JamesLeonis

Dig deep enough and you'll find the lobbyist.

The University of Washington today announced that it is part of a multi-pronged grantmaking strategy from Ballmer Group aimed at drawing more people into careers in early childhood education in our state — including by providing more than 1,500 scholarships over the next eight years.

Ballmer Group is providing a set of gifts totaling more than $43 million to fund scholarships, leadership development and advocacy across multiple organizations, reducing the financial barriers that prevent talent from entering the early childhood workforce. The gifts ensure Washington can successfully implement the Fair Start for Kids Act and build racially diverse leadership in the broader policy field.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/03/16/43-million-set-of...

The Ballmer Group has quietly emerged as a major player in the world of education venture-philanthropy, committing more than $250 million to K-12 related efforts during 2017 and 2018. As a limited liability corporation, the group is free to make charitable donations and for-profit investments—none of which have to be publicly disclosed.

The Ballmers have also gotten on board with the trend of merging charitable giving with venture-capital investments and calling it all philanthropy.

Those elements of the couple’s approach are reflected in their hefty investment in Social Solutions Global, to help the for-profit company develop nonprofit case-management software that will be able to integrate with the student information systems used by most K-12 school districts.

By structuring the Ballmer Group as an LLC, the Ballmers have certainly given themselves more levers to pull in service of their goals, said Reckhow, the Michigan State professor. But they also seem to have embraced the notion that billionaires working to reshape public policy and service delivery don’t need to be transparent about what they’re doing.

Officials from the Ballmer Group, however, told Education Week they would not commit to publicly disclose all the organization’s grants, investments, lobbying work, or support for elected officials and campaigns.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/ex-microsoft-ceo-no-not-th...

We are in the "Bust" phase of the STEM Crisis Myth[0]

[Anxiety over the STEM Crisis] has tended to run in cycles that he calls "alarm, boom, and bust." He says the cycle usually starts when "someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians" and as a result the country "is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically." [...]

The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn't exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their "bust" phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.

Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the "best and the brightest," and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to "suppress" the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.

EDIT: I forgot about the sidebar. This isn't the first time the MIT President has spoken about the STEM Crisis. Here's a quote from the article and compare it to the 2026 quote from Kornbluth.

"Our national welfare, our defense, our standard of living could all be jeopardized by the mismanagement of this supply and demand problem in the field of trained creative intelligence." James Killian, president of MIT, 1954

"And frankly, it’s a loss for the nation: When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures – and you shrink the supply of future scientists." - Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, 2026

I don't mean to pick in MIT specifically, and I do think they are right to call out this administration for its disruptive behavior. They are hardly alone, and undoubtedly more will speak up. However we must rethink how we handle STEM education and employment because the current relationship is untenable. At the very least we should invest in repatriating existing STEM workers who aren't in the field. Otherwise the cycle will repeat to everybody's detriment.

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth

I wouldn't worry about hardware.

I've run the latest local models over the last year, including the recent Qwen 3.6 30B A3B, on a 9yo GTX 1080 and 32G RAM I have lying around[0]. If I can do that I don't think hardware will be a problem for you in the near term. The only updates I've needed were to Llama.cpp when a new class of model was released.

[0]: In my case, I want to see how local models perform on limited hardware, sacrificing context size and intelligence compared to SOTA models, so I have to really limit my expectations.

I want to come at this from another angle: We are about to tell the entire world wide web where all the kids are.

The more these laws are enforced, the more we hand over this information to any unscrupulous website operator, app developer, or advertiser. Are we about to hand Elon Musk [0] your kids' PII? How about Zuck, who (friendly reminder) sold your 2nd-factor phone number to advertisers [1]? How about all of the leaks from these ID services [2]? Or how about these services doing far more than Age Verification [3][4]?

Given the terrible track record of data breaches in tech, this means all this information leaks into even worse hands with little recourse for people and no punishment for companies.

From a security and privacy perspective it's in kids' own self-interest and self-protection for them to undermine all of these laws.

0: "I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for." https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02706...

1: https://www.securityweek.com/facebook-admits-phone-numbers-m...

2: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-...

3: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/persona-age-verificatio...

4: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/age-verificat...

