Thursday Overnight Open Thread - September 17, 2026

Howdy Hordelings! Welcome to the Thursday ONT! Mixed bag of content for those who care. Open thread, as always. On time, as always. What's on YOUR mind tonight?

Quite the before and after

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Why did we stop building stuff with so much detail?

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Abandoned plans for a city across from San Francisco.

Developers planned a city of 30,000 people in the hills directly across the Golden Gate from San Francisco

Two Spanish-tiled stucco gateposts once stood at the mouth of Tennessee Valley in Marin County, opening onto nothing at all.

Behind them a road climbed into the hills and stopped. It had been bulldozed wide enough to carry commuter traffic, because that was the entire idea. Those gates were the front door of Marincello, a city of 30,000 people planned for the slopes directly across the water from San Francisco. In the mid 1960s it came alarmingly close to existing.

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Modesty was not a design feature. Fifty apartment towers, hundreds of houses and townhouses, 250 acres of light industry, a shopping mall running a full mile with ornamental pools and elephant trains, and a square ringed by churches and named Brotherhood Plaza. A hotel would crown the highest hill on the property. Hart costs the twenty-year build at $285 million in 1964 dollars.

An earlier draft was madder still. The Bay Area history archive FoundSF records a scheme originally drawn up for more than 150,000 residents, which the planning process eventually talked down to 30,000.

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A state appellate court ruled on 2 November 1970 that the 1965 approval could not stand and the plan would have to be lodged again from scratch. A lawyer for Gulf Oil called it silly to kill a multimillion-dollar development on a technicality. Praetzel’s answer, years later, was that the technicality in question was the law.

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Walk south from the Tennessee Valley car park and the track underfoot gets suspiciously wide.

This is the Marincello Trail, which the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy measures at 2.9 miles return with 694 feet of climb. The same data gives a typical tread of 120 inches, or ten feet of graded roadway, waiting on cars that never turned up.

So we missed out another blue shithole in California, right??

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The headline here omits a very important word.

Many Venezuelan immigrants shun Florida and turn to smaller cities in Utah, elsewhere

Snow-covered mountains ringing a valley of wide, free-flowing roads remind Venezuelan transplants that the growing suburbs south of Salt Lake City offer what Miami can’t.

One million Venezuelans were released into the United States after crossing the Mexican border during a record immigration surge, and many shunned Miami and other longtime immigrant footholds for smaller places with less established communities — a pattern found in an exclusive Associated Press analysis of fedteral data from fall 2018 to summer 2025.

These cities and towns promised better jobs, cheaper homes, less traffic and higher quality of life, outweighing Florida’s allure of tropical weather and ease of getting by on Spanish alone.

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After less than two weeks there, Vera and his mother accepted a cousin’s invitation to Utah. In the southern suburbs, with massive new housing tracts and pristine shopping centers, Vera found factory work but soon quit to turn a hobby baking for co-workers into his own business. Today he employs 15 people — many, like him, asylum seekers — at a warehouse and two bakeries.

That last sentence contains the clue as to the missing word.

Utah — known as a relatively immigrant-friendly state despite deep Republican roots and support for President Donald Trump — became a top destination for Venezuelans crossing the border, along with parts of the Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston metro areas, AP’s data show. Venezuelans also went to smaller cities including Madison, Wisconsin; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Savannah, Georgia.

It’s a pattern playing out across the U.S.: Some Cubans eschewed Florida and went to Louisville, Kentucky, and Odessa, Texas; Colombians chose the Boston and Denver areas; and Paterson, New Jersey, was the top pick among Peruvians.

These communities have both benefited from the influx of people and struggled to integrate their new arrivals.

"Struggled to integrate their new arrivals"??? How dare they not just make life easy for these "asylum seekers"?!?

Trump’s immigration crackdown instilled fear and made Venezuelans less visible since 2023, when arrivals peaked in Utah and in the United States as a whole. Everyone here seems to know someone who returned to Venezuela voluntarily because they feared being detained and deported or because they lost their work authorization.

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Arrieta’s wife — co-owner Sandy Arrieta — wanted to stay open. But he believes nothing will turn around while Trump’s in office.

