Saturday, 17 May, 2025 —
civics
My wife and I spent some time this morning over breakfast and coffee researching candidates for an upcoming local primary election. Having spent about 90 minutes looking for information, it’s clear that many local candidates do not present themselves well online.
There are several issues candidates present:
- Not having a website at all
- There are some uncontested races where there’s effectively zero candidate information available
- Expecting that Facebook acts as an effective website
- One candidate had Facebook as the entirety of their online presence
- Facebook essentially expects readers to have and use Facebook accounts and I am not enthused with Facebook tracking my activity on a candidate’s Facebook page
- Facebook pages generally are incomplete and ineffective websites
- Not looking at how the site lays out on a phone or tablet
- One candidate we were looking at had CSS layout issues where their photo and their introductory text ran together, with the photo covering up the text
- Having a single page site that focuses on endorsements, issue pull quotes, and invitations to donate, and stop there
- This is a start of what’s essential, but woefully incomplete
Particularly during a primary process, candidates not making an affirmative case for themselves are easily dismissed from consideration, even when they run unopposed. This affects incumbents and challengers alike.
Local candidate websites don’t need to be nearly as detailed or as flashy as a gubernatorial or presidential campaign. They should be present, though, and somewhat evergreen for the entire election cycle. Have the key information available for primary and, after some refreshing, general campaign voters. I prefer more detailed, but static, information about the candidate’s views than I do about seeing social media posts.
Simplicity in the presentation also benefits. I believe there’s more benefit in simpler layouts and more informational detail.
Here are the qualities I find valuable in a candidate website:
- It exists on the open web as a regular website with its own domain
- It’s viewable across phones, tablets, and laptops
- The layout can be basic, but it’s readable, images load quickly, video content is optional, and does not suffer from layout collisions, overlap, or poor contrast
- The website meets basic accessibility standards
The website provides prospective votes with core information:
- Who the candidate is
- What office they are running for
- Why they are running
- Their vision for how they seem themselves in office
- Their core issues and a summary of positions
- When to vote
- Donation and volunteer opportunities
As mentioned above, the candidate website does not stop there. The website also provides deeper background for voters:
- The candidate’s biography and qualifications for office
- Deeper articulation of their core issues
- What perceived benefits do they want to continue or improve upon?
- What problems do they want to tackle
- Not only do I want to see what the issues are for the candidate, I want to understand their perspective and framing of those issues
- Debates and campaign appearances, past and present
- Particularly for debates, when there are any, links to transcripts and recordings are very helpful
- News articles and other media appearances
Local media is stretched thin. For a lot of this cycle’s races in our area, there’s not much in the way of debates, candidate questionares, or endorsements. Candidates should help fill their prospective voters in and a substantial part of that is a competently designed informational website.
Campaigns have outreach options. Text messaging registered voters is obnoxiously present and persistent. Mailers introduce a candidacy and remind voters about key issues and voting dates. Campaign events can offer volunteers and donors camaraderie, coherence, and community. Debates help establish common ground and contrasts between candidates. But, those are all incomplete and shallow.
Any political candidate should have some manner of website. Good candidacies have good websites, though. Deeper websites force a deeper level of thinking, articulation, and engagement between a candidate and prospective voters. That’s what I want to see and consider when I’m evaluating candidates.
For me, if a candidate doesn’t have a website informing voters of what they stand for and why they should earn a vote, I am skeptical the candidate has thought through and can articulate those points to themself and their campaign.
Saturday, 1 March, 2025 —
links
generative-ai
iA, developers of iA Writer and iA Presenter:
Tech companies big and small sell AI as something that thinks for us. It does replace thought with statistics—but it is not intelligent. No one knows what the future will bring. But is a future without thought a better future?
Now, with a tool that might help us think… How about using AI not to think less but more?
There are two primary areas I am investigating using generative AI tooling with, writing and software engineering. This is true for both work and at home. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the evolving possibilities are, and I’m still building a habit of reaching for the tools in order to learn how best they’ll work for me.
The questions and examples in this article are a critical pivot in generative AI’s use from, “let it think for you”, to, “here’s how to leverage generative AI into higher quality writing”. That’s a bit different in approach than how I think generative AI is commonly used.
I am way more comfortable using generative AI as a reviewing tool, for help in unsticking things, or spotting problems vs. “doing the work for me.” I can easily see using similar approaches to edit and improve my general writing and my software development.
On the software engineering side at work, my engineering organization is strongly encouraging the use of tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT and is providing licenses for their use. The key suggestions are working with GitHub Copilot in an IDE and ChatGPT elsewhere for generating code, troubleshooting code, explaining code, and brainstorming.
