kemitchell

I really enjoyed learning electronics through tube amps. But gee howdy are we better off not having big filter caps and badly grounded All American Fives around.

The guitar guys are A/B testing their way toward modeling. I guess that leaves the Hi Fi guys. Nothing against fetishism or historical reenactment, but I'm not sure that's leaving much.

The "barefoot" phenom is a current fashion. And a recurring one. Most of their marketing points---down to radiographs of feet crammed in shoes---go at least as far back as Munson's book on military footwear.

Fashionable shoes have more pointed toe boxes, but a well fitted Oxford doesn't smash the toes into its point. The toes lie naturally, with empty space ahead. The last designers literally build up the toeboxes.

Stand with your feet flat on the floor, barefoot, then lift one one heel as far as you can while pressing the ball into the floor. How much wider do your toes splay, at their maximum?

I'm all for people using tools to try toe running. Rucking, too. I wouldn't toe run in combat boots, and I wouldn't ruck in "zero-drop shoes". I wouldn't do either in a size too small.

The other comment recommending a doctor query is right. If it's affecting daily life, best to check it.

That said, feet do tend to swell as days go on, especially active days. That's why nearly every guide to sizing recommends measuring late in the day.

I have never worn a dress, but I've learned that dress sizes are worse than feeble guidance. They have become, for certain brands and items, a sales lever. And a subtly cruel one one at that.

Menswear brands creep ever closer to parity. Measure waist and leg on a pair of new Levi's sometime!

I like European shoe sizing for putting everyone on scale: men, women, adults, children, everyone. But I understand those sizes refer to last length, rather than foot length.

The higher numbers lend a sense of precision, but the limiting factor is what shoe lasts the manufacture uses, not how they number them. Europeans measure in Paris points, or 2/3 of a centimeter. The US and UK measure in barleycorns, or 1/3 of an inch. 1/3 * 1 in * 2.54 cm per in = 0.847 cm, which is very close. And there are often half sizes.

There is a pretty, clean, uniform system, Mondopoint, which makes a lot more sense. Basically nobody uses it. Ski boots, I'm told.

The wiser online sellers publish fit tables based on heel-toe length, Imperial and metric. When they offer different widths, they publish tables with ball circumferences. Not linear widths, like Brannocks measure.

My local Red Wing store had a gadget that mapped my feet in 3D. I've since seen links the company gave other people to profile pages showing their results.

While the machine was doing its beepy-flashy dance, I told the sales guy I bet he could beat it. He did. The machine recommended a width they had in stock. Sales guy himself told me to order in a different one.

There are old patents for electro-mechanical devices. The dream goes back a long time.

Meanwhile, even bespoke makers in London do test fittings. They'll often start with mock pairs made of scrap leather, then investigate the fit destructively. It isn't just how the feet are shaped and how they move, but how the shoe will move with them, how the shoe materials will form over the last, how the shoe materials will stretch and sag over time, how the design of the shoe itself will affect the biomechanics. It's an incredible trade.

> Message signatures are signatures of stringified JSON. Given that JSON is not particularly well defined to guarantee representation stability are implementation differences handled?

Systems I've seen (and written) that do this use deterministic serialization algorithms that sort keys and do other things standard, general-purpose implementations don't. The implementations in core libraries, browsers, and the like tend to be faster, but the payloads being signed in the apps usually aren't that large.

Judges aren't binary computers. They're people. It's people all the way down.

On the other hand, there's no halting problem. Get on the docket, get a result. Even if the result is "No standing. Go away."

Sans-serif type for printed documents?

> and it extends through all of life, not just magic

A form of entertainment, playing with deception. Deception's expected in the act, but not, perhaps, in other parts of life. I hope you share a strong ethics.

My kind play with words. I wish we shared a stronger ethics.

Whether you're using the right start point and picking the right optional pieces are definitely important. But for most kinds of agreements I see and advise on, there's nothing lawyers know that nobody else could know. What you need doesn't have to come from a lawyer, though it often does.

Meanwhile, specifics of the deal and the broader context can also matter, sometime more than the abstractions legal forms tend to deal in. A lawyer may or may not notice those and reason through them.

Paving an AI path over ill-fitting or over-standardized legal terms isn't great for the industry. Neither is reinforcing lawyer monopoly over business knowledge.

I negotiate professionally. I'm still tempted into one or two books a year on the subject. But the only one I'm ever tempted to recommend is Jim Freund's Smart Negotiating. Very modest in its claims.

Negotiation is a lot like public speaking. The first, most important thing is getting past the idea that it's something you're supposed to be afraid of, actually doing a deal, and realizing you got away with it. Not "crushing" the other side. Not scoring a "win". Just working through the process and ending up better off for it.

Once you're confident enough to practice, it probably won't be hard to find opporunities. Most other people still avoid it, after all. From there you can learn.

You'd have to pay little attention indeed to ascribe inerrant nobility to public office.

> Christopher Alexander

Now, see, for programmers of a certain age...

I bought the books, too. And no, I never finished reading them. So I am definitely in the club. ;-)

Reduced cavitation? Submarines?

