Jed Davis 🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸

@xlerb.bsky.social

1120 Followers 296 Following

[he/him] [📍 San Francisco] [sad about computer, sad about politics, FIXME more topics go here]

Old black&white photo of a soldier on horseback, with a rifle almost as long as he is tall strapped to his back. (Spoiler: it's from 1938, he's Polish, and that's a wz. 35)
Fivey Fox, bespectacled cartoon mascot of politics website Five Thirty Eight, declares that "chaos reigns" while surrounded by US maps with some states colored blue
✨ AI Overview The meme about carrying a propane tank on a bicycle is a joke about *mutually assured destruction*, *forcing cars to give cyclists space*, and *extreme bicycle commuting logistics*. The core joke revolves around leveling the safety playing field against aggressive drivers: • The Logic: Cyclists joke that while drivers usually win collisions, strapping a volatile propane tank to a bicycle frame means "if I'm going down, I'm taking everyone with me". • The Result: Drivers reportedly give bikes a much wider, more respectful berth when they think a close pass could trigger a massive explosion. • Real-world vs. Internet: While it started as a theoretical "pro-tip" image macro and discussion on forums like r/fuckcars, people occasionally post actual photos or videos of heavy utility hauling (like full propane or fuel canisters on cargo trikes) as the ultimate chaotic-neutral commute. For a look at the humorous ways internet culture pokes fun at fuel logistics and vehicle interactions: (image cuts off here)
Fake screenshot from Disco Elysium: RHETORIC [Heroic: Failure] – Alright, here we go. We're devoting all your available brain cells to coming up with a question about Air Canada. Scratch that, to coming up with *the* question about Air Canada, the alpha and omega of Air Canada questions, and that question is: 1. - (Whisper.) "Why am I stuck in a middle seat with no room for my femurs?" 2. - Oh god, that's bad. Surely I can think of something better.
A 2D space of AI opinions, with overhyped/transformative on the X axis and bad/good on the Y axis. I'm in the transformative+bad quadrant but not very far from the center. The space is divided into 30 Voronoi cells, colored but not labeled; I'm at the more-bad less-transformative end of the one I'm in. Text follows: You are... The Org Chart Survivor (patron saint: Ethan Mollick) Your company made you 'AI Lead' on top of your actual job. You use it, it helps sometimes, and you've stopped trying to explain to leadership what it can and can't do. You run little experiments and post the results. Just try things, you keep saying. Just try things.
Tightly cropped screenshot of a Bluesky post, cutting off the poster's name and showing only three lines: The "Replied to a blocked post" indicator; A label: "Made over 100 replies yesterday"; The text: "Nobody f****** cares" (asterisks in original).
Seven of Nine, looking grim, holds a big futuristic gun in each hand, both pointed at something or someone left of the viewer. The word "no." is superimposed in big red letters.
Star Trek Voyager frame: Tuvok, wielding a bow and with a quiver of arrows on his back, on some earthlike planet, running towards the viewer with Neelix at his left side and Chakotay behind and to his right.
Shiny new Muni bus stop sign for the 43 Masonic and 44 O'Shaughnessy (southeast bound), at Lawton and 7th
T.J. Rumfield, Colorado Rockies №7, upside-down during his dramatic dive/fall into the dugout catching a foul fly ball. His face is slightly visible at the bottom, and his legs are dramatically above the railing. He's wearing a purple jersey and white pants.
The map mentioned in the post; see the Wikimedia Commons link for description and attribution.
Star Trek Original Series title screen but edited so the title is "starlight was my mother and my father was the dark". (The image is the Enterprise orbiting retrograde around a weird purple-and-green planet.)
Now it's a DS9 episode title, and it says “Needle and Worm”. Toto, I don't think we're in Dahkur Province anymore.
Edited Star Trek title cards continue. This one is from Voyager, titled "The Colony" (which probably isn't a real episode but might be the name of something else) and it's a forward ventral view of Voyager.
