Links for October 2022
By Robert Ellison.
SFGATE: Skyscraper with floating cube might come to San Francisco
This is an incredibly bad idea for a city with a record for skyscrapers that don't stand up straight...
San Francisco November 2022 Ballot Measures
By Robert Ellison.
- A: Retiree Supplemental Cost of Living Adjustment; Retirement Board Contract with Executive Director
- B: Public Works Department and Commission, Sanitation and Streets Department and Commission
- C: Homelessness Oversight Commission
- D: Affordable Housing – Initiative Petition
- E: Affordable Housing – Board of Supervisors
- F: Library Preservation Fund
- G: Student Success Fund – Grants to the San Francisco Unified School District
- H: City Elections in Even-Numbered Years
- I: Vehicles on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway
- J: Recreational Use of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park
- L: Sales Tax for Transportation Projects
- M: Tax on Keeping Residential Units Vacant
- N: Golden Gate Park Underground Parking Facility; Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority
- O: Additional Parcel Tax for City College
My guide to all fourteen ballot measures for San Francisco in November 2022. Hot on the heels of 8 in June. My overriding principle here is to prevent the need for future ballot measures although I can't help myself from indulging in the occasional good idea.
A: Retiree Supplemental Cost of Living Adjustment; Retirement Board Contract with Executive Director
Yes. This is cheap and makes retirement benefits for city workers more fair and predictable.
B: Public Works Department and Commission, Sanitation and Streets Department and Commission
No. We just voted to create a department of sanitation and streets in 2020.
C: Homelessness Oversight Commission
Yes. More oversight for spending on homeless services.
D: Affordable Housing – Initiative Petition
Yes. Makes it easier to build new housing in San Francisco. Seems to cut a lot of unnecessary red tape to get projects moving faster.
E: Affordable Housing – Board of Supervisors
No. This competes with D to try and avoid losing too much control.
F: Library Preservation Fund
No. I'm not anti-library, but I am opposed to ballot measures that carve out specific funding and then will need another ballot measure if anything needs to change.
G: Student Success Fund – Grants to the San Francisco Unified School District
No. Another set aside that can't be undone without a future ballot measure.
H: City Elections in Even-Numbered Years
Yes. Increased voter turnout should lead to more representative local officials. I thought I voted for this already in 2012? Unfortunately this measure also has an adjustment to keep the number of signatures required for a new ballot measure constant. I'd love to see it get harder.
I: Vehicles on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway
No. Let's keep some car free space.
J: Recreational Use of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park
Yes. As above.
L: Sales Tax for Transportation Projects
Yes. Extends an existing sales tax for transportation.
M: Tax on Keeping Residential Units Vacant
No. Could discourage new housing from being built and as written does not apply equally to all housing.
N: Golden Gate Park Underground Parking Facility; Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority
Yes. I need to make decisions about a single parking garage? This would allow the city more control, and as I want to keep JFK car free it makes sense to optimize this parking resource for people who will have more difficulty getting to the museums as a result.
O: Additional Parcel Tax for City College
Yes. This is an important resource and we need to get it back on track.
Related Posts
- San Francisco November 2020 Ballot Measures
- San Francisco November 2016 Propositions
- San Francisco 2014 Ballot Measures
- San Francisco and California March 2024 Ballot Measures
- San Francisco November 2024 Ballot Measures
(Published to the Fediverse as: San Francisco November 2022 Ballot Measures #politics #sanfrancisco #propositions #election The official ITHCWY voter guide to San Francisco's 2022 ballot measures. )
Catfood Earth 4.30
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, October 23, 2022.
Catfood Earth 4.30 is available to download.
This update fixes a couple of problems with the screensaver. It now has improved support for multiple monitors (the image will repeat rather than stretch). There was a problem with the screensaver not starting in some cases. This should now be fixed. After upgrading to 4.30 please find and run the 'Catfood Earth Screensaver Settings' shortcut to configure the screensaver.
4.30 also includes version 2022d of the time zone database.
Related Posts
Autumnal Equinox 2022
By Robert Ellison.
Autumn (or Fall) starts now (23 September 2022, 01:04 UTC) in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring if you happen to be south of the Equator. Rendered in Catfood Earth.
Related Posts
- Autumnal Equinox 2021
- Autumnal Equinox 2020
- Autumnal Equinox 2023
- Autumnal Equinox 2019
- Autumnal Equinox 2013
(Published to the Fediverse as: Autumnal Equinox 2022 #code #catfood #earth #equinox #autumnal Render of 23 September 2022, 01:04 UTC, the exact moment of the Autumnal Equinox 2022 in Catfood Earth. )
Stable Diffusion Watches a Security Camera - a short horror movie
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Friday, September 16, 2022.
A horror movie made by forcing img2img to watch a Japanese security camera over 24 hours.
The office was empty, so the main influences are sunrise and sunset and then just subtle shifts in lighting. In terms of settings, strength was 0.75 with scale of 6.6 so the animation doesn't look anything like the actual office in question. The prompt was "photo of something unspeakable lurks in the shadows of the office, high quality, cinematic lighting, subtle horror, horrifying, japanese, found footage, sharp focus, 8k, no text". I upscaled with Gigapixel AI and then added some music.
