David Faden

@util.bsky.social

572 Followers 2272 Following

Father, husband, software engineer, and analyst, interested in California native plants, Bayes, utilitarianism. Trying to stay curious about many things.

The pop-up has a flag connected with each language, starting with the French flag. The language names are: Français English Deutsch Italiano Español Català Occitan Brezhoneg
Google search results for [sunset time] no longer show the sunset time onebox but instead show an AI Overview?
Pinkish purplish thistle flower
Some form of selective signal enhancement has been found in animals ranging from crabs to birds to primates, suggesting it is an ability shared with our last common ancestor, which was roaming around about 550 MYA. The earliest manifestation of this "data control" ability was a rudimentary form of attention, a process that helped manage the onslaught of sensory information besieging an exploring hunk of cells. A signal-enhancing process appeared early in evolution to help organisms sort out which of all the stimuli bombarding them might be more relevant for survival (better to give priority to information about an approaching threat, meal, or mate than to much else) and has been conserved across all life forms, stemming from this early organism. Steven Wiederman and David O'Carroll at the University of Adelaide in Australia discovered that in the modern-day dragonfly brain there is a single visual neuron that selects one particular prey-like visual target and follows it, completely ignoring another. This is interesting not only because it demonstrates that dragonflies have a form of competitive selection, which is required for visual attention, but also because a selective attention process is accomplished by a single cell. In vertebrates, selective signal enhancement evolved into what we now call attention...
Yellow flower with a yellow center. Common woolly sunflower.
Yellow flower(s) surrounded by green leaves. Grindelia
Teeny green leaves, teeny purplish flowers on a teeny plant with a strong smell.
Measuring the weight before squeezing out some toothpaste: 2.6 oz.
Pinkish green petals around a purple orange lined center of an Epipactus gigantea flower, another bud waiting to open
Pipevine swallowtail caterpillars nibbling on partly eaten Aristolochia californica leaves.
Monarch butterfly caterpillars (Danaus plexippus). If you look carefully, you'll find a smaller one.
Screenshot from the Lidl cloud site. It says: Create customer account Select one of the countries in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) or the Netherlands. If your company is located outside the DACH region and the Netherlands, contact us for further assistance. Business accounts can only be used for business purposes. Private use is currently not possible.
Messy rotationally symmetrical sketch.
Cistanthe grandiflora flowers with sunlight shining through them.
Clusters of purplish flowers on thin stems above bunches of frilly leaves in a hellstrip. The lid for a water meter is visible in the background.
Rows of pennies, standing up, some corroding. In the middle, a wheat penny.
Strawberry flower -- white petals, yellow core -- surrounded by three dark green leaves, with reddish stems and lighter leaves visible in the background.
Purplish stems and green leaves, against a yellow measuring tape. Two new shoots have grown around an inch from the closest node to where I made the cut. The original stem beyond the node is starting to dry up.
Baby blue eyes, starting to open.
Gaps between gray bushes and grass filled with goldfields.
Small yellow sunflower-like flower with succulent looking leaves next to a curb
Four bright yellow petals with a mess of darker orange stamens in the middle. One of the leaves has a dusting of pollen.
I typed "counter-clockwise". Gmail suggests simplifying the sentence by replacing it with "clockwise".
Golden yellow buttercup flower.
http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html says "Not Found. The requested URL was not found on this server."
Water droplets on a bush poppy leaf. Other leaves branch out in the background. The green fuzz on the bottom left is a deer plant (Acmipson glaber). The green fuzz on the bottom right is California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum). I think this might be the first time that I've typed "Eriogonum fasciculatum" without making a mistake.
Green strawberry leaves lit by a camera flash, surrounded by brown soil, with the remnants of a puddle from watering.
Circles in circles, Moire-like, with a 4x4 grid of larger ones, smaller ones repeating
Temporarily Offline Internet Archive services are temporarily offline. Please check our official accounts, including Twitter/X, Bluesky or Mastodon for the latest information. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Two green leaves popping out of the ground with prominent parallel veins. Taken on October 20th.
Seeds in cells mixed with soil. An almost empty bag of Idaho fescue seed in the background.
Grass sprouts emerge from potting soil amongst wood chips that look large due to zooming in.
In life and business, the person with the fewest blind spots wins. Blind spots are the source of all poor decisions. Think about it: If you had perfect information, you would always make the best decision. In a poker game where you could see everyone's cards, you'd play your hand perfectly. You wouldn't make any mistakes.
Power lines cross white clouds and a blue sky.
Screenshot that says "Listen", "Play", "What did you hear?", parts of the UI for a Korean learning game.
Do you live in CA and grow plants? Take our 20-min survey and you can have the opportunity to win a $10 gift card! ELIGIBILITY: • You live in California • You grow plants in a garden, farm, or plot • You would like to learn more about gardening for wildlife
Warning message: "Heads up! WebContainers require modern Web APls that likely aren't supported by your browser. Either open this page in a Chrome, or download this sandbox from StackBlitz and run it locally. You can dismiss this warning to see the code, although you'll likely see unexpected errors."
Teeny green sprouts in a tray of soil in a grid
Blue sky save for a streak or two. Not sure whether those are real cloud trails or lens flare from the sun.
Rows of umbrellas hang from wires, bright solid colors: orange, blue, fuchsia, green, yellow. The GIF zooms in on a yellow one.
Fremont
Tubular yellow flower with red-orange spots near the center. Teeny hairs around the edges. A few holes chewed in it.
What role do you think international advocacy played in getting your sentence reduced and, ultimately, in securing your release? Is there anything specific that you think was particularly helpful? International attention was what made them not murder me in captivity. I was taken along with a fellow humanist who was later released, so it was immediately made public. Were that not the case, I would have been vanished just like many other abductees who have yet to be found. It's most often powerful individuals in government, with dangerous ideologies, who abuse government capabilities for private or dogmatic agendas or politics. Many have vanished without a trace in such circumstances; bodies are never found, and the state keeps mum. The advocacy kept the authoritie. acting as if it were protocol and paperwork, while in reality they were preparing me for slaughter. They knew it meant death taking me where they took me, and they said it to me, confident that I would not survive to tell this.... We're currently at the Supreme Court to determine if abduction and smuggling from point A to B, and trial with the laws of point B, is legal and legitimate, since 1 have made it out alive.
A face made out of black and white squares.
A wasp chews on a green blade of Junegrass, then flies with away with the piece it cut away.
What you see when you win: "YOU SAVED HIM.... THIS TIME... HA HA HA"
A time series plot of the clicks per second
A cross section of a tule stem showing the hollow columns within.
A small brownish bird with a white stripe above its eye and a grayish chest enjoys rolling in some dry soil.
Coyote brush cuttings in a pot of soil, green leaves and stems.
Hairy green leaves behind yellow ray florets around yellow disc florets on Heterotheca sessiliflora
Purple ray florets surround the yellow disc florets.
Orange yellow California poppies surrounded by stems from some non-CA poppies.
A dark-eyed junco sits on a sign near the Los Altos Heritage Orchard and sings.
A row of social media icons from Sam Liccardo's homepage, including a link to Bluesky.
An inaccurate FAQ. What is the Verification Code (control number) listed on Form W-2? The verification code is no longer in use. We do not require this entry within the program.
Long, slender green leaves. Yampah!
Screenshot from terminal saying "BUILD SUCCESS"