bdw5204

Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.

The President can, in fact, recess appoint a Supreme Court justice per Article II, Section 2, Clause 3[0].

Since the George W. Bush administration, Congress has used pro forma sessions[1] to prevent recess appointments. Both the House and Senate would have to agree on a time to adjourn Congress per Article I, Section 5, Clause 4. If they disagree but one of them wants to adjourn, the President can adjourn them under Article II, Section 3. But no president has ever done this. President Trump talked about doing it to ram through his appointments both in 2020 and last year during the transition period. But so far it hasn't been deemed necessary because the Senate has, surprisingly to me, confirmed his cabinet in a timely manner and without significant pushback even on the less conventionally conservative choices like the DNI and the HHS Secretary. In all likelihood, the threat of adjourning Congress and of using his billion dollars plus of fundraising for 2026 to primary uncooperative Republican members of Congress has forced them to largely fall in line for now.

Recess appointments to the Supreme Court were common in the old days when the Court was less politically contentious. Justice William J. Brennan was recess appointed by Eisenhower and later confirmed by the Senate. A recess appointment who is not confirmed by the Senate would be null and void at the start of the next Congress on January 3rd of the next odd numbered year. I doubt any president would recess appoint a Supreme Court justice today both because it would be likely derail their nomination and also because a recess Justice might get to hear at most 1 term of cases depending on timing. Recess appointing somebody to run the FDA or the Justice Department or even to be a district court judge would be much more useful to a President's agenda.

[0]: "The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session."

[1]: These are sessions where they immediately adjourn by unanimous consent after doing the formalities to open the session. C-SPAN broadcasts them live and they only last a few minutes at most.

It's also worth noting that reliable daily temperature records only go back to the late 1800s. The way you know this is that there are no record highs or lows in 1788 or even 1828. Most likely, at least some of the real records were set prior to the invention of temperature measurement.

On a related note, global population data before about 1800 or so is also unreliable because censuses hadn't been invented yet. During the Enlightenment, people actually debated if world population was increasing or decreasing. Many thought it had been constantly decreasing since the decline and fall of Rome. In general, reliable statistics for more or less anything are newer than the United States of America.

This is just another reason why dependencies are an anti-pattern. If you do nothing, your software shouldn't change.

I suspect that this style of development became popular in the first place because the LGPL has different copyright implications based on whether code is statically or dynamically linked. Corporations don't want to be forced to GPL their code so a system that outsources libraries to random web sites solves a legal problem for them.

But it creates many worse problems because it involves linking your code to code that you didn't write and don't control. This upstream code can be changed in a breaking way or even turned into malware at any time but using these dependencies means you are trusting that such things won't happen.

Modern dependency based software will never "just work" decades from now like all of that COBOL code from the 1960s that infamously still runs government and bank computer systems on the backend. Which is probably a major reason why they won't just rewrite the COBOL code.

You could say as a counterargument that operating systems often include breaking changes as well. Which is true but you don't update your operating system on a regular basis. And the most popular operating system (Windows) is probably the most popular because Microsoft historically has prioritized backward compatibility even to the extreme point of including special code in Windows 95 to make sure it didn't break popular games like SimCity that relied on OS bugs from Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS[0].

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

All the use of real names on social media accomplishes is a chilling effect on speech. Especially if your opinions differ from those of your employer or customers. Or if people who disagree with you are engaging in harassment campaigns or domestic terrorism against their political opponents.

This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-dox or be silenced.

It's perfectly readable on Brave for Android. The text even wraps to the screen size so you don't have to scroll.

Which phone browser renders it in an unreadable manner?

The best thing for Brave to do would just be to build it into their own ad blocker because Google is going to intentionally make it more and more impractical to support older extensions that interfere with their business model.

I don't think there was ever a time when you could succeed in the marketplace on the merits of your tech. Once the tech reaches the relatively low bar of "good enough", the rest is sales and marketing. In the most lucrative enterprise market, the "good enough" bar is even lower than in the much less lucrative consumer market because the people who will actually have to use your tech aren't the ones buying it. Technical quality likely matters the most to "customers" who don't pay anything such as users of popular open source projects.

