Sortition in the wild: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/snohomish-county-is-showing-us-what-civics-looks-like/ (more: https://www.snococivicassembly.org/what-is-a-civic-assembly)

#sortition #democracy

this is roughly how I feel about LLM-generated and LLM-rewritten prose: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writing-i-will (not only the title… though yes, also the title)

please consider the reader before letting an LLM touch anything that someone else has to read

#LLM

rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-ranked-fourth-among-large-cities-for-growth-last-year/

#seattle

Called my (soon to be former) HVAC vendor[1] and the call was answered by an AI human voice… that did not disclose it was an AI.

It pretended to be human. After 2-3 exchanges (as awkward as you'd expect), I asked.

I'm not sure I've ever been more ready to run away from a vendor. I escalated to a real person, who was thrilled to pass along my feedback.

1: BelRed Heating/Gene Johnson, which is one of many trade names of Apex Service Partners. fuck them.

#enshittification #hvac #seattle

in any other context, Instacart's checkout flow - silently toggling on a subscription, after showing prices - would be criminal fraud. we wouldn't use the euphemism "darkpattern."

if an individual ran this scam, they'd reasonably expect criminal charges, not a civil fine.

#instacart #darkpatterns (that are actually fraud)

Folklife Festival (Seattle) next weekend and all I want is a simple PDF schedule, or even a static web page. every year, it's the same 4000-pixel-wide timeslot-ignorant glitchfest: https://nwfolklife.org/festival/schedule/in-person-schedule.html

god help you if you want to see all the performers in the same time slot or want to read about the performers without clicking on every. single. cell.

#seattle #NWFolklife

when you run out of episodes of The Pitt, move on to med school grand rounds lectures:

Univ of Miami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=8w62yN2ZAa8 (https://www.youtube.com/@universityofmiamidepartmen7840/search?query=%22clinical%20problem%20case%22)

UCSF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOX3B_PukT4&list=PLp2l8GCZXFqSgUfwaResQ7rGwKbGIUi_m&index=15

Univ of WA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ladeedpelsk

#thepitt

Apple Podcasts (macOS 26.4.0) started playing everything an octave lower than normal, maybe even two octaves lower. playback speed was still set to 1x.

rebooting "fixed" it. a friend said he experienced the same thing earlier this month.

I'd love to understand the root cause of this bug. is there a code path that shifts pitch (and isn't exposed to the user)? some reference pitch that a caller can specify? a frame decoding bug?

#macos

for 2 measles cases, this list of exposure locations is wild: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/disease-illness/measles#toc-Locations-of-potential-exposures

2 infected people made 7 (!) visits to urgent care or emergency departments, including a 2-day hospital stay while contagious.

presumably both cases were mistaken for the flu before the red spots appeared, but who knows. based on the exposure times, it seems like Overlake may have diagnosed a case faster than UW Medicine or Kaiser Permanente.

(background: https://publichealthinsider.com/2026/04/01/two-measles-cases-identified-in-king-county-connected-to-international-travel/)

#seattle #measles

I've been trying to improve my mental model of when and how people use LLMs for text that others will read. That included asking people who sent me mostly-LLM-cleaned-up emails to tell me how they generated the text.

Other than SEO'ers churning out AI slop for clicks (which these aren't), I think well-meaning people simply don't see an "LLM voice,"[1] let alone its flaws.

They don't know that the LLM output is recognizably different. To them, it's not. …

1/2

#llm

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/magazine/chatbot-writing-style.html

"Meta itself estimated that 10% of all its revenue was coming from running ads for scams and goods that they themselves had banned: around $16 billion a year."

"Meta also estimated that its platforms were involved in initiating a third of all successful scams taking place in the entire United States."

https://80000hours.org/2026/03/robs-meta-leaked-documents-scams/

#facebook

"One of VRNW’s original founders, Josselyn often said that Whatcom County is a good place to live and a good place to die.": https://vsedresources.com/vsed-resources-nw-loses-a-guiding-light

(interested in legalizing assisted suicide for people with dementia? DM me)

#endoflife #dementia