When it comes to designing secure protocols, I have a principle that goes like this: if you have to perform any cryptographic operation before verifying the MAC on a message you’ve received, it will somehow inevitably lead to doom.
Fei-Fei Li's Quest to Make Machines Better for Humanity
Artificial intelligence has a problem: The biases of its creators are getting hard-coded into its future. Fei-Fei Li has a plan to fix that—by rebooting the field she helped invent.
SF’s Market Street Subway runs on Floppy Disks #Transportation #Floppy @sfstandard
The SF Municipal Transportation Agency is using rather outdated technology for crucial operations: 5.25-inch floppy disks. “Our train control system in the Market Street subway is loaded off of fiv…
SF's Market Street Subway Is Running on Reagan-Era Technology: "Our train control system in the Market Street subway is loaded off of five-and-a-quarter inch floppy drives," SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin told KQED's Priya David Clemens this week. "We have to employ programmers who are experts in the programming languages of the nineties in order to keep running our current system. So we have ...
Regular Expressions make me feel like a powerful wizard - and that's not a good thing
(This is a rant because I’m exhausted after debugging something. If you’ve made RegEx your whole personality, I’m sorry.) The other day I had to fix a multi-line Regular Expressio…
In causal inference, we are usually interested in estimating the causal effect of a treatment (a drug, ad, product, …) on an outcome of interest (a disease, firm revenue, customer satisfaction, …)…
Glenn Fleishman has a lucid and helpful introduction to Mastodon in TidBITS that opens with this: Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry …
The Fediverse is wired together by protocols like ActivityPub and WebFinger which, as yet, I know very little about. That’s because the Steampipe plugin, which supports the dashboards I’…