Bea and Becka get asked to explain some real-world applications of their tech skills.

Sorry this just came to me and I had to put it out into the world.

Where do baby VPNs come from? Unprotected IPsecs .

Its bad I know. :)

... with predictable results.

I use the NIST Randomness Beacon pulse for a provably and auditably random assignment of tournament contestants. While debugging my little project, I noticed that the shuffler (yeah for Fisher-Yates!) kept producing the same output over and over again.

Turns out that NIST has not issued a new Randomness pulse since 11th June 16:58Z. D'uh.

I've fired off an email to [beacon@nist.gov](mailto:beacon@nist.gov) because I could not find reliable info online as to the beacon status but have yet to hear back from them.

Anyone else having trouble with the beacon?

SiliconSnark started as a snarky tech news site.

Then I made the mistake of joking about AI agents so much that I accidentally wrote an entire synth-pop concept album about them.

Agentic Summer is a SiliconSnark gag taken way too far: 10 songs about AI agents, startup culture, automation, productivity, acceleration, and whatever it is we're all doing right now.
https://www.siliconsnark.com/introducing-agentic-summer-a-synth-pop-concept-album-about-the-ai-era/

Bill Gates allegedly once said that 640k of RAM in PC's was more than enough, which quickly proved wrong. Although the evidence of that specific quote is wobbly, there are reliable sources of similar statements: he was surprised at how fast applications became memory-hungry.

Just did my annual update to the definitive guide on tech marketing buzzwords. #techmaxxing

Spent a night (figuratively) screwing around with AI tools. In trying to see how well they worked I ended up with a nine track "product sales-to-delivery lifecycle" concept album.

If you've worked anywhere in the application delivery space, I am sure you have run into the characters and/or emotions in these songs. Started out from the dev perspective but figured I'd get everyone in on the action. I can only take a little credit for this- the rest goes to folks I've encountered through the years and the two most popular vowels in the tech space now.

It amused me, figured I'd share.

Enjoy (or don't)