mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.3+glitchFor many years I was one of the faceless nerds who helped keep democracy afloat. I studied computer security and electronic voting in graduate school, worked with various groups such as the Carter Center for Democracy, regularly volunteered as an elections official, spoke at DEF CON and Black Hat on issues surrounding voting security, and more. After twenty years I started dialing back my involvement in 2022, and now I have a ringside seat living in the suburbs of DC to watch the world's pre-eminent democracy self-destruct.
This is not the future I thought I was building for us.
To: JNE Sector
From: CPU
Re: Policy clarification
No, you can't come in with three of your buddies, all of you turn in each other for the same crime, and get half off the punishment. That would be creative, which is to say, Communist treason.
IntSec is extremely creative in how it punishes creativity.
I have long had a weird role in @GnuPG@mstdn.social . I don't influence the specifications (RFC9580 or LibrePGP), I don't touch the codebase, I have absolutely no official role. Some people listen to me anyway because of my twenty years of active involvement in the GnuPG community.
Today, a member of the GnuPG community wrote one of the bravest criticisms I've ever seen of GnuPG's leadership. It was professional but it was so unflinching I thought it certainly had to be a private communique mistakenly sent to the mailing list.
It was not.
First, my hat is off to @andrewg@mastodon.ie for writing that criticism. It is important and it should be read by GnuPG supporters.
You can read it ourself in the archives:
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2026-April/068280.html
I will have more to say later. I have to be very careful what I say, because I do not want to give the impression I'm seeking to influence a specification or an implementation.
For now, I will say I am on Andrew's side in this and I commend him for what he's done.
RE: @mattblaze@federate.social
Computer security as a field of academic study is really, really new. When I entered a Ph.D program in computer science in 2003, I had to phrase my research interests as "failure analysis and software reliability".
At age 51, I'm beginning to have some of the younger engineers look at me like I'm part of the Old Breed. Me, I'm looking around at the real Old Breed — people like Peter Neumann — and all I can think is the old lions are leaving the savanna, and I have absolutely no idea how I or anyone in my generation can live up to the examples they set for us.
But with God as my witness, I will try.
RE: @petrabrandstrom@mastodon.art
I don't know if Petra means "share your impressions" or "share my post", so I'll do both.
My headcanon: against the gathering storm and all its forces, the youngest prince stands defiant astride his best horse, holding his most trusted sword. He is protected by his own hope, and while he lives there will still be sunlight for the land.
I like to keep my professional ( @rjh@mastodon.online ) account different from my personal one (this), so forgive me for being terse here: but for those wondering, today's interview went well and I have two follow-ups with engineering directors next week.
Burn it down, burn all of AI down.
I was just reading a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. "Carrion Comfort" is one of his Terrible series, capital-T, in which Manley Hopkins himself believed he had best touched something deep and true in the human heart. I was affected by it, and intrigued. I wanted to learn more, so I did what any rational person would do: I looked online for literary criticisms of it.
THEY ARE ALL WRITTEN BY AI.
These sites are so desperate for clicks they're now asking AI to compose lit criticism to expand their repertoire and reach.
I just looked for thirty minutes and couldn't find one single reputable site offering me informed criticism of Manley Hopkins with a "none of our content was written by AI" pledge.
Burn the entire thing down. I'm fucking done with AI. Pass me my wooden clog, brother, there are machine gears here, and I must engage in sabotage.
As a Washington D.C. resident, I can't begin to describe how appalled I am by a UFC octagon on the White House lawn.
You know, a quarter-century ago I described myself as "mostly libertarian" in my political outlook. Today …
Wow. Today.
The problem with the upcoming July 4 250th Anniversary Shitshow isn't that it features conservative artists: it's that it doesn't feature any _good_ conservative artists.
"Ah, but Rob," I keep hearing, "there is no such thing as good conservative art!"
Really? Why was 1984's box-office blockbuster a comedy about a bunch of refugees from academia going into business for themselves, the trouble of acquiring capital, the headaches of real estate and capital outlays, staffing, meeting payroll, and how the very *moment* they started to get ahead an unelected busybody bureaucrat who doesn't understand their business shuts them down, kicking off a disaster only the protagonists can fix?