Star Trek The Next Generation title frame, edited so the title is "Not Like the Others". (The Enterprise-D faces the viewer, with the usual starfield background.)
Star Trek Original Series title frame, edited so the title says "An Insurmountable Skullfort" which is not actually a TOS episode (I think?)
An engraving of Irenaeus, the second-century theologian, with "laser eyes" superimposed.
A leopard, head resting on the backs of its forepaws as it lies semi-prone in an odd position as only a cat would do, glares at the viewer.
Comic book panel: two soldiers carrying rifles face the viewer, respectively saying “hey hey, look who it is” and “the ‘press’” (with “press” scare-quoted). There's a tank behind them and what might be bombed-out buildings in the background.
Photo of my TV, with the disclaimer from the aforementioned ad freeze-framed; text follows: Not authorized by a candidate or a committee controlled by a candidate Ad paid for by California is Not for Sale, No on Steyer for Governor 2026, a Coalition of Housing Advocates, Labor and Small Business. Ad Committee's Top Funders: Californians for Resilient and Affordable Energy, No on Steyer for Governor 2026, Sponsored by the California Electric Utility Industry Labor Management Cooperation, PG&E, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245; California Chamber of Commerce; California Association of REALTORS.
A paperback book with a warped cover: "DCE/RPC over SMB: Samba and Windows NTÂŽ Domain Internals. An expert guide on improving efficiency and security on Windows NT", by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (yes that's all one person's name).
A frighteningly large bird leans over staring into the eyes of a woman with an SPCA badge, captioned “what you did there, I see it”
A frighteningly large bird leans over staring into the eyes of a woman with an SPCA badge, captioned “what you did there, I see it”
A drawing of Bert from Sesame Street, looking frazzled and holding an old-style phone receiver, captioned in French “je téléphone à la police”
Some very fluffy cumuli, like white cotton candy, in the distance past treetops and powerlines.
Grainy black&white image of a tuxedo cat peeking its heat out of a basket, with caption "I'm surrounded by morons."
Categories • Drugs not assigned an ATC code • Abandoned drugs • Beta-Hydroxyamphetamines • Fluoroarenes
An anthropomorphic cat with gray fur, wearing the uniform of a Starfleet Lieutenant (science division), seen from the shoulders up.
Itanium Sales Forecasts, Servers, $bn/yr The "Actual" line is at the bottom of the chart, with a series of decreasingly exuberant predictions moving down towards it over time.
Your ΔE_{OK} JND 0.0045 Okay this is genuinely impressive. You're well below the standard JND of 0.02. The CIE should be sending you a job offer. Or at least a certificate. Button: Share result Button: Again. I can do better.
The Duolingo bear says, "There is no hope for us."
The brown waters of the mighty Schuylkill River, with some apartment buildings and trees in the background on the left bank. This is the view facing downstream from the Manayunk Bridge, between Northwest Philadelphia and Lower Merion Township in Montgomery County.
A cargo ship with many containers on it, moving eastward with the Marin Headlands in the background. The ship has large letters M S C on it, and the cargo containers are mostly yellow with some maroon
The Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide (Specifically, an image of the front cover, with a photo of the computer from a jaunty angle and an abstract illustration of papers and charts in the background.)
A scenic view of the Marin Headlands from across the mouth of the bay. Some plants are flowering in the foreground, and the far coastline is obscured in ground fog.
A simple protest sign that says "abolish ICE, dismantle DHS"
A woman with long blond hair sings into a microphone. A series of blunt-ended metal cylinders hang from her necklace, and several more are strapped to her upper arms. (Eurofans might recognize the singer as Nevena Božović, representing Serbia in 2019.)
Cropped screenshot from KSP. A spacecraft has entered orbit around the moon Minmus, and the orbit is pretty weird: it's roughly a square. The corners are rounded, the sides aren't straight, and the exact shape varies from one orbit to the next, but much more square than anything in space should be. The predicted trajectory is traced in bright magenta, with "Pe" and "Ap" markers at the apsides.
