Luis Villa
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lu.is
Luis Villa
@lu.is
5.1K followers 1.7K following 5.5K posts
Programmer-turned-lawyer, trying to build human(e) futures.

Day job: SonarSource. Boards: Creative Commons, OpenET (open water data), CA Housing Defense. Also: 415, dad. Past: Wikipedia, Moz, 305

Also: https://lu.is + https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief
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lu.is
Nerd conferences used to be different. Good to know American engineers have always been slobs though. (About a 1926 standards meeting, mostly between Europeans and Americans, in New York and Philadelphia.) #standards
Picture of a book’s text. The text reads: In February, le Maistre informed his American co-organizer about the packing instructions he planned to send the many "European Engineers of world wide fame" who soon would be "em-barking by the Cunarder 'Andania'" to attend it.In light of the comparative informality of most American engineers and the conflicting demands of customs elsewhere, le Maistre wrote: I am advising [the Europeans] to bring: a. Evening dress b. Smoking dress c. Morning coat for official opening and that sort of affair. Foreigners as you know, use a tailcoat a great deal, which corresponds to the French. d. No high hat & I am telling the ladies [accompanying wives of standardizers] no furs are necessary.
January 2, 2026 at 4:28 PM
lu.is
So now I know: blame the Germans. #standards
Picture of a book, open to the following text: The German innovation that generated the most enthusiastic response from the national secretaries, and that was copied worldwide in the 1920s, was the practice of publishing each DIN standard as a separate numbered document, often with separate subsections, that could be sold in whole or in part to interested firms.'3 Today, this form of standards publication is a global genre. In fact, such documents (now often electronic) are what most people involved with private standard setting consider standards to be.
January 2, 2026 at 4:18 PM
lu.is
Secret Santa brought me this extremely nerdy book. On page 8, I learned that ISO is HQd in the same office park as Sonar. After Christmas I will demand to learn why no one told me this 😂
Picture of a spread open book. The title visible on cover and spine is Engineering Rules: Global Standards Setting since 1880, by JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy. Text from a book. Highlighted is the text “in an unremarkable building near the Geneva airport overlooking a suburban train station and a highway cloverleaf”
December 25, 2025 at 11:54 PM
lu.is
A screenshot of a “conversation” with Claude, indicating at the top that the model is Opus 4.5. In the conversation, the typist asks about bike infrastructure changes of the last half-decade, and in response Claude says “the transformation is remarkable—I was last in Paris in 2018 and it was still quite car-dominated”
December 14, 2025 at 7:29 PM
lu.is
Today in “metadata is hard”
A screenshot from a book information site showing the cover of a book and metadata about the book. The book’s title is “Backstreet Boys: the Illustrated Story”. The picture of the cover shows the author as “Sam Hughes” but the metadata shows the author as “qntm”, the pseudonym of an author of science fiction.
November 27, 2025 at 1:36 AM
lu.is
Calexit when
A screenshot of the New York Times “spelling bee” application, showing that it insults the great state of California by saying that “hella” is not a word
November 25, 2025 at 4:45 PM
lu.is
Original post: plasmatrap.com/notes/affmiu...
November 23, 2025 at 6:40 PM
lu.is
“Luis why are you so angry about human drivers” still haven’t seen a Waymo drunk drive at speed, with no front plate, the wrong way up my residential street across from a school. Thankfully I was not on the sidewalk next to this.

