Remote
Dan Ports
@dan@discuss.systems
mastodon 4.7.3Distributed systems, operating systems, networking research.
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research; affiliate faculty, University of Washington.
But realistically: mainly cat photos, food and wine, and bad jokes.
I also administer https://discuss.systems/
4319 Followers
593 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 08, 2022
web:
Replying to
@irene@discuss.systems @catsalad@infosec.exchange Pixel is the smallest cat but somehow she contains the largest meows
Replying to
@FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange @irene@discuss.systems @catsalad@infosec.exchange Pixel is so dapper that she has a tiny pocketwatch to go with her tuxedo. She uses it to make sure meals are served precisely on time.
Replying to
@donni@mastodon.social @catsalad@infosec.exchange I don't remember where i first saw this, but I'm going to keep posting it
(in order to keep trying to process it)
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
How am I supposed to work out when the gym bros keep hogging the bench?
#cats #catsofmastodon
Pixel learns that her litter box manufacturer has been purchased by private equity and they are introducing subscription-based AI features that no one asked for.
This is not the enshittification she called for.
#cats #catsofmastodon
Someone at my workplace has scheduled a "puppy play event" as a fundraiser for our Giving Month and, er, I’m not sure that means what they think it means...
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
My friends have a whiteboard where they keep their home improvement todo list, so every time I visit I surreptitiously add a fake item.
- rotate furniture
- refinish doorstops
- ceiling fan torque dampers
- check attic ambient load distribution
- dishwasher vapor return manifold
- recalibrate subfloor tension dampers
- test GFCI harmonic inversion modes (+/- 0.5%)
- confirm plumbing flow alignment (clockwise only!)
Early American Chinese restaurant menus were designed to be parsed as SQL.
When my mom started medical school, the dean gathered everyone in the auditorium and announced "I've been forced to admit three women into this class, but I want everyone to know that they took a spot away from a qualified man."
Fifty-something years later, my dad just got his latest batch of cardiology fellows, residents, and interns -- and every one of them is female.
Please tell me that this school is actually an elaborate practical joke.
https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/16/75k-year-private-school-encouraging-kids-go-viral-twitter/
I'm not saying that the main problem with US politics is a lack of capybaras, but I would be willing to consider replacing everyone in Congress with a capybara as an experiment.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-capybaras-lawmakers-herd-fec574aa45b80b76d4993f8eda86d94b
Some days I really miss teaching... and some days I hear from my friends that their students have been asking for extensions because "OpenAI deleted my girlfriend".
Catposting.
#cats #catsofmastodon
Mutex contention: this critical section is already occupied.
okay, can we now have another Turing Award for major contributions to the field of gay romances?
https://www.popsci.com/science/alan-turing-love-short-story/
In honor of Minion's 10th birthday today, please tag yourself:
#cats #catsofmastodon
In honor of Minion's 10th birthday today, please tag yourself: #cats #catsofmastodon
I missed this news earlier, but legendary early OS and computer architecture researcher Jack Dennis died in March.
He was at MIT from 1949 -- before their first computer! -- until retirement and beyond, and did pioneering work on hardware support for time-sharing on the PDP-1 and on the memory and protection architecture of Multics.
Some of the many things he introduced include:
- segmented virtual memory
- capability-based security
- dataflow computation and architectures
- starting the SOSP conference
- probably being the first person to name a variable 'foo' (!)
https://news.mit.edu/2026/jack-dennis-pioneering-developer-dataflow-models-of-computation-dies-0410
Pixel has gone offline for maintenance (because dinner is half an hour late.)
Replying to
@catsalad@infosec.exchange today they are currently flopped out at the highest, and warmest, point in the house.
Replying to
Also reminded of the time my dad came home from the hospital and excitedly told me that he had just learned about “the LGBLT community”
(this was in the 90s when LGBT was a new term)
Cats with winter melons is the viral trend I did not know I needed.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202607/1366302.shtml
#cats
From one of FDR's Fireside Chats:
"Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you—using his stockholders' money to pay the postage for his personal opinions—that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry"
Good thing we have progressed so far since 1938 that this no longer applies.
Oh, wait, you mean that the part that no longer applies is the next sentence?
"Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the Nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business executives heartily disagree."
Replying to
@rooster@beige.party millennials have been spending all our money on avocados and all we got was a 40 million year old woke gender ideology?
The real measure of research success is not how many papers you have in a conference, but how many of the attendees have a sticker of your cat on their laptop.
I've been using Immich, a self-hosted photo server for a year or so and have been really impressed with it overall, but I'm in awe right now because I just typed "klein bottle" into the search bar and it successfully returned my photos of Klein bottles.
#selfhosted
randomly reminded today of the fact that Bill Clinton wrote a political thriller in 2018 that contained a surprisingly passable explanation of the Border Gateway Protocol.
I'm not saying we should necessarily have an exam on distance-vector routing protocols as a cognitive test to be qualified for the presidency, but... actually, why not?
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Replying to
I miss when weird sex things on the internet were just weird sex things and not somehow fascist scams.
This is my emotional support Sichuan chili oil.
Replying to
@steve@discuss.systems @dev@discuss.systems almost as rich a source of powerpoint absurdity as the time I googled 'site:*.mil' for ppt files
help I am married to a doily maximizer, my house is already all doilies
Replying to
@dev@discuss.systems I took a finance class in grad school to satisfy an obscure requirement and it was roughly on this level.
But with worse graphics.
Replying to
@catsalad@infosec.exchange I was a little suspicious that this might be something the Chinese are making up to troll westerners, but I checked with one of my students who confirmed this is real.
(to be fair, he is also willing to troll me, so...)
Replying to
@regehr@mastodon.social @aburka@hachyderm.io @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io @dev@discuss.systems this sounds awful, I can’t stand tomatoes
Free startup idea: agentic AI for Etsy witches
Replying to
@tsturm@famichiki.jp yep! Way better than my alma mater's plan to put all degrees on a blockchain, the imperial Chinese managed to put them on an actual block!
Replying to
@tsturm@famichiki.jp ooh, making a note of this for my next trip to Tokyo
Having visited most of the major tourist destinations already it is time to start visiting the obscure museums.
(see also: the Imperial standardized testing museum in Beijing)
Replying to
@aurynn@cloudisland.nz also using iTerm2, looking to see what the recommendations are
(before that I was using rxvt in X11, which was in retrospect was certainly a choice)