Viewing profile — Smudge

only once pushed or merged to a shared branch.

I'm no fan of the system we have, and I agree that it's dysfunctional at best, but my view is that the only thing worse than a two-party system is a single-party system. All of the…

The ever-widening political divide, which I have observed both in the abstract and in family/friend relationships, is something that I could easily see spelling the end of US democ…

You missed the part about regulating. The point isn't to create a drug free-for-all, it's to reduce the economic incentives that lead to drug cartels.

I made a CLI for controlling macOS's "Night Shift" feature programmatically. It also doubles as a Rust library. https://github.com/smudge/nightlight Now I'm working on cross-system…

Having a "brutalist" aesthetic is called out in its README as part of the design philosophy. Brutalist is a bit of an acquired taste. There are at least a couple different schools …

Well said, and I'm sorry you had to deal with such a heartless reply.

Doesn't really answer your questions, but I'd point out that it's possible that we only hear about these suicides precisely _because_ they are from professions that tend to produce…

When modeling was done for the Kuwait oil fires, there were two opposing expectations. One was that the fires would cause a kind of "year without a summer" similar to the Tambora e…

Worth noting that Teller was one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove.

Most forest fires don't create strong enough firestorms (if they do at all) to funnel material high enough to have an effect -- most of the ash falls back down in a matter of weeks…

Most tests have been performed underground. And for an above-ground test to cause anything close to a nuclear winter, you need a lot more material than the bomb itself and the soil…

Email is just one example, but maybe a better example is talking to an API that supports some form of idempotency. You don't want to talk to the API during a transaction that invol…

Nice -- pg-amqp-bridge seems like a clever solution for coordinating the two. It still puts some amount of the queuing load on the DB, but I'd be comfortable with that trade-off if…

Very common in the web context -- you perform some form of relational persistence while also inserting a job to schedule background work (like sending an email). Having those both …

Firstly, time spent learning is not time wasted! Secondly, the best way to avoid making painful design decisions is... to make them enough times that you instinctively remember the…

There is a much bigger barrier to entry when it comes to monetizing via product placement and sponsorships. For smaller entities, developing dedicated advertising partnerships is j…

The book How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking [1] by Jordan Ellenberg has a segment on this with similar examples (minus the programming bits), tying it in to hu…

Hospital-acquired infections have become incredibly common. My grandmother caught a C diff infection after what had already been a very arduous treatment and recovery, and she rece…

Curious about the first one -- was there some kind of conflict of interest? As far as I can tell all you were doing was taking public information already available on the page and …

Immutable data is very easily shared.

Intuitively the solution kind of makes sense. M must always be the highest point within the range. A and Z are at the same height and are the lowest point within the range. Imagine…

I think the operating word is "some," not all. We know that UBI will sometimes be misspent. Most if not all aid programs have this problem. That doesn't mean it isn't worth it for …

Basic income doesn't always solve this for someone who is already homeless, but it might still act as a preventative measure, giving someone enough of a financial buffer to avoid h…