Notices by Jeff Miller (orange hatband) (jmeowmeow@hachyderm.io)

@skinnylatte @recursive Bellevue's downtown is very new, many high-rises in a tight cluster replacing a suburban town center. I like the bus transit center across from City Hall and the light rail station; I was a bus commuter for a year and a half.

But downtown seems under-designed, hotels and infocomtech office boxes and high-rise residential towers, with shrubbery maintained with gasoline powered landscape crews.

One of the residential towers, above a luxury store mall by City Hall, seems designed to appeal to Chinese speaking residents.

@thomasfuchs "A gift! A gift comes!"

The author announcing the OMNI cover typeface with a section heading calling out to Larry Marder's comic Tales From the Beanworld.

Quite the deep dive into Aldus Pagemaker and its world.

@inthehands The civics lesson worth repeating.

@skinnylatte You are most of the tacos on my timeline.

If I should dream of moving to the East Bay to wander the streets with a camera, a taco guide map, and an electric folding bicycle, you will have something to do with that.

(Currently my dream is more like "wander the neighborhoods of San Francisco with a pair of good walking shoes.")

@thomasfuchs laughing aloud on my back porch at that dogcat picture and probably scaring the birds

@skinnylatte "This is the storefront on Valencia where Good Vibrations was for many years until it moved across from the police station into a bland space next to the mobile phone store and then the company ran into a cash crunch and sold out to a big outfit from the midwest and gave up on co-op worker ownership but I bet you really wanted to hear about the pirate supply shop with the secret youth writing gang in the back room."

@inthehands "Rescind the establishment of DHS" is appropriate, for a bad decision badly elaborated and badly used.

@thomasfuchs "this works only with Japanese pencils which are thicker than American pencils" aha the alt text has The Rest of the Story.

@skinnylatte Forwarded your tip to the spicy Buldak eater in the house.

@inthehands "The Reorg Cycle" is my favorite fable about failing(ish) upward by fortuitous timing of the effects of bold managerial action and the evaluation of short- and medium-term results.

Early results are promising because they address known shortcomings. Medium term results are reversion to the steady state of Melvin Conway's Law, because an org reshuffle gives a different assortment of working contexts, making some coordination harder than before.

@inthehands That declaration of working beliefs about household infotech security could use a complementary set of working principles from orgs providing household devices and services.

"At this organization, we believe customer information is..."

I had cause to think about this because the extended family purchased an shared digital picture frame to which family members could add pictures, hosted by the service or linked from a participant's personal photo hosting account.

After some careful reading of the terms, I created an account and shared a few photos. It looked like the company had thought about it (Information We Collect / How We Use Your Information) but it seemed to be a business model operating with some obvious risks related to privacy and abuse.

@skinnylatte Now that I think about the office buildings of Cupertino, Santa Clara, and along South Bay US 101, the Foothill Expressway and Page Mill Road, they do have a strong flavor of low-rise boxes surrounded by parking lots. A larger corporate campus would have landscaping, breezeways and open courtyards, looking like a community college.

When I was at Google HQ, they were taking over several of these office boxes every year, limited by the Baylands, US 101, Intuit, and NASA Ames. At least there were Android operating system release mascots to pose alongside, and one city park. Otherwise as you say.

@skinnylatte PG&E, alas, in 1997 split into the unregulated holding company ($$$ extraction vehicle) and the regulated utility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Company#1990s,_deregulation,_and_decline

@thomasfuchs Win 3.1.1? Oh hey flashbacks from running Cricket Graph / Xerox Graph in the Planetary Image Research Lab at the U of A campus in Tucson.

@thomasfuchs I am once more asking you: Restore your backups!

@thomasfuchs Tucson has the most amazing skies.

@inthehands Be more present and insistent in what you ask than the lobbyists who are daily present in the representatives' attention.

@skinnylatte Or follow up the pasta club supper with impasto technique, paintings you can squish to your satisfaction and really feel that you've created art.

Better than throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping it will stick, like some big name orgs I've worked with.

@inthehands Perhaps the language of stage magic and mentalist cold readings is appropriate for distinguishing the play to the audience from the content and rhythm of the interactions, and the use of LLMs as instruments.

I have trouble seeing beyond the terrible synergy of the financial bubble and the motivated reasoning of the boosters to the genuine positive applications and the real costs and limits.

Working with conversational support and workflow agents before the bubble, I could see that there were really good ways to use them, "everybody wins" ways, but a temptation to cheap out on creating the right interaction context for that case.

@skinnylatte Benioff talks over his execs at an all-hands, doesn't respect his team. Can't turn off the salesman evangelist personality.