Transcript of a discussion on a friend's wall on the merits of responding "guillotines" to union text-bankers when asked what the country needs more of:

Me: When you respond "guillotines" what do you expect the campaign volunteer reading the response to think you're advocating for?

Them: Murder.

Me: Whose murder do you expect them to think you are advocating for?

Them: The richest people in the US.

Me: 0.1%, 1%, 5%?

Them: I think billionaires is a good cutoff. There are 540 in the US. So, the richest 0.000164%.

Me: Is executing them your first choice? Or would you prefer to see non-violent redistribution?

Is your objection that having this much money is immoral when others need it so much more, that you can't be this rich without having committed serious crimes, or something else?

Them: I'd certainly prefer a non-violent solution. Redistribution sounds lovely.

My objection is that we do not have anything remotely resembling a democracy. And I think that having that much money is actually immoral, while 21% of the children in the US are below the poverty line. Putting them together, I think it's a fine solution to kill them off until they can figure out how to release their chokehold on our government.

And it seems to me, solutions within the system have been adequately tried.

Last week I wrote about estimating whether insulation was worth it for our shed if we're going to use it as a home office. While I'm waiting for the carpenter to put a new roof on it, I'm thinking through what finishing the walls would look like.

The Facebook side of the discussion on the insulation post was very helpful, and got me thinking about putting closed cell foam panels directly against the concrete walls. Because it's both a vapor barrier and efficient insulation it reduces the risk of condensation happening between the concrete and the insulation.

I'm less sure about what comes next. Whatever I'm doing is not structural, and there are a lot of trade-offs. All of the options involve the layer of closed-cell foam directly against the concrete, but then they vary on how they're finished. Standard options:

A few months ago I wrote about trying to decide what to do with our shed. It turns out that not only is our property too small for a tiny house ("backyard cottage"), the only reason we're able to have the shed where it is it's because it is grandfathered in. The shed turned out to have solid footings, so we decided to have it repaired.

I hired a mason to redo the cinderblock and a carpenter to replace the roof. The mason has finished, and I'm waiting for the carpenter to start:

Disclosure: I work on ads at Google; this is a personal post.

Peter Snyder of Brave recently wrote a post on the proposed WebBundle specification arguing that it makes URL randomization easier and so is harmful to content blocking. The core of the post is incorrect, however, and based on a misunderstanding of what can be done today and what WebBundles make easier. Snyder and I discussed this some on HN and I wanted to take a step back and try to write up the issues more clearly.

A WebBundle (see explainer) allows you to serve a single file that the browser can treat as multiple files. This solves many long-standing problems, some of which I've been working around for a long time. A classic one is that many sites will have a large number of small files. Everyone who visits the site will need essentially all of these files, and you lose a lot of performance in individually requesting each one. When I worked on open source web page optimization software (mod_pagespeed) it could combine CSS, JS, and images so the browser could request a single 'bundle' for each, but it was not ideal:

One of the playgrounds near our house has an angled ring shaped merry-go-round:

There are lots of different toys at the park, but this one is different. It has depth.

Let's say you would like to control your computer partly with your feet: how do you go about it? This wasn't something that I was especially interested in before my wrists started hurting, but now I have it set up I like it a lot and I would definitely keep it even if my wrists were completely better. I have three pedals, set for scroll down, scroll up, and "archive this email message and take me to the next unread message." You could possibly use foot controls for different things in different programs, but I haven't gotten into that.

I got a cheap no-name three pedal foot switch for $35 shipped. I suspect it's not the most durable option, but it's cheap enough that if it breaks I can easily replace it. It comes with (useless-to-me) Windows-only software to program it, but out of the box the three foot switches send a, b, and c. I installed the open source tool Karabiner-Elements to remap them. First I needed to tell Karabiner to only affect the foot pedals: