[Sarcastic, not so naive, actually critical of most sanctions as a tactic the U.S. has used, but frustrated as fuck at the lack of… agency, principles, justice.] So now, finally, this is the part where the U.S. gets sanctioned, right?
Posts in: Journal
I have things to be optimistic about that I am apart of and I worked to support others' efforts that were meaningful to me this past year. That will all be my fuel to push even harder this coming year. Despite all that, at every level, same: Dan Sinker’s exit interview with 2025. And same.
This household has had to fight off something right up to the end of the year. Good riddance 2025, except for every moment The Childe has grown up through and past… too fast.
Today I have a family gathering but it may also need to be a day for de-conflicting local git repositories and iCloud and some dumb things that happened by accident with 2 laptops in play. It is helpful to have a project to go heads-down on, separate from both local and remote obligations.
Remember when end-of-year emails from your services were novel and useful? Yeah, I’m not sure I do either…
Happy Solstice! ☀️🌏
I’m listening to the Supreme Court and those arguing before it debate the color and size of the cups in the shell game of campaign finance. The most hilarious claim is that there is no quid pro quo bribery.
The original machination.org was kind of a relentless real time (as soon as I consumed something and gave it some sort of credence in my mind) link log. The post yesterday was a more emblematic of a later stage, a slightly more sanely paced round-up. Thought about doing it again today. No. I’ve got other stuff I need to do. I was pushing through being sick and hanging the noose of the world’s news as seen by me around my neck isn’t going to help. Maybe intermittent long links, Tim Bray style. The things that stick with me and why and how, that don’t seem too redundant to what has stuck in the zeitgeist. If I can keep a good habit.
But what a wild headline ride this last day, huh? Definitely worth getting off and stepping back for a moment, at least.
When a shield becomes a shackle
Today’s Cloudflare outage illuminates another infrastructure dependency we’ve sleepwalked into: defensive consolidation. Sites adopt Cloudflare not for performance but survival, protection from the automated scraping that feeds AI systems and other bots that now dwarf human traffic. In defending against automated consumption, most hand control to intermediaries. When Cloudflare stumbled this morning, some sites that delegated DNS entirely couldn’t even disable Cloudflare to restore access. The protection became a jail.
Gardens vs. giveaways
So much more vision than in D.C. A relatively low-effort, certainly less expensive, high-impact community-centric and green way to re-use a stadium site. Certainly better than what D.C. is actually going for now. Moot now, anyway, as the old RFK stadium was being taken down before the options going forward were finalized and the Commanders deal reached. There was an option for the site without a publicly subsidized NFL stadium.