Ryan Ragona
@ragona.com
cryptography + trusted computing @ openai. I’m into guitar, music theory, photography, and weird math. he/him. anti-fascist. child of radical queers. 🏳️⚧️ 🖤
the only people who benefit from this are child predators and i'd like dem officials to say so into a microphone
Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · 2y agoNew — The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) was told this week by DOJ that they'd lose their funding if the org didn't remove any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials, I've learned. Staff were told they need to deadname trans kids in their reports to comply.
if you were ever looking for a reason to become radicalized
The Verge@theverge.com · 2y agoApple ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally to UK spying
if ai agents end up being a notable part of global conflict in the future, there will _never_ be such a thing as too much compute, even just for inference. you have agi in a tiny model? cool. here’s 100gw of compute, make me a billion hackers and see what you can do about that power grid.
1. I love this guy, and god bless Canada. 2. The clearly involuntary “eh?” in the sentence — “The American people aren’t going to put up with it, and the Canadian people… EH, we will NEVER put up with it.” SO GOOD. 🍁🇨🇦 I’m nominating this for “Hardest ‘Eh’ of 2025” I don’t care that it’s January.
Acyn@acyn.bsky.social · 2y agoCanadian MP Charlie Angus: Donald Trump, you’re a disgrace as a human being. While you may have gotten the presidency, you’re still a disgrace. You’re a convicted felon, a pervert, and you treat your allies with disdain while you kiss up to Putin. Anytime, anywhere, Donald—we will take you on.
I think this might be my favorite thing I’ve read this year. inspiring tbh, makes a nerd want to build privacy preserving shit.
Black Aziz Anansi@blackazizanansi.blacksky.app · 2y ago@dansup.bsky.social , who is the founder of pixelfed, sent this letter to Mark Zuckerberg/Meta regarding their blocking of links to Pixelfed.
as an individual fqdn becomes more popular, I want the the dns resolution to get fuzzier. goigle.com I’m really sorry you’re google now.
been thinking about my queer friends and fam a lot this week. the inauguration, the hard right shift in the tech bubble. I have two moms and a trans dad. I grew up in the 80s in oregon, when there were aggressive anti-gay measures on the ballots. (me at portland pride with my moms in the 80s)
I can hear the meeting: “it’s about giving users the ability to choose their content. we don’t want paternalism, these are informed adults.” subtext: “facism is so hot right now. we have to support that user base, or we’ll lose too many eyeballs. and god knows what the new administration will do.”
Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · 2y agoMeta is getting rid of factcheckers, recommending political material and “dramatically reducing the amount of censorship” (of Far Right material), Zuckerberg has just announced. Welcome to the new Twitter.
corporate spyware, used to breach government spyware. this is an example of a huge of “security investment” managing to be starkly, directly counterproductive at a massive scale. if this doesn’t make you wonder if maybe the surveillance itself is the problem, nothing will.
Dustin Volz@dustinvolz.bsky.social · 2y agoNEWS: The massive Chinese hack of U.S. telecoms breached firms Charter, Consolidated and Windstream as part of a historic espionage campaign. Security vendor Fortinet was a key intrusion point. Investigators are still grappling with the damage. That and much much more: www.wsj.com/tech/cyberse...
this frame is compelling. when a profession adds women, men value it less and stop participating. women are going to college in larger numbers — is that why young men aren’t? … men, I’m starting to think we shouldn’t make life choices mostly to avoid the spooky ghost of femininity.
Cyd Harrell@cydharrell.bsky.social · 2y agogreat article about the devaluation of absolutely anything where women achieve 50%. which is a thing.
I am super impressed with this book. It is an opinionated take on reducing music theory to its actual foundation, rather than a mishmash of hundreds of years of overlapping theory with 6 names for the same shit. Easily the most practical book on theory I’ve ever read.
4yo: “can knives cut through bones?” me: “nah not really” her: “… it would take a WHILE”
sweetwater customer service needs some kind of study, it’s remarkable. just had one of the most human chats I’ve had in a long time, simply talking about how their luthiers will setup a guitar. are they like.. making people feel safe at work or something? 😅 (shoutout to Levi M., a lovely human!)
My favorite photos are definitely of my kiddos this year, but this crow going to visit his buddy made me smile.
This Salt Typhoon stuff is insane. The entire FISA surveillance infrastructure has been completely owned by China and literally no part of our telecom infrastructure is safe to use without end-to-end encryption.
A passage from the Tao that’s frequently worth revisiting.
I just realized I am technically allowed to fret the A string with my thumb. no one can stop me… except maybe joint pain.
just tried asking o1 pro a music theory question and I think it did well! (it’s actually also one of the longest compute times I’ve seen out of it, which is interesting.) makes me want to play with having multimodal models analyze song audio from a music theory perspective.
this is such a good point I don’t think we hear enough of. when we paint undocumented immigrants as scary criminals who climbed a wall to get here, it dehumanizes the really boring (and bureaucratically terrifying) daily reality of overstaying a visa trying to find your feet in a new country.
David Neiwert@davidneiwert.bsky.social · 2y agoThis mythology assumes that all these “aliens” crossed the border illegally, which is in fact a federal crime. But a majority of undocumented workers are visa overstays (up to 65% in recent years)—people who arrived legally but whose permitted time has expired. 16/26 cmsny.org/publications...
my timeline of cryptographers has switched from its usual math and code chatter, now it’s mostly people panicking about the asiacrypt venue dress code that disallows *checks notes* tshirts 😱
