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maxlybbert

1,786 karma · joined August 23, 2013

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maxlybbert··on Stephen Colbert says CBS forbid interview of Democrat because of FCC threat
The people who wrote the constitution had plenty of experience with the First and Second Continental Congresses, and the Congress set up by the Articles of Confederation. And Parliament, and state legislatures. They both loved and feared democracy. Not everything in the constitution is meant to be democratic.

Senators were originally appointed by state governments to prevent the federal government from slowly weakening the states ( https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S1-2-3/A... “To further allay Anti-Federalist concerns regarding concentrated federal power in Congress, the Federalists emphasized that bicameralism, which lodged legislative power directly in the state governments through equal representation in the Senate, would serve to restrain, separate, and check federal power”). That’s not really “democratic.”

In grade school, we focused on the fact that states with small populations weren’t enthusiastic about letting larger states set national policy. Sure, New York would have been happy to have more influence in both the House and the Senate than any other state, but Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut weren’t going to sign under those terms. Horse trading to get them to join wasn’t “democratic” either, but they wouldn’t have joined any other way.

maxlybbert··on Stephen Colbert says CBS forbid interview of Democrat because of FCC threat
I know what Colbert said, and what Colbert claims CBS said. But I feel like something is being left out.

The equal time requirement wouldn’t prevent Colbert from interviewing a political candidate. And it wouldn’t require Colbert to send invitations to anybody. It would require Colbert to allow a competing political candidate to appear if the candidate demanded it.

CBS could decide they don’t want that hassle. Colbert could decide he doesn’t want that hassle. But the law as it stands doesn’t prevent the interview.

I actually remember when Reagan’s FCC decided to stop enforcing equal time. Plenty of people complained about how the change would ruin America. Now they seem to believe Reagan was right after all.

maxlybbert··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
Yes, this comes up, but the Court tends to say things that didn’t exist are covered by constitutional rights. I can’t imagine think of any time they asked “could the founders have imagined this?” Television, radio, and the internet are all protected by freedom of the press without anybody ever showing that the founders could have imagined them.

From Heller v. DC:

“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, e.g., Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, e.g., Kyllo v. United States, the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

A few years after that ruling, the Massachusetts state supreme court upheld a conviction for a woman who had carried a taser for self defense. The Supreme Court accepted her challenge, allowed it to go forward without paying court costs, and unanimously overturned that ruling without asking for oral arguments ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/577/411/ ):

“The court offered three explanations to support its holding that the Second Amendment does not extend to stun guns. First, the court explained that stun guns are not protected because they ‘were not in common use at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment.’ This is inconsistent with Heller’s clear statement that the Second Amendment ‘extends . . . to . . . arms . . . that were not in existence at the time of the founding.’

“The court next asked whether stun guns are ‘dangerous per se at common law and unusual,’ in an attempt to apply one ‘important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms.’ ... In so doing, the court concluded that stun guns are ‘unusual’ because they are ‘a thoroughly modern invention.’ By equating ‘unusual’ with ‘in common use at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment,’ the court’s second explanation is the same as the first; it is inconsistent with Heller for the same reason.

“Finally, the court used ‘a contemporary lens’ and found ‘nothing in the record to suggest that [stun guns] are readily adaptable to use in the military.’ But Heller rejected the proposition ‘that only those weapons useful in warfare are protected.’

“For these three reasons, the explanation the Massachusetts court offered for upholding the law contradicts this Court’s precedent.”

The fact that Caetano was a unanimous and thorough ruling says a lot to me. Perhaps you’re holding out hope that Heller will be overturned soon, but the chances for that are very slim ( https://youtu.be/nFTRwD85AQ4 ).

maxlybbert··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
I have a copy of https://archive.org/details/gerard-metral-gun/ on my bookshelf (by a European, too!).
maxlybbert··on The Dilbert Afterlife
For what it's worth, the only company where I posted Dilbert art (two animation cels that my wife bought for me from eBay) was nothing like the Dilbert world. It's just that I loved Dilbert and I thought it was a funny decoration.
maxlybbert··on Scott Adams has died
I'm positive he was trolling.
maxlybbert··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Personally, I think most Americans don't give Venezuela much thought.

I think Trump is hoping to get a short popularity boost the way George Bush did with the capture of Manuel Noriega, but people cared more about who controlled the Panama Canal in the 1990s than they care about who controls Venezuela today. And I don't know anybody who expects this to impact drugs coming from Venezuela or Latin America in general.

maxlybbert··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Even though the military was involved, I think this was officially a law enforcement action, much like capturing Manuel Noriega and sentencing him to prison.

Nicolás Maduro was indicted for various crimes in 2020. I have a feeling the "possession of a machinegun" charge will be dropped, but the US does have a long track record of saying drug activity affects the US enough that it can arrest and prosecute almost anybody.

