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talaketuon “X” Didn’t Pay Severance. Now It’s Facing 2,200 Cases – and Big Fees

Note that Employees were not a party to the merger agreement. Does an acquisition FAQ bind the company? I believe the argument is that it was effectively an offer to employees to stick around, and employees who did so effectively accepted the offer, at the cost of other opportunities in the market, and hence this was a binding contract. This doesn't seem so solid to me.

talaketuon The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

If "in the park" is meant as an analogy for "on the platform" in content moderation, then curiously enough Twitter suspended @RealDonaldTrump for off-park action (Jan 6).

talaketuon The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

A wheelchair is used for transporting a person.

talaketuon The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

Let's say that in your opinion: (a) it's a vehicle, (b) it's in the park, (c) but the park authority doesn't have jurisdiction over the activity.

Is the correct resolution to deny (b)?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "in the park" represents within the analogy.

talaketuon Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816

> There seem to be 10 people "managing" for every one person coding

Take this literally, not as as a ration. - each SWE in a product team has an EM, Dir Eng, VP Eng, PM, Director Product, VP Product, ...

talaketuon Why do arrays start at 0?

counting grid? What even are these?

talaketuon Leslie Lamport revolutionized computer science with math [video]

Indeed - though I think this is a mathematical philosophy about theories. "Genius" is a nice word choice to emphasize your point - it refers to some kind of distinct spirit that happens to inspire the person, not the person themself. (A little like writing vs typing.)

talaketuon Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

Business data / process flow is so stable compared to a software implementation that having quality documentation pays dividends again and again. If you could document only one thing, document the business data flow.

talaketuon US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

Except when update schedule on the client differs from the server.

talaketuon US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

sure, except obviously sunrise at 6AM and sunset at 6PM.

talaketuon Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify

Yes, this is said, but the meaning of "prove" (which is related to "probe") has not really changed very much at all compared to "test" - a word which in this sense is a metonym from the fired pot used for assay of metal. The meaning in "mathematical proof" or "prove beyond reasonable doubt" or "prove your love" doesn't really diverge significantly from this so-called archaic meaning - a demonstration to show.

On the software abstraction, exceptions are simply a convenient implicit control flow device for handling the alternate path when an intended state cannot be achieved. I don't follow the paper's argument that "current exception design is suboptimal for efficient implementation" - but I would not be surprised considering the lifetime issues.

talaketuon Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify

The primary definition (OED) is "forming an exception", which is why I think this cliche is a tautology ("exceptions are for forming an exception") that does nothing to guide me on whether an exception is appropriate in a given case.

Btw, we don't say "exceptions are for infrequent conditions", because that's not what they're for.

I quite like the etymological "taken out", because it carries a notion of special handling - a control flow aspect that is the main point of using them.

talaketuon Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify

English also has the phrase "the exception proves the rule" - and it's just swell when our general code handles special cases.

I would have not have thought an unreachable host was exceptional, given that it's quite normal.

talaketuon Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify

"exceptions are exceptional" means what?

talaketuon Why do we round corners?

"round corners feel natural" is no better explanation than "round corners are smoother".

talaketuon Efficient Pagination Using Deferred Joins

> you'll see no benefit if you were paginating PKs in the first place, but most app developers are paginating actual records, right?

You are unclear on this point, but I don't really see how it addresses any of parent's (grogers) counterpoints. Maybe be a critical concept for you to reconsider! (I suspect application developers mainly use OFFSET/LIMIT because it's simple to implement and readily availability in SQL, rather than the optimal way for the user to accomplish their task.)

talaketuon Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

listen to the sentence Psaki utters at about 66s in: https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1448740969726156800

talaketuon There is no 'printf'

oh right

> But what if you're not using C99 or newer?

UB - that takes all the fun out of it.

talaketuon There is no 'printf'

> more efficient code that does the same thing

In this case, it produces a different result.

talaketuon Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics (2018)

You are unsure whether "2 + 2 = 4" is real, but certain that "2 + 2 + 4 = 8" is.

talaketuon Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics (2018)

It's a matter of language and logic. "another" is a contraction of "one other", and "other" means "distinct".

So, given you have "one (element) and one different (element)", at that point, you have, ipso facto, 2 elements.

talaketuon Databases, Types, and the Relational Model: The Third Manifesto [pdf]

Nice toy example.

> What information about the whole dataset can you extract from this join?

You could count the number of users.

talaketuon YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

You over-fit the "fallacy of irrelevance". This is my feeling about the Monty Hall problem: The fact that Monty is now offering me the option to take make chances and switch to the other door, after I have chosen this one, when he knows which door actually has the prize, does seem relevant to which door has the prize.

talaketuon What is property-based testing? (2016)

I can see how you might avoid "highly coupled with implementation details" example-based tests. With a little abstraction, you can do the same with property-based tests.

Properties as external assertions that you code up as a test. An easy example is to think about the contract of a stack, and the properties that result, and how you could test those properties with arbitrary example: pushing arbitrary t of T on a stack of T results in a stack 1 deeper popping a non-empty stack results in a stack 1 shallower, etc.

talaketuon A Single Fire Killed at Least 10% of the World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says

"Would a tree falling in the forest ..." never seemed much of a puzzle to me.

I don't agree with the proposition that life on Earth had no value until it gave rise to the evolution of Homo sapiens, or that it would have no value after our extinction.

talaketuon A Single Fire Killed at Least 10% of the World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says

The article mentioned the fire was started by lightening. It didn't state the cause of all these fires, but there is plenty of evidence and theory about how a hotter drier climate leads to an increase in the intensity and frequency of fires.

talaketuon A Single Fire Killed at Least 10% of the World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says

"Who cares?" reminds me of the diagnostician's distinction between signs and symptoms. Vital signs of the health of the biosphere can be measured, just like your blood pressure can be measured regardless of whether you I should care about how you feel.

talaketuon A Single Fire Killed at Least 10% of the World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says

If you accept the idea that the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then a natural description of large-scale and ongoing reduction in ecological diversity could be "disease".

talaketuon Australia media can be sued for social media comments, court rules

What's bullshit is your suggestion that Facebook is not subject to Australian law!

For example see News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code - it requires platforms such as FB to enter into commercial arrangements with news media (https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...)

talaketuon Australia media can be sued for social media comments, court rules

Note that Facebook was a not a respondent in the original defamation case. In any case, multiple parties can be responsible for publication. From point 55 of the judgement:

> The Court of Appeal was correct to hold that the acts of the appellants in facilitating, encouraging and thereby assisting the posting of comments by the third-party Facebook users rendered them publishers of those comments.