Apple's move into advertising cheapens their products, cheapens their brand, and raises entirely sensible questions about their commitment to privacy. There is no chance that the advertising income is enough to justify that trade-off.
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Waldo Jaquith
@waldoj@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Thought follower. Male software developer. Alumnus of 18F, the Obama White House, Georgetown's Beeck Center, the Biden-Harris Transition Team, and the Biden administration. Speaks only for self. he/him
4473 Followers
240 Following
50 Posts
Joined April 03, 2017
Place:
Charlottesville, VA, USA (Monacan land)
Website:
Bluesky:
Pronounced:
JAKE-with
Replying to
It is such an interesting exercise being a website developer of ~32 years and confining myself to the visual and conceptual palette of the 1990s. I'm not going as far as limiting myself to the 216 “web-safe colors" or limiting page weight to 35k. It's fun to think "I have a BirdNet Pi...and I have a website…why not put recent birds on my website?” Is that cringe? Maybe! But I don't care!
I saw today that the Free Software Foundation issued a statement on something or other, and I must remind everybody that child-rape advocate, sex pest, and creep Richard Stallman remains a member of the FSF board.
Until the FSF removes Stallman, the board members who enabled him, and accounts & atones for their decisions, they should be ignored.
Blog entry: We need something between a traditional home solar installation and plug-in solar. Imagine paying an electrician to install an inverter that connects to your electrical panel. You’d be left with a box on the side of your house, with a connection point for solar power. Then you, the homeowner, can plug a solar panel into that box. Or two or three or fifty solar panels.
Permitting sucks, so let's reduce the footprint of what needs a permit. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2026/07/beyond-plug-in-solar/
RE: @anildash@me.dm
If I lived in the EU, I'd have pivoted my career by now to supporting the creation of publicly owned software and technical infrastructure, to wean the member states off U.S. tech. It's the only sensible thing for them to do.
Boy, this bit does not bode well for the rest of this article. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html
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Continuing the home-page-ification of my personal website, I've added a sidebar with HTML-3-table-style bevels and a very 90s #c0c0c0 background. Fighting my normal urge to get everything right before publishing, I've pushed it out with lots of embarrassing layout bugs because that will force me to fix them quickly.
Using Arial over Helvetica makes me twitch, but...nineties. We'll see how long I can tolerate that.
I don't know what a Git worktree is and I'm annoyed to have to learn what this new thing is.
I have been frustrated by the lack of protest songs in popular culture. Enter Massive Attack and Tom Waits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-57FrioeuE
Massive Attack / Tom Waits - Boots on the Ground
RE: @rejectedplates@mastodon.social
Somebody with a large donkey just sad and confused to have their license plate proposal rejected
99% of my Snyk notifications are "there's a security problem with a library in the Dockerfile of your software that it allows it to run locally for development purposes; no fix is available.” This information is useless to me.
@mathowie@xoxo.zone "So far, the ‘killer app’ aspects of AI is helping me create/iterate/finish things I've wanted for many years, but couldn't find time or energy enough to do completely on my own.” Amen! I've been dragging half-completed ideas or ever-crappier websites for *decades*, in some cases, and I have appreciated the help in getting these over the finish line.
@mathowie@xoxo.zone I'm glad you covered here the question of whether noise-cancelling headphones actually reduce noise hitting your eardrums, for safety's sake. I use my AirPods under my standard over-ear hearing protection when running my table saw etc., and I'm glad to know that's actually helping. https://a.wholelottanothing.org/the-airpods-max-2-are-better-at-noise-cancellation-than-the-previous-version/
The ADSL protocol will get you 3.5 Mbps download over wet string. https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html
I'd forgotten how good the "Sneakers" soundtrack is. I don't think I've seen this movie in ~25 years.
RE: @thiseconomy@mastodon.social
My bot's been on a real heater recently. On Monday it was "between a rock AND a hard place?” and last week both "for all debts public AND private?" and "hammer AND sickle”?
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Huh, well, posting about a feature on my site that disappears when I’m not actively listening to music is not really a great way to share it.
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It's JavaScript-based, so that I can cache the HTML for the site. Instead of making a live call to Last.fm, I use some JS as an intermediary, which caches the song for 60 seconds. I extremely don't think that Last.fm is worried about the traffic I'll generate, but it just seems like the decent thing to do.
Replying to
We’re 30 years into a contracting death spiral, where software projects have more and more requirements—thousands of them, in the case of major systems—and yet those projects more likely to fail than ever. This model hasn’t worked.
The solution is a radical reversal: the elimination of nearly all of those requirements. This is how we put government in charge again. This is how we succeed.
~fin~
RE: https://mastodon.social/@kottke/116846509539740340
My family has been here since 1639 (whatever the hell “my family” means that many generations back) and that is extremely not what makes me American. I’m more American for the immigrants that comprised my family, waves of them with each generation, from Canada, Sweden, Sicily, England, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands.
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@monkeyninja@10base2.dev Mamdani discovered a shocking budget deficit when he took office, that Adams had covered up. He didn’t just cut funding for fun. The city is obliged to have a balanced budget. I’d bet real good money that funding will be more than restored.
