Jesse Farrell

@jfarrell

🏳️‍⚧️ powerlifter, unfree software repairbot, cat mum. 🏉: UBB/Leinster/🇮🇪 (♂️) 🇼🇸/🇹🇴/🇫🇯/🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (♀️). @pingouin@tech.lgbt in fediverse. 🇧🇧🇲🇸 Pro-democracy, antifa-scist. Capitalism is a choice.

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¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y jfarrell.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· 10d

www.instagram.com/p/DboMEtYicae/

The USAPL Women's Committee is aware of the incident involving IPF
spotter Ernestas Kusinas intentionally endangering athlete Sonita Muluh's safety during a world record attempt at Worlds, and his subsequent public admission that he did so because of
racism.

We condemn this in the strongest possible terms....

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· 14d

If we are fortunate enough to have a future rebuilding moment with a pro-democracy administration, we cannot make the same mistakes again. Rebuilders need to think about their work through the lens of power-shifting. They need to consider how they can design policy structures that build durable people power and deconstruct the power of the organized interests opposed to a multiracial, egalitarian democracy. We see this effort as being consistent with, and adding to, other important ongoing efforts to learn from the Biden-Harris Administration’s record and assess what a future administration needs to do differently.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· 14d

Initially slated to play in the final two matches of the Championship, Antoine Dupont was forced to withdraw due to a calf injury. In his absence, Maxime Lucu stepped up brilliantly—much as he has done for years with his club, Union Bordeaux-Bègles. Yet, taking on the roles of starter and captain in the blue jersey, the Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle native truly impressed, delivering three outstanding performances.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· 18d

[with alt-text]

1. I will boost the region's economy, prestige and fame.
2. I will cut your taxes, and raise everyone else's.
3. Bus fares to be capped at £1.99, and 99 Flake ice-creams to cost no more than 99p.
4. I promise to spend more time in Clacton-on-Sea than in Washington DC, and to champion the area.
5. MPs who resign mid-parliament to be barred from the resulting by-election.
6. MPs who change party mid-parliament to be forced to face a by-election.
7. I pledge to build at least one affordable house.
8. Arcade grabber games to be made fairer so players actually have a chance to win.
9. Oil and gas companies to pay for solar panels for everyone. (From Jack, aged 10)
10. Regeneration of Walton Pier so it is just as great as Clacton Pier.
11. A windfall tax on cosy crime novels written (or 'written') by celebrities.
12. Potholes to be filled, using copies of the 2024 Labour Party Manifesto.
13. Parliament to be moved to my new Bin HQ, in Weeley, while the Palace of Westminster is restored.
14. People who drive past Clacton station with annoyingly loud exhausts to lose their licence.
15. I will not accept £5 million gifts from crypto billionaires (on Earth).
16. A referendum on whether Pluto should regain its planet status.
17. The hand-dryer in the gents' toilet at the Great Himalayas restaurant, Southport to be moved to a more sensible position.
18. Wayne Rooney to be new expert summariser for the BBC at Eurovision.
19. Count Binface to represent the UK at Eurovision 2027, with Clacton hosting Eurovision 2028.
20. I stand by my past manifestos: Ceefax, speakerphones, nationalising Adele, renaming HS2 ‘FFS1', the hand-dryer at the Crown & Treaty, I've got it covered.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· 24d

The Robert MacNeil Report (now PBS NewsHour), broadcast of July 2, 1976, nicely restored: americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-...

Jim Lehrer hosts a discussion about the upcoming United States Bicentennial celebrations for The Robert MacNeil Report. The guests each have their own opinions about the state of the country 200 years after it was founded; one calls for radical changes, one believes the country needs to refocus on how it is perceived, and one believes that the reaction to the Bicentennial shows that the nation has its priorities in order. Topic include the celebrations being held all over the country, the current economic state of the nation, historic traditions of the US, and understanding ourselves as a nation.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· 29d

Scipio Subwoofer. Not to be confused with...

A 1972 Topps Scipio Spinks baseball card, when he pitched for the Astros.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Jul 1

TIL: Willis was married to Phylicia Rashad (Phylicia Ayers-Allen), pre-Cosby, pre-Ahmad, and they wrote a disco Josephine Baker concept album, featuring Village People, their band, and their production team. On Casablanca Records.

