Yesterday’s AWS outage reinforces an old truth: the cloud is—oversimplified but not wrong—someone else’s computer. This isn’t an argument against cloud adoption. It’s about trust distribution and control boundaries. How much faith do you place in a single provider, how much can you afford to take advantage of their redundancies—or can you afford not to? What’s beyond your control regardless of SLAs? What do those SLAs actually mean? Are you hedging those bets?

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I appreciate the ecumenical critiques. Not to “both-sides” it: there are significant differences and fairly one-sided undemocratic reasons for the complete deadlock, but the clippy sign could very well stand the test of time. I had my ear out for process and not just content critiques from the stage.

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This morning I’ve been listening to SCOTUS arguments (rather than public radio pledge drive pleas) and heard conservative lawyer (and former Solicitor General under the end of the Bush II administration) Paul Clement admit Republicans have a hard time finding voters who want to join Republicans in court to have standing to support Republican complaints about (what in my mind amounts to) voter enfranchisement. This was all as an aside in the arguments being made this morning in Bost v. IL Bd. of Elections.

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Having taken a break from certain social media platforms in recent years, I might be missing the valuable content amidst the trolling, spam, and slop I imagine having to continued to fester. However, I don’t feel compelled to give any fucks on the news about Sora 2, except those which I give for all of generative AI (some of which I use): concern for its energy consumption, as a source of societal and civic distraction, and potential to cause confusion. Is there truly any art or communication being created with it or similar tools that was impossible or significantly more valuable than before its existence?

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Jane Goodall … dies at 91 Hope is "the dogged determination to do what is in our power to make the better future we wish for actually happen,” says Jane Goodall. … not “wishful thinking”.

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Bruce Schneier lays it out pretty broadly that regular Americans really should be thinking of their personal threat model as living under authoritarianism. It might be uncomfortable to think about. I remember in the past, it was a bit of a no-go to even bring up whether we saw our government as a potential threat in our threat model at a past job. And getting an answer? Well, that was even less fun, given the sensitivity of certain data and the tension of priorities.

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