Ex-Illustra, Sleepycat, Cloudera. Currently: Board member at Cityside. Working on: Climate. Politics.
Not a tech bro.
| Medium | https://maolson.medium.com/ |
| Website | https://www.olsons.net |
| Github | https://github.com/maolson0/ |
| Not a Tech Bro | https://not-a-tech-bro.ghost.io/ |
Just saw Project Hail Mary. Loved the book. Loved the movie.
Two thumbs up!
That's a movie joke.
This six-part retrospective on Azure's reliability and security problems is excellent. Sure, there are deep technical problems. Critically, though, there were deeper Microsoft problems. The organization wasn't able to recognize, understand or fix itself.
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
In 1991, a subatomic particle traveling *just* under the speed of light — and I do mean "just" — slammed into Earth's atmosphere with the energy of a major league basebal pitch!
But... where did it come from? And how?
A thing I wrote:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-did-the-oh-my-god-particle-come-from/
The quest for immortal rice just got a huge boost
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2026/04/the-quest-for-immortal-rice-just-got-a-huge-boost/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Sustainable Agriculture @sustainable-agriculture-AnthropoceneMag
I banged out FORTRAN code on the keypunches in the basement of Evans Hall, showed up late nights to take backups of the machines Bill Joy and Bob Fabry were using to make BSD on 4, learned some deep CS from faculty on the ground floor, hung in the Math Library on 1 and wrote a huge pile of POSTGRES in 608-3 and 608-11.
That concrete monstrosity means a lot to me. Super excited about the Gateway. Still...
1. GenAI is probably going to impact us but how? Nobody knows.
2. The worst thing about GenAI isn't the technology, it's the shitty people: https://karlbode.com/the-problem-with-ai-is-shitty-human-beings [<must-read]
3. We can’t have a grown-up conversation on the subject because the trillion-dollar bet’s fear+greed pressure crowds out truth.
4. When the bubble pops, the shitty people will melt away. Then we can maybe figure it out.
5. We so *SO* need that bubble to pop. Next week would be ideal.
Two, how I built it:
https://medium.com/@maolson/building-the-uqbar-clock-cd9da7182a67
I've been working on this project for a while. Two posts about it: One, describing the clock I built for the restaurant my daughter owns.
https://medium.com/@maolson/the-uqbar-clock-240c929fdc1d
1/2
Watching the livestream of the Artemis II launch, I just witnessed one of the astronauts type in the password on their tablet while sitting in the capsule on camera.
#ArtemisII #Artemis #Artemis2 #NASA #InfoSec #cybersecurity #OpSec #Privacy #SpaceExploration
Phil Plait
Anthropocene Magazine
Tim Bray
Sheldon Nylander
occult