Chris Zubak-Skees
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zubakskees.bsky.social
Chris Zubak-Skees
@zubakskees.bsky.social
520 followers 130 following 880 posts
Data journalist and software engineer https://zubak-skees.dev
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zubakskees.bsky.social
@thewheatgerm.bsky.social There's one Wikipedia editor who has been single-handedly keeping Jet Lag out of Charleville-Mezieres's history of culture and sport.
November 12, 2025 at 11:40 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Uh, Michael Wolff what are you doing? www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Email from Michael Wolff to Jeffrey Epstein. Asked about crafting an answer for Trump about Epstein's relationship to give in a town hall, he writes: "I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he'll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime."
November 12, 2025 at 3:26 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
October 27, 2025 at 10:07 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
It's a bit of a term of art.
Small wars vary in degrees from simple demonstrative operations to military intervention in the fullest sense, short of war. They are not limited in their size, in the extent of their theater of operations nor their cost in property, money, or lives. The essence of a. small war is its purpose and the circumstances surrounding its inception and conduct, the character of either one or all of the opposing forces, and the nature of the operations themselves.
October 22, 2025 at 6:24 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Sadly it's calling me a freeloader and throwing me out of the bar.
October 9, 2025 at 8:00 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Prototypical millennial:
September 30, 2025 at 9:39 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Small question: NYT is running a Gage Skidmore photo of Charlie Kirk's wife. Makes sense, Gage Skidmore has taken most of the political photos you've seen online and freely licenses them Creative Commons. But no CC in the attribution. Was Skidmore on assignment for the NYT? Unlikely.
September 21, 2025 at 10:51 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
True
September 21, 2025 at 7:32 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
My high school
A photo of the Pittsburgh skyline from across the river with a big red arrow pointing at The Clark Building, where I did learn
September 20, 2025 at 6:59 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Rude.
Error 503 Backend is unhealthy Backend is unhealthy Error 54113 Details: cache-dxb1470023-DXB 1755882754 1949302830 Varnish cache server
August 22, 2025 at 5:13 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Ah, okay for Ed Board stuff they have this.
By The Editorial Board The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
August 20, 2025 at 2:24 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
I may have put all the soccer on my calendar, and tbh it's not coping too well.
A bunch of scrunched up calendar entries, mostly for soccer matches
August 11, 2025 at 8:14 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Ligue 1, officially known as Ligue 1 McDonald's for sponsorship reasons, is a professional association football league in France
August 9, 2025 at 2:07 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Operations Skills: PRIMARILY KAFKA AND CASSANDRA BUT I CAN MAKE ANY SORT OF PREDICTION AND HAVE IT IGNORED BY ANY TYPE OF BUREAUCRACY
August 4, 2025 at 6:01 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Is this the metaverse?
Screenshot of a page that says "Join a meeting as an avatar You can join any [Microsoft] Teams meeting as a personalized avatar by following the instructions here." Below it is a screenshot of an avatar making a heart with their hands in a Teams meeting.
July 31, 2025 at 5:01 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
I should probably add some titles to my notes.
A screenshot of Obsidian showing untitled notes 5-34
July 27, 2025 at 9:16 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
TIL about the taxpayer roadmap, which I approve of on general grounds, but which looks like the most cursed board game on Earth and unfortunately isn't always clarifying.
The Taxpayer Roadmap. It's like, a Metro map or Candyland, but entirely concerned with the U.S. tax payment and collection process, which looks absurdly complicated.
July 21, 2025 at 6:15 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
"In a demo for Wired, an OpenAI researcher showed how Agent could order a batch of cupcakes — which took it one hour to complete." The cupcake anecdote seems to not have been a demo, but something an OpenAI researcher told them.
