AI is starting to unbundle the final part of the idea propagation value chain: idea creation and substantiation. The impacts will be far-reaching.

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My first job was as a paper boy:

The job was remarkably analog: a bundle of newspapers would be dropped off at my house, I would wrap them in rubber-bands (or plastic bags if it were raining), load them up in a canvas sack, and set off on my bike; once a month my parents would drive me around to collect payment. Little did I appreciate just how essential my role writ large was to the profitability of newspapers generally.

Newspapers liked to think that they made money because people relied on them for news, furnished by their fearless reporters and hard-working editors; not only did people pay newspapers directly, but advertisers were also delighted to pay for the privilege of having their products placed next to the journalists’ peerless prose. The Internet revealed the fatal flaw in this worldview: what newspapers provided was distribution thanks to infrastructure like printing presses and yours truly.

Once the Internet reduced distribution costs to zero, three truths emerged: first, that “news”, once published, retained no economic value. Second, newspapers no long had geographic monopolies, but were instead in competition with every publication across the globe. Third, advertisers didn’t care about content, but rather about reaching customers.

I illustrated these three truths in 2015’s Popping the Publishing Bubble:

Editorial and ads used to be a bundle; next, the Internet unbundled editorial and ads, and provided countless options for both; the final step was ads moving to platforms that gave direct access to users, leaving newspapers with massive reach and no way to monetize it.

The Idea Propagation Value Chain

As much as newspapers may rue the Internet, their own business model — and my paper delivery job — were based on an invention that I believe is the only rival for the Internet’s ultimate impact: the printing press. Those two inventions, though, are only two pieces of the idea propagation value chain. That value chain has five parts:

The evolution of human communication has been about removing whatever bottleneck is in this value chain. Before humans could write, information could only be conveyed orally; that meant that the creation, vocalization, delivery, and consumption of an idea were all one-and-the-same. Writing, though, unbundled consumption, increasing the number of people who could consume an idea.

Now the new bottleneck was duplication: to reach more people whatever was written had to be painstakingly duplicated by hand, which dramatically limited what ideas were recorded and preserved. The printing press removed this bottleneck, dramatically increasing the number of ideas that could be economically distributed:

The new bottleneck was distribution, which is to say this was the new place to make money; thus the aforementioned profitability of newspapers. That bottleneck, though, was removed by the Internet, which made distribution free and available to anyone.

What remains is one final bundle: the creation and substantiation of an idea. To use myself as an example, I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet, the ability to distribute them around the globe; however, I still need to write them down, just as an artist needs to create an image, or a musician needs to write a song. What is becoming increasingly clear, though, is that this too is a bottleneck that is on the verge of being removed.

This image, like the first two in this Article, was created by AI (Midjourney, specifically). It is, like those two images, not quite right: I wanted “A door that is slightly open with light flooding through the crack”, but I ended up with a door with a crack of light down the middle and a literal flood of water; my boy on a bicycle, meanwhile, is missing several limbs, and his bike doesn’t have a handlebar, while the intricacies of the printing press make no sense at all.

They do, though, convey the idea I was going for: a boy delivering newspapers, printing presses as infrastructure, and the sense of being overwhelmed by the other side of an opening door — and they were all free.¹ To put in terms of this Article, I had the idea, but AI substantiated it for me — the last bottleneck in the idea propagation value chain is being removed.

AI Democratization

What is notable about all of these AI applications it that they go back to language itself; Roon writes with regards to large language models (LLMs) on the Scale blog:

In a previous iteration of the machine learning paradigm, researchers were obsessed with cleaning their datasets and ensuring that every data point seen by their models is pristine, gold-standard, and does not disturb the fragile learning process of billions of parameters finding their home in model space. Many began to realize that data scale trumps most other priorities in the deep learning world; utilizing general methods that allow models to scale in tandem with the complexity of the data is a superior approach. Now, in the era of LLMs, researchers tend to dump whole mountains of barely filtered, mostly unedited scrapes of the Internet into the eager maw of a hungry model.

Roon’s focus is on text as the universal input, and connective tissue.² Note how this insight fits into the overall development of communication: oral communication was a prerequisite to writing and reading; widespread literacy was a prerequisite to anyone being able to publish on the Internet; the resultant flood of text and images enabled by zero marginal distribution is the prerequisite for models that unbundle the creation of an idea and its substantiation.

This, by extension, hints at an even more surprising takeaway: the widespread assumption — including by yours truly — that AI is fundamentally centralizing may be mistaken. If not just data but clean data was presumed to be a prerequisite, then it seemed obvious that massively centralized platforms with the resources to both harvest and clean data — Google, Facebook, etc. — would have a big advantage. This, I would admit, was also a conclusion I was particularly susceptible to, given my focus on Aggregation Theory and its description of how the Internet, contrary to initial assumptions, leads to centralization.

The initial roll-out of large language models seemed to confirm this point of view: the two most prominent large language models have come from OpenAI and Google; while both describe how their text (GPT and GLaM, respectively) and image (DALL-E and Imagen, respectively) generation models work, you either access them through OpenAI’s controlled API, or in the case of Google don’t access them at all. But then came this summer’s unveiling of the aforementioned Midjourney, which is free to anyone via its Discord bot. An even bigger surprise was the release of Stable Diffusion, which is not only free, but also open source — and the resultant models can be run on your own computer.

There is, as you might expect, a difference in quality; Dall-E, for example, had the most realistic “newspaper delivery boy throwing a newspaper”:

Stable Diffusion was on the other end of the specturm:

What is important to note, though, is the direction of each project’s path, not where they are in the journey. To the extent that large language models (and I should note that while I’m focusing on image generation, there are a whole host of companies working on text output as well) are dependent not on carefully curated data, but rather on the Internet itself, is the extent to which AI will be democratized, for better or worse.

The Impact on Creators

The worse is easy to envision; Charle Warzel issued a mea culpa for using an AI image as an illustration in a post about Alex Jones:

I told Bors that what I felt worst about was how mindless my decision to use Midjourney ultimately had been. I was caught up in my own work and life responsibilities and trying to get my newsletter published in a timely fashion. I went to Getty and saw the same handful of photos of Alex Jones, a man who I know enjoys when his photo is plastered everywhere. I didn’t want to use the same photos again, nor did I want to use his exact likeness at all. I also, selfishly, wanted the piece to look different from the 30 pieces that had been published that day about Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook defamation trial. All of that subconsciously overrode all the complicated ethical issues around AI art that I was well apprised of.

What worries me about my scenario is that Midjourney was so easy to use, so readily accessible, and it solved a problem (abstracting Jones’ image in a visually appealing way), that I didn’t have much time or incentive to pause and think it through. I can easily see others falling into this like I did.

For these reasons, I don’t think I’ll be using Midjourney or any similar tool to illustrate my newsletter going forward (an exception would be if I were writing about the technology at a later date and wanted to show examples). Even though the job wouldn’t go to a different, deserving, human artist, I think the optics are shitty, and I do worry about having any role in helping to set any kind of precedent in this direction. Like others, I also have questions about the corpus used to train these art tools and the possibility that they are using a great deal of art from both big-name and lesser-known artists without any compensation or disclosure to those artists. (I reached out to Midjourney to ask some clarifying questions as to how they choose the corpus of data to train the tool, and they didn’t respond.)

I get Warzel’s point, and desire to show solidarity to artists worried about the impact of AI-generated art on their livelihoods. They are, it seems to me, right to worry: I opened this Article discussing the demise of newspapers which, once the connection between duplication and distribution was severed, quickly saw their business models fall apart. If the connection between idea creation and idea substantiation is being severed, it seems reasonable to assume all attendant business models might suffer the same fate.

There are, though, two rejoinders: the first is that abundance has its own reward. I am uniquely biased in this regard, seeing as how I make my living on the Internet as a publisher effectively competing with the New York Times, but I would argue that not just the quantity but, in absolute terms, the quality of content available to every single person in the world is dramatically higher than it was before the distribution bottleneck was removed. It seems obvious that removing the substantiation bottleneck from ideas will result in more good ones as well (along with, by definition, an even greater increase in not so good ones).

The analogy to publishing also point to what will be the long-term trend for any profession affected by these models: relatively undifferentiated creators who depended on the structural bundling of idea creation and substantiation will be reduced to competing with zero marginal cost creators for attention generated and directed from Aggregators; highly differentiated creators, though, who can sustainably deliver both creation and substantiation on their own will be even more valuable. Social media, for example, has been a tremendous boon to differentiated publishers: it gives readers a megaphone to tell everyone how great said publisher is. These AI tools will have a similar effect on highly differentiated creators, who will leverage text-based iteration to make themselves more productive and original than ever before.

The second rejoinder is perhaps more grim: this is going to happen regardless. Warzel may be willing to overlook the obvious improvement in not just convenience but also, for his purposes, quality proffered by his use of Midjourney, but few if any will make the same choice. AI-generated images will, per the image above, soon be a flood, just as publishing on the Internet quickly overwhelmed the old newspaper business model.

Moreover, just as native Internet content is user-generated content, the iterative and collaborative nature of AI-generated content — both in the sense of being a by-product of content already created, and also the fact that every output can be further iterated upon by others — will prove to be much more interesting and scalable than what professional organizations can produce. TikTok, which pulls content from across its network to keep users hooked, is the apotheosis of user-generated content; Metaverses may be the apotheosis of AI-generated content.

