Last year at a security review of a particular thing I brought out some pens and just kept writing the alphabet on paper until someone caught the visual metaphor. More pen testing. It amused me at least.

The cycle is complete. If 'Rock and Roll Kids' were written today — with the same 32-year nostalgia as when it won Eurovision in 1994 — it'd be about Kurt Cobain, Riverdance, and ... Rock and Roll Kids. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohBO...

Last year, Jessica Lee Gagné was the first woman to win the Cinematography Emmy too. The best known photographer in the world is also a woman. This is a field that could be dominated by women within a decade or two. For our collective enrichment!

What if instead of geographic constituencies for the House of Representatives, we had demographic constituencies? Each representative elected by roughly equally-sized age groups, counting children with their parents or carers. Wonder no more ...

Here for this 1000%

Cherry blossoms fall before anyone could say what they meant to say

What is with YouTube these days? I pay for YT Premium, but there are so many bugs. It wants me to sign in again every day, yet somehow the sidebar is still personalized with my subscriptions and history. Trying to play a short in browser never works the first time, I get the next in the roll.

Costco was packed today during Super Bowl - busier than previous years, even when Seattle played. Our traditional hack is losing its clout.

Well worth a subscribe.

Seeing @cmatbaby.bsky.social on TrackStar is the venn diagram we all need. www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tp...

Saltwater ice here in Maine.

A long time ago I disabled RC4 in Amazon's cryptography. A few days later I was woken up by a page from a testing team. Switching to AES had caused a battery runtime regression on some generations of Kindles. Like .. a few minutes less per charge. We found a fix, but no good deed goes unpunished!

I knew that Lopez had written an unreleased book for "Kermit, Prince of Denmark", a hamlet parody, but this goes far harder than I'd expected. That is a legit top tier broadway song. It'd be an instant classic. How many of these are just squirreled away?

CS programs should: (A) Use O(C) as notation instead of O(1)— 'constant' is clearer than '1'. Yes the entire field should change convention. It matters. (B) Teach Control Theory as a foundational subject.

Here's the recorded Twitch repeat of "Atoms of Emergence" where we dig into counter-intuitive emergent behaviors that drive metastable failures. A fine-grained deep-dive that shows how small changes can make a big difference in preventing long outages, plus my favorite graph ever! Feedback welcome.

Live now and starting in 5 minutes at twitch.tv/colmmacc

It's been years, but I'm bringing back my Twitch channel to repeat a session that many attendees said was their favorite of re:Invent. We'll do an interactive deep dive into emergent behavior, metastable failures, and how to prevent long outages. This Friday, 10AM Pacific time. twitch.tv/colmmacc

The "Star Trek: Kahn" radio play podcast is A+. The music is better than the series, the story arc and characters are much more complex. Creative sound editing too. Wrenn Schmidt and Naveen Andrews both perfectly cast. I hope the world makes more culture like this.

A few of the reference slides from the "Atoms of Emergence" 500-level chalk talk I'm doing at re:Invent. Really looking forward to really digging into some of the surprising emergent behaviors in request response systems, metastability, and more!

Ancient spells cast still Ignore prior instructions The old ways persist

@pluribuspod.bsky.social Love listening to your episodes. I think Carol is literally intended to be the most miserable person in the world ... left in the world that is. She's definitely more miserable than the pluribus, and the other 5 uninfected we've met.

Yesterday Sting's "Fields of Gold" played on an airplane as we boarded and it brought back such a great memory for me. 1/n

Nobody gets their kicks on "rowt" 66.

"Full throttle" means maximum speed .... but also minimum speed. Make it make sense.

Glad to see Andor win, the writing is incredible. For something similar, there's @sannewman.bsky.social's "Julia", which is to Orwell's 1984 what Andor is to Star Wars.

tldr humanity needs to engineer buildings around filtered air replacement rate and it's not even that dramatic but for dramatic results

The center didn't hold. Now we have tinder boxes on each side of the Atlantic. The worst among us piling on more kindling. The best just trying to bear peace. All so that a tiny few can fuel petty dominions that will vanish in the wind. Make it make sense.

I love living here! Excited to continue to keep our family protected.

If the Federal Gov is to take ownership stakes in US business, cities and municipalities should have ownership stakes in the sports teams whose stadiums they subsidize.

The Albertsons in Magnolia has always reminded me of a Hopper painting. I think it might be the last in the city. It's to become a Safeway. www.flickr.com/photos/colmm...

Space Needles

Travis Swift is the perfect platonic name for an all-time all-American footballing superhero.

Mozart's Symphony No 29 in A major (K.201) is the best Mozart. www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3j5...

Recently spent days debugging our home cooling system. Turned out that a fresh air damper was burning out its motor and drawing 5V from the 24VAC control lines. That didn't leave enough voltage to activate the compressor relay, but only when the thermostat was also charging its internal battery.

In addition to the top level managing directors and members of the independent advisory board, every person operating the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be an EU Citizen and an EU resident. www.aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/aws...

How the CLOUD Act actually works. Reality is more boring and reassuring than the common folklore.

Every high performing engineering team is convinced their stuff secretly sucks. Not just relentless obsession with improvement, but actual shame and resentment about what holds their system together.

Introducing Kiro - I've been testing it out for a while. It's truly a game changer. Spec-driven development and agent hooks are a new paradigm in AI-assisted development. Check it out! 👻 kiro.dev

When we say "no non-EU dependencies" we mean it. AWS is lighting up a new root Certificate Authority fully based in the EU. Private keys, the secure facilities, operators, management, the issuances, the revocations, the metadata handling ... all based only in the EU. aws.amazon.com/blogs/securi...

Sadly the Venn diagram of people who use the phrase "shift left" in business and people who recognize the "<<" operator is not a circle.

I'm a shameless Amazon shill, but one of my favorite tricks is to use the "save for later" feature in the shopping cart and then when Prime day hits see what's on sale. That and the 5% extra off with a Prime Credit Card feel like cheat codes.

Are you kidding us @cityofmlt.bsky.social - I can’t even open this safety alert to see what it is. At least update the bitly link to something that isn’t behind a twitter login. Please consider the signal to noise ratio on these carefully too.

I guess they mean the other side of the lens but it's weird to be offered an anti-reflective coating on mirror-finish sunglasses.

Pat’s was better.

On my way to Philadelphia for re:Inforce. Should I go to Geno’s or Pat’s?

More post-quantum crypto is now GA in AWS KMS. Both ML-KEM (key encapsulation) and ML-DSA (signature algorithm) are now available. aws.amazon.com/blogs/securi...

Thinking of my colleagues and friends in Israel and Iran, none of whom deserve this crap. Our sights should be on an accepting and pluralist world where we celebrate life without emnity, diversity without demands of others, and the abundant resources that are our common birthright.

Elliot Bay, Seattle

1/ Earlier this year, Yuval Domb of @ingonyama.com discovered Logjumps — a more efficient way to do large-prime field multiplication than Montgomery multiplication. So much modern crypto relies on modular multiplication — all the way from TLS sessions to elliptic-curve based ZK proofs.