The invasion of Ukraine, on the other hand, is -- I believe -- a regular military exercise. Putin has claimed that he wants to achieve some unusual goals ("denazify the Ukraine special forces"), but even those goals aren't really law enforcement.

maxlybbert··on AI employees don't pay taxes
Economists often talk about substituting capital for labor. It's certainly common in countries, such as the US, where labor is relatively expensive.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to change the tax system to make sure there's no tax advantage to substituting capital for labor, or for that matter, labor for capital. I have no idea what changes would be needed, but there's no reason that using AI should have significant tax implications.

maxlybbert··on MongoBleed Explained Simply
Newer versions of C++ (and C, apparently) have functions so that the cast isn't necessary ( https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/byte/memset.html ).
maxlybbert··on Toll roads are spreading in America
I agree. I don't like toll roads, but I recognize that they only charge me for using them, because my use isn't necessarily good for everybody else.

Gas taxes also work (ignoring electric vehicles), but paying a specific amount for a specific road certainly seems more direct.

maxlybbert··on How well do you know C++ auto type deduction?
I know Google’s styleguide discourages auto, but other C++ places I’ve worked weren’t scared of it. The type deduction rules usually do what I expect, unless I have a weird pre-C++11 proxy type that somehow hasn’t been updated in the last 14 years.
maxlybbert··on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
It so happens I went to high school in California. My math teacher mentioned how much interaction she had with the state universities, and also lamented the fact that universities offered remedial math courses. She felt that if somebody needed remedial math, they shouldn't be in a university; a junior college would be a better fit.

At the time it felt elitist, but now I agree with her. Yes, this example shows that the high schools are doing a bad job, but it's not clear to me that the universities should clean up the mess. There are other possibilities.

maxlybbert··on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
Colleges need to figure out how to advertise those benefits, and the colleges' role in providing the benefits. The fact that they've been flat-footed for a decade tells me either (1) they're incredibly bad communicators, or (2) they don't really believe their own claims.
maxlybbert··on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
I'm not sure American universities are still issuing things similar to 1990s 4-year degrees. They issue documents claiming to be degrees, but the quality has dropped, and they aren't what they used to be.
maxlybbert··on How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)
It starts about twelve seconds into https://youtu.be/tcHNHRGPkkw .
maxlybbert··on What Killed Perl?
I remember being very enthusiastic about helping people on, say, Stack Overflow. It didn’t take much extra effort to be nice and made me happy.

But I also burned out relatively quickly. I’d happily answer new questions nicely, but the third or fourth time I saw the same question I spent much less effort to give a welcoming answer than I had the first time I saw it.

Of course, getting the same question repeatedly may suggest something should be redesigned.

I don’t know any good way to keep helpful volunteers helpful for a long time. The best idea I have is constantly recruiting new experts to continually replace the ones that burn out and chase off newbies.

maxlybbert··on What Killed Perl?
I don’t think Google was ever a Perl shop. eBay and Amazon were, apparently. Netscape wrote Bugzilla in Perl. I’m sure there were others.
maxlybbert··on GCC 16 considering changing default to C++20
Correct, this is a discussion of which language version the compiler should follow if the programmer doesn’t specify one. It’s not about which features are acceptable when implementing the compiler.
maxlybbert··on All praise to the lunch ladies
> [Original, emphasis added]: the only reason we have school lunch programs in the US at all is because the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for black children in the 70s

> [Response, emphasis added]: The first school lunch programs started with private initiatives in the 1890s. The first major federal program for student lunches was the National School Lunch Program enacted in 1946

Are you saying that the government started trying to one-up the Black Panther school lunches 30 years before the Black Panthers started offering them?

Is it possible that the people in charge of school lunches in the 1970s viewed the Black Panther program as some kind of competition? Sure. Was the 1970s Black Panther program "the only reason" the US started a national school lunch program in the 1940s? I don't see how that would be possible.

maxlybbert··on DEC64: Decimal Floating Point (2020)
Oops, I meant IEEE-754.
maxlybbert··on DEC64: Decimal Floating Point (2020)
Well, for one thing, IEEE-757 was a significant improvement on the vendor-specific ways of handling floating point that it replaced ( https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754st... ).

I wasn't a big fan of floating point until I worked with a former college professor who had taught astrophysics. When possible, he preferred to use respected libraries that would give accurate results fast. But when he had to implement things himself, he didn't always necessarily want the fastest or the most accurate implementation; he'd intentionally make and document the tradeoffs for his implementation. He could analyze an algorithm to estimate the accumulated units in the last place error ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place ), but he realized when that wasn't necessary.

maxlybbert··on System.LongBool
Looking at the C 2011 standard, it looks like "_Bool" is implementation defined ( https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1548.pdf , pg. 57 of the PDF; the page labeled 39 section 6.2.5 paragraph 2): " An object declared as type _Bool is large enough to store the values 0 and 1."

