Mastodawn

New blog entry: “Capital funding poisons software projects."

Color of money shapes a lot of things about government in the U.S., and a big one is how we buy software. When agencies have to treat custom software development (an operational expense) as a capital expense, that has a cascading series of effects that lead to billions in wasted spending annually. If we can shift to opex, such as via an IT investment fund, we'll see better results. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2026/03/opex-not-capex/

Capital funding poisons software projects.

Using capital funding instead of operational funding is one of the biggest causes of failures in government software projects.

Waldo Jaquith

David Cook 2d ago

Wedge LIVE!2d ago

Lyndale Avenue will get a separated bikeway when it's reconstructed in the next few years. Hennepin County heard that you were deeply skeptical of the previous design that had a shared use path.
https://beheardhennepin.org/lyndale-avenue/news_feed/the-updated-design-for-lyndale-avenue

The updated design for Lyndale Avenue

We heard your thoughts about the layout that we shared last summer and have refined the design to reflect your feedback. Here’s what we’ve changed Our design now includes a separated bikeway on the east side of Lyndale Avenue. The previous design included a shared‑use path. We’ve included space for a future northbound transit lane between 31st Street and 28th Street. All other lanes for parking throughout the project area will be standard sized. View the refined design and leave a comment on our interactive map. You can share your comments through April 24.2100 block of Lyndale Avenue SouthThis section…

Hennepin County

David Cook Mar 19

Signal Mar 19

New: Group member labels, a way to describe yourself or your role in a group chat, only visible to that group chat.

Label yourself the “Goalie” to your soccer team or “Favorite Child” to your family to stir some drama.

Available on Android, Desktop & iOS
https://signal.org/blog/group-member-labels

Label yourself

We all take on different roles in relation to our friends, neighbors, family members, and colleagues. Keep those different roles clear in your many Signal group chats by using group member labels, now available in the latest versions of Signal for Android, Desktop, and iOS.

Signal Messenger

David Cook Mar 18

Ted Mar 18

In late 2024, Anthropic shipped a "privacy-preserving" system to analyze user conversations. Do the privacy claims stand up to scrutiny? 🤔

(You can probably guess.)

Here's a ✨ new blog post ✨ about it: https://desfontain.es/blog/cliopatra.html

Research highlight: Cliopatra: Extracting Private Information from LLM Insights - Ted is writing things

The price of not using robust notions when building “privacy-preserving” analytics systems

David Cook Mar 9

jomny ive

David Cook Mar 7

Agnès H.Mar 7

Par contre mon mec, mon tendre époux, a carrément pris le pli du #graphcooking.
Force est de constater que la technique permet de représenter des recettes assez complexes sur un tout petit papier.
J'ai mon carnet. Il a sa boîte de post-its Galactée.

David Cook Mar 4

Even the Call of Duty writers know this doesn't turn out well https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Tel_Aviv_War

Tel Aviv War

The Tel Aviv War or Invasion of Tel Aviv is a conflict that occurred prior to 2015.[2] It was presumably fought by the United States of America, assisting its ally Israel in an attempt to fight off one or more of Israel's neighboring countries. The conflict followed a series of other Middle Eastern conflicts, but is notable for causing such massive devastation of the region that those countries involved subsequently collapsed, setting off a global energy crisis that crippled First World...

Call of Duty Wiki

David Cook Mar 2

car lite enough that I can time my annual/semiannual gas purchases ahead of telegraphed US military adventurism

David Cook Mar 1

wint Mar 1

wife chasing me around the kitchen table with a rolling pin because she found me in the epstein files being a Mossad Operative

David Cook Feb 12

W3C Developers Feb 12

The @w3c Privacy Working Group just released a new document to help non-experts review systems that use differential privacy (DP). Differential privacy is a modern #privacy technique that lets collect and analyze data while keeping individuals’ contributions hidden.

▶️ https://www.w3.org/TR/differential-privacy-guidance/

This guide suggests what to pay attention to when evaluating such systems, not how to build them.

Feedback wlc: https://github.com/w3c/differential-privacy-guidance/

Considerations for Reviewing Differential Privacy Systems (for Non-Differential Privacy Experts)

The purpose of this document is to provide a high level understanding of the trade-offs that are required when designing and deploying differentially private systems (e.g., privacy, utility, number of trusted parties). Its goal is to enable a less-expert reviewer in their analysis of differentially private systems, and to suggest issues and dimensions to consider when reviewing a system.