NEW POST

Modern hardware is remarkably fast, but software often fails to leverage it. Caer Sanders guides their work with mechanical sympathy - software that is sympathetic to its underlying hardware. They distill this practice into everyday principles: predictable memory access, awareness of cache lines, single-writer, and natural batching.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/mechanical-sympathy-principles.html

Two papers came out last week that suggest classical asymmetric cryptography might indeed be broken by quantum computers in just a few years.

That means we need to ship post-quantum crypto now, with the tools we have: ML-KEM and ML-DSA. I didn't think PQ auth was so urgent until recently.

https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/

It has been a busy winter so far for me, which is why I haven't been posting a lot here. But today I'm proud to share with you the fruits of some of that labor: The Colorado Democratic Party's platform for 2026. For those unfamiliar, a platform (in the US) is a statement of values that a political party stands for, generally agreed upon by people who stand for election as representatives of the party.

I was elected during last year's party re-org to the Platform Committee. The chair of the committee asked if I would run the subcommittees for two of the "planks" (sections) of the platform: the Democracy section, and the New Tech & AI section. It was an honor to work on both.

I'm going to share screenshots from the New Tech & AI plank because it's relevant to the work I do here, and I think a lot of people might be interested to see this statement of values. This plank is brand new, never before covered in prior Platform documents.

I'm also pleased to report that the whole of the Platform Committee and the roughly 1500 delegates to last weekend's statewide party Assembly voted to approve this as-is, with no additional changes, on a vote of 98.9% in favor.

There's a lot to like, but my favorite aspect of this is that I managed to get widespread approval for use of the term #enshittification in the official platform, both from the Platform committee and the larger party leadership. Thanks @pluralistic for the inspiration. (I believe this is the first time the term has been used in any official political party platform ever.)

The full platform is readable at https://www.coloradodems.org/platform

#AI #datasovereignty #privacy #infosec #techequity #R2R #RightToRepair #politics #COpolitics #Boulder #Colorado #Democracy #democrats

Well, I just came out of an intensive three day hack session and it appears I made a thing:

https://bc.bodil.lol/

I'm not saying it's a gaming calculator, but it's damned useful for running the numbers in that kind of game. I guess most people scratch that itch with a spreadsheet, but my programmer brain obviously feels much more at home with a text editor and a bit of syntax, and that's what this is. A spreadsheet for nerds.

It's a pure client side web app, built on top of MathJS, so it does units, functions, trigonometry, matrices, etc out of the box, and CodeMirror, which reminds me I have to put the Emacs keymap in.

No React, no Tailwind, no slop, just carefully hand crafted browser tech and enough CSS to make you ill. Works on Firefox and Chromium and almost certainly not Safari. Please enjoy.

EDIT: I fixed it to make sure it works on Epiphany (aka GNOME Web), so fair bet it should now work on Safari too.

A sad day for more than 120 #AssociatedPress employees as the organization announced that it is having to close down its newspaper-focused business, which represents only 10% of its revenue and is shrinking. More buyouts are expected.

The general public does not seem to value information quality, and at this point only governments will be able to sustain quality #journalism. https://apnews.com/article/news-industry-buyouts-ap-newspapers-dd790effc6a385514b3323560161ea4f