Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time Zones

    What if event organizers could share a link that would do the work for you? If someone clicked on mytime.at/5pm/EST, they would see their local version of that time. It sounded simple enough.

    I began coding.

    I knew trying to manage time is a fool’s errand, but that’s what datetime libraries are for. I would merely build an extra time zone conversion layer on top.

    Surely that couldn’t be complicated

    …Right?

    I soon discovered just how wrong I was. One after another, I kept learning the falsehood of yet another “fact” that had seemed obviously true. Eventually my original vision became literally impossible to pull off without making serious compromises.

    Zain Rizvi

    Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones (Zain Rizvi)

  • Tricked by A.I.

    A good video by a content creator who accidentally included some AI generated footage in one of their recent videos. It takes a look at how it ended up there and how the internet is getting filled with generated slop that you need to be increasingly vigilant for if you want to avoid it.

    I do try to be thorough. So how didn’t I spot the molten nonsense coins, so obvious to the viewer? Well, brains are funny. Eyes too. What we see depends a great deal on what we expect to see.

    Pillar of Garbage

    I Was Tricked by A.I. (And It’s Big Tech’s Fault) (Pillar of Garbage)

  • Stop Using Generative AI as a Search Engine

    I know people are sick of talking about glue on pizza, but I find the large-scale degradation of our information environment that has already taken place shocking. (Just search Amazon if you want to see what I mean.) This happens in small ways, like Google’s AI wrongly saying that male foxes mate for life, and big ones, like spreading false information around a major news event. What good is an answer machine that nobody can trust?

    Elizabeth Lopatto

    Stop using generative AI as a search engine (The Verge)

  • You Should Have a Website

    When you post on social media, you are subject to the whims of whoever runs it. If you get banned, no one knows how to find you. If the website gets sold to someone who sucks, you cannot transfer your identity somewhere else. If the main algorithm that people use to find your posts starts suppressing your posts, you have no backup plan.

    Social media leaves you bouncing from one enshittified, corporate-owned app to another.

    …

    When your favorite social media website gets bought by some asshole with more money than sense, you are going to be left holding the bag. If you have a website, you can link your social media profiles on the website, and build up a reputation as having that website so people know where to find you if your current social media implodes.

    Nora Reed

    You should have a website (Nora Zone)

  • More on Biden’s Pardon

    It’s one in a long line of things that should be punished by the electorate, but are currently not. This kind of behavior, whether it is from President Biden or former President Trump should have made either of the candidates unelectable. But we aren’t rewarding people for doing the right thing, and we’re not punishing people for doing the wrong thing. And unfortunately, I don’t see that trend changing anytime soon.

    And as I said at the beginning, there’s no dispute that the President actually possesses this power. But we’re in really bad shape as a country, if the rule is if you’re legally allowed to do it, then you can and should do it.

    I guess this is a good reminder that so much of what we’ve come to respect in our society and in our government is not about the law as it’s explicitly written down, but is just a norm that we’ve grown accustomed to. A norm that is slowly eroding.

    Devin Stone, LegalEagle

    The Hunter Biden Pardon Is An Abuse of Power (LegalEagle)

  • How North Carolina’s Gerrymandering Affects the Nation

    Here’s the reality: the congressional map we used to have, with a 7-7 Republican-Democratic split, reflected the true political makeup of our state. It was fair. It gave voters on both sides confidence that their voices mattered. But that wasn’t good enough for legislative Republicans in Raleigh. They threw fairness out the window, forcing through a mid-decade map that handed Republicans an unfair 10-4 advantage in the next Congress. That’s 71% of North Carolina’s seats in the U.S. House going to Republicans and those 10 bright red districts were not even close.

    It doesn’t take a mathematician to see what’s wrong with that. And now, with Adam Gray’s apparent victory in California’s 13th District giving Republicans a bare three-seat majority in the U.S. House, it’s clear that gerrymandering in North Carolina tipped the scales in their favor and cost Democrats control of the US House of Representatives.

    Representative Wiley Nickel

    NC congressman: Republicans stole fairness from the nation in giving GOP a House majority (Raleigh News & Observer)

  • Those Who Remember Dictatorship

    The events in South Korea, and this trip to Portugal, has me more convinced than ever that the United States is an innocent teenager when it comes to our development as a nation, and our tendency to let the market choose our politics and our economic policy for us is exactly what millions of citizens in Portugal, South Korea, Colombia, Turkey, Uganda, and dozens of other nations would warn us about. And for me the most shocking part was that as a journalist of 25 years, I know so little about their experiences.

    Jacob Ward

    Those Who Remember Dictatorship (The Rip Current)

  • Storing Times for Human Events

    What’s wrong with calculating the exact UTC time the event is starting and storing only that?

    The problem is that we are losing crucial details about the event creator’s original intent.

    …

    My strong recommendation here is that the most important thing to record is the original user’s intent. If they said the event is happening at 6pm, store that! Make sure that when they go to edit their event later they see the same editable time that they entered when they first created it.

    Simon Willison

    Storing times for human events (Simon Willison’s Weblog)

  • Biden’s Pardon

    Joe Biden has now provided every Republican—and especially those running for Congress in 2026—with a ready-made heat shield against any criticism about Trump’s pardons, past or present. Biden has effectively neutralized pardons as a political issue, and even worse, he has inadvertently given power to Trump’s narrative about the unreliability of American institutions. Biden at first promised to respect the jury’s verdict in Hunter’s gun trial, and vowed he would not pardon Hunter—and then said that because “raw politics” had “infected this process,” he had to act. And so now every Republican can say: When it comes to pardons, all I know is that I agree with Joe Biden that the Justice Department can’t be trusted to treat Americans fairly. I’m glad he finally saw the light.

    Tom Nichols

    The Hunter Biden Pardon Is a Strategic Mistake (The Atlantic)

    Some have suggested that Biden’s pardoning his son will now give Trump license to pardon anyone he wants, apparently forgetting that in his first term, Trump pardoned his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to federal charges of tax evasion, campaign finance offenses, and witness tampering and whom Trump has now tapped to become the U.S. ambassador to France.

    Trump also pardoned for various crimes men who were associated with the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian operatives working to elect Trump. Those included his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and former allies Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. Those pardons, which suggested Trump was rewarding henchmen, received a fraction of the attention lavished on Biden’s pardon of his son.

    Heather Cox Richardson

    December 2, 2024 (Letters from an American)

    Personally, I’m disappointed to see President Biden pardon his son, especially after saying that he wouldn’t do so. On the other hand, it is important to remember the context that Trump already has used a pardon for a family member and has also used them to shield his political allies.

  • An Uncertain Future for Election Reform

    Supporters of electoral innovation – from ranked-choice voting, to independent redistricting, to proportionally representative systems – face formidable obstacles. Perhaps the most significant is simple voter comprehension.

    Carolina Forward Research Staff

    An Uncertain Future for Election Reform (Carolina Forward)