“Until the government changes, the problems will not end,” said Fidel, 65, who immigrated in 1994.

That's more than enough for you to get the gist of the intention of this article. Check out the whole thing if you want more bilge.

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Saw some pushback in the comments on Tuesday against my semi-crusade against Flock. We can respectfully disagree. But you might want to skip past this segment.

Hackers find encryption keys stored on stolen Flock camera despite company's denials — group extracts more than 27,000 clips, 1.6 million images captured in a span of 21 days from the device

Flock claims that images are only briefly stored on its cameras before being forwarded to the company’s servers, but a group of hackers determined that this wasn’t the case.

Flock says that its cameras are protected by on-device encryption, and even though a security researcher noted some flaws in its system, the company said that physical access is still required to exploit them and that the images are only briefly retained on the device before they’re forwarded to the cloud. However, 404 Media says that a hacking group called stegan0gram found out that this wasn’t the case after they took down a Flock camera positioned over a roadway and analyzed the data stored inside it.

While the hacking group failed to access the most sensitive data stored on the Flock camera, they were still able to access its Android operating system and found two storage partitions, labeled “vendor” and “media.” The latter was found to contain an encryption key that unlocked another partition containing all the media files from the camera. 404 Media said that that particular Flock camera captured about 1.6 million images across 21 days, detecting around 50,200 vehicles and, more concerningly, 11 people. There were also 27,321 video clips saved on the device — MP4 files with a 1024 x 768 resolution that lasted about a second or two.

Abilities like reading license plates and describing vehicle characteristics like color, make, and model are done on Flock’s servers, but these cameras still retain some edge AI capabilities. This includes detecting people, vehicles, bicycles, and plate-like shapes, which it then crops and sends to the company servers, alongside the original images. Although the software was found to have some facial detection capabilities, the publication said that this was the stock capabilities included in the operating system and wasn’t used by the camera.

How the American revolt against Flock cameras mirrors the Boston Tea Party of 1773

A grassroots revolt against automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, has gained momentum across the United States.

ALPRs are AI-powered cameras that capture images of all passing vehicles. The camera systems turn details into datapoints searchable by anyone with access to the information.

Today, there are more than 130,000 ALPRs on U.S. streets. And more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use cameras produced by a single manufacturer, Flock Safety, which says its cameras have helped law enforcement agencies identify and arrest criminals and reduce crime.

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As a historian of the American Revolution, I see parallels between Americans’ revolt against ALPRs and colonists’ destructive and often violent pushback to late 18th-century British rule.

If this summer’s celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding failed to inspire widespread patriotism, the increasingly bipartisan revolution against ALPRs suggests Americans have not entirely lost their rebellious spirit.

Long article, but I think it's worth the read.

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Incredible surgery!

Twin sisters conjoined at the head underwent successful separation surgery

Surgeons at a children's hospital in Missouri earlier this year successfully separated infant twin sisters who had been born conjoined at the head, hospital officials announced Wednesday.

Sisters Hiyab and Wuhbto are now recovering and undergoing rehabilitation and intensive care, more than six months after their cranial separation surgery in February, the hospital said.

The Feb. 24-25 surgery, at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, took more than 24 hours to complete and involved a team of specialists across multiple disciplines.

"It is still too soon to know exactly what their long-term development will look like but what we do know is that they now have opportunities that would not have been possible without this intervention," Dr. Joanna Kemp, head neurological surgeon at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, said in a press conference Wednesday.

News video segment at the link. Photos also.

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Dino is just like the rest of us!

The T. rex had a body temperature similar to our own, study finds

Using fossilized teeth, scientists have finally taken the T. rex’s temperature — and it wasn’t too different from our own.

Researchers once thought that dinosaurs were sluggish, cold-blooded creatures. Later findings challenged that, suggesting that older dinosaurs were warm-blooded and could control their body temperature.

Most scientists agree that Tyrannosaurus rex was warm-blooded, but pinning down the exact core temperature of an extinct creature is difficult.

“We can’t just use a thermometer to do that,” said Jasmina Wiemann, a paleobiologist at Johns Hopkins University who had no role in the latest work.

DJ Doof - Random 90s Stuff Edition

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posted by Doof at 09:55 PM

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