Chris Adams

Software developer at a big library

Homepage: https://chris.improbable.org
GitHub: https://github.com/acdha

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Last Notes

2026-04-16 18:46:29 UTC

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oh, man, wouldn’t you love to have to explain to a court that your Debian package isn’t really part of the operating system? That’s a very broad net. Like I haven’t used it in years but if they still ship pam-ldap I’d be at risk for a patch I made in the 2000s to get it to stop hanging.

2026-04-10 00:07:47 UTC

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excuse me, I’m withering into dust remembering knowing prefixes it was safe to dial BBSes on.

2026-04-08 23:14:53 UTC

It’s like Google is trying to give users the worst impression of their #AI tools:
https://s3-us-east-2.amazonaws.com/code4libsocial/media_attachments/files/116/371/625/696/947/756/original/a355156a3c6c6813.jpeg

2026-03-15 02:17:40 UTC

“A Resume.org survey of 1,000 hiring managers found that 59% say they emphasize AI’s role in layoffs because it “is viewed more favorably by stakeholders than saying layoffs or hiring freezes are driven by financial constraints.” Only 9% said AI had fully replaced any roles. This is not a technology story; it’s a management honesty story that happens to involve technology.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-13/the-ai-washing-of-job-cuts-is-corrosive-and-confusing

2026-03-02 22:10:53 UTC

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I remember that and M$ so well. That used to feel a bit cringe but they're making a good argument for it.

2026-03-02 21:05:18 UTC

It’s like being back in the 90s but I’m more tired:
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/03/02/microsoft-gets-tired-of-microslop-bans-the-word-on-its-discord-then-locks-the-server-after-backlash/

2026-02-27 03:20:01 UTC

“The reels of film were old and battered and no one knew what was on them.
They were from before World War I and had been shuttled around from basements to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library. There were about 10 of them and they were rusted. Some were misshapen. The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together.
The librarians peeled them apart and gently looked them over, frame by frame…”
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2026/02/lost-19th-century-film-by-melies-discovered-at-the-library/

2026-02-20 13:50:40 UTC

Rarely is the need for skilled reviewers so prominent:
“Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro #AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter. … Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.”
https://www.ft.com/content/00c282de-ed14-4acd-a948-bc8d6bdb339d

2025-12-18 18:34:38 UTC

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Google+ was good at the very start but I think I got trained to ignore it after they tried growth-hacking with the non-stop notifications that someone I interacted with once selling something on Craigslist had joined. You could just tell their management had frozen out anyone who actually wanted to use it personally, which had to have been such a letdown to everyone who worked on it.

2025-10-21 20:29:24 UTC

Please let this be a joke:
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/aws-crash-causes-2000-smart-beds-to-overheat-and-get-stuck-upright-3272251/

2025-10-20 00:36:02 UTC

Looks like Indiana University gave students more of a media lesson than anticipated:
https://apnews.com/article/indiana-daily-student-ids-censorship-homecoming-6d8f4948c93fb0faaa57ff25b8efb8f9
https://www.purdueexponent.org/city_state/features/indiana-daily-student-censorship-newspapers-editorial/article_4cfd4bc6-f5a8-45f5-8091-dd9fc9f9da97.html

2025-08-08 20:51:28 UTC

@npub1ep8…29a5 it looks like that Zwilling Enfinigy you mentioned back in December is $100 for Costco members:
https://www.costco.com/.product.4000351890.html

2025-08-04 20:43:16 UTC

#Java folks: what do people prefer for writing modest size web apps or micro services? Something faster & less maintenance intensive than SpringBoot?

2025-07-14 19:20:44 UTC

#Django turned 20 over the weekend:
https://birthday20.djangoproject.com

2025-07-07 16:51:48 UTC

“The Mellon Foundation today announced the appointment of Dr. Carla Hayden as a senior fellow. As part of the Foundation’s fellowship, Dr. Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress, will pursue scholarship, writing, and research projects while also serving as a strategic partner and counsel, working in collaboration with Foundation leadership and staff, advising on opportunities to support and advance libraries, archives, and other organizations”
https://www.mellon.org/news/mellon-announces-appointment-of-dr-carla-hayden-as-senior-fellow

2025-05-24 00:02:01 UTC

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Shrewd targeting for institutional purchases?

2025-05-23 22:15:43 UTC

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I keep thinking I need a bot to follow your book thread and automatically place holds with my library.

2025-05-18 14:50:48 UTC

I’d say @npub1gv2…tlwl is easily having the most fun of anyone at the #pyconus poster session
https://s3-us-east-2.amazonaws.com/code4libsocial/media_attachments/files/114/529/392/714/839/639/original/c95944173987a01b.jpeg

2025-05-18 13:03:58 UTC

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I was thinking about a related problem earlier: a few projects I used to maintain have had contributions from what appears to be a very prolific contributor in Europe. I'm inclined to give them more access but not having a social graph in common has me thinking of Jia Tan, and wondering how I'd know whether they're a real person or 3 Chinese military LLMs in a trenchcoat. I don't think that's likely but the combination of attacks & reduced international ties seems worrisome for FOSS.

2025-05-09 02:41:48 UTC

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that makes three of us. I’d think they meet the requirements in Humphrey’s Executor for a quasi-judicial/legislative role but that’s currently being challenged so…

2025-05-09 01:45:21 UTC

House Democrats have disclosed that Trump has told the #LibrarianOfCongress that she’s fired, but there’s no stated reason or clear authority to do so:
http://democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/delauro-firing-librarian-congress-dr-carla-hayden

2024-12-16 14:17:01 UTC

“In 2025, buying a Vizio TV won’t just mean buying a TV from a company that’s essentially an ad business. It will mean fueling Walmart’s ad business. With Walmart also owning Onn and Amazon owning Fire TVs, that means there’s one less TV brand that isn’t a cog in a retail giant’s ever-expanding ad machine.”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/12/buying-a-tv-in-2025-expect-lower-prices-more-ads-and-an-os-war/

2024-12-12 19:04:56 UTC

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the big one for me is liability. These companies want to empower AI systems to make decisions snd sound authoritative without accepting responsibility for errors, but those should be mutually exclusive options.
(Thinking of the difference between Tesla’s YOLO FSD and Mercedes’ limited but far more capable system where they accept liability.)

2024-11-08 03:07:14 UTC

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I swear this has to be connected to something broken in Matt’s personal life, like Musk being willing to blow $30B on Twitter to stick it to his daughter’s support community.

2024-11-01 14:05:37 UTC

“when I used my phone again to display my barcode, the person at this desk said ‘you can’t sign your name but you’re tech-savvy?’ I replied that I was a computer science professor who just happened to have an injured arm. I’m sure that people with more permanent disabilities get this sort of nonsense all the time.”
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2024-10/2024-10-31.html

2024-10-28 16:42:58 UTC

“The state’s top education official relied on generative artificial intelligence to draft a proposed policy on cellphone use in Alaska schools, which resulted in a state document citing supposed academic studies that don’t exist.
The document did not disclose that AI had been used in its conception. At least some of that AI-generated false information ended up in front of state Board of Education and Early Development members.”
https://alaskabeacon.com/2024/10/28/alaska-education-department-published-false-ai-generated-academic-citations-in-cell-policy-document/

2024-10-22 16:34:03 UTC

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yeah, I saw that but really wanted to emphasize thr point because the primary user group I support now are blind people and sooooo many developers have been surprised that a tool which has aXe in its CI wasn’t really accessible at all.

2024-10-22 16:07:27 UTC

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I just want to emphasize that last point. axe is a good tool but it solves accessibility in the same way that flake8 passing means your code is bug free.

2024-10-16 17:37:47 UTC

The U.S. Library of Congress is hiring an enterprise architect, a rare non-supervisory GS-15 position:
https://www.usajobs.gov/job/814149800
#getfedihired cc: @npub1rl4…l72p

2024-10-15 13:06:41 UTC

The U.S. Library of Congress has an open fully-remote position for a DevOps engineer:
https://www.usajobs.gov/job/813930400
#GetFediHired cc: @npub1rl4…l72p

2024-10-14 12:17:41 UTC

Remember when Eric Schmidt said that we should let AI solve climate change because we aren’t?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/08/google-meta-omaha-data-centers/

2024-10-03 01:10:13 UTC

Beyond the obvious “don’t use Uber” lesson, this feels like an argument for antitrust breakups – ordering a burrito shouldn’t require a ToS which also applies to a taxi service. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/ubers-mandatory-arbitration-upheld-in-case-over-severe-crash-injuries/

2024-09-16 14:31:48 UTC

The U.S. Library of Congress is hiring a GS-14 #accessibility specialist eligible for remote work:
https://www.usajobs.gov/job/809242000
#a11y #section508 #wcag #getfedihired cc: @npub1rl4…l72p

2024-09-16 03:36:35 UTC

“there are concerns that these displaced communities may never be able to return to their lands. While weather extremes regularly displace whole communities in other parts of the world, this could be the first permanent mass displacement due to climate change.”
https://theconversation.com/south-sudan-floods-the-first-example-of-a-mass-population-permanently-displaced-by-climate-change-238461

2024-09-13 01:01:58 UTC

“Local farmers, authorities came to believe, were systematically destroying vital weather data in order to falsely claim millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded crop insurance, for a drought they made up.”
https://coloradosun.com/2024/09/08/patrich-esch-ed-dean-jagers-ranchers-fraud-insurance/

2024-09-10 11:35:32 UTC

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the cost difference is really staggering. If these work well, I’d imagine the under-insured will jump on that since you could buy a couple of pairs not to need to recharge during the day and still come out ahead.

2024-09-09 20:11:12 UTC

I am curious whether this will be a surprising #accessibility win because there are people who won't wear hearing aids but will buy popular earbuds which don't have a stigma (“they make me look old!” – certain people I knew who used to go to Who concerts without earplugs). If true, that would be a depressing little mirror on our culture.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/9/24236881/apple-airpods-pro-second-gen-hearing-aid-protection-features-update

2024-09-09 13:29:31 UTC

I am still chuckling about this:
https://front-end.social/@heydon/113067488731467484

2024-09-03 16:15:46 UTC

This is a clever abuse of the way so many people have had their contact info breached:
https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/113074407533859452

2024-08-23 01:48:55 UTC

You Snoos, you lose: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2024/08/1700-smart-bassinet-adds-20-month-sub-but-only-if-you-buy-it-used/

2024-08-19 22:51:39 UTC

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To your larger point, yes, I think there is definitely a reactionary tone well worth calling out here. I don't think that's 100% of it but it's a lot more than 0%, and it definitely distracts from the question of what approaches make sense in the current era where these tools are going to be used no matter how much harrumphing happens in The Atlantic.

2024-08-19 22:49:58 UTC

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I have … more than zero times found erroneous key presses made by the clumsy ape using mine ;-)

2024-08-19 22:37:09 UTC

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I agree that the model is broken for that specific area but if you broaden it a bit to cover the idea of reading one or more things and distilling common themes from them or questioning the perspective of the author(s) I think you're back to needing not to call something full-on cheating but finding a way to teach the concept of not blindly trusting the tools, similar to how even people who used calculators learned to check significant figures, etc. to look for mistakes.

2024-08-19 21:57:00 UTC

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I think the overlap is when you're trying to get the tool to do something so you don't have to learn it, like asking your buddy to write a paper for you, and that is setting you up for bombing the next unit when involves some foundational understanding you'd need to even tell if the answer is correct.
That last part is a good discussion angle because it's not giving up a tool, especially one which can be really amazing for e.g. ELL students, but learning how to use it safely.

2024-08-19 20:36:27 UTC

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my wife was already doing that for AP Bio but tried to have the talk in the form of “don’t let the tool write something you don’t understand or you’re setting yourself up for a harder time later” to keep it on the goal.

2024-08-19 20:33:36 UTC

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I share that conflict. I feel like at least part of the answer should be replacing mechanistic tests with things which are more focused on understanding and reasoning, but that can be a lot more work for instructors who have never been more overloaded and underpaid, so it’s easy for me to say not being the one who has to do it.
If I was teaching language, I could make all of the exams oral but then that’s hours of content to grade and potentially impacts certain students’ accommodations.

2024-08-14 11:41:24 UTC

Even if you think terms of service agreements are absurdly broad, you’d never expect this shameless claim:
https://wdwnt.com/2024/08/disney-dismissal-wrongful-death-lawsuit/

2024-08-06 21:39:16 UTC

Really not impressed by someone reacting to supply chain security goals by pressuring open source developers to do unpaid labor:
“This is my second attempt to obtain the requested information; if we cannot verify this, NASA will be unable to perform the Federally mandated assessment of the product/service supply chain.”

2024-08-02 17:53:15 UTC

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such a disappointment. I wanted an example of a small, sustainable business but…