If you want to make money from a good product then becoming a social media influencer who talks about your product is the most straightforward way to advertise without having to pay for ads.

One reasonable compromise would be for video makers to provide a transcript or written article to complement their video. Video is a terrible format especially when you're actually using the video and not just using it as a mechanism to deliver audio. Audio is not a bad medium because you can do something else while listening to it.

I imagine most exit nodes are likely controlled by the US government and/or its close allies. Who else wants to have their IP address banned from most of the internet and potentially get visits from their country's equivalent of the FBI?

If most Tor users ran exit nodes and most people used Tor, it would effectively make internet traffic anonymous. But without those network effects, it is vulnerable by design to deanonymization attacks by state actors.

I think there's a case for short term copyrights (28 year terms or less) but I don't think patents are necessary for innovation. You generally can't stop people from copying your food products but we still have a ton of new foods on a regular basis because inventing new food is lucrative even without a government monopoly. The extreme competition and the ability of grocery stores to come out with a store brand copycat keeps big food honest and prices low. Recently, many people have started buying store brands instead of name brands which is why there are tons of signs at the grocery store about price reductions these days.

I do think it'd be hard to make sufficient money to fund a video game or a movie without copyright because they are inherently non-scarce goods once created that can be copied at effectively zero cost. I don't think it matters for books, most of which don't make money for their authors anyway. I also don't think it matters for music because the money there is from live performances and people only care about Taylor Swift's songs because she's singing them.

If we got rid of copyright, government could subsidize the production of works that would be copyrighted by creating a UBI and/or returning to the old norm of a single income household. Many people already create these kinds of works for free and/or ask for donations.

The FOSS community, which only uses copyright law (in the case of GPL) to force FOSS code to stay FOSS or (in the case of MIT) to require attribution, illustrates what the software industry would look like without copyright. Some people, including myself at one point, even work for companies writing FOSS code. Most software companies already make money by selling support contracts, cloud services or ads rather than from selling licenses to copyrighted software so fully abolishing copyright would have surprisingly little impact on tech.

I'm actually in favor of some government intervention to fix the mess it created or where that is politically more plausible than a free market solution. Antitrust action to break up large companies would be great as would banning non-competes and addressing the culture of companies requiring absurd numbers of interviews to get a job. I also favor regulations to stop fraud such as making it illegal for airlines to sell more seats on a plane than they have.

In medical care, I'd prefer a Singapore style system where the government covers catastrophic care but you have a savings account for everything else. I think that's more viable than a pure free market because a college student who comes down with cancer or gets shot in this very high crime country probably can't afford to pay out of pocket for medical care. Likewise with somebody who gets laid off because their employer wants to increase its stock price.

In general though, I like that we have had significantly higher economic growth than European countries over the past generation and want it to stay that way. So I prefer libertarian solutions over socialist solutions wherever possible.

Whenever there's something that looks like a market failure, there's almost always a governmental grant of monopoly privilege or some government regulation to prevent competition.

Why are prescription drugs unaffordable? Because of a grant of monopoly privilege called "patents" that allow a company to monopolize a drug for around 2 decades. Why is health care so expensive? Because the government subsidizes employer provided insurance through the tax code so nobody cares about controlling medical costs. Why is housing so expensive? Because local governments literally make it illegal to build housing infringing on the private property rights of landowners with idiotic "zoning" laws and by doing things like declaring run down parking lots to be "historic" parking lots that must be preserved. Why is the labor market so skewed against labor and in favor of capital? Because numerous government laws make it harder to start businesses than it should be and also because government subsidizes employers providing "benefits" through the tax code. Why did the railroads collapse and most of the US become dependent upon cars? Because the government regulated the railroads to death with the Interstate Commerce Commission and subsidized both cars and car infrastructure. You can keep going on and on with examples but the answer is almost always something that the government did to screw up the market.

