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Bullshit reporting on sex work
Sex work reporting in the US is broken. Case in point: the headline for this USA Today article: Largest human trafficking sting in Ohio history nets 161, including city councilman Okay, that sounds pretty serious! Let’s take a look. Most of those arrested were charged with engaging in prostitution, a first-degree misdemeanor. “We want to…
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Remembering Steve Jobs a decade later
10 years ago I posted a few quick memories about Steve when I was saddened to learn of his passing. I’d like to again share a passage from his Stanford commencement: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is…
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The Pull Request Is More Than Just a Pull Request
Editor’s note: This is a programming-related blog post; if you don’t program or your don’t know what a pull request is, you probably won’t get much value out of reading this. Disclaimer: I currently work for GitHub, and I work on the pull requests team. I’m writing these thoughts about pull request in my personal…
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The “Recall Ted Wheeler” Boondoggle
There’s been a campaign in Portland to recall our mayor, Ted Wheeler. Ted Wheeler is a milquetoast husk of a mayor, true, and I look forward to seeing him get replaced with a better mayor. But here’s the thing: we didn’t need to recall Ted Wheeler; he was up for getting replaced already. Last year.…
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Patreon Comes Full Circle
Patreon had a really simple and straightforward business: creators online could sign up for accounts on Patreon, and fans could give them money every month. It was a welcome way to start earning money doing online content creation: instead of being subject to the whims of chasing clicks and the seasonality of ad spending, a…
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Meta update
Since the summer time I’ve been a little up and down in terms of posting frequency. It seems like I do tend to post in bursts, sometimes having a streak of several days, only for this blog to go quiet. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing; I don’t think anyone actually is manually…
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Digital Surveillance Isn’t an Inevitability
Last week, Apple announced that they are hitting pause on their initiative to implement a surveillance system to add software to users’ iPhones to perform client-side scanning for CSAM. Here’s hoping that the “pause” is mostly just Apple PR trying to save face and that they ultimately are going to quietly scrap the plans. I…
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OnlyFans and the Cautionary Tale of Scale
It’s hard to look at OnlyFans’s announcement yesterday of their upcoming ban on sexually explicit content without seeing where scale, and companies’ pursuit of scale, played a part in seriously disrupting a lot of creators’ lives. Follow the Money First, and probably most pertinent, there’s the issue of credit card processors. There are only a…
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Electron Has Its Place!
I love to rag on Electron, but like many things, it has its place. For instance, Electron is perfect for stuff like the Docker desktop app, and not just because both are notorious for hogging system resources on my computer. I don’t need to interact with Docker’s GUI that often, and the UI is mostly…