Also no bodega cats were harmed.
A car with a crumpled front end and airbags deployed, backed across a sidewalk.
November 22, 2025 at 6:53 AM
lu.is
A coffee cup with a label from “Park Coffee” indicating it was bought from a small S.F. cafe chain.
November 9, 2025 at 7:08 PM
lu.is
I had been mostly avoiding that temptation, but then right after you skeeted that @adapalmer.bsky.social dropped “and here are four books on the history of patronage” and
“Car dangerously swerving off the highway to take an off ramp at high speed” meme, where the main highway is labeled “renaissance historiography”, the car is labeled “me”, and the off ramp is labeled “history and sociology of WEIRD gift economies”
November 5, 2025 at 4:54 PM
lu.is
Pictured: 48 Hills, pondering upzoning
A gargoyle at Notre Dame, with hand on chin, pondering something awful. In the distance stretches a terrible city that no one wants to live in because it is so dense and walkable.
October 11, 2025 at 10:08 PM
lu.is
Sunday update: MOAR SHEEP
A dog staring down 20 sheep on a green field. The shepherd is on the other side of the sheep, waving their crook. In the distance is a wooded hillside.
October 5, 2025 at 5:40 PM
lu.is
My MIL grew up on a sheep farm, so I am doing some Extreme Grass Touching today at the National Sheepdog Finals in farrrrr northeastern California.
A huge open sky over a field of grass. In the foreground, the backs of a warmly-dressed family are visible, looking out into the distance. In the far distance five sheep are being herded by a single sheepdog.
October 4, 2025 at 6:11 PM
lu.is
Here’s the key data point; I admit some of these numbers are so huge I question the data quality but the direction is exactly what you’d expect:
A chart showing the following text: SFMTA found that instances of speeding fell at 15 corridors with speed cameras On a single day before implementation compared to a single September day after implementation. Table showing 15 corridors where SFMTA conducted a speed analysis before and after speed cameras were installed. Instances of speeding fell at every single one. Table with 3 columns and 15 rows. (column headers with buttons are sortable) Corridor % of drivers speeding before cameras % of drivers speeding after cameras Geneva 31% 3% Alemany 26% 5% Bayshore (SB Only) 21% 3% Monterey 17% 3% Bryant 15% 7%
October 4, 2025 at 4:42 PM
lu.is
#solarpunk short stories that wrestled with deeply reduced compute budgets would be very interesting.

Original post: tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_n...
September 21, 2025 at 6:41 PM
lu.is
🆒

Original post: mstdn.social/@winderful/1...
September 21, 2025 at 1:36 AM
lu.is
Original post: mastodon.social/@gvwilson/11...
September 20, 2025 at 9:57 PM
lu.is
September 20, 2025 at 6:33 PM
lu.is
This is a very good ruling, on the face of it.

I’ve long thought that a missed opportunity for libre software (particularly in the context of LLMs) was emphasizing that democratic accountability can’t happen without code transparency.

Original post: mastodon.social/@dcabo/11522...
September 18, 2025 at 3:37 PM
lu.is
I wonder if this from @grimalkina.bsky.social is part of why so many senior devs are enjoying AI right now: they know their positions are (relatively) secure so they *feel* this as primarily a time of experimentation and upside.

Original post: masto.machlis.com/@smach/11522...
September 18, 2025 at 3:33 PM
lu.is
Going to be putting this one in a slide deck soon, I suspect

Original post: shrimp.starlightnet.work/notes/acl265...
September 14, 2025 at 7:17 PM
lu.is
This is interesting but not surprising. Real heads will recall the similar “government copyright licensing offices lose money” and “museum copyright licensing offices lose money”.

Original post: hachyderm.io/@jedbrown/11...
September 14, 2025 at 6:55 PM
lu.is
I would read a book on why this human+tech centric style (visible in S.F. both here on this 1920s car dealership and in Rivera’s Pan American Unity) went out of style. Anyone have any pointers?

(Also, it’d have been fun if the Abundance guys were hanging out with artists instead of… ya know.)
A sculpture above a majestic doorway. The Cadillac logo sits between two reclining men. The men are holding a wheel and matching large gear, as well as other mechanical implements like anvils and wrenches. They appear serious but satisfied, gazing into the distance.
September 9, 2025 at 10:33 PM
lu.is
FYI, Pennsylvania folks.

Original post: mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/1151586...
September 6, 2025 at 7:28 PM
lu.is
I am cautiously pro-LLM in my own work, but collectively I fear the car is the predictive historical model: small wins for individuals + huge wins for a handful → massive externalities and collective action problems that will take generations to fix.

Original post: urbanists.social/@straphanger...
September 3, 2025 at 3:22 PM