Zagorath

Presidents have immunity? Cool. Biden, time to order a hit on Trump.

Actually long desks are no longer considered best practice. At my work, some devs have a lazy suzan, while others prefer a circle that they can pivot around to face the right computer.

I do think that the idea of judicial review itself makes sense. After all, what’s the point of a constitution if the legislature can just makes laws that go directly against it? The problem, in my view, is that the constitution covers too many things, and does so in far too unspecific terms, which makes for an incredibly broad range of possible political interpretations.

One take I’ve seen some Australian lawyers suggest is that the extent of politicisation of America’s Supreme Court is an inevitable result of how highly political their constitution is.

In Australia, our constitution deals with the basic functioning of government; how elections take place, who can vote, and mostly fairly boring procedural stuff like that.

America’s constitution quite famously lays out a number of very specific rights. Rights that are, by their very nature, quite politiciseable and open to interpretation. If SCOTUS is able to invent rights that they claim are implied by the written text, with the legislature unable to legislate around it, that’s a problem. It becomes even more of a problem when SCOTUS decides they can infer rights that are implied by those rights which SCOTUS themselves inferred. Deciding what rights people have—or removing those rights—should be the job of democratically elected representatives, not political appointees. So the court granting a right to abortion because they say it’s implied that you have this right based on the right to privacy (quite a large stretch, IMO), and that right to privacy being implied by your explicit right to due process (a more reasonable inference), is quite a silly arrangement. Better for the legislature to simply do their job.

Not that this is in any way “simple”. It would require a complete ground-up rewrite of the American constitution. And that’s obviously never going to happen.

Oh damn yeah. I was comparing YouTube Premium in countries like Australia (US$11.07/month), US ($13.99), and UK ($16.41). If you’re somewhere that it costs a tenth of that, it definitely changes the calculus.

Nebula is US$50 per year if you go straight to the website, but $30 per year if you click through any one of the creators’ own referal URLs. No region-specific pricing as far as I know (but YouTube does have region-specific pricing, which is slightly cheaper in Australia than America using current currency exchange rates, which is why Nebula is more expensive here than in America, in YT-months).

The vast majority of Nebula content is available on YouTube, albeit with sponsors/ad reads removed, and sometimes a week or so early.

There’s a fair amount of Nebula “Plus” content. Extra or supplementary material to videos that are otherwise available on YouTube, or an extra video in a series where most of the series is on YouTube but this episode is not.

There are also Nebula Originals, where Nebula themselves helped fund the project and the video is exclusive to Nebula. There are quite a few of these, but they’re less common than the other categories.

The entire library is available to browse for free without an account if you go to their website and hit Explore so you can see for yourself. Look for the Nebula logo star for Originals, the + sign for Plus content, and the lightning bolt for Nebula First. You can also use the filters near the top to see only those, if you want. To give a rough sense of the relative abundance, my tablet displays up to 9 thumbnails per screen, and when sorting by most recent, the oldest I see without scrolling is 20 March for Originals, 30 April for Plus, just 9 May for First, and when unfiltered it only goes as far back as 19 hours ago, including 2 Nebula First videos.

some companies just convert dollar values to local currencies

This is what Dropout does I think. It displayed some weird numbers like $91.74, but didn’t actually say anywhere that this was AUD until I read the fine print, so I almost started out comparing it to the US YT price. I assume the US price is a more round number.

Nebula just displays US prices and charges US prices regardless, I think. It’s been a while since I actually looked at how they do it.

YouTube Premium costs as much for just two months as Nebula does for an entire year (if you sign up through a creator’s code—US prices. Australian prices it’s about 2.6 months) Highly recommend, probably the best bang for your buck option.

Dropout is quite a bit more expensive than Nebula, and narrower in range of content (basically comedy panel shows, sketch comedy, and D&D), but it’s still only 5.4 months’ worth of YouTube Premium in cost (for your second & subsequent year—4.3 months for the first year discount), and you’re directly supporting the creators. Still a very good deal.

If you’ve got both of those, that’s 8 months of YouTube Premium’s cost, leaving 4 months worth that can be spent directly on individual creators’ Patreons, Kofis, one-off donations, or on their merch.

It’s easy to imagine a hypothetical way that could lead to problems. But in all the code I’ve worked with, either that scenario is avoided entirely, or other context makes it absolutely clear which IProductService is being used.

So, Democracy?

I don’t think so. When I’ve seen it done it’s usually not been random values injected (except when those values are secret keys which should absolutely not be stored in code to begin with), it’s usually injecting a service. Another class, usually with a name that makes it easy to trace down. Like if you’re building an OrderService, that might take as a dependency an IProductService, which would have injected into it the class ProductService (personally, I don’t like the Hungarian notation that C# uses, but it’s a convention and my preference for sticking to strong conventions for the sake of consistency outweighs my distaste for Hungarian notation). That’s easy to find, and in fact your IDE can probably take you straight to it from the OrderService’s constructor.

It can be used in bad ways, but if it’s used in the right way you should never have the situation you just described.

I’m really glad to see that text transcriptions of image posts are much more common here than on other sites, but clearly still not common enough.

or that China is doing in Taiwan.

?

Do you mean that they’re threatening to do to Taiwan? Because so far they’ve done nothing but posture. Or maybe you meant Hong Kong, which is certainly really, really bad, but I don’t think rises to nearly the same level as Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestine.

I respect enormously where he’s coming from, but he refuses to acknowledge the very simple fact that spoilers do occur, and in close-run races, they can change the outcome for the worse. He says the Democrats didn’t understand the winner-takes-all Electoral College in 2000, while he himself dismisses his own part in that. Yes, ideally, Democrats would have played a better game and won by a larger margin and the spoiler wouldn’t have mattered. But they didn’t, and I think every factor that lead to Gore’s loss should be looked at and criticised, including Nader’s run.

The first and most important change that could be made in America is moving to a real voting system. First Past the Post is a sham. It isn’t democracy. Whether the move is to IRV or MMP or STV or whatever almost doesn’t matter. Just move to something real. Eliminate the spoiler effect, and then you can begin to see real meaningful policy change.

It really depends on how much people want to get around it. I grew up in Vietnam, where when I was in about year 10 of high school, the government decided to start blocking Facebook. Their block was only DNS, so word quickly spread around the school that you could still access Facebook if you changed your DNS. This was before quad 9 or even Google’s quad 8 (the latter came around shortly after, which was a big improvement to how easy this became), so the DNS we ended up using was a difficult specific number to remember and communicate, but even despite that, by the end of the month pretty much everyone in school—from students to teachers—had learnt how to change their DNS to bypass the block.

People always say that piracy is more popular when it’s easier than the legal means. And obviously adding a DNS block to pirating is going to increase its difficulty, and increase the relative convenience of legal means. But if the legal means continues getting worse and worse, at some point piracy is going to look more appealing again, and people will figure out how to bypass the DNS block.

Yeah for sure it is. The biggest difference is that there’s a fairly simple way to explain the adjectival order: “opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose”. It’s apparently very difficult to explain when you can and cannot use contractions in a concise way.

the second phrase starts with an implicit “your” too

Could be. Personally I interpreted it as an implicit “the”. Doesn’t change the meaning either way.

Ahh yes, I knew I remembered hearing about this somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where. Tom Scott’s videos on linguistics are excellent.

Like @deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz, I was bothered by the contraction. So I decided to Google it in the hopes of explaining why exactly it’s wrong, in case you’re a second-language speaker.

I honestly thought there would be a simple explanation, but it turns out that there doesn’t seem to be one. I found one Reddit thread which linked to a now-defunct blog (luckily, [it’s still available through the Wayback Machine), another that linked to an earlier Reddit thread, inside of which was yet another link to an even earlier thread. Here’s the most recent of the threads in that chain if anyone wants to read it. But below is quoted the important bit from that archived blog post:

You CAN end a sentence with a contraction if it is a Type 2 (Verb-Negative), both in speaking and writing. You are always in safe territory when you end a sentence with a negative contraction.

Examples:

• No, I don’t.
• I’m a student, but she isn’t.

For a Type 3 (Modal + “have”), English expert Eugene Mohr says in his article in TESOL Quarterly, “The Independence of Contractions”, that “no contraction takes place if….have occupies the final position” in a sentence. HOWEVER, Mohr limits his explanations to contractions in written language, not spoken. In informal speech, native speakers often contract a modal with “have” at the end of a sentence. So, while it looks funny written out, you will hear people end a sentence this way.

Example:

• I didn’t go to church, but I should’ve.

Last, and most importantly, you CANNOT end a sentence with contraction if it is a Type 1 (Pronoun-Verb). Not in formal English, not in informal English – never! In this case, you must write out the entire verb that follows the pronoun. So take a look at the contraction at the end of your sentence. Does it contain a pronoun? If it does, then break it up into its two original words.

• INCORRECT: Yes, we’re.
• CORRECT: Yes, we are.

But the bottom line is yeah, the title here uses a contraction in a way that is not permitted by standard English prosody.

Let’s say it takes half a second to copy/paste and submit the message. That’s 50 seconds saved, round it to one minute. You’re only doing it once, so let’s cross over to yearly. According to the Munroe Automation Scale, you can spend up to 5 minutes on it.

I’d say that code took about 1 minute to write. Maybe 2.

Result: do the automation.