mhalle

Looks interesting, thanks for writing and posting.

I would suggest you go further and package all the branch related operations as subcommands of "gut branch". For instance, "gut branch ls" is more transparent and explicit than just "gut branch".

Also move the "switch" commands to "branch". Force branch creation to be explicit ("gut branch new") that does not change the current branch. That will prevent typos or memory lapses from leading to errant new branches. Then provide "gut branch switch branchname" that will only switch to an existing branch. You can include a "-f" flag to explicitly force branch creation, allowing a single command "create and switch" operation. You have in general avoided flags, but "-f" is extremely common and widely understood in the unix world.

Small changes like these can make significant improvements in the ergonomics of an interface that is already better than git's.

"Stupid rules" for one person are what enable another person to live an independent life. The Americans with Disabilities (ADA) act has been law since 1990 and codifies mobility and access as civil rights in the US.

ADA does add to the costs of projects, but so does, say, safety code compliance. It's the law, and it exists for a good reason.

As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.

The Reagan administration, I believe, imposed the unfunded mandate on emergency rooms to treat patients using EMTALA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...

This mandate makes sense from a moral point of view, especially for true emergency situations. However, the act didn't take care of the cost of care, which was placed on hospitals and ultimately passed on to other patients and the government. Obamacare attempted to address this issue.

EMTALA also distorted US healthcare be redirecting poorer people to expensive emergency care rather than preventive or primary care, which might well serve many of their needs better. That's also something that Obamacare was designed to fix.

I understand that this comment comes from personal experience, and I appreciate the value of that viewpoint and experience. As a liver transplant recipient and a liver disease researcher, I have to add that the severe disease that puts people on the edge of transplant (or life altering implant, in this case) is not easily generalizable.

There was no saving my liver, which failed because of Hepatitis C due to tainted blood product. I lived day to day before transplant worried that I might bleed out, one of the horrible ways liver disease can kill you or knock you down. At the same time, I read liver support groups where people discussed many different "liver health" techniques, some sensible and some not. Some gave benefit to the sick, some gave hope to the hopeless, and some provided dangerous diversions to people whose only real hope was to get evaluated for transplant and accepted on a waiting list.

After dealing with the trauma of severe disease and the sick life-and-death game of organ allocation, one of the hardest mental changes I had to make post-transplant was realizing that those days were done. I might face other health challenges, but they would be different ones. The story here is different: people being plunged back into darkness not because their devices failed, but because of tech startup level problems. It's pretty cruel, almost dystopic.

On a related topic, I find programming or typing while wearing a watch leads relatively quickly to wrist pain due to the pressure constraints it puts on the muscles and tendons.

I have tried several different watches and experienced this problem. I know many tech industry people wear watches while they work, but I have never heard a discussion of this condition. I wonder if I am somehow unusual in this situation. I am otherwise not especially prone to repetitive stress injuries.

It has been bad enough I have thought of converting a wristwatch into a modern pocket watch, though I would lose any feature that depended on skin proximity.

As a person who has spent plenty of time in ICUs or other hospital floors in my life as a patient, I can add some more background to the mental health / delirium aspect. First, it definitely isn't just ICUs, just most common there. High stress environment, powerful medicines, poor sleep, and just sickness. Next, a fair number of patients in hospitals may already be predisposed to psychiatric conditions, or at least be mentally fragile. Some abuse substances. That adds to the whole environment, and hardens staff. I experienced hepatic encephalopathy because of liver failure, which really impacted my mental state, and at least some of the staff bundled me in with the crazies. Empathy would have gone a long way to reduce the stress for me. On the other hand, I am empathetic to them. The job is tough.

But most importantly though, given these mental stresses and challenges for vulnerable people, there is almost no psychiatric support for patients, staff, or families. That's shocking to me considering how many people experience "ICU delirium". There is almost no backup for staff to help with otherwise normal patients who, say, might think you are a monster trying to kill them.

If there was one thing I would fix, that's it. Psychiatric support on floors, helping staff ease the mental challenges of extremely vulnerable patients.

One interesting thing about the XView toolkit: it built the entire UI out of fonts (bitmap fonts at the time). It supposedly allowed faster rendering because the fonts were loaded and were server side.

I actually used the low layer display layer under XView for some UI projects. Worked great!

While I'm here, the other nice thing about programming in SunView (and later XView) was the use of varargs call patterns to build UI elements. Early X development, as I recall, was significantly more verbose than the Sun equivalent, though probably more type safe. The *View APIs felt a little more like today's high level languages.

A couple of historical points I seem to remember. There were X10 versions running on SunOS (3.5?), Though I don't know if it was officially supported. X11 early releases were significantly slower than X10 on Sun hardware.

SunView was originally Suntools. The change to SunView brought some improvements in the UI, but mostly in the API.

I can still remember the days of the Sun 1 with the VT100-like keyboard. To a freshman at MIT who had only seen a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer and an Apple II, it was almost undescribable. It was the days of 1MB of RAM on a "personal" machine and a lab-wide pair of 500MB Seagate Eagle hard drives being all you could possibly need.

