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matt blaze Profile picture
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10 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Email that starts “I know you’re busy” and proceeds to ask me to spend time doing something to save them time.

So, were they lying when they said they know I’m busy? Or are they flexing how much more valuable I should think their time is compared with mine?
People who genuinely need help almost never use the “I know you’re busy, but” template. It seems to be reserved for people who know they’re asking for something unreasonable, but want to appear reasonable.
Cue the parade of people telling me I should be more generous with my time. Maybe I should smile more, too?
One of the most important things you can do for both yourself and those you care about is recognize that you don’t owe arbitrary amounts of your time, energy, or attention to everyone who demands it, no matter how “nicely”.

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More from @mattblaze

matt blaze Profile picture
10 Nov
For the record, I will not be offering my election integrity course at the University of Austin.
Even imagining doing that makes me want to hide under the bed.
I’m considering, however, a course in computation theory, covering such topics as Gödel’s completeness theorem, Turing’s Halting Solution, and why they don’t want you to know whether P=NP.
Read 4 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
9 Nov
The reaction to this illustrates the Great Divide in America, which is between those who’ve read Caro and those who haven’t.
The thing about The Power Broker is that when you first see it you think, oh god, this is one of those impossibly long books people claim to have read but never actually do. But then once you actually crack it open, you’re just hooked.
It’s ostensibly a biography of Robert Moses, but it’s actually a political history of New York and the power of infrastructure.
Read 5 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
8 Nov
If you’re a computer scientist and you’ve not read this seminal work, you owe it to yourself to do so. (Un)fortunately, it’s become hard to find platforms on which the attack can be reproduced in the form described, but it’s a transformative experience when you do.
Mastery of the buffer overflow attack - not just understanding it conceptually, but actually being able to execute it - is like developing a terrible superpower. You start to understand the problem of security in an entirely different way. @aleph_one’s paper made that accessible.
Anyway, @aleph_one’s paper, and an exercise based on it, is assignment #1 in every security course I teach.
Read 10 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
8 Nov
“Why did you block my other account? You must be an asshole.” You might not be learning the intended lesson here.
For the record, I block people for a variety of reasons, my being a capricious asshole being only one of them. Mostly I block people for being abusive or excessively tiresome.
If you’re unhappy about this, please feel free to make a first amendment complaint about me to your nearest police precinct. They’ll be glad to help you. Or complain to my employer (that’s George Mason University, remember).
Read 4 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
7 Nov
So, “cryptocurrency technology" means digital signatures and hashes, at a minimum. So, which public key signature schemes do we teach 11th graders? Something based on elliptic curves, maybe? And where in the curriculum do we introduce chosen prefix attacks against hash functions?
Also, we’ll really need to start these kids with a good foundation in number theory and finite fields, not to mention the basics of differential and linear cryptanalysis. Better start in the 8th grade or so.
Or maybe they mean things like securing digital wallets. Which means we better getting them started in serious hardware reverse engineering techniques by the 9th grade or so.
Read 10 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
7 Nov
Out of context, this sounds like the sort of thing that should cause one’s friends to stage an intervention. In context, too.
Maybe vaccines are “communist” because of their side effect of protecting not just recipients, but also those with whom they come into contact. Perhaps a proper capitalist vaccine should be developed that protects recipients while creating extra risk for everyone else.
But of course, if the market wanted such a vaccine, it should exist already.
Read 8 tweets

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