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1. Beyond the $600 annual fee I paid to Midjourney to have access to the fully rights-unencumbered Corporate plan ↩

2. In the case of these image applications, noise is added to an known image and then the model is trained on backing out the image from pure noise; the resultant model can then be applied to any arbitrary text applied to pure noise, based on further training of matched text and images ↩

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The fourth issue of Branch Magazine is dedicated to the theme Open Climate. 

The co-editors of this issue of Branch Magazine met on a caravan. Inspired by the routes and exchanges of the old trading caravans, we have been traveling at our own time and pace, sometimes alongside each other, sometimes meeting again to rest and reorient. We’ve thought of these moments as our caravanserai. 

These spaces have been essential for our own personal and professional journeys—to take time to pause and reflect critically, explore nascent ideas and well-thought out ones, to immerse deeply into new contexts and to meet fellow travelers. 

The caravan 

During the pandemic, our caravan moved online. Throughout lockdowns, personal loss, isolated winters and hot summers, we gathered around the glow of our Zoom room and warmed our souls with stories from the road and our hopes and fears of the journey ahead. 

Babitha George, director of the design research studio Quicksand, dialed in from Bangalore and told stories of craft technology and community-centered design. She created Decentralizing Digital, a beautiful design research project done in collaboration with community partners, small-scale farmers in India and local artists. 

Shannon Dosemagen, director of the Open Environmental Data Project, called in from New Orleans and shared her interest in socially situated data. Building on these ideas, she co-authored the article Open Climate Now inviting the open movement to take climate action. 

Michelle Thorne, senior adviser to the Green Web Foundation and editor of Branch, was often facemuted on the calls from her home in Berlin, sometimes pushing a stroller or watching her kid play on a snowy, deserted playground. She was interested in how to build and maintain the knowledge commons in a way that isn’t extractive nor harmful in its emissions and environmental degradation.  

From our conversations, we knew we wanted to hear from others who were also dreaming about sustainable and just futures. We wanted to know: how is sustainable technology tied to community governance, to the knowledge commons and digital sovereignty? What does an internet look like that takes a craft approach—honoring local knowledge, local materials, and sustainable practices. And along this caravan, where are the places that foster an ongoing dialogue about climate justice and the open movement? 

From our rest stop conversations, we realized there is much to unlearn, to reimagine, to regenerate, to build and debate together. So we decided to publish a special issue of Branch magazine to celebrate these topics. 

Open Climate  

While we are faced with urgent crises, we wanted to acknowledge that solutions may be slow. We wanted to divest from the narratives of disruption and solutionism and make space for embracing slowness and hope. We sought a future that is anchored in a respect for different kinds of knowledge. The stakes are high, and we need stories and narratives that bring us together and include us all. This is the power of openness. 

As we opened a call for proposals for this issue, we invited fellow dreamers and doers to respond to a social imagination that inspires climate action and to share what actions they are taking towards a more just and sustainable internet. 

We wanted to turn away from the daily inundation of hot takes that often privilege doom and despair. We wanted to prioritize initiatives that are community-centered, place-based and contribute to the commons, as we felt strongly that this was imperative for a more just future. We wanted to consider together how we could harness the tools of the open movement and apply them to climate justice and more rapid climate action, while also stewarding the knowledge commons and accounting for its environmental impact.

Proposals arrived in a broad array of formats—video, audio, writing, visual art, physical objects and code—even sensory experiences of climate change. We hosted an online ideas jam with all the contributors and invited them to make a new work for this issue or, in the spirit of free culture, to remix and repurpose existing pieces. We are very grateful to all the contributors for their kindness and passion in this process. 

In this issue you will find explorations of hi-craft rather than hi-tech. You will read about the hope of seed libraries and repair shops. You will learn about the leading open projects on measuring the internet’s carbon emissions and mitigating environmental damage from manufacturing hardware. You will be invited to walk along the rivers of India and to consider a handmade computer. You will be delighted in the alternative computing environments that have always been here: in rural places, among sovereign communities and with people prioritizing sustainability over reckless speed. 

Open Climate is a living, breathing practice. You will find some of its shapes and practitioners here. We hope it sparks connections for your work and that we might join each other on a caravan towards more just and sustainable futures.

By all measures, I’m pretty well networked now. I have a globally popular blog and Twitter account (follow me there if you want, @raulpacheco). People from all over the world read my blog, regularly use my resources in their teaching and their own teaching, and I have solid networks across multiple fields and disciplines (political science, human geography, public policy, public administration, qualitative methods, mixed methods).

It wasn’t always like this, and I wanted to write about this, because my current situation (extremely well networked) was far from what I experienced as a graduate student. I woke up this morning (September 4th, 2022) pondering about the role and value of networks in graduate school and post-PhD, and how I did not have “the correct networks” leading to my studying a Masters and a PhD.

I studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate. From that vantage point, I knew more or less where to go if I wanted to do a Masters (Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya, of course) leading to a PhD. The Tec de Celaya’s chemical engineering department is top-notch, and at the time I was finishing my undergraduate, ALL faculty members were Mexicans with foreign PhDs. I had met several of them through events I organized as a student (I brought them to my university to speak), so I knew that if I wanted to do my PhD in process control, I would have to go to University of Wisconsin Madison (where Arturo Jimenez did his PhD).

I switched fields for my Masters (economics of technical change), and for my PhD (human geography and political science). This meant that I had ZERO networks in any of the 3 fields. I joined programmes literally walking in without knowing anyone and very little about the actual disciplines I was about to study. Moving from natural sciences and engineering to economics was a shocker, but entering political science and human geography absolutely shattered my understanding of the world and how I was supposed to study phenomena. They’re different! In chemical engineering I knew what I needed to do to analyze a chemical reaction. I had blueprints, equations to analyze distillation towers, design chemical plants. In political science, human geography and economics, analysis meant something entirely different.

No networks, no tools either.

So, for my Masters and PhD, not only did I not have the right networks, I didn’t have the right tools either. I entered completely unrelated fields and had to be fully retrained to understand description, analysis and many other concepts in an entirely different way.

THIS IS HARD

So when I see a social scientist (say a political science PhD) who did an undergraduate degree in political science, followed up by a Masters AND a PhD in the same discipline and sometimes even the same field, I immediately think “you moved within the same discipline, the challenges you faced are completely different from those crossing disciplines in such a stark way”.

Certainly, my knowledge of chemical engineering and economics enhances what I study and shapes how I conduct research as a political scientist and human geographer, but I say this now as a tenured, senior professor with a pretty decent publishing career.

As a graduate student, I was TERRIFIED.

So, my experience also colors my approach to mentoring and teaching students, and makes me more inclined to continue writing my blog and sharing resources others may need. Because God knows I sure needed them, didn’t have them during graduate school!

I’m pleased to announce that registrations are now open at exercise.cafe/register

Configuration is ongoing, and I’m on the lookout for moderators, but I wanted to keep the momentum going on this project. Please register if you would like to share and discuss things related to exercise and fitness (and can agree with the Code of Conduct below!)

For those new to the Fediverse, this is an instance of Pixelfed, which is kind of like a federated/decentralised version of Instagram. The difference is that your updates can be followed by anyone from a compatible instance.

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Code of Conduct v0.1

Exercise.cafe is a community focused on sharing and discussion of exercise and fitness-related activities. It’s a friendly, non-judgemental space.

The following behaviours all help make exercise.cafe a positive environment:

• Demonstrating empathy and kindness toward other people

• Being respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences

• Giving and gracefully accepting constructive feedback

• Accepting responsibility and apologizing to those affected by our mistakes, and learning from the experience

• Focusing on what is best not just for us as individuals, but for the overall community

Examples of unacceptable behaviour include:

• Public or private harassment

• Sexual attention or advances of any kind

• Trolling, insulting or derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks

• Publishing others’ private information, such as a physical or email address, without their explicit permission

• Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a social setting, including excessive advertising

We welcome members regardless of qualities such as gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, nationality, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, family structure, spirituality, religion (or lack thereof), education, or other personal traits. We particularly celebrate diversity and do not tolerate bigotry or prejudice. Diverse opinions on politics, religion, and other matters are welcome as long as they align with our core values. For the avoidance of doubt, this is anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-transphobic space.

Enforcement

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behaviour may be reported using the built-in tools of the platform. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated promptly and fairly, respecting the privacy and security of the reporter of any incident.

Consequences for actions deemed to be violations of this Code of Conduct:

1. Correction

• Community Impact: Use of inappropriate language or other behaviour deemed unprofessional or unwelcome in the community.

• Consequence: Removal of contravening content. A private, written warning from community leaders, providing clarity around the nature of the violation and an explanation of why the behavior was inappropriate. A public apology may be requested.

2. Warning

• Community Impact: A violation through a single incident or series of actions.

• Consequence: Removal of contravening content. A warning with consequences for continued behaviour. No interaction with the people involved, including unsolicited interaction with those enforcing the Code of Conduct, for a specified period of time. This includes avoiding interactions in other spaces, too. Violating these terms may lead to a temporary or permanent ban.

3. Temporary Ban

• Community Impact: A serious violation of community standards, including sustained inappropriate behavior.

• Consequence: Removal of contravening content. A temporary ban from any sort of interaction or public communication with the community for a specified period of time. No public or private interaction with the people involved, including unsolicited interaction with those enforcing the Code of Conduct, is allowed during this period. Violating these terms may lead to a permanent ban.

4. Permanent Ban

• Community Impact: Demonstrating a pattern of violation of community standards, including sustained inappropriate behavior, harassment of an individual, or aggression toward or disparagement of classes of individuals.

