fernmyth

It’s an alternative to coups and civil wars. The deal made in private conversations is something like “Give up power peacefully. Everybody gets pardoned and goes home to their families. Nobody needs to do anything crazy or violent out of desperation to avoid prison.”

Replace Gmail? Meaning instead of real emails from my actual contacts, I’ll read AI generated emails?

Hey, remember that time we used "an organic" kitty litter instead of "inorganic" kitty litter and the resulting explosion cost a half-billion dollars to clean up? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#20...

Here's a dumb idea:

- Take the most recent sale prices of all neighboring parcels within a quarter mile

- Take the land-area weighted average price per square foot

- Assess the given property as its land area times that average

Practically, this can be assessed without ever visiting any of the properties, and there are no games for either the assessors or the owners to play to manipulate it. Each neighbor serves as an example of the potential use (and therefore value) of local parcels. Yes, your hole-in-the-ground gets taxed the same as a skyscraper of the same size. Have you considered building something useful on it?

(Yes, as usual, parks, churches, and other non-economically-extractive community amenities would be exempt from _paying_ the tax, but that doesn't change the assessment)

This will make lobbying more powerful. If you can’t make money from insider trading, you have one less alternative to accepting bribes. I’d rather require insider trading than ban it.

Here's Vitruvius in "De Architectura" claiming it's common, easily verified knowledge: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius...

Of course, him mentioning "Don't do this" suggests that lead water pipes into the home were common enough to need a warning against.

Science is a tool for finding truth, or at least weighing evidence. It isn’t policy and doesn’t have anything to say about policy.

You can have a policy of waiting for overwhelming proof of harm before banning anything. But there are an awful lot of chemicals added to our food and environment, with precious few studies competently and honestly tracking their effects. I want a much more careful policy - don’t put unknown chemicals in my body without convincing me the benefit.

As described in the article, sharing data between apps is currently impossible. I wish Solid/PODs had taken off, but I get the sense that project spent more time on ontologies and less on making useful things.

How can we draw apps into using a common data backend owned by the user?

Cursor with defaults, I guess mostly `cursor-small`. Typically I write and adjust function names or signatures and let tab-complete draft the code and propagate refactors.

It does mix up Crystal and Ruby, but the compiler catches it.

Windfall, for those who want it.

LLMs were fantastic for writing a project[0] in a new, niche language[1]. They help write any missing libraries. They help iterate when I get stuck on language aspects. They explain concepts as well as the median SO post, and much better than the posts that don't exist.

[0] https://github.com/TedSinger/chatfile/

[1] https://crystal-lang.org/ - quite pleasant

If this happens, the designer had a error in his design, and should extend the design to accommodate the facts that escaped him at design time.

Errors in the initial design should be assumed as the default. Wise software engineering should make change easy.

Constraints on natural keys are business logic, not laws of mathematical truth. They are subject to change and often violated in the real world. The database as record-keeping engine should only enforce constraints on artificial keys that maintain its integrity for tracking record identity, history, and references.

Your database may not be primarily a record-keeping engine, and your tradeoffs may be different.

It is useful for humans if a farmer can lock in the price for their crop at planting time, rather than get a nasty surprise when they harvest. In financial terms, this is "selling a futures contract". It's also useful if the farmer sees a low futures price and chooses to plant something better. Likewise every producer and consumer of every crop, metal, hydrocarbon, etc.

Agreed that this author and the industry as a whole go too far in the direction of finance for finance's sake.

I thought at 0°F you're supposed to bring the cows inside! Also at 100°F

I guess it depends on the cows

[Written laws] were just like spiders' webs; they would hold the weak and delicate... but would be torn to pieces by the rich and powerful

- Plutarch

It’s not about an unfamiliar syntax. S-exprs are objectively hard to read. The same shape for function calls, macros, blocks, and data means I can’t distinguish them by sight to detect the code structure. I have to do conscious paren matching.

