Complacency kills — manifested as a preference for convenience, caused and aggravated by a lack of preparation, compounded by loss of composure, with fatigue as accelerant.

The hits keep coming.

AI is making you stupid. MIT just proved it. Or so the teaser line on myriad social media posts, still circulating months after MIT published “Your Brain On ChatGPT”, would have us believe. Did you read the upstream 206-page PDF? I did.

This will change how you see AI forever… is the breathless message behind myriad reposts of the “WHERE AI GETS ITS FACTS” meme, originated by Visual Capitalist, from which we are meant to conclude that Reddit-sourced slop comprises nearly half the inputs.

When you take the wheel of a car, you should drive it like it is stolen. That will, however, require more subtlety than the casual GTA enthusiast imagines.

404 Media last week broke a story with SignalGate 2.0 vibes — ICE reportedly added a random person to an intelligence-laden group chat for an active manhunt. While reminiscent of an earlier gaffe where short-timer Mike Waltz invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group where top officials discussed imminent airstrikes in Yemen, this case feels different.

Back around 2010, zipping along I-95 South, I spied a roadside billboard from a major defense contractor featuring a CGI soldier clad in Halo-style armor and sporting the tagline “SAIC — now hiring cyber warriors”. “Blergh, there goes the neighborhood”, I thought, a “neighborhood” so reclusive it had until recently stubbornly eschewed so much as an exit ramp sign admitting its mere existence.

“There goes another domino”, I thought upon reading an FT piece covering Spain’s “noooooooop” to the US’s F-35 in favor of a European-made option. Just days earlier, similar rumblings had emanated from Switzerland as Trump slapped punitive tariffs on them. And, zooming out, we see Portugal also edging away from the F-35, citing a need to consider the “predictability of our allies”, echoing prior German suspicions of an embedded “kill switch”.

“Argh, again with shooting the messenger!”, I found myself thinking on Friday when news broke of Trump firing Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEntarfer in the wake of irksome numbers. “This reeks of elbowing CDC out of COVID reporting channels in 2020”, I further reflected dourly.

“Argh, again with the root file system writes!”, I lamented recently, while helping a client port the enterprise version of an open source product from Heroku to AWS. While configuring it to run on Amazon’s ECS, I had reflexively enabled the readonlyRootFileSystem option, knowing that not only to be a good practice generally, but also key to preserving recent hard-won gains in their AWS SecurityHub score.

Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” novels stand tall among my favorite science fiction universes. In this thoughtscape the so-called “Culture”, a star-faring pan-human species, co-exists with its hyper-intelligent starships, essentially giant brains wrapped in interstellar travel technology and often bristling with weapons. Across assorted plots the Culture clashes with rival civilizations whose own ships offer fascinating design contrasts.

But Signal is secure, right? Right? Well, sort of, at least theoretically, at least probabilistically, at least to a degree and in certain contexts…

I remember a simpler time some twenty-five years ago when a three-tiered architecture of web server, application server, and database server defined my reality at a part-time job worked during university. If memory serves this consisted of a lightweight Apache front-end, a heavier middle-tier Apache running mod_perl, and a backend running MySQL. Maybe there was another tier in the form of a database connection pooler but probably more likely is that I am hallucinating that we even had separate Apache tiers. There were, meanwhile, actual servers on which all this ran to which I might SSH from my college dorm room to read log files and restart processes on the local system. Actually maybe there was just a single server with all this on it. These were, as earlier noted, simpler times.

I am given to understand that programmers who came of age in my father’s generation used what we now call punch cards. Whereas today’s practitioners poke at a keyboard that manipulates files resident in volatile memory, backed by persistent storage, and fed to lightning-fast compilers or interpreters, yesterday’s craftspeople might have fleshed out programs on whiteboards or paper, only then to laboriously encode them onto structured cardstock, punch cards, which somehow had to make their way to a mainframe to await their turn to execute in an overnight batch job, the outcome of which might be to find that your program had some trivial error in it, the correction of which would take another day.

“But that’s three thousand dollars per terminal per year!”, the exasperated government program manager exclaimed. I had, to his astonishment, just noted that I was gladly paying for an unclassified terminal, in addition to a classified terminal, on each of my twenty engineers’ desks. “How can you expect software engineers to do their jobs without easy access to Google?”, I replied. The woman who had remained mostly silent in the meeting until now, her role being the contract lead for my flabbergasted counterpart, finally chimed in — “can I come work for you?”.