activescott's Notes

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STIHL

and development in
the region’s most populous counties (King, Pierce, and Snohomish)
has led to an expansion of impervious surfaces, which in turn
increases stormwater runoff and degrades water quality from
pollutant loading. Comprehensive restoration plans and policies
have been developed to address water quality degradation
associated with urban development and increased stormwater.
The Puget Sound Urban Tree Canopy and Stormwater Analysis
Project is designed to enhance the discussion around those plans
and policies, with information about the role tree canopy plays in
managing water quality and quantity in the Puget Sound region.

Key findings from the comparison, presented in further detail in this report include:
1. In nearly all modeled scenarios, i-Tree Hydro yielded lower runoff volumes, and therefore a lower benefit of tree canopy than WWHM.
2. Increase in tree cover over impervious surface results in decreased runoff volumes.
3. Development that includes tree retention results in reduced runoff volume compared with development without tree retention.
4. Scenarios where tree canopy is replaced with any other land cover type, including herbaceous layers or impervious area, result in
increased runoff volume.
5. Areas with higher existing tree canopy coverage experience a lower magnitude of runoff volume when tree canopy is reduced.

With expertise from urban forestry program and policy managers, supplemented by analysis from i-Tree Hydro, decision
makers can more effectively factor in the impact of a decrease in tree canopy and an increase in impervious surfaces in the planning stages
of development projects involving changes to land cover. Including tree canopy in the discussion opens the door for forward-looking
strategies, including forest retention and canopy enhancement as a complement to mitigation strategies in a particular jurisdiction

King Conservation District is a nonregulatory, special purpose district, funded by you, with a mission to promote the sustainable use of natural resources through voluntary stewardship in King County. We provide technical assistance to private residents in forest management, farm conservation planning, wildfire preparedness, and streamside and shoreline enhancement. We also work with cities and other organizations to support community gardens, urban forest canopy, and local food systems. You don’t have to go it alone, your local conservation district can help.

Google, clearly, knows what it’s getting into. This story from The Times on Wednesday reports that Google, working with Intel and Sony, is also working on a competitor to Apple TV (and thus the iTunes Store for video). The unofficial partnership Apple and Google forged a decade ago grew during a period when the two companies were focused on very different markets. Now, their sights for the coming decade are on the same markets: mobile computing devices and entertainment. Post-PC computing, if you will.

Apple faces more decisions than Google in such a war, because Apple has products that use Google services; Google doesn’t have products that use Apple services. Those rumors that Safari and/or MobileSafari might switch to Bing as the default search engine? I give more credence to them now. The problems for Apple there are that (a) Microsoft is every bit as hell-bent as Google to take on the iPhone; and (b) Bing, improved though it may be, is not as good a search engine as Google.

I can’t see Apple building its own search engine, but perhaps they really are building their own maps service — hence their purchase of PlaceBase last July.

AI creates the reverse problem. In the AI age, the buyer risks giving away knowledge, just in order to use what they bought.

You essentially pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable: the proprietary knowledge you must reveal to make that intelligence useful. The better you want the model to perform, the more of that knowledge you have to feed it!

Over time, the information asymmetry becomes increasingly skewed. The seller learns more and more about you as you use what you purchased, while you learn very little about what the seller is learning in return.

That is what I think of as the Reverse Information Paradox.

Patents solve one aspect of Arrow’s paradox. They let an inventor disclose an idea without simply giving it away. The Reverse Information Paradox needs its own equivalent.

While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation, and to reserve the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data. If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself. Therefore, it's imperative that we distribute the learning infrastructure to every firm so that they can control their own learning loop.

