Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Dirty Dice

    Another song I like: Dirty Dice by Katie Melua.

  • Federal Cuts, Local Impact

    As a small, local example of the impact of how the Trump administration is recklessly cutting down the federal government, the school district my daughter attends has suddenly lost millions of dollars that helped it to attract teachers to work in the district’s highest-need schools.

    The U.S. Department of Education announced last month it was canceling $600 million worth of “divisive teacher training grants” across the country, including $11.78 million for Wake County Public Schools (WCPSS) to implement Project LEADERS (Leveraging Employee Advancement to Develop Excellence and Reach Success). 

    According to WCPSS, the grant helped hire 133 new teachers across the system’s 24 highest-need schools since January 2024, leading to a 40 percent reduction in teacher vacancies in those schools.  

    …

    The Department of Education characterized the grants it canceled as promoting critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and anti-racism. In the case of Wake County Public Schools, the money covered $1,500 hiring bonuses, $2,500 retention bonuses, training sessions, and tuition assistance for beginning teachers.

    Chloe Courtney Bohl

    A Teacher Reflects on the Impacts of Federal Funding Cuts to Wake County Schools (Indy Week)

  • A Government against Free Speech

    Despite claiming to be defenders of free speech, the government is using control over research funding and ICE as tools to attack the practice. Its treatment of Columbia University and the students there who protested against Israel’s war against Gaza is a clear sign of how far the administration will go to punish those who say things they dislike and why universities should resist those efforts rather than trying to fight free speech on campus.

    Trump is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.

    Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

    Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

    Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

    Then go after the universities.

    Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests. On Friday he cancelled hundreds of millions in grants and contracts with Columbia University.

    Robert Reich

    The universities are next (Robert Reich)

    Again and again, Columbia has shown a willingness to throw students, faculty, free speech, and academic freedom under the bus in acquiescence to a right-wing, pro-Israel narrative that treats support for Palestinians as an affront to Jewish safety.

    For all Columbia’s appeasement, President Donald Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university.

    Natasha Lennard

    Columbia Bent Over Backward to Appease Right-Wing, Pro-Israel Attacks – And Trump Still Cut Federal Funding (The Intercept)

    This is exactly what happened to Mahmoud Khalil on Saturday night. Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, has a green card. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, is an American citizen.

    Immigration agents appeared at his apartment building and told him he was being detained. He now appears to be in a detention facility in Louisiana.

    Khalil did nothing illegal. He has not been charged with a crime. He expressed his political point of view — peacefully, non-violently, non-threateningly. That’s supposed to be permitted — dare I say even encouraged? — in a democracy.

    Robert Reich

    The Trump regime will arrest some of you in the middle of the night because you spoke your mind (Robert Reich)

  • Empathy

    Empathy, the ability to understand another person’s feelings and point-of-view, is essential to civilization. We should all be very skeptical of anyone who presents it as a flaw because what they’re really asking us to do is dehumanize those they view as adversaries.

    The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

    Elon Musk

    Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy (CNN)

  • Hallucinations in Law

    When even folks who are well-educated and held to high standards are falling for the lies of generative AI, the tech companies creating these products are clearly failing their customers. It needs to be absolutely clear to anyone using a generative AI product that none of the output from it can be trusted no matter how plausible it sounds.

    Much like a chain saw or other useful by potentially dangerous tools, one must understand the tools they are using and use those tools with caution. It should go without saying that any use of artificial intelligence must be consistent with counsel’s ethical and professional obligations. In other words, the use of artificial intelligence must be accompanied by the application of actual intelligence in its execution.

    Judge Mark J. Dinsmore

    Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases (404 Media)

  • Trouble is a Friend

    It’s Friday, so here is another song I like: Trouble is a Friend by Lenka.

  • My Career: Silverlight

    When I graduated from the University of Michigan, I decided to start my software engineering career at Microsoft. I accepted a position on a new small team working on what was at the time referred to as either Jolt or WPF/E (Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere). The product was a cross-platform browser plug-in to support rich applications and media streaming. Upon release, it would be called Silverlight.

    The first version of Silverlight was very bare bones. It supported embedding a user interface defined in XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) into a webpage and interacting with those UI elements through the page’s JavaScript. The main goal of that v1 release was media players. At the time, Flash was the dominant way to embed media on a webpage because without plug-ins, browsers did not have a way to support video playback.

    From Microsoft’s point-of-view, the point of Silverlight was that competition with Flash. Microsoft wanted to sell their servers for media delivery, but the dominance of Flash for media playback was allowing for Flash Media Server to be the go-to server option for media. In order to support Windows Server sales, Microsoft needed an alternative to Flash so that companies could deliver rich media experiences without establishing a relationship with another server company.

    As a side note, when you’re working at a big company, it’s always worthwhile to know why the company is investing in what you’re working on. It won’t always be talked about openly, but figuring it out will help you to understand what outcomes will actually be valued by upper management.

    My main contribution to the initial version of Silverlight was its support for Firefox and Safari. I worked on pieces of both the browser interaction through the NPAPI (Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface) and our internal platform abstraction layer for system calls on Mac OS. I hadn’t programmed either browser plug-ins or anything for Mac before this point, so my time involved a lot of learning new things as we pushed towards our first release.

    The second version of Silverlight, released about a year later, made things much more interesting. The plug-in now included a version of the .NET Framework allowing for programming of Silverlight-powered interfaces with C# rather than JavaScript, and it supported more media features – adaptive streaming and, unfortunately, DRM (Digital Rights Management). That second release is where Silverlight started to pick up bigger customers including NBC and Netflix.

