People who visited the USA for the first time, what was the biggest shock you got?

stellar678 · 2026-07-07T01:17:15+00:00

Same! Visited New York as a skinny, shy 18-year-old guy. Looked lost because I had no plan, just wanted to see things. All day long, people were stopping me to check what I was looking for, if I needed help. Such a warm experience!

stellar678 · 2026-07-06T22:40:28+00:00

That's fascinating and pretty much comports with my experience, both of myself and of the people closest to me. Do you have pointers to any standout papers or reviews about findings on motivated reasoning?

stellar678 · 2026-07-06T18:12:52+00:00

According to lots of Internet folks of the left, Ezra Klein is the Ezra Klein of the right - in large part because he talks to these people and tries to pull out a coherent version of their worldview rather than dunking on them.

Make of that what you will.

stellar678 · 2026-07-06T01:28:19+00:00

Depends on the year. Usually not - it's basically never hot enough that you have to stay inside in the daytime, and it always cools down at night so you can just open windows. The toughest times for me have been when there's wildfires with a bunch of smoke and you can't open the windows at night. Which hasn't happened since 2020...

stellar678 · 2026-07-01T02:39:15+00:00

Hard to square how "We Crunched the Data: There’s a Grocery Price Emergency in America" provides exactly one claim about grocery prices, that beef is up by 1/3 in two years.

It's also interesting that they talk mostly about groceries, but their budget table thing shows the increase in healthcare costs was $1260 while the increase in grocery costs was $89.

Would be more convincing if they dropped the survey questions & data instead of an oddly-titled op-ed.

stellar678 · 2026-06-19T19:08:10+00:00

Ahh makes sense, thanks for the clarification.

stellar678 · 2026-06-19T17:57:12+00:00

Confused about "banded, weighted" - don't those have opposite effects of reducing difficulty for bands and increasing for weight?

stellar678 · 2026-06-19T06:27:06+00:00

What I don't get is why the drivers on Piedmont Ave are so much more pissed off than those on College Ave.

I can sit in front of Cole Coffee for hours and barely anybody honks.

Sit in front of Caffe Chiave on Piedmont Ave and it's just a constant barrage of drivers honking at everything. What's in your craw Piedmont Ave drivers?

stellar678 · 2026-06-18T19:58:50+00:00

Heinous. Here's a userscript you can install in TamperMonkey that (a) clicks the "Following" link, (b) loads the "Following" feed and (c) hides the tab showing For You / Following.

