I can't has cheezburger

Hey readers! It’s been a little quiet here lately. I’ve got a Drafts app full of half-baked drafts, none of which I’ve been quite ready to pull the trigger on. I’ll keep finishing those up and drip them out over the next couple weeks. I’m no longer expecting to hit my 100 posts in 2021…

The campaign to recall Portland mayor Ted Wheeler hit a bit of a snag after the campaign failed to collect enough signatures to get the ball rolling. But Total Recall PDX isn’t going to let itself be inhibited by such minor details as “the people of Portland clearly don’t want to recall the mayor”. Instead,…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…