Related Posts
- A black lab chases a Roomba and then things start to get weird...
- Stable Diffusion Animation of Scale Parameter
- Style Transfer for Time Lapse Photography
- Diary of a Living Room
- Coastal
(Published to the Fediverse as: Stable Diffusion Watches a Security Camera - a short horror movie #etc #video #stablediffusion #ml #4k #animation A horror movie created by forcing Stable Diffusion to watch a random Japanese security camera for 24 hours. )
Better Rotating Outages
By Robert Ellison.
I have an idea for PG&E. We're facing the possibility of rotating power cuts this evening in California due to record heat. The California ISO has a thing called a flex alert where they ask you nicely to reduce power consumption, and I got a text and email earlier today. If the ISO calls for outages PG&E starts flipping off the switch for some blocks, and you can even look up your address to see if you're at risk.
This could be so much better.
Just keep tabs on average power consumption for each block during hot weather. And then instead of a flex alert we need a leaderboard - the blocks which save the most power are safe, and the blocks that do the worst are the first to get shut off.
Related Posts
- Pandemic Gas Mystery
- California Climate Credit
- Which PG&E rate plan works best for EV charging?
- California, I can save you billions with a small and reasonably priced computer program...
- Animation of US PM2.5 Air Pollution in 2023
(Published to the Fediverse as: Better Rotating Outages #etc #pge #power Make a leaderboard game out of flex alerts and punish blocks that do the worst instead of random power cuts. )
A black lab chases a Roomba and then things start to get weird...
By Robert Ellison.
Another experiment with Stable Diffusion (see my San Francisco skyline video from earlier today). This one uses img2img instead of txt2img. I started with a video of my dog following the Roomba around the house. I dumped all the frames out and then used Stable Diffusion with the strength parameter ramping up from 0.0 (source image preserved) to 1.0 (source image ignored) and a scale of 11.5. The prompt was "illustration of a black labrador being chased by a giant scary roomba trending on deviant art". The frame at the top maybe best captures this concept. I used Gigapixel AI to scale the output back up to 4K resolution and then added the original soundtrack.
Related Posts
- Stable Diffusion Animation of Scale Parameter
- Stable Diffusion Watches a Security Camera - a short horror movie
- Style Transfer for Time Lapse Photography
- Mandelbrot Spin Zoom
- Space Journey
(Published to the Fediverse as: A black lab chases a Roomba and then things start to get weird... #etc #video #animation #stablediffusion #4k #ml Stable Diffusion img2img generated from a video of a dog chasing a Roomba. )
Stable Diffusion Animation of Scale Parameter
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Thursday, September 22, 2022.
Here is a video created by animating the scale parameter in Stable Diffusion:
This uses the prompt "a photo of San Francisco shrouded by fog 8k landscape trending on artstation", seed 56345, dimensions 896x448 and frames that range from scale 0.0 to 21.9. The higher the scale the more literally your prompt should be interpreted.
Interesting at scale 0 Stable Diffusion seems to think San Francisco is a diverse crowd of people protesting something (and it's not wrong):
From there is settles on a foreground quickly, experiments with various numbers of Transamerica Pyramids and then starts throwing in various permutations of the Golden Gate Bridge. It eventually decides that the Transamerica Pyramid belongs in Marin and that the bridge is so iconic that the city is probably filled with red aircraft warnings lights.
I think the versions a third of the way in are the best.
Related Posts
- A black lab chases a Roomba and then things start to get weird...
- Style Transfer for Time Lapse Photography
- Stable Diffusion Watches a Security Camera - a short horror movie
- West Portal Timelapse of Timelapses
- Adobe Super Resolution Timelapse (Crystal Growth)
(Published to the Fediverse as: Stable Diffusion Animation of Scale Parameter #etc #video #ml #stablediffusion Animation of San Francisco in fog created by Stable Diffusion and increasing the scale parameter. )
Photo Sorter 1.20
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, October 2, 2022.
Photo Sorter has been updated to handle some duplicates I've been developing in Google Photos. These are pretty specific rules but might be helpful if you are trying to maintain a local archive from Google Photos via Google Takeout. You can get the latest binary and source from github (or fork away if it's not quite what you need).
The first change is that Photo Sorter now checks for duplicates in the source folder as well as the destination. If two source files have the same date taken and the same filename then the larger file is chosen as the winner and the smaller file is deleted. The filename check ignores anything in parentheses, so 123.jpg is considered to be the same filename as 123(1).jpg. This helps alleviate a fun bug where Google Photos will export via the API a different file that was originally uploaded. I've stopped using the Google Photos API for this reason, and because it will under no circumstances allow you to download a video that is the same quality as the original upload. Crazy edge case Google. Happily Google Takeout still works so I'm stuck doing it slowly and wastefully.
The second change is that if a source duplicate is found using the rules above then it will also be deleted from the destination folder (in order to be replaced by the presumed better version of itself).
Photo Sorter copies some folder full of photos and movies to a different folder with a clean structure and some de-duplication. It's been keeping me sane since 2018.
Related Posts
Book reviews for August 2022
By Robert Ellison.
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
5/5
Rising Tiger (Scot Harvath #21) by Brad Thor
2/5
