ledauphin

this is really interesting. i would have assumed poison would be a major factor in control, but at least on the government website that is not suggested to be the case.

honest question: does public awareness of their invasiveness have any chance of making a difference? does the salt-and-vinegar thing at all meaningfully reduce their population? i have trouble imagining it but would love to hear of evidence to the contrary.

it's a common misconception that modern non-relational stores (such as DynamoDB) aren't ACID compliant. DynamoDB offers ACID transactions, even across tables, as of several years ago.

not that you're saying they don't, but some people might interpret your comment that way.

but they're not reliable about this either. i had a similar experience once with an RTS and i asked for a refund at the 4-5 hour mark and was told no dice.

it's bizarre that any legal theory could consider criminal charges with this as the justification, without also putting the boot-er in jeopardy for the exact same thing.

If there's anyone left in the comment section now that this has been flagged and consigned to the outer darkness...

Please take a moment and imagine a world in which software developers were all forced to spend 4 weeks a year building drone missile AIs for Palantir so that the US can bomb weddings in Yemen.

Further imagine that you started your career before the US had drones, so the possibility that your skills would be required to bomb birthday parties had not occurred to you when you initially chose your current field.

Obviously not everyone here is in agreement about the moral status of various forms of medical services. That's fine - as it happens, apparently not everyone in the US is in agreement about the moral status of bombing weddings in Yemen either!!

But a failure to understand that – especially in a big tent society – sometimes people with certain skills don't want to put them to use in the way that other people want to see them put to use, is a truly remarkable failure of imagination for a message board filled with people of above-average brainpower.

Courts are pretty good at awarding large dollar amounts and/or throwing people in jail when they lie to the court. Which is what would be required if someone attempted this, since (as far as I'm aware) there's no religion or cult in history that believes anything remotely approaching this very strange straw man.

this is a very fair point which sadly just redoubles my disappointment with the vast majority of the newer laws I hear about.

I'm very confused by your comment - where does the language of the bill say anything about _banning_ medical procedures? And do you get the impression that there are a lot of (or any) doctors in Florida qualified to expel dead fetuses who would prefer to refuse that medical procedure? Or is this just a very detailed straw man?

interesting you bring up jury duty and military service, both of which have longstanding religious conscience exemptions.

I have to imagine you're more capable of having a serious philosophical discussion than this sounds.

There is a huge difference between offering to treat only those whom you like, and offering to do only the types of procedures you believe are "good".

We have rightly outlawed the former for many categories of supposed goodness/badness. But forcing people to start performing new treatments that are the societal cause du jour that would not previously have been part of their job description is quite arguably federalized slavery. The goalposts will never stop shifting, so either swear eternal and unwavering fealty to the state or go find a different job?

It's quite rich when a forum of techies who mostly can find a well-paying job doing almost nothing of lasting value for anyone can find time to judge medical professionals who improve people's health on a daily basis because of a difference of opinion about the job description of those healthcare professionals.

Doctors literally do this all the time. This is part of what it means to be a doctor. ER surgeons don't get to know whether the patient is a "good guy or a bad guy" before they save the patient's life.

And this bill doesn't change that long-established approach to medicine.

this bill does not allow exclusion of medical care based on your beliefs about the patient, but based on your beliefs about the medical care in question.

[It is deeply weird how uncurious the comments on this particular article are.]

This bill allows providers to exclude forms of medical care across all patients, not persons of specific types.

I suppose if:

1. your sincere religious beliefs impelled you to deny all medical care to people based on their beliefs - in other words your religion establishes that certain beliefs make you an unperson.

AND

2. This bill were written saying anything at all about denying all medical care, which it is not, since the provider would be forced to identify specific forms of care that they were unwilling to provide to _all_ people, rather than _all_ forms of care to _certain_ people.

There's no need to argue for a point if it can be placed between quotation marks and attributed to an as-yet-non-existent higher intelligence.

the irony with this (as with all such laws) is that all you have to do is ask a mathematician to give you a function that is maximally un-manipulatable in this way, and the law would immediately be much harder to game.

but instead we insist on writing all our laws as though the only tools available to us are +-÷×, and people who recall middle school math can find ways to game them.

I would be willing to bet $10 that this whole article was written primarily in order to give substance to its perfectly excellent headline pun.

Ethics is not reducible to "learning not to lie." There's also "not using sweeping generalizations to dramatically affect individual's lives" and "using authority the way it was intended instead of shrinking from the responsibility granted by the will of the people" and a whole other host of ethical issues that apply to the various aeronautical administrations.

Brainwashing alone does not an ethical system make. You generally have to act ethically in order to teach other people to do the same.

Java records weren't even a gleam in the eye of James Gosling when Clojure was solving these problems at its inception.

yeah, i think this is maybe the best video of a road landing ive ever seen.

highway/road landings of small aircraft happen in the US on a pretty regular basis.

the biggest risk is still probably power lines, not cars. a small aircraft landing on a road will be going about the same speed as highway traffic, so unless it's really busy, drivers will usually notice an airplane in front of them and have time to slow down.

this sounds like the sort of perfectly reasonable system that the original manufacturer could install in order to save the world from buying several hundred thousands replacement car batteries every year.

I'm pleased to see the inclusion of hash-based cache invalidation!

this seems like a reasonable objection.

for my part, i wish somebody would write a data modeling library for Python where the underlying objects are themselves Rust objects, such that they could be handed off to Rust code with no translation penalty, but where the data model definition happens completely on the Python side.

This would be helpful on larger teams where everyone needs to be able to contribute to the data model but not everyone is comfortable writing Rust.

i wish Kernza would succeed. It is a more interesting-tasting grain than wheat!

this is an interesting statistic. I'd love to have a reference!

based on the overwhelming majority of the top 30 comments, i think you should feel comforted.

this comment should be higher.

atomic move semantics are the single thing that makes writing basic filesystem interactions plausibly deterministic. anything else is just pretending that errors never happen.

is this a generally agreed-upon fact? I'm not sure I buy it, but I'm interested to see a defense of it.