alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

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Last Notes

2026-08-17 15:36:50 UTC

> The test flight of Heart Aerospace’s X1 demonstrator aircraft took place at Plattsburgh International Airport in upstate New York on August 12. The X1 aircraft is comparable in size to a small regional airliner and can achieve a maximum takeoff weight exceeding 25,000 pounds with the help of four wing-mounted electric motors. The battery-electric propulsion system delivered more than one megawatt of power during the maiden flight.
>
> All-electric aircraft can offer quieter and cleaner flight without the emissions that come from burning jet fuel. They may also prove more reliably cost-effective than conventional aircraft that come with jet fuel costs subject to geopolitical disruptions.
>
> But the initial success of the X1 demonstrator does not mean Heart Aerospace is planning to commercialize an all-electric aircraft. Current battery-electric systems can only typically sustain short flights of about 100 to 200 miles, which is why they have been limited to air taxi operations by companies such as Joby and Archer.
>
> Instead, testing of the X1 and a planned follow-on X2 aircraft will shape development of Heart Aerospace’s main offering to the airline industry—a 30-seat hybrid-electric regional airliner known as the ES-30.

2026-06-13 19:43:04 UTC

> Microsoft has spent years subsidizing Xbox rather than profiting from it, CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged this week, as he addressed the gaming division’s need for a new approach.
>
> His comments came during a Wednesday evening taping of The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast, released Friday. Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton pressed Nadella on the future of Xbox a few hours after the division’s leadership signaled an upcoming reset.
>
> “No one can accuse Microsoft of not having invested for the last 25 years,” Nadella said of the Xbox and games business. “And now we have to turn this into a sustainable business.”

2026-04-12 14:38:26 UTC

> Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement.
>
> While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.
>
> The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide “the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair” of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment’s software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday’s settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward.

2026-02-13 18:59:46 UTC

> Last week, hundreds of Google workers, outraged by the federal government’s mass deportation campaign and the killings of Keith Porter, Alex Pretti and Rene Good, went public with a call for their leadership to cut ties with ICE. The employees are also demanding that Google acknowledge the violence, hold a town hall on the topic, and enact policy to protect vulnerable members of its workforce, including contractors and cafeteria and data center workers This week, the number of supporters has passed 1,200; the full petition is at Googlers-Against-Ice.com.
>
> As the signature count rises, employees say that Google is working to stifle speech critical of its ICE contracts: censoring posts on its companywide forum Memegen, issuing warnings to workers who post ICE-related content, and ignoring their calls to address the issue both privately and publicly.

2026-02-13 18:50:12 UTC

> Sitting in his family’s living room in New York City, 14-year-old Miles Wu was astonished to find that a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight. For a total of more than 250 hours, Wu had diligently designed, folded and tested copious variations of the technique—a series of tessellating parallelograms that can fold or unfold in one fell swoop—to find one that could be used to build deployable shelters for emergency situations like natural disasters.
>
> “I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu, who’s currently a ninth-grade student at Hunter College High School in New York City.
>
> Wu had always been fascinated with the ancient Japanese art of origami, but he really began indulging in it as a hobby about six years ago. In 2024, he started exploring paper folding beyond its appeal as a creative pursuit. “I started reading about how different types of geometric origami were being studied and applied in STEM for their various physical properties,” he says.
---
> The teenager was researching the Miura-ori fold when Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and wildfires raged in Southern California. “I thought maybe these origami patterns, which are strong and collapsible, could be used as emergency shelters in these natural disasters—kind of like a tent,” he explains.
>
> Wu noticed that existing structures were sturdy, easy to deploy or cost-efficient, but rarely all three. “This creates a problem during emergency situations, such as hurricanes or wildfires, as deployable shelters ideally need to be produced quickly, set up easily, and able to withstand the elements,” he says.

