Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Longform tweets, toots, and other stuff

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  • Jeff Bridges

    Who is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met? Well, sort of. My daughter was an exploring toddler. And, perhaps running for Congress? She greeted everyone. One outing to a restaurant with outdoor seating with friends, she was antsy. She wandered as I shadowed to keep her away from dangers. Pretty typical…

  • App ad network malware

    My home router’s security feature blocked some things when I was web browsing in increasing frequency. It got really bad. The AP and NBC News both experienced redirects to a page spoofing my ISP asking personal questions to give me a smartphone in the same hour. Obviously fake. Obviously a scam. Maybe phishing. These were…

  • Government shutdowns and cybersecurity

    Watching the United States government hash out a budget and looming shutdown, I worry about the blackhat hackers exploiting it. Not enough of those protecting us from these threats are essential workers. Agencies I depend upon, like CISA, furlough 80% of their workforce, leaving whitehats in the dark about what they’ve detected. Their research feeds…

  • WordPress and Mastodon

    Months ago, Automattic acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will publish on the Mastodon network as a federated instance through the ActivityPub protocol. The blog basically becomes a server of sorts in the fediverse. That sounded cool, so I installed the plugin. This post will serve as a test to see if it works.…

  • Human hallucinations

    Listened to a Marketplace Tech episode about AI backed banking chatbots. A line caught my attention.: Sometimes people characterize made-up statements as hallucinations. I think that’s giving a little too much humanity to a robot, but if you would be comfortable with a teller just fully making something up to a member of the public,…

  • Resolution progress 2022: End

  • Short descriptions matter

    To me, the most important part of an email is the subject line. What it tells me factors into whether I read it immediately or get back to it later. Later might take months as I don’t really have the time to read my email. Same thing with tickets. Additionally, several times a week, someone…

  • Power of anticipation

    As a teenager, my father worked for the City of Valdosta in building permits. People would ask me, hoping I had overheard him, about the businesses they hoped would soon come there. One restaurant in particular stood out as the crowd favorite. Which isn’t surprising because going to the one in Tallahassee, I invariably saw…

  • Federated social media

    Back in April, I learned about Mastodon. I made an account, but never used it. I made another and started using it. People are leaving Twitter. Many of those to Mastodon, so I will find them. You can find me there as @ezrasf@mas.to , so connect with me. The concept is interesting. There are many…