wollman.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy - Profile | ThreadSky

Got a completely content-free autoreply from my representative, House minority whip Katherine Clark, which is so long delayed after whatever communication I originally sent to her office that I have no idea even what the context was. The autoreply text is about NIH, which is probably not what I […]

submitted 11 minutes ago • 0 comments

Next week I will be driving to Lake Placid to watch the Skeleton (and Monobob) World Championships. The last time I went there was for the World Cup races in December, 2019, and it was on the drive back home from that trip that I learned that Marie Fredriksson had died, which is still the only […]

submitted 2 hours ago • 1 comment

On encryption backdoors: Emergent Harms in the Security Group at the University of Cambridge have put out of a researcher paper around how over half of all cybercrime court cases in the UK are prosecuting UK police officers for abusing systems access […] [Original post on cyberplace.social]

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

Happy First Radian Day, to those who celebrate. This is the 58th day of the year. 58 ≅ 365.256/2π. That is, it is the day during which the path traced by the Earth around the Sun, starting from the beginning of the year, is momentarily the same length as […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

[satellite doom post] Just had a meeting with my group of collaborators working on calculating collision timescales of satellites and junk in orbit. I keep convincing myself "oh I'm exaggerating it can't possibly be that dangerous." But uh. It's really bad, guys. I'm not going to say any […]

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

[uspol] Nobody who follows a plushie on Mastodon needs to be lectured about this, but if you need a citation for your uncle or neighbor on what people outside the US think: Americans, you have made yourself the hideous villains of the free world. People in the many countries that are happier […]

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

The MassDOT Title VI (civil rights) email footer is written in 11 different scripts, but one of them doesn't render for me. I have support for Portuguese, Spanish, simplified and traditional Chinese, Russian, Haitian Creole, Vietnamese, French, Italian, and Arabic, but the next-to-last one just […]

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

The fact that there are different amounts of snow left on the roofs of adjoining buildings of the same age, construction, solar exposure, and heating system bothers me greatly.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

There's a lot to be said for graham crackers. First and foremost that they would horrify Sylvester Graham.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

It should be obvious now that what #Trump and #Musk are doing has nothing to do with "efficiency" or reform or any other potentially laudable goal. It's destruction. It's sabotage. It's an attempt to dismantle the U.S. system of government before anyone can stop them. Act accordingly.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Drives me absolutely nuts when a well-meaning colleague responds to a help ticket with sincere but half-remembered misinformation.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

A key observation from Henry Farrell some weeks ago: "The result is that X/Twitter is a Pornhub where everything is twisted around the particular kinks of a specific, and visibly disturbed individual."

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

There's something to be said for a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich on a cold winter day.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Discovering today that the reason my ancient script to check the #SNMP alarm MIB on a Juniper switch is now broken is that #Junos now refuses to accept SNMP requests that arrive on any interface that isn't in the default routing-instance. It can be told to allow them, but then it just responds […]

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Email going around my lab today (but apparently decided by the top brass last Friday) of an Institute-wide hiring freeze (exclusive of faculty or public safety). We had a couple of open positions that were delayed in posting by our bad HR processes just long enough that they're now stuck in the […]

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Not sure what to say about an academic conference that's still "new" after 52 years.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Getting to the part of the year when the sunrise is annoyingly bright in my bedroom windows at a time when I am still trying to sleep.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Decided to buy a 52-week T-bill this month rather than the 26-week bills I have been rolling over for a couple years now. The rates recently haven't been that much worse, and the Treasury market is likely to be fucked next month because of the budget/debt ceiling stuff (the Treasury is already […]

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

A US judge is absolutely roasting the US government today. Here’s the text and a photo of them.

submitted 9 days ago • 4 comments

Today, I was reading Dave Clark's Ph.D. thesis (on a lark, I worked for him 30 years ago) and I ran into an offhand reference to a computer system I had never heard of before: the Plessey System 250. Unfortunately the Wikipedia article about it is not just WP:OR but also many paragraphs of […]

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Someone asked me if there is a page that collects all the weird bullshit "AI" products currently being pushed to the market. That page exists. It's called linkedin dot com. But nobody there knows that they are in the asylum.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

“When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me...It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose” “I don’t care how well their ‘AI’ works – or if you found a fancy fun […]

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Important reporting from @Wired on the secrecy of DOG-E and the uncertainty over who, if anybody, is formally in charge of it. https://www.wired.com/story/doge-elon-musk-leadership-administrator/

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Remember that the NAACP is calling for a massive boycott of Walmart, McDonald's and Meta because of their about face on DEI under pressure from the vague notions of the US president and his friends. I would appreciate it you participated in this boycott too. It seems like it's pretty big […]

submitted 10 days ago • 15 comments

I don't think it ends well if some disgruntled Afghanistan veteran gets taken off the psych meds they need and decides to go assassinate the person responsible.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Feeling a bit maudlin this evening, so all the Roxette in my playlist is a pretty good companion...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

I didn't notice this at the time (it went straight to my spam folder, as usual) but on Friday morning, my Representative (Katherine Clark, House Minority Whip) sent out an email blast titled "Trump's Next Target: Your Wallet". That seems like a promising line, if they can make the media pay […]

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

The indiscriminate (and hastily reversed) layoffs at DoE is more evidence that the DOGE people don't actually know what various federal agencies that they're vandalizing actually do. They likely thought "Department of Energy? Sounds like it funds solar power and other woke stuff. Slash it!" […]

submitted 11 days ago • 3 comments

Paranoia seeps into a federal workforce worried about getting fired and being watched “Some government employees are now turning off their phones at home. Others are opting for in-person chats at work rather than over Microsoft Teams.” […]

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

Finally managed to have, well, not quite a normal meal, but at least passingly familiar with "normal", for the first time in about a week. Sticking to very palatable stuff for now, interspersed with sips of Gatorade. Hopefully some actually normal meals tomorrow.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

If you want to start understanding what #ElonMusk is trying to do to the federal government, I encourage you to read @davekarpf's most recent piece, linked below. Then subscribe to read more, because he is a brilliant and insightful historian who is calling it like it is on a way that few […]

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Spent eight hours in the ER yesterday for dehyration. Wanted to compliment the ED staff for their care, but the hospital web site only accepts compliments for named individuals.

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

You should ask yourself this question: If the Trump regime was intent on destroying the United States, what would it do differently than things like wrecking public health and scientific research?

submitted 14 days ago • 3 comments

BREAKING: A bunch of U.S. Digital Service employees (including me) were fired tonight. It's still unclear exactly how many. There is no visibility whatsoever into what determined who was let go. Legacy USDS (i.e., pre-DOGE) leadership was not involved in the decision about whom to let go and […]

submitted 13 days ago • 15 comments

Roses are red. Violets are blue. Singular "they" predates singular "you".

submitted 14 days ago • 2 comments

Sounds like Duo will have an interesting postmortem to read, based on all the alerts they keep sending me.

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

Just uttered in the work slack: "my antipathy toward python is a strictly increasing function".

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments