Kee Hinckley

Passionate about making social media a safe place for everyone. 

SWE with a BA in Anthropology.
Four decades on social media.
From Bell Labs intern to Meta TL in Scaled Human Review (it doesn’t). Currently consulting.
Previously nazgul, mooshjan, and coyotetoo (a long time ago) on Twitter. they/she

See pinned post for more details.

Banner Art: ©️ Shadi Fotouhi. Four self-portraits of my daughter depicting various medications and the emotions they are meant to treat. 

Pronouns: she/her
Location: Guanajuato, MX
Occupation: Retired, writing SF&F, and tech and social commentary

Public Key

npub16rwg6sq27e8wxrpqr5satf6zn6adpamy5dhx56vnp9n8z7t4cgqs3x58v0

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nazgul_at_infosec.exchange@momostr.pink

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nprofile1qqsdphydgq90vnhrpssp6gw45apfawks7aj2xmn2dxfsjen3096uyqgprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyv8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnndehhyapwwdhkx6tpdsy5z2mg

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relay.momostr.pink

relay.snort.social

atlas.nostr.land

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Last Notes

2025-09-17 02:56:48 UTC

#otter and #GreatBlueHeron at #sunset #Photography
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/115/217/376/043/634/778/original/fdbda6566c600364.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/115/217/378/384/901/394/original/a591053872956e23.jpeg
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2025-08-21 06:43:42 UTC

❝ The crazy thing is not that garlic isn’t grown from seeds; it’s that, for the most part, it can’t be. Ever since people began cultivating garlic — six millennia ago by some estimates, 10 by others — it’s primarily been done through asexual reproduction. In all those thousands of years, scarcely a single plant was coaxed to produce one solitary seed.
And so it forgot how.
About 15 years ago, a Missouri farmer and former union painter named [Mark Brown](https://www.gatewaygarlic.com/?ref=ambrook ) began trying to coax true seeds from his garlic — an attempt, essentially, to undo thousands of years of domestication.
❞ https://ambrook.com/offrange/crops/so-you-think-you-know-garlic?utm_source=clivethompson&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=linkfest-38-tk-tk-and-tk

2025-05-04 20:06:08 UTC

Seems about right.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/114/451/360/521/279/608/original/a58485b6d4c32f0f.png

2025-03-28 22:44:37 UTC

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We know the names of some of them. The soccer fan with a soccer tattoo, a tattoo artist, the gay barber, the guy with a tattoo honoring his grandmother, the one with one honoring his daughter. But none of them deserved to be denied due process.
El Salvador did return some due to not matching their agreement. Several woman, and a guy who wasn't even from Argentina.
That alone tells you how rushed and completely without logic this was. Speak Spanish, have a tattoo, and on our list of asylum seekers? In you go.

2025-03-28 21:19:18 UTC

❝ These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” This man was slapped for his tears, beaten for his vulnerability.
No phone calls. No visitors. No books. No talking. Just exile to a place “so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten.”
And all of this—every slap, every sob, every stolen dignity—stamped with American approval. Coordinated with American officials. Executed with American efficiency. ❞
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/28/what-is-it-exactly-that-being-an-american-means-to-you/

2025-03-20 04:26:00 UTC

I see the tough guy approach is going well.
❝ Today, when the phone call [with Trump] was scheduled, Putin was on stage at an event. When his interviewer asked if he needed to go because he would be late for the call, Putin dismissed the question and laughter broke out. Brett Bruen, president of the Global Situation Room public relations firm wrote: “Making leaders wait is an old Putin power play. But, this is pretty brutal. Putin is publicly mocking Trump.” ❞
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-18-2025

2025-03-16 05:29:20 UTC

Remember that old adage about IQs? 100 is the average and median IQ. Half the population is *under* 100.
ChatGPT and its ilk are trained on the text available on the internet. We are the expected to believe that they are experts and will reply to questions accurately.
When they are trained on a corpus of content written by average people.
I'll stick to experts, thank you very much.
“AI”: Brought to you by the people who thought NFTs were a good investment.

2025-03-08 18:13:07 UTC

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
-Elon Musk, March 6, 2025
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
-Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge/index.html

2025-02-26 00:31:44 UTC

My therapist thinks that I'm dealing with internalized transphobia (due in no small part to the era I grew up in). And I don't think they're completely wrong. When the answer to "if you could flip a switch and instantly transition" is a clear "yes". But the answer to "Should I do it now, at my age" is very conflicted, then clearly I'm tied up with the whole "passing" thing. That said, society is not helping. And also, I get a lot of joy from being somewhat femme. But it's true that the uncanny valley thing scares me, and that's pretty transphobic. I feel like we hold ourselves to a much higher standard of femininity than cis women do.

