@mikeolson@mastodon.social
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mikeolson

@mikeolson@mastodon.social

Ex-Illustra, Sleepycat, Cloudera. Currently: Board member at Cityside. Working on: Climate. Politics.

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mikeolson, to random
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We have an emptied-out, tall round plastic take-out container that we throw dead batteries into, to save them for our irregular trips to the hazmat recycling place. I have always lazily thought that was a bad idea, but it worked fine.

I was sitting in the kitchen at 9:30 tonight and the fucking thing exploded. Flash and BANG. Soot all around the inside, on the cabinet above.

It's outside on concrete now, far from flammables. Will diagnose closely tomorrow.

Mischief managed, but oh, my.

mikeolson,
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Here’s the culprit! A 3V CR2032 lithium cell blew itself up. Bottom half of the battery is missing — probably in the kitchen somewhere.

mikeolson, to random
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One of my favorite things:

The Netherlands has a lot of territory below sea level. It manages a system of pumps, dikes, canals and locks to control water flow.

That interferes with annual migration of fish to their spawning grounds.

Smart folks have set up a "fish doorbell." There's an underwater camera live-streamed on the web. If you're watching and spot fish, you press a button, and the lock keeper knows to open the gate!

https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/utrechts-fish-doorbell-back-spring

glyph, to random
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I just want to write some code, maybe make some music, maybe draw some pictures.

I don't want to be mad about blockchains, I don't want to be mad about GenAI, I don't want to be mad about terrible backfiring "think of the children" legislation, I don't want to be terrified about the rising tide of bigoted, racist fascism ending democracy in my lifetime.

I don't want you to have to be mad about all that either.

I wish the world would leave us all alone for a little bit.

mikeolson,
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@glyph I went down a two-year rabbit hole to design a clock that keeps solar time, and that also keeps metric time. I learned how to work with Arduino, bought and figured out a 3D printer, and built a handful of artisanal digital artifacts for my friends and family:

https://maolson.medium.com/my-solar-metric-desk-clock-works-ee4500a5f757

You can link backward in the first paragraph (consistently, in the backward posts) for more history on the project.

mikeolson,
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@glyph I had a lot of people ask for a clock, but they're a bunch of trouble to build out of atoms, so I decided to learn how to write code for the iPhone and built an app. I got it approved by the App Store and now you can get a software-only, free, no ads, no tracking version of the Solar Metric Clock so you always know where the sun is.

https://www.olsons.net/projects/multiclock

mikeolson,
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@glyph Love those timer abstractions. Neat project.

mikeolson, to random
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You guys! My semicolon haiku got an honorable mention in the annual ACES grammar poetry contest!

https://aceseditors.org/news/2024/results-are-in-read-winning-entry-aces-14th-annual-poetry-contest

I’m super into competitive poetry.

Thanks, @grammargirl!

mikeolson, to random
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The California Presidential primary election is March 5. Early voting begins today. I'm going to walk down to the Methodist church in my neighborhood this morning to vote.

I canvas and donate to support causes and candidates, but this single action -- marking a ballot -- is the most consequential thing I do as a citizen.

Every generation of Americans inherits the responsibility to form a more perfect union, and passes on its legacy.

This is how we do it.

mikeolson, to random
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Somebody’s fax machine called my mobile phone and left a 90-second screech voicemail.

I am not backward-compatible.

mikeolson, to random
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"The Bezzle," @pluralistic's new book, is out today. My local independent bookseller will get a visit this afternoon.

By coincidence, yesterday was the 4th anniversary of his self-hosted, self-published blog. He's written an interesting retrospective on that project. This is the open web many of us thought we were building in the 1990s:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

mikeolson, to random
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Howdy folks,

A connection of mine is volunteering for the Code for Ukraine program:
https://www.codedotx.org/code-for-ukraine

They are looking for volunteers -- current college students or tech company employees -- to teach 50 Ukrainian students how to code over the course of the summer in the Carpathian Mountains. If you know folks with a CS or adjacent background who might be interested in volunteering, please share this with them!
https://www.codedotx.org/instructor-experience

dannotdaniel, to random
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ever wonder what the world would be like if Trump just put all Daddy's money in an S&P 500 index fund cos a lot of people would be alive..

mikeolson,
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@dannotdaniel And he would be wealthier.

mikeolson, to random
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Have just realized that “peer” could be “one who pees,” and juries of peers and peer review and peer pressure are forever changed for me.

mikeolson, to random
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I don't burn books. I share reviews.

Here's @pluralistic on Chris Dixon's Read Write OhPleaseGiveMeYourMoney:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

mikeolson, to random
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Yes!

Now do real estate professionals and lawyers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-proposes-requiring-investment-advisers-to-put-in-place-anti-money-laundering-controls-1482ba25?st=uy65c60425qipjc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

WSJ gift link

mikeolson, to random
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Database geek content warning!

@eatonphil's done a great job of explaining Raft, among a collection of other distributed consensus protocols. This stuff used to be my jam (Phil, I do so love a B-Tree!), but I am out of the field for a while now. Really enjoyed the clear description, and the notion of the store as the tape for a distributed state machine. That concept and the protocol were new to me.

https://notes.eatonphil.com/2024-02-08-an-intuition-for-distributed-consensus-in-oltp-systems.html

mikeolson, to random
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Pong Wars is absolutely mesmerizing.

https://pong-wars.vercel.app/

Javascript source code up on github:

https://github.com/vnglst/pong-wars

Via @jkottke

mikeolson, to random
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Andreesen Horowitz has a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times print edition today. It's promoting a new book by general partner Chris Dixon, called "Read Write Own."

I have thoughts. 1/n

mikeolson,
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Always nice to have folks hop on the "I hate big tech" train. It'd be a little more credible coming from a company that hadn't backed, and profited enormously from, Facebook and Twitter, dating as far back as 2011. 2/n

mikeolson,
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And there's plenty of evidence that AI has helped to damage the public discourse and even to destabilize society.

A16Z's disdain for the technology is undermined a bit by this uncomfortable page on their web site:

https://a16z.com/ai/

3/n

mikeolson,
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All those cryptocurrency scammers, though, amirite!?!!

Yeah. Funded Axie Infinity and Opensea. Jumped into, and quickly out of, ICOs and NFTs. Somewhat awkward. 4/n

mikeolson,
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Most of all, though: Blockchain? Are you fricking kidding me? The database invented by a cryptographer, fantastically slow and expensive, vastly worse technology than Postgres plus robust security?

Read write oops.

5/5 /fin

mikeolson,
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Nah, one more.

If you’re Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, you don’t get to complain about the internet you inherited. FFS, you materially made the thing.

6/5, really /fin

mikeolson, to random
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This is very cool:

https://directfile.irs.gov/

Government services should be as easy to use as consumer websites, and shouldn't require citizens to pay for commercial help to do stuff like file taxes.

One thing struck me: Form is not pre-filled, you need to enter all your data. That's a shame; countries like Australia provide forms filled in with data supplied by employers, making the process easier and less prone to error.

But this is a great start!

Came my way via @waldoj.

sundogplanets, to random
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Had a meeting with a bunch of astronomers concerned about satellite pollution. One of them asked the question "what do we think the situation in orbit will be like in 10 years?" which followed on the heels of several people who work with gov't talking about how incredibly pro-commercialization everything is.

It completely devastated me. Apparently I am not very optimistic about how things are going in orbit. I feel better after a long walk in the woods. But still very sad.

mikeolson,
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@sundogplanets
Thanks, Dr. Lawler.

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