Gene_Parmesan

I'm a lawyer. I've explained this so many times it's starting to bore me, but I have to keep doing it.

Jury nullification has never existed as a right in any common law system. It is merely a descriptive term that lawyers use to describe a situation where a jury decides to ignore the law. Lawyers cannot instruct juries on its existence because, in the law, it doesn't exist. It only ever happens because juries cannot be punished for deciding contrary to what the law says; their right to their own reasoning is sacrosanct.

It describes a situation where the jury ignores the law, and lawyers can never instruct juries to ignore the law, in any circumstance. Lawyers can never say "I know the law says X but if you ignore that, we can't punish you hint hint."

It is a term that describes a crinkle in the law. It does not exist as a right, and juries are NOT entitled to do it, but at the same time, they cannot be punished for doing so.

People who whine about jury nullification are one step below 'sovereign citizen' types in terms of driving me nuts with their willful misunderstanding of the law.

I’m sure they won’t even talk to anyone not willing to pay $100k+ per year.

Wouldn't surprise me. We had a vendor whose product we had used at relatively reasonable rates for multiple years suddenly have a pricing model change. It would have seen our cost go from $10k/yr to $100k/yr. As a small nonprofit we tried to engage them in any sort of negotiation but the response was essentially a curt "too bad." Luckily a different vendor with a similar product was more than happy to take our $10k.

I found the early game changes incongruous with the core design of the mod as well. The mod is about logistical challenges - specifically where trips are high volume but high cost. I don't know why a mod about that in the context of space exploring needed an extended burner phase, for instance.

There's a lot of theorizing that early sapiens intentionally set fires to clear thick, impassable forests and kill game in the process. The cleared areas would make post-fire hunting easier as well.

I don't know if this is the same wave, but a few years ago they declassified footage from military planes actively tracking UFOs. In the wake of that there was a bit of a flurry of naval and air force personnel saying they've "seen things." The UFO community - of which I am not a part - seems to have been veritably foaming at the mouth ever since.

Personally I'm always more interested in the conspiracy behind the conspiracy. It is undeniably more likely that the Pentagon has, for some reason, started quietly pushing out things in this vein than it is that actual aliens are flying around. I'm very curious as to what their motivation might be.

There's a lot of evidence, for instance, that during the heyday of Area 51 they knew they had to get out in front of civilian sightings of odd aircraft, and that project bluebook was essentially them just cross referencing sightings with classified test flights. So I'm curious about what they might be trying to get ahead of here.

Having the same shallow conversations over and over with different individuals

I'm ADHD-neurodivergent so I get the point here, but think of this phenomenon as verbal handshaking. The point isn't the subject matter of the conversation, it's everything else about the exchange. You could almost get the same effect just from spouting word salad at each other, the content doesn't matter. It's how people feel out others whom they don't know very well, with a lot of observation gathering going on. There's a social dance you typically need to go through before someone else will feel comfortable engaging you on a more personal level.

I simultaneously agree with you (tor being another prime example of this -- they may not be able to see which tor sites you're visiting [unless they control the exit node] but they sure as hell can see you're using tor), and also think that at some level, the "what have YOU got to hide?" attitude is purposefully encouraged by the intelligence agencies as a way to slowly erode privacy expectations. "Good people don't need an expectation of privacy" is the start of a really dark path.

I think dev wages will stagnate across the board. I think the simple existence of the fear of being replaced by never-tiring, always-working AI will subconsciously prime devs to be willing to work for less. Devs have been in a market with a significant shortage of skilled labor; can we say that remains true after GPT hits the mainstream even more than it already has?

Especially when the system we're discussing is literally the most advanced AI model we're aware of.

Still not enough. Seriously. Once information is out there it cannot be clawed back, but legal agreements are easily broken.

I worked as a lawyer for six years; there are extremely strict ethical and legal restrictions around sharing privileged information.

Yes, this is exactly my issue. Libertarianism only lasts as long as it's not your $3bil at risk. Then it becomes "oh but the government can't let ME fail."