2026-02-03 21:09:02 UTC

> About 50 residents of a community outside Chile’s capital spent Saturday trying their best to power an entirely human-operated chatbot that could answer questions and make silly pictures on command, in a message to highlight the environmental toll of artificial intelligence data centers in the region.
>
> Organizers say the 12-hour project fielded more than 25,000 requests from around the world.
>
> Asking the Quili.AI website to generate an image of a “sloth playing in the snow” didn’t instantly produce an output, as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini would. Instead, someone responded in Spanish to wait a few moments and reminded the user that a human was responding.
>
> Then came a drawing about 10 minutes later: a penciled sketch of a cute and cartoonish sloth in a pile of snowballs, with its claws clutching one and about to throw it.
>
> “The goal is to highlight the hidden water footprint behind AI prompting and encourage more responsible use,” said a statement from organizer Lorena Antiman of the environmental group Corporación NGEN.

2026-01-31 18:48:21 UTC

> Within hours of the deal for TikTok’s U.S. operations being announced last week, Issam Hijazi noticed a big uptick in users to his social media platform UpScrolled. That stream of disgruntled users fleeing TikTok over censorship concerns turned into a flood this week, crashing UpScrolled’s servers.
>
> UpScrolled, launched last July, supports text posts, photos, short-form videos, stories and other features. It claims to be a platform with “no censorship” and “no shadowbans.” On Monday, it ranked among the top 10 free apps on Apple’s App Store, and No. 2 among social network apps. It hit more than 1 million users from just 40,000.
>
> “You all showed up so fast our servers tapped out,” UpScrolled said in an Instagram post on Monday. “We’re a tiny team building an alternative to the platforms that stopped listening to you. Right now, we’re scaling and running on caffeine to keep up with what YOU started. Bear with us. We’re on it.”
> UpScrolled is backed by the Tech for Palestine incubator, an advocacy project that helps fund tech initiatives to support the Palestinian cause. Hijazi, a Palestinian-Australian, spoke to Rest of World on the sidelines of a conference on Saturday.

2026-01-16 15:59:10 UTC

> At age 50, Daniel was “on top of the world.”
>
> “I turned 50, and it was the best year of my life,” he told Futurism in an interview. “It was like I finally figured out so many things: my career, my marriage, my kids, everything.”
>
> It was early 2023, and Daniel — who asked to be identified by only his first name to protect his family’s privacy — and his wife of over three decades were empty nesters, looking ahead to the next chapter of their lives. They were living in an affluent Midwestern suburb, where they’d raised their four children. Daniel was an experienced software architect who held a leadership role at a large financial services company, where he’d worked for more than 20 years. In 2022, he leveraged his family’s finances to realize a passion project: a rustic resort in rural Utah, his favorite place in the world.
>
> “All the kids were out of the house, and it was like, ‘oh my gosh, we’re still young. We’ve got this resort. I’ve got a good job. The best years of our lives are in front of us,” Daniel recounted, sounding melancholy. “It was a wonderful time.”
>
> That all changed after Daniel purchased a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — the AI-infused eyeglasses that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made central to his vision for the future of AI and computing — which he says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Meta platforms through extensive interactions with the company’s AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a “new dawn” for humanity.
>
> And though his delusions have since faded, his journey into a Meta AI-powered reality left his life in shambles — deep in debt, reeling from job loss, isolated from his family, and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

2026-01-08 16:27:10 UTC

> For almost 200 years, the Galapagos rail had been missing from Floreana. Thought to be extinct on this small, inhabited island in the Galapagos archipelago, the shy, near-flightless bird is still found on some of the other islands. But Charles Darwin was the last person to record a sighting of one on Floreana, when he famously visited the island in 1835.
>
> This year, after the removal of rats and feral cats from Floreana, the bird stunned conservationists by making a surprise re-appearance on the island. How the lost bird returned is a mystery. Other threatened birds have also recovered, and some are even singing new tunes never heard on the island before, which you can listen to below. The change reveals new insights into how a safer, almost predator-free environment can allow animals to experiment and innovate, scientists say.
>
> "The Galapagos rail was one that I was not expecting at all," agrees Paula Castaño, a wildlife veterinarian who works for Island Conservation, one of the organisations restoring Floreana. "It just showed up" on Floreana, she says, adding that perhaps it had clung on as a small, hidden, unnoticed population all this time.
>
> "[The rails] reappeared and now it's very common to find these birds just walking around the island. You can hear it, you can see it, it's unbelievable," says Paola Sangolquí, a marine biologist at the Jocotoco Conservation Foundation, which is also part of the restoration project.
>
> The rail's reappearance is part of what scientists are describing as an extraordinary return of life to Floreana, after the removal of the invasive predators that had wreaked havoc on native species.

