iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

(therefore readability doesn’t matter)

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It’s like text got so long that there was a collective giving-up on actually reading anything.

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Fell St DMV also surprised me for being a suburban Safeway-tier pedestrian experience. The only way in was between cars entering. 🙃

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What do you see as the Opus alternative? I’ve seen this take a bunch, but within Claude, Fable is too expensive/overkill for most work, and IME Sonnet is not a drop in replacement for any task that requires ambiguity/discretion/domain knowledge greater than a junior engineer.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 21/09/2026

When I went to the DMV for a California ID, the guy at the counter next to me was making a spirited plea that a distracted driving citation was just a mistake. IIRC he was caught on camera but I didn’t catch the full context. I don’t think I’ve ever heard another real life human get cited.

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I’ve been spending a couple weekends building out a reasonably secure home lab. The sheer number of common daemonsets that don’t strictly need the full RBAC scope they have…

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 21/09/2026

I’m still new enough to computer glasses that I keep putting them on in my first meeting of the day, when I see my image without them.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 20/09/2026

I think a lot of of this could be fixed with kubelet/CNI/etc node level changes that make node groups a much sharper security boundary, and conventions + tooling that is much more strict about escalation paths. E.g. you should not be able to accidentally run Flux on the same node as webservers.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 20/09/2026

I'm still a big believer in Kubernetes, but 2026's security environment really stresses foundational decisions that made Kubernetes and the ecosystem appealing to use/build on. A single cluster is WAY too permeable of a security boundary in 2026 if any running container/VM gets compromised.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 20/09/2026

When I was much younger and more caffeine tolerant, I would fill up a mug with multiple espressos at work. At one point I apparently said “I can see the logs before they come in”.

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Transbay Coalition @transbaycoalition.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Greetings from MacArthur BART after the RTM event this morning! Going to a Day of Action event means that not only getting to meet cool people, but you also get some cool swag to show your support!

Three people stand in front of the MacArthur BART fair gates. In the foreground is a person wearing a mask in a yellow shirt. In the midground, there are two people holding up YES on MEASURE RTM signs.

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Jeffrey Tumlin 🏳️‍🌈 🌁 @jeffreytumlin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Bay Area transit advocates gathered signatures to save transit, and now they're delivering the vote. Want to make a difference for our region? No better place to invest your time than informing voters and networking with future leaders luma.com/connectbayar...

luma.com

Connect Bay Area · Events Calendar

View and follow events from Connect Bay Area on Luma. Organizing for the Regional Transit Measure on the November 2026 ballot. Vote Yes on RTM November 3rd! ConnectBayArea.com

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Rebecca Saltzman @rebeccaforec.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

AC Transit and Director Joel Young thought they could sweep his harassment under the rug by hiding it and then lying about it. No way were we going to let that happen. Young isn’t fit for office, and since his colleagues won’t hold him accountable, voters must. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

sfchronicle.com

AC Transit director harassed female colleague, investigation finds

AC Transit Director Joel Young, a candidate in the November Ward 3 election, was investigated for a complaint of unwanted physical contact against a female director.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 16/09/2026

I work on alignment (getting people to agree with one another).

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Cyrus Hall @cyrushall.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

This Thursday, we're kicking off the ground game for the Regional Transit Measure, with events in each of the 5 counties. There are 50 days until the election. In that time, we need to convince Bay Area voters to invest in public transit! In San Francisco? Come rally and then talk to BART riders!

luma.com

Yes on RTM Day of Action: Rally in Downtown San Francisco + BART Crawl! · Luma

We're kicking off the Yes on RTM campaign in San Francisco at the Powell St. Cable Car Turnaround! Hear from elected and community leaders about how vital it…

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 14/09/2026

Pragmatism is just a scam to make people more dependent on better outcomes.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 14/09/2026

Pragmatism is just a scam to make people more dependent on better outcomes.

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I would say generally. The sharp edge is when being fast to deliver/claim something is (seen as) more important than effective use of resources.