In the cloud era, enterprises accumulated data. In the AI era, they accumulate learning. The trust boundary must evolve accordingly, from protecting information to protecting the mechanisms through which organizations learn, adapt, and compound intelligence. There are a few things every enterprise must do to ensure this:

• Control: Create your private evals, because evals define what “good” looks like inside the organization. Also, retain ownership of your organization’s memory, traces, feedbacks, decisions, and institutional context, and ability to use outputs of models from your own tasks and queries.
• Capability: Build your own proprietary learning environments within the tenant boundary to train or tune models, where models learn against real workflows without exposing the company’s knowledge.
• Choice: Ensure the orchestration layer is decoupled from any single model. Ask yourself: If any one model you are using is taken away, do you still have the ability to operate and optimize for your evals using other models? Does your company “veteran” capability remain with you even if a given “generalist” model is taken away?
• Cost: By decoupling the orchestration layer, you are also able to bring together context, models, and tasks in the most efficient and cost-effective way without sacrificing quality.
• Compound: Bring these four together and you create your own continuous learning loop (i.e. hill climbing machine) that will allow your AI investments to compound the value of your firm.

Black Plastic Connector with Two White Tabs (Fig 6).

The two white tabs within the top of the black connector must be compressed. Then the black connector can be pulled over the white tabs to remove the hose (Fig 7).

Tips for removing: Push one of the white tabs in and twist the black connector slightly. This keeps the first white tab pushed in. Then push the other white tab in and remove.

A flat head screwdriver may also be used to push the white tabs in on each side. Lightly pull down on the black connector while pushing in the white tabs.

When installing a new hose, ensure that black nylon hose is threaded tightly into the black connector or leaking may occur.

According to a 2022 review study in the Journal of Economic Literature, there is overwhelming causal evidence that shows that the CAA improved air quality.[78]

According to a 2011 study by EPA, when compared to the baseline of the 1970 and 1977 regulatory programs, by 2020 the updates initiated by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments would be costing the United States about $60 billion per year, while benefiting the United States (in monetized health and lives saved) about $2 trillion per year.[79] In 2020, a study prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated annual benefits at 370,000 avoided premature deaths, 189,000 fewer hospital admissions, and net economic benefits of up to $3.8 trillion (32 times the cost of the regulations).[80] Other studies have reached similar conclusions.[81]

Mobile sources including automobiles, trains, and boat engines have become 99% cleaner for pollutants like hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and particle emissions since the 1970s. The allowable emissions of volatile organic chemicals, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and lead from individual cars have also been reduced by more than 90%, resulting in decreased national emissions of these pollutants despite a more than 400% increase in total miles driven yearly.

A 2018 study found that the Clean Air Act contributed to the 60% decline in pollution emissions by the manufacturing industry between 1990 and 2008.

Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on December 17, 1963

Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives

They include $7m for 878, a “leading British and American think tank” devoted to “the rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration”.

On Wednesday, German chancellor Friedrich Merz responded to the prospect of grants to Maga-aligned groups in Berlin by saying: “I do not ‌want the American government or institutions close to the government to interfere in German ⁠elections.”

A state department spokesperson said that the DRL grants would “continue to undergo the Department’s standard and rigorous vetting process by grant professionals” and that decisions were still under “active deliberation”. They added: “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities. “

The grants are part of a broader shift that has caused dismay among veterans of the state department. In interviews, five former officials suggested that there has been a months-long effort by Trump-aligned individuals in the state department to subvert normal funding procedures and allocate US taxpayer money to conservative and Maga-aligned causes in the UK and Europe.

A former US official who reviewed the allocations called the lack of procedure around them “outrageous and absurd”.

“Sole source awards require significant legal justification to avoid required competitive processes,” they said.

“They are usually given to entities with unique capabilities that are hard to find elsewhere. But in this case I would argue that these entities are being funded to subvert legal and competitive processes.”

Another said that the sole source grants laid out in the document amounted to “horrible stewardship of US taxpayer money.”

The plans are laid out in a congressional notification seen by the Guardian, which documents how the state department intends to spend a sum of money that was allocated last year to a branch of the state department called the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL).

878 has yet to list any specific initiatives, but says that it is focused on “mass migration”, “warfighting” and “rejuvenating energy abundance for urgent re-industrialisation”, as well as “Judeo-Christian culture”.

So when he released his book, literally titled Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life, I asked him what motivated him.

"Mostly anger at the wellness industrial complex," Emanuel says. He says the wellness industry is selling people all kinds of things that are expensive and clinically unproven, pointing to the latest peptide trend, whole body scans and "all sorts of supplements" marketed as anti-aging elixirs.

