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dllthomason The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

> the people asked for this, right?

No, not by sufficient margin.

Even assuming every state would decide this direct question the same way as they did the Presidency this past election, a Constitutional amendment requires ratification by 38 states.

> The will of people is the ultimate judge, isn't it?

Ultimately it has to be, but not always in the moment. The bar to Constitutional amendment is high for a reason.

dllthomason MySQL at Uber

Indeed, per their profile they're in Brazil, which is not a guarantee of that but does make it likely.

dllthomason Are Americans' perceptions of the economy and crime broken?

I don't think the current sense is suicide exactly, but rather (hyperbolically) so sold on a (misguided) belief that you would commit suicide if, per that belief, they were "supposed to" do so. I agree that it would feel awkward to use it about someone who had actually killed themselves, but I think that's mostly because there's an element of (dark) humor to it.

dllthomason US pauses all federal aid and grants

It's not immediately clear to me how we should read the Constitution on that question, but the Impoundment Control Act seems to explicitly include "delay" alongside "withholding" in things that it might be forbidding.

dllthomason US pauses all Federal aid and grants

Absent context, I think there's a reasonable argument to be made. Remember, though, that we're comparing a JD Vance who was recently impressed with the importance of following the rules with a Trump recently impressed by the opposite.

dllthomason Are Americans' perceptions of the economy and crime broken?

The phrase occurs in that book, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that it had "the current sense" before Jonestown.

dllthomason I Met Paul Graham Once

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology

dllthomason Citations on the Anthropic API

"Completely useless" might be too strong. In a context where you're already doing RAG it would help you verify what's produced.

Certainly it's radically less useful than if it could produce citations to the training set, though.

dllthomason Did Elon Musk Appear to Sieg Heil at Trump Inauguration?

It was certainly done in Rome, but 80 years ago isn't ancient.

dllthomason Before Squid Game, there was Battle Royale

The term predated the movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royal_(professional_wre...

dllthomason Property-Based Testing for the People

> Indeed, the world is not IID.

Right! And even if it were, in the sense that that's what we should expect as real world input, it wouldn't generally be the best distribution for finding bugs.

dllthomason Property-Based Testing for the People

Ah, yeah, generating for property testing probably doesn't want a uniform distribution. What patterns are interesting will surely depend on what we're doing with the array.

dllthomason Property-Based Testing for the People

Not weighing in on any particular tech (hypothesis or otherwise), but intrigued by your example...

My initial impulse is to pick a random cell which must not be zero, generate a random number for each other cell and a random non-zerp number for that one. I'm not immediately decided on whether it's uniformly distributed.

dllthomason Books I Loved Reading in 2024

I mean, it would, wouldn't it? Theodore Sturgeon wrote a bunch of books, and I've always assumed his "Revelation" was initially delivered in that context.

dllthomason Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

It feels really gross that he was acquitted in the second impeachment partly because he argued that criminal court was the appropriate venue for the issue, and then turned around and argued in criminal court that he was immune for not having been convicted in the impeachment.

dllthomason Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

> He can be President all day long in jail.

Playing devil's advocate, at least in part...

In practice, he cannot perform many of the duties of the office effectively - or perhaps at all - from jail.

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it says he should be President (given the outcome of the process we had). The laws that say he should be in jail are subordinate to the Constitution and so rightly lose out in the minimum way practicable - a delay in sentencing.

...

I do have problems with some of what I've written here, but it seems like a sensible position that could be held unreservedly by someone who disagrees with me on a few questions of fact that do have a subjective component.

dllthomason Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

It is obviously not true that only 64% of voters who cast votes in the 2024 election cast votes in the 2024 election, so some meaning slipped here, somewhere.

dllthomason Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

"Voters" doesn't always mean "eligible voters". "Those who cast votes in the election under discussion" seems a reasonable sense of the term in this context.

You are correct that he got the plurality and not the majority of the popular vote.

dllthomason Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

That seems true for any attempt to continue using the IP for the same thing. Turning it into a parody of that thing might have an audience (and therefore produce ad revenue), would not seem to need Jones involved, and be something for which Global Tetrahedron seems well resourced.

dllthomason A liar who always lies says "All my hats are green."

Yeah, my comment was just a suggestion that that wording be imported into the question, rather than living in a clarification.

dllthomason A liar who always lies says "All my hats are green."

I think the puzzle is better if the person "only speaks falsehoods" than if they "always lie" - depending on context, a true statement can be a lie.

dllthomason A liar who always lies says "All my hats are green."

The specific linguistic concept your reaching for is "implicature" from pragmatics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature

dllthomason The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats (2014)

Okay, but granting that, why?

dllthomason The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats (2014)

I honestly don't know, but if not I would like to understand why.

dllthomason The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats (2014)

"This is not money you were ever going to pay."

I don't see why. Don't out-of-pocket maximums only apply to covered care?

dllthomason Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

I think that's probably right, yeah.

dllthomason Good Software Development Habits

With a sufficiently broad definition of "database", yeah, that's my understanding.

dllthomason Agile Is Dead

I very much agree that Brooks didn't "start everything" but I think he brought value to the discussion of those human organization problems in the context of software. Weinberg got there earlier but I feel like I personally got more of value from Brooks. Obviously YMMV.

dllthomason Agile Is Dead

I think there's some space between MMM and agile and the former (as problem statement more than proposed solutions) holds up better. It's been a while since I last read it, though.

> Anyway. In your opinion, what the pathologies for _this_ time would be?

That's certainly an interesting question; I don't have a ready answer.

dllthomason Agile Is Dead

> Individuals and interactions -- over processes and tools

That's why I proposed having a "build team" where you ask an individual to run your compiles for you, rather than dealing with an impersonal CI system. More Agile.

The old Manifesto sounds nice, but it's more a reaction (overreaction?) to some pathologies of the time than something that will get you very far without otherwise knowing what you should be doing.