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(claiming ownership of something to stop someone else from taking it on, without intent/ability to follow through properly) A former director introduced me to it to describe some politics of the time, and somehow I have found a lot of use for it ever since.

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There’s a fine line to walk between upholding “if it gets past me it’s probably worth doing” and the fact that many people are often already functionally committed to doing the thing.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 10/09/2026

It’s tough to position myself as a go-to design reviewer, because very very often my review is “I disagree with the shape of the solution“, or worse, “this problem does not exist”. *drags on a cigarette* It’s all incentives, you see.

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It wasn’t just the cursed sky, it was the global deadly airborne pandemic. It was deciding to burn some lifespan of my one n95 mask, my strongest protection when I needed to be around other people, to go outside. I don’t want more of this, for anyone.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 09/09/2026

This day felt like a tipping point in a long, drawn out, and uneven apocalypse. It profoundly changed my urgency on long-term climate impact. We have had many better days since. But this is where we are going.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 07/09/2026

I think the distinction is that it’s very hard to get people to change their mind with a counter argument or evidence, but ceding intellectual ground absolutely tips more people over when a narrative is unopposed or one of multiple “viewpoints”.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 07/09/2026

I’m trying to think about how to better share photos, because I’m not anywhere near as online as I used to be, and posting them to social media ad-hoc just isn’t satisfying. Do I get a Glass account? Do I hop on the newsletter bandwagon?

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I’ve been hitting a ton of this in machine learning code, and I can’t even tell what concept or keywords is triggering it.

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My elderly mother doesn’t take transit because the time/convenience hit is substantial for almost any trip from her suburbs. It’ll take a lot of investment to change that. But she started biking a substantial portion of trips, because enough painted bike lane coverage tipped her comfort level over.

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My old hometown of Victoria BC went big on bike lanes/routes as the cheapest path to congestion-proofing, and it’s been working great at reducing VMT and delaying the decision to buy one’s first car. Meanwhile, transit is not getting as much love in funding/priority, but it’s improving.

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People have already made a lot of transit+bike points, and I’ll add: Bikes, like cars, are an individual solution so it’s _easier_ to touch: 1. If you’re willing to take more risk you can bike anywhere regardless of infra. 2. It’s cheaper for local gov to encourage biking than to fund transit.

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I wish we had more green space and it was spread a bit more evenly across area of the city, but I really love how much nice park space we have and how easy it is to get to much of it with transit or a bike.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 05/09/2026

My favourite thing about San Francisco is how easy it is to walk up a hill and suddenly feel like you’re in a separate place from the city.

A zoomed in view of tall colorful houses/apartments around Bernal Hill, seen from a distant high spot. The west curved trail up the hill is prominently visible, with some tiny people walking on it.

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I can’t help but think of the Sunnyvale crows.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 04/09/2026

The monastery has donation effectiveness easy because there’s no quantifying karma.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 04/09/2026

Reasoning about donation impact w/ small orgs is tough, because they don’t have the infra to have real data, especially around praxis if they aren’t doing food/supplies. So it’s like “is (wlog) $100 going to fund a decent bit of stuff, or will it buy a statistical +0.28 views on petition blasts?”

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 04/09/2026

I think it’s a bit funny and sad that, impact wise, a chunk of nonprofits functionally exist as “We have an email list we can send someone else’s CTA to, and it’s a high-quality mailing list because people had to be interested enough to donate to us”.

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Which is to say, I wish more advocacy cared about outcomes.

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Consolidating bus stops is super contextual around the actual impact to rider trip times, and tipping points around how frequently X buses can serve the line. Consider: - Denser low-use stops in neighbourhoods are a useful tradeoff - Downtown flat stops every 100m are a waste of everyone‘s time

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There’s a joke that everyone deserves a rapid transit line that stops at their doorstep.

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I am disabled myself and I am DEEPLY offput by the amount of knee-jerk “people don‘t need fast buses” crowd. Managing access/utility trade-offs is complicated, and if you can’t respect that, then I’m going to have trouble listening.

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