chaps

44 ms·

511.
by chaps 2y ago
And I'm saying that as an award winning investigative journalist who focuses on transparency and police misconduct. This is the first time in years where I only have one lawsuit against a police agency. I also have counsel on retainer
512.
by chaps 2y ago
This is terrible advice, friend.
513.
by chaps 2y ago
Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.
514.
by chaps 2y ago
Why is that relevant? Google used a hashing function to persist a new record within a database. They created a record for this. Like I said in a sib. comment, this FOIA lawsuit goes into questions of hashing pretty well: https:/&#x2
515.
by chaps 2y ago
No. The calculation is what determines what the assignation should be. It does not actually assign anything. This FOIA litigation by ACLU v ICE goes into this topic quite a lot: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-2n
516.
by chaps 2y ago
Erm, "Assigned" in this context is not new: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca5/17... "More simply, a hash value is a string of characters obtained by proces
517.
by chaps 2y ago
I've taken this trip a couple times! It's a genuinely wonderful experience. Every Amtrak trip I take has some memorable experience I hope to never forget. Tip: get the sleeping car and eat every meal they offer, especially if you
518.
by chaps 2y ago
City of Chicago did some strange geofenced text messages to folk in westside Chicago to get people to go inside during the early COVID days. From leaked emails: Hey folks, We have a situation on Westside neighborhoods (specifically
519.
by chaps 2y ago
Many years ago I worked at a company that had to print out every transaction with a dot-matrix printer every evening. It was my group's job to do very minimal maintenance on it like adding toner/paper and such. When filling the to
520.
by chaps 2y ago
Can you expand on what you mean, exactly?
521.
by chaps 2y ago
I hope you're a nicer person in-person, too.
522.
by chaps 2y ago
Lemme tell you a story. Years ago during the pandemic early days, a harvard epidemiology student asked me to proof-read his paper that argued that covid-19 killed more white people than any other race. The dataset he used was the Cook Count
523.
by chaps 2y ago
Fair. Can I ask why exactly you think my take is "very weird"? Your original post was exceptionally dismissive, without explanation, and your comment on FOI was said so confidently probabilistic that it struck me that you misunder
524.
by chaps 2y ago
Not any different from being red-team'd, but you do you. But thanks for your input -- it makes more sense that your apparent reluctance to be challenged makes it clear why you think my take is odd. Even still, I challenge you to challe
525.
by chaps 2y ago
"FOI probably gives you PDFs." Having submitted thousands of FOIA requests, I get the impression that you haven't, actually, submitted many FOIA requests. I've received many, many, many, many non-PDF FOIA responses. Shar
526.
by chaps 2y ago
That's a really freaking neat trick. Thanks!
527.
by chaps 2y ago
Yes, of course there can be. But I cannot ignore the harms in doing so, by misrepresenting the data in a way that disallows others to understand what is or isn't there -- it happens regularly . These datasets are often used as a pol
528.
by chaps 2y ago
Can you say more about this?
529.
by chaps 2y ago
Here's something about shotspotter data in Chicago: https://x.com/foiachap/status/1775296597850480663 And this one makes some rounds: https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentall
530.
by chaps 2y ago
I do work with "open data" on a near-obsessive basis and -- friends, please do not trust "open data" portals to reflect reality accurately. The datasets are often curated, categories changed during the ETL processes, row
531.
by chaps 2y ago
Worked on a team that deployed crowdstrike agents to organize and... Yeah. One of the biggest problems we had was that the daemon would log a massive amount of stuff... But had no config for it to stop or reduce it.
532.
by chaps 2y ago
This sort of philosophical question becomes more important when you think of second-order-and-beyond. Think of, in this case, that color is just a manifestation of experience. But that manifestation of experience applies to, for example, th
533.
by chaps 2y ago
Missed opportunity to call it "TetriSQL".
534.
by chaps 2y ago
Nah, it ended up being just a single line of powershell to complete the FOIA.
535.
by chaps 2y ago
It was largely about what FOIA compels an agency to do. They were arguing that what we were asking for was way outside of what is normally done. It was a strange argument.
536.
by chaps 2y ago
Recommended against, sure, but does that actually matter? I had to sue the City of Chicago because one of the Mayor's main policy consultants was using gmail for most of their work. Sure the judge frowned on it and I won the case.... b
537.
by chaps 2y ago
Hah. They almost definitely do. Not sure how it works at the federal level, but in Illinois here we have the Local Records Act, which requires that retention policies be created for all documents/records. When I FOIA'd for all of
538.
by chaps 2y ago
How are you defining a "flashcard"?
539.
by chaps 2y ago
Grants!
540.
by chaps 2y ago
You could have side-paths that quickly go nowhere, but without any hints as to which ones do or don't. That way, backtracking towards the main path is pretty trivial and leads to a constant forward progression.

More ›