I spent those years in dll hell.

…and why do kids these days say ooh-wooh?

Apparently the court system has to make decisions regarding this case without knowing the medical justification for euthanasia.

Her father believes his daughter is generally healthy, and his lawyer previously argued in court that any physical symptoms she presents are a result of psychological conditions.

I wonder if she has treatment-resistant anorexia. I have read somewhere about people with that diagnosis seeking euthanasia.

This is why my programs don’t come with documentation. If you want to use them, the best I can do is a messy script that “works for me”.

Just drape your coat over your arm in front of you like an elegant gentleman. No one will ever suspect.

For journalists, it raises a question: Should a public official’s family be held to the same standards as that official themselves?

Bullshit. It raises the question: Should a Supreme Court Justice be believed unconditionally when he offers an excuse for what really looks like inappropriate bias? The discovery that another flag associated with the January 6 attack flew in front of Alito’s beach house has shown that the NYT was correct not to accept his story about his wife. I’m honestly surprised by the discussion of how a judge’s family is expected to behave - it’s as if a dead body was found in Alito’s house, he said that he had no idea how it got there, and the press started talking about whether or not he had a responsibility to monitor access to his property more closely.

Sometimes when I open my mouth really wide, I somehow spray a little stream of saliva, like from a squirt gun. It makes me feel like the dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park, but so far I haven’t been able to do it on purpose.

Their problem:

So apparently NetHack has a mechanic that slightly changes how the game plays every time it’s full moon according to your system clock

The model wasn’t trained on a full moon. They had a system to set up the environment for replicable results but it didn’t include modifying the system time.

It reminds me of another bug with the system time, which a friend of mine encountered. He was working on hardware and he was getting a lot of units that worked fine at the factory, immediately failed at the client’s location, and then worked again when they were returned to the factory. It turned out that when these machines were turned on, their embedded OS automatically queried some server to update the current time. The client’s internet connection had such high latency that the server’s response only came back after the machine was already in use. This generated a huge delta-t value that triggered the sanity checks and shut the machine down. The factory had a much lower-latency connection and so the race condition could never be replicated there.

As for the weirdest bug I ever encountered myself: a compiler generating bad machine code. I have often said that the worst part of programming is that the computer always does exactly what you tell it to, but that was the one and only time in twenty years that the computer actually didn’t.

Fear? My impression is that they’re looking for trouble, not trying to avoid it.

buying bottled water

perfectly good pond in background

I also responded, “So, you are saying that property rights have priority over human rights?”

In this vein, I enter another definition of “trespassing” as “an unlawful act committed on the person, property, or rights of another.”

When university presidents and chancellors call in campus or municipal police officers to dismantle peaceful tent encampments and arrest demonstrators, they commit trespass against “the person” and their First Amendment right to “freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Not quite at the Sovereign Citizen level of legal misunderstand but getting there…

There are already solid-red states with no blue urban areas. I suppose it’s technically true that people die in these states (all humans are mortal) but the implication that everyone there except rich landowners is likely to die prematurely is ridiculous.

This claim that the frozen embryos should be considered children according to Texas law has been thrown out repeatedly by Texas courts. It’s almost certainly not going anywhere.

The same thing that already happens to most of them now, I suppose: their basic rights are protected by the Constitution but if they want to live in a community that welcomes them then they might need to move. In the specific situation this article is about, the queer people in eastern Oregon would have to deal with the same issues that the queer people in Idaho already deal with.

In general, I sympathize with the desire to rescue people from the customs of their community, but I don’t think that doing so by imposing our customs on their community is a good idea except in the most extreme cases. It violates the golden rule: I wouldn’t want outsiders imposing their customs on me, even if someone in my community was being mistreated according to the customs of those outsiders. It also doesn’t seem to work very well in practice. It has failed in extreme cases like the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and I fear that it is currently failing in the USA.

Democracy works well when people have similar general goals and just disagree about how to accomplish them. It doesn’t work well when people have opposing goals. Thus I have a lot of sympathy for these people even though I disagree with their politics. Why should they have to follow the rules set by culturally dissimilar coastal cities far away rather than the rules set by much more similar and much closer Idaho?

If I could remake the US government from scratch, I think I might create something like the self-governing cities of medieval Europe. The Democratic/Republican divide is largely an urban/rural one, and this way both the urban and the rural areas would have the local governments and the representatives that the majority wanted. Real-world state lines do a poor job of demarcating regions where most of the people have similar values. A better system is possible, but in practice there’s too much inertia to make such large changes.

Are you claiming that Batman wears spandex because originally he was supposed to be naked but the CCA wouldn’t allow that?

It’s easy to act self-righteous when that has no consequences, but in practice most people on this planet live in countries (including democratic countries) that probably would actually kill the children in an analogous scenario.

If you present me with a trolley problem in which the only way to destroy Hamas also kills a million children, I won’t know what the right answer is. I suppose it would depend on what would happen to Israel if Hamas wasn’t destroyed.

However, the moral calculus for nations is not the same as it is for individuals. The standard established the last time the Western world fought a war it took seriously does seem to be “as many as it takes” and I suspect that this would still be the standard if such a war happened again. (All those nuclear missiles we have ready aren’t precise weapons…) In that context, demanding that Israel should show restraint that other countries haven’t and wouldn’t seems like hypocrisy.

Deadpool. He’s not funny, he’s just obnoxious.

I assume the genie’s rule is “if I help you, I help him twice as much” rather than simply “I do to him twice as much of exactly the same thing I did to you” because otherwise it’s way too easy to kill the other guy while helping yourself.