Crosstalk between luminance and chrominance signals are called dot crawl (chominance signal interfering with the luminance signal causing spatial artifacts) and chroma crawl (luminance signal stepping on the chrominance signal causing color artifacts).

I believe chroma crawl was generally more of an issue with NTSC, if the luminance signal wasn't sufficiently band limited.

DICOM is a standard for medical imaging, and the patient data related to it, supported by every medical imaging device manufacturer.

JSON is a data format, it isn't in itself a standard for any content in particular, particularly medical imaging content. Think schema, not encoding (and in fact there is a JSON encoding for DICOM).

Thanks for offering this service!

You explain your API offers historic data using the "past_days" parameter. Could you also offer a "date" parameter for a given day, or are you only keeping a rolling window of data?

She explains that she wants clicks so that the video rises to the top of the fractal woodburning search results.

She also probably wants this new video to get attention because she's risking reposting banned content.

> you can rename the target directory before and after the rsync.

The problem is that the ergonomics of renaming a directory on a remote machine is vastly inferior to doing so on a local machine. Locally, you can use mv. There is no "rmv".

Even worse, rsync is from a different generation of unix utilities than cp/mv or rcp/rsh or scp/ssh. It is more "Swiss army knife" style, able to stand on its own. It shouldn't need to depend on a mythical rmv command.

Finally, I very frequently use the "copy a directory to a new name" feature, both locally and remotely. Locally, I use it to make a quick backup of a directory for emergency recovery. Remotely, syncing a local log directory to a remote "log.machine-name" is pretty common I think. Without renaming, you would do "log -> remote:machine-name", but machine-name would have to exist on the remote machine, necessitating a separate "rmkdir" command.

I didn't know about this meta-syntax, thanks - it looks very useful.

I would have to think about how it fits in with the philosophy of the trailing slash sometime, but I don't want to hurt my head right now.

I get what you are saying: cp/scp should have consistent behavior when the second arg is a directory. The "problem" operation you describe is analogous to copying plain files, though (copying contents to a new name).

I don't think having to create a target directory first is obvious, although neither is the fact that bare "cp" doesn't copy directories.

Finally, for remote copying it would be a nightmare for scp to require the destination directory to exist. To copy a directory tree to a remote server with a new name you'd need to either ssh a remote mkdir command, or add a flag to scp to specify the new name.

I end up reposting this comment whenever rsync's slash treatment gets mentioned.

rsync has "weird" syntax for a reason. Unlike other unix-like commands, it treats trailing slashes as significant AND consistently. If a directory has a trailing slash, it means "contents" of the directory". No slash means "the directory itself". These are two different concepts, and a program that copies directories should take the difference into account. scp (and cp, for that matter) don't take this difference into account. That leads to gotchas with recursive (-r) copying. Most importantly, scp isn't idemopotent:

scp -r fromdir todir

If todir doesn't exist, scp will copy the contents of directory fromdir to a new directory named todir.

Execute the same command again (now that todir exists), and scp will copy fromdir to todir/fromdir .

On the other hand:

rsync -a fromdir/ todir

will always copy the contents of fromdir into a directory named todir (effectively, a directory rename operation), whether todir exists or not.

rsync -a fromdir todir

will always copy the directory fromdir into the directory todir, whether todir exists or not.

These rsync operations are idempotent, which it important because rsync is designed to incrementally re-sync directories. It is expected that it will commonly be run more than once, which is why it needed to address this IMHO fundamental bug/limitation in cp and scp.

Here's an interview with Don Hopkins, the point person for the Carter Center's Guinea worm eradication efforts (the job he took up after helping lead worldwide smallpox eradication):

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/multimedia-article/were-be...

Probably not. "Steal the shirt off someone's back" means to take everything from a person, even the most basic and least significant item of clothing that they are wearing, and leave them with nothing.

I think the ubiquity of clocks in western societies points to the fact that time cannot be directly perceived. Our perceptions of time are both individual and circumstantial. For instance, time dilation slows the apparent passage of time during sudden trauma like a car crash.

Even in computation, where time is ideally measured very precisely, event based applications are extremely common, far more so than absolute or even exact relative time applications.

Time is computationally and culturally important because of the need to synchronize. But cross cultural synchronization of meetings is hard even at the basic level because prevailing attitudes of “On time” are different in, say, Germany, Spain, and China.

Richard Lewis has written about these cultural differences of time. Here’s a sample of some of his observations. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-under...

Plenty of transplant recipients from deceased or living human donors are on permanent immunosuppression. Depending on the organ and the person, day-to-day life can be almost completely normal. Source: I am a liver transplant recipient.

A family of 5 making $50k per year is one lost job away from poverty in much of the US, which was much more likely during the pandemic without assistance. They remain economically vulnerable, probably chronically. A family of the same side making $200k per year is not on the border of poverty anywhere in the US.

Meanwhile, the public facilities used by both families such as parks were underfunded with the loss of tax revenue during the pandemic (and often before). Charitable giving is an opportunity to improve them without raising taxes. Without those inclusive civic institutions, those with means can go to private or for profit recreation and cultural options. Those who don't have nothing.

