Keep Moving forward

Always the next step

When I started this blog, I called it “A life of Failure”. This is a bit of an inside joke of mine. At my last job, I did a talk to the company with the same name. It was about how failure is a part of the process and no system is 100% available. I’ve spent a long time being a reliability engineer, for several years my job has been to run into an org that is struggling to keep their stuff running and fix it. As soon as I finished, I’d find another and do the same thing.

So the joke of a life of failure is that failing is a part of the process, it is how we learn. A life of failure is about learning and moving forward. About not stopping when we fail.

Ok, with that said, I am certainly looking like I am wrong on the post I wrote last Friday about PA audits.

I have been chasing a lot of things as well as trying to decompress some, so honestly I don’t have as solid of a follow up on this as I’d like. Instead, I would ask people with information or opinions to join me on Reddit to continue the discussion. Peer review is the best way to build data anyway. You can find me at u/the8bit or on this thread.

Always the next step

I have a very strong resolve about failure. Full honest, I had a pretty bad day on Monday for semi-unrelated reasons. I felt awful. In the middle of it, I turned to my wife and said “The frustrating thing is that despite feeling completely hopeless, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and just start moving forward again. Always I move forward. Never stop. To stop is to die.”

Indeed, I woke up the next day and started moving forward again. A life of faliure is not about losing. It is about always picking yourself up and moving forward.

What comes next

Currently, I’m not entirely sure what comes next. I put together a decent snippet this morning thanks to some Reddit contributors outlining some election security issues pre-2024 and how possibly the audits would not catch this type of issue. I’ve had a few different people express their concern with that, but I didnt have the time to do the math and I trusted that the process was set up to catch this type of thing.

Perhaps that isn’t what happened though.

I am not going to propose a specific theory here. Instead, I am going to open up the forum to the full collection of data and insights that I have noted down over the past few weeks. I’ve organized this as best as I can and tried to outline my theories, conclusions, suspicions, etc as concisely as possible. For anything that I am theorizing, I tried to provide a confidence interval (% likely) to outline how I felt. These are all gut feelings, but I will say I do this a lot professionally and I’ve played some pretty cute strategic games in my time. I don’t want you to believe me though. I want you to be skeptical. To challenge the assertions and bring new data to bear. Together, we can build out a better understanding of what happened, sourced by solid data.

What the Fox Saw

(Its a gladwell ref, look it up. I’ve been dying to use this one all week so yeah I’m shoe-horning it in)

Here is a google doc containing 11 pages of news timelines, theories, connections, etc.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ALICE9slihC3rxHm5EEuiGuFB0qAgugY4ls6_YFaWq8/edit?tab=t.0

If you would like to contribute, I have asked for contributors on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/comments/1h153ow/request_for_contributors_compiling_and_merging/

You can chat message me on Reddit or leave a message there with more information.

Apes together strong.

If something is coming, at some point, we are going to have to figure out how to explain these things to the American population. It is going to be hard. This stuff is complicated. I’ve been staring at it for weeks (much to the dismay of my wife — if I’m right here someone owes her big!!) and there are entire sections of the plot I don’t understand at all. I wrote further about that in a different blog. I don’t particularly love my framing of ‘enemy’ in this, but I quite frankly dont have the time to go clean it up again (or edit this one), but I want to get this information out as much as possible as we are definitely ‘on the clock’.