• Consequence: Removal of contravening content. A permanent ban from any sort of public interaction within the community.

This instance is run by Doug Belshaw (@doug) and the moderators are:

• [looking for volunteers!]

If you feel that you have been treated unfairly by a moderator of this instance, please make this clear to another moderator. Please be aware, however, that direct messages are not yet end-to-end encrypted.

Funding

This server will be supported by donations. The ability to do this will be set up at a future date.

Blocked servers

Exercise.cafe is a node of the Fediverse network. While users can block individual users from other servers, the following servers are blocked for all users of exercise.cafe. This is due to actions which contravene our code of conduct.

• [list of known problematic servers will be found here]

References

Thanks to the following for inspiration:

• https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_conduct

• https://wiki.social.coop/rules-and-bylaws/Code-of-conduct.html

• https://playground.bonfire.cafe/terms/code-of-conduct/

License

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The post Registrations are now open at exercise.cafe! first appeared on Open Thinkering.

Anticosti Island is a large but mostly uninhabited island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Covered with subarctic pine and spruce forest, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of deer, and surrounded by rugged and scenic coastlines, it is an attractive destination for adventurers.

In August, 2022, I bikepacked more than 250 km of roads and trails across the island. Starting at Prot Mennier, the only town (population 250) I rode a couple 50 km loops nearby and also a 180 km run along the Transanticostienne to Baie de la Tour on the island's northeast coast.

The trip was not without its challenges, but the island is far more accessible and amenable than it's made out to be. And I found the largest challenge was the dearth of accurate information available for people like me. This article is intended to address that.

Overview

Anticosti Island is 225 km long and at its greatest width is 56 km wide. It's basically a big slanted slab of limestone and shale, rising to 191 metres in hills along the north coast, with deep river valleys cut through the soft rock, and a significant amount of wetland to the south and east. It is forested with spruce, fir, and pine, though you'll also find large open patches as a result of logging.

It has an unusual ecology. There are no bears, wolves or other large predators; you'll only see the occasional red or black fox. There are no squirrels, chipmunks or raccoons, though there are rabbits and some smaller animals. There are mosquitos and black flies, especially along river rapids, but there aren't the swarms normally associated with the Canadian north. Ticks are not an issue.

The climate can be a challenge. My trip in August was scheduled to coincide with the warmest and driest part of the year; in twelve days on the island I had three days of rain, and I found the 18-23 degree temperatures quite hot on the concrete-like roads. But wind and rain can make it feel a lot colder quickly, and Anticosti has plenty of both, especially earlier in the year. Even summer visitors should be prepared for three-season camping.

The island is divided into four major sections. The area around the far west point, including the town, port and airport, are run by the community of Port Menier. To the east of that is a large tract of land run by a private outfitter, Pourvoirie Geneviève. The middle part of the island, along with the part eastern tip, is run by the Quebec provincial parks agency called SEPAQ. This area also includes a Quebec provincial park (dark brown). To the east there is a region operated by another outfitter called Safari Anticosti. You can freely travel through the area but need to pay a fee to visit the provincial park.

The island's major industries are forestry (and you'll encounter a lot of logging trucks on the western part of the island) and tourism. Most of the tourism is based around hunting and fishing; the hunting season starts at the beginning of September at it's probably a time best avoided by bikepackers.

Transportation

There are flights offered by Air Liason but for all practical purposes visitors should plan on taking the one boat that provides regular service, the Bella Desgagnés, operated by Relais Nordik. The trip is 22 hours from Rimouski, or about 8 hours from Sept-Iles. Rimouski is about a six hour drive from Montreal on a four-lane highway; there is secure parking right at the ferry terminal where you can leave your car behind. The ship runs once a week, departing from Rimouski Monday evening, stopping at Port Menier Monday evening, and continuing up the Quebec north coast for three days; it then returns, picking up passengers at Port Menier Sunday evening and dropping them off in Rimouski Monday afternoon.

The Bella is primarily a cargo vessel, but it has a limited number of cabins. These are booked months, even years, in advance. But there are many more spots available for non-cabin passengers. As a non-cabin passenger I paid about $270 each way for myself and my fully loaded bicycle (which is backed in a shipping container but available if you want it when the ship stops at Sept-Iles). The cabin passengers are basically on a cruise and eat in the dining room; the rest of us eat at the cafeteria, where the food was just fine. Note though that there's no meal service the Monday evening of departure, so bring some ham and baguettes. There are showers and lockers available for all passengers as well as vending machines.

The ship docks at the end of a long jetty at Port Menier; it's a full kilometer into the town and another two kilometers to the campground after that, so be prepared for a hike or bike ride at disk as soon as you arrive. Most roads in Port Menier itself are paved, but beyond that there's nothing but gravel. The main road is called the Transanticostienne and runs from Port Menier to the far side of the island about 270 km away. From this main road there are numerous side roads leading to destinations on the north coast or in the south.

Just about everything you will read about Anticosti Island warns about how bad the roads are and how important it is to be prepared for flats. This was a huge source of uncertainty for me. My own experience was very different. The roads were no worse than any of the gravel roads I've cycled elsewhere in Canada, and much better than some of the rail trails I cycled the previous year. A good gravel or mountain bike will have no trouble on the roads; I saw a number of fatbikes, but I had no difficulty on 700-40 knobby tires (specifically Maxxis Ravagers) which after 300 km of Anticost roads were still like new. I'm including a number of photos of the roads in different locations so people can judge for themselves (I found almost no road pictures when I was planning my ride) and there are many more examples in my videos.

That's not to say your experience will be the same. Gravel roads are generally a lot better in drier conditions and later in the year, which is why I traveled in August. On Anticosti there isn't much of a soil layer, so when you get rain there can be a lot of surface water; this degraded some of the smaller roads on steeper hills. As well, you might encounter fresh gravel that has not yet been packed down by traffic, especially earlier in the year. But in talking to people I learned that there wasn't a lot of variation in road conditions, at least in the summer.

You can rent a truck through SEPAQ (they have an office in Port Menier). The rates are roughly $200 per day, and gas of course is extra. Also, you have to provide your own insurance; SEPAQ will require that you have a certificate that proves you are covered (specifically, QEF no. 27, covering a vehicle valued at $45,000). The trucks are equipped with radios and extra gas tanks; gas is available at Port Menier and Auberge Macdonald.

Accommodation

There are two hotels (more accurately, auberges) on the island (one in Port Menier, and one at the 106 km point on the Transanticostienne on the north coast). The outfitters also have their own lodges. The big challenge for campers and bikepackers on Anticosti is that services are geared almost exclusively to package tourism (for example, a five-day flight and chalet stay for about $5k). You can't book cabin (or chalet) stays for less than five days at a time, and these are booked far in advance (2023 is pretty much booked already, for example). For the rest of us, camping is the only option.

There are five campgrounds on the island. One is owned and run by the Port Menier community, and is two km from the townsite. It's called Camping du Château (book here), but don't make the mistake of assuming (as I did) that it is anywhere near the hotel; it is near the ruins of an old hotel. A second is run by Pourvoirie Geneviève and is on the north coast at Baie Martin. The remaining three are run by SEPAQ: two are on the north coast (Camping Wilcox, about 11 km from Auberge Macdonald, and Baie de la Tour) and one on the south coast (Chicotte, apparently 7 km from another Auberge).

The problem for bikepackers is that these campsites are very far from each other. From Port Menier to Camping Wilcox is 116 km, for example. Baie de la Tour is another 72 km after that. It's even further to get to Chicotte (159 km). Baie Martin can be used as an stopover on the way from Port Menier to Camping Wilcox (which is what I did) but it's a slow road down to the coast (10-15 km each way) and still 85 km remains between Baie Martin and Wilcox. These sites are designed for people who drive, not backpackers or cyclists. Also, they cost $30-$35 per night.

Plus, there's a municipal ordinance that prohibits camping anywhere else. So, um....

Now, in practice, this is very lightly enforced (if at all). There are no people! Most every bikepacker I spoke to or read about ended up doing some stealth camping. The roads are just tough enough, and the distances are just far enough, that it's pretty necessary. But also just about every bikepacker also hitches a ride with either SEPAQ staff or tourists. There's a steady stream of SEPAQ trucks and they will for the most part give you a lift (only one rich tourist gave me the evil eye for daring to expect some sort of charity).

The campsites are a good deal though (except for Baie Martin, which had no services). They have showers and washrooms. The Chateau campsite also has laundry and a power outlet. They have picnic tables and fire pits and firewood is (in theory) available. They are all near a supply of water, which while not potable, is clean and can be filtered. I would book well ahead of time for Camping du Château, since there's only five spaces, and for Baie Martin, since there's only one, but I would have a hard time imagining the others are full, except during fall.

Services

Not surprisingly most services are centered around Port Menier, though Auberge Macdonald was also pretty important.

Food - there's a very well-stocked grocery store in Port Menier with pretty much everything you'll need, including fresh produce. There are two restaurants, one in the Auberge and another called Chez Mario on a road outside of town. Reservations are needed for supper at the Auberge, and it's expensive all round. Chez Mario (open for breakfast and supper) was much more reasonable, and (because it serves the truckers and workers) offers good food in large portions. There's also a restaurant at the Auberge Macdonald, which I guess in theory is available for breakfast and support (reserve ahead, and remember you're camping 11 km away) and has sandwich snacks and soft drinks available at lunch.

