Happy #NYC #CongestionPricing Eve!
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There's about 100 people in below freezing temperatures at 60th and Lex to celebrate, also a few counterprotesters.
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Cars cross 60th St and pay the #CongestionPricing toll that kicked in at midnight.
Loudest cheers are whenever a bus passes by.
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Some profanity aimed at NJ Gov Phil Murphy for all his (failed) last minute lawsuits to try and block #CongestionPricing
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An ambulance crosses into the #CongestionPricing zone. EMS and FDNY response times have gone up over the past decade because of increased congestion - the toll should help speed them up:
https://abc7ny.com/post/nyc-emergency-response-teams-set-record-slow-times-due-increased-congestion-report/15331864/
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I've uploaded my photos and videos from tonight's #CongestionPricing launch to Commons; you can find them in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:New_York_City_congestion_pricing along with other folks' media. All are available under a 
license that allows for free reuse (usually only requiring attribution)
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Streetsblog has a really nice explainer and summary for everyone who hasn't been closely following the #NYC #CongestionPricing saga: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/01/05/congestion-pricing-has-begun-here-is-the-only-explainer-you-need
MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners: Resources, links, projects, and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes on the public interwebs
Using Python uv tool as a replacement for Poetry for a small Python utility I'm writing. It feels a lot like Rust's Cargo.
All that I can say for now is that it is certainly a better experience than setting up a virtualenv manually.
I am writing this proprietary tool for a team of JavaScript developers. I think they will feel that it is just as easy to use as npm/yarn or whatever is the new hotness this week.
Yes, I keep coming back to the thought which is expressed here...
Before You Can Have Smalltalk, You Must First Defeat Capitalism. - Matthew Gaudet:
https://www.mgaudet.ca/blog/2024/10/28/before-you-can-have-smalltalk-you-must-first-defeat-capitalism
"If you want to build a future that involves beautiful systems like Smalltalk, you must first rebuild the economic environment wherein it could be built. Wherein it could succeed!"
A look at Uber Shuttle, the shared bus service that has rolled out in over 20 cities and completed ~30M trips globally, as Uber awaits approval in Bengaluru (Anisha Sircar/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2024/uber-shuttle-india-shared-bus/
http://www.techmeme.com/241207/p8#a241207p8
Food, meat [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I made a "savory pumpkin pie" for Thanksgiving dinner. It contained bacon, onion, rosemary, cheese, and a bit of black pepper and cayenne. I think it turned out pretty well!
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Pie in pan on oven. The pie is covered with cheese.
Problems with Free and Open Source Software
https://njoseph.me/blog/posts/foss-problems/
My last blog post for September. After not writing any blog posts for 4 years, I wrote 4 in one month!
New blog post!
Using small AI tools on Debian GNU/Linux
https://njoseph.me/blog/posts/small-ai-tools-debian/
I am using the word #AI as it is meant to be used, as click-bait. 😉
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^ This blog post was made possible by notes taken in my @TiddlyWiki file. It would've felt like too much work to write otherwise. Assembling a blog post from a bunch of tiddlers + a little editing is quick and easy.
I just realized that I can't have both speech-to-text and text-to-speech working simultaneously in this setup. If I install the package `sox` on Debian, my speech-to-text setup works, but it breaks the speech-dispatcher somehow, so can't do text-to-speech.
Did anybody figure out how to get both of them working? i.e. Piper and Whisper
Edit: I think there is a problem with how Pied uses sox.
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If you have a problem using #Pied with Firefox Reader Mode, install this Firefox extension as an alternative.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-aloud/
It uses the browser's local storage to store the Piper voices and runs entirely within the browser.
check out this beautiful post by @jimmyhmiller on What It Means To Be Open
I have started quoting liberally in my linkblog (subscribe via RSS).
Earlier, I was only writing my own summary or opinion of the subject, but quoting adds more context. This is inspired by the writing style of Pixel Envy blog. https://pxlnv.com
New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2024) https://bits.debian.org/2024/07/new-developers-2024-06.html
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The true, tactical significance of Project 2025; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/
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An X-ray of a broken femur. On either side of the fracture is a elephant (cropped from a medieval illumination) facing one another, in the livery of the GOP logo.