gorgoiler

It feels onerous as an idea because bank statements, monthly bills, payslips, will bequests, stock vests and trades, bank robberies*, and investment income each have different ways of being tracked. At least most of these records of individual financial activity come with a PDF these days. It wasn’t that long ago that applying for a loan meant scanning in papers for your lender to review.

Computers are smarter now. Not only can they read documents (or at least match the shapes against shapes they’ve been told are real) but they can also understand the contents too (or at least match the words against ideas they’ve been told are real.)

There may well yet be a future Data Valhalla where individuals hold their life.zip themselves, and upload whatever bits of it are needed to get that Nordstrom store card / car financing / cheeseburger loan without having an intermediate credit agency.

*I feel there’s a kernel of a joke there about a bank robber asking for a receipt with the loot in anticipation of declaring it on their tax return.

For me, modeling is just as much about figuring out the shape and features of an object as it is producing a STEP. I would love to model an object in a GUI then re-edit the file with code and re-render with a library, not the least reason being that GUI tools render multiple orders of magnitude faster.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aWnFWclW0Qs

As long as the signal is built, like any good interrupt code, to only do message passing instead of blocking work then there won’t be any performance issues. We’re polling between a handful of local processes that are in the order of human-computer interaction, not polling remotely in a large scale way.

Do you take your hot air balloon up and trust where the wind takes you?

Do you sail across, into, and down the wind, using its power but still choosing where you go?

Do you cycle under your own power, lifting your saddle, tucking your head down, and trying to avoid the wind’s effects as much as possible?

All three are valid! Most people can’t sail or produce 400W with their legs, but most people can operate a hot air balloon burner. The capital expenditure part of this analogy might work as well:

the balloonists spends a reasonable amount of money to ride where the wind takes them;

the yacht crews spends fortunes to conquer the world as first-class wind masters;

the cyclists go it alone through sheer human strength and persistence, with a handful of them being astonishingly good at it.

(I cycle to work btw, albeit on a 50lb Pashley cruiser. Bike level autonomy at, erm, hot air balloon speed!)

Historically, of course, copy and paste on a Unix machine was a mouse thing and followed X11 conventions. You selected text with the left mouse button — automatically be saved to the primary clipboard just by virtue of being selected, no key press needed — and the middle mouse button pasted it at the location you clicked.

This is somewhat different to having the two part motion/action of select/control-C and click/control-V. It’s boiled down to just select and middle-click. Separately, you can often use shift-Insert to paste the primary buffer.

And if someone decides the codebase needs an abstraction over (and therefore specific functions to handle) Iterable[Walrus|None] then you check the weather and suggest they take a break and go for a stroll. (You check the weather to see if you should lend them your brolly.)

What am I missing?

Point 1: Eastern Mongolia, middle of nowhere. Check! gorgoiler proven correct!

Point 2: Sri Lanka. Some roads nearby. Ok. But still mostly natural landscape.

Then Sweden and Greece. Roads and towns all around. Peru, next to a road. The next two in Australia and Argentina came back fairly wild, albeit with large stripes of deforested land (power lines or fire breaks?).

But no, I was wrong and you are right. We’re everywhere.

Viewing: I have a message or messages stored on disk in files or mboxes or a maildir. How do I render them? Example use case is evidence in a law suit or, more likely, emails I’ve put in a shared drive to help me and my partner argue with our landlord. Yes, I could just have a Gmail folder for these but I don’t want to have one foot in a file-filesystem and one in a mail-filesystem. I want “lease_2024.pdf” and “20240401_deposit_confirmation_002.eml” to both be files. But then of course we have…

Filesystem interface: Emails have important attachments with MIME file names. Or perhaps a more keen observation is that some named files have emails as attachments! I’d like to symlink into a virtual FS that keys files off a UUID / Message-ID, and be able to mount that virtual FS from any mail store I have available (Gmail API, JMAP, IMAP, .tar archive, mbox, maildir, or .eml files.) Most conversations I have with people don’t involve files, and most files don’t involve conversations, but when they do I want them to feel natural and not some kind of special category of filey-messagey thing that doesn’t play well with plain files or, less commonly, plain messages.

Composition and sending: Creating a new message involves making a new file and then using that file to drive a sending API. I want to compose a beautiful email using a tool that is good at that job. Maybe I’m using vim to draft it in markdown with macros and tools to machine build certain complex parts? I also need some mime aware tooling — sometimes — to help prepare a bunch of attachments that may or may not have names related to their names on disk! I want all of this to be scriptable, on the occasions when it’s complex (30 part message for a client’s loan application!) and easy when it’s ad hoc (to: mom, see cat.jpg).

Search: email is notoriously the extension of and replacement for my long term memory. I have gathered message history from many sources and accounts over the years. I need to manage these into packed archives for the old ones, editable archives for the current ones, promote the former to the latter, and arrange new messages into the system. This feels like another separate tool.

I’m sure there are other potential tools lurking here as well. Separate rendering, composition, sending, receiving, searching, and archiving, feels like the goal. Most new email apps I see try to implement all of the above in one new package when, really, it would be great to see innovation on each branch of email as separate tools.

My PDF viewer doesn’t need to innovate on file browsing! My SVG drawing tool doesn’t need to innovate on mounting remote filesystems via SSH!

False. A partial ordering doesn’t guarantee a maximum element!

