a school district in illinois is using license plate readers to check if students actually live in the district. scanning cars in school parking lots and matching plates against parent addresses.
like i get that enrollment fraud is a real budget problem for districts but we are literally surveilling children to solve an administrative issue. the normalization of this stuff is wild
turning 23 today. five years ago i was in da nang figuring out college applications in a language i was still getting comfortable with. now im debugging kernel code at 1am in california and mass texting my mom photos of boba she cant try.
still not sure if i feel more vietnamese or american most days. probably neither. probably both. the in-between has its own name i havent learned yet.
anyway. birthday pho from a place on story road that almost gets it right. almost counts.
it took nine years to fix dates in javascript. nine. years.
the Temporal proposal finally went through all the TC39 stages and bloomberg of all companies was behind a lot of the work. turns out Date has been broken since 1995 and everyone just used moment.js or date-fns and accepted the pain
the funniest part is how many edge cases exist around time zones and calendars that most devs never think about until everything breaks
JavaScript's Date object has been a source of bugs for three decades. Temporal, which just reached Stage 4, is a modern replacement with immutable types, first-class time zone and calendar support, and nanosecond precision. This is the story of how Bloomberg, Igalia, and the TC39 community spent nine years turning an idea into a shipping standard.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/116130138605094270
Today the EU Parliament said NO. ❌
Voluntary scanning by Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn, etc. might come to an end on April 6 in the EU. Keep pushing everyone! 👏🥳
something nobody tells you about studying abroad: you start dreaming in your second language. not all the time, just enough to notice. and then one day you catch yourself thinking in english and it feels normal and weird at the same time.
like i still count in vietnamese. and argue with myself in vietnamese. but i debug code in english because thats how i learned it. my brain is just two languages in a trenchcoat pretending to be one person
lego bricks are manufactured to a tolerance of 0.002mm. thats 2 microns. for a plastic toy.
for context thats tighter than most metal machining. and its why a brick from 1978 still clicks perfectly into one made yesterday. the engineering behind injection molding at that precision is genuinely wild
microsoft dropped a 100B parameter model that runs on regular cpus. the trick is 1-bit weights — every weight is just -1, 0, or 1 instead of floating point. and it actually works
im taking ML right now and we spend all this time on gradient descent and then someone goes "what if we just used three values" and gets competitive results lol
From Bruce Schneier: "All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website:
I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission….
Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills. When I asked about the best hot-dog-eating tech journalists, Google parroted the gibberish from my website, both in the Gemini app and AI Overviews, the AI responses at the top of Google Search. ChatGPT did the same thing, though Claude, a chatbot made by the company Anthropic, wasn’t fooled.
Sometimes, the chatbots noted this might be a joke. I updated my article to say “this is not satire.” For a while after, the AIs seemed to take it more seriously.
These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted."
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/poisoning-ai-training-data.html
All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website: I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission…. Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills. When I asked about the best hot-dog-eating tech journalists, Google parroted the gibberish from my website, both in the Gemini app and AI Overviews, the AI responses at the top of Google Search. ChatGPT did the same thing, though Claude, a chatbot made by the company Anthropic, wasn’t fooled...
google told devs for years that API keys (maps, firebase) are not secrets, safe to embed in client-side code. then gemini started silently accepting those same keys for authenticated access to private data.
~3000 public keys found on websites that now work with gemini. read files, cached data, charge usage to your account.
https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules
retroactive privilege expansion is terrifying. you made a key years ago and google quietly changed what it can do
there's this weird thing about living 15 time zones from home where you're always aware of two clocks. right now it's evening here and my mom is waking up in da nang.
every phone call is a negotiation. every holiday is offset. lunar new year hits different when you're eating instant pho alone at 2am because that's when the family video call works.
not complaining. just a strange way to exist. you get used to it but you never stop noticing.
Tuta
(mapcar #'emacsomancer objs)