Viewing profile — davidp

The day-by-day dev log[0] is worth a read on its own. It's impressive what a single developer can do with the right determination and discipline. [0]: https://github.com/a327ex/SNK…

You're right that this is potentially anticompetitive, but “Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story. I've never heard libertarians say that. Rather,…

Superb video, and in the public domain. Thanks so much for the link!

I certainly hope we don't. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the press, including the freedom to make mistakes and even outright lie. There is no godlike authori…

Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platforms (Windows, Linux…

Nothing built on X does mixed DPI well, because X itself (in most configurations) treats multiple monitors as simple viewports onto a single screen. A single screen with multiple D…

It's an improvement over writing csv files to disk. This is not a high bar.

This is not intended to contradict your point, but the first video is an obvious marketing fluff piece almost certainly funded by the Chinese government (China Daily is not an inde…

They are hired by the agent You can and absolutely should hire one yourself. Additionally, if you have a buyer's agent, don't make the mistake of using theirs either -- the buyer's…

These struggles sound much harder than what I've had to deal with; please accept my sympathy. About the student debt: That's a lot of debt. I suspect you and many other millenials …

Agreed. An expat is someone "on assignment", who has and expects strong ties with their home country. People who fit this description tend to frequently seek help from their own co…

Agreed. Pre-Wayland, Linux/X typically needs to treat all your screens as viewports onto a single virtual screen, which of course has to have a single DPI. This is a more common us…

As simple as possible, but no simpler.

> We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. Plain text is easier to produce, lowering the friction for people to contribute, and i…

I like to trot out this old gem[1] when people wonder why there's so much hate for MySQL. Nontransactional DDL alone is sufficient to classify it as a toy DB for me. Yes, I've been…

You're mostly right, except that trees are now understood to not be a great way to sequester carbon: They eventually grow old and die, and the carbon in them is released as they ro…

> he was a cool guy and I don't think he'd enforce the clause The problem with that kind of trust is that sometimes the person who makes the decision isn't the cool guy. It can be …

That's the apparent paradox in the galaxy rotation curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve

I have a friend who is a linguistics professor at a major public university, and she has complained to me about some of the projects she's been involved with where her fellow resea…

This light bulb is exactly why many people prefer statically-typed programming languages, especially above a certain codebase size/complexity and team size. Make my tools do the gr…

With the GPL at least, its major clauses are aimed at restricting software from being incorporated into closed systems. I don't know if eliminating that control was what the GP had…

Copyright is the foundation of all FLOSS licenses, from GPL to MIT. You might know that already, but that's a sharp double-edged sword you're swinging.

Title II != net neutrality. Title II is a highly bureaucratic strong-oversight-in-all-things tool aimed at a completely different problem space, namely providing a legislative solu…

This is the problem that a lot of people have with the FCC regulatory approach, specifically abusing Article 2 of the 1996 communications act. Net neutrality is essential for the i…

I know this isn't a comforting thought, but: Missiles from the most likely source (North Korea) are not thought to have very good accuracy. They may be as likely to hit Kauai or th…