Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Longform tweets, toots, and other stuff

Mastodon – Facebook – Bluesky – Threads – Tumblr – LinkedIn

  • 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…

  • Intellectual superpower books

    Maybe because I am a bookworm, but this is a tweet storm that I decided to make a blog post to better organize my thoughts. Investigation of truth The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Jeffrey Robbins (Editor). This provided confirmation bias on my love of tinkering on…

  • Resolution progress 2022 : Q2

    Read 12 30 50 books. I have finished 23, which is well above the 50% pace at 76.7%. Updating the goal to include 20 more books, so now 50. Will count audiobooks. Not counting kids books. Add 12 read to the kid at least 20 times. 3 of these. Only at 25% pace, need to…

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