2025-12-14 18:46:57 UTC

> Like so many of the businesses – and ideologies – that thrive on social media, FBS cultivates a sanitized image of the product it promotes. Saldaya never hosts podcast guests who regret their decision to freebirth. And she routinely deletes negative comments on Instagram, such as the one posted earlier this year by a mother who lost her daughter: “My baby died 41 weeks stillborn after I followed your teachings and I will regret it for the rest of my life.” (The mother was also blocked.)
>
> The first woman known to have lost her baby after following Saldaya’s advice was Lorren Holliday. When she got pregnant in 2018, she interviewed midwives, but couldn’t afford the $5,000 downpayment for their services. Reluctantly, she resigned herself to the hospital, until, scrolling through Instagram one day, she found FBS: “What they offered was exactly what I was looking for.” A friendly animal lover with short pink hair, Holliday lives in a trailer on an acre of land in the Arizona desert with her husband, Chris, their three barefoot children and 35 dogs, cats, ducks, goats, chickens and turkeys. “I wanted health. I wanted natural.”
>
> She began bingeing the podcast and joined Saldaya’s FBS Facebook group. A freebirth, Holliday believed, would give her baby the most gentle start to life.
>
> Holliday was in her Airstream caravan when her contractions began on 1 October 2018. She was 41 weeks pregnant. By day three she realised they “weren’t spread out any more. It was like one long contraction.” Holliday began messaging Saldaya for advice. “The pain is unbearable … I just want to know if I’m not progressing,” she wrote on 4 October. She said she’d been vomiting, and explained a pattern of contractions that would have rung alarm bells for a medical professional. Saldaya said the pain was not unbearable – thinking of it that way “is a dead end – or a path to hospital birth”. She added, “You’ll have to die 1000 deaths and let go of everything that you think you can’t do.”
---
> On the evening of 6 October 2018, after six days of active labor – unheard of in a medically managed birth – Holliday sent Saldaya a photograph of luminous green meconium. The following day, Saldaya asked for an update. Holliday said the baby wasn’t moving much and she hadn’t been able to urinate for 24 hours. Saldaya said she would go to hospital at this point, but suggested she may want to lie to doctors about when her water broke. She sent her a script to deceive medics.
>
> At the hospital, Holliday learned her daughter was dead. Journey Moon had dark hair like her father. Holliday doesn’t know what color her eyes would have been, but she likes to imagine they were blue.
>
> After Journey Moon died, the Daily Beast reported on the case. At Saldaya’s request, Holliday lied to the journalist, saying Saldaya didn’t advise her during her birth, and Saldaya said she’d provided no advice. “We tweaked,” Holliday says bitterly, “that little interview.”
>
> Both Saldaya and Holliday received hate mail after the article was published. “I wanted the best for Journey Moon,” Holliday says of her decision to freebirth. “That’s why I stuck it out so long, to give her the best birth possible. When people started calling me selfish and greedy, that killed me, because I did it for her.”