Maybe old Netscape folks shouldn't feel so bad.

Microsoft even did it to the Soviet Union. And they got away with it that time! ;-P

Thank you for sharing this story!

This post sows the seeds of its own best counterargument: time is money and maintainer money means maintainer time.

There's no sharp either-or between just a hobby and full-time job. There are some inflection points, as where money becomes enough to take one fewer contract client, devote a day or afternoon per week, or leave a current full-time job. Overall, paying a maintainer who has to manage money enables them to spend more time. That addresses the fundamental unbalance between demand and capacity that risks burnout.

I think of burnout risk as having another key factor that isn't mentioned here: psychology. It isn't just demands versus wall-clock capacity. It's your perception of demands versus the focus you can bring in time allotted. Paying someone for their work is a very direct, accountable, and socially recognized way of confirming the value of their effort. Not feeling exploited changes how maintainers relate to bugs, patches, planning, and support.

Good argumentation from very faulty assumptions.

The Developer Certificate of Origin is not a contributor license agreement. (See https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/07/02/DCO-Not-CLA.) It has no part that clearly says the contributor grants a license for their contribution, or on what terms.

This is the main disadvantage of the DCO, especially in non-GPL projects. Not that it "encourages distributed ownership". A contributor license agreement doesn't change who owns any copyrights, either. That's a copyright assignment. FSF's copyright assignment paperwork isn't a contributor license agreement, either. Assignment != License.

License grants in CLAs are often in different, broader terms than open source licenses for several reasons. For one, many open source licenses are ancient, without clear and complete license grants by today's standards. Second, part of the point of a CLA in many cases is to enable project stewards to change or legally upgrade license terms in the future. CLAs give them all the rights we can think of to license on whatever terms, so they're not caught short.

There is no reason CLAs for a project can't be shared openly.

If temptation to abuse of power were inevitable, we would see a lot more individual contributors to open projects who retained ownership of their copyrights suing project users about meaningless license violations for monetary settlements.

Companies like Elastic have changed to new licenses for future development. None that I'm aware of has tried to change the license terms for previously released open work retroactively, and there are serious legal questions about whether this is even possible or practical. Bloggers and tweeters sow a lot of unfounded fear about "evil corporate relicensing" by using loose terms that can imply, for those ready to see it, that there are releases floating around out there with Apache 2.0 license notices that aren't actually Apache 2.0 licensed anymore. What actually changes is that ongoing development by those companies moves to new terms, and folks interested in continuing development under the old license terms either do or don't step up to "fork" from the last release under those terms.

I did https://commonform.github.io/.

I am a legal professional. Convos with colleagues have been all over the place.

Is sounds like you’re using for education without taking the deal they offer for education.

If the terms of that program aren’t workable, they can lose you. But freeloading is almost by definition precarious business.

Don't let lawyers confuse form and substance as cover.

It's perfectly possible to address more possibilities in simple language. The result might run longer, but it won't hurt to read.

Too many companies run on legal docs execs don't read. Too may lawyers write those docs to put readers off. If you want robust legal work for your company, maximize accountability for your legal advisers. All the usual tools.

It’s case by case. I have seen some accurate CEO comp headlines. Some publications certainly bat better than others.

As for Intel: $10m a year is still a lot of money.

I have also heard that targets are occasionally hit. ;-D

Really interesting.

I searched for this online, but couldn't find it. Might you have a link handy? Much appreciated!

I'd sure go for a standardized inline HTML tag that expands in UI like <details>. Semantics like a footnote, perhaps.

Author of post here. Much appreciate this comment.

My personal TL;DR is probably more like "blockchain, bleh". I think it's a dead end, for social ⋃ technical reasons. But I know and respect folks holding out hope and putting in time. I wouldn't pull the plug on them.

But the burden's still on them to meet and exceed extant standards. No public policy regressions tolerated. If you want deregulation, fine. Argue that across the board and compete.

Thanks for your note.

As fellow counsel, I'm sure you get why the post had to be general. I earnestly believe that none of the clients I had did anything I thought illegal when I represented them. But I can't ethically blog details of their compliance postures, or of their private negotiations. I can't name names, of clients or of counterparties.

I did not then and do not now perceive any great regulatory "vacuum" as concerns securities regulation. Having learned the 33 Act from law school and in practice, rather than Coin Center and blogs, I didn't see uncertainty demanding regulator clarification. I saw Coin Center and friends trying to manufacture a perception of such uncertainty. Even so, the SEC Report on Investigation on the DAO came right out and said "security", under both '33 and '34 acts, five years ago. And hammered the point that existing analysis fully applied.

But will "system data" use less than 4.5 gigs on my 6S?

I fell for this, years ago. It's worse in practice.

Common law and civil law legal systems are fundamentally different, and they differ meaningfully in how NDAs get written on them. I doubt a single set of terms could cover both kinds of jurisdictions without more or less sticking two NDAs together with an IF THEN ElSE between them.

I am just an American lawyer. Working with colleagues from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada on Waypoint and Guestbook, I was surprised how well one set of terms could serve clients under all those systems.