I am an American, and most of the other folks on the project were as well. I did go through an interview with Customs officers when I returned to the US, but it didn't affect my ability to use GlobalEntry. I don't have clearance, but it might cause questions if I did apply for that in the future.
I've also been to Syria as a tourist several times, and at one point had to maintain a second passport for visiting Israel or the West Bank. You can't travel to most of the Arab world if you have Israeli stamps, but you can get another book from the US to keep them separate.
I was working in Libya on voter registration tools with the UN and the High National Election Commission. The government decided to not implement a planned TZ change, and didn't inform the public until the day of. Not the hardest thing we dealt with, that was a full country internet shutoff by a mob outside our data centre (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-25481794). Sometimes the politics of a project are more complicated than the technology...
We did implement an all-SMS voter registration system, which was pretty cool. Hasn't been used much since, but it's all open source. https://github.com/hnec-vr
I did something similar for my wedding website back in 2013. We used a mail-in service that produced a decent TTF, and then I converted it to a WOFF. Still online at https://ruthandjosh.net/story/ (warning, millennial cringe ahead)
Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit and inventor of RSS and Markdown, was hounded to death by an overzealous prosecutor for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the intent to learn from them. He was charged with over a million dollars in fines and could have faced 35 years in prison.
He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their technology actually reproduces and distributes copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.
I used to work at a company that used Sentinel-2 data and a large scale AI model to detect changes in land use and land cover anywhere in the world. They provide free global data at 10m resolution on an annual basis, or paid versions at 3m resolution over a custom timeframe.
I did a project at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media on building a hyper-local radio platform, and we'd always use Car Talk as an example of the kind of interactions we wanted to enable. Like, what if you were a vet in rural Uganda, and you wanted to have a show for farmers to describe their problems and get expert help. Call it Goat Talk, and we'd descend into bleats and baahs.
This was an informal thing for a long time, but I didn't know that there's now an actual certificate. I may have to go back and request mine retroactively.
Believe it or not, George isn't at home
Please leave a message, at the beep
I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone
Where could I be?
Believe it or not, I'm not home!
I had a niche in voter registration, and wrote frontend code and server processes that helped tens of millions of people register to vote in the US.
Worked on tools for Rock the Vote, vote.org, HelloVote (the first sms voter reg chatbot), and VoteAmerica. It’s a surprisingly tricky problem on the backend, with state specific rules and lots of smaller jurisdictions (most election officials are at the county level). Developed methods to extract a user signature from a photo and include in the generated pdf, so people wouldn’t have to print, sign, and mail the document, and we could do everything digitally.
In 2014 went to Libya to help there after the revolution (but before the civil war), and worked on a team that was helping build tools for that new democracy. They haven’t had another national election since, which goes to show that sometimes politics are more complicated than technology…
This is intentionally done by one political party that does not care about democracy. They push policies that restrict individual voting rights, gerrymander districts for minority rule, and expand the influence of money over people. This has been their plan for decades, as they see the younger and more diverse America as a threat to their ideology. We have got to vote them out at every level.
"By using fax and email APIs, VoteAmerica is building out a system that allows voters to request a vote-by-mail application just by taking a photo of their signature. VoteAmerica’s tool then uses code to put the signature in the right spot on the form and then programmatically faxes it to the relevant local election official."
This uses some very slick computer vision techniques to do the signature extraction in variable lighting, and runs on AWS lambda for easy scalability. We'll be sending text messages to 300k Georgia voters on Monday (the first state where this is live), and will extend to 14 more states over the next month.
I've also been to Syria as a tourist several times, and at one point had to maintain a second passport for visiting Israel or the West Bank. You can't travel to most of the Arab world if you have Israeli stamps, but you can get another book from the US to keep them separate.
Sorry for your friend. Borders are bullshit.