On somedays the ST comments are golden

Congratulations to the Kraken for winning the World Cup!

TFW you're custom implementing a Base64 to interpret a bit vector...in javascript... for your webpage about school districts.

Why am I writing byte parsing code in the browser for 128-bit integers? Why?

I swear half my life with computers is converting one file format to another. Grrrrr

I very strongly agree with this from @awongpublic.bsky.social. And I was happy with 3 of the 4 school board endorsements the Stranger made this year! But overall they’re doing more harm than good by making school board endorsements when they don’t regularly cover the district.

So, this is an interesting analysis from @awongpublic.bsky.social - since 2005, only two people (out of 36) have gotten elected to the Seattle school board without a Stranger endorsement. And none since 2011. Whereas the Times is batting just above .500 www.reddit.com/r/seattlepub...

If you care about SPS and want to help, we need folks to text-bank for Sarah Clark! It's super easy. I've automated the process to just a few clicks from your phone that you can do between tasks. If you're up for it, DM me! (heads up: it will use your SMS number)

New analysis: 50M of the SPS budget is chronically never used but still inflates the budget badly. medium.com/@awongawong/... Also, if you're interested, here's my school board election thoughts medium.com/@awongawong/...

2 things that make me hate modern tech society: (1) Data is so frequently sent around in PDFs. (2) Google Sheets is still one of the best multi-user, strong consistsency, small-scale backing stores for your web services. As a society, what in the world have we built :(

Ballots are arriving in mailboxes this week — and I’d love your vote to continue doing great work for our students! Watch the video and learn more: www.sarah4schoolboard.org

When you start trying to remember how borgmon var names were structured for design ideas you know you're in trouble...

... uh... wha???

Zomg. americabydesign.fail "Do your people even know basic HTML? Why is every single word wrapped in two spans? What’s up with the inline styles? Did you know that you can use CSS to make text uppercase?" Whomever made this, I wanna buy you a drink. (Switch .fail to .gov to see original)

embedding javascript into react to write html is all sorts of backwards feeling

That there are 2 packages danfojs and danfojs-node drives me nuts. I can't test my code in the commandline easily without abstracting out the frigging environment. I hate node.js.

Today's joyful posting -- cover of Sparkle from Kimi no Na Wa (Your Name) by the Grassini Project. The singer's expressiveness is really cool on this one.

OSPI provides a "enrollment summary" table and a "per-school enrollment" table. The two do not use the same units for counting students. WHY CAN'T ANYTHING BE EASY‽‽‽

Published an OpED on the SPS Superintendent search. Basically, we need someone that can get the organization in order in terms of staff and finances so that vision and policy can even be implemented. Focus on that first. Then worry about vision, etc.

This from @awongpublic.bsky.social is excellent. SPS needs a board and a superintendent committed to basic fiscal controls. But over the last 20 years those have eroded. It got a lot worse in the last 5 years as Liza Rankin and allies further removed most board oversight of operations and money.

Shout out to everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, who ran this cycle. Thanks for giving us choices!

I mean really.... where can the city council put a new hydroelectric dam in city or a new nuclear facility?

do people know what office they are running for?

SQL automatically casts for me sometimes. When it does it, I hate it. When it won't do it, I hate it. I just hate SQL.

Another part of seattle going. :(

For SPS Board Primary, vote Vivian Song, Sarah Clark, and Joe Mizrahi. medium.com/@awongawong/...

This is a really good write-up of the politics...and I thought that before I saw some of my posts quoted (Thanks for that!)

I asked ChatGPT to write fanfiction involving Hello Kitty, Guan Yu (chinese historical figure + legend), and 2 google engineers who love memory safety. It delivered.

Some days I hate SQL. other days... actually there are no other days.

some days you just feel like putting in a tablespoon of coffee into the family's miso-based soup noodles... this is one of those days.

Wherein we show that yearly deficits of the past ~15 years have been almost entirely prediction mistakes and exist on paper only during the budgeting process. We also show that in the past 2 years, the real deficit has only been 40M and then 13M (nowhere near the 100M). Please reshare.

Wow. This explains how 5 intersecting policies combine to have intersectional harm, sometimes doing the exact opposite of the policy's objective. Recent SPS advocacy pushed lot sof broad "magic bullet policy" which can backfire badly. Folks in SPS should read this for background. Good job Rebekah.

Gauche as it may be to repost someone posting about something I wrote, I don't know how to twittersky so here we are. Thanks @robertcruickshank.com !

Willing to trade one Gulf of America EO for one No More Daylight Savings EO...

Breaking: WASHINGTON (AP) — 21 civil service employees are resigning from Elon Musk's DOGE, refusing to "dismantle critical public services."

Wherein I highlight a bunch of inconsistencies in the SPS budget as well as the fact that we seem to have reconfigured staffing from "teacher" to "aides" meanings we got larger classroom sizes for lower "staff : student ratios"... hmm... feels like multiple structural issues. Lots of questions...

Hi Mark! Frmr engineer and program strategist from US Digital Service (which is now DOGE). Would love to chat w you about putting some serious capital into direct social services (food stamps, social security, etc) that the public can rely on as fed. services are under siege. Open forum on it maybe?

if you know anyone that is thinking of leaving gmail/outlook.com/etc "for security" and they don't have some sort of insanely specific knowledge about security and threats, please tell them to stop it. kthxbai

Nov's unemployment figure of 4.2% "counted homeless people doing occasional work as 'employed.' ... [If you include] unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent." www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Opinion: 2-hour delay with remote learning is the WORST of all possible worlds in terms of setup.

Wait a sec.. 415M for computer infrastructure upgrades over 100 schools for 6 years? 4M/school/6years. What kind of infrastructure are they putting in??? New WIFI APs in each school? New laptops per student? Subscriptions?

It took me weeks to actually commit to putting this message out there. We can say hard things.

www.seattletimes.com/opinion/we-w... I'm torn... But leaning no on BEX that isn't crafted in coordination with city or demographic strategy.

That feeling of panic when you're glancing at really old tabs you've left open and you forget you were looking up some details on how to do process management in bash.

Trying to schedule an appointment and currently: "you are the ... FORTY SEVENTH ... caller in the queue". Should I stay or should I go?

Merry Christmas.

Highly recommended: Albert Wong 's (@awongpublic.bsky.social) editorial in the Seattle Times calling for school board members to resign. www.seattletimes.com/opinion/been...

"It's a Cybertuck" -my kid

@wctang24.bsky.social why u no post?

Huh. I got followed by this guy. he keeps using that follow button. I do not think it does what it thinks he does.