Structure recognition should be pushed as far down in the subconscious as possible. Rainbow parens help, but it’s not nearly enough to stop other expression fragments from jumping into attention. Likewise clojure’s different bracket types for data structures, likewise the editor highlighting the paren matching the one at the cursor. Better than nothing, but incomparably worse than just having visually distinct syntax in the first place.

C-style is fine. Python-style, ML-style, SQL-style, BASIC, shell: all fine for structure recognition. But lisp is just a soup. Or a fog.

Same problem with elasticsearch queries, too.

"Non Plus Ultra"

Followed by another company introducing their "Plus Ultra" model.

There's no reason for the doctor to involve any patients, other than to write their names down. These are fraud factories submitting thousands of templated claims per year.

I’m quite happy with my Perixx Periboard 335 replacing the Microsoft Ergo Sculpt. Standard layout, semi-split, tented, low (-ish) profile, mechanical switches, wired.

Took me a lot of searches to find something meeting my requirements

Plot the days when your air conditioner is on with the temperature of your room. It will have many concrete examples and a long-term correlation showing that actually, the air conditioner is associated with the temperature going up.

All feedback/control systems are like that.

Solving recurrence relations has always felt just out of reach for me. But rewriting it in matrix form makes so much sense! Thanks!

This works on my system76 lemur pro 10 with pop!_os: - click and hold on the touchpad with thumb - swipe with another finger to drag around. Multiple, disjoint strokes work, so there's nothing special about switching fingers

It would be a bit uncomfortable to do for long periods, since my thumb has to hold down with clicking force.

The lenses in your eyes refract different wavelengths at different angles - think of a rainbow coming out of a prism. Only one wavelength can be perfectly tuned to project a clear image onto your retinas. We are optimized for green, red is close enough, but blue always looks blurry.

I love it! I’ll have to play around with it today

The funny Unicode symbols are actually ASCII `->` and `|>` rendered in a font with ligatures. I agree it's a bit jarring to see, but you wouldn't need a special keyboard.

Should they ignore engagement increases of 3% because someone has stern feedback?

Yes. A sane person or organization must be able to make judgements that include values other than narrow metrics.

If your engagement numbers told you to jump off a bridge, would you?

You’ve hit on three of the four of Jane Jacobs’s conditions for a healthy, high-density neighborhood in her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”!

- Variety of building age/quality, to have rent levels that allow diversity of activities (low rent hole-in-the-wall for an art club; high rent, new construction, ground floor retail for luxury shopping)

- Variety of building use schedules to ensure eyes on the street at all hours and full utilization of infrastructure (including restaurants). A pure residential area or pure office park will fail this and turn into a ghost town at some hours. Hudson Yards might hit 2 schedules but not 3, which is the ideal.

- “a dozen dozen places in a five minute walk” allows niche businesses to survive, since the large effective service radius includes enough people to find some customers. Rockefeller Center’s arcade is actually quite important and covered in the book, since it cuts some too-long blocks into short enough blocks.

I don’t remember the fourth condition, so read the book to find out.

The emojis are colorful, detailed, and unique. They have much higher visual weight than the text, which is black, simple, and regular.

In other words, they are objectively distracting.

I have never measured the speed of light myself. But Google and Wolfram Alpha agree with my memory of physics lectures and textbooks.

All of our epistemology is based on testimony. And in the degenerate but common case where the credibility of the source isn't considered, our epistemology devolves into memes.

If Wikipedians apply consistent effort towards reconciling contradictory information in favor of seeking out better* sources, then that makes it as robust a system as we know how to make.

*I don't know how to define "better" or "credible"

1. LEGOs, "The Way Things Work" by David Macaulay, programming (for me, LOGO, Excel, TI-Basic, but there's better now), any kind of game system to analyze or theorycraft (but avoid games with too much time-sink!)

1a. Look for kindred spirits in general. Knowledgeable and enthusiastic science, math, and history teachers, but also find peers!

2. Don't bother with this. It creates a tunnel vision that smothers other futures, and sets up destiny as something to dread, instead of something to happily stumble upon. Inventions come from synthesis across fields more than specialization within one.

Market cap is a stock. GDP is a flow. Comparing the two is nonsense.