The LP cover for Josephine Superstar (1978), Phylicia Rashad's only album. She is wearing an outfit inspired by Miss Baker's skimpy banana-themed stage outfit.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Jun 22

Such a move would be in keeping with Hegseth’s career and thought. Like Trump, Hegseth lacks any sense of what the interests of the United States as such might be. His ideological purge of the top officer ranks is inconsistent with battlefield success; it is consistent with the aim of creating a Trumpian praetorian guard whose only mission is to intimidate Americans. Indeed, the natural trajectory of the Department of Defense under a complete incompetent such as Hegseth (whether he explicitly wishes this or not) is to render the armed forces capable of little more than civil war against fellow citizens.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Jun 4

Started work today, coffee in hand, and was greeted by the sounds of a freebop line from Montreux/Berlin. Happy birthday to the maestro, and thank you to the person at Arista who made it possible for teenage Me to amass the Braxton oeuvre via cutouts in the record stores around UNC/VCU. WKCR.org

A WKCR promo image for the Anthony Braxton Birthday Broadcast: a '70s-vintage B&W photo of the maestro, resting the bell of a sopranino saxophone on his thigh; the photo is tinted purple, to match the odd lime-green and purple color scheme of the background and text.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· May 29

Two morsels among many....

When the federal government collects information about citizens, the law requires specific things first. Privacy disclosures. Notices in the Federal Register. Published contracts with outside vendors. I went looking for all of it across twelve National Design Studio programs and found none of it, not a single required document filed across any of the twelve. Every missing document is, by itself, a violation of federal law, and these are the laws Congress wrote after Watergate to make sure the federal government could not run secret surveillance programs on its own citizens. The only document they did publish is a privacy policy on TrumpRx, and it contradicts itself two paragraphs apart. The first paragraph says PostHog records the pages users visit and the medications they view. Two paragraphs later, it says they do not collect health or medical information. A federal health website is lying to the people using it and cannot even keep the lie consistent.

I wanted to know whether there were more sites the studio had not announced. Here is something almost nobody outside of security research knows. Every website with a padlock in the address bar has a certificate, and there is a rule that every certificate issued anywhere in the world must be logged in a public ledger the moment it is created, no exceptions. The side effect of that rule is that every new website on the internet, even ones nobody has announced and even ones hidden behind a login, leaves a public fingerprint the moment it is built. There is a free search engine called crt.sh where anyone can look up those logs. I typed in the studio’s domain, and underneath the public sites I already knew about were roughly forty more, unannounced, with no links pointing to them from any public page. I started reading the names. Sites that looked like they belonged to the State Department. To NASA. To the Department of Homeland Security. And then two that stopped me cold: a working preview of vote.gov, and something called fbi-kirk-tipline. I checked the public ownership records for every subdomain, and every single one traced back to the same place, the Executive Office of the President. The National Design Studio had built pre-launch versions of websites belonging to other federal agencies and registered all of it to the White House.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· May 21

Contrast Fallon’s “head empty, no thoughts” presentation with someone like Dick Cavett. Back in 1969, on what was, at the time, the most popular show in the country, there’s a 17-minute segment with James Baldwin on the possibility of Black liberation in America. There’s a moment where Baldwin talks of the American system wanting him, as a Black man, to be an accomplice to his own murder. The camera cuts back to Cavett, who has been listening intently. “I don’t understand that last sentence,” says Cavett, which leads into a discussion of the work and activism of Stokely Carmichael. What’s shocking is not just the content but the space and time given to ideas—to the intellectual and cultural problems of the world outside the studio walls.

In contrast, Fallon is desperate to keep the real world out. In his interviews, he barely seems to be listening to his guests, waiting for them to finish speaking so his rituals can begin anew. The constant, forced joviality can’t completely conceal an encroaching terror—the horror of the political world that keeps threatening to break down the walls around his studio-castle.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· May 14

EXCLUSIVE Several Google Cloud customers say their API keys have been compromised and used by bad actors to run inferencing workloads using the most expensive video and picture models, leaving them with bills for tens of thousands of dollars and weeks of back-and-forth headaches with the Chocolate Factory as they tried to prove they were not responsible for the mess.

The problem is being hashed out on social media, with sites like Reddit collecting stories from Google Cloud users that seem to follow a similar pattern: After months or years paying small monthly bills to Google Cloud for access to tools like Maps, their API keys are discovered, and in minutes they are charged thousands of dollars for API calls to Nano Banana and Veo 3.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· May 12

If CUNY is successful in developing internally owned-and-operated substitutes for any or all of its Software As A Service (SaaS) contracts with for-profit EdTech firms (and their private equity owners), the development costs will very rapidly pay for themselves, merely by freeing the associated institutions (and the city) from ongoing Ponzi austerity extraction of public resources at the expense of investment elsewhere in the CUNY system.