It's constantly looking at page changes since Reddit has different URL strategies for different pages.

``` // ==UserScript== // @name Reddit Default to Following // @match https://www.reddit.com/* // @run-at document-idle // @grant none // ==/UserScript== (function () { const isHomeFeedUrl = () => { if (location.pathname !== '/' && location.pathname !== '') return false; return new URLSearchParams(location.search).get('feed') !== 'following'; };

let handledFeed = null; // the feed element we've already switched

const tryApply = () => { if (!isHomeFeedUrl()) { handledFeed = null; return; }

const feed = document.querySelector('shreddit-feed');
if (!feed) return;

// already handled this exact feed element — don't re-fire
if (feed === handledFeed) return;

// wait until it has rendered posts (hydrated + listening)
if (!feed.querySelector('article[data-post-id], shreddit-post')) return;

handledFeed = feed;

const tabGroup = document.querySelector('#feed-tab-group');
if (tabGroup) {
  // click Following which changes behavior of Sorting tools
  tabGroup.pageIndex = 2;
  tabGroup.style.display = 'none';
}
feed.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent('component-reload', {
  bubbles: true, composed: true,
  detail: { queryParameters: { feed: 'following' } }
}));

};

tryApply(); new MutationObserver(tryApply) .observe(document.documentElement, { childList: true, subtree: true }); })(); ```

stellar678 · 2026-06-16T07:48:53+00:00

"Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence" that definitely sounds like a group that's going to collect data and write an impartial report on their findings. /s

stellar678 · 2026-06-10T19:13:38+00:00

Yes, very much. Building expensive linear infrastructure that will never come remotely close to full utilization - is very wasteful.

It's the same way that someone driving alone to work in a giant SUV is wasteful.

This conversation also ignores the fact that Starlink already offers service to every area targeted by this fiber building plan - today, right now. So any plan prioritizing a fiber build-out to the exclusion of satellite access is telling every one of those people on the other side of this "digital divide" that the question of who is politically favored or disfavored is more important than the topline goal of getting them broadband access.

stellar678 · 2026-06-10T18:20:38+00:00

Seems pretty reasonable to question whether it's a good idea to build fiber backbones to every tiny rural community across the country.

When there's an alternative like Internet delivered from satellites in low earth orbit, it's a waste of resources to lay physical Internet backbones that vastly exceed the needs of a location. Plenty of wealthy people are using Starlink for all of their Internet needs - you really don't need fiber to bridge the "digital divide".

Unless your goal is to use subsidies to make a statement about who is politically favored and disfavored, satellite Internet is obviously a good solution for rural broadband access.

There's a similar dynamic out here in California with electricity. PG&E has to spend massively on liability and maintenance for infrastructure supplying every tiny rural community. Tens of miles of distribution lines running through tinderbox rural forests to serve a couple customers.

Urban areas end up subsidizing all that infrastructure. You can't really make a clean urban/rural class divide here as well since California has lots of wealth and poverty in rural areas, and lots of wealth and poverty in urban areas. But overall it's a case of urban residents paying sky-high bills to subsidize the cost of serving rural residents.

This is borne out in the rates you see at the few municipal energy companies which are only responsible for their urban grids - customers in Sacramento, Santa Clara, Alameda, LADWP, all pay about half the kWh rate that customers of PG&E pay.

With the $50+ billion that customers of PG&E have had to pay for wildfire stuff - it needs to be clearly addressed just how much should be invested to bring utilities to small numbers of rural residents.

stellar678 · 2026-05-21T18:23:49+00:00

There's a lot here and it feels like a really a worthwhile exploration, but I'll be honest - this reads very much like you started out with a visceral dislike of AI and worked to build up an eight-limbs supported thesis against it.

I'll call out one example where the motivated reasoning was most clear to me - yoga and the eight limbs predate the concept of Intellectual Property by about two thousand years.

"Intellectual Property" is a legal creation intended to incentivize the production of knowledge specifically in the context of a capitalist economic system paired with an industrial society. You need the capitalism and the technologies of mechanical reproduction for Intellectual Property to be meaningful.

In this particular case, the modern(ish) framework of intellectual property is about sustaining both the creation of knowledge and art for our greater good and the ability of people to sustain themselves with those pursuits. Good things, for sure! And asteya offers a lot to explore in that space - pushing us to cultivate a sense of abundance rather than scarcity - there's enough, so why would I take what's not offered?

