I just love that there are multiple people in Trump’s administration who are credibly accused of “drinking and misconduct” so you need to actually read their names and titles to know which one got canned on any given day.

Yeah, I’m with you on that (like, if it were a fake attempt, wouldn’t you want the shooter to not be a Republican?), but there are enough weird things around the shooting that it should give anyone pause.

The big one that I haven’t seen a compelling answer for is how someone managed to get on a roof within comfortable plinking distance of a former president running for reelection and then fire multiple shots before getting dusted. “Incompetence” is the only answer we’ve been given, so I’m not surprised that conspiracy theorists are flocking to this.

What an incredibly sad thing to admit.

I’d nearly forgotten how he sent JD “Mercy stroke” Vance to resolve the situation.

It’s the sort of move that might look like a clever reversal, but ultimately has a very steep price tag.

A blockade is an act of war, and this one is clearly pointed at the rest of the world, not Iran. It’s predicated on the same faulty assumption that Trump’s administration made when invading Iran: our military is unanswerable, and they will take it lying down.

Escalation paths from this are all bad-- what if an EU ship ignores challenges from a US Navy vessel, or China sends a military escort with a shipping fleet? Are we really about to start another shooting war, or will we stand there with our dicks in our hands as they sail by?

I’m thinking this brilliant idea is abandoned in a week.

“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” she said, adding that “numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been calculating [sic] on social media for years now”.

So this isn’t about empowering the victims of Epstein’s criminal enterprise to find justice, it’s about punishing them for inconveniencing her?

That’s utterly ghoulish. Jesus Christ, Melania.

So yes, I’m generally aligned with normalizing career changes and breaking down social barriers around perceived masculine / feminine roles, but:

Now Reeves says what’s needed are policies and programs to draw male workers into fields such as nursing, teaching and social work.

I am not sure I agree with the premise here. I think that trying to lure men into e.g. social work is an answer looking for a question. The broader landscape of what constitutes work is always shifting, and right now interpersonal services are waxing, but that could change overnight. I think that we need to think more generally about how to help people transition between fields as labor demand changes.

I’m also not sure how to think about “jobs created” in this context:

That parity masks the significant gains women have made in the labor market recently. Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump’s second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That’s nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.

This is the sort of statistical claim that makes me want to better understand the underlying structure of the data. Are these full time roles? Are they roles that were eliminated and re-opened? Where, geographically, are these positions? This feels like the actual story to me.

Thus solving the problem once and for all!

Yeah, I had a good laugh at this. Half of the commits I review are coauthored by Claude, a fact that I’m sure Anthropic is thrilled to claim, but this colossal fuck up was obviously the work of a rogue intern or something.

I wonder if there’s going to be a point in the future where we all look back at this massive over-investment and kick ourselves for making so much expensive electronics waste.

Like anyone who’s been paying the least bit of attention, I was wondering “wait, what’s new here?”

In a letter sent Tuesday to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Raskin said the documents point to a broader risk to national security, writing: “These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests.”

This is more interesting than the headline, in my opinion. The claim that they “pertained to his business interests” is not exactly the same thing as selling them to the highest bidder. It suggests either that Trump’s businesses are the subject of intense scrutiny by the fed or, more likely and more worrying, Trump is much deeper into brokering sensitive information than we expected (as in, it’s one of his main sources of income).

At least pushing it is free :)

Holy hell, the fact that those slack messages and that chatbot history ended up in court is mind blowing. I guess we should be grateful that this time, the bad guy and his hamfisted “Project X” got put in the spotlight.

Attorney-Client Privilege. Sorry, I should have just said it.

For anyone who might have avoided this part of the world, ACP makes communications between you and your counsel inadmissible in court. In big companies, it’s somewhat common to bring lawyers into discussions under the auspices of seeking legal advice, but primarily to ensure that if any artifact from that discussion were to be uncovered by an adversary, it couldn’t be used in a lawsuit.

That’s an impressive investigation.

It would be tough to find a better example of why lobbying in the US is fundamentally broken. An entity like Meta has ample funding to break up an operation into distinct cells that do not directly interact in public forums, while tracking the whole process in documents protected by ACP. I think it’s particularly telling that Meta lobbyists are quietly nodding along legislation pushed by “grass roots” activists and that Meta’s new OS just happens to implement the technology exactly as described in the law.

It’s that sort of coordinated effort that the RICO act was drafted specifically to address, but it’s perfectly legal.

The economy not only shed jobs in February, it also lost jobs in two of the last three months, three of the last five months and five of the last nine months. (During Biden’s term, there were literally zero months in which the economy lost jobs.)

And this is all before the imminent corrections when the AI bubble pops, which will take us from accelerating tumble to free fall. An astounding feat, given what this administration was served up.

Describing Chuck Schumer as “political opposition to the fascists” is a bizarre joke, neighbor.

This might seem like a very indirect response, and that’s because it is largely a notion I have after a couple years of observing the fediverse. My background is in infrastructure for micro services, which is a powerful source of bias, so take this with a grain of salt.

The fediverse is suffering from major problems caused by homogeneity, data duplication, and lack of meaningful coordination. It is completely unsurprising that it struggles to provide the level of service that most users expect. I’m not saying this to be mean, but because I’ve experienced these same growing pains in commercial settings.

The solution has always been to restructure product services in a way that separates concerns. Most of the big guys will, at a very high level, use an API gateway which handles security + authn, then forward requests to high level product services which in turn reach down to the data layer services (which are often ORMs with huge caches sitting on top of databases). Works great, usually.

The fediverse, from what I’ve seen, does not do this. Everyone sets up largely identical monolithic applications which share messages through the Pubsub protocol. Information is duplicated everywhere, and inter-instance communications are a liability not only in content but even in compute and persistence (you can absolutely get DDOS’d by a noisy neighbor). Individual instances are responsible for their own edge security, compute, and data. It’s just a lot to ask of a single person that wants to host a federated instance.

I think that a healthy federated internet will eventually require highly specialized instances at several layers, and for certain maintainers to thanklessly support the public facing services. One of the most obvious classes of these specialized instances, to me, would be the data layer and catching instances, which exist to ensure that content posted on one instance is backed up and served for other instances. It reduces the strain on public facing instances because they no longer have to host all the content they’ve ever seen, and it also ensures that if a public instance goes down, the content does not disappear with it.

This same principle could be used on “gateway” or “bastion” instances which enforce strict security on behalf of public instances. Public instances would block direct connections while treating requests from the gateway nodes as highly privileged. Each public instance would either find a gateway instance to protect it or handle its own security and inter-instance communications.

This obviously isn’t a complete solution, and it’s a hell of a long way from a technical specification, but my hope is that others who are looking at the weird and wonderful landscape of our new internet are having similar concerns and reaching similar conclusions.