ISA FULFORD, THE research lead for OpenAI’s new ChatGPT agent, needed to order a bunch of cupcakes, so she asked the AI tool to do it for her. “I was very specific about what I wanted, and it was a lot of cupcakes,” she says. “That one took almost an hour—but it was easier than me doing it myself, because I didn't want to do it.” Fulford shared her experience of the agent taking an hour to procure cupcakes as an example of OpenAI’s tool needing a long time to complete a task during the testing process. Every request won’t require that kind of time investment. I tried to imagine what the almost hour-long screen recording of Fulford’s agent looked like as it scrambled to find the perfect cupcakes. Where did it go first? Where did the tool potentially get lost?
July 19, 2025 at 6:30 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Please, my father was Mr. Nam'e. Call me Guest.
A Starbucks cold brew cup for [Guest Nam e]
July 15, 2025 at 6:39 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
This another case of pulling from the story, which says "President Donald Trump and other Republicans have so far withheld the funds, with many arguing..." To fit in a skeet, they snipped "other Republicans" without clarifying who "many" refers to. Classic copy error. Not worth getting mad about.
A post by Adam Weinstein with a screenshot of a Washington Post article from 9 years ago titled "'A lot of people are saying...' How Trump spreads conspiracies and innuendoes" and quoting a Washington Post post from today that says "President Trump has so far withheld federal relief funds, with many arguing that California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats in the deep-blue state have mishandled the fires and should be forced to rescind liberal policies in exchange for aid." Weinstein's comment on this is "Huh, weird."
July 10, 2025 at 3:38 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
I'm no soccer knower, but it seems to me that looking back far enough to pick Chelsea and Man City over Arsenal and Liverpool, Madrid over Barca, was a mistake. Otherwise this looks approximately right, for the clubs with which I'm familiar. Are there other omissions?
A Club World Cup bracket, teams represented in the quarter finals include Al-Hilal, Fluminense, Palmeiras, Chelsea, PSG, Bayern, Dortmund, Real Madrid
July 3, 2025 at 6:51 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
This is the scale
Movie poster for Spaceballs, which is the highly anticipated prequel to Spacebars 2, in which a giant vacuum cleaner lady that looks sort of like the Statue of Liberty and also the Death Star scoops up the atmosphere of the earth including a bus
July 3, 2025 at 3:50 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
Ah, I see. * nods like he gets it *
The combination of these two factors: every node has to process every transaction, and we want it to be relatively feasible to run a node––means Ethereum transaction throughput has to be capped fairly low. Q: And Arbitrum Rollup fixes this? Arbitrum rollup fixes this! The basic idea is this: an Arbitrum Rollup Chain runs as a sort of sub-module within Ethereum. Unlike regular, layer 1 ( “L1”) Ethereum transactions, we don’t require Ethereum nodes to process every Arbitrum transaction; rather, Ethereum adopts an “innocent until proven guilty" attitude to Arbitrum. Layer 1 initially “optimistically assumes” activity on Arbitrum is following the proper rules. If a violation occurs (i.e., somebody claims “now I have all of your money”), this claim can be disputed back on L1; fraud will be proven, the invalid claim disregarded, and the malicious party will be financially penalized. This ability to adjudicate and prove fraud on L1 is Arbitrum’s key, fundamental feature, and is how and why the system inherits Ethereum’s security.
July 3, 2025 at 3:31 AM
zubakskees.bsky.social
I have some KPIs
I'm a survivor (What?) I'm not gon' give up (What?) I'm not gon' stop (What?) I'm gon' work harder (What?) I'm a survivor (What?) I'm gonna make it (What?) I will survive (What?) Keep on survivin' (What?) I'm a survivor (What?) I'm not gon' give up (What?) I'm not gon' stop (What?) I'm gon' work harder (What?) I'm a survivor (What?) I'm gonna make it (What?) I will survive (What?) Keep on survivin' (What?)
July 2, 2025 at 3:59 PM
zubakskees.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/u...
In a letter to The New York Times threatening to sue for libel over its article on Tuesday on the D.I.A. assessment, a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump took issue with The Times’s report that classified findings indicate that the U.S. attack sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings. The letter also took issue with reporting that said the D.I.A. report said much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium had been moved.
June 26, 2025 at 2:02 AM