jwz
jwztl;dr PG&E has been a criminal enterprise operating illegally in San Francisco for well over a century. Eminent Domain PG&E.
"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."
The great PG&E debacle: A timeline 1898-1997: A deep dive into the scandalous history of the power company, including the Raker Act and Hetch Hetchy dam deal:
https://jwz.org/b/yk00
jwzJust pushed out updates to four of my apps because of an update to the updater and it's turtles all the way down.
https://jwz.org/b/yk0y
jwzFour way stop versus $100 billion valuation.
It's on its back, baking in the hot sun, but you're not helping, Leon. Why is that?
Also, all the headlines say variants of "Waymo halts service during massive S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams" but what they fail to mention is that it took nearly six hours of these traffic jams before Waymo finally decided that the press they were getting was bad enough that they should do the most obvious thing in the world.
https://jwz.org/b/yk0t
jwzIt has come to my attention that the artwork for the original mozilla.org "dinosaur" logo is not widely available online. So, here it is.
As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article "They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo", I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998...
https://jwz.org/b/yk0j
jwzToday I got my periodic reminder of how much I fucking despise Python, and every so-called tool that has chosen to depend upon Python. Fuck this whole "ecosystem". I mean really get right up in there and fuck it. mesa-25.3.1# meson setup build ... Program
https://jwz.org/b/yk0h
jwzRoomba doom.
Let's have a slow clap for the corporate tools who still have to show up at work and try to spin their bankruptcy fire-sale as Line Goes Up:
"Today's announcement marks a pivotal milestone in securing iRobot's long-term future," said Gary Cohen, iRobot's CEO. "The transaction will strengthen our financial position and will help deliver continuity for our consumers, customers and partners."
I guess their pivot to being an arms dealer didn't work out, huh.
https://jwz.org/b/yk0f
jwzXQuartz EGL.
Dear Lazyweb,
Some time in the last ~6 months, eglCreatePlatformWindowSurface vanished from the libraries provided by MacPorts "mesa". Where do I find it? It is not in libGL and there is no libEGL.
macOS 14.7.7, mesa 25.3.1, xorg-libX11 1.8.12.
https://jwz.org/b/yk0d
jwzRIP John Varley.
Michael Swanwick: John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment. In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction...
https://jwz.org/b/yk0b
jwzStudy Finds 80% Of Americans Lack Social Connections To Pull Off Heist.
I thought it was just me. NEW HAVEN, CT -- Shedding new light on a previously undocumented effect of loneliness, a team of psychologists at Yale University found that at least 80%...
https://jwz.org/b/yk0V
jwzSince yesterday my server has again been getting absolutely obliterated by AI scrapers. This time, though, load is below 1, but I'm getting up to 10 requests a second and all of my Apache workers are in state "R". "apachectl restart" fixes it... for a while.
What levers do I have to pull on this? E.g. maybe it would be sensible to drop connections if they stay in "R" for more than a couple seconds?
This 12 year old post suggests some sysctl.conf changes, but I have...
https://jwz.org/b/yk0T