I'm not saying Japan was good, and this isn't a callout to you. I'm arguing that the erasure of US brutality in China and the Philippines, as well as Gunboat Diplomacy on Japan itself, is why we can see ourselves as the Good Guys. This erasure is part of Manufacturing Consent. Its better to abandon the temptation to moralize the sides in war and see it as Great Power competition.

First we have US [Commodore Perry] who, in 1854, used gunboat diplomacy in Nagasaki harbor to end Japan's isolation and open it up for trade. This would snowball into the Meiji restoration, which ended the Shogunate, and an Emperor that rapidly modernized Japan's economy and military to prevent foreign domination that China was experiencing at that time.

Three decades prior to Japan's invasion of China, and a decade before Japan seized Korea, the United States and other Great Powers were suppressing the Boxer Rebellion as part of China's [Century of Humiliation] to exploit China for themselves. In addition the US, after it seized the Philippines from Spain, spent several years brutally putting down the native independence movent [p-h war]. Americans aren't taught this history, and fear of that brutality of American reprisals influenced the Japanese against surrendering during WW2.

Speaking of the Philippines, its seizure by the US and other Spanish territories after the Spanish-American war as well as the annexation of Hawaii alarmed Japan. They saw US and other imperial powers as rapidly encroaching on Japanese sphere of influence, in particular the decades of 1890s-1900s. Japan saw all of this and didn't want to be the next China. Japan also saw all of East Asia was it's sphere of influence as a Japanese mirror of the Monroe Doctrine and the western imperial powers as both a tacit threat and competition.

The US wasn't interested in helping China against Japan out of a moral duty, but protecting US interests against a rising Japanese Empire, in addition to British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Far East. The tipping point for Japan was when the US embargoed Oil and ship-grade Steel (as well as other strategic commodities and economic sanctions) from Japan throughout 1941, which led to Japan planning to seize more territory in SE Asia. To support these annexations, Japan had to push the US out of the Philippines, and to do that they attacked Pearl Harbor as a way to buy Japan time to take and hold territory before Americans could respond.

I mention all of this because Americans aren't taught this yet so much of our history hinges on these events.

[Century of Humiliation]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

[Commodore Perry]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Expedition

[p-h war]:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Phili...

Ignorance is a Weapon.

Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evil X, which is why so many of our wars start with a ship "under attack" (USS Maine, RMS Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin incident), or supposed WMDs (Iran, Iraq)

A great example is the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ask any American and they can call up all kinds of minute details about the attack. However if you ask them about the US trade embargoes and blockades against Japan in the months leading up to the attack, the vast majority of Americans will draw a blank. That is on purpose.

When stuff does break through to us, raw and unfiltered, most will react with horror. The self image of Americans as the Good Guys cracks. This happened in the Viet-Nam conflict when journalists had a free hand to show what was happening. Massive protests and a near mutiny by the US Army caused the Pentagon to get far more involved in how wars are presented in future conflicts. More recently Americans were so horrified when they witnessed the Israeli genocide after October 7th that it completely inverted both public sentiment and support for Israel, causing the forced sale of TikTok to Oracle and under US control to clamp down on the coverage.

The elephant in the room is 'unverified' users will overwhelmingly be underage kids, and that absence will be tracked across the internet. This whole thing inadvertently exposes who are the kids vs the adults programmatically.

Second, if all it takes to get into underage spaces is not being verified, predators *will* notice and exploit this hole.

Even the absence of information is information.

The Roblox games site, which recently launched a new age-estimate system, is already suffering from users selling child-aged accounts to adult predators seeking entry to age-restricted areas, Wired reports.

I rest my case.

I guess I'm earning my grey hairs in my beard, because everything old is new again. Today AI/outsourcing is Offshoring 2.0.

In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed].

Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown]

I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s.

[laid off]: https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-20...

[pushed offshore]:

- https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes...

- https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...

- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megade...

[poor quality]: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-i...

[reversal]: https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-a...

[collapsed]:

- https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsour...

- https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html

- https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-do...

- https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-sc...

[brown]: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-...

I'm also using Synctrayzor on my Windows 10 machine. I'm on Android using the official Syncthing app there as well as on Linux. It sometimes takes a while for them to discover each other, and it of course works better when all the devices are on my home network. The only real problem I've encountered is when filenames have special characters another OS doesn't like.

I sync the database to my phone, and a couple of other devices too with syncthing. I need it on my phone anyway to log into accounts while I'm out and about.

