Current status: Living and working in a ecocidal necrostate.
Journal
[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?
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.
Once again, this isn’t inherently about Cloudflare.
It’s about thoughtful defense architecture versus reactive adoption. The question isn’t only whether to use these services but how to use them while retaining agency.
Before reaching for the CDN, consider the actual threat. Is it sustained abuse or periodic spikes? Are you conflating high traffic with hostile traffic? A statically generated site, if otherwise practical, might simply weather the storm. Rate limiting at your application layer might suffice. Sometimes vertical scaling costs less than the complexity you’re adding (Cloudflare makes it free or cheap for small endeavors, so once again it depends on how you value things and what you can afford).
When you do need stronger defenses, maintain your exits. Keep authoritative DNS separate from your CDN provider. Use CNAMEs, not full delegation. It is too easy to hand over the DNS keys, especially for a simple web site, but this is like a reverse mortgage on your house. Maintain an origin subdomain for direct access. Document your configuration outside your provider’s walled garden. _Test your ability to redirect traffic _ away from your protector.
I’ve found a lot of the kinds of efforts I’ve worked with can get by with fairly humble technical solutions, and commodified technical solutions can do well by them (I worked on, and owned the end-of-life of a platform that was essentially commodified). It still requires having a person on hand who understands what is being paid for and can take ownership of different circumstances that arise, adapt, and when surprised, learn and iterate.
At the very least, consider whether solutions for immediate problems are worth ceding control. In some cases, sure. But if you didn’t even have the resources on hand to intentionally make the choices and if the results caused unexpected pain, start looking for resources that understand the Internet, value lean and independent development, and are interested in what you do and what you need and can interrogate you and the technologies within reach to find an informed and suitable match.
Did I mention that I am, like everyone, looking for new work?
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.
Instead, I guess we have RFK Jr. (or Trump!?) stadium to look forward to… and compromised, commercialized environment around it.
The best way we can honor service members is to send the National Guard home
There isn’t an obvious public link to this specific message, sent out on Free DC’s list, though their site has plenty of their digital campaign materials about this and other issues they advocate for. I thought it was excellent though. Once again, I think of my passed grandfather, Battle of the Bulge veteran, Republican, who I know would find this use of the military offensive.
I’ve reproduced the core of the email I received, including their emphasis and links (minus ActionNetwork’s redirects):
Armed soldiers don’t belong in our communities. The National Guard isn’t supposed to police American civilians. They are not supposed to chase down children, intimidate people on the street, harass residents for simply being outside, or be used as props in Shake Shack photo-ops.
Trump is trying to make the National Guard do all these things here in DC as well as in Chicago, Memphis, Los Angeles, and Portland. Guard members themselves are increasingly fed up with it.
Yesterday we learned that National Guard members are increasingly questioning their role in Trump’s agenda of occupation and deportation.
“This is just not what any of us signed up for, and it’s so out of the scope of normal operations,” said J, a member of the Ohio National Guard who spoke on condition of anonymity. "[Y]ou want me to go pick up trash and dissuade homeless people in D.C. at gunpoint. Like, no dude."
J isn’t alone. In September, leaked documents revealed that the Guard knows its occupation of American cities is “leveraging fear,” driving a “wedge between citizens and the military,” and promoting a sense of “shame” among some troops and veterans. That’s not what service members deserve.
This Veterans Day, the best way we can honor service members is to send the National Guard home. These deployments are unsafe, unlawful, inappropriate, and a waste of public funds. Our demand remains: National Guard Out Now.
I might become a decent writer if I put as much effort into composing and finishing prose in private as I did in venting it off as stream of consciousness to a couple of poor victims I portray as friends. Instead, it gets vented there (and sometimes cribbed for here) and I don’t feel the urge to revisit and work it further.
What happens when we all put our heads in the cloud
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?
The pattern looks familiar: numerous organizations, despite apparent diversity in their offerings, seem to have concentrated their infrastructure in AWS US-East-1. No real surprise. What’s telling is (based on reporting to date) the apparent lack of tested multi-region failover capabilities. When this reportedly DNS-originated incident hit, rapid adaptation failed—if it even existed.
I don’t operate at hyperscale. I am a web developer who evolved through digital professional services into a technology manager. My experience comes from managing other technologists, engineers, and vendors for what was, in terms of staffing a larger medium-sized business where our budget probably couldn’t match what these tech giants spend on toilet paper. Yet we maintained business continuity—for a 24/7 crisis line—through outages. When any cloud component failed, whether SaaS platforms or our AWS deployments, we retained operational capability through alternative pathways, including fallback to “pre-cloud” configurations.