Water - water is good to drink in the restaurants, and you can buy bottled water (including 4L jugs) at the grocery store. Otherwise, water on the island is not considered potable. That said, there are numerous rivers and streams on the island with sparkling clear water; just run it through a water filter (I used the Platypus). Note that it might be quite a number of kilometers between rivers when you're inland (and especially between the airport and Riviere de Huile at around km 50, though I've told there's a nice spring around km 40).

Supplies - there's a well-stocked Home Hardware in Port Menier with just about everything you'll need (especially if you're a hunter). Note that while it had both propane and butane fuels, it did not have isobutane. There's also a crafts shop right nearby that has souvenirs. There's also a bank and a post office in the same building as the hardware store.

Power and wifi - there's a power outlet at the Camping du Château laundry and washroom. I was also able to recharge my electronics at the restaurants (they were pretty good about that). There is wifi at the tourist information booth in Port Menier as well as at both of Auberges. There was no cell service when I was there but a brand new tower had been installed and there should be service around Port Menier as I write. Otherwise, there's no power or internet available anywhere. 

Attractions

The island is visually stunning just about everywhere, though on the Transanticostienne between Port Menier and the SEPAQ lands it's mostly just a lot of forest and you'll see a lot of logging trucks. (You'll read a lot about how dangerous these are and how bad the dust is, but they are good about slowing down for cyclists and the dust is just dust).

- Pointe-Ouest - there's a house there (apparently now an Auberge, but really it's a house) and a lighthouse. There's also a cool shipwreck about 100m up the coast. It's an easy 20 km cycle from the campsite at Port Menier. Also along the same route are some pioneer cemetaries and the ruins of the old settlement at Four à chaux de Baie-Sainte-Claire.

- L'Exclos - there's a series of fenced areas where the deer are (nominally) excluded. The vegetation is quite different as a result (because elsewhere, the deer eat everything). Along this same route north of Port Menier is a nice seashore and waterfall.

- Caves - not surprising in a limestone area. There are various caves (known as grottes) such as Huile River and Baie de la Tour, but the big one is at Grotte à la Patate. It's a bit of a squeeze to get in but apparently worth while (I have been). You can rent helmets with lights at Auberge Macdonald, about 25 km away.

- Chute Kalimazoo - I missed this but heard very good things about it from people who went there. Follow the trail up from the parking area. There's a nice pool you can swim in below the falls.

- Avion de la rivière à l'huile - I thought it was a mistranslation, but no, there's an airplane crash-landed in the forest about 300m off the main road about a kilometer or two up from the river (about km 52).

- Observation River Canyon - there's a steep canyon cut through the limestone by the Observation river, with a trail through it.

- Pointe-Carleton - Old lighthouse, definitely worth a look. Can bee seen from the road.

- Chute Vauréal - these are some very tall falls 90 meters in height, and accompanying canyon. The area has two separate attractions with separate access points from the road - a 7 km trail through the canyon located at km 151, and a steel viewing platform overlooking the falls about 100m in from the access point at km 153 on the Transanticostienne.

- Baie de la Tour - the is the location of the campground, but also is an area of stunning beauty with gigantic cliffs and sheltered lakes and waterfalls. It feels too like it has its own microclimate.

Some Thoughts

Though there were only 250 people on the island (plus maybe the same number of visitors) I felt like I met them all when I was there. Port Menier was busy and the roads were busy. And it was pretty easy to meet the other bikepackers and adventurers that were there, because they won't be anywhere else.

But when you're away from the main places, you're really alone. The Transanticostienne is busy (ie., you'll see a couple trucks per hour), but the back roads far less so. You can really feel it on Anticosti.

I think it's an outstanding bikepacking destination, one that is a lot less difficult and dangerous than advertised (especially if you have the right gear and precautions) but that takes yhou to places you never knew existed.

It could be an even better destination if SEPAQ and the outfitters make a few minor investments, and in particular, create spaces every 20-40 km where bikepackers can stop overnight, especially toward the eastern part of the island where there is nothing. It would also be a good idea to allow them to forward supplies to themselves to be picked up at Auberge MacDonald.

The Road Pictures

Port Menier

Point l'Ouest

Near Port Menier

Back road near Baie Martin - this is the worst bit of any road I saw

 

The roads to Baie Martin (Not on a lot of maps)

Near Auberge Macdonald

Near Vaureal Falls

Road to Baie de la Tour

Back road in an Exclos

Charles Petzold:

Whenever a 2nd edition of a book is published, people ask “I already have the 1st edition. Do I need to get the 2nd?” It’s a legitimate question and I’ve asked it myself. Reading a 2nd edition after the 1st is not trivial: It’s a commitment of both additional money and additional time.

Sometimes a 2nd edition has mostly small changes: correcting a few mistakes, adding some more up-to-date information. But other times a 2nd edition involves some major upheavals. Perhaps the author had become dissatisfied with certain aspects of the 1st edition and wanted to fix them.

The 2nd edition of Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software falls into that second category.

"Code" is one of my favorite programming books ever (even though it doesn't really go into programming much). I've read it multiple times, and when I first started reading it, I'd make it only part way through before I had to stop and start over from the beginning. There's just so much good information in that that really builds on itself.

I'm super excited about the second edition, and I've had it ordered for months now, but I think I'm having to wait on a second printing or something. I'm guessing I'm not the only one.

I wished dearly that the Mac and Windows came with built-in BASIC environments. If that were the case, the language I would have discussed in this chapter would have been BASIC.

But I didn’t have that freedom. My hands were tied. There was only one real choice. My free will meant nothing, and I was forced into JavaScript.

So it goes. The only consolation is that I’m not the only person in the world forced into using JavaScript. There are literally millions.

This made me laugh.

This is what happens to an Apple Watch when you're hand jamming up some of the stellar granite at Index, and you forget to take off your watch. Or you're just climbing in general and don't want to take off your watch because you religiously close those rings. I'm a little shocked the watch has lasted almost two years as it is.

So I'll be getting an Apple Watch Ultra, eventually, once this one kicks the bucket. Because I'm not gentle with these things. And the new waypoints feature would have come in super handy this past weekend while I was in Tieton.

Sure, Ben. Yea, I bet that's where the trail was. Right past that rock where a rattlesnake is obviously hiding under. I can't wait to hear another tail shake at me. Where are we again?

Grokking Stable Diffusion

Jonathan Whitaker built this interactive Jupyter notebook that walks through how to use Stable Diffusion from Python step-by-step, and then dives deep into helping understand the different components of the implementation, including how text is encoded, how the diffusion loop works and more. This is by far the most useful tool I've seen yet for understanding how this model actually works. You can run Jonathan's notebook directly on Google Colab, with a GPU.

Via @johnowhitaker

I hope to write something more thoughtful soon, but this piece from CNBC prompted me to at least jot down a placeholder: Apple is clearly coming for the ads business, and it’s starting exactly where Facebook did ten years ago: The app download marketplace.

First, the news – not that it’s that new given many smarter observers have noticed Apple’s recent pivot to advertising. From CNBC: Apple plans to sell ads in new spots in the App Store by year-end.

The addition of these new ad units only strengthens Apple’s already  robust business of selling search ads inside the app store.  Apple also sells other types of advertising, but what you might not realize is how large the app download advertising business actually is: an estimated $118 billion this year alone. Google and Facebook/Meta dominate the category, but Apple’s coming on strong – aided in large part by its decision, under the cloak of caring about consumer privacy, to kneecap the third-party data ecosystem that underpinned its competitors’ offerings. In short, Apple made it far harder for its rivals to deliver ROAS (return on advertising spend), and advertisers, being logical businesspeople, are moving spend to Apple.

Why does this matter? Hypocrisy, for starters. Apple is spending countless millions positioning itself as anti-advertising, while at the same time privately planning to grow its own advertising business to a significant percentage of its overall revenues and profits. According to reporting from Bloomberg and elsewhere, Apple’s current advertising business stands at around $4 billion, putting it roughly in the league of Twitter, TikTok, and Snap, all of which are struggling to build app download businesses (and failing, in large part, because they can’t use data from Apple’s ecosystem). But Apple has been hiring ad platform talent lately, and some research outfits predict the company could scale its ads business to $30 billion within the next four years – putting it in the top tier of advertising giants*.

Once that happens, it’s worth asking: How will becoming an ads business change the famously privacy-first company? I plan on digging into this question – and welcome any thoughts you might have as I do.

• * Yes, yes, I know that $30 billion is not much given Apple’s nearly $400 billion in top line. But study this chart, and think about the fact that Apple’s services revenue – which includes advertising – has a nearly four times higher gross margin than its devices business. Put another way, every dollar in ad revenue is worth up to four times MORE than a dollar in device revenue. 

(And PS, watch this space – Germany is suing Apple for self dealing in its ads business…)

 

Patrick Rhone, on being handy:

When it comes to technology, my knowledge largely comes from my lack of fear over trying new things and pressing buttons just to see what they do. My consulting clients ask me where I learned how fix that thing that they called me in for – even if I may not have encountered their specific issue before. I explain that the main thing is my lack of fear. That I’m willing to just try things to see if I can figure it out. Push buttons just to see what they do. And, in doing so, I can now fix that problem should I ever encounter it again.

If I have an employable skill, it is that.

Towards Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute includes this snippet:

All I had to do was run my existing code, without any change, using PyPy. It worked and the speed bump was phenomenal. The batched version took only 2.5 minutes to insert 100M rows. I got close to 3.5x speed :)

I decided to try this out against my own Python tool for inserting CSV files, sqlite-utils.