Not the parent, but a heavy user of Keepass. When you unlock your database, you can re-key it with several options for encryption algorithm, key derivation, and the transform rounds. I also have it set up with my Yubikeys as a kinda-sorta two factor for an added layer of security.

To keep the encryption modern regular updates are made to the program, and any migration would happen when re-encrypting the database. Checking my earliest entry, I've used it for 15 years without a hiccup.

Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Dark Forces are my triumvirate of that era. Of all of them, Duke Nukem felt the most interactive. There are times I would clear a level of enemies, then play with all the gizmos the level designers put inside like the jail cell block doors of Death Row. The security cameras were so advanced at the time too! They rendered their view, in real time, on a wall TV. I wouldn't see that effect again until the 2000s. The levels felt intuitive too, at least the Earth levels, that I felt like an urban explorer in a way that Deus Ex would later capture.

I agree.

I find it a bit ironic that this site regularly talks about banning whole countries and IP ranges on our servers, then acts shocked when users do the same. The fact that somebody went to the effort to create and share this shows how poorly the public sees the web.

The reality we face is "Check your AdBlocker" is the new "Check your spam folder" and we should adjust accordingly.

I visited Munich back in 2013 and recorded several surfers on the wave [0]. For reference I was standing on the bridge just above the platform in the article's second photo. It was pretty neat, and I'm sad that it might be lost.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW4eheoiHY4

I have a use case just for this. Sometimes my internet goes down while I'm working on my desktop computer. I'll put my work in a branch and push it to my laptop, then go to a coffee shop to continue my work.

The Drake Equation is filled with assumptions, like life must appear on a planet in the Goldilocks zone of a star. The whole equation has only one datapoint to extrapolate from. Tweak the equation's parameters and it will predict universes that only have one civilization per galaxy or worse! We have no way of knowing what those parameters are because we haven't seen other examples.

A major reason we are interested in Europa is because it might have underground oceans. Hypothetically, through tidal forces with Jupiter, the moon's core is hot enough to create oceans under the ice crust. Combined with hydrothermal vents you have the possibility for deep sea life similar to our own deep oceans. The Drake Equation does not predict this possibility.

10 years ago μTorrent tried to package a crypto miner as an install path offer instead of a toolbar and faced incredible backlash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent#Ads_and_malware

The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.

I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.

Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destr...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretl...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-sq...

[3] https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...

I can confirm my FreeBSD, Debian, and NixOS boxes don't have it installed by default. It's also not installed on my TrueNAS box.

This is not correct.

The copyright office itself doesn't recognize any transfer of works-for-hire [0] unless there's (#3) a written document of the transfer, (#4) signed by the recipient, (#5) signed by the copyright holder, and finally (#6) the work was made expressly as work-for-hire. Every employment, contractor, and freelancer contract is written with all of these questions accounted for.

Even wedding photographers keep the copyright of the photos they take of your wedding too for this very reason, unless explicitly contracted to transfer those rights.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf, page 5

The artist still owns the copyright. Payment by itself does not transfer copyright. To do that the artist needs to explicitly sign away those rights. This happens in employment all the time. Part of the paperwork you sign is about transferring over the copyrights from yourself to the company.

I highly recommend you check your own paperwork to see exactly how much this covers, since some states allow contracts that cover everything you make at any time. California has a specific law that limits these contracts to only works done on company equipment and on company time. Your state might be different.

In many ways it's the same as it ever was.

If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell 'H-T-M-L' you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical ".com" to their name, much like "AI" is today.

When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn't the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation.

This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed.

If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches.

The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing.

I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the "pampering" was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned 'Job Hopping' of the era.

Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It's one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It's quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of 'startups' vanished. This also broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with 'Job Hopping' and the incentives to stay were broken.

My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We're going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we'll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I'm betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.

You might consider mirroring the (legal) BitTorrent releases of your favorite Linux ISOs or something to that effect. I personally mirror several OCRemix BitTorrent releases [0] including the big 4K archive.

[0] https://bt.ocremix.org/

The group behind AI Dungeon released the Wayfarer model in 12B and 70B variants. The former is small enough to run on local hardware. 10/10 would get eaten by a giant sloth again.

[12B]: https://huggingface.co/LatitudeGames/Wayfarer-12B

[70B]: https://huggingface.co/LatitudeGames/Wayfarer-Large-70B-Llam...

