I’m deeply uncomfortable with Microsoft attempting to weaponise their extensive law enforcement contacts to arrest people who post zero days in the products.
It comes after the researcher was kicked off GitHub (owned by Microsoft), Gitlab (a Microsoft partner), after they were doxxed on Twitter and had their MSRC - Microsoft vulnerability reporting portal - account disabled.
I think this is well worth reading. I've been a bit frustrated by some over-confident claims that data centres in space are literally impossible due to the cooling issues alone, and other claims that those issues are fairly minor. I am nowhere near close to being familiar with all the real-world engineering nitty gritty; I understand a fair bit of thermodynamics, but that is not enough to really settle things. FWIW, the arguments here seem well grounded in physics and the technological/economic/legal issues raised strike me as plausible.
https://robtow.substack.com/p/spacex-ipo-orbital-data-centers-and
You might be surprised to hear this from someone who spent as many years as I've spent doing big data analyses for public schools, but I went most of my life without getting grades (I was homeschooled until college!).
I can still remember the swirling disorientation I felt the first time I saw all my rich, complicated, months-long experience and work of the first semester flattened into a letter grade. How did anyone know this was RIGHT?
"when did Star Trek get woke??"
In the very first episode of Star Trek: the original series, we see a white Captain reporting to his black Admiral boss, a black woman on the bridge just a couple years after Jim Crow was abolished, wearing a short skirt (a symbol of feminist liberation at the time), a Japanese helmsman on the bridge only 20 years after the internment camps, a Russian crewmate on the bridge during the Cold War [edit: actually did not appear until Season 2 but the point stands], and the foundation of the modern concept of queercoding.
In the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we see male crossdressing crew members, a female officer on the bridge in charge of security, a literal ship's counselor stationed at all times on the bridge, a single mom raising her teenage son on her own while juggling a full career in medicine, a blind mechanic whose "disability" is shown to be a strength, and an angry, all-powerful godlike being who is revealed to be simply a petulant child masquerading as a deity.
In the very first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, we see a black man gain a powerful command position, respect the hell out of the customs of a religion he didn't understand, show respect and equal treatment to members of three other alien races he didn't understand, appoint a female guerilla fighter who defeated imperialist fascists to a position of authority within his administration and defer to her judgement in areas of her expertise, accept his friend's gender change, and tell his son he loves him.
Star Trek has always been woke. You just grew up to be a bad person.
Tesla is having its 'Dieselgate' moment
I'm looking for work, please boost!
I'm a senior software engineer with 35 years of experience. I've worked across an unusually wide range of domains: mobile game backends, privacy-preserving data platforms, high-throughput COVID testing infrastructure, email and account systems, e-payment processing, job marketplace systems, and bioinformatics. I pick up new domains quickly and have a track record of doing it repeatedly. I understand how to turn business needs into engineering requirements.
I've worked remotely since the 1990s and can operate with minimal supervision. I don't need hand-holding to find the right problem to solve. Several of my most valued projects were self-directed: I identified the need, built the thing, and shipped it.
Some of the technologies I'm familiar with include: Python, Perl, TypeScript/JavaScript, Haskell, Go, C, Java. Postgres, MySQL, SQLite. Flask, SQLAlchemy. AWS (Lambda, S3, RDS, SQS, EC2). Docker, Git. Github and Gitlab.
I've also repeatedly picked up new languages and stacks as needed: Haskell for differential privacy research, TypeScript for a 24/7 AWS Lambda system, Flask for my most recent employer. I've become productive with new systems over and over, and I can do it quickly.
I'm also a published author (Higher-Order Perl, Morgan Kaufmann), longtime blogger, and conference speaker with a reputation for making complex ideas clear.
My résumé is at https://plover.com/~mjd/cv/Mark%20Jason%20Dominus.pdf
Thanks for your attention!
#OpenToWork #remoteWork #softwareEngineering #Python #backend #hiring
This article on Arabic script typesetting and justification is turning out even better than I had hoped.
“My favourite resident of the block, and one of my favourite characters in all of Unicode, is U+FDFD, ﷽ : four-word invocation, bismillāh ar-raḥmān ar-raḥīm, as a single codepoint. A monument from the era when rendering was baked into the encoding because nobody trusted the renderer to do anything, preserved forever, like a fly in amber that recites.”
Dear Fedi friends,
Apologies for another toot about #WSocial but I am genuinely shaking right now.
The @EUCommission and its president Ursula von der Leyen have recently migrated their ATproto (Bluesky) accounts to W Social.
I cannot fathom why they would pick a private enterprise whose leaders didn't even have ATproto accounts 3 months ago... and who are so open to having their users' data mined to train European AI models.
My articles on them:
🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-social/
Wow. Just wow.
the cyberpunk present is weird as fuck: the latest Shai Hulud malware wave contains an LLM prompt to create biological weapons and nuclear weapons, with the purpose to trip LLM safety refusals so that LLM-based code scanning wont see the malware
Kevin Beaumont
Greg Egan
Cat Hicks
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"
Jaap Burger
Mark Dominus
The Tennessee Holler 
Elena Rossini 🌈
Laurens Hof