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?

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.

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.

> 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