Jason D. Hintersteiner

CWNE #171. Sr. Solutions Architect, Comcast Business. Expert in Wi-Fi & Backhaul; Veteran in Lithography; Outlaw in Elsinore. All tweets are my own opinions.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.

Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.

Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.

The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.

Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."

They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.

If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.

[PeachProof @PeachProof23]

In 1952, CBS told Lucille Ball she couldn't show her pregnancy on TV.

​The word "pregnant" was banned as "vulgar." Censors forced a priest, rabbi, and minister to vet every script.
​So, Lucille executed a brilliant, unprecedented revenge plan...

​Instead of hiding, Lucille used her leverage as the star of America’s #1 show.

​She forced CBS to write the pregnancy into the script. But she didn't stop there.
​She timed the production schedule with military precision to synchronize fiction with reality.

​Her real-life cesarean section was scheduled for January 19, 1953.

​That exact night, the episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital" aired.

​While Lucille was recovering in the hospital having given birth to Desi Jr., 44 million Americans tuned in to watch Lucy Ricardo give birth to Little Ricky.

​That single episode pulled in 71.7% of all US television households.

​To put that into perspective: More Americans watched Lucy give birth than watched Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential inauguration the very next day.

​Before this, pregnancy on TV was treated as a shameful taboo. After it, it was entirely normalized.

​Lucille Ball didn't just break the rules - she rewrote the entire playbook of Hollywood business, marketing, and cultural history.
​She wasn't just a comedian. She was a genius.

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

"I am happy to be able to fight for my principles and for Britain, the nation which now champions these principles and has become a second home to me. If I survive there will be only one ambition left: to be able to continue to fight for freedom and peace as a British citizen."

- Rudi Friedlaender, a German Jew, fought with great courage for Britain during WW2.

Tragically, he made the ultimate sacrifice in August 1944.

[Don't Tread On Me @ACMBreaker]

@AdamKinzinger

[thaddeus e. grugq @thegrugq]

Microsoft could stop researchers bothering them with security bug reports by simply not writing security bugs into their software.

[Sick of the BS @SickoftheBS4888]

The execs that blindly went down this path deserve to lose their jobs. This pattern is the same as literally every previous new technology lifecycle. It's even got a name; The Hype Curve. We're at the top of that curve right now with AI and these execs are at the bottom of the dumbass curve too.

[Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) @EscanorReloaded]

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

[We don't deserve cats 😺 @catsareblessing]

Kittens when the job requires zero kittens😂

[Alex Ward @alexbward]

Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby, always worth a read on Memorial Day

[GBX @GBX_Press]

This is a video of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein with children
This is the video that the Department of Justice deleted yesterday
Now they want to remove it from the internet
Sharethis everywhere
don'tstop talkingepstein files..

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

She Was 37. Broke. Dying. And She Made 30 Million People Laugh Every Week. Erma Bombeck didn’t have an office. She had a typewriter on a wood plank in her bedroom. She didn’t have time. She had three kids and a disease that was killing her.

Ohio. 1965.
Erma was 37, a mom in Centerville, Ohio. Laundry never ended. Kids destroyed the house daily. Dishes reappeared like magic. Everyone said motherhood was “sacred.” “The highest calling.”

Erma thought it was also messy. Loud. And funny as heck.

So she walked into a tiny local paper and asked to write the truth. Not the perfect mom version. The real one. They said, “We’ll pay you three dollars per column.”

She said yes.

She went home, put a typewriter on a plank between two cinder blocks, and got to work. No desk. No fancy setup. Just her and the chaos.

She wrote about the septic tank exploding during dinner. About trying to get three kids to school without losing her mind. About “the beautiful absurdity of a life spent making other people's lunches”.

Three weeks after a bigger paper found her, she went national. Soon, “At Wit's End” ran in 900 newspapers. “Thirty million readers. Twice a week. Every week.”

Erma became the most-read humor writer in America.

Why? Because she said what no one else would. “She told the truth about motherhood when polite society insisted it must remain perfect.” She joked about selling her kids. Told moms to “lock the bathroom door and hide from their families for five minutes of peace.”

Thirty million women read it and thought: “Oh my God. Someone finally said it.”

Phil Donahue was her neighbor. He said, “Motherhood was sacred. Mothers were put on pedestals. Then Erma wrote, 'I'm going to sell my kids.' She punctured that pretense and was suddenly speaking for millions.”

But here’s the part nobody knew: Erma was dying the whole time.

At 20, doctors told her she had polycystic kidney disease. Incurable. They said she’d never have kids. She adopted a daughter. Then somehow had two sons.

For decades, she did dialysis and came home to write. “She made America laugh while quietly fighting to stay alive.” She never complained. Never asked for pity. “She just kept writing.”

She grew up poor in Dayton. Dad died when she was nine. At 13, she wrote for her school paper. At 15, she got a job at the Dayton Herald. A professor told her: “You can write.” So she did. For 31 years. Over 4,000 columns. 15 books. Nine bestsellers. 15 million copies sold. Eleven years on Good Morning America.

She wrote survival guides disguised as jokes. Titles like The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

She beat breast cancer in 1992. Finally told the world about her kidney disease in 1993. Got a transplant on April 3, 1996. Wrote her last column 14 days later. Died five days after that. April 22, 1996. She was 69.

She’s buried in Dayton under a 29,000-pound boulder from Arizona. Big as the laughs she gave us.

Think about it. She started at 37 — when the world says women are done. For three dollars a week. On a plank. While on dialysis. While dying. “And she never stopped being funny.”

Because “humor isn't the opposite of pain. It's how you survive it.”

She once wrote, “Success is outliving your failures.” She did.

Not because she got famous. But because 30 million people picked up a paper and felt less alone. She told them: Motherhood is hard. You’re tired. You’re not failing. You’re human.

“Before Erma, mothers were supposed to be saints. After Erma, they were allowed to be people.”

She was 37 when she started. Dying the whole time. Wrote till five days before she died.

Erma Bombeck (1927-1996). A housewife. A typewriter. Three dollars. Thirty million readers. And the belief that ordinary lives are worth writing about.
“Not despite their ordinariness. Because of it.”......................

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

«Teachers who make physics boring are criminals»

— Walter Lewin

[Time Capsule Tales @timecaptales]

Over seven seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard, the General Lee went airborne more than 150 times and rarely survived a jump. An average of two Dodge Chargers were totalled per episode. By the time filming ended, an estimated 300 Chargers had starred as the General Lee.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

CARTOON OF THE DAY 😕🇺🇸

(From @Nick_Anderson_)

[Jason D. Hintersteiner @EmperorWiFi]

Ok, let’s start with the steel for your Marie Antoinette ballroom…

[HOSTIS @hostis_black]

Two members of Congress have been quietly merging two separate site-blocking bills into one.

Representative Zoe Lofgren (D) of California and Senator Thom Tillis (R) of North Carolina's bill would let copyright holders petition federal courts to order American internet service providers and DNS resolvers to block entire foreign domains.

Comcast. Verizon. Spectrum. T-Mobile. Cloudflare. Google. OpenDNS. All of them, ordered to refuse to resolve a domain on the strength of a court order obtained by the MPA's lawyers.

Once the law exists, any foreign domain a federal judge finds objectionable disappears from the address book of every American household that does not run its own resolver.

This is what fourteen years of post-SOPA institutional memory loss looks like.

In 2012, the Stop Online Piracy Act died on the floor of Congress because the public found out what was in it before it passed. Wikipedia went dark in protest. Reddit went dark. Google put a black censor bar across its homepage. The bill sponsors retreated. The lesson the entertainment industry took from that defeat was not that the public opposed internet censorship. The lesson was that public attention was the problem.

So this time the bill has been drafted in private. There has been no blackout. There has been no consumer-facing campaign. The strategy is to negotiate the details quietly with the parties most able to refuse, and the public never finds out the law exists until they cannot reach a website.

In early 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Cox Communications v. Sony Music that an ISP cannot be held liable for a billion dollars because some of its customers downloaded music. Justice Sotomayor, in a concurrence, complained that the ruling now permits ISPs to sell internet access to "every single infringer who wants one" without lifting a finger to prevent infringement. The publishers and the studios read that as a green light to ask Congress for the lever the courts no longer hand them.

This is the lever they want. A federal court order. A list of foreign domains. ISPs and DNS resolvers compelled by law to block on receipt.

The list of countries that already have laws like this includes the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, India, Brazil, and Russia. The MPA cites this as evidence that the United States is behind. In Spain, IP-level blocking ordered by the football league has knocked legitimate businesses offline because they happened to share a server with a blocked domain. In Italy, the Piracy Shield system has blocked Cloudflare entirely on multiple occasions. In the United Kingdom, blocking orders have been used to take down sites that were not piracy sites at all, on the basis that they linked to piracy sites.

The collateral damage is the system working as designed. The blunter the instrument, the easier the enforcement.

There is no version of this law that targets only the bad actors. Domains are not isolated. Hosting is shared. CDNs are shared. The address book is a single document. Once the law exists, the list of blocked domains will only grow, the criteria will only loosen, and the appeal process will only formalize what was already done.

Anything that depends on resolving a foreign domain becomes contingent on the goodwill of a federal court and the lobbying budget of whoever wants the domain alive. Every shadow library, every IPTV mirror, every privacy-respecting service whose lawyers cannot match Disney's. All of them will be one petition away from disappearing from the address book of every household whose internet runs through Comcast.

Most people do not run a VPN, do not configure a custom DNS, do not know what an IP address is. Most people get the internet their ISP serves them. The bill is written for those people. The bill assumes that if the road is closed at the resolver, the destination effectively does not exist.

This bill will outlive its sponsors, its pretext, and the industries that bought it. Laws granting infrastructure-level censorship power do not get repealed. They get expanded. Every kill switch finds a hand.

[Chris Wood @CWood_sdf]

i love how people are saying "if we write a sufficiently detailed specification, the agent can write all our code"

do you know what writing a sufficiently detailed specification that deterministically maps to what a computer's actions is? it's coding

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

She broke her leg parachuting at 17. At 18, she refused to bail out over the ocean and saved her plane on fumes. By war's end, she'd flown more aircraft than any pilot alive.
March 1, 1922. Pretoria, South Africa.
Dolores Theresa Sorour hated her name. She renamed herself after Jackie Rissik—a South African hockey star who didn't let anyone tell her what women couldn't do.
Young Jackie had the same attitude.
At 15, while other girls learned piano and etiquette, Jackie was at the airfield taking flying lessons. Her brothers mocked her. "You're too small to handle a plane," they laughed.
She got her license at 17—the youngest pilot in South Africa.
Then she decided to do something no woman in her country had ever attempted: jump from a plane wearing a parachute.
The authorities tried to stop her. Women don't do that. Too risky. Inappropriate.
Jackie borrowed a pilot's chute and jumped from 4,000 feet anyway.
She landed badly among a group of polo players and shattered her leg.
That broken bone would later save her life.

By 1938, Jackie had moved to England to earn an advanced flying certification. South Africa had no schools willing to train women beyond basics. If she wanted to become exceptional, she had to leave everything familiar behind.
Then Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.
Jackie tried joining the Royal Air Force. They laughed her out of the recruiting office. Women fly? In combat? Absurd.
So she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and spent months staring at radar screens in a bunker—watching German bomber formations as glowing dots while RAF pilots scrambled to intercept them.
She was watching the war from underground while desperate to be in it.
July 1940. Everything changed.
The Air Transport Auxiliary was recruiting. They needed civilian pilots to move military aircraft from factories to fighting squadrons. Dangerous work—flying unfamiliar planes in terrible weather with no weapons, often no radio, using only a pocket manual for guidance.
Jackie was 18 when she joined. The youngest woman they'd ever accepted.
The men called themselves "Ancient and Tired Airmen." Most had been rejected by the RAF for being too old or injured. The women? They just wanted to fly.
Jackie excelled immediately.
Give her any aircraft—Spitfire, Lancaster, Tempest, Hurricane—and twenty minutes with the instruction booklet. She'd figure it out. Takeoff, delivery, land, repeat.
Eighty-three different aircraft types. Some she'd never seen before climbing into the cockpit.
By war's end: 1,500 successful deliveries. Two hundred more than the next closest pilot.
But numbers don't capture what she survived.

January 5, 1941 started like any other mission. Jackie was ferrying an Oxford trainer through miserable weather—thick fog, driving rain, zero visibility.
Another ATA pilot, Amy Johnson, was flying a similar route that same day.
Both got disoriented in the storm.
Amy followed proper procedure: she bailed out over the Thames Estuary when things got desperate. The freezing water killed her. Her body was never found.
Jackie saw the Bristol Channel appear through the fog beneath her. She had maybe twenty minutes of fuel left. No idea where she was. Visibility measured in feet.
Protocol said bail out. Use the parachute. Let the plane crash.
Jackie remembered her broken leg from 1938. Remembered the agony. Made a split-second decision.
She dropped to wave-height and flew blind on fumes until she spotted land.
She landed safely.
Amy Johnson—more experienced, more famous, following the rules—died that day.
Jackie—breaking protocol, trusting her instincts—lived.
Months later, flying a Tempest over Surrey, Jackie spotted something that made her blood freeze: a V-1 rocket heading for London.
These German flying bombs were unstoppable once launched. When they ran out of fuel, they dove and detonated—obliterating entire city blocks.

More story⏬⬇️

[Chris Doohan @ChrisDoohan]

#startrek