Stephen Checkoway

YouTube video by Sipping Kanar with Dukat Glory to you and your house - Star Trek: DS9

m.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdE...

Look, the Klingons were cool with him murdering Duras. Nobody liked that guy.

This is, frankly, pathetic.

Well done OpEd...

Scene from Breakin. JCVD is in the background dancing.

Suggest your father watch Breakin. Lots of (dance) action and (an uncredited) JCVD definitely doesn’t die.

I saw somebody on TikTok using the word 'slopper' as a slur for people who use ChatGPT, and that's a thing we should start doing.

This is genuinely hilarious. I tried o4-mini analyzing a chess game with a friend and it kept screwing up and eventually here we go.

GitHub - qntm/proposal-bigint-constants: ECMAScript Proposal: BigInt constants for mathematics ECMAScript Proposal: BigInt constants for mathematics - qntm/proposal-bigint-constants

Decided to write up a formal proposal. Hope the TC39 committee likes it!

github.com/qntm/proposa...

There was the JWST naming scandal. I guess it was renamed after Webb in 2002 but it came to a head in 2021–2022. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E... (in the Legacy section)

I appreciate you explaining what the law is regardless of my opinion on the law.

I have no idea who I’m responding to here as I have them blocked or they have me blocked or something but I’ve complained about this before. bsky.app/profile/stev...

I stopped watching Colbert a few years ago. Every show included Trump is fat jokes. Just lazy writing.

Justice Dept. Asks for 1-Day Sentence for Ex-Officer Convicted in Breonna Taylor Raid

They mean to be as insulting to Black people, as dismissive of our lives, as resistance to our status as full citizens in this country as they can be.

There is no common ground to be had at the expense of our sisters & daughters’ lives and our dignity as a people.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/u...

I’d like to introduce you to my new AI startup, Slop Co. With Slip Co., our users enfrangle the most aligned AI imaginable. Unlike other AI products with sci-fi names, Slurp Cup produces consistent, reponses, with no mistakes and the left number of fingers per limb. Shop Co.: your one stop for Slop!

Also the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. (I’m a proud alumnus.)

I’m really amused law schools have a specific term for that. I occasionally get those students in my classes but way less often than my female colleagues who get most of the show offs and know-it-alls.

Environment variables just don’t seem like a safe way to pass secrets to a process.

I think that, perhaps, you’ve misunderstood my point: key management is hard.

The aside about environment variables has more to do with things like logging where secrets have to be scrubbed, e.g., GitHub Action logs. Also they just hang around in the clear in /proc/<pid>/environ.

My point here is that C is just incredibly hard to use correctly, even for simple tasks like "copy a string to a struct field," not that this code is particularly egregious.

Screenshot of a terminal showing: 1. Compiling the program with GCC's warning 2. Creating a master key 3. Adding a new key with an overly long description to the database 4. Listing the keys in the database shows the encrypted bytes of the added key 5. A hex dump of the output showing the encrypted bytes

Here's an example of it going wrong. Text from the image is on GitHub: gist.github.com/stevecheckow...

I honestly cannot tell if this is sarcasm or condescension.

It's really time to stop using C for new projects. I just ran across

APIKey new_key;
strncpy(new_key.description, description, MAX_DESC_LEN);

in a new API key management project. It's not exploitable, but it's definitely a bug.

I'm a little surprised but gcc warns about it but without explaining.

One standard way to do this is to provide the API key via an environment variable rather than hard coding it. That always made me uneasy. But more importantly, it doesn't really solve the problem. You still have to have source control and key management. Key management is hard.

“But when the same type of sensitive key gets exposed again and again […] it’s a sign of deeper negligence and a broken security culture.”

I think the takeaway is broader: credentials like API keys that have to be accessible to a program but can't be checked into source control are hard to protect.

A white and orange American shorthair cat lounges on a basement floor. Sitting in front of him is one of the next generation, an all black American shorthair, Reginald. (Also visible but irrelevant to the story at hand, an electric spinning wheel, an Ashford traditional spinning wheel, and a basket of laundry.)

One of my cats (probably Kirk) appears to have searched duck duck go for “vghu8’” and then clicked on the first link which is a data sheet for Siemens VGU7 and VGU8 series combination gas valves. This was discovered when my wife asked me why I had been looking at gas valves so we hit back in Firefox

Good thing you guys let so many of his other nominees through without a fight. Otherwise the senate might still be working through those and not confirming unqualified judges.

A few years ago I was flying and I sat next to a man who worked on some tv show about water parks. Just trying to make conversation, I asked him about it and he was super disappointed I'd not heard of it before. So awkward.

If you’re not white, or you have friends or loved ones who aren’t white, or you’re not a total sociopath and therefore care about fellow humans who aren’t white, you need to understand this regime thinks not being white is inherently suspect, and lots of your fellow Americans are fine with that.

A Baseball Coach Says He Fended Off ICE Agents Questioning Kids on the Upper West Side The baseball field in Riverside Park near 72nd Street and Youman Wilder. Photo 1: Google Maps. Photo 2: Courtesy of

A local NYC baseball coach says he fended off ICE agents during a recent practice.

Youman Wilder said caught feds questioning youth about where they're from & country of origin, so, he told feds to back off & kids to not answer!

Shoutout all of our local heroes!

I’d like to assure my students that 0% of the content in my courses comes from generative AI.