Slightly after midnight, sitting outside in a tshirt perfectly content in this clear warm night after a clear temperate day in what the stereotypes would have me believe is a fog stricken part of the city.
Music plays gently into the night while the breeze grazes the trees. To the west, an ocean under cover of darkness with planes above bound for destinations across the globe. The nearby birds opt for closer destinations. While a train rumbles down below.
China just sent a rocket to collect samples from the moon and if we had a better world we would all see more news in various languages following the mission as a group of folks try and grab some moon rocks from the dark side yet once more and get away with it.
The reason every single website takes seven years to load and chokes oddly if there's an error or delay in any of the hundreds of connections is because some engineers decided their jobs would be easier if everything was a microservice and then that decision slowly crept towards the actual frontend code until everyone else paid the price for it.
As the eclipse becomes closer the weather sites have started laying the eclipse track down on the maps for anyone looking at a forecast image within six hours of the eclipse time.
But the forecasts themselves are getting pretty grim for many favored locations.
The models are still in rapid flux though and won’t be worth planning around until <120h out.
Some of the first long range weather models for eclipse day are up! Cloud cover model is unlikely to be accurate this far out but general pressure zones maybe give a vibe. This is going to get a lot more useful as the eclipse approaches but I wouldn’t make any plans based on the current runs yet.
Just to drive home the unreliability of the models at this point: CFS shows a completely different type of weather happening on the same day. The models are so far from converging that they agree on basically nothing.
Small Niklaus Wirth appreciation note. Pascal and its "related" family of technologies held a broad influence in much of UCSD’s computer science department for many decades. Which is why one of my first encounters with Oberon was writing a compiler frontend for it since it was one of the languages used in the compiler classes. It is also where I finally learned that not every school assignment can be done the day it was due and a parser might take at least a couple of days.
I have to say, having been in Hong Kong recently in the lead up to the latest district council elections… I find it extremely hard to be excited about anything related to disqualifying someone from a ballot.
The root of my discomfort lies in the fact the 14th amendment’s criteria is not objective enough, which means that we’re establishing more precedent that small groups of people can disqualify candidates from ballots.
I think the slope here is just too slippery. This case isn’t the one I’m worried about, but what happened in Hong Kong isn’t that far down the slope. I believe the most durable defense is in a near absolute right of people to elect the candidates they want, no matter how stupid.