The specific problem with COBOL is that COBOL is both a language that was badly designed on the day it was created and that there is a stigma against programmers who have worked with it. This stigma is also a problem for other languages such as Visual Basic and PHP and it can make it harder to find programmers willing to work in those languages. Nobody wants to be "unemployable" because they worked in a stigmatized programming language even though the idea of stigmatizing programming languages is objectively idiotic.

This wouldn't be a problem if organizations that are still using COBOL code would pay high salaries for COBOL programmers because there are people who are only writing code for the money who'd be happy to work with a terrible programming language if it makes them money. But they generally also want to pay antiquated salaries from decades ago for COBOL jobs if they even offer a salary at all. Because they would have migrated their system off of COBOL decades ago if they actually cared about properly maintaining it!

If you aren't already wealthy, you're probably working because "you just want a check". Even if the job you want is to own your own company, you still have to work until you have enough savings. This is how the world has always worked for most of the population in every human society that has ever existed.

For somebody who's unemployed, especially somebody who's been unemployed a while (very common in this market), the main thing you care about is getting employed again.

I imagine somebody who's currently employed wants to know that the company is better than the place they're currently at before they'd accept an offer. But sometimes "better" can be a very low bar to clear because their current company might be awful.

In other words, evaluating the candidate by their questions is just bias towards those who are already in good situations. Somebody being unemployed or employed in a toxic environment doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them especially in an economy where companies continue to lay people off at random.

In every round, the interviewer should leave with the impression that you answered their questions as honestly as possible because you’re looking for the right fit, not just a job.

This is precisely what I despise about "job interviews". What you ask in the "Do you have any questions?" section of the interview should be irrelevant. I don't want to have to ask questions when I don't care about the answers just because that's what "top candidates" are supposed to do. What you're actually measuring is how much the person you're talking to is willing to read articles like this to come up with fake questions to ask as part of a fake performance so you'll hire them.

It is but "AI" is considered such an "important" technology at the moment that no judge is going to want to be the one that "destroys innovation" by enforcing copyright law. If the perception of the technology changes in the political world in an unfavorable manner, these cases would go the other way or (if there's precedent) they'll pass laws overturning the precedents.

I think this would be extremely useful in increasing Linux desktop adoption. There's an enormous number of Windows users who hate Microsoft's changes to the Windows GUI and wish they could still run XP or 7. There's also a need to make sure it is stable enough that users never have to resort to the command line and that it runs "non-free" software out of the box, especially software originally developed for Windows. The latter, of course, is a necessary compromise to get people who aren't FOSS purists to use the operating system. I think the focus should be on Windows rather than Mac because Mac users generally like Mac.

Linux adoption, in my view, is held back by the existing community's lack of desire to deliver what the average user wants. Things are obviously better on that front than they used to be but Ubuntu is still quite bad at doing what non-technical users want from a computer. Most Linux users seem perfectly fine with that.

There's a long history of "Baptists and bootleggers"[0] pushing for regulations that serve both of their interests. The term comes from the 2 main groups that advocated for laws against the sale of alcohol in the southern US. The unions can easily be secretly in cahoots with McDonald's or the taxi industry.

Its also clearly not just something they're pushing in New Zealand given that California voters had to overturn a similar state law via referendum[1] a few years ago. They did this by a 17 point margin at the same time that they voted for the left wing candidate for president by around a 30 point margin[2]. In virtually any other state in the US, declaring Uber drivers to be "employees" would almost certainly lose at the polls by a much larger margin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_elections#Pres...

Uber drivers, by any reasonable standard, are contractors not employees. Uber does not, to the best of my knowledge, tell them when or where to drive nor does it force them to pick up passengers. That's the distinction between contractor and employee.

Declaring Uber drivers to be employees seems to be a political move, likely lobbied for by low wage employers that are being forced to offer higher wages because many of their former minimum wage employees are now contractors for apps.

Many users will see "contact us for pricing" and assume that means you can't afford it. That's fine if your customers are enterprises but definitely not for consumer products that middle class people might actually buy.