2025-10-27 15:19:47 UTC

[archive.is link](https://archive.ph/p2bmV)
> TwitchCon, which took place last weekend in San Diego, California, is an overlapping series of cacaphonies. A quick stroll down the show floor reveals a hodgepodge of advertisers like State Farm, booths dedicated to high-profile games like Resident Evil, The Sims, and Minecraft, a tabletop section, a music stage Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has been known to perform on, and eventually, an esports arena. There are also panels in various rooms, as well as an artist alley like you’d find at Comic-Con or an anime convention. But these are all distractions. The real main event – the reason people spend hundreds of dollars to attend – is the streamers.
>
> Despite all the aforementioned sights and sounds, one scene defined TwitchCon 2025. During a meet and greet on Friday, Emily “Emiru” Schunk was approached by a man who proceeded to grab ahold of her and attempted to forcibly kiss her. Schunk’s personal security guard quickly intervened and pushed the assailant away, but after that he was reportedly allowed to roam free. Schunk, rattled, resumed her meet and greet, but the next day she declared that she’ll never return to TwitchCon.
---
> Over the course of the weekend, a handful of other streamers came forward with stories and clips of harassment at and around TwitchCon. In another case that caught the attention of the wider content creation community, a streamer named Emerome was approached by N3on, a notorious shit-stirring IRL streamer more frequently associated with Kick than Twitch, who invited her to a party entirely on the basis that she was “very beautiful” and then, when she sarcastically replied that she loves being objectified and walked away, started screaming that her friend was fat. It should be noted that N3on did not simply buy a ticket to TwitchCon and show up; Twitch featured him and gave him his own meet and greet.
>
> On another occasion, Jack Doherty – who, like N3on, loves to shove cameras in people’s faces and provoke them until they lash out, but who was banned from Kick after crashing a McLaren while looking at his phone, then unbanned, and then banned again a few days later for getting into a street fight – repeatedly shouted the f-slur at a PeachJars, a popular Twitch streamer, after she suggested, correctly, that Doherty is a homophobe.
>
> Clips like these have led many in the Twitch community to decry both TwitchCon security and Twitch as a company and platform. Content creators like Hoyt, Ethan Klein, and John “Tectone” Robertson, absolutely part of the problem, used these incidents as an opportunity to pretend like they care about women – as well as safety or anything else beyond whatever drama of the day gets them views and allows them to go after perceived enemies – while Twitch mainstays like Ben “Cohh Carnage” Cassell and Devin Nash have advocated for Twitch or a new platform like it to implement a strict games-only policy, to eliminate IRL streaming. There were also calls for Twitch to eliminate politics, even though the category is not really directly relevant to anything that happened at TwitchCon (Hoyt, again part of the problem, concurred with Cassell here; hmmm, wonder why).
>
> But these are alluringly simple solutions to a host of complex problems, the kind that play well online but don’t really hold up under scrutiny. For one, the most viewed clips from TwitchCon are illustrative of two related but different problems: 1) Obvious security concerns around streamers’ physical safety, and 2) IRL streamers farming for salacious moments, a type of stream that doesn’t necessarily perform well on Twitch but does lead to engagement in the algorithmic short-form clip slurry that is YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. The latter is a gray area. The former is a can of worms so full-to-bursting that I’d recommend taking cover.

2025-09-18 16:32:10 UTC

> A software update rolling out to Samsung’s Family Hub refrigerators in the US is putting ads on the fridges for the first time. The “promotions and curated advertisements” are coming despite Samsung insisting to The Verge in April that it had “no plans” to do so.

