Waldo Jaquith
banner
waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Waldo Jaquith
@waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Thought follower. Male software developer. Alumnus of 18F, the Obama White House, Georgetown's Beeck Center, the Biden-Harris Transition Team, and the Biden […]

[bridged from https://mastodon.social/@waldoj on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
It's this guy right here, in a suit, en francais, talking about how to keep huge government software projects from failing catastrophically. This interview was conducted in October, when I was in Montreal, testifying before a hearing about their DMV's big […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
December 1, 2025 at 8:06 PM
Bold claim from this local restaurant.
November 29, 2025 at 7:59 PM
I never did manage to log into this Google account today. Every CAPTCHA was just as indecipherable.
November 25, 2025 at 10:04 PM
@simon I'm surprised that it doesn't natively label speakers, instead of "speaker 1," "speaker 2," etc. That's always a chore with diarization, but frequently (as in this case) the transcripts contain the information necessary to identify speakers.
November 18, 2025 at 11:48 PM
One of the great things about Amazon, once they started selling music, was their huge collection of 30-second clips from each song. It is frustrating that, at some point, they removed that functionality—for years, they've simply shown a table of track […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
November 16, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Ah, well.
November 14, 2025 at 3:46 PM
I very much doubt that user research demonstrated to Microsoft that what people really want, as the very first thing on GitHub's home page, is a chat-based LLM interface. In fact, I'll bet that less than 1% of page loads results in somebody actually using […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
November 12, 2025 at 8:10 PM
My fellow security aficionados may share my fascination with this CVS POS system updater I spotted in the wild yesterday. The typos do not inspire confidence. It appeared to be stuck at this 99% point, also a bad sign.
November 9, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Safari on macOS has so little chrome at this point that it's hard to find a place to grab a window to move it. Fitt's law is clear about why this is a problem, and, time was, Apple’s long-suffering Human Interface Guidelines wouldn't have allowed this.
November 6, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Sycamore leaf.
November 6, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Here are some of the photos. I especially enjoy seeing everything *other* than the subject—the background stuff that seemed mundane then, but has been made fascinating by the passage of time.
October 12, 2025 at 3:53 AM
Many months of seeing @rejectedplates leaves me confused by plates like this. The DMV’s rules are baffling.
October 4, 2025 at 9:55 PM
So here's a weird thing that challenges my understanding of how iOS and macOS work. I gave $5 to Virginia Public Media (VPM). My credit card recorded it as “VPM.” iOS reported it as "Vpm.” But iPhone Mirroring rendered the iOS notification on my MacBook as […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
September 13, 2025 at 1:30 AM
September 5, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Why the heck does Apache keep hitting the ceiling for the number of workers, so it stops accepting new requests? The traffic isn't high enough to justify this!

... Ah. Well. Yes.
September 4, 2025 at 3:58 PM
My chickens have discovered they can follow around the lawnmower and eat the fleeing, exposed insects.
September 1, 2025 at 11:49 PM
As I watched, this yellowjacket tore off this larva’s head and flew away, heavily burdened with the body.
September 1, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Our plum tree’s first-ever plum!

Also, the figs are coming in fast and furious on our increasingly enormous fig tree. Time to start giving them away.
August 9, 2025 at 5:00 PM
In 1997, posing with my Apple Newton, the computer that convinced me to move from DOS/Windows to the Mac.
August 9, 2025 at 4:04 AM
I guess I have no concept of what license plates Virginia will and will not approve.
August 2, 2025 at 5:10 PM
You're doing great, macOS
July 30, 2025 at 2:12 PM
So…Amazon hasn't updated their computer storage categories in a while.
July 20, 2025 at 3:07 AM
Toad in the hole
July 16, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Well here’s an interesting new scam.
July 12, 2025 at 8:06 PM
Well, that's certainly a lot worse than it was.
May 15, 2025 at 4:02 PM