The git transition document talks about keeping a bidirectional mapping between old and new hashes, and converting between the two when pushing to legacy repos:

https://git-scm.com/docs/hash-function-transition/2.55.0

I suspect that’s what gitbutler.com means when they say that, although broken today, everything “will almost certainly be fixed” when git 3.0 ships.

While I’m sure they make a good argument in the hash theory section, I’m less inclined to believe the “train wreck” part of their post.

If you upgrade your house and leave the roof off then yes, it will be a “costly mistake” the next time it rains, but if your plans say you intend to put the roof back on then I’m not sure how I am supposed to interpret a blog post warning of the perils of a roofless house.

This is undoubtedly very clever writing — perhaps I’m missing an ironic in-joke, even? — but the intractable density of syllables renders its empirical tractability incalculable.

It’s a shame. It would be cool to get the simplified version. There’s something interesting here for sure, nestling under the pile of words.

I would take a punt at filing a complaint about that. Threatening someone with selective enforcement must fall short of professional standards at CBP, as stated on their .gov page:

https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/exhibit_08_-...

”Tin with trace levels of indium, particular to the Cornish deposits, has been found in shipwrecks near Israel and southern France”

Thanks for the direct link though. It’s very interesting.

Solid lime green: Wimbledon!

Hard brick red: Roland Garros!

Deep blue: the hard court ones!

Here’s an example of the, at the time in the mid 1980s, some pretty innovative 3D wire rendering in the game: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h1JorNBSs4Q

Done: QED, Richard Feynman. Lectures on explaining quantum electrodynamics but with no more math than geometry.

Currently: One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw, Witold Rybczynski. The discourse goes into his references in depth. It has yielded an excellent list of museums to visit.

On deck: Impossibility: The limits science and the science of limits, John Barrow. A re-read for me. Barrow discusses what we can never know in a way that’s like P vs NP but for the physical world.*

While stock markets provide useful liquidity for investors entering and exiting positions, they are also rampant with finbro kids doing nothing more than jumped-up gambling. We don’t know which market trades fall into the serious wheels-of-capitalism bucket, and which are gambling, because we don’t have to know. The real world works in dollars so, to date, the state taxes people on the realized capital gain in dollars.

If a bunch of kids are selling handfuls of leaves to each other for a nickel each is the state now valuing my unkempt forest at $99bn? The state is welcome to pull up a chair and watch me try to sell 5 kilotons of leaves to every kindergarten playground in the country. If I succeed then it will take its cut of the capital gain. If I fail, it will not.

When the state starts looking inside the market black box and guesses, based on little Johnny and Becky’s recent playground trades, that I might be able to get at least $300 a tonne for my damp, rotting leaves, then the state is doing something at best weird and at worst unfair, and states doing unfair things is really bad.

Fix the system properly: when you inherit stock, you inherit the cost basis as well. Rinsing off capital gains liabilities through “buy/borrow/die” is the real villain here.

If they were true patriots they would respect the restrictions of the congressional FLOUR Act 2028 and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.

So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?

Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?

Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians.

Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?

You can’t definitively prove the absence of a watermark. You can only prove the watermark is there. Once you do prove it’s there, the thing that carries the watermark changes in some way — it is “burned” or tainted?

There must be value in having a visible vs an invisible watermark, or in declaring that a work is watermarked without revealing the hidden mark, or having two marks — one that is publicly verifiable and another that is hidden?

If the process itself can be defeated through adding entropy (or more generally by revealing the watermark algorithm) then is that not security through obscurity, which is to say it is a one-shot rather than a general system that is doomed to become obsolete over time?

Something feels off about a technology based on being hidden but whose only value is in being revealed but I feel dumb for not being able to be more specific about what feels wrong! It could simply be that anyone who can verify the presence of the watermark also now has a tool to tell them when they’ve successfully scrubbed the watermark off the work, so the verify tool has to be kept secret which in turn limits its usefulness.

The sulfur content also affects the onion quality and price: “sweet” onion has low sulfur content, “sour” onion has high. Sweet onion can be used much more easily than sour onion, which requires more culinary processing to extract the sulfur compounds that make you smelly and your eyes water.

Onion has been shown to have a negative impact on climate, especially on air quality with people in confined spaces after lunch, but despite this it continues to be a valuable resource that is processed into many everyday foodstuffs: white, yellow, red, salad, and for specialist applications the highly refined shallot and pearl compounds as well.

Alas it seems likely that geopolitical upheaval will mean onion trading at ever higher prices. Brest Roscoff Intermediate (light, sweet onion) is trading over $8 a bunch (yes, crude onion is traded in weird units!) since the war began.

There’s also a bright future for synthetic. environmentally friendlier onion! Hydroponically grown scallions — so called “green” onion — have some interesting applications in the aerospace industry e.g. in-flight sandwiches and salads.

They don’t go outside (they can’t really, it’s too busy by the road here and they’d decimate the wildlife, but I live with it because ultimately we’re doing them a huge favor by giving them a home, post-rescue) so I am sure that has something to do with it. Perhaps infantilism is keeping them in this pack headspace? But even then my mother’s cat — rural, murderous, tough tabby tom — treats her like a god and the rest of us as an annoyance.

Thus moved solar-thruster

Good old traffic lights have a much better feature of being able to control traffic to allow for pedestrians, give cyclists a head start, give smaller side roads a look in at busy junctions, and giving a platform for traffic monitoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield

Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated.

My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.