You don’t want people to starve. So you collect all the bread and parcel it out to everyone. If someone wants bread, they need to wait in the breadline. This may take a very long time that they’d rather spend doing something else, but they don’t have a choice – the breadline is the only […]

A thing I’ve noticed working on a large-ish project by myself: I end up spending a _lot_ of time working out minor issues – an assumption small enough I didn’t conceive of the possibility it was false, or a one-character typo, or a hunting down a particular piece of minutiae which is in no way […]

One of the biggest problems with bitcoin, and with cryptocurrencies more generally, is deflation and instability. Because there’s no central authority to mediate supply according to demand, the value of bitcoin fluctuates wildly. Are there any algorithmic, decentralized ways to correct for deflation – to basically create a trustworthy central bank in distributed, algorithmic form? […]

Oh zsh, why didn’t I turn to you sooner? bash, it’s over. Except for the few lines it’ll take me to switch to zsh whenever I get on a new system, we won’t be seeing each other anymore. zsh gives me things you just couldn’t, like oh-my-zsh and actually-functional vi key bindings and thousands of […]

Making ssl the-thing-that-does-website-encryption and the-thing-that-proves-legitimacy at the same time was a _mistake_. The end result is that it’s hard/impossible to securely serve a site without the additional overhead of verifying that you are not a scheming villain.