Award-winning pro writer of 50 books + "Teacher of the Year" Saddleback College, SpaceXAI Post-Training Tutor

Southwest Florida
Joined May 2008
Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
Please share, Terrill has not been able to work because of illness and really could use a community of care 🪶💕 thanks if you can assist
Terrill has been sick most of the year, and while he's *still* uplifting others in their need, he needs help himself. Share even if you cannot donate.
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
Looking for a unique mineral specimen? Shop untreated gemstones and matrix crystals now on sale.

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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today. "Patch every PHP server immediately." I asked what happened. "Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required." Cool. How many PHP servers do we have? According to inventory: 12 According to reality: Nobody knows. We found one running WordPress. Three running old internal tools. One under someone's desk. Two inside vendor appliances. A forgotten employee directory from 2016. And a server named: PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH Naturally, that one runs payroll exports. Then we found a PHP 5.6 box. I asked who owned it. The documentation said: BRIAN. Brian left in 2019. We called Brian. He said: "Oh wow, that's still running?" Excellent. By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call. CEO: "Can hackers actually get in?" Security: "Potentially yes." CEO: "Without a password?" Security: "Yes." CEO: "Then why do WE need passwords?" Not the lesson. Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue. Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers. Finance asked for a cost comparison. At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline. Marketing refused. "Our campaign is live." So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover. We finally patched everything we could find. Then our scanner discovered another PHP server. Hostname: TEMP-PHP-2014 Uptime: 4,512 days. Nobody knows what it does. Nobody owns it. Nobody can shut it down. But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels. Security has classified it as critical infrastructure. It is running PHP 5.4. The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees. The emergency patch took four hours. Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven. The internet isn't held together with code. It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
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IKR???? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 👇
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
One of the best feelings for an introvert is slipping out of a social event without anyone noticing, driving home in complete silence, and feeling more at peace with every mile
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
Elon Musk
@elonmuskOct 19
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.
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🥗 "I wish I could provide fresh vegetables, fruits, and food for my family, but I don't have a campaign link to help me afford these basic needs. Please help me get a donation campaign link — I am in desperate need of it. Thank you from the bottom of my h" 🙏🇵🇸 @atmahmudulhasan
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
Working on my bif Democracy for the Few project and just finished looking at the actual 39 signers and who were slaveowners. They love to lie about this but sadly out of the 39 at LEAST 29 were. 3 would have (it was abolished in those states already) and 1 ran a slave ship.
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At just 18, Japanese classical guitarist Haruna Miyagawa performs Niccolò Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 in a guitar arrangement. Originally written for violin, this celebrated piece is known for its intricate variations, complex arpeggios, and demanding technical challenges
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
How Cool Is This! 🦢 Yesterday a large group of white Pelicans was spotted swimming near Cedar Key, Florida. They were more than likely displaced due to hurricane Isaias. Credit: Joseph Williams 🎥
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
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Replying to @CNN
CNN has been Community Noted for its Epstein Class post on Sandra Birchmore.
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
Colleagues. We are healthcare. We generate the revenue. The C-Suite needs us, we don’t need them. We aren’t the driver of healthcare costs. Stop choosing to work for systems that devalue what we do. We have been the frog in the pot as the fire has been slowly turned up over 30+ yrs. Jump out before your cooked.
🤖 Made with AI
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
Based on my Cornell follow the money findings, and with a daughter applying to colleges right now, I wanted to look across more universities to understand how far this goes. So I built Behind the Ivory Walls, a model that ranks America’s 31 richest universities on who controls their police, how many sexual assaults they never count, what they have already been caught failing to stop and how much they have paid to settle abuse claims. I scored every school on 10 criteria. They come down to three questions: who controls the police, how many assaults never get counted, and how much the school has already paid for abuse it was warned about. The 10 criteria: who employs the campus police, who those police answer to, whether city police are required to lead sex crime cases, whether the public can see the records, whether anyone outside oversees the department, how many assaults never make the official count, how many victims tell no one at the school, the school’s documented failures, the money it has paid for abuse, and pending lawsuits. Highlights of findings: (1) USC, Cornell and Columbia stand apart from the rest. Each one has paid or agreed to pay ~ $1 billion or more for abuse by a doctor the institution had been told about. (2) 21 of the 31 schools have no rule that requires anyone outside the university to see a sexual assault report before it reaches a prosecutor. Only seven have a written rule that hands sex crime cases to city police. (3) Only about 1 in 15 of the assaults students describe in their own schools’ surveys shows up in the official federal count. (4) 28 of the 31 run their own police force with arrest powers, and 28 have no independent oversight of those police at all. (5) 16 keep their police records completely closed to the public. At nine, the police report up to the university’s finance or legal office. At the University of Chicago, the department is overseen by the general counsel, the school’s top lawyer. (6) At 19 of these schools, students’ own survey answers point to about 7,600 sexual assaults a year. Those same schools reported about 510 to the federal government. At the University of Chicago, the federal count captures 1.9% of what its own students report. (7) At Penn, victims told no campus office at all in about three out of four incidents involving women. If you have a child applying to college this fall or attending one right now, all 31 schools are in the article. Public universities are next, so let me know what other schools you want run next! Full article is up on my Substack now (link in bio and it's free).
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Every use of a leaf blower is a massacre. A typical blower pushes air out at 150 to 200 mph. That's faster than a Category 5 hurricane, aimed straight at the layer of leaves where next year's butterflies, moths, and fireflies are hoping to spend the winter. Woolly bear caterpillars curl up under those leaves. Luna moths hide their cocoons in them, disguised as dead leaves. Fireflies lay their eggs in them. Bumblebee queens sleep an inch or two below. Blast the beds down to bare dirt and all of it gets scattered, exposed or bagged for the landfill. Flip it to vacuum mode and it's even worse. It sucks up whatever's in the leaves, insects and spiders included, and chops it up. In 2019, Germany's environment ministry told people not to use leaf blowers unless they're indispensable, because small animals get sucked in or blown around and damaged. Get a rake. Move the leaves off the lawn and driveway, pile them whole in your garden beds and under your trees, and leave them there until spring. Next year's bumblebees and fireflies will thank you.
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We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
These ball manufacturers are getting smart. Deflating balls under pressure so they don't pop. I'm gonna have to get one for donkey.
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
The famous Bramante Staircase in the Vatican Museums is actually a double helix—two separate spiral ramps intertwined so those walking up never meet those going down. Designed by Giuseppe Momo in 1932. 🙏🏼🌍🕊️ 📷 Photo by © Claudio Ciardi
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Amy Sterling Casil retweeted
"START THE CAR JANICE I FORGOT MY WALLET"
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