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@chartgerink@akademienl.social It turns out that most of the time that it's important that it be a crime to destroy evidence is when government doesn't know if evidence is there. If government already knows about the evidence, then destroying it becomes a lot less problematic.
(None of this to defend the current situation—I don't know enough about that to have an informed opinion.)
New blog entry: “Capital funding poisons software projects."
Color of money shapes a lot of things about government in the U.S., and a big one is how we buy software. When agencies have to treat custom software development (an operational expense) as a capital expense, that has a cascading series of effects that lead to billions in wasted spending annually. If we can shift to opex, such as via an IT investment fund, we'll see better results. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2026/03/opex-not-capex/
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The core proposition of an Agile contract is this: Instead of defining lots of requirements, those are introduced as user stories throughout the life of the project, based on constant user research, prioritized by a government product owner. When you define requirements up front, they'll be wrong.
live.gov and launch.gov
Replying to
When procuring custom software, agencies commonly make the mistake of contracting for detailed deliverables. They think “our existing system has 16 workflows, so let’s require those the contract for the new system, so that we’ll know we’ll get all that functionality.” This ends badly.
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@monkeyninja@10base2.dev (Removed the others, because I’m not interested in participating in that larger discussion.) The baseline here should be what each has done relative to a stock Democrat. Spanberger has basically been a stock Democrat, though vetoing more Democratic legislation than most Dems would. Mamdani has done far more, in barely more time, and blocked nothing good.
Blog entry: Delivery deadlines are a mistake.
I wrote last week about how it’s a mistake to include detailed deliverables in an Agile software development contract, but let’s throw another mistake on the pile: including a delivery deadline in an Agile contract.
Yes, I understand it sounds absurd to say that a service contract shouldn’t have a delivery deadline. But hear me out. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2026/04/delivery-deadlines/
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In the case of those 16 workflows, it would be a real victory if user research found that, actually, only 9 workflows were needed. That's faster to build and cheaper to maintain. But only if the contract allows building just nine! Did it specify 16? Well, then you're getting 16 now.
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But, wait, it gets worse!
It is essential that every project be led by an empowered government product owner, whose has the crucial job of preparing and prioritizing user stories for the vendor team to pull from at the beginning of each sprint. This restores control to government.
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@kwezelaar@mastodon.nl @mathowie@xoxo.zone If water is your concern, I hope you don’t eat beef—it requires vastly, vastly more water. ( I very rarely eat beef, for this and other environmental reasons.)
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...Unless you also tell the vendor that they must complete particular objectives. Then you’ve just destroyed that model. Now the vendor has to ignore the PO and substitute their own judgment about what work needs to be done when, and how, because they must answer to the higher power of the contract.
Every requirement is just tying your own hands.
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@glennf@zeppelin.flights My hunch is that I was only confused on the website because I'd been primed to expect audio. :) Saying "Disk space” in big letters up top sure clears things up!
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@glennf@zeppelin.flights FWIW, I read this and believed you were describing audio volume—it took me a bit to figure it out. My hunch is that a slight terminology tweak might be needed.
Boosted by @kkarhan@jorts.horse
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@mathowie@xoxo.zone I completely forgot I'd set up a new Tailscale exit node before I left home, and I’m now piping this hotel WiFi traffic through my home's connection, including my Pi-hole.
That curtain trick was courtesy of Rick Klau. Not his invention, but his tweet about it *really* took off.
Blog entry: Independent government cost estimates are essential for custom software projects. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2026/04/igce/
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@monkeyninja@10base2.dev They’re awful. Always awful. I don't get the attraction in any way. (Though peep jousting is fun, it's true.)
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@jwz I am now considering the alternate timeline, from which we deviated in 2016, in which lunch.gov is just a nice website set up by the Ag Department all about how to have a nice lunch.
@20002ist@thepit.social Oh cool so I simply say “/ˈæ.pə.θɛm/" thank you Wiktionary
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@mathowie@xoxo.zone It blows my mind that the price of storage could go *up* as anything more than a blip. This is not…OK well actually this is the future I was promised, but it's not the one that I *wanted*.
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@mathowie@xoxo.zone What's the least-shitty car rental company, in your experience?
This question brought to you by our ongoing fight with Budget, who charged us $250 to vacuum out some sand from the back of a rental van last month.
Replying to
@HakeemG@mastodon.social a) I explicitly said that I do not care to be part of the larger discussion. b) I have all of this information—after you all, you already provided it—but I do not come to the same conclusion that you do.
Too bad DDG and Kagi bangs can only scope down to one site, because I'd love to have one to search cooperative extension services’ websites, the U.S.'s best source of agricultural information. They're a wealth of information about gardening, pest management, food preservation, composting, beekeeping, invasive species, stormwater management, etc., etc. But every state has different publications, and sometimes I have to search a bunch to find what I need.
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@jessamyn@glammr.us It’s interesting that Apple assumes the latter group—OS updates are auto-installed not when the watch is charged, but only when it’s charged *at night*. Otherwise they have to be manually installed.