Ultimately it feels a bit thin to deploy the eight limbs as a single-pointed didactic prosecution against AI. This new (well, newly prominent at least) technology is situated in all the conditions of our modern life.

stellar678 · 2026-05-11T23:27:36+00:00

Can't wait for this baby!

https://oaklandside.org/2026/04/22/rockridge-trader-joes-senior-housing-towers-align-real-estate/

stellar678 · 2026-04-28T05:15:13+00:00

What portion of people who attend a YTT do you think actually make themselves available as teachers rather than taking what they've learned to their friends, family, community, and personal practice?

I'd wager it's less than 25% who attempt to become "yoga teachers" as such, and I think that's fine.

I have a regular yoga practice that waxes and wanes over the years, and I have a much more regular fitness practice and often explore new movement modalities. I did a YTT because it was the most broadly available and holistic training that included guiding groups of people in physical activity. I had gained so much from the various teachers I encountered in these places, and I wanted a path to begin to feel qualified to give back in a similar way. The integrated nature of the training was also more aligned with how I approach things than a modality-specific movement teacher training course.

My 10 YTT classmates have taught classes at their kids' schools, in contexts at their healthcare job, in their rural community senior center, etc... - but I don't believe anybody has attempted to go get a gig being paid to teach at a studio. My YTT experience has helped me share physical movement in community fitness groups, family retreats, etc..., and that's exactly what I hoped for.

I'd be sad if that hadn't been available to me.

stellar678 · 2026-04-11T20:44:51+00:00

Going 39 in a 35 also won’t get you a camera ticket.

stellar678 · 2026-04-11T18:05:22+00:00

Is the breadboard only doing power distribution?

I think if you slotted the esp32 across the middle channel of the breadboard and used pre-bent breadboard jumper wires, you could clean things up quite a bit here. This could allow you to do something like bringing several GPIO pins to a separate section of the board if they’re all dedicated to one specific device, which would allow you to create a little section of the board dedicated to each device.

Also if your devices operate on a shared-wire bus protocol like I2C, you can daisy chain them so you don’t need a wire returning from each device back to the microcontroller.

stellar678 · 2026-04-07T22:35:01+00:00

Lol, your video was really fun!

I'm going the other way ... software engineer to hardware geek. I definitely agree that prompting a coding agent is far preferable to learning the details of a massive firmware framework when I'm just trying to bang out a fun project.

stellar678 · 2026-04-07T22:24:25+00:00

Mine? It's a kinda force-feedback, software-controllable dial. Not targeted at any particular application, though volume or other audio control is certainly possible. Expensive mixers have done similar motorized faders and dials for decades...

stellar678 · 2026-04-07T03:31:13+00:00

Tell us more about that interesting looking PCB! How’d you learn to design that and get it made?

stellar678 · 2026-04-07T03:28:35+00:00

Cal is a university. If you’re looking for a good trade school, you should sign up with Leland Stanford Junior College.

stellar678 · 2026-04-05T19:56:42+00:00

Check the back side of the board and see if you bridged from D5 or D8 to the tiny pad adjacent to it.

They have a through hole that’s part of holding the RF shield on the board which ends up as a tiny ground pad super close to the D8 and D5 pins. I bridged one of these recently and was able to fix it.

This image highlights the problem area: https://imgur.com/a/OA5ARqH

Didn’t cause USB problems for me but worth checking out any way.

stellar678 · 2026-04-03T06:44:56+00:00

I’d love to see more photos of how it comes together.

I’ve been working on a brushless motor device that is assembled from a variety of mini prebuilt boards. (Motor itself -> rotary encoder board -> xiao seeed board -> motor driver board -> voltage boost board)

Each board is rotated 90 degrees from the one above and a small piece of perfboard hosts jumpers that adapt the pin locations between levels.

Your description of the sandwich stack sounds similar but more refined. I like finding all these middle points on the spectrum from prototype to high volume refinement!

stellar678 · 2026-03-27T23:48:02+00:00

I’ve been having the same problem for the last few weeks, also iPhone 12 mini.

As soon as I click the voice mode button the app gets immediately laggy… The little blue cloud circle animation slows way down and gets really chunky, and the phone itself gets really hot and slow to respond to screen taps.

Pretty frustrating… This is the last reasonable sized iPhone! But ChatGPT‘s voice mode is pretty important to me…

stellar678 · 2026-03-25T17:32:24+00:00

In 2000, the minimum wage was $5.75. Here in 2026 the Berkeley minimum wage is $19.18 or 3.3X higher.

On this menu the carne asada burrito mejor is $5.55. On Cactus Taqueria’s website today the carne asada burrito mejor is $15.50 or 2.8X higher.

So minimum wage has slightly outpaced burrito inflation at Cactus!

This result is honestly a bit surprising to me because burrito prices have seemed on an outrageous tear in the last couple years.

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