Having a car is integral to life in the Midwest!

Especially when trying to decide "do I stick with AWS or go to GCP or Azure" the fact that you can't easily run scaling experiments on a new account is NUTS! Like isn't this what everyone does?.

I get @awscloud not letting random new accounts mine all the bitcoins, I really do. But when setting up new accounts I wish there was some way to prove "I know what I'm doing so please don't make me go through 100 support requests just to use 20 32-core instances". /1.

Many of my networking and security colleagues, here and around the world, spend time working on encryption technologies, new routing protocols, and novel ways of enhancing privacy. It seems perverse we're expected to effectively abandon all of that at our intellectual homes. /fin.

Academia is supposed to be a place where people innovate, challenge assumptions, push boundaries, and are free to "think different". It's hard to do that when the CIO sees literally every website you visit and file you open. For every single member of the university community. /4.

I worry the proliferation of app stores has created a generation of users who don't realize the power of general-purpose computation, or are too eager to cede control -- to their employers, their device manufacturers, and their governments. /3.

Computing is special. General-purpose computing is a limitless tool to create and expand knowledge. The ability to write your own code, control your own device, send packets to who you want --- these are incredible powerful mind-expanding tools! /2.

I don't think many of my colleagues in adjacent (non-CS) fields recognize the threat that the "corporate control of computing and information" represents to academic freedom and the academy. If campus IT had their way we would all be using chromebooks and never have a root pw. /1.

An academic community that was generally very vocal against 9/11-era Patriot Act surveillance excesses seem too willing to roll over as soon as someone says 'hackers' or 'ransomware' /3. But universities are (and should be ) run by their academics, and we should PUSH BACK /fin.

I ran for (and won) a seat on the Council of the Faculty Senate specifically to push for these computational academic freedom issues and an end to academic spyware. But it's hard! You have to fight with CIOs who claim that surveillance is necessary for security. /2.

There are severe academic freedom issues here with the surveillance of everything graduate students and professors do on their computers. This is an incredible violation of computational academic freedom. At @UChicago many faculty are pushing back on this as much as we can /1.

RT @milesnawmiles: @stochastician pumped up the #5thgrade enthusiasm about all things outer space. Thx Dr Jonas! @SkypeScientist @SouthSide….

"Zero to nazi in two lines" -- I give you Foundational Models.

From my brilliant colleague at Madison: "Hey we all have a PhD in \vspace".

RT @beenwrekt: "No automation, no AI, no machine learning" is a perfectly reasonable set of design principles.

New professor lament: writing my NSF CAREER, having a good idea, and thinking "Oh I should test this it'll only take a few days" and then remembering NO! WRONG ANSWER! PUT IT IN THE DAMN GRANT.

Is it just me or do the Plein Air pastries taste like soap? I just want a freaking danish. Is there something in them that triggers the cilantro soap (OR6A2) receptor?.

Spring (summer) cleaning my office (SUMMER WOOO) and I discovered I have 19 printed copies of "Nineteen Dubious Ways to Compute the Exponential of a Matrix" hidden in various piles.

Time to get up and make the biosketch!.

I would really support a faculty-focused tour of campus, for both new faculty and existing faculty who haven't gotten out much (say, due to covid). What are all these buildings on campus? What do they do? What is their history? What are the neat nooks and crannies?.

It's always a valve! But also often a failure to communicate. If I had $$$$ I would create a similar NGO analyzing Data/AI failures and producing similar content to educate the public.