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it still makes me sad that twitter is a bad place now. it used to be a good place, and the world would be better overall if it was still a good place. Merry Melancholy Christmas, I guess.
Christopher Schmidt
Public posts from @crschmidt@better.boston
Latest posts
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@ crschmidt.net If you want to have the best chance of me seeing replies to my bsky content, you should follow @ bsky.brid.gy , which will then mean that your replies will syndicate to my bsky notifications.
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@ crschmidt.net (I haven't exactly been active on Mastodon or Bluesky; my most recent set of posts has been half just testing out bridgy to make sure it's working. But social networks, as implied by the name, have a strong network effect, and for better or for worse, Bluesky is where a lot of the network energy is at the moment.)
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There has been a significant shift in people to Bluesky in the past few weeks. Because I am 100% the type of person who uses social media for the dopamine hit that I get from posting there, regardless of how badly I feel about that from a rational perspective, I expect that this will result in me posting more there. You can follow @ crschmidt.net to see that content mirrored on the fediverse.
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"Over the past year, the E-bike Lending Library has loaned bikes more than 500 times, with borrowers traveling more than 16000 miles since the program began. ... [this year, borrowers who later purchased] will travel more than 328,000 miles on e-bikes." https:// communitypedalpower.org/blog/2 024/10/celebrating-one-year-of-the-e-bike-lending-library/
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So, here's some math. The E-Bike Library has had an average of 97 loan requests per month since the start of April. 60% of those loan requests are for cargo bikes. If I were to loan all bikes for a week at a time (as i'd really like, both for borrowers and my own sake), this would mean I'd need around 20 cargo bikes. In reality, I have 8 good ones and 2 mediocre ones that I prefer not to loan. Not…
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My guess would be that Waymo is safer for cyclists than your average human-driven car; most negative cyclist/Waymo interactions I have seen reported appear to be cases where I would be surprised if a human driven vehicle would do better, and the incidents that do happen seem more minor than the things we see regularly between regular drivers and cyclists on the streets of Cambridge. But it's hard…
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I think that most of the evidence is that Waymo cars are driven significantly more safely than the average human-driven car. I think there is evidence that Waymo is worse about its interactions with cyclists than it is with other cars. This is a thing that is harder for some good reasons, but I hope is a significant focus for Waymo, especially as it continues to expand operations in San Francisco.…
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It is amusing to me that I still regularly bump into random cases where knowing the EPSG code for the "Google Web Mercator" projection is useful to me, despite not really working in web mapping for the past... 15 years.
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I am so bad at categorizing bikes in any useful way. Trying to talk about the difference in the seating position of the Aventon Level versus the Soltera, or the difference between the Radio Flyer L885 (fixed forward handlebars) versus the GSD/HSD (tool-less adjustable handlebars with a wide range of motion) is so hard for me, and I don't have any good answers.
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Since I just activated a "free trial" for shopify, sharing the pricing options that are presented for shopify customers.
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When I was in 8th grade, I researched on the internet what went into making a fertilizer bomb on the internet. Complaining that an LLM-style tool (whether ChatGPT or Twitter's latest "Grok" whatever) lets you get information that you can get in any number of other ways strikes me as silly. Filtering the outputs of LLMs (which are largely just trained from public content that is accessible in many…
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Applying the same rules and expectations to cyclists as you do to drivers makes no more sense than applying the same rules and expectations to pedestrians as you do to drivers. A shared set of expected behavior is good, but the risk created by a pedestrian crossing a crosswalk without coming to a complete stop is different than a driver doing the same.
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Good morning. This morning, I was taking a bike ride out to the end of the Minuteman and back before work, and as I arrived at the end of the path, I received a calendar alert on my phone for therapy. So I sat down in a park in Bedford Center, did therapy on Zoom via my cell phone tethering, and then rode back into the office to start my workday. There is nothing special to this story. I just felt…
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Sad to learn about the passing of Susan Wojcicki following a battle with lung cancer. Susan took on the position as CEO of YouTube shortly after I started, and I found her to be a thoughtful, kind, and empathetic person to head the team in a complex environment. I met her several times, and she was really good at making me feel positive about the work environment we were in. May her memory be a…
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CNN says it's # TeamWalz . Vibes stay winning.
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But someone in a leadership position acknowledged the harm, acknowledged that there were obviously changes that the officer could have made (e.g. one rec was to simply turn on the car's lights if it needed to be parked in the bike lane), and said that they would personally take steps to correct the officer's behavior to avoid future negative interactions. When I submitted the complaint, my…
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I did not appreciate the fact that the officer parked in the bike lane (even if he was "on a call" while he was watching baseball on the TV in the police vehicle, he could have just pulled 10' forward!); and him repeating several times "You've really got nothing better to do, how sad" was off-putting. But I will say that "taking 60 seconds out of my day to move a large hazard out of a bike lane so…
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A police officer was parked in the bike lane. I asked him to move, and he did, but in doing so was then a jerk to me about "having no life". I filed a complaint with the police department Professional Standards complaint form. I got a call 2 hours later from the Deputy Chief of Patrol Operations. He apologized, said (based on my report) the officer made several mistakes, and said he'd have a…
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Got a ride around Somerville from Coach Balto in the library Bunch Cargo trike tonight. (For those who don’t know, Coach Balto is a major figure helping drive forward bike buses nationwide.)