The Daily Parker

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing.

While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company:

• US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if she knows where she is half the time, announced she's finally retiring from the Senate at the end of this Congress.
• Both Paul Krugman and Josh Marshall call bullshit on the GOP's (latest) plans to steal my social security contributions. (Note to the masses: the only way Social Security could be in trouble is if the United States somehow lost its taxing authority.)
• Air India has ordered 220 airplanes from Boeing and 250 from Airbus, including 70 long-haul A350s and 777s.
• Cranky Flier chides United Airlines for publishing a flight schedule they have no intention of flying over the summer.
• In other "fictional schedule" news, the CTA hasn't fixed its own frequency and reliability problems even after six months of trying.
• Rick Steves recommends traveling to Europe's second cities, like Manchester, Lyon, and Hamburg. 
• Timothy Noah draws a straight line from railroad cost-cutting through crew size reductions and the massive derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last week.
• Corrupt former Chicago police sergeant Ronald Watts, whose misconduct has led prosecutors to throw out more than 200 felony convictions and will probably cost the city half a billion dollars in settlements, blamed his downfall on "anti-police atmosphere" without the self-awareness required to see his part in that.
• Bruce Schneier bemoans the lack of urgency in Washington (and other capitals) to regulate cybersecurity.

Finally, you may not want to know what the CBP beagle squad has found in baggage at O'Hare.

I've got an open research problem that's a bit hard to define, so I'm exploring a few different avenues of it. I hope reading these count:

• Dara Massicot performs an autopsy on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
• Walter Kirn worries about AIs inadvertently training themselves, and the mushy content that will result.
• Bruce Schneier describes hacking the tax code, which I hope he goes more into in his latest book, currently on my bedside table.
• The Texas DOT seems to be at war with urbanism, which makes a certain sense, but something about their shenanigans in Houston recently seems unusually corrupt.
• The less said about toilet plumes, the better. But please put the lid down before flushing.

Since none of these has anything at all to do with my research project, I should get back to work.

My burn-up chart for the current sprint has a "completed" line that nicely intersects the sprint guideline, so I can take a moment this Monday morning to eat lunch and read some news stories:

• James Fallows has some insight into the near-miss in Austin, Texas, that came uncomfortably close to killing over 100 people. AVWeb has a comment as well.
• Bruce Schneier lays out how adversaries can attack AIs—by corrupting their training data, among other things.
• Alex Shepard argues that the English Premier League has turned itself into the very thing its fans feared.

And closer to home—like, less than a kilometer away—the City of Chicago has made some recommendations to improve a stretch of Clark Street that could be a model for other streets in the city.

It got practically tropical this afternoon, at least compared with yesterday:

Cassie and I took advantage of the no-longer-deadly temperatures right at the top point of that curve to take a 40-minute, 4.3 km walk. Tomorrow should stay as warm, at least until the next cold front comes in and pushes temperatures down to -18°C for a few hours Thursday night.

I'm heading off to pub quiz in a few minutes, so I'll read these stories tomorrow morning:

• London plans to build an elevated rails-to-trails park through Camden, similar to Chicago's 606 Trail and New York's High Line.
• Julia Ioffe outlines how Russia's pariah status has hurt their ability to spy on the West, but says we shouldn't rule out Russian shenanigans as their failed invasion of Ukraine grinds on.
• Via Schneier, a government audit found that people suck at choosing passwords. But we knew that.
• Molly White read all the FTX subpoenas so you don't have to.
• The contractor responsible for bits of the CTA's Brown Line Flyover falling off claims to have fixed it.

OK, off to empty the dog, refill the dog, and scoot over to Sketchbook Skokie for a shellacking. (Our sports person can't make it tonight.)

I have no idea. But today I managed to get a lot of work done, so I'll have to read these later:

• A whopping 78% of voters in Rep. "George Santos" (R-NY) district think he should resign.
• Who should I vote for in the upcoming Chicago Mayoral election?
• National Geographic explains the science behind seasonal depression.
• Via Bruce Schneier, it looks like ransomware payments have declined 40% since 2021.
• Writing for Strong Towns, Michel Durand-Wood compares urban planning to...pizza.
• James Fallows describes what an amateur pilot checkride is like, and why they're required. (And wow do I miss flying.)

Finally, if you live in Chicago and look straight up and slightly north with binoculars tonight, you might see a little green comet that last passed Earth 50,000 years ago.

Accused fraudster Sam Bankman Fried did what every prosecutor hopes a defendant will do: start a blog. Researcher Molly White annotated his first post:

Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently decided to fill his time spent confined to his parents' Palo Alto home with blogging, perhaps in the hopes that he can just blog his way out of the massive criminal and civil penalties he's facing.

Although many of his statements here repeat things he's said elsewhere, I think it is useful to be able to analyze some of the story he's trying to spin all in one place, rather than cobbling his narrative together from multiple sources.

It's remarkable the extent to which SBF outright lies, or at the very least twists his version of events to distort reality in his favor. I don't intend to annotate further posts from him—which I suspect will be many—but instead hope that this will be sufficient to give some idea of just how thoroughly misleading his statements are.

