idlewords

I lived near this particular park, so the article struck a chord with me.

For things to be better, we need to start doing things differently, and one starting point is to have compassion for the people who are denied the use of public spaces by the hardcore homeless who refuse outreach and aid.

San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion, for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money.

Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?

Because this is a person wants to sleep rough in a park and has to be pushed through every step of the process to leave it. I would imagine things go much faster if you hate sleeping in a park and want a roof over your head.

This is an article about a man who was given all those things, repeatedly, and went back to sleeping rough in the park. How would giving him money make any difference?

The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"]

I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.

I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.

Thank you; I really appreciate that!

Just fill the ball with water.

The big-ticket items in the Federal budget are the military, old-age pensions, and medical spending; everything else is pretty much a rounding error. All three of those categories are rife with multi-billion dollar waste and fraud, but have powerful bipartisan political armor. I am looking forward to seeing what happens when Doge grasps one of these third rails.

I am absolutely not accusing Khelif, or anyone else, of pretending to be something she's not. The evidence is clear she's a male athlete who grew up with a disorder of sexual development, but it's possible in that scenario to be raised as a girl and not learn of the condition until puberty. I think accusations of bad faith against Khelif are cruel.

To answer your second question, I don't think any male athlete should compete in women's sports, since it negates the purpose of having sex-segregated categories. I believe it's possible to preserve these categories without excluding or vilifying transgender athletes. And I think this sentiment is in line with the vast majority of people who understand there is a tension between affirming people's gender identity and being fair to female athletes.

("Ageist" is a joke about the non-sequitur accusations of transphobia I got in response to my tweet.)

Slow-boiled water gives superior flavor!

1500 watts is about what an electric kettle uses.

Neither could this neutrino.

This is very useful feedback, thank you!

For the Chrome extension, I started by just getting compliant with manifest v3, so Chrome would stop complaining. But now that it's relatively fresh in my mind, I'm going to redesign it so that the most common case (save this page) is one-click.

I think the reason a lot of the mobile apps suck is that the API is underpowered to do what those apps need. Once I get the v2 API out the door, if it turns out that no one wants to build a proper modern app on it, I'll roll up my sleeves and do it myself. But getting that new API stable and running is top priority.

I would love to hear your thoughts about what a minimalist 'save only' iOS app should behave like, either here or at support@pinboard.in.

This is someone accusing me of transphobia in a situation where no one involved is trans, and no claims are being made about trans people. Which strikes me as extremely ageist.

Thanks for that!

The whole site is responsively styled; I'm confused about why OP says otherwise.

It was a single email, in 2022, and the wording was exceptionally friendly!

(For those who don't know, the site moved to a subscription model in 2015 and I asked old-timers to consider converting their account voluntarily. Everyone who chose not to still has a lifetime membership to the site.)

Because the "boosted Singal post" is a retweet of Singal saying this about the Onion:

"There's still some good onion but when it's cringe it's so cringe

I want the old onion back"

That's it. That's my alleged rightward shift.

Singal is considered a suppressive person on Bluesky and agreeing with him on anything is prima facie evidence of fascism. But I think this attitude says more about Anil and Bluesky than about me.

I encourage curious people to dig in to what [1] is referring to, and form their own opinion.

The Chrome extension was last updated a month ago. The whole site went quietly responsive over the last two years. I beg people to align their criticism with reality.

I plead guilty to not building a mobile app, because I don't know how to build mobile apps. Right now I'm trying to kick a better API version out the door so that more capable people than me can.

Pinboard has been up and running for 15 years. How many more years would I need to run the site before you'd decide I'm not going to shut it on a whim? Because I'll totally do that, just going on impulse right now.

People should use whatever site they find most useful. But I find the specific criticisms here baffling. To wit:

* "The site has barely changed in years/decades". That's kind of the point of the site! People ancient enough to remember Pinboard origins know that I cloned it off of del.icio.us after Yahoo made that site useless through repeated redesigns. The value proposition of Pinboard is that it endures, just like the stuff you archive there.

* The "add URL form is not responsive". I fixed this in early January, along with a raft of other updates targeted at phone users, as the author himself acknowledges. I've been working to get things looking neater on phones for a while now; bug reports about this are especially welcome.

* They don't like me and my politics are bad, for reasons they can't remember or articulate.

Again, you can dislike me and my website for any reason you want, but if you're going to publicly attack my livelihood, do it with more substance.

If you have the chance, it's really worth making the trip to Cahokia, IL. It was the capital of one of those civilizations that peaked in the 12th century, and you can still climb the monumental earthworks and gain a sense of the place. Any society that DIYs a mountain in Illinois deserves to be remembered.

I'll buy both.

I blog with raw HTML too, but I don't blog about it. The "blog about the tools I use" tarpit is somewhat unique, it's like if online chefs were obsessed with creating knife and fork recipes.

If you haven't been to Japan, it's worth lingering over these pictures and noticing a few things:

- The complete absence of vandalism

- How generally clean everything is

- Accessibility strip for blind people (bumpy yellow stripe in train stations and sidewalks)

- Nothing is broken or out of service

- How safe and welcoming the public transit system feels.

Japan is worth the journey if you ever want to step into a high-trust other dimension.

I've noticed a fun split among people I know—those who grew up on a farm will move heaven and earth never to deal with chickens again, while people who grew up in cities or suburbs are really into the idea.

Bird flu is what's going on.

If your threat model is tracking, then worry about carrying around the 24/7 tracking device more than the specific software you run on it.

Yo mama so fat...