The Destruction Of The Boundary Waters Is Nigh

(2) The Destruction Of The Boundary Waters Is Nigh:

Should that vote prove successful, and should the man who just anointed himself the second coming sign it into law, that measure will repeal the U.S. Forest Service Land Management Plan governing 225,504 acres of national forest in northern Minnesota. The current land management plan includes a mineral leasing withdraw that’s preventing Chile’s biggest mining company from building a heavily-polluting copper mine smack dab on top of the headwaters for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. And if that gets built a process will begin that will eventually destroy that area’s currently pristine ecosystem by dumping sulfuric acid into it.

That’s incredibly stupid not only because destroying America’s most popular wilderness area will cause more economic harm to the region than the income it will net, but also because all of that is being done in order to give Minnesota’s copper to China, so it can continue to build out its renewable power grid, and continue to race ahead of America on the development of artificial intelligence.

I dove into all that in more detail at this link.

Because Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to get around the filibuster, and disapprove of that LMP with a simple majority vote, the other thing their success will do is permanently shift all USFS LMPs into being legally considered agency “rules,” which must be approved by Congress. Because the CRA is retroactive, that will apply to any LMP written since 1996, and any permit issued as part of one. Any standing LMP or permit issued since 1996 may no longer be valid should this vote be successful. And the CRA specifically prohibits any “substantially” similar replacement, so not only could this grind industrial operations on USFS land to a halt as all of this winds its way through federal court, but it could also set USFS the task of re-doing 30 years of work, and force them to start from scratch. LMPs usually take about two to three years of research, public hearings, and stakeholder input to create. And the crazy thing is that this is the exact problem they’ve already created for the BLM, with some legal experts stating that move also applies to USFS. But, a yes vote here would definitively apply that same problem to USFS.

[Wes Siler does a great job. Go support his journalism.]

Scripting News: Online suckage is everywhere

Scripting News:

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you’re trying to do.
It’s another freaking algorithm.

Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It’s a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.

Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it’s a fucking machine. it has no idea what i’m doing.

First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.

[It’s some kind of mess.]

F*** You! Co-Creator of Go Language is Rightly Furious Over This Appreciation Email

F*** You! Co-Creator of Go Language is Rightly Furious Over This Appreciation Email:

“Legendary computer scientist Rob Pike furious over an email he got that thanked him for his contributions. He posted a screenshot on the decentralized social network Bluesky along with an angry, profanity-filled message.”

[I can’t blame him… in fact I support him. Greedy f**cks. All off ’em.]

making things true

making things true:

when i look at the history of computing, the most important moments weren’t new features. they were new primitives. the command line gave us composable programs. the GUI gave us direct manipulation. the web gave us hyperlinks. the smartphone gave us sensors and connectivity. each unlocked entire ecosystems because they provided new atoms that could be infinitely recombined.

AI isn’t just a feature. it’s a new primitive. it’s a new way of decomposing and recomposing reality.

[Hmm…]

npilk // ChatGPT is my static site generator

npilk // ChatGPT is my static site generator:

In the end, I decided to cobble something together with Jinja. I wrote a base_common.html for my header and footer, a basic template for posts, and a custom script to generate the full site from the post templates. This wasn’t quite as automated as I hoped, but it was simple, and left me with plenty of control.

Modern problems require modern solutions

After tediously copy-pasting the first couple of posts into my template, I had a thought that’s becoming more and more common. Why not just ask ChatGPT to do it?

I wrote a simple prompt:

I need to put my blog post into my standard template. I’ll paste the template from an old post and then the new post content. Can you update it into the correct format?

Here’s the template from a prior post: {pasted template}

And here’s the new post: {pasted new post}

[Nice!]

Cuts At National Park Service Aren’t About Efficiency

Cuts At National Park Service Aren’t About Efficiency:

There’s no data for how much money was lost by gateway communities near national parks during the 2018-2019 shutdown. The last one we have data for was the 16-day shutdown in 2013, which cost those economies $414 million in visitor spending. Again that year, 87 percent of NPS employees were furloughed during the shutdown. So again continuing our very bad math, with 31 percent of NPS employees gone, that adds up to $147 million in lost spending every 16 days, or $3.3 billion annually.

Ultimately, the Trump administration and Republican quislings in Congress are trying to offset $5 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires so they can pass the legislative priorities as part of a budget reconciliation package. The $228 million they hope to save by firing all these park rangers adds up to 0.00456% of that total. Less than a rounding error. Remember that when you come down with explosive diarrhea during your big national park camping trip this summer.

[My hatred for the actions of the current administration… grows with each day.]

Interesting and weird

Scripting News: Wednesday, October 16, 2024:

I thought that was both interesting and weird. I don’t get how anyone I know can be a fan of the that team. An American League team in a National League city. Kind of like rooting for Staten Island. Anyway, the Yankees may win the ALCS, but what does it mean? It’s not going to make New York love them.

[Dave’s been cracking me up with his love of the Mets for a long time. My father grew up in Yank’s territory and so while Dave rambles on about philosophy and love of his perenially underdog team and how it’s a NL city, I grew up with a team that seems to win a lot. Including the ALCS this year of course. And while the Mets have gone home for the season, the Yanks still have potential for greatness in this season. While I’m at it, congrats to the New York Liberty who just one the team’s very first WNBA championship in a messy, but somehow classicly NY game.]

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors:

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

It’s been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.

I’ve heard from users and authors alike of feed software. Sometimes the users have filed bug reports and/or feature requests and have gotten positive results from the project (or vendor). Other times, the authors of such software have gotten in touch, did some digging, found a few nuances of how their libraries work, and improved the situation.

Some of them are trying but are still not quite making it right.

Here’s some of what’s been going on.

[Facinating how we keep looping around…]