That's _Ghostbusters,_ folks. Peel back the superficial trappings and you've got a pro-capitalist, pro-entrepreneurship, anti-regulation workplace comedy.
There is _great_ conservative art being made.
It's just the MAGA crew hates it even more than Hollywood. And with good reason: can you even imagine what Egon Spengler would do with Trump?
RE: @davidnjoku@mastodon.world
Great question! One answer is that race is a social construct because it doesn't exist as a scientifically definable one. We can talk about entropy in a scientific way because there is highly precise language used to talk about it and we can easily sort out what is or isn't entropy. Race isn't so clear cut: it's inherently fuzzy.
But this doesn't mean we can't correlate specific definable demographic groups with specific genetically heritable traits. Many insular religious communities have identifiable clusters of genes, for instance — or consider European royalty and hemophilia — or the ones you mention.
Science requires a precision that's missing from the concept of race. This means race might be said to exist as a scientific concept in the fields of sociology or psychology, but the more rigorously-defined the discipline becomes the less useful fuzzy concepts become to discussions in those fields.
And, of course, this also limits the utility of those fields, too. A differential equation has no concept of race, but that also means it can't help someone arrested for driving while black, either.
@marielgm@mastodon.mit.edu — sorry for Mexico's loss, but man, that was a hell of a game.
@rickf@indieweb.social — no, Trump *did not* adopt Kavanaugh's position.
Trump is not capable of understanding Kavanaugh's position.
Neither are you.
Neither am I.
The ruling was published only a few hours ago. The only people who understand Kavanaugh's position are the nine SCOTUS justices. Every other legal scholar on the planet is reading through this opinion carefully. It's literally over a hundred pages of incredibly dense legal theory.
Trump, as usual, is bloviating about shit he doesn't know the first fucking thing about. (My vulgarities are not directed at you: they reflect my frustration with him.)
Stop giving him credit for being some legal archscholar who's capable of fully understanding the implications of a complex opinion just published a few hours ago.
To: JNE Sector
From: CPU
Re: Latest from Friend Computer
Note that FC "winning the war against Communism 38 times and counting" means that in every field trial devised to date, Communism has been a philosophy of losers.
Losing is treason. Communism loses. Communism is treason!
@rickf@indieweb.social — it's not his idea, as can be told by the fact it's not ludicrous.
The existing White House Marine One helicopter fleet (not Marine One as a whole, just the Marine One helos approved for White House landings) is composed of models that first flew in the 1950s (!!)[*]. They're getting long in the tooth and spare parts are becoming hard to come by.
The non-WH-qualified Marine One aircraft include VH-92s and MV-22s.[**]
Marine One *really really really* wants to ditch the VX-3D and VH-60N, in order to simplify their logistics and run everything on the VH-92/MV-22 pair... but they can't.
Those craft are significantly more powerful, which means their engine exhaust will set fire to the White House lawn. So, no WH landings or takeoffs for them.
I first moved to DC in 2008 and even back then people were talking about a WH helipad. Prior presidents always considered it a troublesome project: they have to take on the historical commissions and weather bad PR, just so the Marines cam simplify their logistics and use more reliable aircraft? Nonsense: let the next administration take that one on.
Well, now we've got a president who could not be paid to give a fuck about historical commissions, and he *loves* flying around in VIP helicopters.
So, yeah. A helipad is likely. And you know it's not his idea because it's actually a good one.
[*] The VX-3D is a later model of the original VX-3A, first flight in 1959; the VH-60N is a UH-60 in the VIP role, first flight in 1979.
[**] First flights in 2017 and 1989 respectively.
A lion has left the savanna.
He was kind to me, and wise, and held onto a child's appreciation for puns and wordplay.
@rickf@indieweb.social — no, because per SCOTUS birthright citizenship is established by the Constitution and any law to the contrary would get smacked down by the Courts before it ever took effect.
That's the importance of today's decision.
I'm out of the hospital.