Our teams' recovery strategy addressed both RTO and RPO intuitively, before we knew what those terms were. We identified single points of failure, built redundancy where cost-effective, and accepted calculated risks elsewhere. Most importantly, we tested these failover procedures regularly.
This sounds like common sense. Experience suggests otherwise.
If your organization needs someone who treats information systems and infrastructure as a product serving your team, someone who speaks plainly and pragmatically about availability, threat models, and builds contingency plans that actually meet reality, especially if you’re trying to make the world a better place, I am interested.
I am a technologist but a morning like this encourages my Luddism (understanding technology’s impact, valuing autonomy, adopting it intentionally). I had cash; while Venmo was down, our visit to the PTSO coffee table outside school happened anyway & The Childe did some practical math.
A couple of photos from the No Kings rally in DC
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.
I have to wonder, with Donald Trump’s particular enthusiasm for McDonald’s, and his self-aggrandized narrative about his role in real estate, does Trump play their Monopoly game?
I took Metro this morning. Got on a Silver Line train in the direction of Ashburn. Operator pronounced it ASSburn.
Yeah, we’re all on the train to ass burn these days.
Bruce Schneier on Digital Threat Modeling 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. (I didn’t get one!)
Journalism should have already be on board and well ahead on the idea, especially for certain stories and topics. But the Pentagon’s push this week should really make that clear. Nevermind the major networks recently being directly targeted and their general capitulation. Or maybe the State Department’s proclivity to kick out journalists who ask pesky questions?
I do not think this is a question anymore.
The seasons change, but I am always anti-fascist.
Just some curious bullshit
What appeared to be RFK Jr’s old 2024 presidential campaign bus was parked (illegally) outside the Pierce School condominiums in northeast DC on September 16. This location is also known for hosting a crypto party aligned with Trump’s inauguration and being a place Musk and other DOGE figures early in the administration.
I have no other context, but found it weird to see. I found it vaguely notable that it happened between RFK Jr’s grilling before the Senate Finance Committee last week and his fired CDC director’s testimony before the Senate HELP Committee yesterday. That’s probably a coincidence.
If RFK Jr. hadn’t bought a multimillion dollar home in Georgetown upon his appointment, I’d say it would fit that he’d be living in the old campaign bus (down by the river?) when in DC.
Whatever the actual story, DC has enough Dear Leader banners of Trump being hung off of Heritage Foundation, Agriculture and Labor buildings, we don’t need an outdated totem of failure emblazoned with our other narcissist-in-residence rolling around town.
What did he fight for?
I’ve been thinking about the news lately. (That’s a true statement most days of the week, most weeks of the year.)
I’ve been thinking about Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s quitting, because of speech restrictions from Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s parent company.
I’ve been thinking about all the backlash on people who mostly either tried to counter the hagiography of Charlie Kirk or perhaps were venting less tactfully (I’ve been known to).
I’ve been thinking about one of my grandfathers — I’ve mentioned him before in the open air of the Internet: The one who is a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who really fought real Nazis. A conservative, a believer in freedom. I think also, like many veterans of that and other wars, he came out of World War II an atheist. (He went in a Quaker, one of the more conservative “programmed” variety, like Nixon.)
He was also a dairy farmer, part of a dairy co-op that supplied Ben & Jerry’s (well before the Unilever acquisition). I do not know what he thought about the hippies making and selling ice cream all over New England and Upstate New York, but I know he didn’t mind eating it or selling to them. (Conversely, Ben and Jerry had to know all these family dairies their milk came from weren’t exactly communes.)
I know he didn’t mind their speech. I know this because when I grew into a teenager, I took positions against what I considered abuses of authority in my small world—positions he wouldn’t take himself. And I got in trouble for them.
And he spoke up in my defense.
“What did I fight for?” my mother has quoted him from that time.
What did he fight for, I wonder. Most days of the week. Most weeks of the year.
The climate crisis, slow-roll-WWIII, no better than band-aids on the social safety net between axe swings at it, and a duopoly political system oscillating between making it all happen or doing nothing people actually need to stop it, and an economy teetering on realizing it.
Imagine, in terms of the kinds of things being cut in proposed House and Senate GOP budget bills, what we could pay for already (accepting ludicrous premises) if we just weren’t flying all those KC-135s and C-17s constantly at $20k+/hour/plane re: Israel/Iran. Or you know, the fucking parade.
If you told me 30 years ago that an adult me, not a lawyer, would listen to Supreme Court oral arguments “for fun,” I’d have spit my Mountain Dew in your face.