I believe everybody uses a single byte for that -- a single byte can store the values 0 and 1 -- but it looks like they aren't required to.

I believe C++ specifies "bool" is one byte; it's definitely never larger than a "char".

As far as std::vector<bool>, the fact that each value is defined at taking up a single bit inside the std::vector<bool> doesn't really say anything about how large each bool would be outside of the std::vector<bool>. std::vector<bool> was arguably a case of the Committee being too clever ( https://isocpp.org/blog/2012/11/on-vectorbool ).

maxlybbert··on ICE bought vehicles equipped with fake cell towers to spy on phones
I actually find that a decent argument, but I believe it’s already been shut down. When police used thermal imaging to “observe” a house, without doing anything they thought required a warrant, the Supreme Court decided it was too intrusive ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/533/27/#tab-opin... ). But if I understand the ruling correctly, if the police make it well-known that they have the ability to do something intrusive, then they don’t need a warrant.
maxlybbert··on Public static void main(String[] args) is dead
The first book I read on Java managed to explain "public static void main(String[] args)" by the end of the first chapter. It wasn't a long chapter, either.

I don't like Java, and the excessive boilerplate is a big part of that opinion. But it was never nearly as arcane as some people here are making it.

maxlybbert··on FBI arrests US Army veteran for 'conspiracy' over protest against ICE
I think the ACLU’s advice (which I linked to) is pretty clear about how to organize a legal protest. Sometimes the goal is to get arrested, but if you want to avoid that, then it’s not hard to do.
maxlybbert··on FBI arrests US Army veteran for 'conspiracy' over protest against ICE
The fact that Americans have a right to peaceful assembly doesn’t mean that every non-violent assembly is legal ( https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-7-3-1/A... , last sentence):

“the government may impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place, or manner of protected speech, provided the restrictions ‘are justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech, that they are narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest, and that they leave open ample alternative channels for communication of the information.’”

People complain about this all the time (“free speech zones”) but it’s been the law for decades.

See also https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/protesters-rights .

maxlybbert··on Compiler Bug Causes Compiler Bug: How a 12-Year-Old G++ Bug Took Down Solidity
Maybe "doesn't work" is the wrong phrase. Usually, it does what people expect (except that the library ignores any "operator==" or "operator!=", which surprises people who went through the trouble to define them). And depending on what "operator<" does, it's possible for distinct values (a.k.a., not-equal values) to compare "equal." So to avoid confusion, people start using phrases like "equivalent" instead of "equal." But usually there's no real confusion: if you sort a list of strings by length, nobody's surprised when "hello" and "green" compare "equal," even though they have different contents. Everybody realizes that they have equal lengths, not equal contents.

The main things I've actually had to watch out for are floating point values that could have not-a-numbers (e.g., https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/numeric/math/isunordered.h... ), and possibly Unicode strings that aren't normalized ( https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/ ), but those act weird in all software I'm familiar with. Because people forget about the relevant edge cases.

maxlybbert··on Compiler Bug Causes Compiler Bug: How a 12-Year-Old G++ Bug Took Down Solidity
When the STL became part of the standard library ( http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html ), there was a question of how to handle algorithms that sort containers, or that perform a binary search, or in some other way, need to know whether “a” is less-than, equal-to, or greater-than “b”. The algorithms have to work on primitive types, and user defined types as efficiently as possible. They eventually decided to only require a function for “less-than.” And if “a < b” returns false, and “b < a” also returns false, then “a” and “b” are considered equal.

There are times that doesn’t work, so documentation usually has a footnote that (1) certain algorithms require a partial ordering and not necessarily a total ordering, and (2) to use those algorithms, you must implement less-than, but any other comparison operator is ignored by the algorithm; instead, less-than is used to figure out greater-than and equal-to as needed. This was considered better than requiring programmers to implement a collection of comparison operators, and trusting those programmers to make those operators act consistently with each other (e.g., never say that “a” and “b” are both less-than and greater-than each other).

The spaceship operator seems to address this specific case ( https://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p0515r0... ). According to Herb Sutter (note that his name is on the proposal), “We added the C++20 spaceship operator to the language, but we also applied it throughout the C++ standard library and that made the library specification nearly 20 pages shorter — a net reduction” ( https://herbsutter.com/2020/12/ ).

maxlybbert··on Once a death sentence, cardiac amyloidosis is finally treatable
That was my first thought, too. I guess the condition's name is pretty memorable.

It's been almost twenty years, so it shouldn't surprise me that new research means that people who died in the past maybe could have survived longer if we had known better. And, of course, Jordan was going to die some day. But I certainly wish he'd had more time.

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