So isn't it on the programmer to ensure the safety checks are enabled if appropriate? I agree with the gist of your statement, I'm just not sure how this is the responsibility of the language itself. It ships with the option to build via a safe mode. I don't think it's a moral imperative of the language designer to ship without an unsafe mode. Even rust has unsafe blocks.

In most engineering professions, it's the engineer's responsibility to ensure appropriate levels of safety, not the CAD software used to build the blueprints. But every situation doesn't have the same level of safety required; backyard sheds don't have the same needs as skyscrapers.

I see an unfortunate number of people who seem to think that the only way to not get taken advantage of in life is to be cynical, and that living with empathy and joy is equivalent to allowing yourself to get walked over.

In my worldview/self-understanding, having solid boundaries is a core requirement of living joyfully. You have to love yourself in order to live joyfully, and having & enforcing clear boundaries is a requirement of loving yourself (where love is used as an active verb). Allowing someone else -- a company or a person -- to violate your boundaries is not compatible with actualized self love.

The main goal is peaceful contentment regardless of what the world does. Pursuing happiness as in euphoria is a fool's errand. Euphoric feelings are not something we can ever generate on demand. Instead, the goal is to control what you can, which is only ever your response to the world.

There's a sense in which this feels selfish -- which it is, but that's okay. I would say one thing companies certainly do is try to make people feel guilty for prioritizing their own mental health and wellness. Don't let them do that. Having boundaries at work is not something to be guilty about. For instance, I do not work more than 40 hours in a week without abnormal extenuating circumstances. I've made that extremely clear to management. I've certainly had a supervisor or two try to push the envelope, but I just make sure to not let the envelope get pushed. That doesn't mean I'm not living joyfully or with empathy. I can enforce my boundary without getting defensive, guilty, angry, or any other negative feeling. In fact, I've found that me pushing back goes much more smoothly when I do so calmly and without anger or defensiveness.

By the way, no one's saying this is easy. What happens when a family member dies suddenly? No one in existence can prevent themselves from having an uncontrolled negative emotional reaction to tragedy. That's okay. Perfection is not the goal, just continual improvement.

even more extreme

I'm a musician & amateur home producer, and this extreme approach of yours is exactly what I recommend to people (and what I do myself) to overcome the feeling of "I can't get started because what I start on sounds bad and I have an overwhelming fear of making something that sounds bad." Turning it on its head by purposefully trying to make the cliched, trite, and generally whack song I can, can be immensely freeing.

Failure as a VC-funded enterprise != failure of the underlying 'thing' as a concept. A programming language seems to be a weird fit for the VC model in the first place, no?

I'll be interested to see if these layoffs do eventually hit technical workers in non-big-tech sectors. Are these layoffs simply the chickens of large scale "blitzscaling" coming home to roost? Or are they a leading indicator of a wider trend?

I haven't seen any reduction in demand for devs in my region, but that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't coming.

If the primary reason for this is the emissions from increased energy requirements, then we can find ways to reduce this load by (as the article suggests) using renewable energy sources, which has the additional effect of reducing the load of all of our energy usage.

But plastic entering the environment is forever there. The very concept of single-use plastics is anathema to the environmental movement. I think any article that encourages their usage is suspect. For instance, this is exactly the sort of piece I could see being pushed by Keurig PR.

benefits could be lost if their convenience encourages two cups instead of one

Who is only drinking a single cup of coffee? When we stay at my parents' house, what would have been a single pot of coffee becomes six or more single use plastic cups going into the trash.

For me, it comes down to the fact that static typing completely eliminates large classes of bugs. It therefore dramatically lowers the testing load. The compile step essentially performs its own tests. Think about all the test cases I save myself from having to write...

Beyond that, it also forces me to think structurally from the start. But I tend to be working on rather complex applications, I almost certainly wouldn't use a static lang for data processing or similar tasks.

It feels a lot like the people who used to try to convince everyone functional programming was the only way to go and object-oriented programming was for dinosaurs.

What do you mean "used to"?? Haha

Guess we should shut down open source then.