I installed PyPy using Homebrew:

brew install pypy3

Having run this, pypy3 was available on my command-line.

I used that to create a PyPy virtual environment in my /tmp directory:

cd /tmp
pypy3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Running python --version confirmed that this had worked:

% python --version
Python 3.7.13 (7e0ae751533460d5f89f3ac48ce366d8642d1db5, Apr 26 2022, 09:29:08)
[PyPy 7.3.9 with GCC Apple LLVM 13.1.6 (clang-1316.0.21.2)]

Then I installed sqlite-utils into that virtual environment like so:

pip install sqlite-utils

And confirmed the installation like this:

(venv) /tmp % which sqlite-utils
/private/tmp/venv/bin/sqlite-utils
(venv) /tmp % head $(which sqlite-utils)
#!/private/tmp/venv/bin/pypy3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
import sys
from sqlite_utils.cli import cli
if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r'(-script\.pyw|\.exe)?$', '', sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(cli())

Then I tested an import against a large CSV file like so:

(venv) /tmp % time sqlite-utils insert pypy.db t /tmp/en.openfoodfacts.org.products.csv --csv
  [------------------------------------]    0%
  [###################################-]   99%
  12.67s user 2.53s system 92% cpu 16.514 total

I tried the same thing using regular Python sqlite-utils too:

~ % time sqlite-utils insert pydb t /tmp/en.openfoodfacts.org.products.csv --csv 
  [------------------------------------]    0%
  [###################################-]   99%
  12.74s user 2.40s system 93% cpu 16.172 total

Surprisingly I didn't get any meaningful difference in performance between the two. But at least I know how to run things using PyPy now.

If it seems like you've been seeing a lot of Ethereum co-founder and figurehead Vitalik Buterin around Twitter lately, it may be due to the influx of hacked verified Twitter accounts that have been retrofitted to resemble Vitalik's account. They've been used to share a litany of scam links to supposed Ethereum giveaways in celebration of "The Merge": the much-anticipated change to Ethereum's consensus model that's scheduled to happen on September 15.

Most of the tweets say something like "To celebrate the Merge, Ethereum Foundation giving away 50,000 ETH!", and link out to various websites that invite people to send some amount of Ethereum with the promise that they'll receive twice as much in return—a classic double-your-money scam.

At least 36 verified Twitter accounts were compromised and used for the scam, including the 6 million-follower Cityarabia account that normally tweets for Arabic-speaking fans of the Manchester City football club. On the afternoon and evening of September 14 alone, at least 195 ETH (~$314,000) was drawn in by the accounts and scam websites I found.

• Tweet by Molly White

When the "politics" were widespread civil unrest in the summer of 2020 triggered by the police murder of George Floyd, and pressure on the company to release a statement in support of Black Lives Matter, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that there would be no political discussion or activism at work, and those who didn't like it could leave.

Now, he's just announced that Coinbase will be "integrating our crypto policy efforts right into our app" by providing a rating of Congressmembers' negative or positive "crypto sentiment". He also said that they plan to "help pro-crypto candidates solicit donations from the crypto community (in crypto)", and wish to get their users to attend town hall events. "We've also added a very easy way for you to contact your member of Congress to urge them to support pro-crypto policies," Armstrong said in a video demonstrating the feature.

• Tweet thread by Brian Armstrong
• "Coinbase is a mission focused company" , Coinbase blog

If you own a bike, you need a flat-fixing kit. It’s really that simple.

Sure, maybe you’ll get lucky and get a flat close to a shop, or the buses will be running on time for once, but even with all that going for you, getting stranded across town will cost you time, money, and precious sanity.

You can put together a great kit in less time than it takes to read this guide.

by Clint

It’s been a while - both since I’ve written a post and ridden a fully loaded bicycle. I had been dreaming about this route for the past few years. Every time I would drive through the I-70 corridor in Colorado, I’d see this bike path that weaves in and out under the highway and next to the water. Very scenic despite being next to the interstate. I always wondered how far it went. Last year we drove through Independence Pass when it opened. The entire time I had wished I had a bike with me. Exploring by bike is one of my favorite ways to see a place, old or new. Everything looks so different than when you’re on foot or in the car. 

Fast forward to early summer this year. My buddy Rico was starting to get curious about what a bike tour is like. So as any good friend would do, I tricked him into going on a 200ish mile tour with 9k+ feet of climbing on loaded bikes, some of which was at altitude. Just kidding. I didn’t think the riding was anything he couldn’t handle. He regularly commutes to work by bike, 15 miles each way. We broke up the ride into chunks. 40 to 50 miles per day over 5 days with a rest day in there. Very digestible. Honestly I was hoping the tour would be 100% type 1 fun and I would say most of it was. A little type 2 fun definitely snuck its way in there. More on that later. 

Our route incorporates both of these super scenic bikeways, up and down mountains and over passes. I thought, what better bike to do this on than a Pass Hunter! It’s a versatile frame and packs up well with modern touring gear. I'll delve into the equipment in Pt. 2 of Independence Pass Hunting - coming soon!

Without boring you any further with planning details - here’s the tour broken up day by day.

Day 1 - Carbondale to Aspen to Lincoln Gulch

We started the tour in Carbondale. We were able to camp out nearby so we could get a fresh start first thing in the morning. Rico had the connections for a good safe spot to park for the duration of our tour. 

Carbondale is cute! Folks seem very happy there. The mountains are beautiful and the Rio Grande bike trail passes through the middle of town, completely isolated from cars. We topped off our coffee thermoses at Bonfire coffee and headed up the Rio Grande trail. 

The cycling infrastructure in Colorado continues to blow my mind. The trail is gorgeous and very well maintained. It passes through some very scenic farm country between mountains. 

The consistent elevation gain of the path was impressive. You can barely tell you’re biking uphill. It gets a little bumpier towards Aspen, but only more scenic. The trail takes a ridgeline that overlooks the valley. Shortly before Aspen we took a stop for Rico to throw a line in the water. He pulled a trout out probably within 5 minutes. I don’t know how he does it. 

At this point, we rolled through Aspen. Took a quick stop at a grocery store for some last minute supplies and rolled by the art museum. Rico is a structural engineer and his firm did the entryway of this building. Pretty neat. 

On the way out of town, we got to ride through some actual aspens. For anyone who doesn’t know the fun fact about aspens - an entire forest can be a single organism, similar to a mushroom or other rhizomes. 

The Rio Grande trail ends at the edge of Aspen. At this point, we transitioned onto Independence Pass. Let the pass hunting begin! The initial climb was pretty tough. We broke it up into chunks and stopped for a photoshoot at golden hour. 

The end of the first day ended in some unintended hike-a-bike. Silly Google Maps took us on a hiking trail that used to exist with multiple stream crossings. Noting this for next time - take the access road to the campground. 

Lincoln gulch is my favorite (and only) campground I’ve stayed at on the pass. We set up camp and got to work on some camp meals! One of my favorite parts of touring. End of day 1.

Day 2 - Rest day

We planned our 2nd day to be a rest day. Again - trying to have some type 1 fun. I think it was a good idea. We both wanted to adjust to altitude (almost at 10k feet at this point), hang out on the pass, do some fishing, and take pictures of cool bugs. Honestly the campground is so gorgeous, I could have absolutely nothing to do and still enjoy my time. We pulled out Rico’s vintage Olympus lens to get some vibey lifestyle shots at the campsite for y’all. Rico’s the photography buff here. I’m gonna have to direct all photography questions to him. 

Also worth mentioning, we met Captain Jack at the campground. Coolest 62 year old from Florida we’ve ever met. Captain Jack and Rico had a little fishing contest. I’ll brag for Rico - he pulled out 8 rainbow trout, 1 brown trout, and 1 brook trout on our rest day. 

A lot of “I bet you can’t pull a fish out of there” followed by Rico pulling a fish out of there.

End of rest day. 

Day 3 - Summit day and Leadville

The main reason for the rest day was to be fresh, rested, and acclimated for summit day. Time to bike up to 12k feet! I think, for the most part, it worked; however, the weather had other plans for us. To sum it up, it rained for a good three quarters of the day. Made for a lot of ups and downs, both emotionally and physically. 

Clouds broke as we summited! We met a dude, Nate, in his converted ambulance at the top and he offered us warmth, a coffee, and a photo of the two of us. Very grateful for Nate. He’s done his fair share of thru hiking and bike touring as well. It was nice to share a quiet moment with a cool guy before bombing down the opposite side of the continental divide!

Silly grins and breathtaking views down the backside of the mountain. So glad the weather cleared up enough for this portion of the ride. 

The end of our day 3 ended up being the most challenging for me. Rain picked back up just as we were entering busy roads. I didn’t quite remember the speed limit being so high and the shoulder so small on the road south of Leadville. No photos here. Just taking it one piece at a time, pulling off for larger vehicles to pass. I’ll probably skip this part of the ride next time. 

We made it into town just in time to check into our hostel, walk downtown, and eat an uncomfortable amount of carnitas. 

Pass out at the hostel and End of Summit Day.

Day 4 - Leadville to Eagle

We took our time after day 3, both to recover and enjoy Leadville. I can’t wait to go back to Leadville! The outdoors scene in town is rad. So many folks are there for the mountains and they’re intense! Can’t believe they do what they do at 10k feet. 

A couple of notable spots to stop by in Leadville. Definitely check out ZeroDay for Coffee. Hannah made us some delicious drinks and we chatted with Tony for a while about local climbing and biking. Looking forward to hanging out with these folks again soon.