    As Silverlight grew, I worked on other pieces of it and picked up more responsibilities. I implemented its networking APIs to give application developers the ability to make HTTP requests using either the browser networking stack, which allowed for cookies and auth to be used from the browser session, or directly through the operating system, which allowed more control but was independent of the browser’s state. I also worked on its support of out-of-browser applications, including support for multiple window Silverlight apps.

    It was a lot of fun to get in on a project from nearly its start and see it grow over the years as we shipped 5 major versions. The team working on Silverlight was also great. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last. While Silverlight was successful in enabling customers to deliver great media experiences using only Microsoft products, shifts in the way people use the internet over those years meant that it had no future.

    Two big changes were happening. First, Google launched their Chrome browser and began to push for HTML5. Their search engine business meant that they wanted to both push application development to focus on websites and for those applications to use standard HTML and JavaScript that their search engine could understand. The other big shift was the iPhone. Suddenly people had a capable browser in their pocket that they were using for more and more of their web browsing. Supporting Windows and Mac was no longer a compelling cross-platform story, and Apple had no interest in supporting Silverlight in their phone browser.

    Between HTML5 allowing for rich media without any plug-ins and more browsing happening on devices without plug-in support, there was no longer a market for Silverlight. As work on Silverlight 5 wrapped up, Microsoft split the team. A small team would continue to service Silverlight until its inevitable end-of-life, and then the vast majority of the team was moved to either Windows Phone or Windows 8 to work on the application platforms for those two products.

    Another lesson from Silverlight is that sometimes even if your product is successful, the market can shift and change its fate. Silverlight didn’t end because we failed to deliver a good product or because we were out-competed by another plug-in. Instead, changes in the broader market brought about the rapid disappearance of browser plug-ins as a whole.

    I was on the portion of the team that moved over to Windows Phone, but that is a story for another post.

  • Digital Packrat Manifesto

    Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It requires intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices—and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful. It reminds me of when I was in college and everyone in my dorm was sharing their iTunes music libraries on the local network. I discovered so many new artists by opening up that ugly app and simply browsing through my neighbors’ collections. I even made some new friends. Mix CDs were exchanged, and browsing through unfamiliar microgenres felt like falling down a rabbit hole into a new world.

    While streaming platforms flatten music-listening into a homogenous assortment of vibes, listening to an album you’ve downloaded on Bandcamp or receiving a mix from a friend feels more like forging a connection with artists and people. As a musician, I’d much rather have people listen to my music this way. Having people download your music for free on Soulseek is still considered a badge of honor in my producer/dj circles.

    Janus Rose

    The Digital Packrat Manifesto (404 Media)

    Where possible I try to make sure I get DRM-free files that I can keep. For music, I buy mp3s, usually as albums. For movies and shows, I do mostly stream. For any movie or show that I want to actually keep, I buy discs rather than digital copies. On the rare occasions that I buy a digital copy of a movie, I make sure it is on Movies Anywhere so that there is less chance I lose access due to one tech company deciding to abandon their service. For books, I only ever buy ebooks from stores that sell without DRM, like DriveThruFiction. For other books I want to read, I’ll either buy a physical copy or borrow a copy from the library.

  • Deleting ‘Justice’, ‘Dignity’, and ‘Respect’

    “Justice.” “Dignity.” “Respect.”

    Those words are now considered red flags by the Army as it does a wide-ranging scrub of the massive amount of digital content the service has created online over the years — a purge that is leading to the removal of images and videos featuring women and minority soldiers from official platforms.

    The deletion of photos, video and other content is part of an order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that all the military services eliminate online material not allowed by the Trump administration. Hegseth has pushed to eliminate any trace of diversity efforts, which has included policies and programs — and now media — that recognizes women and troops with minority backgrounds.

    Steve Beynon

    Army Deleting Online Content Related to Women, Minorities Using Key Words Like ‘Respect’ and ‘Dignity’ (Military.com)

  • Trump against Zelenskyy

    Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader.

    Kaja Kallas, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

    EU’s top diplomat: ‘The free world needs a new leader’ (The Hill)

    We are perilously teetering towards a global disaster, one that few seem to fully comprehend. Today’s obscene spectacle in the Oval Office, where the President and Vice President of the United States berated the leader of a sovereign nation fighting for its survival, is not just a diplomatic misstep. It is a stark warning that we are perilously close to the collapse of the post-World War II international order.

    Mike Brock

    This is an Emergency (Notes From The Circus)

    Why did they hammer him? Because they don’t want Americans to view Zelensky as a hero. That view will complicate Trump’s plan to surrender Ukraine to Putin. Trump is ready to give Putin everything he wants. And then carve up the world.

    Make no mistake: Putin’s aggression will not end with Ukraine. By giving in to Putin, Trump is inviting him to invade Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland — and then the rest of Eastern Europe that used to be under Soviet and Russian control.

    Trump wants Canada, Greenland, Panama, and much else.

    Robert Reich

    Today’s disgusting scene (Robert Reich)

    If you want to watch the entire meeting, C-SPAN has it available. If you want to jump to where it goes off the rails, that starts to happen around 38:20 after a reporter asks President Trump a question about how some people see him as too aligned with Putin.

    Full Meeting between President Trump, VP Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Oval Office (C-SPAN)