Why was I in the hospital? Because when I sprained my knee two months ago, the radiologist erred by diagnosing it as a sprain.
I've been walking on a broken leg for two months, and that got to the point it needed intervention.
(Some bits here will be obviously fictionalized. The subject was not nuclear physics, but something else of similar importance to our present moment.)
In today's job interview, I discovered the company is deeply concerned about nuclear physics and wishes to ensure they get a candidate with a sterling nuclear physics background, preferably someone who knows some of the major labs, ideally someone who's actually worked at Los Alamos National Laboratories, it's a high bar to clear but they believe in reaching for the ...
I listened to them.
"I have a personal friend who volunteered to vouch for me," I said.
"Oh?" they wanted to know. "Whom?"
"Robert Oppenheimer. He's expecting your call."
Sometimes — not often, but *sometimes* — the universe gives you the chance to flex like the Incredible Hulk.
Time to withdraw from social media for a while.
=====
"Not to keep repeating myself, but the problem with the Court is not merely that their decisions are bad, but that their entire self-conception of themselves as the Guardian Council of the USA, with sweeping and arbitrary power to maintain the mos maiorum, is utterly incompatible with a free society. And this isn't something you can solely blame on a few corrupt appointees, it's the entire constitutional law-industrial complex, the juristocratic network of associations and professors and judgeships and clerk appointments that we have allowed to award itself veto authority over the res publica."
=====
I'm calling shenanigans. That's some *impressive* AI slop there. It sounds superficially impressive while getting everything so backwards that a Magic 8-Ball would be better grounded in reality.
No, I'm not going to dissect it for its fucking overwhelming wrongness. My life is short and by the time I finished my left-leaning friends would've already moved on to the next oh my fucking God you said _what?_
And therein lies the problem.
Y'all are fucking gullible and you uncritically believe AI slop handed to you by complete strangers just because you think it agrees with your _weltanschauung._
I'm tired of hemorrhaging respect for people I love. So I need to step back for a while.
@marielgm@mastodon.mit.edu — I have been That Guy since I was a teenager. On behalf of That Guys everywhere, you have our condolences and understanding. Look after your own mental health while you do it.
@rickf@indieweb.social — she's safe: a recent SCOTUS case makes it clear POTUS can't fire FCC commissioners at-will.
I saw someone say, quite earnestly, that "if privacy is a national security issue, [NGOs in the privacy space are] de-facto defense contractors."
Well, no. And, TBH, that's the kind of thinking you get into if you've never worked in the national security space.
I once asked a senior CIA official why they were so gung-ho about partnerships with public schools. I was given an immediate answer. "The education of the nation's youth is a core national security interest, meaning educators are tier-1 national security partners, and we support them as such."
Kindergarten teachers aren't in the defense community. They ARE in the national security community, albeit in a highly specialized way.
The national security community is orders of magnitude larger than the defense community. They shouldn't be equated or conflated.
Today in JNE sector, Javie-R-JNE-1 was replaced mid-mission after his fourth clone ratted out Javie-R-JNE-1, -2, and -3.
"Now _I_ can be a Troubleshooter, carry a laser, and get half off the punishment for my next crime!" he said excitedly upon assuming office.
Javie-R-JNE-5 then alerted Friend Computer to the fact Javie-R-JNE-4 was openly boasting about planning future crimes. Javie-R-JNE-4 was taken away on conspiracy charges, while Javie-R-JNE-5 was executed on the spot for being a ratchet skank who narced on his own clone.
Javie-R-JNE-6 arrived at the Troubleshooter Mission Briefing and, by the briefing's end, was the sole survivor.
@rickf@indieweb.social — the SCOTUS case people cite to support POTUS's authority to fire independent commissioners, _Trump v Slaughter,_ was about the Federal Trade Act.
The FCC derives its authority from the Communications Act, a different statute.
_Trump v Slaughter_ put handwriting on the wall — I wouldn't like to give odds on FCC independence lasting to the end of this Administration — but for now, at least, it remains…
I just realized what bothers me the most about a UFC octagon on the White House lawn:
The real-world White House is now indistinguishable from the one in _Idiocracy._