- Remote Stands, Bus Boarding, and Last-Minute Gates: A Tale of Two Airport Systems (Gad’s Newsletter)
- Palantir Is Extending Its Reach Even Further Into Government (Wired)
- PHP – The Toyota Corolla Of Programming (De Programmatica Ipsum)
- US Nuclear Weapons Return to UK After 2008 Withdrawal: Reports (The Defense Post)
- North Korean spies posing as remote workers have infiltrated hundreds of companies, says CrowdStrike (TechCrunch)
The scheme relies on North Koreans using false identities, resumes, and work histories to gain employment and earn money for the regime, as well as allowing access for the workers to steal data from the companies they work for and later extort them. The aim is to generate funds for North Korea’s sanctioned nuclear weapons program, which has so far made billions of dollars for the regime to date.
Tag: programming
Tuesday texts to read – 1
Trying something new I’m trying, sharing a few different stories I’ve come across in the last week that I’ve found interesting or worth reading.
- Backyard Coffee And Jazz In Kyoto, Japan (The Deleted Scenes)
- Effective July 7, 2025, the National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted-access federal facility with access only for visitors with a legitimate business need. (National Archives)
- The Scheme that Broke the Texas Lottery (New Yorker)
- Quebec provides universal childcare for less than $7 a day. Here’s what the US can learn (The Guardian)
- Why Engineers Hate Their Managers (And What to Do About It) (Terrible Software)
Most managers aren’t evil; they’re often just as frustrated as their engineers, caught between demanding executives and burnt-out teams. They’re measured on metrics they can’t directly control, asked to do more with less, and criticized from every direction.
- Why Are Federal Agents Wearing Masks? It’s a Threat to American Democracy (Adam Kinzinger)
Let me speak plainly: this is cowardice. You do not serve justice by hiding your face. You do not build trust with a community by terrorizing it from behind a mask. And you sure as hell do not defend the Constitution by violating it in the dark.
25 Years of PHP
I know, I’m a day late… On June 8, 1995 Rasmus Lerdorf announced “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)” on a CGI usenet board (now converted to a Google Group). PHP quickly became a great way to make dynamic websites and it is still going strong today. I started using PHP in 2001 and I still turn to it for projects, including this website. Sure it has its quirks and bugs but it has been an evolving language that to this day has a loyal following.
New programming languages have been created and I am sure a lot of people have moved on to them (Node, Go, Rust, etc.) but PHP still drives a large chunk of the internet, something like 80 million websites. I have met a lot of friends because of the language including Chrispian, Patrick, Brad, Brandon, and many others at WordCamp events, or programming meetups. I am really thankful for those friendships.
Anyway, I’m happy for Rasmus Lerdorf and for the language.
Why Everyone Should Learn to Program
Why Everyone Should Learn to Program (Reviews in Depth) →
Dan Haggard on why everyone could benefit from learning to program:
We passively receive ALL the various interfaces that we deploy to manipulate our environment: the stove top you use to cook your food, the knife you use to cut your meat, the piano on which you play your music, the steering wheel you use to drive your car.
Just think about that for a moment and let it sink in. EVERY interface you employ on a day to day basis is likely created by someone else. And since our own creativity is necessarily constrained by the various interfaces we employ then an absolutely crucial dimension of creativity is denied to us. […]
If you use a computer in your day to day work – it’s very likely that your processes have developed to a point where they could benefit from some degree of automation. And the only person really qualified to provide that automation ultimately will be you and YOU alone – because you may well be the only person who knows the process. […]
I now feel cured of an affliction I never realised I had. If I had to name this affliction, I’d call it – defaultism. Always did I just default to the way of things as it was handed to me. Now I look at every aspect of my life with a hacker’s eye.
It is awesome to see someone jump into programming and love it. The complexity with programming does not usually lie in the code itself but in the setting up of the environment and getting the language to run consistently across multiple machines. Platform specifics and quirks across environments used to have books written about them but now, with such great internet search tools, it is easy to find a fix to just about any problem you may have.