CUNY-owned EdTech platforms would provide an additional public benefit by reclaiming student, instructional, and employee data, the reserve currency of technofeudalism which is presently being mined by EdTech operators like OpenAI, Oracle, KKR, Vista and Silver Lake Partners. Universities are currently paying these SaaS providers and their investors twice, first with large subscription fees and again with access and aggregation power over large troves of data produced by members of their campus communities.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· May 11

Digital media companies were all built around a single idea, which was that the internet and its attendant platforms — social media sites, Google, YouTube — had created an opportunity to build massive audiences. These companies used technical and editorial strategies that were totally foreign to their print forebears. The Huffington Post pioneered SEO practices, Gawker perfected the format of the can’t-look-away personal essay, Vice was an early adopter of online video, BuzzFeed practically invented a half-dozen viral post formats. All of this was in service of building those precious audience metrics, but the actual customers of these businesses weren’t the readers or viewers but the advertisers who coveted access to that audience; all of the major digital media companies also had teams that produced ads, including ads that looked like editorial content, a.k.a. “native advertising” or “branded content.”

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· May 9

This is the part the Tories need to understand, sitting there clutching their commemorative Thatcher mugs: you do not absorb a populist movement. The populist movement absorbs you.

The Republican Party of 2026 is a death cult that does cosplay of the Republican Party of 2000. Mitch McConnell is a coat rack. Liz Cheney is in exile. The party of Reagan is the party of a man who thinks the Baltics are a nightclub and Vladimir Putin is just misunderstood. Everything they touched died. Their think tanks, their magazines, their agency, their ideas, their dignity, their grandchildren’s view of them at Thanksgiving… all of it, gone, converted into MAGA red hats and bluster on Twitter.

That’s the future the Conservative Party is staring at right now. Not “a tough cycle.” Not “a rebuilding period.” Extinction. Farage himself told the Evening Standard this week — and credit where it’s due, the man understands what he’s doing… that the Conservatives “will disappear as a national party.”

He’s not bragging. He’s filing the death certificate.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· May 2

[with alt text]

GROSS: You were on the road with James Brown once, right?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, I was with him for a couple of days. I met him in Boston. He was doing a little - he was doing a show in a small jazz club. And I told him I was a great admirer of his, and he said, well, come on the road. You know, see how we do it. Because I asked him how he got the band to be so tight. And this is the time when he was doing - "Sex Machine" was his big hit. And I spent three or four days with him in Atlanta, in Augusta and in Washington, D.C., watching from backstage just what he did, and it was a great thrill.

GROSS: So did you learn anything you could apply?

TILSON THOMAS: Absolutely because what - I realized that he was focused on the exact duration of the perceivable present. In every particular piece, the stroke of the beat had a certain length. He wanted the trap drummer to be out in front and the hand drummer to be in the back and the bass player to be right in the center, and he had an exact idea of how wide in time that stroke of the (vocalizing) would be, and he used it. And it was something very sophisticated and just the kind of thing that composers like Igor Stravinsky thought about a great deal.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 26

It is not even fair to call Ben Shapiro an ideologue. That would imply a coherent ideology being defended. What Shapiro is, is a partisan apologist of the most elite kind, whose job is to make the most plausible steelman case for voting his clan, in the language of the liberal intellectual tradition, in order to confuse people into going along with it.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 24

Something is profoundly off in the computer industry when it comes to software broadly and AI specifically. It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 22

The aforementioned coffee.

A fresh French-press carafe of coffee: 53g beans, 800 ml water, sitting on a butcher-block table, with a kitchen sink, counter, and dishwasher in the background. Will start to be consumed after my bowl of granola.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 22

Happy Mingus Day, to all who celebrate. For WKCR's traditional Louis Armstrong broadcast, it coincides with July 4th; it could be enjoyed (in a past era) with a chunk of hash, a pot of strong coffee, and a box of Nat Sherman cigarettellos. Today, I have to work. But there will be coffee. wkcr.org

A promo image for the annual WKCR Charles Mingus Birthday Broadcast, featuring a couple of CD cases, one for the Mingus Big Band, and one for Mingus' Blues & Roots Atlantic album.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 13

A BlueSky poster: "This entire current administration is a spin off series from Veep."

