Ryan Ragona

1. I love this guy, and god bless Canada. 2. The clearly involuntary “eh?” in the sentence — “The American people aren’t going to put up with it, and the Canadian people… EH, we will NEVER put up with it.” SO GOOD. 🍁🇨🇦 I’m nominating this for “Hardest ‘Eh’ of 2025” I don’t care that it’s January.

I’m now picturing my canadian hacker friends contributing to canadian cyber resistance. do y’all have any idea how many genius fucking canadian hackers we rely on? probably leave behind `sorry.txt` after they pwn everything, but we’d still get wrecked.

been thinking about my queer friends and fam a lot this week. the inauguration, the hard right shift in the tech bubble. I have two moms and a trans dad. I grew up in the 80s in oregon, when there were aggressive anti-gay measures on the ballots. (me at portland pride with my moms in the 80s)

I’m very proud of my family. And I’m very proud of all of my trans friends, and their families. I’m thinking of you, and your kids. I remember what it’s like when your country seems to tell you, “your family isn’t right, we don’t know if we’ll let you keep it.” It’s awful, and I’m sorry.

been thinking about my queer friends and fam a lot this week. the inauguration, the hard right shift in the tech bubble. I have two moms and a trans dad. I grew up in the 80s in oregon, when there were aggressive anti-gay measures on the ballots. (me at portland pride with my moms in the 80s)

(When I was a teenager punk rock was my favorite thing on the planet, but as a wrinkly old man myself now I play the folk music he taught me. I love playing his songs, even though I only know a couple.)

been thinking about my queer friends and fam a lot this week. the inauguration, the hard right shift in the tech bubble. I have two moms and a trans dad. I grew up in the 80s in oregon, when there were aggressive anti-gay measures on the ballots. (me at portland pride with my moms in the 80s)

So fuck it. I’m gonna tell the internet about my family. My dad was trans. He transitioned when I was young, and became a sweet, calm old man. I didn’t think much of it. He told me he felt more like a man. He took up gardening. He calmed down. We learned to shave together. He loved his grandkids.

been thinking about my queer friends and fam a lot this week. the inauguration, the hard right shift in the tech bubble. I have two moms and a trans dad. I grew up in the 80s in oregon, when there were aggressive anti-gay measures on the ballots. (me at portland pride with my moms in the 80s)

But yesterday… I found myself missing it? I miss it when of COURSE major corporations give their ERGs money for a float, it’d be corporate suicide not to support gay rights. I thought — trans rights are coming too, the arc of the universe is bending linearly towards justice.

been thinking about my queer friends and fam a lot this week. the inauguration, the hard right shift in the tech bubble. I have two moms and a trans dad. I grew up in the 80s in oregon, when there were aggressive anti-gay measures on the ballots. (me at portland pride with my moms in the 80s)

I was a kid, so I had trouble understanding the ballot measures. I knew my mom was a teacher, and that some people thought gay people shouldn’t teach. Those people thought gay people shouldn’t adopt, and I didn’t really understand that, so I thought it meant they might take me from my mom.

corporate spyware, used to breach government spyware. this is an example of a huge of “security investment” managing to be starkly, directly counterproductive at a massive scale. if this doesn’t make you wonder if maybe the surveillance itself is the problem, nothing will.

this security feature turned into to the ONLY critical finding in the environment. it shipped hastily, and it could be abused for escalation. the *security* feature we added for incident response ended up also adding our worst vulnerability.

corporate spyware, used to breach government spyware. this is an example of a huge of “security investment” managing to be starkly, directly counterproductive at a massive scale. if this doesn’t make you wonder if maybe the surveillance itself is the problem, nothing will.

as a tiny personal example, it reminds me of a red team finding I once fixed. we’d built a high security custody environment. hardware keys, dedicated devices, quorums for sensitive operations, alarms on all access, that kind of thing. red team comes in to beat it up, we’re feeling ready.

this frame is compelling. when a profession adds women, men value it less and stop participating. women are going to college in larger numbers — is that why young men aren’t? … men, I’m starting to think we shouldn’t make life choices mostly to avoid the spooky ghost of femininity.

oh. if women participating in a profession causes men to devalue it, then there are strong incentives to keep women out. aggressive gatekeeping is practical from this lens. ☹️

this frame is compelling. when a profession adds women, men value it less and stop participating. women are going to college in larger numbers — is that why young men aren’t? … men, I’m starting to think we shouldn’t make life choices mostly to avoid the spooky ghost of femininity.

😂

just tried asking o1 pro a music theory question and I think it did well! (it’s actually also one of the longest compute times I’ve seen out of it, which is interesting.) makes me want to play with having multimodal models analyze song audio from a music theory perspective.

(The reason I asked this question is because I don’t really think there is a strictly correct answer, it’s a progression that just sorta sounds neat on the guitar but doesn’t analyze cleanly.)

just tried asking o1 pro a music theory question and I think it did well! (it’s actually also one of the longest compute times I’ve seen out of it, which is interesting.) makes me want to play with having multimodal models analyze song audio from a music theory perspective.

this is such a good point I don’t think we hear enough of. when we paint undocumented immigrants as scary criminals who climbed a wall to get here, it dehumanizes the really boring (and bureaucratically terrifying) daily reality of overstaying a visa trying to find your feet in a new country.