2025-09-10 16:04:19 UTC

> I am not generally in the habit of criticizing the editorial decisions of The Washington Post, my employer for 11 years and an institution that continues to good, important work in covering the unwinding of American democracy. But I think the paper’s assessment of the putative debate over Donald Trump’s signature on the note provided for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday demands some context.
>
> The article’s original headline was “No clear answers on whether Trump signed the Epstein birthday book,” a declaration that was eventually softened to “Is the signature Trump’s? Epstein birthday book feeds speculation.” The article first presents the denials of Trump’s staff and allies that he couldn’t have signed the bizarre, creepy, suggestive document. It then quotes handwriting experts, some of whom who indicated uncertainty about the signature’s provenance. A number of full signatures of Trump’s are shown in an apparent effort to demonstrate variation.
>
> The use of full signatures doesn’t make sense because the signature in the book — created in 2003, before Epstein was on law enforcement’s radar — includes only Trump’s first name. The New York Times compared that signature to other examples of Trump signing only his first name, showing that they are nearly identical. In fact, the Wall Street Journal, which originally reported on the note, also published an article demonstrating why the note was almost certainly from Trump, including similar first-name-only signatures from the now-president.
>
> The Journal did so, it’s safe to assume, because its initial report on the letter was rejected as invented or “fake news” by Trump et al. (Trump even sued, claiming, in part, that no such letter existed.) In other words, it probably assumed that publication of the note would trigger precisely the response that it did, an effort to move the goalposts of claimed fraudulence.
>
> There is absolutely no reason to think that the note was not, in fact, from Trump and no reason to think that the signature is not his own. Even setting aside the obvious-to-any-layperson similarity to other signatures, the idea that someone would create a phony Trump letter as a private gift to someone Trump had praised publicly the year prior doesn’t make any sense.
>
> So why treat the idea that the signature isn’t his seriously? Why treat the assertions of people with demonstrated track records of lying on Trump’s behalf — including Trump, his communications team and right-wing influencers — as offering sincere complaints on this particular issue? Why grant them the benefit of the doubt that they actually think the signature isn’t his?

2025-08-19 16:18:06 UTC

> I've noticed a trend—particularly in some recent RPGs—of, well, let's call it 'Netflixiness'.
>
> Dialogue designed to leave absolutely nothing to interpretation, to exposit information in the most direct way possible, devoid of any real character or context. There's an assumption that any moment the audience spends confused, curious, or out-of-the-loop is a narrative disaster.
>
> I hate to keep knocking Dragon Age: The Veilguard about, especially since I still had a decent time with it all told, but the thing that made me break off from it after 60 hours really was its story. It's a tale that does get (slightly) better, but it gave me a terrible first impression I never quite shook.

2025-06-26 07:44:31 UTC

> It started to become clear the previous April, when a man who had been pursuing me canceled a dinner at the last minute. There was a scheduling mix-up with his son’s game. I understood. I’m a hockey mom; I get it. Still, I went. I wore what I would have worn anyway. I took the table. I ordered well. And I watched the room.
>
> Only two tables nearby seemed to hold actual dates. The rest were groups of women, or women alone, each one occupying her space with quiet confidence. No shrinking. No waiting. No apologizing.
>
> That night marked something. Not a heartbreak, but an unveiling. A sense that what I’d been experiencing wasn’t just personal misalignment. It was something broader. Cultural. A slow vanishing of presence.
---
> I’m 54. I’ve been dating since the mid-80s, been married, been a mother, gotten divorced, had many relationships long and short. I remember when part of heterosexual male culture involved showing up with a woman to signal something — status, success, desirability. Women were once signifiers of value, even to other men. It wasn’t always healthy, but it meant that men had to show up and put in some effort.
>
> That dynamic has quietly collapsed. We have moved into an era where many men no longer seek women to impress other men or to connect across difference. They perform elsewhere. Alone. They’ve filtered us out.
>
> I recently experienced a flicker of possibility. With James. We met on Raya, the dating app. There was something mutual from the start — wordplay, emotional precision, a tone that felt attuned. It was brief, but it caught light. I remember saying to him, “Even fleeting connections matter, when they’re mutual and lit from the inside.” I meant it.
>
> There was just enough spark to wonder what might unfold. Enough curiosity to imagine a doorway. But he didn’t step through it. Not with a plan. Not with presence. He hovered — flirting, retreating, offering warmth but no direction.