I like this idea quite a bit. It's lightweight and read-only, which makes it far easier to host. I'm in the process of publishing some of my own repositories so I'm going to give this a try.

Totally fair. Unfortunately this dog is a 4 years old black lab and we don't have the capacity to train him out of it. We manage it by keeping him indoors when we let the chickens free range in the yard.

My mom has a dozen backyard chickens and I agree with all of these. I'll tack on two bits from my own experience:

Good: Fresh unwashed eggs don't need to be refrigerated. They are perfectly safe at room temperature on the shelf for days.

Bad: You can't leave them with other pets without supervision. One of the dogs got himself a taste for chicken and already ate at least three. You can't train this out of the dog, unfortunately. I had to put down one poor chicken that was deeply injured but still alive. We constantly stay vigilant to keep the dogs and chickens separate.

I went through school specializing in game development. Here are some thoughts:

Game development is all about project management, including managing external teams. The CS is just one part that goes into the whole business. You instead will be working with artists and their tools, from exporting 3D models to playing sound correctly. Getting everybody working productively is Project Management 101. As a corollary, having students make a very simple game (like Frogger or Space Invaders) with multiple people, including non-technical people, is great practice for real-world development while not exploding in scope.

"Game Design" is notoriously vague, but college is a unique place where you can get all the building blocks. You really want to have some experience with music, art, philosophy, theater, creative writing, project/business management, and much more. The broader your experience the more it serves your foundation. College is also a great place to meet many different people (artists, business, theater, music, etc) that can contribute and bounce ideas. You will learn about managing people!

Game development is more Art than Computer Science. Yes it is a simulation that is programmed on a computer, but outside low level game engine development you will be working on much more fuzzy concepts like artwork and "fun" far more than the CS heavy parts. Because it takes so many different experiences combined together, it's hard to make a specific elective or specific major. I do think other majors, like Film and Theater, are a good prototype of what a Game Development major might look like because they too have to combine many different technical specialties into a production.

tl;dr: Game development isn't a single major, but a whole bunch of majors in a trench coat.

My Windows rule-of-thumb is "Upgrade every other release." It served me well in the past when avoiding several weird Microsoft fads/features they love to cram into those 'cursed' releases.

98 -> XP, skip ME (to be fair, this window of releases was chaotic)

XP -> 7, skip Vista.

7 -> 10, skip 8.

However these days I only use Windows for games, and Valve is making inroads into that environment. Windows 10 might be my last Windows version.

folks are completely unaware at how antiquated their OS is at this point.

This release cycle is stretched far beyond Microsoft's historical cadence. For comparison, 7 released in 2009, 8 in 2012, and 10 in 2015. Compare that to the 2021 release of 11. The last time Windows had that long of a release cycle was the XP (2001) to Vista (2007) cycle. That era was plagued with development issues and gave rise to the very long XP deployments that Microsoft struggled to escape as well.

It's not that it's 'old' that bothers me, but more like Microsoft doesn't give me a good reason for upgrading despite the long cycle. Microsoft's decades long obsession with "Appifying" their OS, their wavering commitment to Windows prompting Valve to invest in alternative OS development, the "Microsoft Account" to log in fiasco, the botched AI rollouts (plural!), turning all of their applications into subscription webapps, the list seems to grow every quarter.

It's not all bad. WSL is the single best thing Microsoft did in the last decade, and maybe ever! It single-handedly caused me to upgrade from 7 to 10 Pro for Hypervisor support. For a long time WSL + Windows was my primary development box. If I were in charge of Windows, I would double-down on WSL and begin the arduous process of moving the Kernel from NT to Linux (or BSD, etc etc). Windows would then become an application layer with paid business support rather than core development. I would drive ports of popular programs and invest in stuff like Mono and Wine for supporting the long-tail of applications. It would also fit with Microsoft's decades long strategy of Windows being the OS for multiple PC and hardware manufacturers, but shifting the revenue focus from OS sales to their App store and subscriptions.

Choose a 'startupy' sounding name.

- Tumblr removed a letter

- Optimizely added a suffix

- del.icio.us is still the best domain name ever created

- a lot of domains have 'the' or 'try' as a prefix.

The standard dictionary names/combos were taken a long time ago, so you need to be creative.

Once you are an established company (revenue, funding, etc) buying an "expensive, proper" domain becomes less of an issue.