Scan of two pages in an old book; it's all handwritten in cursive and is difficult to read. It's labelled “Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu” (State Archives in Poznań). The text is a series of numbered paragraphs, from 14 to 22, and one may notice that the first words of each look the same. On careful inspection the text is in the Latin alphabet (i.e., not Cyrillic); if the viewer knows enough Polish, they can identify that as the language, and if they spend enough time staring at the repeated text in the first lines they might be able to guess that the year is 1820. If fluent in Polish, which I am not, perhaps one could read more, but it may be a painful experience.
Jacob Misiorowski of the Milwaukee Brewers
A path between two wooden fences turns into stairs going up a hillside, but it's completely blocked by fallen branches. Locals might recognize it as the Oakhurst steps.
Screenshot of a power outage map for San Francisco. There's a lot of red and orange: most of the Richmond, a lot of the Sunset, the whole Haight / Cole Valley / Duboce Triangle / Hayes Valley area, also parts of SoMa and Civic Center, some spots in Chinatown and North Beach… I'm probably missing something. Anyway, it's bad.
2025 Year in Transit: I was in the top 10% of GO riders this year N, 44, L Cartoon snail with a crown floating over it Icon and name of the app "Transit"
Annorax, the Krenim captain from that Voyager two-parter where he's going around retroactively deleting stuff from time (a technology which is clearly established as a torment nexus that ought never have come into being).
Duolingo screenshot, cropped: Falstaff the bear exclaims, in Polish, "Nie pozwalam!"
Pope Leo XIV, standing in the aisle of a normal passenger airplane, holding a baseball bat while several people take photos.
A baking sheet with 8 drop biscuits on it, but they have chunks of turkey sausage in them, to such an extent that they might be more sausage than biscuit, also they're kind of spiky, and the whole photo has an ominous aura.
6 horizontal stripes: dark blue, black, maroon, yellow, white, cyan
Fort Point, nestled under the Golden Gate Bridge, seen from the southwest
A foggy night sky, over the tops of some 2-3 story buildings. There's a fuzzy glowing area in the fog, a light bluish green, the kind of color that perhaps reminds one of toothpaste. There's also part of a tree in the foreground.
Photo of me from the shoulders up, taken from a low angle. I'm wearing dark sunglasses, a baseball cap, a bright orange t-shirt, and a backpack. Behind and above me is a flag, partly hidden behind my head, but there are rainbow stripes along the bottom, the rest of the background is white, and there's a red star in the place you'd expect for the California flag. Behind the flag is a clear blue sky.
A Romulan ship from Star Trek Online, specifically a Praetor-class Command Warbird Battlecruiser, a.k.a. The Screaming Chicken for its, uh, interestingly avian visual design
The flag of Newfoundland and Labrador, as in the Canadian province. It's low-res and fake-wavy, as befits a screenshot of an emoji.
My hand putting a ballot envelope into the slot in an outside ballot box. The envelope has the address of the San Francisco Department of Elections.
A sign with a huge illustration of a wasp and the text "CAUTION! active wasp nest, avoid area." The sign is a laminated printout stapled to a wooden stake and the whole thing is tilted about 20 degrees to the left. The out-of-focus background suggests this is in a park, and the sign has the San Francisco Recreation & Parks logo in the corner.
A billboard with text “Droids ship software while you touch grass”, a logo like a pinwheel, and the name Factory, with a photo of grass as the background
the "sickos: yes" meme but the person's head is replaced with the head of the bear from the California flag (tilted up to face the speech bubble), the moon is replaced with the flag's red star, and the shirt now reads "sickos republic" (the latter word in the flag's distinctive style)
Black-and-white image of an older Bela Lugosi, facing the viewer looking grumpy and making a weird gesture with one hand, superimposed over an overhead view of some bison
Dathon, the alien captain in the ST:TNG episode Darmok, saying: "Ben Shapiro, with the lumber"