As for a bike shop, I highly recommend Bici Cas. Talk to Rafa. He’s so cool. I was drawn in right away by his weird custom single speed mountain bike hanging in the window. He’s super knowledgeable about routes in the area and has a huge stock of bikepacking gear all crammed in a tiny, but well organized shop. 

Afternoon rolled around and it was time to start riding again. After drying out the remainder of our gear from the previous day, we started making our way towards I-70 via highway 24. We were more than a little tired from the day before and very excited for a mostly downhill day. We made lots of stops to check out the new scenery.

The few hills on the route definitely kicked our butts and threats of rain again in the afternoon definitely spooked us a little, but check out this cool bridge! I’d like to come back to do the ride under the bridge. 

We made it to Minturn. The bulk of the ride was over at this point. Basically no more hills to climb. “Mostly flat” according to the metric Google Maps uses for bikes. We got burritos at a shop Rafa recommended. Great burritos with cool skateshop vibes. 

After our first dinner was a turning point. Entirely type 1 fun from here. We were back down at a more reasonable elevation. It’s hard to describe, but despite being completely exhausted from the day before, we were feeling pretty buff. Neither of us were getting out of breath on the hills. So much oxygen (relatively)! Highly recommend this part of the ride. Not quite as scenic, but the riding is super fun. We alternated between bike paths and highway 6 until staying in Eagle for the night. 

We stopped at the City Market to replenish calories and commit some culinary sins. There were corndogs, grocery store sushi, several pounds of mac & cheese involved. I won’t go into detail. After that, we headed back to the hotel and turned in for the night. I enjoy staying in hotels as well as tent camping. I’ve got nothing to prove :)

End of day 4.

Day 5 - Last day!

The last day flew by. The dreamy I-70 corridor bike path day. This part of the highway is pretty in a car, but you get to see so much more on a bike. This was our easiest day mileage and elevation-wise, so we took it easy and made lots of stops.

Rico wrapped up the trip by catching his biggest dang brown trout to date! I’m especially bad at taking photos of people holding fish so please just enjoy this picture of the scenery. 

We also stopped by this spooky burnt down forest by bike path. 

Also now that we were back down to about 6k feet of elevation, there was plenty of *air* to be had hehe. Thanks Rico for the photo. 

The canyon was, by far, the coolest part of the day. Easy riding, great views, completely isolated from cars. We biked by Hanging Lake. I didn’t even know such a feature was there. Definitely going back to check this out. I think the coolest part about the bike path is how many folks were utilizing it! It makes me so happy to see so many different people out using the bike infrastructure. Folks on road bikes, rented e-bikes, old dudes on 90s mtbs headed toward the breweries. Some folks were even packrafting. Ride up to float down. 

We passed through Glenwood Springs, stopped for ice cream and jumped back on the Rio Grande trail to head back to Carbondale.

One last stop before completing the tour. While he enjoys fancier foods sometimes, Rico is a huge fan of McDonald’s. Guilty pleasure food from childhood. The last goal of our tour was to stop by a McDonald’s. Rico kind of got into the whole commuting, touring, x-biking, non-competitive side of cycling thing after a short 1 mile ride to McDonald’s. So you can say this was our longest ride to McDonald’s to date. 

Conclusion

We made it back to the car with ease. Both of us were satisfied, and excited to have completed the tour. Would I do it again and/or recommend it to a friend? Probably not, but it was definitely worth it. Mileage, elevation gains, and weather I would happily experience again. I wasn’t crazy about some of the Rt 24 interactions with cars. That was, mentally, the hardest part for me. That being said, I am very excited to explore more of Independence Pass and the surrounding side roads. I can absolutely recommend that part of the ride to anyone. The I-70 corridor cycleways are also amazing if you don’t want to deal with all of those elevation gains. 

It was great to meet so many cool people and see so many folks on the trails having fun and riding bikes.

I’ll be back with a part 2 talking about the gear on the trip and more ride report posts if you’ve enjoyed this one. 

Outside: Yvon Chouinard No Longer Owns Patagonia.

Effective immediately, 100 percent of Patagonia’s earnings not reinvested in the business will be distributed to the Holdfast Collective to help “protect nature and biodiversity, support thriving communities, and fight the environmental crisis,” according to a press release. The company has for years donated 1 percent of its sales to grassroots and environmental causes, but this shift will increase that figure dramatically. The estimated charitable outlay of the new company will be roughly $100 million a year.

Yvon Chouinard:

“One option was to sell Patagonia and donate all the money,” he wrote. “But we couldn’t be sure a new owner would maintain our values or keep our team of people around the world employed. Another path was to take the company public. What a disaster that would have been. Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility. Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own.”

Yvon Chouinard is quite a character, and I've always liked him. Patagonia's products were always a bit more pricy, but the quality is amazing and their commitment to the environment more than makes up for it.

I've you've not already watch Valley Uprising, you should. It's a great film about rock climbing in Yosemite and Chouinard plays a key part in it. He's a legend.

Hello everyone.

One clarification regarding iPhone 14 Plus. In yesterday’s update I wrote:

“The iPhone 14 Plus finds itself in a pricing canyon. It’s the third-most expensive iPhone, after iPhone 14 and iPhone SE. However, it’s just $100 less than the 6.1-inch iPhone 14 Pro.”

That should have said "It’s the third-least expensive flagship iPhone.” The broader point is unchanged - the iPhone 14 Plus finds itself in a weird spot within the iPhone line.

With that, let’s jump right in.

---

Thoughts on iPhone 14 and 14 Pro Pre-orders

Here is the current delivery dates for the iPhone 14 flagships (U.S.):

• iPhone 14 (Sept 20 to 21) – available Sept 16th

• iPhone 14 Plus (Oct 7) – available Oct 7th

• iPhone 14 Pro (Oct 13 to 20) – available Sept 16th

• iPhone 14 Pro Max (Oct 20 to 27) – available Sept 16th

Apple has embraced an underpromise and overdeliver mantra when it comes to delivery estimates for online orders. Delivery dates almost always end up being pulled forward. This may explain why delivery dates aren’t dependent on iPhone finish color or storage. Apple may be simply providing an estimated delivery range for each model that it is confident it will not just meet but exceed.

An Above Avalon membership is required to continue reading this update. Members can read the full update here. An audio version of this update is available to members who have the podcast add-on attached to their membership. More information about the podcast add-on is found here.

(Members: Daily Updates are always accessible by logging into Slack. If you haven’t logged into Slack before, fill out this form to receive an invite.)

---

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I find myself these days vacillating between a state of quite blissful equanimity (a very new thing in my life) and a state of almost existential dread. As with most humans, I suspect, this is largely affected by immediate personal circumstances — in my case, the latest trajectory of my health and/or finances. In other respects (work stress, relationships, etc) my life is pretty stable.

My state of mind seems now much less affected by my perceptions about the state of the world. Partly this is due to the realization that there is nothing much that can be done about ecological or economic collapse, about the threats of war and nuclear escalation, about the political upheavals in the increasingly unstable nation to the south, about pandemics or natural disasters, or any of the other risks we now face, day-to-day. We can learn and practice new skills, and hope they will help us navigate collapse a bit better. But the world will go on, with or without us, so I now figure I might as well just enjoy the ride, and the opportunity to witness this remarkable time in this remarkable place.

Somehow, in spite of everything, it seems to be getting easier to do so.

---

COLLAPSE WATCH

image from a new study published in Science magazine. The loss of ice, sea ice, permafrost, reefs, glaciers, boreal and tropical forests, the release of underground and undersea methane, and the disruption of air and ocean currents, all exacerbate climate collapse caused by human carbon emissions into the atmosphere

Teetering on the edge: We are currently sitting right on the edge of passing many tipping points that will plunge the globe into runaway climate change.

Civilization’s suicide: Chris Hedges explains how our civilization’s collapse will be similar in its nature and style to past collapses, but vastly greater in scale. The earth, he says, will soon not be able to support more than a billion humans. Thanks to John Whiting for the link, and the three that follow.

52 meter sea level rise?: New research suggests the vast East Antarctic ice sheet is much more vulnerable to climate change than thought — even half of it melting would submerge two billion people’s homes in the ocean.

The impact of “limited” nuclear war: A landmark study of the impact of a small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan reveals that it would produce enough global cooling and agricultural collapse to cause as much as half the world’s population to die of starvation, even in countries half a world away from the conflict.

Death by fire, death by water: Climate change is simultaneously causing the greatest droughts in recorded history across the globe, and some of the greatest and most destructive flooding.

Or death by salt: Human activity is accelerating salt pollution around the globe, far more than desalination plants can compensate for. The consequences for the health of humans and other life forms are known, but nothing is being done to address the problem. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

What is humanly possible: Hank Green describes the massive, relentless and perilous effort of thousands that went into the recent surprise climate agreement approved in the US. It’s good news, but it’s just a tiny start, and achieving anything more at any scale will be even more difficult and more unlikely.

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LIVING BETTER

cartoon by the extraordinary Michael Leunig

Our deadly western diet: Our nutrition-poor diets are, by a mile, the largest contributor to death and disease in the western world. Finally, some nations are seriously looking at a national strategy to address this massive problem.

…and how entrepreneurs can help: I’m delighted that friends of mine at 100km Foods in Ontario have won yet another award for their business connecting producers and consumers of healthy foods.

Letting midwives provide abortion services: A midwife explains how letting their profession do abortions would save time and money and make the service safer and more accessible.

