Blake O'Hare

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

Full disclosure: I have worked at Microsoft and have built multiple "wizard" menus for applications.

I don't know, one is 10 button presses and the other is 8...

This appeared in my feed right next to this: bsky.app/profile/retr...

Perhaps a √, not a ✓

"Quick! Get to the safety of the large white room!"

without additional context, at first i thought this was about Jane Goodall

No one has ever see a shutdown like this. Senators came to him, big manly men who didn't cry when their mothers died, with tears in their eyes, saying Sir...

Found a counterfeit Starbucks on Google Maps, lol. Honestly, I wish I could visit it. maps.app.goo.gl/TsyzE6mBzWkC...

"うん。無理" -> "yeah, nope"

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

YouTube video by Saturday Night Live Sci-Fi Cold Opening - Saturday Night Live

FYI: "May divorce be with you" was used in an SNL skit youtu.be/35n6Ya-dW-4?...

I let a goat from my local zoo run SQL commands against prod without protection and it nuked my data

The comments: have you tried this other much smarter goat

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

The original meme for reference. Also, you can claim it for yourself by calling 高信 Real Estate at this number, I suppose. Anyone want to pay me to open a Michaelsoft Binbows memorial museum/shrine?

Today I made a pilgrimage to the old Michaelsoft Binbows building.

Sometimes it's good to at least have the ability to do both. When I did this for my adventure RPG game, it had lots of story cutscenes and yielding kept the scripts fairly simple. But of course for dynamic gameplay and NPC behaviors I still used the latter state machine style.

screenshot from an online job application form. the question reads "Can you describe specific ways you have integrated AI tools into your development workflow? Please include any custom setups, automations, or use cases beyond single prompt usage" (a red asterisk indicates that this is a required question). an answer has been typed in the textbox below the question: "there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask. it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same. it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. “you simply must visit the monster—i always just ask the monster.” there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn’t mean it has no price for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face."

applying for jobs again

Just don't read the wisdom from the booklets hanging by the mirror.

...and now I have the Super Mario Bros 2 boss music stuck in my head.

A close-up of a Tokyo metro map

A picture of central Tokyo from above.

programmers are always posting like "worked on tracking down an issue with a Flurble deployment for twelve hours. the problem wasn't in Flurble at all - it was in the Gumbies install. It turns out if you install Gumbies 3.0 over Gumbies 2.7 and don't do a cache flush on all the client spiders they'll get stuck in the crystal maze." then you look up Gumbies and the site is one of those scroll scroll scroll types with one sentence per page, like "GUMBIES is a lean, expressive sharding sandcube for testing and deploying large scale Woodchips playgrounds. GUMBIES automates and streamlines away watersliding phases, meaning your team can get right to the chipping. See why Microsoft, OpenAl and Bloingo have embraced GUMBIES in their Woodchips workflows." and you get to the bottom and you're like I want this I guess but I still don't know what

This is my entire life

My guess is translate probably confused 閉 with 問 due to the picture fuzziness.

Red text that shows says "... caution/attention". Below that is "...(honorable) cats ... affixed to do(or?)... cannot leave... please close ..."

So probably something like "Attention customers: my dear cats cannot go out, so please close the door this sign is attached to"

Denny's would have a Heinz ketchup bottle.

Currently visiting America for the holidays. Here are some photos I took:

Bronze

I wrote down all my in-progress personal projects and the dependencies between them and I feel like I'm looking at the Civilization tech tree.

Go easy on the potassium.