dannyman.toldme.com

The hotel’s breakfast buffet was decent and important because breakfast is not served on the train which departs at 8:25 am. We ate our eggs and sausage and cereal and whatnot and schlepped to the pedestrian overpass where we were greeted in the elevator by a man just waking up across from a pool of vomit. Grandma was comfortable enough taking the stairs up if I handled the luggage. We crossed the tracks to the other elevator, to which the man had moved so that he could rest away from vomit. We rode down in the vomit-free second elevator with the man, and ambled over to where the lady was yelling to the assembled throng how boarding would work. Welcome to the glamor of train travel in America!

The train rolled up and we crept our way down the narrow platform to our boarding places, dutifully staying behind the yellow line, except where the platform had been flooded by rain. We found our first-class sleeper car and the attendant re-assigned our two rooms on the spot so we could have adjacent bedrooms. She later obtained the special key to open the partition between them. I appreciated her initiative, because I had previously called Amtrak, waited on hold, and spoke with a nice person who had access to The Slowest Computer which couldn’t help me anyway but rest assured it doesn’t matter if the bedrooms are next to each other. Sure. I figured if there was any improvement to be made to that situation the Train Staff would not be encumbered by computers and they would do what was right by them. Worked out great.

I wandered to the rear end of the train, where you can look out the window. Great view.

There were a decent number of folks riding to Reno, a favorite gambling spot for some Californians. A lady explained that driving was faster, but if the weather wasn’t looking great, the train was a more relaxing experience. As we climbed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains East of Sacramento, the snow picked up. Mobile phones alerted that there was a snow storm in effect. I watched the adjacent rails as the snow grew deeper, and was covered. Our train was delayed at Truckee around 90 minutes. As we waited, someone from the crew stepped off to make a snowman along the tracks. Slowly, snow accumulated on the top windows of the observation dome. It was a pleasant time, watching the snow cover the trees as we waited. A set of seven Union Pacific locomotives passed us headed downhill, then later the plow train: two diesels and a caboose with a plow beneath. The deal is the plow train ran down the line to a loop where it spun around and plowed back up the line. Before long, the plow train passed us again, heading East. Once the line was clear we were off again through the snow on plowed rails.

Waiting with no urgency for the plow at Truckee.

Reno is a “fresh air stop” where you can get off the train for up to fifteen minutes to smoke a cigarette or let your dog pee “but don’t go upstairs.” From the train platform, Reno looks like a bomb shelter. Atop the concrete canyon you can just make out a few tall hotels.

We spent most of our time in the Observation Lounge. The train staff made regular announcements for new passengers that the lounge was for People Not Luggage. I sighed that I wish they made these announcements on Caltrain, where half the seats are reserved for backpacks. A recent Caltrain encounter: I went to sit at a table, and I wasn’t In The Mood. I lifted a guy’s backpack off my seat to set it across the table.

He calmly caught it and said, “You could just ask.”

I gestured at the mass of baseball fans that had packed the car. “You could read the room.”

“It is important to be polite.”

I smacked my hand on the table in agreement, “Yes! It is important to be polite!”

We were amiable enough after that interaction. But yes, it would be a sweet treat indeed if Caltrain riders had better etiquette.

Anyway, part of the fun of the train is the other passengers, overhearing conversations. An older guy with an old red cap covered in train pins explained to someone the distinctions between Alcos, F units, and E units, and what trains he had ridden as a kid, and how he was headed home to see his folks. At one point he mentioned his love of visiting the Museum of Science and Industry. I leaned over and chirped that was my spot every weekend when I was a kid. We chatted a bit and I mentioned that a new thing nearby is the Obama library, a towering modern structure near the classical architecture of the museum. He said he wasn’t fond of Obama, as the Affordable Care Act had pushed up his health insurance, but his wife had voted for him. Fair enough. Later I noticed that the button on his hat that said “2024” had the word “Trump” just above.

It is important to be polite.

Waiting for lunch in the dining car.

We moved East. Dinner was good. The menu, as far as I know, is the same every day for decades on end, modified only when the Pandemic limited the menu. I had, as usual, steak and potatoes and a glass of wine.