Decent doesn't quite cover it for people unfamiliar with the size of the state. The island that this volcano is on is bigger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

IMO Rust is what you'd get if you took a functional lang designer and forced them at gunpoint to create a procedural systems lang. It's not functional, but you can tell it was largely inspired by ideas from the paradigm -- immutable by default, expression-centric to an extent, features like Option<T> and Result<T> available, etc.

It's certainly a language that encourages programming in a functional flavor, even if the lang itself isn't functional.

Same, except aged 28. I completely randomly happened to stumble upon a detailed description of inattentive ADHD, and had the thought, "Hmm, I wonder how doctors are able to differentiate between someone who has these symptoms and has ADHD, and someone like me who has these symptoms but doesn't have ADHD."

Then it hit me like a brick wall. Now I understand the phrase "it was like time stopped." Blinders came off and I felt like I re-evaluated every life experience I'd had in about 30 seconds. Two doctors appointments later I was hearing "Oh yes, you certainly have intense ADHD, the question is just how intense."

ADHD affects so many things as you mention. For me, getting treated has nearly entirely eliminated all forms of anxiety. For instance, I was a socially anxious mess in any sort of group setting; now I intentionally seek out conversations and enjoy telling stories. Some days I hardly recognize the old me. Strange feeling.

But yes, diagnosis + treatment highly recommended. Untreated ADHD increases your risk factors for so many things -- for instance, substance issues (NIH estimates fully 50% of people with substance issues have ADHD whether they know it or not).

Criminal sentences for first time offenders very rarely follow the sentencing guidelines, and in some ways you can consider them to be a starting point for negotiation. When I was a prosecutor, fully 90%+ of the ~750 cases I handled in the 18 months I was there were guilty pleas of some sort. Pleading a 2 year case down to probation was a daily occurrence. (Note that I worked at the state level, not federally.) The machine is lubricated for quick settlement.

Mandatory minimums are obviously a different story.

No, and this is a core misunderstanding of the profession.

The job of software engineers is to design and implement solutions to business problems with technology. The job of a software engineer is not merely "write code." Writing code will almost certainly be the smallest percentage of a skilled engineer's time. They need to be spending their time thinking and designing.

We're talking about solving extreme scaling problems at extreme scales here, not churning out crud apps at a local freelance studio.

Saying "we are materially changing the terms of your employment, you can accept them or quit" is constructive discharge.

Besides, unemployment is one thing that is usually very liberally decided in the employee's favor, given that you are effectively paying for it.

There's a The Smile song called "You'll Never Work in Television Again." Last week I said "play <name of song>" and Alexa responded that it could not find a playback method called "television." I tried to annunciate more clearly and it replied "OK, playing <song name> on repeat," because the song title ended with the word "again."

Nothing reminds you about the difficulty in cleanly parsing human language more than trying to work through a voice interface. I'm not sure what is missing precisely, but I'd say "an ability to use semantic understanding" might be helpful. All of our AI works explicitly with no understanding of semantics, but it's becoming clear to me that the ceiling that places on their "intelligence" puts them still leagues away from the world of true AGI.

This is one of those situations where it's a clear documented (via study and real world experiment) benefit to both workers and employers, so you wonder why it's taking so long to spread.

One problem is I genuinely believe it has to be mandated. Every company has people who will take any action purely to make themselves look attractive for the next promotion cycle. And if even just one person is actually putting in 50/wk at a company that's supposed to be 32/wk, everyone else is going to feel pressured to work 50.

Same! You're definitely not alone, even if I do feel like a rare species these days. I really wish we were all going in two or three days a week. This constant wfh is driving me crazy.

To the point where it feels like they have pretty obviously intentionally gimped the mobile website to drive you to the app - which just makes me way less likely to install it. Page loads take absolutely forever, videos almost never work first try, their image galleries are essentially unusable... None of these are issues on desktop web (on the same network).

In fact, this is one of those truisms about the "down" side of the classical business cycle - that recessions partly function as an excuse to cut inefficiencies. How accurate this truism is, I don't know.