2025-06-13 14:05:01 UTC

> An estimated 68% of internet activity starts on search engines and about 90% of searches happen on Google. If the internet is a garden, Google is the Sun that lets the flowers grow.
>
> This arrangement held strong for decades, but a seemingly minor change has some convinced that the system is crumbling. You'll soon see a new AI tool on Google Search. You may find it very useful. But if critics' predictions come true, it will also have seismic consequences for the internet. They paint a picture where quality information could grow scarcer online and large numbers of people might lose their jobs. Optimists say instead this could improve the web's business model and expand opportunities to find great content. But, for better or worse, your digital experiences may never be the same again.
>
> On 20 May 2025, Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai walked on stage at the company's annual developer conference. It's been a year since the launch of AI Overviews, the AI-generated responses you've probably seen at the top of Google Search results. Now, Pichai said, Google is going further. "For those who want an end-to-end AI Search experience, we are introducing an all-new AI Mode," he said. "It's a total reimagining of Search."
>
> You might be sceptical after years of AI hype, but this, for once, is the real deal.
>
> People use Google Search five trillion times a year – it defines the shape of the internet. AI Mode is a radical departure. Unlike AI Overviews, AI Mode replaces traditional search results altogether. Instead, a chatbot effectively creates a miniature article to answer your question. As you read this, AI Mode is rolling out to users in the US, appearing as a button on the search engine and the company's app. It's optional for now, but Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, said it plainly when launching the tool: "This is the future of Google Search."

2025-06-06 03:23:24 UTC

> [...]this year, Lowe's ended its participation in surveys conducted by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest LGBTQ organization. Lowe's also shuttered an employee resource group for LGBTQ employees and ended its sponsorship of Pride parades.
>
> A Lowe's spokesperson said the company "will continue to strive to cultivate a workplace that reflects the customers and communities where we operate and where everyone feels welcomed, valued, and respected."
>
> Lowe's is just one of 19 companies that have ended their support of Pride parades, in whole or in part, this year.
>
> The corporate pullback has left several Pride parades short on cash. NYC Pride faces a $750,000 budget gap after losing corporate sponsors. Pride parades in San Francisco and Kansas City are each about $200,000 short. Smaller parades are faring even worse. Eve Keller, co-president of USA Prides, a network of parade organizations, said that "rural Prides are down 70% to 90% when compared to the average year."

2025-05-01 17:41:28 UTC

> [I spent well over a month talking to investors to get the actual data behind what’s happening to the games industry. I was going to say “enjoy!” but it’s, uh, not great. ](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dqnjwcs52efhcva7smwhotul/post/3lo2kp4gon22e)

2025-03-25 15:21:04 UTC

> The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.
>
> There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
>
> “There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.

2025-03-08 18:18:35 UTC

> In nearly every American city, state and local ordinances dictate the minimum number of parking spaces required for everything from homes and restaurants to retail. Many of these regulations have remained unchanged since the 1960s, forcing today’s businesses, residents and cities to conform to the outdated priorities of planners from generations ago.
>
> In Dallas, for example, regulations dating back to 1965 thwarted German Sierra’s plans to open a humble coffee shop and community space in 2022. Despite doing everything the city recommended to be granted a parking exemption, Dallas was unwilling to let Sierra open Graph Coffee unless he provided 18 parking spots, amounting to more square footage than his property possessed.
>
> Sierra’s struggle highlights the uncompromising realities of parking minimums, which put undue strain on small businesses. At the same time, his story also highlights the arbitrary calculus that characterizes these regulations. For example, Dallas has drawn a distinction between a “dry cleaner” and a “laundry service” through its code, mandating that the former must provide 30% more parking than the latter even though critics argue they’re effectively the same use. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that San Jose, California, at one point required miniature golf courses to have 1.25 parking spaces per golf tee. In Seattle, bowling alleys needed five spaces per lane.
>
> Ending the mandates and subsidies that require property owners to waste productive land on automobile storage is a priority for Strong Towns. We recognize that empty parking lots are financially unproductive, costly to maintain, and often in conflict with the types of places cities across North America want to be.
>
> Fortunately, a rapidly growing number of cities across North America are beginning to question mandatory minimums, inching toward reforming or even repealing them altogether. Here are some of the communities rethinking their approaches.

