Thomas Ptacek
Full of passionate intensity.
- JAMC sounds absolutely nothing like Echo & The Bunnymen. That is all.
- Peak vertical video food content. I am officially wearing an onion around my belt. It is the fashion of my time.
- Just recorded the premiere episode of Season VIII of Security Cryptography & W/evs, this time with Alex Gaynor and Paul Kehrer, who have a momentous announcement about pyca/cryptography and OpenSSL.
- This is a perfect piece of technical writing. alexharri.com/blog/ascii-r...
- Quick reminder that ChiSec is tonight, it's at Kaiser Tiger now (on Ogden in West Loop), starts at 7PM, no RSVPs just show up, I'll probably make it by around 8PM.
- I wrote a thing. fly.io/blog/design-...
- Final SCW of 2025! We had Matt Bernhard on to talk about cryptographic voting systems, in the wake of the IACR election. (Everybody I voted for in the new election won! Woo!)
- Rust people should be embarrassed by the people trying to argue that Rust is the only truly memory-safe mainstream language. Far and away the cringiest RESF trope.
- They should use Vince Guaraldi's instrumenal Joe Cool diagnostically. If you can hear it and not at some point grin, something's clearly wrong.
- Quick reminder that ChiSec is tonight at 7PM. It's at Kaiser Tiger, at Randolph and Ogden (just down the street from where Twisted Spoke was).
- No he didn't. He said other bad shit, which isn't reported here because it's not as exciting as the made-up shit. Shun accounts that do this.
- Three dumb ideas that recur constantly in discussions among nerds about intelligence: (1) IQ tests are illegal in hiring. (2) There exist national average IQ numbers. (3) Intelligence research is suppressed.
- I wrote a thing, about a project you should knock out when you get 45 minutes free. fly.io/blog/everyon...
- @oakparknerd.bsky.social Mask off for Stopeck, I guess.
- Have you moved to the district yet?
- Simon calls out this Dan Abramov comment about how ATproto is qualitatively different from ActivityPub. Maybe he's right. But I look at ActivityPub/Mastodon as a midpoint between blog/RSS and Twitter, and I don't remember the blogosphere being ineffective. simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/27/...
- New Neko is fine. Good. The music has gotten more interesting. This is better than the last album with all the cigarettes on it. Still not clear how you can ever outdo Fox Confessor.
- Called this. www.galois.com/articles/cla...
- Good Morning Spider is an underrated album.
- New frontiers in carnitas-making. Today: took the fat cap/skin off in a whole sheet, sliced that into big cubes, rendered it for a couple hours, tried not to eat all of that, then browned the shoulder in the fat, cubed up, threw the skin in, and braised it off. I've been doing the fat cap all wrong!
