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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · 21d

Random thought of the day:

Centralized, convenient, authoritarian, manipulated, low quality
(X, Meta, Reddit)

always wins and marginalizes

Decentralized, slightly inconvenient, democratic, organic, high quality
(BlueSky, Mastodon, web forums)

Seems to sum up the entire history of the internet.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · 28d

That's prob a silly anecdote and tangent to the broader issue of media literacy, critical thinking, and engagement with society overall. Obviously there's a wide distribution within each gen. But yeah, I also worry about how that distribution looks for gen z and later wrt all the areas I just listed

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · 28d

It's weird and uncomfortable trying to gauge how much is every generation's blind snobbery vs. how much is reality. Gotta admit, the stories about avg zoomers being tech illiterate bc they grew up on mega-dumbed-down iDevices radically undermine the expectations for the future I had 15 yrs ago.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · 29d

New thought after seeing latest POI photo:

After that oval address, and with FBI in charge... is there any scenario where perp turns out to be someone apolitical or on the right, and that info is accurately relayed to the public?

That I can't really imagine it shows again how far gone we are.

brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Sep 11

POTUS gives address explicitly blaming "leftists" while manhunt is ongoing and no suspect ID'd. Then rattles off list of political violence that excludes the most recent major incident - MN in June - which saw 4 D *legislators*/family shot. You know, actual direct political violence/intimidation. 1/

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Sep 11

That a POTUS would do this, let alone it being unremarkable in the scheme of things, is such a perfect illustration of how far gone we are. Hard to imagine coming back as a society from this fascist-leaning Idiocracy within a generation. 2/

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Sep 11

POTUS gives address explicitly blaming "leftists" while manhunt is ongoing and no suspect ID'd. Then rattles off list of political violence that excludes the most recent major incident - MN in June - which saw 4 D *legislators*/family shot. You know, actual direct political violence/intimidation. 1/

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Sep 1

The Gary, SD, tornado on 6/28/25 settled into a state of laminar perfection starting a little over halfway through its life cycle.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Sep 1

Guys, I think we might've needed the gatekeepers :(

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Aug 22

I hope so tbh, and I live in the middle of OK.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Aug 22

As a TL cleanse from today's photogenic Dakotas bonanza, here's Gary 6/28 (so 7 Dakotas bonanzas ago?) around its peak drillbit stage.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Aug 19

Wide shot of the 6/28 Gary monster shredding trees north of SD-22 with easily the loudest roar I've heard firsthand.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Aug 16

The 6/28 Gary, SD, tornado reaches peak 🐍 just before crossing Hwy 22.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jul 12

No, but I seriously doubt it's about public safely. More likely, law enforcement has direct access to the WEA system and choose to use it when one of their own is victimized. We've had many similar alerts in OK when a suspect is loose who injured a cop, but rarely or never for other loose suspects.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jul 11

The OK one just now was sent as "extreme," the highest level otherwise reserved for TOR (e.g., SVR is a lower tier). Exact same thing has happened 10x over the last decade here, including overnight.

They've given ppl no choice but to disable all categories.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jul 11

Absolutely sickening a week after Kerr Co. These cretins are directly responsible for normies turning off WEAs, and I can't blame them.

WEA is functionally dead until the adults get a handle on it.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jul 8

The Gary, SD, storm on June 28 appeared smaller than most tornadic supercells I've seen on the Plains -- more in line with the summertime minisupercells Iowa and other parts of the upper Midwest are famous for.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jul 5

A few highlights from the initial Clear Lake, SD, storm on 6/28/25. This was about 90 minutes before the Gary monster developed with a new, trailing storm just a few miles away.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jul 2

...and of course now with the ostensible death of DOGE and MAGA civil war, any hope of convincing the holdouts has gone up in flames. The dominant SM platforms have a stranglehold on ppl like nothing else in modern life ever has. $45B was an absolute steal in hindsight.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jul 2

I'm not usually the boycotting type for "the owners kinda suck" situations like Chick-fil-a. The Elmo shit during the election and DOGE, knowing X was a major part of his arsenal, was so clearly 10 tiers beyond that. Shouldn't have even been a dilemma for anyone who touches atmos sci...

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jun 27

Good question. Not sure, but thankfully even if the "official" version is just 5 non-lagged members, it's straightforward to create a time-lagged version by combining members from the past X runs. My guess is that it'll be done in some capacity.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jun 27

Selfishly, I agree and have plenty of reservations about this plan. OTOH, familiarity is the one criterion that the newer system will always lose on, even if it's objectively 5x better... so we'll have to rip off that band-aid someday.

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jun 27

Either way, the potential switchover at least looks substantially less dire to me with a true mixed-physics (including multiple independently-developed schemes) REFS ensemble than it would with one that only uses initial condition perturbations for ensemble spread. 7/7

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jun 27

If REFS replaces HREF next year, we'll have to see whether its specific param. schemes complement each other as well as HREF's.

Simple example: does it have both an "undermixing-prone" (NAM3km) and "overmixing-prone" (HRRR) member? How about outflow-prone microphysics vs. the opposite?

6/

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jun 27

The crucial good news: the proposed REFS has physics diversity WRT both PBL and microphysics parameterizations -- see attached table from 2025 HWT SFE ops plan.

Based on what we found in the HREF paper I linked earlier, this is likely a substantial component of HREF's useful spread. 5/

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brettjrob.bsky.social @brettjrob.bsky.social · Jun 27

That's the crux of the HREF vs. unification debate. And it's tough when the baseline everyone has grown used to is a highly dispersive pseudo-ensemble.

We now expect to see extreme possibilities across various dimensions represented.

But HREF's design probably isn't sustainable long-term.

4/

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