It is disheartening to hear that emergency public assistance would be used as a rationale to "obviate the need charitable contributions".

It would be great if we could somehow turn the growth in discretionary income made possible by these economic policies into greater giving to public serving institutions (libraries, parks, etc) and other charitable contributions.

COVID's impacts have not been proportional across the socio-economic spectrum, nor has the benefit of the economic stimulus.

As a liver transplant recipient (7.5 years out), I find how transplant patients are stereotyped in this somewhat informal article a bit misleading.

First, transplants are about as close to a life-changing miracle as you can imagine. By which I mean night and day change for a reasonable subset of patients. The fact that we now have anything like access to interchangeable parts that can let people live extremely normal lives is absolutely remarkable. Before transplant there were times when I was too weak to walk. One month after transplant I could walk a mile, three months after five miles.

There is zero question I'd be dead by now without my transplant. I might have lived a year or so more with my old one, but it would have been an unpredictable high-wire act between GI bleeds, encephalopathy, coma, and fear that any simple action might trigger an emergency trip to the emergency room. Internal bleeding and encephalopathy put my in a coma for three days and, when I came out, this PhD computer scientist couldn't remember my own kids' names. Now I'm writing this. I am simply so fortunate to be able to have this second chance in life.

As for the misleading parts, "Organ transplant patients are, by their nature, sick patients." Yes, but that's why they get transplants. Many get better. Look at livers. Viral hepatitis (in my case, Hep C) is one of the most common reasons for liver transplant. But we can cure Hep C. I was one of the first people cured before transplant with Gilead's Hep C antivirals. The new liver fixed my cirrhosis. Now I get sick less often than my kids, and my life is extremely normal except for a couple pills a day (tacrolimus) and lab tests every three months. I was a mild hemophiliac, and that was cured by the new liver as well.

If you looked at my lab tests, besides a low platelet count, I would look perfectly normal. And especially for livers, which deal with processing a lot of foreign substances in the body, so it probably more tolerant than other organs, the lifespan on them may be quite long. Older liver transplant patients can sometimes even drop their immunosuppressants completely.

So, for people who have curable diseases, the health of a transplant patient can be quite good, potentially better than their peers. There's no specific reason they as a single less healthy class (as opposed to a set of classes, which also includes people who abuse alcohol or have diseases we can't cure).

To answer some other questions in the discussion, the transplant process tries hard to keep someone from being able to literally buy their way onto the transplant list. For livers, priority of transplant goes by a lab test called MELD which estimates 90 day mortality. You have to be sicker than other people but healthy enough not to waste an organ. It's a fairly macabre competition.

There are, however, advantages to those with means. In the US, organ transplant is administered nationally but organs are still basically allocated regionally. If you can travel to another region in the country with a surplus of organs, you can get a transplant sooner. I did it. It saved my life.

You also need to go through a battery of tests to make sure you are, basically, a good host for the rare organ. In general you have to stop substance abuse. You need to lose weight. You need to take a physical which can disqualify you. You need to have a social support mechanism to help take care of you after surgery (in the hospital, after discharge, and long term).

Finally, you need to have insurance that will cover the potentially million dollar surgery and and complications that might follow. And that means there's another hidden process that happens in the insurance company to assess whether you're a good risk or not.

Most of those conditions strictly require wealth. All of them benefit from it, especially access to health care. On the other hand, it isn't clear that access to health care is strongly correlated with an absence of dementia, is it?

Be aware that following this link to a nice electronic timer may change your global Amazon language preference to Spanish.

I would suspect that the stress of kids risking their family's income is not conducive to better learning or social outcomes, especially for kids with learning challenges or non-traditional strengths (said as a B-C level elementary school student now PhD).

Teachers, parents, or caseworkers don't need that stress either.

Well know species, such as the Monarch butterfly, are candidates for extinction, but don't make it to the list because other species are "higher priority":

https://www.fws.gov/savethemonarch/ssa.html

A forecast driven watering algorithm can look for rain in the immediate future, rather than the current state of the ground. It can also change the duration of watering based on temperature and relative humidity. RainMachine does that while only consuming weather data. You also have the option of turning that off and just using wireless control of the sprinklers, which as the GP says is extremely handy.

I think this is an interesting idea, but I don't know how well it scales.i think it is a high bar for individuals to explicitly manage every single donation of personal data.

What I have thought might work is that individuals could donate their data to a non-profit entity that would have a legal responsibility to protect contributors' data. The non-profit would act as a data broker for researchers. It could sell aggregate data, but the sales would go to charitable causes. Contributors could opt out of specific research or specify specific charities.

The result is a little like a non-profit data brokerage. It would put experts in charge of data protection and confidentiality, and it explicitly acknowledges that data has value. The broker would have legal recourse and financial means to track down data abuse.

The term light field display includes lenticulars and parallax barrier displays (and holograms and volumetric displays). They are all different ways of carving up, sweeping out, or multiplexing a light field.