Sarah K Moir

Weekend Reading — Cloud outages will continue until morale improves Kevin Beaumont Tech Stuff I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong I'm using Alabaster to see how I like it (PS it's an extension, not a theme): The problem with that i...

Weekend Reading — Cloud outages will continue until morale improves

labnotes.org/weekend-read...

Lies, damn lies, and shoplifting statistics For 32 years, the National Retail Federation (NRF) — the lobbying group representing major retailers in the United States — has produced the "National Retail Security Survey." The survey, widely cited...

"The new NRF report acknowledges that retailers do not 'have a unified industry database collecting retail crime data,' and many retailers lack 'the resources or capabilities to collect and track retail theft.' Yet the NRF still issued a report claiming shoplifting has increased 93% in four years."

Screenshot from King of the Hill Season 7, Episode 23

Screenshot from King of the Hill Season 13, Episode 21

Yes, I mention that in the post.

Music metadata: What it is and why it matters What music metadata is, how digital streaming providers (DSPs) create acoustic, explicit, and cultural music metadata, what music metadata is used for, why music metadata matters to listeners, and how...

one of my niche interests is music data analysis... a couple months ago I gave a lightning talk about music metadata and finally finished writing up all the details for my blog:

thisisimportant.net/posts/music-...

yesssss me too and I offhandedly mentioned it to some longtime friends and they were like "wait what now??" so I figured it was time to shout more!

divert purchases to your local library and read more books that you might want to!

Library Extension (for web browsers) Library Extension lets you instantly see book and eBook availability from your local library

constantly internally raving about how good this extension is and didn't do enough raving about it externally: www.libraryextension.com

any page that you go look at a book, it will search your local library catalog and tell you if it has it!

Screenshot from King of the Hill Season 5, Episode 9

I started only buying the vacuum sealed pre mashed avocados bc it’s so reliably consistent 😅

@sfmta.bsky.social please please run more N trains at rush hour, I’d like to be less physically close to my fellow commuters on a regular basis.

This is important Sarah Moir is a tech writer in San Francisco, CA, USA. Read the output of her curiosity-driven research into music metadata, technical writing practices, documentation for startups and SaaS, data anal...

I also have a blog at thisisimportant.net, please motivate me to publish more than once every 6 months (oh no)

See Moir Music A monthly newsletter about shows I recommend in the San Francisco Bay Area, featuring music recommendations, music-related events, and other anecdotes and links.

for folks in the SF bay area, I restarted my monthly events (mostly shows, but also book talks and more) newsletter a few months ago: buttondown.com/see-moir-mus...

Just 10 members of Congress have even dared to call Israel's mass murder in Gaza a genocide. Meanwhile, they're straight up murdering journalists. The gulf between what's happening and what most of our leaders will acknowledge is so remarkably vast.

How much more evidence of genocide do Western governments and press need to acknowledge reality?

and also check out sharing and reuse to make sure your posts can't go where you don't want them to go

Screenshot from King of the Hill Season 7, Episode 13

too real

pjreddie, who made the best real-time computer vision system, epically explaining that he quit AI because the primary use case was killing people

smart rule to have set up tbh

Just got back from a trip so now I have like 10 emails from each company I interacted with asking how my trip was... can we not do CSAT like this, please?

fun news! I was laid off from Twilio.

going to take this weekend to chill out, and will start looking for roles next week.

if you or someone you know is looking for staff/principal level Developer Advocacy, OSPO, dev infra, or similar roles pass them along!

reposts from tech folks appreciated <3

Screenshot from King of the Hill Season 3, Episode 4

the two news reading personas in 2025

the scope and scale of ICE Air is not well understood, and the agency likes it that way

as a Plane Guy, I am both in awe of the logistical complexity involved and deeply saddened to see that effort and aviation in general weaponized against humanity in such a brutal yet mostly invisible way

Screenshot from King of the Hill Season 4, Episode 18

Will the Senate Save NIH? Rescuing biomedical research is every bit as important as saving Medicaid.

It seems that only the science community is noticing that NIH and NSF budgets are cut 40% and 55% in the budget bill, respectively. If you live in Maine, West Va, Pennsylvania, Alabama, or Louisiana, CALL YOUR SENATOR as they could make a difference. See below.

prospect.org/politics/202...

Our digital repositories team spends a great deal of their time now simply protecting our commoned public digital resources from bots. This insatiable, aimless, destructive desire to excrete novel slop is impeding our access to — and even damaging — our cultural heritage + vetted public knowledge.

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.