2025-02-28 17:58:25 UTC

> Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users' personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn't fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users' personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
>
> > Does Firefox sell your personal data?
> >
> > Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.
>
> That promise is removed from the current version. There's also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you, and we don't buy data about you."
>
> The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define "sale" in a very broad way:
>
> > Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about "selling data"), and we don't buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of "sale of data" is extremely broad in some places, we've had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
>
> Mozilla didn't say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.

2025-02-13 18:24:09 UTC

> The entire franchise’s inability to balance substance with pleasure crashes into its inept conclusion. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve hated an ending to a movie more in recent memory than this one. For the purposes of this review, I will not spoil it. But let’s just say this film imagines it’s living in a different country, nay a different world, than the reality many have experienced. It argues for unearned forgiveness while making rushed, last-second nods to the weight of Black excellence, the fight to gain a seat at the table, and the importance of representation. It not only turns its hero into a Magical Negro. In an effort to soothe white America’s anger and hurt, it also asks its hero to grin and figuratively tap dance off screen. Even as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly anthem “I,” a choice meant to elicit joy, adds a declarative note, you can’t help but feel icky. This is our Black Captain America? This is our piece of the pie?
>
> This movie is anything but brave. It is the most feckless, spineless blockbuster of the last decade, a film in need of burning down the old world before daring to look for the new.

2025-02-09 19:39:59 UTC

> A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the "The Legacy Collection," these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines.
>
> The emphasis of that sentence should be on the word "some." Forums and Reddit threads were flooded with players saying the game either wouldn't launch at all, crashed shortly after launch, or had debilitating graphical issues. (Patches have been happening, but there's work to be done yet.)
---
> Look, it's fine to re-release a game without remastering it. I'm actually glad to see the game's original assets as they always were—it's deeply nostalgic, and there's always a tinge of sadness when a remaster overwrites the work of the original artists. That's not a concern here.
>
> But if you're going to re-release a game on Steam in 2025, there are minimum expectations—especially from a company with the resources of EA, and even more so for a game that is this important and beloved.
>
> The game needs to reliably run on modern machines, and it needs to support basic platform features like cloud saves or achievements. It's not much to ask, and it's not what we got.

2024-12-30 08:00:49 UTC

> In Texas, where dozens of proposals attacking transgender people have already been pitched for the coming year, a hopeful sign has emerged nonetheless: The west Texas city of Odessa, notorious for adopting one of the most extreme anti-trans bathroom measures in the country, has now declared the ordinance unenforceable, a step taken after voters ousted the council members and mayor who had pushed it through.
> The city’s bathroom ban came into full effect this fall, calling for “bounties” on supposed offenders and creating a right for private citizens to file suit against them.
>
> Just weeks later, though, Odessa voters sent the mayor and three council members to defeat. The new mayor, Cal Hendrick, and the new council members, Craig Stoker, Eddie Mitchell, and Steve Thompson, have promised to revisit the ordinance in full.

2024-12-28 17:43:02 UTC

> I really tried to enjoy myself. God, I tried so hard. I attempted to find nuggets of joy within its hamfisted dialogue, one-note companions and the flashy but soulless fights. But I just couldn't do it. Every time there was a glimmer of hope, it was dashed against the rocks of infinite disappointment.
>
> Honestly, I'm amazed I finished it. There was certainly a point where I was starting to feel like I'd rather do anything else than listen to a hot Grey Warden talk about his big dumb bird for the hundredth time, or play therapist to a giant dragon slayer who just wants to moan about how their mum doesn't understand them. These should have been great characters. A veteran knight reclaiming his order's lost legacy, a proud warrior wrestling with their cultural and gender identity—there's so much good stuff to mine here. But nope, they're just plain boring. All of them.
>
> I'm beating a dead horse, I know. I've already said my piece. But it's just a real shame. When I got to the final cutscene that teased what we can expect from the next Dragon Age, it really sealed the deal. I'm out. BioWare just isn't telling stories I care about anymore. Instead of moping around, I'm moving on. BioWare had an exceptional run, but that developer is long gone. What's left is just an EA studio that makes middling games I'm not really interested in.