I suspect most Tor exit nodes are controlled by the US government and/or its allied governments. It doesn't make much sense for anybody else to run an exit node because your IP gets banned by much of the internet and you get unwanted visits from law enforcement.

I personally would not call that a reasonable policy proposal but it is (unfortunately) constitutional due to an oversight by the US Framers in 1787. The appropriate way to stop it from passing would be to vote against politicians who advocate it as they are unfit for office.

Venezuela's Supreme Court was packed by Hugo Chavez 20 years ago[0]. He expanded the Court from 20 to 32 judges. When he did this, he also filled 5 existing vacancies with new judges. In other words, their Supreme Court is controlled by the Maduro regime.

[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2004/12/13/venezuela-chavez-allies-...

One reason why authors should self-publish is to prevent their books from being bowdlerized by the publisher in the future. You can't predict what will cause future "morality enforcers" to faint. Self publishing also means you can publish things that the current "sensitivity readers" (i.e. censors) would never let you publish.

Of course, this isn't foolproof because your descendants or heirs might also be willing to bowdlerize your work or even take it out of print altogether. So another option would be to just release all of your copyrighted works into the public domain upon your death allowing anybody who cares to publish uncensored copies.

Your mile may vary but I wouldn't advise looking for new jobs at the moment[0]. The current job market is a dumpster fire so recruiters and hiring managers are on their absolute worst behavior right now. If the money's good and especially if you're fully remote, I'd say just do whatever you have to do to keep the job and focus on building another source of income independently of your job. The long term goal being to eventually end your dependence upon employers. At least that's my career goal that I'm trying to work towards. If you do it that way and especially if you keep your expenses low, you can have a soft landing instead of being forced to uproot your entire life to get out.

If you've already got significant savings, you can either use the runway to launch your own startup or even just buy an already profitable business that makes enough money to pay for your living expenses.

I'm not sure I'd suggest switching to a different job if you hate all of the bullshit around corporate programming because you'll probably hate all of the bullshit around whatever other job you pivot into as well. If you own the company, you can choose to just not do all of that agile/waterfall/scrum/whatever bullshit and to build whatever you want built assuming you can make enough revenue or investor funding from it to make it financially viable.

[0]: If you truly hate your job and/or insist on looking anyway, I'd recommend looking until you burn out on job interviews and dealing with the rampant spam and fake jobs polluting the job boards. If you get an offer worth accepting before that, that means you've won the lottery. If you don't, stop your search until the market improves or you feel like trying it again. My own experience being forced into a job search in this market against my will[1] has strengthened my own resolve to get the hell out of employment so that I don't ever have to deal with job interviews ever again.

[1]: Specifically, I was laid off from a great job that I was very happy at where there was very minimal corporate bullshit to worry about because their client cancelled a project that I was supposed to be working on. The company didn't have anything else for me to do.

Giving up freedom for "security" is the surest way to end up with neither of them. This situation where the government of Brazil has outlawed VPNs and Apple is collaborating with it to deprive the people of Brazil of their access to a free and open internet is a perfect illustration of this.

The difference between Apple's response and Twitter's response[0] to internet censorship efforts by the Brazilian government also shows why privately owned companies are more likely to stand on principle than publicly traded (i.e. stock market owned) companies which mainly answer to the pension funds and gamblers who control the stock market.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgjv857plevo

If I'm writing something, I'm writing it once. That "prewriting" stuff they teach in schools just slows down the process and makes you overthink your choice of words. I take the same "1 take" approach with code with the idea being to write the best solution on the first try. Why waste time writing something bad just so you can fix it later? That doesn't make any sense.

As I'm writing, I do go back and make changes as they pop into my head. But once I'm done writing it, I'm done unless I notice an obvious mistake after the fact.

The second reason is the candidate experience. Some candidates feel humiliated if their interview is cut short and will harbor bad impression of the company for a long time. The company doesn't want that.

What leaves a bad impression of a company for me is being gaslit in an interview that they seem interested then getting a passive aggression rejection email later. If you know you aren't going to hire the person you're interviewing, you should let them know and immediately end the interview. That's the polite and decent thing to do.