arcbyte

Just remmeber that "a" is short for "any". So do want the specific thing, or will any thing work?

A siblings commenter stated this opinion much more persuasively for me. When these people arrive here, they are absolutely guests. It's incontrovertible that they are guests. Theres no debate.

However, time is important and after a certain amount of time or perhaps even connection made to the community, a person does move from guest to neighbor.

A lot of us still consider domain squatters to be trolls. Use it or lose it.

Well, China is already "the past". They're past the Lewis turning point. We'll have to look somewhere else for "the future".

I'm agreeing with the comment you originally responded to about the statistic being misleading because it is an almost self-evident truth that prosecutors ultimately expend their limited resources on the cases they are most sure of the defendant's culpability based on the evidence.

You countered about plea deals being coercive because the plea deal is generally much lower than the maximum or even average sentence of people who go on to be found guilty and ultimately sentenced after a trial on the merits.

I then countered that people who ultimately "become subject" are generally guilty and therefore the coerciveness, if you accept it as such, doesn't really matter.

I'll concede two things: 1. "become subject" is doing a lot of work there. What I meant is people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute. There are plenty of people who are arrested and ultimately not charged for various reasons. So my assertion is really that if the state ultimately chooses to proceed with prosecuting someone, they have some evidence that a crime has happened and that you are connected to it in some way that implies some degree of culpability. 2. My definition of "the system" is just the adversarial trial of evidence in front of an adjudicator. I would not include the laws or legislative system in that, although it is obviously related and we both hate that.

So my whole point is really to say that because of overbroad laws, it really is more likely than not that a prosecutor can find a law for which there is evidence that you are guilty of breaking it. Hence, plea deals existing or not, you would have been found guilty in court, and therefore my assertion from personal experience is that most people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute are guilty and plea deals are not the terrible coercive force on innocent people you claim it is.

What youre saying is true, but the reality is that the number of people actually affected by it is vanishingly small. Of course its not vanishing if youre that person affected, but as far as the system goes, its negligible.

The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty. The reason can often be attributed to overbroad laws, but that still means you are guilty and will likely lose your criminal case. The prevalence of plea deals is just a performance optimization on top of that fact - most people are guilty at that stage and we'll let you off a little easier if you avoid the time and cost of a trial.

Innocent people are coerced to plead guilty, but you also have to realize the number of "innocent people pleading guilty" also contains guilty people who convinced lay people, who never saw or reviewed the evidence, they were innocent. As a prosecutor during a plea negotiation I once almost dismissed a charge against a girl who convinced me that she was innocent until I actually looked a security tape before signing the dismissal. She was 100% guilty. This is another interesting point about how busy prosecutors are - i didnt even bother to review the evidence against her before offering her a plea deal.

All this to say, if you end up coerced into accepting a plea deal despite your innocence, you are not a normal person. Yes, there's at least one normal person out there who was coerced, but they're the exception that proves the rule.

Courts need more funding, laws need to be relaxed and fine tuned, we need to stop the school to prison pipeline, but even with all those problems the system works pretty damn well.

Well we dont really like it when you burn the flag in protest if thats one of the alternate worships you are suggesting.

The values you exactly stated:

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The moment my mom needs my help to login to something because she clicked the button but now it's expired / she got a new phone / raison du jur, I will be totally unable to assist her. It's a horrible concept being foisted on unsuspecting victims.

In general, we Americans really, really love our country. Our flag still represents values tied closely to our revolutionary war and and independence. Obviously the flag gets wrapped around all sorts of causes, even contradictory ones, but that core kernel of shared values is truly universal.

So as individuals we choose to fly the flag a lot.

You are correctly stating that stare decisis is really just (very) persuasive precedent for the court reconsidering its own decisions, and that it is not binding on other jurisdictions that are not lesser.

But these words belie the fact that stare decisis is largely a social construct for the judiciary. The right case and (very) persuasive argument could and does overcome precedent of any level in any court. It's just a matter of framing this case as "different" enough in a way that your reviewers (whether a higher court or a political concern) will agree with.

That's not really true at all. You just think that because you never hear about it. Stare decisis still applies at a trial level, but its scope is obviously much narrower. Moreover, most things really aren't that novel. Most importantly, its quite hard to research on this level and usually pointless because theres usually a higher level case anyway.

Lol. I would have said exactly the same thing at 20 years old and be just as disgusted by it at 30. People grow up.

I'm curious if there's a way to merge multiple key/value pairs into a single cryptext (without just appending or exploding the size of the result) such that everyone securing their information into this scheme stores a copy of the same encrypted blob, but their key decrypts a different value from the blob.

In this way, people could act as backups for one another with plausible deniability of what's being stored.

I feel this sentiment. I think its a good one.

The approach I take is that every law should expire after a standard, unchangeable time - probably several terms of Congress, say 6 years to account for one full Senate turnover.

Congress can just repass verbatim old laws if they wish - its already written and can be a simple, fast vote. Or we can have debate over outdated provisions like we should have.

This is not true at all. Not even a sliver of truth.