The attendant folded the seats in our cabin into bunks. The First Class Bedrooms shoehorn in a toilet room that also serves as a snug shower stall. When the lower bunk is extended, you enter the room by shuffling past the mattress, which mostly blocks the narrow doorway. Five of us and four bunks, with the bottom bunks I would describe as “twin and a half.” The boys were nervous about the top bunks, but Older Son took the one above Grandma. Mom took the top bunk above the one I shared with Younger Son. The night was comfortable enough. Quiet. Warmer than I like. The train rocked pleasantly. When he woke in the morning, Younger Son looked up out the window at the scrubby hills of Eastern Utah and said it was pretty.

Whizzing out of Utah and into Colorado the next morning.

I tried the narrow shower and it was alright. During breakfast, the attendant folded the beds back into daytime seating and, with our blessing, consolidated our luggage into one bedroom so she could clean the other for passengers boarding at Grand Junction, where we were getting off. We lounged more in the observation car: the train came upon and paralleled the Colorado River, which meandered through the scrubby landscape, offering gentle rapids in spots, alternating with sandy banks. There were groups of folks riding the river in rafts, some camping. It looked to me like a good time. Around the river the scenery was wonderful. In the distance were a few snow-capped peaks.

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We started with brunch, after a walk of less than a mile downtown. We ate at our usual brunch spot. The lady there who is the soul of the operation but not the owner will be around some weeks more, before she moves to an affordable part of California with her new husband. We rode Caltrain a few stops down to Santa Clara and had nearly two hours until the Capital Corridor train was to arrive. Fortunately, it was Saturday, and the Historical Railroad Society was open. Bonus: it was their Open House weekend. The volunteers held our luggage in the Historic Waiting Room. We gazed at the model railroads, the boys with less sustained interest than me. Plenty of time to check out the signal tower. “You know, Older Son has toured the interlocking before, strapped to my chest.”

Ready to board Caltrain, the first leg of our adventure!

Signal towers are some impressive under-rated problem-solving. Train lines come together at junctions, and you need to ensure they don’t crash into each other. The signal tower is built high enough to look things over. And a siding is added so trains can pass. A little yard. Now there are a dozen switching points for half a dozen tracks and they all need to be coordinated correctly and consistently, so they get tied together with cables, such that if one switch between tracks is thrown, the matching switch is also thrown, and the appropriate cables that control the semaphor signals are pulled to the correct positions so the engineers know if they need to stop, or if they are allowed to go.

Touring the Santa Clara Signal Tower with Older Son, in 2014.

The earliest versions were “Armstrong” systems, so-called because it took strong arms to pull the levers that pulled the cables to correctly set the switches and signals. At Santa Clara, they had a more modern 1920s signal tower, where switches activated electrical relays that triggered the switches and signals. The regular trains ran through on schedule, special trains had orders made up on the typewriter in triplicate thanks to the miracle of carbon paper, and work went on until the work of the signal tower was replaced by a central computerized operations center in 1993, and handed over to the Historical Preservation folks for historical preservation.

Touring the Santa Clara Signal Tower with Younger Son, in 2026.

Appreciating the sweep of history I made mention of the future which we hope will eventually arrive: California’s High Speed Train system. It will run through the Santa Clara junction, passing below the old preserved tower. The guide got a glimmer in his eye, and said that what isn’t said enough is that we were standing over the first operational high-speed segment. If you took a high speed trainset and set it on the tracks here, it could pop up its catenary to Caltrain’s overhead wires and run between San Jose and San Francisco as Caltrain currently does. Today trains can run up to 79 miles per hour. With improvements to the signaling and tracks that will come along with the High Speed Rail construction, our new Caltrains are rated to 110 miles per hour. They ran faster than that when they were tested in Pueblo, Colorado.

The view from inside a Capital Corridor train, bound for Sacramento.

