Waldo Jaquith

Thought 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.

Place: Charlottesville, VA, USA (Monacan land)
Website: https://waldo.jaquith.org/
Pronouns: he/him
Pronounced: JAKE-with

Public Key

npub18fzvad62teasp3mm4fczhmhdezq77kep26mkyu9xzghreywz3fnquf34vn

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsr53xwka99u7cqcaa65uptamku3q00tvs4ddmzwznpyt3uj8pg5espz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds377nqr

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub18fzvad62teasp3mm4fczhmhdezq77kep26mkyu9xzghreywz3fnquf34vn

Show more details

Last Notes

2024-07-10 23:43:26

Current status: horrific chest pain
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/764/374/340/581/511/original/e88ea4923b051d26.jpeg

2024-06-18 16:29:24

A blind colleague recently joined a new federal agency. The agency is refusing to let him use the NVDA screen reader (free, open source), because it's created by an Australian non-profit which is not registered on SAM.gov (because they're not a vendor).
If you know of how a federal employee has gotten approval to use NVDA, would you let me know what magic words were required?

2024-06-09 01:27:31

I was just alerted (thanks, @npub18fs…hzcc) to The New Yorker including a non-trivial mention of me in an article today. I was surprised, but not *that* surprised. It's about a blog entry I wrote in 2011 that has shown surprising staying power over the years: "On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/how-the-fridge-changed-flavor
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/583/589/761/154/747/original/e5faa18398ca2671.png

2024-05-30 23:10:57

Guilty guilty guilty, on all counts. The case was airtight.
If Trump had been charged for all his crimes throughout his life, he never would have been president. Hold the powerful to account!

2024-05-30 22:55:54

The tension is so thick you could shoot it in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

2024-05-29 04:35:05

It's 2024, and Major League Baseball is finally integrating the record books, which will no longer protect white baseball players’ stats from the superior performance from Negro Leagues players. As a result, Ty Cobb is no longer recorded as the leading hitter, and Babe Ruth is no longer recorded as the best slugger—those titles both now belong to Josh Gibson. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nightengale/2024/05/28/negro-leagues-statistics-officially-incorporated-into-major-league-record-book/73882293007/

2024-05-18 22:45:49

- reply

Great example! I know lighting aficionados will lament the loss of some sort of richness of incandescent lighting but I don’t think most people notice or care.

2024-05-18 22:26:17

Heat pumps and induction ranges are two strong examples of products that are better environmentally *and* better products than their gas/oil competitors, for almost everybody. (EVs will get there, but they’re not there yet.)
Because carbon emissions are free, it’s important that low-emission new products be clearly better than the polluting status quo. It’s a high bar, it’s not fair, but I’m glad we have heat pumps and induction ranges as a model.

2024-05-16 21:58:27

There's a group chat that includes Michael Dell, Howard Schultz, Bill Ackman, Daniel Loeb, and nearly 100 other powerful kajillionaires whose names are less well-known. They used it to advocate for arresting protesters at Columbia University and to fund-raise for New York City mayor Eric Adams. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-leaders-chat-group-eric-adams-columbia-protesters/

2024-05-11 04:30:26

The aurora is borealising pretty hard here in Virginia.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/420/101/891/683/972/original/cced812ec1edcdf7.jpeg

2024-04-30 15:51:41

For a small fee, the law is optional.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/360/495/331/462/124/original/40c62f7cfbf16348.png

2024-04-25 03:33:16

We need to make it socially unacceptable to work at McKinsey and to hire McKinsey. They cheerfully built and executed a strategy to addict millions of Americans to OxyContin, killing hundreds of thousands of people (and counting). I have no doubt they're doing something equally evil right now.
McKinsey is bad. Working for them is bad. Hiring them is bad. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/business/mckinsey-criminal-investigation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE0.JNW4.cqXVwWVvFV92&smid=url-share

2024-04-23 04:20:28

It really looks like the Supreme Court is going to OK outlawing homelessness.
To punish people for not being housed, we're going to...house them…but In jail? And under what circumstances would they be released? If they agree to leave town so they can be locked up in another city's jail for the crime of homelessness? Maybe just straight-up house them, non-punitively, and skip the whole arrest thing? https://wapo.st/4d8H5N5

2024-04-19 04:32:55

I made a new Mastodon bot, called "I Hope This Email Finds You.” Twice a day it proposes a novel way to conclude that sentence that opens so many emails. (It uses phrases from Google Books that include the phrase “finds you.”) I've been having fun reading these, so I turned it into a bot because you, too, might have fun reading them. https://botsin.space/@thisemailfindsyou/112295528875440987

2024-04-17 03:28:57

- reply

Browsers should refuse to respect paste-disabling. This is not something that any user wants.

2024-04-17 03:26:30

I'm trying to pay my Virginia income taxes online, and they have disabled paste in any field of consequence. Paste in a password? Nope. Your bank's routing number? You're gonna have to hand-key that. Your bank account number? You better believe you're typing that in.
If you wanted to force people to create crappy passwords and cause them to accidentally siphon money out of strangers' bank accounts, this is how you'd do it. And somebody went to extra effort to make it be like this!

2024-04-07 05:00:22

- reply

Virginia's governor also vetoed SB373, which established a paid family and medical leave program for the state. Why? because it would “remove[] the incentive for the private sector to provide these benefits.”
It's been 248 years, and the private sector hasn't yet provided those benefits. The dude just thinks that women shouldn't be in the workforce.

2024-04-07 04:53:44

- reply

Virginia's governor also vetoed HB81, a bill that eliminates the common-law crime of suicide.
Yes, that's right—thanks to our governor, it remains against the law to kill yourself in Virginia.

2024-04-07 04:51:43

The Virginia legislature passed a bill preventing the extradition of VA doctors to states where abortion is illegal—otherwise, e.g. North Carolina could charge a VA doctor with providing an abortion to a NC resident who traveled to VA. The law explicitly says that it doesn't apply to a doctor who has fled another state.
Virginia's governor just vetoed it, saying the bill “is aimed at medical professionals from other states who may be in Virginia and subject to an extradition." Horseshit.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/227/666/797/063/222/original/8a62c212a62d04b7.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/227/667/117/566/830/original/6d248fb8d85f2932.png

2024-04-02 23:26:20

- reply

Wow, I didn't know about that.

2024-04-02 20:32:42

- reply

"It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. [...] 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales.”
Just amazing stuff. https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116

2024-04-02 20:31:48

This is amazing. I remember when Amazon announced this, I denounced it as impractical vaporware, that there's no way that the tech was up to doing this automatically, that there was no way this will work in production…and then I had to eat crow when they actually launched stores that work like this.
And here we are!
https://follow.ethanmarcotte.com/@beep/112202769079697463

2024-03-29 13:56:59

I appreciate this survey of the state and reasons behind high national rates of chronic absenteeism among students, but I think it misses an important bit that, afaik, all coverage of this topic has missed: that we moved schooling online in 2020 and *it’s still online*.
You know the thing with “return to office” where there’s no point because your laptop intermediates all your work so there’s not actually any benefit to being in the office? That, but for school. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gU0.vIPn.kbBkJRWitXH3&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=u&sgrp=c-cb

2024-03-23 19:34:55

There are vendors selling generative AI to create RFPs. There are vendors selling generative AI to write proposals in response to RFPs. There are vendors selling AI to review those proposals.
This will end terribly. People will die.