How to tie ourselves to the mast: The Persistent Charter

Here I propose a new type of US Federal enactment: The Persistent Charter.

It lives above statues and below constitutional amendments in both the superiority of force and how long it takes to enact/repeal. It would give the federal government a new way to tie itself to the mast, reducing uncertainty and smoothing out bumps in the positive law landscape.

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A utility to create a static HTML website from your Twitter posts

tldr; download your data archive file from x.com and then use this webpage to convert it to a static HTML website that you can host anywhere. Make sure you also move or copy the data/tweets_media folder from the archive to the same folder your you save new tweets.html file.

Check out my exported tweets page here to see what it looks like.

If you are not sure how or why you would do this…

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A pill that makes you sad and happy

Imagine a drug that makes you horribly nauseous and miserable for the first 59 minutes after you take it, but then makes you feel hedonistic bliss for a final 1 minute. The other effect of this drug is that during the those first 59 minutes, it blocks the transcription of long-term memories so that by the next day you only remember the final 1 minute.

  1. Assuming you did not know the full effect profile of this drug until after taking it the first time, would you expect yourself to take it a second time?
  2. Assuming you would decide not to take it a second time during the 12 hours while you still remember how horrible the first 59 minutes were, how would you prevent your future self who only remembers the bliss phase from taking the drug again?
  3. If you were King in the world where this drug existed, what policy measures (if any) would you enact to improve the welfare of your subjects’ interactions with this drug?
  4. If you were trapped on a deserted island with an inexhaustible supply of the drug and no way to prevent your future self from taking it each new day, would your subjective life be one of ecstasy or misery?

A new version of `devmem2` with kernel super-powers

Have you ever been sitting at your Linux shell prompt and just wanted to store a simple value at a simple address, but every force in the universe was lined up to prevent you from doing so?

I present devememkm, a tiny Loadable Kernel Module that will let you poke any value into any address you want instantly, reliability, and without ceremony.

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