Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 is an excellent documentary about comedy just after September 11, 2001.

There’s the adage “Comedy equals tragedy plus time” which is pretty much the Onion’s operating principle but we basically skip the time part.

Comedians that genuinely wanted to do the right thing took cues from each other (including Letterman’s 09/17 return) on how to navigate the very challenging new territory in the midst of intimidation and threats of violence.

The comment that Bill Maher lost his job over:

We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.

…was followed by the White House press secretary delivering the warning:

all Americans…that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.

Although not included in the documentary, it seems the press secretary strangely wrote a letter to the Washington Post to deny making those remarks:

Ari Fleischer hasn’t been seen much since he stepped down as White House press secretary in 2003 and moved out of the public spotlight. So it was a surprise when he e-mailed recently asking The Post to “correct the record” on a comment he made nearly eight years ago. Fleischer, now a sports media consultant in New York, said that Post columnist Dana Milbank was guilty of repeating an “old canard” that has become an “urban myth.”

Also not included were any conversations related to the provenance of Maher’s comments. For instance, in Re: Hicks, Rogan and Leary mentioned on Stern, NY Post, different opinions were shared on how similar Maher’s comments were to those from the November 17, 1993 performance of Bill Hicks:

They blow themselves up in order to get at us, and we launch $3 million missiles off of giant floating iron islands 2000 miles away - Who are the real cowards?

They seem very similar but I do not think Maher was necessarily borrowing from Hicks.

In the end, what I learned was that there was a lot of self-censorship and we missed out on a lot of good humor that could have been helpful.

A significant github issue was opened a few days ago by luckygreen:

[BUG][SECURITY] CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md instruction compliance is architecturally unenforced — documented security consequences and 10+ independent reports #53223

Claude code allows a project to declare persistent context and instructions to control Claude Code’s behavior in a file named CLAUDE.md. It seems that these instructions defined in the CLAUDE.md file can be silently overriden if they conflict with Claude’s internal instructions.

The issue references at least 10 other issues that belong to this same class of failure.

Clearly, at the very least, the failure should not be silent and Claude should stop before proceeding any further with an alert so that the problem can be managed.

I don’t want to brag but I finally added a follow button to my static jekyll blog. Because it uses Activity Intents, a visitor can remotely follow my fediverse account regardless of where their host server lives as long as their server supports Activity Intents. The good news is that mastodon.social already supports this as it is running the nightly build. It will be included in the next major release (4.6) as mentioned in Trunk & Tidbits, March 2026 so that other Mastodon servers will support it.

Usually, the idea is suppose a visitor Alice from home server A.com visits Bob’s account on server B.com. Alice would like to easily follow Bob. Alice clicks on the follow button and is prompted for her fediverse address and she submits alice@A.com. Her browser makes a CORS webfinger request to A.com so that the web page at B.com can discover what url to redirect Alice to so that she can follow Bob from her home server where she is logged in. My setup is slightly different because my follow button is on my blog instead of on my fediverse server.

The code was added to Mastodon in Add support for FEP-3b86 (Activity Intents) (#38120) and it seems there are 2 different values for “rel” a home server may offer to accept a follow: 4.10 Follow Intent and 5.1 Object Intent so my button accepts 2 different values.

var rels = ['https://w3id.org/fep/3b86/Follow', 'https://w3id.org/fep/3b86/Object'];

Intents are for all activities but it seems there is a tendency for fediverse home servers to support just a subset of activities at the moment. Earlier this week, I added support just for follow and like for my home server. Since my webfinger identifier has a different domain than my fediverse server, I also had to add intents to webfinger in my jekyll software as well as allow webfinger to respond to CORS request.

Cindy Cohn, executive director for EFF was on the Daily Show.

We need better options and people are developing them, right? There’s the whole Mastodon universe. I know it’s not very big yet but it’s a decentralized place where people can build safe communities for themselves.

We could take in a hockey game.

Distraction (1998)