A reply: "Dark Veep. Please cancel it "

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 9

I think my only activity on X in the last 18 months was to retweet a couple of folks' MA tweets. And the only thing remotely "NSFW" was a trans flag in my bio. But I appealed my arbitrary suspension, and got cancelled. Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.

Text of reply from X to my suspension appeal:

Hello,

Your account was suspended due to multiple or repeat violations of the X Rules:
https://x.com/rules.

This account will not be restored.

This case will now be closed and replies will not be monitored.

Thanks,
X

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 8

"[H]anding Colbert’s time slot over to the affable [Byron] Allen is peak enshittification."

If Allen isn’t leashing the comics, he’s certainly muzzling them. In the Trump 2.0 era, Allen is the ideal host for CBS. He may not be a bad person, but the people who hired him are—or rather, the person calling the culture-war shots in the White House is. Allen got the gig in what’s known as a “time buy.” His production company puts up the money to lease the time slot from CBS for his show—which will then be followed by a game show he also owns. It’s a common marketing strategy for 3 am infomercials and religious broadcasters. The company leasing the airtime makes money up front with little or no investment, and buyers like Allen make their money on the commercials and products they sell. In the past, Allen has split the commercial sales revenue with CBS.

Allen’s hire is the equivalent of bringing Bari Weiss into run CBS News or what the Washington Post and LA Times have become after killing off their planned endorsements of Kamala Harris in 2024. Allen’s show likewise represents a scaled down, cheaper, far less ambitious media product. It’s designed not to cost much and not to offend. And if past history is much if a guide, it won’t attract much of an audience.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 3

Ebbie: about that macro....

Ebbie, now seated in my lap, stares at a boob, for some reason.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Apr 3

Me: the ponderin' is done, the discussin' is done. Time to type all that code you wanted.... Lambchop: not so fast, bub.

Lambchop, a black shorthair cat, is seated in my lap, holding down my left hand, which is attempting to type something at a computer keyboard.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Mar 25

I’ll also note here that Apple is far from a perfect company. Their walled garden approach is inherently anti-consumer, and they’ve rightly taken some criticism for inflating hardware costs, deliberately making their computers difficult to repair, enforcing arbitrary divisions between different classes of products to encourage users to buy more devices, and maintaining a monopolistic and increasingly toxic app store.

But buying an M1 or M2 machine on the used market won’t directly give Apple any money, and beyond running the Asahi installer script doesn’t require interacting with any Apple software or their ecosystem in any way, beyond the initial installation. I’ve argued in the past that older Apple computers make excellent Linux machines for these reasons as well, and since the M1 and M2 machines eliminate the IME risk of these older computers they’re an even better proposition, even without considering the massive performance gains possible.

Ultimately, though, the best choice of hardware depends on one’s threat model and priorities. If the goal is to minimize exposure to IME/PSP-level risks while retaining semi-modern performance, an M1/M2 Mac with Asahi Linux is one of the best options available today. But if fully open hardware is non-negotiable, you’ll need to accept older or less powerful machines… for now.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Mar 23

Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.

By 3:43 PM he told CBS he doesn’t want a ceasefire. By 5:13 PM - 13 minutes after futures markets closed for the weekend, in a coincidence that should be studied in every securities fraud textbook - he posted on Truth Social that the US is “getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts”. The S&P reversed more than 1% in seconds. QQQ had already surged 1.1% in the 80 minutes before the announcement, with call options flowing in at a pace that suggests someone, somewhere, had an itinerary.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Mar 16

People rejecting Evangelical Christian nationalism aren’t stupid. They realize that bigotry, even when it is wrapped in religion or justified by the Bible or spoken from a pulpit, is still bigotry. They can smell the putrid stench of phony religion from a mile away, and this version of the Church, frankly, reeks of it. People are steering clear in droves, choosing to find meaning and community, and something that resembles love outside its gatherings.

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Mar 11

Maybe throw a couple of dollars in this direction:

An uninhabited Rugby For All hoodie. https://www.rugbyforall.co/

Jesse Farrell@jfarrell· Mar 10

If you give a damn, give to Rugby For All. I've given about $250 in the last year. I support my area women's teams, who themselves are all-in on inclusiveness in the sport. But taking potshots at a handful of clueless pols who don't represent their voters is cheap and uninformed.