Improving primary care: By their focus on just-in-time walk-in clinics and tele-health, many jurisdictions in Canada are missing the opportunity to help our citizens get more holistic health care grounded in a more thorough knowledge of each person’s health and history — something only our currently understaffed and underfunded primary care services can properly provide.

Jeremy Corbyn calls for peace in Ukraine; and we almost had it: Seeking peace, with its commensurate compromises, is the only answer, Jeremy Corbyn urged, and it’s needed now. A peace agreement was nearly signed in April, before asshat Boris Johnson sabotaged it. Johnson insisted to Zelenskyy that there not be any peace negotiations with Russia.

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POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

cartoon of the world’s richest corporate welfare bum by Barry Blitt in the New Yorker

American democracy wasn’t designed to be democratic: “The partisan redistricting tactics of cracking and packing aren’t merely flaws in the system—they are the system“, writes the New Yorker’s Louis Menand. And Chris Hedges chimes in: “A functioning democracy could easily dispatch Donald Trump and his doppelgängers. A failed democracy and bankrupt liberalism assures their ascendancy.”

The invisible empire: White Empire, controlled by the US political-military-industrial establishment, is the most pervasive and one of the most destructive empires the world has ever seen, but we have been carefully conditioned not to use the E-word, explains Indrajit Samarajiva, so we have rendered it invisible in our media and discourse. And thanks to our caste system similarly rendered invisible, we don’t notice that White Empire is substantially secured and maintained by BIPOC people.

The oppressive power of debt: Riffing off David Graeber’s brilliant book, Rhyd Wildermuth explains how debt is used as a tool of oppression — medical debt, credit card debt, student debt, underwater mortgages, and the closing off of bankruptcy options for individuals oppressed by them. Meanwhile, bankruptcy remains a simple and profitable way for corporations to skip out of paying for failed property and business ventures. Individuals therefore become slaves to the system, forced to work harder and harder, obediently, to try hopelessly to pay down these impossible debts, just like indentured servants.

Canada’s Green Party dies a slow death: The ghastly demise of Canada’s Green Party continues. The execrable Elizabeth May, having driven a huge wedge into the party by purging those demanding the party take a stand against Israeli Apartheid (which the vast majority of members supported), has now driven a stake into its coffin by calling for the expulsion of those opposed to Canada’s supplying military aid to Ukraine, and by threatening to quit (again) if the bankrupt party delays its leadership convention (which she is contending) or closes its Ottawa office to save money. She and her right-wing supporters like Andrew Weaver have wrecked the party beyond repair, so even David Suzuki has abandoned them in disgust. The party’s president has likewise quit, fed up with the infighting, interference, and lack of accountability to its members.

Corpocracy, imperialism & fascism: Short takes:

• US/NATO warmongering in Ukraine is even scaring Henry Kissinger
• The US occupying force in Syria continues to slaughter civilians
• The Atlantic celebrates the conversion of the anti-war left to pro-war advocates in Ukraine
• Top Biden advisor says if it were 40 years ago the US would have overthrown the newly-elected leftist leader in Colombia
• Murder of Antifa protester by known right-wing militia member denied and covered up by police in Portland (thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link)
• Instead of regulating corporations, the US government now subsidizes them, and the clean-up of their messes (thanks to John Whiting for the link and the 3 that follow)
• The right-wing UK government is destroying the NHS to privatize it to their friends. A backlog of seven million people has already forced 10% of the population to pay for private health service because they can’t afford to wait years for treatments.
• Food and oil cartels are making a fortune off war- and embargo-created shortages
• Charging Trump with espionage would merely embolden military intelligence’s prosecution of whistle-blowers about its misdeeds
• How warmongers have charged up anti-Chinese sentiment in the US (thanks to Paul Heft for the link)
• The Bandera “death list” of enemies of Ukraine’s right-wing government includes a lot of journalists

Propaganda, censorship, misinformation, disinformation: Short takes:

• If you insist on saying the invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” you’re pandering to CIA/Pentagon propaganda. It’s perfectly acceptable to believe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was abhorrent, and also believe wealthy and powerful vested western interests are doing all they can to provoke, extend, escalate and misrepresent the war.
• And if you think there’s systematic forced labour of Uyghur Moslems in Xinjiang province in China, you should read these reports. You are being played. And, again, it’s perfectly acceptable to deplore China’s past human rights record and also believe western interests are exploiting and misrepresenting the situation in Xinjiang to foment xenophobic anti-Chinese sentiment and support for military action against China.
• Daniel Dumbrill, a Canadian who is living in China, interviews an Aussie who dared question a spokesperson for ASPI, the Aussie right-wing “think tank” funded by the US defence industry, on false claims about China. (For a sense of life in China’s countryside, check out Daniel’s visit to a Tibetan trailer park.)
• Chris Hedges summarizes the propaganda war in the US and censorship of any unapproved and critical reporters who challenge America’s “permanent war”.

CoVid-19 becomes the pandemic we all pretend is over: Short takes:

• A terrific article on the complex challenge of identifying and treating the diverse face of Long CoVid. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.
• The Director of the US CDC, rather than resigning, blames others and “shakes up” her department for the organization’s staggering incompetence, that has contributed greatly to loss of confidence in public health leaders during the pandemic.
• BC’s provincial health officer succumbs to political pressure and abandons support for mask mandates for preventing CoVid-19.
• Death rates from CoVid-19 remain flat, at the same level they were at a year ago and two years ago before the fall/winter upsurge. The advice of competent health experts remains absolutely unchanged: Wear a mask indoors except at home, and in any crowded locations and near vulnerable people. Get all the vaccines you qualify for. Test, trace and isolate when you or loved ones get symptoms. This is not onerous or complicated, folks.

The economics of imperialism: Short takes:

• Looks like 2008 all over again, except this time it’s energy utilities and energy corporations that will require trillions of dollars in bailouts to prevent bankruptcy from reckless energy derivatives gambles gone bad.
• A great global economy primer: Who produces what, who trades with whom, what sanctions are in place and how they’re working, and what political and trade alliances are in place. Thorough, and scary. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.
• Michael Hudson on the multiple economic crises we face: His analysis runs from class war and “the problem of debt” to the causes of inflation, supply chain problems, the rentier economy, the politics of austerity, the new giveaway of Ukrainian resources to western interests, and the emergence of a multipolar world.

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FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon by Liana Finck in the New Yorker

Another perception of life in Iran: If you got a kick out of Daniel’s visit to the Tibetan trailer park (link above), check out a day in Tehran with polyglot Zoë.

With and without you: Halsey’s song and video Without You created quite a stir. If you liked the original check out the Kompa remix by Haitian musician Chemdrumz — gives the song a very different feel. Some amazing art happens at intersections!

Beaverton (Canadian “the Onion”) headlines of the month:

• “Columnist just going to re-run his ‘Nobody Wants To Work Anymore!’ editorial from last month to save the effort”
• “Canada loses Conservative leadership race”
• “1,392 Shoppers Drug Mart locations tie for ‘worst’ “
• “Pope takes over empty apology duties from exhausted Trudeau”

Can we choose not to hate?: I recently wrote a blog post about our unique human proclivity to hate. Rhyd Wildermuth also wrote about hate recently, but he thinks we have a choice not to hate. Given that he and I agree on so much, I was intrigued by this difference.

On word puzzles and roses and feminism: A lovely rambling blog post by Lyz at Men Yell at Me. Just gorgeous writing. Thanks to PS Pirro for the link.

The right way to fight for your life: Also from Lyz, the harrowing story of 15-year-old Pieper Lewis, who spent two years in prison for stabbing her rapist, and had to pay the assailant’s family $150,000 in reparations. Contrast that with Kyle Rittenhouse, the right-wing vigilante who killed two men just because they were protesting, got off scott free, and became a hero on Fox News. Something is very rotten in the state of America.

Ugly Swedish lawns: Sweden is conserving water by rewarding the ugliest unwatered died-off lawn in a contest. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

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THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

words to convey inexpressible feelings, from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

At the Pond, by Mary Oliver

One summer
I went every morning
to the edge of a pond where
a huddle of just-hatched geese

would paddle to me
and clamber
up the marshy slope
and over my body,

peeping and staring—
such sweetness every day
which the grown ones watched,
for whatever reason,

serenely.
Not there, however, but here
is where the story begins.
Nature has many mysteries,

some of them severe.
Five of the young geese grew
heavy of chest and
bold of wing

while the sixth waited and waited
in its gauze-feathers, its body
that would not grow.
And then it was fall.

And this is what I think
everything is all about:
the way
I was glad

for those five and two
that flew away,
and the way I hold in my heart the wingless one
that had to stay.

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Pretty impressive. Also, some quite nice photography, as well as detailed insights into what the new camera system is like in practice.

Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, Sept 15, 2022

Alex Usher reviews two books on the topic and offers interesting and engaging commentary, but what was of most interest to me was this remark: "The problem is that working from case studies alone tends to blind you to counter-factuals." A counterfactual (usually spelled without the hyphen) is a (generally true) conditional (if-then) statement in which the antecedent (the 'if' part') is false. For example: 'If Mars were bigger, it would have stronger gravity'. Usher writes (correctly, in my view) that overlooking counterfactuals is "a blind-spot of a lot of books". And this is important because we don't really understand things if we can't consider alternatives to what actually happened. If tuition costs had not risen, for example, would there still have been a backlash against the U.S. higher education system? How we answer this question matters. Image: NBC News.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

It brings us great sadness to share the news that FredMcD has recently passed away.