The Sacramento train arrived, to take us on the branch that has no pretensions of High Speed travel. North through the salt ponds. Why are they red, asked Younger Son? The Internet suggests that the algae that most enjoy the saltiest water are red. We cruised through the industrial backyards of the Bay Area, where all the cool equipment gets stored amid the graffiti. There seem to be fewer homeless folks camped along the way than there were on my last ride, two years ago. My hunch is that two things are true: in some cases we have done decent work of helping people move up from homelessness, and also that we have sent the cops in to shove The Problem further out of sight. Which is more true I could not tell you.

Our Sacramento train viewed from the overpass at Emeryville. The rightmost track is where we would board the California Zephyr the next morning.

Off at Emeryville and over the tracks to the hotel where we met Grandma. For a few dollars more, you can book a Bay View, but I correctly inferred that for a few dollars less, I could book a Train View. And the train view was fantastic: the Capitol Corridor stopped by at a regular cadence, then the Amtrak Coast Starlight, as well as freight trains. Sometimes in the night the horns heard softly on the fifth floor would prompt me to look out through the picture window and smile. The hotel has a restaurant but it was closed, so we walked to the Food Court across the street. Oakland offers no shortage of variety in cuisine, but the vendors were mostly consistent in serving their respective foods in garbage, collected in bins. The burger place flaunted convention, serving Younger Son and I drinks in used glass tumblers, incurring the endless toil of washing.

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Away from the noise of social media, the Internet is still brimming with great stuff to read. The old way of finding a feed reader, subscribing to some sites, and coming back on occasion to be wowed still works great. Kagi has pitched in with their “Small Web” site to help folks find new voices. It takes a little more effort to get this going than it does to visit the increasingly barren FaceBookMegaMart or injecting TikTok into your retinas, but damn it is so much more gratifying.

Unlinked quotes here are most likely taken from The Sun Magazine, which has great writing in the even older and more convenient format of the printed magazine.

But, quickly, the feeling to be without a smartphone changed from anxiety to liberating. I felt really happy not to have a phone on me while outside. I was rediscovering my old way of getting lost in my thought, of sometimes talking to myself to clarify an idea. Which is less weird these days because everybody assumes you have an ear bud and are on the phone with someone else. In fact, when walking alone, I’m often on a call with myself.

—Ploum

“When you bury a parent, you bury the beginning of your life.” –Bob Hikok

No one who isn’t us is going to destroy the Earth, and no one who isn’t us is going to save it. The most hopeless conditions can inspire the most hopeful actions. We have found ways to restore life on Earth in the event of a total collapse because we have found ways to cause a total collapse of life on Earth. We are the flood, and we are the ark.

–Jonathan Safron Foer

“Grief doesn’t make an appointment. It just shows up while you’re doing the dishes.” –Lalaie Ameeriar

To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.

–Elizabeth Kolbert

When you travel, consider skipping the Big Sites. Go where tourists are relatively few. You have a better chance of connecting with the local culture. Craig Mod makes a compelling case for visiting Nagasaki.

Doomscrolling is a protection racket. Every horrifying headline you consume without acting on is a toll you pay to the algorithm in exchange for the feeling of engagement without the inconvenience of actually engaging. Power loves this arrangement. Power has always loved a population too exhausted and too demoralized to walk out the front door. The algorithm is doing work for authoritarianism that authoritarianism used to have to do itself. It’s very efficient. You should be furious about it. Preferably while moving.

—Rook T Winchester

“Being ethical under capitalism is like trying to pray the rosary on a pirate ship.” –Sparrow

The night I sat with a peach, the sensuous experience of licking it, nibbling it, sucking it, juice dribbling down my chest, my belly.

We all learn there’s no substitute for love, but sex and food both run a close second.

–Sy Safransky

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Oxide.computer will sell you an on-premise cloud. Type some commands into a great big computer and it will build you a network of smaller computers inside the big computer. That is an exciting idea for an old Systems Administrator like me.

Oxide recently shared their internal guidelines on using AI. Good stuff here. The LLM Anti-Patterns are especially decent: don’t mandate that anyone use LLMs, don’t shame folks who do use LLMs, and, this shouldn’t need to be said: don’t date your LLM!

What Oxide advocates is responsibility. An AI is a tool to build things. What you build represents you. LLMs can generate code very effectively, but that needs to be code you understand and vouch for. Because, at the end of the day, it is your code and you are responsible.

