have no idea how much gas costs. I haven’t filled the tank since the before times. I hope the gas engine still works.

Me, driving the same plug-in hybrid normally during the 2020s: Oh yeah, gas is kinda expensive. At least I don’t have to fill up the tank very often, and it’s not too much when I do.

Me, driving a rented gas-fueled SUV to the next county and back once: WTF I’M SPENDING HOW MUCH TO FILL UP THIS TANK!?!?!?

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Last Friday, I dropped off my ballot for today’s primary election. I’ve got to say, I really appreciate the new approach in LA County of mailing everyone eligible a ballot, maintaining permanent drop boxes at relevant locations (libraries, etc.), and opening some polling places early to accept completed ballots.

MUCH more convenient than needing the time on one specific day and, in elections with a lot of turnout, waiting 45 minutes, an hour, or longer.

The longest I’ve waited was when I was living in Orange County, either 2003 or 2004, and they actually had to apply the “if you’re in line at closing time, you get to vote” rule. Someone brought a box of to-go coffee from the Starbucks down the street (I think Starbucks might have donated it, too?) and was offering it either to the poll workers or to those of us still in line.

The first election in which the county implemented early voting and flexible polling places (instead of requiring you to get to the specific place on your sample ballot) was also the week before COVID-19 hit the area. Now that I think of it, they still didn’t send out an actual ballot by mail unless you requested one. That changed when it became clear COVID wasn’t going to just blow over before November. Since then some of the smaller, local elections have been mail-only.

Four years….WTF

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I’ve been meaning to disconnect from Jetpack for a while now. This seems like a good time to do it, and to finally clear out the older Tumblr and WordPress.com blogs I don’t use anymore.

Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — 404 Media

It’s the kind of thing that you expect from Google or Facebook, or from any number of start-ups, but there’s been this sense that Automattic should know better — and with Tumblr being login-walled and ad-saturated, and the push to upsell in their WordPress plugins, and now this…it’s looking like they don’t.

I don’t think they’ve hit the “trust thermocline” yet, but selling user data is a pretty clear line.

As for AI access to the Firehose: My previous understanding of the firehose is that it’s basically an aggregation of what you’d see in a bunch of blogs’ public RSS feeds. Which, OK, fine. Analyze your heart out. Display my posts in your RSS reader. Just make sure private posts and comments don’t leak.

But LLM training isn’t the same as analytics, or showing a properly attributed post in a reader. And quietly changing the terms to allow more kinds of re-use on something most people using the service don’t know about? Not cool.

And not making it clear what is and isn’t included for which purposes? That breaks down trust.

Before this, I wasn’t worried about the Firehose. But now I’m not sure I can trust Akismet, never mind Jetpack, and I’m looking for a new spam filter.

Originally posted across several threads through my GoToSocial test site.

Update: Automattic did clarify that self-hosted blogs with Jetpack are not included in the training data. Only company-hosted blogs on Tumblr and WordPress.com. But I still uninstalled Jetpack from this site, just to be sure. Like I said, I’d been meaning to for a while.