If you ever posted a question to our Support Forum, you may be familiar with a contributor named “FredMcD”. Fred was one of the most active contributors in Mozilla Support, and for many years remains one of our core contributors. He was regularly awarded a forum contributor badge every year since 2013 for his consistency in contributing to the Support Forum.

He was a dedicated contributor, super helpful, and very loyal to Firefox users making over 81400 contributions to the Support Forum since 2013.  During the COVID-19 lockdown period, he focussed on helping people all over the world when they were online the most – at one point he was doing approximately 3600 responses in 90 days, an average of 40 a day.

In March 2022, I learned the news that he was hospitalized for a few weeks. He was back active in our forum shortly after he was discharged. But then we never heard from him again after his last contribution on May 5, 2022. There’s very little we know about Fred. But we were finally able to confirm his passing just recently.

We surely lost a great contributor. He was a helpful community member and his assistance with incidents was greatly appreciated. His support approach has always been straightforward and simple. It’s not rare, that he was able to solve a problem in one go like this or this one.

To honor his passing, we added his name to the about:credits page to make sure that his contribution and impact on Mozilla will never be forgotten. He will surely be missed by the community.

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I’d like to thank Paul for his collaboration in this post and for his help in getting Fred’s name to the about:credits page. Thanks, Paul!

 

In the never-ending quest to find the perfect color scheme for any given situation at any given moment, Coolors is another set of tools to find the right shades for your application. The twist is that there’s a generator that shows you schemes based on inputs, such as a certain hue or a photograph. There is also a list of trending palettes.

Tags: color, generator

WordCamp United States was in San Diego this year, a really lovely town. It felt like a throwback because of the venue we had to limit tickets quite a bit, so it felt like a WCUS from a decade ago.

I’ll probably do this year’s State of the Word in December again with a livestream and small live audience, so for WCUS we did a brief introduction to the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release, and focused on audience Q&A. Those are always fun for me because you never know what question will come next. Here’s the video if you’d like to catch up on it:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Sept 01, 2022

I've been getting email suggesting I be more critical of blockchain and web3 technologies, though I would observe, with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, that "in their early years, major new technologies are generally accompanied by a mixture of excitement, speculation and confusion, as people sort out what the technology might be about and how it's likely to evolve. Something important is going on out there, but it takes time and marketplace experience to sort things out." Still - and here is where I think most criticism comes in - I have zero interest in what is called here an 'internet of value'. While it may be true that "contracts, transactions, and the records of them are among the defining structures in our economic, legal, and political systems," I don't think they should be, and there are many more important things in the world. But this isn't a problem with the technology, it's a problem with a world view that see things exclusively in terms of money, laws and power. Image: Tapscott, on Altoros.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Run Stable Diffusion on your M1 Mac’s GPU

Ben Firshman provides detailed instructions for getting Stable Diffusion running on an M1 Mac.

SQLite: Past, Present, and Future is a newly published paper authored by Kevin P. Gaffney, Martin Prammer and Jignesh M. Patel from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and D. Richard Hipp, Larry Brasfield and Dan Kennedy from the core SQLite engineering team.

The paper compares SQLite and DuckDB, and describes some optimization work to make SQLite perform better for analytical queries.

DuckDB is a relatively new project which is frequently nicknamed (including by this paper) "SQLite for analytics". It shares many of the characteristics of SQLite: an embedded database implemented as a header file and implementation file (using C++ as opposed to SQLite's C) with databases that are theselves single binary files.

The primary difference is that DuckDB is optimized for analytical queries: queries that apply aggregate calculations across large numbers of rows, rather than being optimized for fast scanning and lookup of individual rows of data.

I've been tracking DuckDB for a while - it's a very exciting project. If I ever introduce alternative database backends to Datasette it's top of my list of things to try.

The paper spends quite a bit of time on benchmark comparisons. To very loosely summarize those:

• SQLite out-performs DuckDB on a write transactions benchmark by 10x-500x on a powerful cloud server and 2x-60x on a Raspberry Pi, for small to large databases.
• For analytical benchmarks using the SSB (Star Schema Benchmark) DuckDB out-performs SQLite by 30-50x at the highest margin and 3-8x at the lowest.

Neither of these are particularly surprising: DuckDB isn't optimized for write transactions and SQLite isn't optimized for analytical queries.

Next, the paper explores optimizations that can be applied to SQLite to improve its analytical query performance.

One of these has already shipped! In February 2022 the SQLite 3.38.0 release notes included this:

Use a Bloom filter to speed up large analytic queries.

I had wondered at the time what the deal with this was - the paper explains it in some detail:

A key change is made to the join processing, which is to probe the Bloom filters before carrying out the rest of the join. Applying the Bloom filters early in the join pipeline dramatically reduces the number of tuples that flow through the join pipeline, and thus improves performance.

This had a pretty big impact on the benchmark:

The performance impact of our optimizations is shown in Figure 6. On the Raspberry Pi, SQLite is now 4.2X faster on SSB. Our optimizations are particularly effective for query flight 2, resulting in 10X speedup. On the cloud server, we observed an overall speedup of 2.7X and individual query speedups up to 7X

I decided to quote in full the first part of section 5, "future development", because it does a great job of describing some of the key features of the culture of SQLite itself.

5 FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

The developers intend to provide support for SQLite through the year 2050, and design decisions are made accordingly. SQLite’s code and database file format are fully cross-platform, ensuring that SQLite can run on any current or future platform with an 8-bit byte, two’s complement 32-bit and 64-bit integers, and a C compiler. Every machine-code branch in the SQLite library is tested with multiple platforms and compilers, which makes the code robust for future migrations. SQLite is also extensively documented and commented, which helps new developers quickly understand SQLite’s architecture. Finally, the developers work hard to evaluate new programming trends based on merit rather than popularity.

While the performance gap has narrowed as a result of this work, DuckDB is still considerably faster than SQLite on SSB. This is somewhat expected; SQLite is a general-purpose database engine, whereas DuckDB is designed from the ground up for efficient OLAP. Although SQLite’s OLAP performance could be further improved in future work, there are several constraints that potential modifications to SQLite must satisfy.

First, modifications should cause no significant performance regression across the broad range of workloads served by SQLite. Second, the benefit of an optimization must be weighed against its impact on the size of the source code and the compiled library. Finally, modifications should not break SQLite’s backwards compatibility with previous versions and cross-compatibility with different machine architectures

Although SQLite’s performance is a key priority, it must be balanced with these (sometimes competing) goals. We considered several means of improving value extraction in SQLite, but no single solution satisfied all the constraints above. For example, changing the data format from row-oriented to column-oriented would streamline value extraction, but it would also likely increase overhead for OLTP workloads. Moreover, drastic changes to the data format are at odds with SQLite’s goal of stability for the database file format

That section continues with this intriguing detail:

An alternative approach to improving SQLite’s OLAP performance is a separate, yet tightly connected query engine that evaluates analytical queries on its own copy of the data, while SQLite continues to serve transactional requests, ensuring that the analytical engine stays up to date with the freshest data. If the extra space overhead is acceptable, the specialized analytical engine can provide substantial OLAP performance gains.

This design has been successfully implemented in SQLite3/HE [46], a query acceleration path for analytics in SQLite. SQLite3/HE achieves speedups of over 100X on SSB with no degradation in OLTP performance. However, the current implementation of SQLite3/HE does not persist columnar data to storage and is designed to be used in a single process. Future work may explore similar approaches without these limitations.

This is the first I had heard of SQLite3/HE. It's described in this paper: Introducing a Query Acceleration Path for Analytics in SQLite3 - by Martin Prammer, Suryadev Sahadevan Rajesh, Junda Chen, Jignesh M. Patel from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Martin and Jignesh are both credited as authors on the SQLite/DuckDB paper.

It's also the subject of this 12 minute video from the CIDR DB conference.

It's not clear to me if the code for this has been made available yet. I'd be fascinated to learn more about this project.

Building Layoffs on a Healthy Foundation

Kellan provides some valuable guidance for running layoffs in as humane a way as possible.

Via @kellan

Open every CSV file in a GitHub repository in Datasette Lite

I built an Observable notebook that accepts a GitHub repository as input, scans it for CSV files and generates a link to open all of those CSV files in Datasette Lite.

Via @simonw

Vaccines

This article reports that the province expects most residents will start getting the BA.1 boosters starting in October. Note that the wording was “most residents”. There is a small amount of this vax which is going to show up in-country tomorrow, and if it is distributed proportionate to population, BC should get about 100K doses. I bet that some small, vulnerable populations — probably long term care home residents over 80 — will get shots very soon.

Feelings

This article says that people are about evenly split between worried about COVID-19 now, not worried now but worried about a fall spike, and not worried at all:

Statistics

This week’s BC CDC weekly report said that in the week ending on 27 August there were: +651 cases, +160 hospital admissions, +25 ICU admissions, +33 all-cause deaths.

This week’s report said that the previous week (data through 20 Aug) there were: +737 cases, +213 hospital admissions, +44 ICU admissions, +45 all-cause deaths.

Last week’s BC CDC weekly report said that in the week ending on 20 Aug there were: +737 cases, +180 hospital admissions, +41 ICU admissions, +33 all-cause deaths.

Last week’s report said that the previous week (data through 13 Aug) there were: +878 cases, +231 hospital admissions, +32 ICU admissions, +43 all-cause deaths.

The BC CDC dashboard says that there are 306 in hospital / 25 in ICU as of 1 September 2022.

Charts

From the VOC report:

From the BC CDC Situation Report:

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