It is all too easy to ask AI to take away your responsibility. When the cartoon or the video clip or the email was obviously penned by an AI, we can tell you aren’t representing yourself. Is your audience not worth your time? Worse: do you feel unworthy of being yourself? We can’t see you through the slop!

At the other end are the “never AI” folks. On Mastodon I see posts float by from people who grouse every time an Open Source project reveals that it will leverage AI to expedite the unrelenting work of building, reviewing, debugging, shipping, and supporting free code. Surely, some projects will incautiously ingest “vibecoded” AI Slop, but in general, Open Source maintainers are passionate and responsible volunteers conscientiously leveraging new tools to deliver a better service to their community. We owe these folks respect and good faith.

Use the tools. Or don’t. Both choices are correct. The wrong choice is to be the tool, by letting the tool be you. Having a “relationship” with your AI is a sad move, and expecting other people to have a relationship with your AI’s slop is disappointing and creepy. Step away from the keyboard and spend some time with a kindred spirit. Head outdoors to feel the sun and the cool breeze tango with each other across your skin. You are too beautiful and too precious to be outsourced to a GPU farm.

NOTE: in the spirit of exploration, I sought feedback from an LLM, “Kimi K2.5 (reasoning)” on how to make this post more readable and engaging. It suggested some early revisions to this post, but every word remains my own.

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The Little Chinese Everywhere lady who makes video blogs about traveling around the overland silk road had to evacuate Iran when the Americans started bombing there. She just posted a video from Baghdad. 

She asked her local friend of a friend guide how things were going. He said the economy is about the same as 15 years ago, but they are much safer now. You can see that it’s not prosperous. In Baghdad itself, there are apartment buildings that are empty since the war. The guy explained that there are absent landlords who haven’t been looking after things. You can see the bullet holes still in the facades. On the street, all the prices are cheap.

The locals are extremely friendly. All the street food vendors didn’t want to charge their international guests. It reminded me of Jordan. When I traveled to Jordan 25 years ago, the locals were extremely friendly. They would see me in the streets and call out “helloooo! Welcome in Jordan!” But what is different in this video is that all the kids would call out to the Chinese lady “nihao” “nihao” “nihao” and I found myself wondering if they would be quite as friendly to an American anymore. Probably. It is in the nature of people to welcome guests.

I was glad that she encountered guys who had been to China. In one market stall were folks who imported goods. In a restaurant she encountered a group of guys who had been to China to study civil engineering. I found myself grateful that there is a world power that is welcoming people from around the world and helping them to build up their own countries.

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Easy: right-click on “Ask Gemini” and select “Unpin”

Right-click “Ask Gemini” and select “Unpin” …

… and the “Ask Gemini” button is gone! Poof!!

Yet another dull anecdote about Google sucking at UI:

I tried to ask Gemini by clicking the “Ask Gemini” button but it asked me for permission to spy on my stuff and I said no and so it wouldn’t let me ask anything of them.

In my country, Gemini asks you!

So I asked a Search Engine (Kagi) and it pulled up a Reddit post.

Sometimes, the old ways still work best!

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Today I learned how to set up “author attribution” for links to your web site attached to Mastodon posts. I discovered this after sharing a link to ploum on my Mastodon.

Thank you, @14mission for testing the attribution feature for me!

This is a very humane feature, I think. If someone shares your content then Mastodon helps you to connect with their social media profile.

Then I got to thinking about how there are accounts on Mastodon that basically mirror Bluesky. But I never check or post to Bluesky. I could mirror my Mastodon to Bluesky? Yes! Skymoth was super easy to set up. Nice!

I was chatting on Discord and a friend said he wanted to see Mastodon without re-toots. Bluesky has a nice OnlyPosts feature but then I spotted the applicable feature in the Mastodon UI.

Squeeze the “two carats” element to get a submenu.

That left me with one last grouse I have had about Mastodon: the one thing I can not easily block is re-toots of screenshots of X. Or can I? Well, I think I effectively can. The secret is that stuff is mostly re-toots of George Takei, so blocking muting George Takei ought to do the trick.

George Takei is great but his social media is too much.

