Bota Dubati

Multiple, unrelated subjects. Agreeable to reading disagreeing (but not disagreeable) content. Mute is too subtle, Block is the tool of choice.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

Paraphrasing Norm here.

[Benedict Spence @BenedictSpence]

What terrifies me about this attempted beheading is the potential backlash against peaceful beheaders.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

@patriotinTX @AP What SCOTUS ruling are you talking about?

The reasoning by the judge here was that this $100K fee cannot be applied by the executive branch and that it needed to be done by Congress.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

Dennis Ritchie invented C in 1972, co-built Unix in 1969, and his code is running inside every device you are reading this on right now and the colleague who announced his death had to do it through a Google+ post because no journalist thought to check.

He worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey for 44 years. He never gave a keynote. He never ran a company. He never appeared on a magazine cover. He just wrote code that became the invisible foundation everything else is built on.

Here is what he actually built, and why it matters more than almost anything that happened in tech.

In 1969, Bell Labs had just walked away from one of the most ambitious computing projects in history. The Multics project, a joint effort between MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, had collapsed under its own weight. Too complex. Too expensive. Too slow. Bell Labs pulled out.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie refused to let the ideas die.

Working in a small office in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix in three weeks during the summer of 1969. One week for the file system. One week for the process management. One week for the command shell. Ritchie was working alongside him, and when the system needed a language that could express what they were building, he built one.

In 1972 he completed C.

C was not just another programming language. It was a different philosophy about what a programming language should be. Before C, most systems code was written in assembly, which meant every program was tied to the specific hardware it ran on. You could not move code between machines. You rewrote it from scratch every time.

C changed that. It sat close enough to the hardware to be fast, but abstract enough to run on anything. When Thompson rewrote the Unix kernel in C in 1973, it became the first operating system that could be picked up and moved to a completely different machine without starting over. Portability was a new idea. Ritchie made it real.

The branching that followed is almost impossible to overstate.

Unix spread from Bell Labs to universities. At Berkeley, it became BSD. BSD became the foundation of macOS and iOS. Unix influenced Linus Torvalds, who built Linux in 1991. Linux now runs every Android phone, every major web server, every supercomputer on the Top500 list, and the overwhelming majority of cloud infrastructure at AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

C became the parent language of C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Objective-C. Rob Pike, who worked across the hall from Ritchie at Bell Labs for 20 years, said it plainly: "The browsers are written in C. The Unix kernel that the entire internet runs on is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C."

Ritchie won the Turing Award in 1983. He won the National Medal of Technology in 1998, presented by President Clinton. He was head of System Software Research at Bell Labs for decades.

He answered emails from strangers with technical questions until the end of his life. His home address stayed listed in the phone book. His colleague Brian Kernighan, who co-authored the definitive C textbook with him, said Ritchie was a private person who did no self-salesmanship. That was not false modesty. It was just who he was.

He died on October 12, 2011, at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He was 70. He had been ill for some time. The world did not notice until Rob Pike posted a quiet announcement on Google+, and the news spread through the programming community in hushed tones.

No front pages. No tributes from heads of state. No candlelight vigils outside corporate campuses.

The device you are reading this on runs code that traces directly back to what he built. So does the server that delivered it to you. So does the browser or app you opened to get here.

Most people will never know his name.

The ones who built everything you use every day do.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

@pensandpoison This meta stuff starts in elementary school itself before they ever fall into the habit of loving to read.

[Tolkienverse ᚠ @ToIkienverse]

— Estuvo casado 62 años con Rosie Cotton.
— Tuvo 13 hijos.
— Fue elegido alcalde de La Comarca y ejerció durante 49 años en el puesto.
— Fue el único mortal en herir a Ella-Laraña
— Acabó con varios Orcos él solo.
— Estuvo 6 meses sin fumar pipa y sin comer patatas.
— Viajó 2.898 kilometros descalzo.
— Cargó con un adulto a sus espaldas hacia un volcán.
— Una de las pocas personas en la Tierra Media que son inmunes al anillo.

SAM ES EL MVP Y EL VERDADERO HÉROE DE EL SEÑOR DE LOS ANILLOS.

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

USAA is returning $1 billion to Florida policyholders due to Florida’s successful market reforms.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

@TheFP @FrannieBlock 1. His behavior was wrong
2. He could've faced the consequences and probably come out OK, having learned a lesson
3. Committing suicide at this stage is an extreme over-reaction

University seems to have done this by the book, including referral to hotline.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

@Col_Crockett @SenEricSchmitt Any federal judge will enjoin this. We'd want them to. The disparate impact thing comes from the Duke Power Co. SCOTUS case. Lower courts should honor that; Griggs vs. Duke can be relitigated at SCOTUS eventually due to this EO.

That is the way.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

@EWess92 @TheJusticeDept This, by itself, doesn't do anything. It is just a means to relitigate "Griggs v. Duke Power Co." case.

[Paleoncologist @JOSEPH45075332]

The new Epic predictive text typing assistant is SO helpful

LOL

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

@BrendonLeslie "have Democrats register as Republicans to vote in GOP primaries and tank property tax cuts"

That's not how it works. All voters - irrespective of their party affiliation - get to vote on the property tax amendment. There's no need to change registration.