There must be a word for this style of post where you take your own inadequacies and fears and project them on to others?

I play an odd number of levels in either direction of you.

Seems cool but its just not quite responsive enough on Android Firefox. It seems to almost fit, but i think things are cut off. Controls dont seem to work - i think the materials are off screen because the directions say to select materials but I dont see where to do that.

> But in the USA that doesn't really fly. Talking is transactional, either a business deal is going on or shut up.

This is regional within the US and obviously differs by person even then. Just remember that the people you are talking to may be the kind of people that need articles like the above to teach them how to talk to people. Their defenses go up when someone approaches them and while they are well practiced at appearing relaxed, they are not. Conversations are short because its emotionally difficult to stay in a heightened awareness state while someone is trying to pull you out of it. But you can certainly provide offramps

I think you've identified analogous functions, but I don't think your analogy holds as you've written it. A more faithful analogy to OP is that there is no better flight crash investigator than the aviation engineer designing the plane, but flight crash investigation is an actual failure of his primary duty of engineering safe planes.

Still not a great rendition of this thought, but closer.

Lets be real. The only connection an EHR has to patient health is whatever minimum standard the hospital needs to avoid malpractice lawsuits. The rest of the EHR is all about billing insurance companies and Medicare.

Nobody cares about emoji except the poor folks who have to login to it everyday, and it makes their lives a smidgen better. Lets chill on the criticism of emojis.

I’m honestly curious what drives this kind of response. You’re aiming a lot of negativity at someone who’s voluntarily spending his own time and money to do something that, until recently, simply didn’t exist at this level of detail. Yes, there are scientific limitations and fair critiques to be made—but the tone here feels less like constructive criticism and more like punishing the effort itself. That pattern is exactly what drains the internet of anything generous or experimental: people stop sharing when every imperfect attempt is met with hostility. It’s a bit like being stranded in the desert, dying of thirst, finally offered water, and rejecting it because it isn’t cold enough. You don’t have to call the work perfect to acknowledge that it’s valuable, imperfect progress rather than something deserving of contempt.

Nobody was benefiting from the oil nationalization, least of all the Venezuelan people. All their oil engineers left! You can't walk around Doral, Fl; Katy, Tx; or Alpharetta, Ga without tripping over young venezuelans with petroleum engineering degrees who have fled the poverty and repression of Maduro's Venezuela.

Based on where I was born and my background, I should not know as much as I do about Venezuela. Improbably, life led me to develop close ties to some Venezuelans, and with them as a window, I've learned a lot about that country.

In this case, the people of Venezuela are desperate to get rid of their socialist government. It has, predictably and inevitably, led them directly to poverty, starvation, and violent repression.

I have a lot of reservations about the way in which Trump is operating and in this case, the legality of every aspect of how he is doing this operation in Venezuela. Despite all those reservations, this is a rare situation where this action benefits everyone and the world.

I agree with you and have agreed with you for a long time. However, I definitely see the writing on the wall. More than one person in my circle have traditionally been Android users and the lack of innovation from both Apple and Android have them comparing devices on specs MUCH more. I include myself in this list on my next upgrade. I'll be looking largely at specs on the next upgrad because honestly there's not much day to day difference in usage between apple and android anymore

This is hilarious

Slack is a necessary component in well functioning systems.

> W.r.t. query speeds on your columnar storage engine, you will obviously have much better writes that row oriented storage engines.

This should have said reads, not writes. Columnar storage takes significantly more effort to handle writes because it must do many more IOs across the different columns, potentially more de/compression cycles, etc.

Interesting ideas. Im very interested in database ideas that bring new capabilities or better ways to acconplish old ones.

W.r.t. query speeds on your columnar storage engine, you will obviously have much better writes that row oriented storage engines. This limits your write capabilities though. Any effort you put into restoring write speeds necessitates an extra step to the maintain the columnar stores - which puts you back into the group of databases naintaining indices that you criticize above.

I think modern databases are bringing new ideas on how to accelerate both write and query speeds simultaneously with tradeoffs around CAP.

Before I read the blog post I would have agreed with you. It's pervasive, well understood, and the meaning is clear which you point out is what really matters.

But after reading the article I find myself asking if that's really true? I'm doubting it now. Certainly, the Floppy disk icon is clear to computer users who experienced at least a few years of the 90's or early 2000's. That's becoming less and less a percentage of computer users. For most users, that floppy disk has receded into being just a nonrepresentative shape associated to save.

I think it's that the blog post convinced me to reject nonrepresentative shapes as icons. You can't look at the extremely illustrative menu filled with icons that clearly describe window management actions or text formatting actions - where the icon itself conveys clearly, if abstractly, exactly how reality will look after you take the action - and tell me that a menu filled with random nonillustrative shapes has even a similar experience. I can't shake the idea that the menu icon needs to be more than just a logo or branding - it needs to be self-explaining.

The floppy disk did exactly the above when floppy disks were where the data was actually saved. But in 2025, we have to accept that it no longer illustrates anything. Today its just a nonrepresentative shape.