Notices by Sumana Harihareswara (brainwane@social.coop), page 2

Weird.

https://www.nycvotes.org/events-calendar/ displays three € symbols after one of the bullets. But when I try to directly copy them from the page, they just paste as three spaces.

Based on the source code I think something's gone odd with the   character being directly preceded by a bullet ·

"Live in the U.S.? We’re organizing in-person meetings for you to speak directly with your elected officials in Washington, D.C.
October 5–6, join us and nearly a dozen partner organizations for the Day of Action to save NASA’s space science.
Make your voice heard. https://www.planetary.org/advocacy/day-of-action "

boosting a post from The Planetary Society on Bsky https://bsky.app/profile/planetarysociety.bsky.social/post/3lv72gizca22l

boosting from bsky where @buttondown 's @jmduke says:

https://bsky.app/profile/jmduke.com/post/3lv5hwyipu22j

"buttondown is very excited to sponsor @htmlenergy.bsky.social's HTML DAY this coming saturday. if you attend and DM me what you built I will comp you a year's subscription to Buttondown.

at the very least, you owe it to yourself to go to https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html and click through to the very zine-core event sites, each of them more lovely than the last. (i am biased, but my favorite is seattle's)"

@cwebber GIANT CONGRATULATIONS!

A few days ago I came across this amazing bug report against Whisper, the LLM-based transcription tool: 'Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic which translates as "Translation by Nancy Qunqar"'

https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/2608

More about the problem in this thread https://xcancel.com/SheriefFYI/status/1756694564109423035

Thanks for the pointer, @itamarst (in https://hachyderm.io/@itamarst/114874924215640058 )

"New Yorkers! Eric Adams is trying to kill RCV - the very system which enabled a leftist, progressive coalition to win, which 73% of New Yorkers voted for in 2019.

Testimony on this change is due TODAY. Here's a script you can use (you can copy/paste from the alt text)

https://www.nyc.gov/site/charter/contact/contact-charter.page
"

(from @chimeracoder )

#NYC #NewYorkCity

Am reading an in-depth interview with Mamdani from February:

https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/zohran-mamdani-interview-transcript

and noticed he's explicitly skeptical of means-testing and prefers to instead have government directly provide free services, e.g. buses.

Remembered a similar point Tim Walz made when describing free school meals:

https://harihareswara.net/posts/2024/tim-walzs-policy-approach/

every so often I share @leonardr's revised ending to the 2000s Battlestar Galactica

http://www.crummy.com/2009/03/22/1

"Bridge to eQualia" by Blackle is a 9,779-word piece of noir cyberpunk written as a long Bluesky thread. Compelling and uneasy. The author intends to archive it (via blog) soon.

https://bsky.app/profile/blackle.bsky.social/post/3lpmnsdic722n

It starts:

'dragon lady next to me at the second life rave was too close and her wings kept clipping through my player model. I didn't mind but she apologied each and every time it happened. chat was filled with hundreds of variations of "oop sowwie >_<!! xoxo" and "uaah! not again! orz" by the end of the night'

and goes from there.

#sciencefiction #sff #scifi #cyberpunk #noir #shortstory

At #PyConUS this year I learned that the most enduring one-line quote from my 2024 keynote

https://harihareswara.net/posts/2024/references-pycon-us-keynote/

-- the one multiple people quoted back to me, one offhandedly in the midst of talking about their own career -- was:

Infrastructure is a way we take care of each other at scale. (from the start of the talk)

or

Infrastructure is how we care for each other at scale. (from the end)

@dajb https://social.coop/@flgnk/109420093971357270 ?

What's a good replacement for "office hours" (meaning #2 at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/office_hours )?

Again, I am only interested in opinions from people who sometimes actively do written outreach (such as paper flyers or social media posts), to large groups of English-speaking strangers, trying to get them to participate in synchronous events in contexts like education or volunteer efforts.

Trying to get across: "Come to [this place] during [this time] so you can bring questions, ideas, etc. to [this expert or set of experts] about [this set of topics] in a *conversational* environment".

Distinct from:

a free-for-all chat (instead, we expect the expert(s) authoritatively facilitate)

service appointments (it's okay if you don't have a crisp request/suggestion)

https://web.archive.org/web/20031006013813/http://www.irs.gov/individuals/page/0,,id=15565,00.html

The IRS for Kids website used to include an interactive Taxes in US History curriculum concentrating on the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, the protective tariff issue of the 1830s, and the income tax's introduction in the early 1900s

Each topic had an "activity zone"

https://canadahealthwatch.ca/2025/03/25/i-traded-my-u-s-medical-career-for-life-in-canada-heres-how-the-two-health-systems-stack-up

"Burnout, I’ve come to believe, isn’t just about time or tasks. It’s about purpose, alignment, and whether you believe the system you work in deserves your sacrifice."

via @wingo boosting https://mastodon.social/@CdnCurmudgeon/114228687712438487

COVID-cautious people in the US:

Some pharmacies have Novavax vaccines in stock that expire at the end of the month. If it's been several months since your last jab, you might want to get one before March 30th.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1jid0ap/comment/mje8cz1/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Novavax_vaccine_talk/comments/1jfegz8/comment/miuupfi/

https://us-hcp.novavaxcovidvaccine.com/resources

@mattl @brooke ahahahaha

[boosting]

🗓️ NEW EVENT: Join Lambda Legal for Know Your Rights: Passports —a free virtual info session on Wednesday, February 26 at 3 p.m. ET / 12 p.m. PT — to unpack the latest developments and hear answers to common questions re: federal ID policies.

✍️ RSVP today: https://lambdalegal.org/id-info-session

original post: https://bsky.app/profile/lambdalegal.bsky.social/post/3lin2fg4pp22g

@indieblog hi! Small bug report:

Your site has my blog (Cogito, Ergo Sumana) listed twice at https://indieblog.page/all , once with and once without the www prefix. And more intriguingly, even though their RSS feeds are pretty much identical, for one of them, Indieblog lists the most recent post as 2025-01-04, and for the other, 2024-10-04.