2025-02-01 23:32:22 UTC

I'm just going to put this out there.
Storing all media and data on the internet is extremely fragile and dangerous. If we were back in the days when things were published on books and on magtape, we wouldn't be losing all this info.
And yes, people can and should mirror data. But fundamentally, the internet is ephemeral. If we had a Carrington Event tomorrow, or even just all the undersea cables were cut, we'd have chaos. And it could last for decades. https://fediscience.org/@petergleick/113930618026604809

2025-02-01 23:00:54 UTC

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I was thinking about this over the last day and then I realized that we can't actually trust the government to report on negative economic news anymore.

2025-01-17 19:45:21 UTC

Happy sun dog. #DogsOfMastodon
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/113/845/411/613/979/257/original/08b9bba5b586f686.jpeg

2025-01-17 00:50:27 UTC

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Nice!

2025-01-17 00:25:03 UTC

I have photos of my great great great great grandmother. But this is the first I've found of any of the men that far. This is my great great great grandfather, Joseph Niyes. He was born in 1809 and died in 1890.
#genealogy
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/113/840/849/097/401/176/original/7b5a71c150346efa.png

2024-11-28 04:17:04 UTC

"Always remember the secret weapon against fascism – humor. More specifically, insult humor aimed against specific targets, making them laughing stocks. Puns, satire, metaphor, doggerel, and general ridicule are all important tools in writers’ toolkits toward this end." https://mastodon.social/@hrheingold/113557240623275507

2024-11-25 10:01:21 UTC

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If I wanted to be generous, it could be that their activity pub implementation doesn't yet have the ability to respond to things like deletion requests from users or something else required in the EU.
Or the team that reviews features for GDPR compliance hasn't signed off yet.

2024-11-16 23:32:57 UTC

Random IT "(in)security" musings.
When I first started at TiVo they gave me a Mac laptop and for a week or so I tried keeping my personal stuff on one machine and my work stuff on the work one; as one should. And then I said the hell with it and followed the advice of a senior engineer. I wiped the work laptop (after copying the Office licenses and VPN configuration) and used it for both. Over time I upgraded my personal machine and switched to that. I was still running anti-virus, Little Snitch, and stuff, so I was actually staying ahead of their base security level. And I was working remote, so it was easy.
This went on for about a decade, and through a couple acquisitions. Finally they started to crack down and I got an ultimatum; use the work laptop or else. By now they had monitoring software on them and various restrictions. So I said fine, send me a new laptop (I'd long since turned in the old one) and I'll use it to access work.
So I got the new laptop, installed the work security software, wrote a script to dump the routing table into a convenient format, and installed a WireGuard server on it. Then I took my personal laptop, pasted the routing information into my WireGuard client, and happily "used the work laptop to access work". They never noticed. Of course they also never noticed the back-door OpenVPN server someone was running either. Nominally it was for the TiVo boxes to use, but some devs did as well, since it was a split-VPN rather than a full one, and so much faster.
Needless to say, I did *not* try that stunt when I went to work for Meta. Although I did run DAVMail on the work machine so I could continue using MailMate as my mail program instead of Outlook.
I'm not sure there's a moral to this story other than that split-VPNs are inherently insecure and will be abused, but full VPNs are inherently slower and will be worked around.

2024-10-12 02:03:46 UTC

The #sunset got jealous of all the attention the aurora was getting. 1/3
#skagit #pnw #Photography
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/113/291/992/728/125/096/original/53b34a1dec3cb4dc.jpeg
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2024-09-11 22:51:21 UTC

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What if we all did it, just a few shares each?

2024-09-05 05:50:03 UTC

How did I make it all these years without learning that Beetlejuice is actually a super sweet movie?

2024-09-04 18:51:45 UTC

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Don't worry, just be very demure and very mindful and you'll be fine.

2024-08-27 08:14:23 UTC

In the end, history will record that the war against “AI” was won not by programmers, activists, or lawmakers. Rather, the fatal blow was struck by a secret cabal who had anticipated this moment and for years had diligently seeded the web with the ultimate poison pill intelligence test; the shitpost. https://a2mi.social/@dave0/113031300914816116

2024-08-25 03:30:54 UTC

This evening's #SomethingPositive photo is of a small part of Shwedagon Pagoda in #Yangon #Myanmar ( #Burma). It gives me a glimpse of what a peaceful world should be like.
Image enhanced to give it a more dreamy quality. June 16, 2015
#photography
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/113/020/544/890/172/240/original/ddf7c24f5c530aeb.jpeg

2024-08-22 17:36:51 UTC

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Thanks for posting that. I'm embarrassed to have lived in Skagit for 8 years but the closest I've come to Mt Baker is Baker Lake. Definitely need to get up there before the end of the season.

2023-12-09 22:35:21 UTC

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.
I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.
One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.
But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?
Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.
Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death *because* of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.
Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things *well*; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.
The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.
They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.
#ML #TESCREAL