Notices by Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social)

Somebody posted the source code to the IRS’s Direct File to GitHub. https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file

Ah, the world’s major cultures.

trumpcard.gov
https://mastodon.social/@botgov/114223739229794922

The last non-evil printer company has turned evil. Brother has rolled out firmware update that prevent third-party toner cartridges from working. https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/printers/brother-accused-of-locking-down-third-party-printer-ink-cartridges-via-firmware-updates-removing-older-firmware-versions-from-support-portals

Blog entry: Once upon a time, government had an exception for onerous procurement rules for software you could walk into a store and buy. If you wanted copies of Windows, fine, just buy copies of windows. They called it “COTS”: Commercial Off-The-Shelf software. And that became a big loophole.

It’s only COTS if you can use it the next day and configure it yourself, otherwise it’s just sparkling custom software. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2025/01/customized-cots-when-government-demands-to-be-lied-to/

I’m muting this thread because it has achieved escape velocity, resulting in a bunch of replies like “here in Kerblekistan we have achieved a 16% PET recycling rate through exploiting the Malaysian immigrant underclass so therefore plastic recycling works great.” 🙄

I leave you with this video on the topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E

Before anybody gets all up in my mentions: yes, it is hypothetically possible to recycle some types of plastic and yes, there is a small-scale PET recycling industry, but recycling plastics at scale is infeasible and has no path to feasibility.

Plastic recycling is a myth created and propped up by the petroleum industry. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/texas-resident-used-apple-airtags-to-discover-plastics-taken-to-houston-recycling-centers-arent-being-recycled

@jamiemccarthy @inthehands @violetblue Yeah, I'm reading through this and just don't see anything like what's claimed in the original post. This description is pretty clear, and it is definitely not “last year's average is this year's zero.”

Yesterday was my final day at U.S. Treasury OCIO. I’m proud of what our team accomplished there. We did a lot of long-term transformational work, cleared the way for the Direct File team, normalized centering end users, and built a new procurement path for custom software.

We did a lot of good. Some can be undone, but the culture change will last a long time. Once you show people what good software looks like, they won’t soon lower their expectations.

Automattic: WP Engine is bad because they don't contribute to WordPress!

Also Automattic: We will stop contributing to WordPress. https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-sponsored-contributions-to-wordpress/

I just noticed that GitHub Actions has an "explain error" button, and I thought I'd see how it explained this build error. This is what happened when I pushed the button.

...what

FedEx's website lets you set a password of unlimited length (I've tested it up to 100), but when logging in, the password field has a maxlength of 25 characters, so it'll reject your >25 character password. If you override the maxlength in the HTML and enter the full password, then the form complains that the password field is empty.

🙄

When you Title-Case a Phrase for Emphasis, that's "Pooh casing.”

"Why do you have a geiger counter, Waldo?"

They're, like, fifty bucks! How can I *not* have one, at that price point‽

The woman sitting next to me on a flight this afternoon seemed troubled when I produced a geiger counter that was clicking away. I wasn't sure how to explain "I just want to see the radiation levels increase as we ascend higher into the atmosphere" without it becoming a Whole Thing so I just shrugged as if perhaps I'd found it in the seat back pocket, and put it away.

Dominion Power claims that Virginians’ power usage keeps climbing, so they need to build new power plants that we’ll all pay for with rate hikes. Forced to release internal records, it turns out that the only increase is coming from building data centers.

Why should Virginians subsidize Amazon, whose budget is 7x Virginia’s? https://virginiamercury.com/2024/11/26/under-pressure-from-the-scc-dominion-reveals-the-true-cost-of-data-centers/

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.