Notices by Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)

People commonly make the mistake of approaching busy, powerful leaders with a problem instead of a solution. This is a waste of an opportunity.

If you get time to talk to your large corporation's CEO or your agency’s secretary about a problem, bring them a solution that is trivial to implement: “sign this form," “send this email to this person,” "say these words at this meeting."

They are interested in your problem, but they don't have time for it. Give them something easy to say “yes” to.

This can’t possibly be true…can it?

Harris campaigned on who she would help, and Trump campaigned on who he would harm.

That’s a simple truth of this election that I don’t want to forget.

@feld Oooh, that’s a fine point. I will test that.

Confirmed: this is not just me.
https://mastodon.social/@waldoj/113394127909972080

Here’s a hint as to what’s wrong with system-level networking services on macOS 15.1: Safari has inconsistent DNSSEC signature problems, while Chrome and Firefox (which use their own networking engines) do not. Every query has a different subset of signature problems.

I think I'm too rusty on cryptography implementation to meaningfully debug this further; here's hoping Apple patches this soon.

Things that are good to own for the purpose of lending out, to be That Neighbor, especially for community organizing:

* Hand truck
* Folding table
* Camp chairs
* Cooler
* Pop-up canopy
* Bullhorn

I’ve observed that phone spammers’ auto-dialers are increasingly likely to call, let it ring once, hang up, and immediately call back. I assume this is to capitalize on phone settings that silence calls unless the same number calls twice within a few minutes.

Phone spam has destroyed telephony as a first-class communications mechanism.

@vriska The CDC doesn’t provide data for American Samoa or CNMI. There’s nothing my bot can do about that.

Over a decade ago, I worked on a presidential papers project. The audacious goal was to scan in all presidential papers, make them available for download, and extract any possible data. But until the advent of the typewriter, virtually no data *could* be extracted, other than the odd letterhead. My proposal was to collect the images, build a processing pipeline, and when OCR of handwriting was possible, do it then.

Well, ChatGPT *nailed* this. So many handwritten documents can be discoverable!

OCRing handwriting is a vastly more valuable use of LLMs than chatbots or image generation. I spent years of my career on OCRing big corpuses of text, and boy was it bad. I love the idea of a small LLM optimized for handwriting recognition. The National Archives and the Library of Congress both contain huge amounts of valuable information that’s hard to read for humans and unsearchable (and I'm sure there are lots of other such collections). It's nice seeing a legitimately good LLM use case.

I'm reviewing a bunch of government IT consulting firms' websites today, and it sure is a tell when they've pivoted their offerings to be all about AI. DevOps…with AI! Agile...with AI! Cloud...with AI!

These are companies that are not interested in improving government—they’re going to sell agencies whatever agencies think they want, regardless of whether it improves government in any way. The same companies were all about blockchain five years ago. They make the world worse.

@tay @jik I *think* that's right? I am Unhappy about Cloudflare turning on a new form of compression that cannot be turned off unless you give them money, but I don't know enough about Brotli adoption to know if that's fair to criticize them for.

@mathowie If the glass isn't absolutely slathered with lead paint, I want no part of this.

Based on all available evidence, Egypt gave Trump $10 million in cash a few days before his 2017 inauguration (that’s 200 pounds of $100 bills). The FBI and DOJ started investigating this in 2019, but attorney general Bill Barr shut that down. Trump then changed US policy in Egypt’s favor.

Note that Sen. Bob Menendez was just convicted of likewise taking bribes from Egypt. This is their MO. https://wapo.st/3SxAkvO

The Trump campaign can apparently say literally anything in response to a media inquiry and the outlet will dutifully report that the reporter was instructed to fuck themselves or whatever. It’s really bizarre. https://wapo.st/46m0GX8

I don't think it's inherently sexist to call Harris "Kamala." I get that some fans will feel she's familiar, just like there exist fans of Biden who jovially call him “Joe” or fans of Obama who call him "Barack." But, in general, I think it's unduly familiar, *especially* coming from media outlets.

When Hillary Clinton was the nominee, she was called "Hillary” by fans, opponents, and media alike. I was told “that's because 'Clinton' means 'Bill' in people's heads," and I didn't entirely agree, but OK.

Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee, and she's "Kamala,” not "Harris.” There is no other President Harris.

Trump isn't "Donald," Biden isn't "Joe,” Obama wasn't "Barrack.” In 2016, it was possible that this wasn't gendered. But I can’t buy that anymore.

Kudos to the New York Times’ Chris Cameron for the in-sentence hypocrisy check on Tom Cotton. These exact same people have spent *years* loudly advocating for political violence against out-groups, saying that Americans need to own guns so they can murder leaders who they don’t like (“bullet box or ballot box”).

If media outlets don’t follow Chris Cameron’s model, they’ll yet again be performing an enormous disservice to the country. (I fully expect they will screw this up utterly.)

All you have to do is simply vote for Biden in November, and then vote for Democrats in every subsequent election, for the rest of your life, because if a single fascist gets elected then there is no backstop to fascism. It's simple!