Now, I love George Takei as much as anyone. Unfortunately, his social media is a barrage of stuff I don’t want to see that is frequently re-posted. This technique is probably applicable for other popular folks as well.

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“Our destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” –Henry Miller

Hotel in Waikiki: from the balcony on the fifteenth floor I can see other high-rise hotels, but on our block are a pair of two-story apartment buildings. At the one apartment building, every patio is filled with stuff, and on the next building over, the patios are all completely empty. Between our high-rise and the apartment buildings is an empty lot with a fence around it, just across from our building. Between the street and the fence is a homeless man, who has occupied that same spot all week. He caught my eye on the first day, as he was visited by many birds, with whom he was sharing a Domino’s pizza. The next day I saw that there’s a Domino’s around the block. While most folks come and go through the day and night, he is always in his spot, like a video game NPC. I assume he doesn’t want to leave his stuff unattended for long. Aside from the difficulty of living outdoors, being tied to a spot to guard your possessions feels like an even worse burden. Humans need to stretch their legs, not be pinned down to a spot outdoors. “Lock down” without a roof or walls.

I am old enough to remember when The Internet wasn’t just screenshots of quotes from other websites.

What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call ‘containers for attention’ – bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible – and those who haven’t. The distinction isn’t about intelligence or discipline. It’s about environmental architecture. Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook, listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively, read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind. They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.

Others are drowning, attempting sustained thought in environments engineered to prevent it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes. They’re trying to read serious material while fighting a losing battle against behavioural psychology weaponised at scale. They believe their inability to focus is a personal failure rather than a design problem. They don’t realise they’re trying to think in a space optimised to prevent thinking.

—Carlo Iacono

All the hype around AI this early may slow long-term adoption, as more people are drawn in to be underwhelmed and put off adoption longer than if they were lured in by a more mature product. That may slow the rate of job loss that we might anticipate due to the new technology. Also, perhaps, the AI bubble will have turned out to be a stimulus for deploying renewable energy generation faster than we might have otherwise, which will hopefully be put towards de-carbonization of the grid as the bubble pops.

“Our job is to keep up a police action against the possibility of a police state.” –Orson Wells

I do not mourn the Ayatollah. I think the Trump Doctrine may come to be defined as “Change the Regime and You Change the Nation” and I think it will turn out to be hollow. So far, Venezuela is as it was, and while Iran’s leaders have many challenges, there’s no reason to believe they can’t replace Khameni and continue more or less as they have for the past decades. Even in America, we elected a Great Leader who emits a great sound and fury and is doing real damage, but the People aren’t with him. Obama didn’t end Racism, and Trump can’t make us goose step. When you strike at the heart of a nation, you tend to make the State stronger. In America, after 9/11, we rallied behind a mediocre president, erected a new Police State, and looked the other way as our government tortured people. There is a reason that other presidents have been shy about following up on talk of “Regime Change” and that is because it can’t be achieved from the air. Change doesn’t come from the Top, it comes from the heart of the People. It is the hearts of Iranians that offer the greatest potential to change Iran. The same is true for Venezuelans and Americans. We The People are the change that we wish for.

I have no idea if people are reading what I write, and it really doesn’t matter. It gets the ideas out of the whirlwind in my head so I can make space for new things. —Michael Pusateri

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A software person reflects on the Self:

Tagging a bug “Won’t Fix” doesn’t mean it isn’t real and it doesn’t mean nobody noticed; it means the cost of fixing it exceeds the benefit, or the fix would introduce worse instabilities elsewhere, or the system has already built so many dependencies around the bug that it’s become, functionally, a feature. Every codebase of sufficient age accumulates these. They’re documented, acknowledged, and largely left alone so the engineers can go build something useful.

Note (and this is important): you are a codebase of sufficient age.

[…]

Won’t Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you’re trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be. Your distractibility is a bug in the “focused knowledge worker” spec but might be a feature in the “person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly” spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won’t Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.