@CommunityNotes

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

@HeatherSuh7wb4 @DrJesseMorse Only the medical education of an IMG is accepted. In India, they do 5.5 years of medicine. When they come to US they have to pass exams and do 3 years of residency, more for surgery like @DrJesseMorse listed. Because India is in Asia, they're discriminated against in admissions.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

Details matter. Because of the asymmetry in lawsuits, the accusers can go to press but the defenders should not

Meanwhile, he did

Research Fellowship 1 - USC
Research Fellowship 2 - Stanford
Thoracic surgery fellowship - Yale
Pediatric & Congential Cardiac fellowship - Stanford

[Jesse Morse, M.D. @DrJesseMorse]

This unfortunate story is going around about a 13 year old girl’s heart surgery went wrong.

While I don’t know the details, I need to clarify something important.

Cardiothoracic surgery is one of the longest residencies and fellowships in American medicine.

General surgery = 5 years
Thoracic surgery fellowship = 2 years
Pediatric & Congential Cardiac fellowship = 1-2 years

That’s 4 years of medical school, 5 years of residency and 3-4 years of fellowship.

That’s 12-13 years of training AFTER undergrad before you can sit for your thoracic surgery board exam‼️

Then he’s been doing this since 2014 - 12 years.

Remove the race card and appreciate the time, energy and dedication that this man put into saving thousands of people lives.

Unfortunate outcome and we don’t have specifics of what happened, but this wasn’t a result of poorly training. Quite the contrary. This is one of the hardest specialities to achieve in American medicine.

[Jordan Abbott MD @JordanAbbottMD]

Physicians are not burned out because medicine is hard.

Medicine has always been hard. That is not new.

We are burned out because the things making it harder have nothing to do with medicine.

Fix the system. Keep the physicians.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

You give homework and expect it to be done? What kind of diagnostic assessments - if any - did you use?

[Dr. Maria Peiro 🇺🇸 🐊 @MariaPeiro305]

My 3rd grade students did great on the final FAST mathematics state of Florida exam! The results show 87% of my students scored at the proficiency level (with the majority scoring a Level 4 or 5, which is above grade level). The majority were below grade level in mathematics at the start of the school year. I challenged them to be their best, and they worked so hard throughout the school year to meet that challenge. It's important to set high standards for all students. I'm so proud of my students!

By the way, I don't use AI for planning or anything else related to teaching! It isn't necessary to use AI to be an effective educator.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

Happens to the best of us.

[Chess.com @chesscom]

When I was young, I was horrible at chess.

But now, after years of dedication, daily practice, and coaching, I am no longer young.

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

The US Debt Clocks counts up (by a lot).

Florida’s Debt Clock counts down.

More than 50% of the debt retired in the past 8 years!

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

@shauryasselonx @anishgiri Ignoramus. He's a citizen of the world.

Mother: Russian
Father: Nepalese (research and consulting foundation)
Father's Mother: Indian
Born: Saint Petersburg
Childhood: Russia, Japan, Netherlands
Speaks: Russian, English, and Dutch. As a child, he also spoke Nepali and Japanese.

[Bota Dubati @BDubati]

For medicine especially, there are reasons to avoid foreign graduates. US has one of the best, most rigorous academic and residency paths for medicine in the world. We're miles ahead in standards of care and valuing human life.

[Chief_Engineer @ChiefEngineerCE]

Medical Tuesday.

A 35-year-old Indian-origin paramedic in Louisiana just pleaded guilty to faking a medical degree and residency letter. He wore “M.D.” insignia, gained access to ICU patients, and forged prescriptions -including for a cancer patient - all while never attending medical school.

This is not a one-off case.

India has been rocked by multiple large-scale academic fraud scandals involving medical and professional degrees. Tens of thousands of fake credentials have been uncovered, with medicine and engineering heavily represented. Cheating rings on USMLE exams have led to hundreds of scores being invalidated. Some foreign medical schools have been caught inflating pass rates dramatically.

Yet states continue to open provisional and fast-track licensing pathways for foreign-trained physicians while keeping the residency cap frozen on American graduates.

This is unacceptable, especially since many suspected, reported and only now are seeing it play out.

Every physician currently practicing in the United States who trained in India (or other high-risk countries with documented fraud issues) should have their credentials fully re-verified. We need a public database of universities and programs with proven fraud or cheating problems, cross-referenced against every practicing doctor in America. Those who lied should face fraud charges. Anyone who helped cover it up should be held accountable. And patient outcomes under these practitioners must be reviewed.

American patients are being placed at risk so hospitals can access cheaper, more compliant labor. That is not acceptable.

Document concerns. Report to your State Medical Board. Demand a full audit of foreign credentials currently in the system.

American-trained doctors are held to the highest standard. Everyone treating patients here should meet that same bar - no shortcuts, no fakes, no excuses.

Bookmark if you see the pattern. Quote or repost your observation. Comment below if you support a full credential review of foreign-trained physicians.

Citations (APA)
U.S. Department of Justice. (2026). United States v. Samrat Mukherjee (plea). National Board of Examinations (India).
FMGE pass rate data. Federation of State Medical Boards. (2026). IMG provisional licensure pathways by state.

[Amy Reichert @amyforsandiego]

A friend just told me that two Chinese nationals living at their house while attending SDSU received California voter ballots in the mail.

When confronted the Chinese nationals said people on campus INSISTED they fill out voter registration paperwork.

Meanwhile, California will mail ballots to “voters” living in China.

Tell me again why election security concerns aren’t legitimate.