The institutional sense is these tools are roughly equivalent to an exuberant, but inexperienced, intern. Accordingly, the guidance is to delegate work to the tools, but thoroughly validate the results. I think this recommendation is a correct approach. Another, and where I’m finding more natural alignment with is using these tools for review and editorial feedback. The iA suggestions here will help inform how I approach prompt writing and what I’m looking to get out of code generation, to the point where I may build a shell first, then run snippets by and seek improvements.
Similarly, Writing-wise, I’ve made some use of the Apple Intelligence writing tools and had a niggling sense there was a better way of handling their use than I have been so far. This post has just such an example of comparing Apple Intelligence writing tools output against the original and then reviewing a change-by-change comparison. I like that and have an easy way to do that in BBEdit. As with software engineering, it feels more congruent to my way of working.
Saturday, 7 September, 2024 —
transplant
Aria Bendix reporting for NBC:
…two months later, Bennett Sr.’s body rejected the heart and he died at age 57. In a paper, his doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center explained that his body had likely produced too many antibodies that fought off the new organ. A drug he’d been given may also have increased the odds of rejection, and a virus in the pig heart further complicated matters.
Three other patients have followed in Bennett Sr.’s footsteps and received pig organs, most recently a pig kidney transplant in April. Together, they represent the pioneer patients of the burgeoning field of xenotransplantation. For their families, three of which spoke to NBC News about the experience, the journey came with a roller coaster of emotions, from uncertainty to blind hope — and, ultimately, admiration for their loved one’s decision.
…
None of the patients survived more than three months. To the public, that might seem like failure. But to the families, the transplants accomplished their goals: to buy their loved ones more time and advance research that could potentially save lives one day.
This includes Rick Slayman, whose transplant I linked to earlier news items (one, two), although Slayman’s family did not contribute to Bendix’s reporting.
Xenotransplantation, in this case, pig hearts and pig kidneys, is an amazing scientific breakthrough. These transplant families have been through a lot and, it is amazing to me how supportive they are of their loved ones living a little bit longer — days or weeks — to move the medical science forward.
As ever, the defining need is more available donors to help wait list patients. It’s a hard story when health declines so much, in part because tranplant wait times can be so long for suitable matches, particularly for heart and lung transplants, that someone who needs a transplant would no longer qualify medically to receive one.
My hope is over the next few decades there are multiple improvements that allow improved xenotransplantation, cloned human organs, an increase in deceased donor donation viability, and, plainly, more folks willing to donate altruistically while living for kidney or part of their liver. Alongside that, better medical advances to reduce the need for transplants altogether, less terrible and more effective forms of dialysis. May progress continue.
Thursday, 18 April, 2024 —
tech
Sean Hollister:
In 2020, we wrote how coding bootcamp Lambda School seemed like a bit of a bait-and-switch. Four years later and one rebranding to “BloomTech” later, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is finally slapping it on the wrist – it’s permanently banning it from issuing any more student loans, fining the company and its CEO $164,000, and releasing some students from some of their debt.
Why? Among other deceptive practices, the “Bloom Institute of Technology” didn’t call them loans. It advertised a way for students to get high-paying tech jobs “risk free” with “no loans” by paying 17 percent of their future income for five years – rather than the $20,000 sticker price of tuition.
But those Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs) were definitely loans, the CFPB has decided, since Bloom was earning an average finance charge of $4,000 on each one, students could default and get sent to collections if they failed to make payments, and Bloom was turning around and selling those student debts to investors for $7,000 to $10,000 a pop.
What a reckless and abusive business model. I’ve worked with several fantastic software engineers that came out of code schools. The practical focus of these programs is incredibly beneficial, but there’s zero reason a program like this has to be run as a for-profit endeavor as opposed to being a certificate program administered through community colleges.
Monday, 8 April, 2024 —
photography
Mostly cloudy solar eclipse at 91 percent coverage
Here in Williams Township, Penn., we had a maximum of 91 percent coverage from today’s North American total solar eclipse. We’d held onto eclipse glasses we picked up in Montréal, Québec in 2012, where we were present for a clouded-over Transit of Venus. The morning started off sunny, but around 1 PM, clouds started moving in. By the time the eclipse started here, it was iffy that we’d be able to see anything. So, we were feeling a bit of cosmic frustration.
Thankfully, at 3 PM, we were able to see the eclipse through some gaps in the clouds. I’d still love to see totality in my life, but I’m pretty pleased at how some photos in the front yard turned out. The benefit of the heavy cloud cover is it rendered the eclipse visible through the clouds and, therefore, able to be photographed easily without filters.