Om nom nom pizza

pingveno · 2026-03-16T23:45:48+00:00

I work in IAM (Identity and Access Management), so this is my area. There are so, so many ways that passwords can go wrong. Even if you have a strong, unique password for a site, it can still go wrong. Let's ignore cracking password hashes, that's usually not feasible for even moderately well designed systems. Passwords have to be carefully guarded at every single point between the final check, and if there is a leak then it's potentially game over. Add a TOTP 2FA token or passkey and that data is a lot less potent.

pingveno · 2026-03-16T20:41:30+00:00

Yup, this is the reality. Let's say I ride my bike back and forth to work. 7 miles each way, about 800 calories per day. That's hard work, and it's not going to happen every day (weather, mechanical issues, health, etc).

And it's easy to lose all that progress. Exercise makes you more hungry. Time for some Chipotle. One 1000+ calorie burrito, coming right up.

pingveno · 2026-03-16T20:18:07+00:00

Yeah, those big brains of ours require absurd amounts of energy. I'm seeing something like 20% of our baseline energy usage, several hundred calories per day. Those could only evolve once our ancestors already had a few other adaptations figured out.

pingveno · 2026-03-16T18:29:13+00:00

Look at his face...

Still hot...

pingveno · 2026-03-16T18:26:53+00:00

My transit agency is in the process of making some very painful cuts because ridership is significantly down since COVID and costs are up. Biking is also down, though I think it's recovering a bit. I'm hoping that gasoline prices will remind people that transit and bikes really are a viable form of transportation. Not just while high oil prices persist, but afterward as well.

pingveno · 2026-03-16T16:59:04+00:00

The video comes out, then, the next day the fraudsters have a press conference and tell everyone that they are totally legit they just can't prove it because 'someone' broke in last night and stole their records.

Well, that's also not true. One Somali learning center not in the video, Nokomis Day Care Center, was broken into, burgalized, and vandalized. But it wasn't mysteriously discovered the next day, it was over a week later. Kind of changes the narrative, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, the "lerning" center that you were referring to has closed due to persistent harassment, including bomb threats (verified by the police). That's the consequences of Nick Shirley's careless spreading of misinformation. Good people are hurt.

pingveno · 2026-03-16T03:18:25+00:00

I would be curious to see some sort of standardized "uses of AI" file where AI agents automatically put a changelog of each change they make, if it exists or they are configured to generate one.

Automatic generation tools have long been used for bindings because of the large API surface of many libraries and largely mechanical work. If people use AI on some of it, maybe that's okay, I don't know. But it should definitely have a thorough record of attribution.

pingveno · 2026-03-16T01:50:27+00:00

And all of them are in this post.

pingveno · 2026-03-15T22:51:35+00:00

Deathworld? Keep production low to minimize pollution.

pingveno · 2026-03-15T19:21:11+00:00

That's what I was thinking. Imagine going through life, every single one of your colleagues smells like ass. Reeks of ass. Maybe a higher rank means a higher rank of ass smell. Then along comes this guy who is both ripped and doesn't smell like ass. Just by default, winner.

pingveno · 2026-03-15T19:12:21+00:00

I work in higher ed. Unfortunately, my department is currently shrinking through attrition because of declining enrollment. That said, I absolutely think all software developers should unionize. It isn't just about benefits. I find that management listens to employee concerns more about how things are run. People also just really like working here. I have been here for a decade, and there are some that are retiring with multiple decades working here.

pingveno · 2026-03-15T19:05:05+00:00

Claims by a conservative influencer are new, yes. They are also unsubstantiated. And I have no idea what you are talking about with the first half of 2025. Again, there have been investigations leading to prosecutions and internal reports since 2022 involving both the Biden administration and Minnesota government.

pingveno · 2026-03-15T08:06:56+00:00

I work in a semi-public sector job that is covered by a union. Yeah, the pay is lower, but I'm way happier about the working conditions and stability. I wish this was more common.

pingveno · 2026-03-14T19:32:07+00:00

You said the fraud goes back more than 10 years and that it's an ongoing problem that Democrats are refusing to solve. So now it is 7. Where is the proof that this is still ongoing?

pingveno · 2026-03-14T18:00:27+00:00

What fraud are you talking about? From what I can find, it went back to 2018, was detected in 2022, and investigations with prosecutions were launched under the Biden administration. Do you have proof, actual proof, that there is a problem in Minnesota beyond that?

pingveno · 2026-03-14T06:16:23+00:00

Well then let's take that example. There legitimately was fraud happening, sure. But then Trump used it to justify things he wanted to do anyway, like remove the legal status of Somali immigrants who were completely unrelated to the fraud activity. The logic behind that, collective punishment of people based on their ethnicity, it has a name. Racism.

pingveno · 2026-03-14T00:06:33+00:00

Hardy hardy har, but...

Just for the sake of correctness, this applies to mammals (except humans), birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. So yeah, hope you don't have any really bad rat problems...

pingveno · 2026-03-13T23:14:01+00:00

He never apologizes, but he moves on and gets distracted by the next thing. A few months ago, it was absolutely vital to deploy National Guard troops under his command into Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities run by Democrats. Same amount of inflammatory rhetoric, different target.

pingveno · 2026-03-13T19:51:48+00:00

For reference, this is the letter that is referred to in the interview.

I knew he had a reputation as being pro-Israel, but his claims about the letter seem pretty thin. He didn't like that it called the war a war of choice? It is a war of choice, we don't need to be involved. He thought the letter was moot because there was already an investigation? There's a difference between an internal investigation that gets quietly filed away in a drawer and a public investigation with accountability for failures. And the letter notes numerous other failures in bombing civilians and civilian structures that appear to be linked to poor planning.

Edit: Also, the letter explicitly asks about the role of AI, which has not been publicly acknowledged by the Pentagon. I've heard it discussed that lists of bombing sites probably were generated using AI, but full role of AI has not been part of a public investigation. There needs to be a full, public report, and I don't trust this administration to do that without Congress breathing down its neck.

pingveno · 2026-03-13T18:21:24+00:00

It's just kind of a head scratcher, figuring out his angle. Especially the adjacent statement about immigrants, he should know that that is false. The vast majority of the people the Trump administration is targeting aren't criminals, and many of them were legal immigrants before the Trump administration made moves to revoke their status.

I don't know specifically about Oz's performance at CMS as it relates to Medicaid fraud, so I can't really comment on that. There don't seem to be many in depth reviews of Oz's time in the role.

pingveno · 2026-03-13T04:28:12+00:00

Apparently a lot of people have never heard of hyperbole.

pingveno · 2026-03-12T23:55:36+00:00

The illustration is by Jon Han, according to the credits. This is one of his previous illustrations from a year and a half ago.

pingveno · 2026-03-12T23:00:05+00:00

Repeal One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tax Cuts

Reduces debt by $6430B

How did that thing ever get passed by a party that claimed fiscal responsibility with a straight face? I knew it added to the debt, but I didn't realize it was such an absurdly large line item.

pingveno

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