Sample annotation:

If I was going to try to pick out a crypto firm that suffered large losses in an attempt to say "look, it was happening to everyone!", I might not pick the one whose founders have allegedly been in hiding for the last six months.³⁴

And this:

It's clear that SBF's definition of "accurate" differs from most people's. SBF seems to think that if you tell someone that you have $1,000, and then later you say "...in monopoly money", it was still an accurate and defensible statement.

You know, I'm beginning to think 2023 will be the year people lose patience with lying fraudsters.

New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Arden, just resigned unexpectedly, which is a much more surprising story than any of these I queued up:

• President Biden quietly made a big move on immigration that the opposition either didn't notice or can't really criticize.
• Julia Ioffe understands the same thing the White House understands: Putin has no incentive to negotiate for peace.
• Newly-sworn-in US Representative "George Soros" (R-NY) stole $3,000 from a GoFundMe meant to pay for life-saving surgery for a disabled vet's service dog. (The dog died.)
• Pilot and journalist James Fallows has more on the near-miss at JFK last week.
• Uncle Bob reminds developers to factor their functional programs into classes. (Stay readable, folks.)
• Bruce Schneier worries about how ChatGPT could influence politics.
• The Tribune identified 5 suburban breweries to visit, 4 of which were already on the Brews & Choos list.

Finally, I'm glad to discover that ibuprofen may be more effective than acetaminophen for treating tension headaches, so I will now take one.

I'm on hold with my bank trying to sort out a transaction they seem to have deleted. I've also just sorted through a hundred or so stories in our project backlog, so while I'm mulling over the next 6 months of product development, I will read these:

• Via Schneier, credit-reporting service Experian patched a security hole in December that allowed anyone to view someone's credit report with "the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number."
• It turned out, an exciting software deployment caused the NOTAM system outage yesterday. (This is why I work very hard to have boring software deployments.)
• Tom Nichols finds it amazing that George Santos (R-NY) is actually a member of Congress.
• Julia Ioffe shakes her head at the permanent crisis Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) engineered for himself.
• Amanda Carpenter tries to see into the bottlenecks that bollocksed up our security services on January 6th.
• Speaking of bottlenecks, the Chicago Transit Authority has decided to "fix" the "ghost bus" problem by eliminating a quarter of its scheduled bus runs.
• Satellite photos show dramatically increased activity around funeral homes in China, belying the Chinese government's Covid death statistics.
• Soulless corporation Hasbro has turned its fangs to Dungeons & Dragons after they determined the game was "undermonetized." I swear on my autographed 2nd Edition Player's Handbook that I will write a longer post about how corporate copyright terms must be shortened to encourage  future creativity as the founders clearly stated in the Constitution.
• Frank Bruni looks at Noma's closing with relief. (I also have not enjoyed my 3-star restaurant experiences nearly as much as the 2- and 1-stars.)
• Ever see a moose shed its antlers? You'll be as surprised as the moose.

And my bank's customer service finally got back to me with the sad news that the thing I wanted them to fix was, and we are so sorry, it turns out, your fault. Fie.

We get one or two every year. The National Weather Service predicts that by Friday morning, Chicago will have heavy snowfall and gale-force winds, just what everyone wants two days before Christmas. By Saturday afternoon we'll have clear skies—and -15°C temperatures with 400 mm of snow on the ground. Whee!

We get to share our misery with a sizeable portion of the country as the bomb cyclone develops over the next three days. At least, once its gone and we have a clear evening Saturday or Sunday, we can see all five of the naked-eye planets just after sunset.

Meanwhile, I'm about to start my team's Sprint 75 Review, the last one of 2022, which contains a few goodies we put off because we spent most of our time on client requests. We have a strange habit of doing what paying customers know they want before we add the things they don't know they want.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:

• David Zipper points out that Clear has built a business around privatizing a US Government service, which makes things worse for everyone.
• Sorry, time and water are the only things that cure a hangover.
• New York Magazine examines the earth-shaking scandal of "Nepo Babies."
• Just a few kilometers from here, a local residents organization managed to save all 29 mature trees that the Department of Water Management "needed" to cut down to replace a 100-year-old sewer.

Finally, director James Cameron ended all debate about whether Jack and Rose could both have survived in Titanic: "Cameron maintains that Jack simply had to die, telling The Sun that 'if I had to make the raft smaller, it would have been smaller.'" Because the story, you see, required it.

My drivers license expired in 2020, when all the Secretary of State's offices (what we in Illinois call the DMV) were closed, so I just renewed it online. I had hoped to upgrade to a Real ID, but it turned out the 2021 deadline for getting one got pushed back to 2023.

Since I moved in October, I actually have to go to the SOS office as they won't accept address changes online. But I still don't need a Real ID, it turns out:

Americans will have two more years to obtain a Real ID driver’s license or identification card, the Department of Homeland Security announced Monday.

U.S. air travelers will be required to present the Real ID credential to board a domestic flight beginning May 7, 2025. Before Monday’s announcement, implementation had been scheduled to take effect in May next year.

Postponing enforcement of the last phase of the Real ID Act will give motor vehicle departments across the country more time to process the new credentials, but will come 17 years after the changes initially were to be in place. States have reported that progress on the Real ID program was hindered by the coronavirus pandemic.

In any event I already have both a passport book and a passport card. But still, how has it taken 17 years to get this done?