One Big Set Of Stuff - November 02022

Let's start this with a vision of the next 25 years that suggests a big era of progress has already hit the tipping point, and we are on the rush of the roller coaster going down. It does talk a little bit about the things that could cause setbacks, but it's basically the people who believed they got it right on the last boom predicting an even bigger one, with transformations in energy, biotech, and information tech (mostly augmented by intelligences and machines) to shift the world from scarcity to abundance.

Congratulations to the voters of Oregon who wrote into the state Constitution the right to affordable health care, and the hope that their electeds follow on with this by doing the heavy lifting to make it happen properly and correctly so that the residents of Oregon never have to worry about unaffordable or bankrupting health care bills ever again.

Announcing the January release of The Sad Bastard Cookbook, a CC-licensed cookbook for getting food in your face when the world around you (or your internal state of self) has gone completely to shit (or is on its way there.)

Railroad workers deserve paid sick leave. Giving it to them would mean railroad companies would have to build in capacity and redundancy. So naturally, companies would rather spend their profits on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends and lobbying Congress to impose an unfair contract on the railway union workers. And it looks like Congress and the President are more than willing to go along with it, barring those progressives who are trying to get them to use their power to impose a more worker-friendly contract.

( Even more things under the cut )

Last for tonight, a browser-based infinite driving experience calling itself Slow Roads, which has no destination to reach, no checkpoints to race toward, and no obstacles to attempt to drive through.

And from smallgodsproject, A Void, the small cat of being misunderstood, who is, as is right and proper, a small void of the kind that is most likely to be misunderstood.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Adventures In Home Automation #7: Fancier Indicator Lights

There hasn't been much done since the last set of automation work. Which means that I haven't discovered anything that would be improved through scripting or automation yet, or tried to do something that would require a significant amount of research to implement, like some form of free-floating "play this song" skill that would run a search and start playing the result through a selected speaker.

Instead, what's happened is a whole lot of people decamping from Twitter and moving to other spaces. Including a fair few people in the household, some of whom are maintaining a foot in a couple of different sites for when Twitter fully becomes more hassle than it is worth, a calculation that each person gets to make themselves.

( So we made the indicator lights project Even Better )

I feel like this is a slightly more clever/programmer type of solution to the problem, since it didn't require asking for any additional data from the API call (the attribute I needed came in the JSON, I just needed to have something explicitly paying attention to it) and it used something built-in as a good-enough proxy, rather than trying to do something more complex. I'm pretty proud of having been able to think it through, test it, see the results, and, perhaps most importantly, not have to have bashed my head against the templating language to figure out what I was doing wrong. Sure, it's 95% recycled working code from other things, but why reinvent the wheel, right?

At some point, I'll come across something else that needs automating, or decide I want to try and do something clever again, and you'll get to hear about it. This one didn't use the voice assistant, but those are skills that I would love to be able to do more of, to voice-control complex reactions or pass in arbitrary things and have it understand. But that requires a lot more work than the simple thing that I'm using and enjoying as a local control device.

More adventures in home automation (or clever light projects) shortly!

December Days 2022 #1: Silvery

What am I doing for December Days this year? I'm trying to think better things about myself and move my mental state from seeing myself and my life as a series of deficits and failures to achieve the impossible perfect goal toward a more strengths-based approach and trying to convince myself that because I am still here, and I am still holding down some sort of life, even in the face of all the things that are making it difficult for me, I am an accomplishment worth celebrating.

So I asked all of you to provide some adjectives to start with, and then I will turn them over in my head, based on their definitions, and then talk about what comes to mind from them. I'm doing a month-long love meme, from me to me, because I need it. The first one is, of course, about me and this name that I have carried with me for my Internet life.

silvery (comparative silverier, superlative silveriest)

Resembling silver in color, shiny white.

Sprinkled or covered with silver.

Having the clear, musical tone of silver; soft and clear in sound.

( Start simple )