And though the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, he points to evidence that people who are in the habit of eating ice cream have a lower risk of metabolic disease, despite the fact that it has lots of sugar and fat. Researchers have dubbed this the "ice cream paradox." There's data from 2015 that suggests "that ice cream is actually pretty good at preventing development of Type 2 diabetes, and dairy in general is good at preventing Type 2 diabetes," Emanuel says.

• High intakes of olive oil (as the principal source of fat), and a plant-based diet: vegetables (including leafy green vegetables, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers), fresh fruits (consumed as desserts or snacks), cereals (mostly whole grains), nuts, and legumes.

• Moderate intakes of fish and other seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products (primarily cheese and yogurt), and red wine.

• Low intakes of red meat, processed meat, refined carbohydrates, and sweets.

The Mediterranean diet is associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality in observational studies.[12][13] A 2017 review provided evidence that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart disease and early death;[14] it may also help with weight loss in obese people.[15] The Mediterranean diet is one of three healthy diets recommended in the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, along with the DASH diet and vegetarian diet.[16] It is also recognized by the World Health Organization as a healthy eating pattern.[17]

A 2017 review found evidence that practice of a Mediterranean diet could lead to reduced risk of cardiovascular diseases, overall cancer incidence, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and early death.

A 2023 review provided evidence for a reduction of mortality and cardiovascular disease risk in women on a Mediterranean-type diet.[39] A 2024 meta-analysis found that adherence to consuming these foods was associated with reduction in cardiovascular disease risk.

An updated review in 2021 found that the Mediterranean diet is associated with a 13% lower risk of cancer mortality in the general population.

According to a 2013 systematic review, greater adherence to a Mediterranean diet is correlated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease and slower cognitive decline.[52] Another 2013 systematic review reached similar conclusions, and also found a negative association with the risk of progressing from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's

Propagation

A great future starts with trees—BIG trees. Plant one and help fight climate change for a thousand years.

Redwoods and Sequoias for the Pacific Northwest

1Password for Claude lets you authorize Claude to complete browser-based tasks that require an account login. This is useful for things like booking travel or managing online accounts.

According to 1Password, approved credentials are delivered through a secure channel and injected directly into the destination page. The password, one-time code, and other secrets never enter Claude’s context, memory, or Anthropic’s systems.

Instead of granting ongoing access to a vault, Claude requests the specific login items it needs for a task. The user can approve or deny that request with a biometric prompt, and the permission lasts only for the current session.

1Password can also broker access across multiple websites during the same task, allowing Claude to complete a multi-step workflow without stopping for a new login each time.

The launch also introduces what 1Password calls Agentic Mode.

When a compatible AI agent takes control of the browser, the 1Password extension automatically locks down the vault so that only the credentials explicitly approved for that task remain available.

It requires the 1Password desktop app and browser extension, along with the Claude desktop app and browser extension.

Support for payment cards and identity information is planned for a later update.

The Anthropic partnership was first outlined in March, when 1Password said Claude would gain consent-based access to vault items.

The Unified Interface For LLMs

OpenRouter charges a 5.5% ($0.80 minimum) fee when you purchase credits. We pass through the pricing of the underlying model providers without any markup, so you pay the same rate as you would directly with the provider.

if you choose to use your own provider API keys (Bring Your Own Key - BYOK), the first 1M BYOK requests per-month are free, and for all subsequent usage there is a fee of 5% of what the same model and provider would normally cost on OpenRouter. This fee is deducted from your OpenRouter credits.

xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets. One user reported running it in their home directory and seeing it upload "my SSH keys, my password manager database, my documents, photos, videos, everything".

This X1200-c1 case is designed for the raspberry pi 5 X1201 ups shield only, it can fully accommodate the X1201 and the Raspberry Pi 5, with space reserved on the top for mounting the Raspberry Pi 5 Pip boards, such as the X1001, X1000, X1004, X1003 and M901 etc.

Note: Due to the height limitations of the housing, although the X1201 also supports external switch, but no holes of 12 mm in diameter have been provided for the mounting of an external momentary switch.