Joan Westenberg
“Won’t Fix” Self Help

I remember a quote I can’t find, the gist of which was that “prior to the advent of modern psychology, people’s personality disorders were just their personalities.” Older folks are unlikely to “rewrite” their core functionality, but you can tweak around the surfaces of the system to ensure better compatibility. We can also learn not to take other folks’ unintuitive quirks personally.

I have long noticed that I am interested in things for somewhere between three days to three months at a time before my interests move elsewhere. The light of my attention blinks in and out, so I try to bring it around like a lighthouse in hopes that the various ships can course correct before they crash into the boulders.

Anyway, even if you’re not going to rewrite your Being from scratch, you can always work at experimenting with new features. I know some folks like to try a new idea for a month at a time, and evaluate whether this new could-be habit is worth trying to perpetuate. One month is a decent time to road test an idea and also to begin forming a habit, if that is a habit you want to have.

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“We used to have billionaires that collected books. Now we have, like, the chainsaw guy.” –Ben Levi Ross

“At first, I was amazed at the idea of a social media site for AI bots, but then I remembered that LinkedIn has been around for a long time.” —Jerry

The Matrix isn’t Virtual Reality; it is lonely people holding smartphones close to their faces for gentle loyalty-inducing dopamine injections into their eyeballs. A scruffy group of Resistors persist in The Real World, which is actually pretty nice and totally worth fighting for. Welcome, Neo, to the Real World.

“Too many people in my country don’t even understand what politics are. They conflate it with partisanship and assume all discussions of politics are team sports nonsense that only some folks have to pay attention to.” —Alec Watson

God bless America
Doesn’t matter if it’s Chile, Argentina
Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia
Perú, Ecuador, Brasil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana
Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras
El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico
Cuba, Dominican Republic
Jamaica, Haiti, the Antilles
United States, Canada
And my motherland, my homeland: Puerto Rico
We’re still here
Now!
–Bad Bunny, via genius.com

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There is a cloud of dread I can sense in the Bay Area. A shadow ahead of the Super Bowl, which will be hosted this Sunday a few miles from my house. Today it was the “nuke sniffing helicopter” zig zagging around a colleague’s house. Another friend reported that their car was searched by dogs on the way to the UPS store, as they live near the stadium. There’s a general dread of ICE and a surge of Federal Law Enforcement conducting raids while they are in town for game security. Now there are reports of pro-ICE billboards having gone up in San Francisco.

Today I headed home from the office not long after lunch, as I had some tasks to complete at the datacenter. I returned to the office for a spell because Caltrain was effectively shut down. I recognized a familiar pattern: delay due to police activity and single-tracking at the two stations in Palo Alto. I dreaded what that meant: another young person had succumbed to the worst decision they could make. The dread was later confirmed via Reddit.

Keep your eyes open for your neighbors. Ask for help when you need it. Be kind.

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Brita Hummel left a job at Meta.

A temp-worker’s view of the usefulness of Dilbert cartoons as a gauge for dysfunction.

“The land, still cold and wintery, was alive with creatures that trusted in the coming of spring.” –William Least Heat-Moon

A blog is the cultural equivalent of a yard sale.

Elon Musk turned a lot of people off by giving Nazi salutes, but the media never mentions this when reporting Tesla’s falling sales. “Elon Musk spent several chaotic months crudely slashing government programs,” reports The New Yorker.

During our Happy Birthday Phone Call, my Uncle mentioned that I was a Bicentennial Baby. “Yeah, I’m sorry our 250th is under such Circumstances.” “That’s okay, just stick around for 300.” “Uh … yeah, I’ll take some vitamins.”

“You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.” –William Least Heat-Moon

“I don’t trust pride, but when you realize that we are all one, you can be proud of being part of that gigantic entity that we all are.” –Bob Weir

I had a dream that my bicycle got stolen and I was annoyed about having to replace it because can you even buy an affordable awesome new bike with a front fork suspension and rim brakes anymore?

My wife is going for an evening walk.
She asked if I would like to join her.
The cat sitting on my lap looked up at her and meowed “no.”
The older son is going in my stead.

“A city of men is also a city of horses–balding horses, horses beautiful as Brooke Shields. Cars kill more people, but relieve us of the sight of beings whipped on our streets.” –Sparrow

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