Doc Avid Mornington

Github != Git

Bringing up his actions in a different job doesn’t really seem to have bearing on comparing administrations. Biden has a pretty bad history prior to his presidency as well.

But also, and more importantly, judging progressiveness just by final results, without referent to the era, is not useful. By this logic, the Biden administration could literally be rolling back progress, and as long as they don’t go too far, we’d still have to call them “more progressive than FDR”. The only useful way to judge progressiveness is as progress made - or at least progress worked for - from the starting baseline.

I think it’s reasonable to say Biden has had the most progressive administration since LBJ. I was really surprised by how good he’s been, relative to my expectations.

I get what you’re saying, here. That’s why I specifically disclaimed making any judgement about whether it would be moral, or wise. But consider the other side of that same coin: the court did this specifically to overthrow democracy and allow Trump, or any other president who will carry out Project-2025 to use this power to maintain an effective dictatorship. There’s no other explanation for this ruling. Would using this absurd power once, now, to restore a court that is loyal to the Constitution and People of America, be worse than letting Trump get in, assassinate any and all opposition, and end democracy? Could we trust it to end there? Would Biden install justices that would immediately reverse the ruling and bring things back to normal, or just install his own loyalists? I dunno, it’s complicated.

Ultimately, it’s also all just theoretical, anyhow. I find it almost inconceivable that Biden would do this.

If your SQL model has nulls, and you don’t have some clear way to conserve them throughout the data chain, including to the json schema in your API contract, you have a bug. That way to preserve them doesn’t have to be keeping nulls distinct from missing values in the json schema, but it’s certainly the most straightforward way.

The world has more than three languages, and the way Java and Python do things is not universally correct. I’m not up to date on either of them, but I’m also guessing that they both have multiple libraries for (de) serialization and for API contract validation, so I am not really convinced your claims are universal even within those languages.

I am not the other person you were talking to, I’ve only made one comment on this, so not really “hellbent”, friend.

Yes, I am pretty sure I read the comments, although you’re making me wonder if I’m missing one. What specific comment, what “case specified above” are you referring to? As far as I can see, you are the one trying to say that if a distinction between null and a non-existent attribute is not specified, it should universally be assumed to be meaningless and fine to drop null values. I don’t see any context that changes that. If you can point it out, specifically, I’ll be glad to reassess.

Is that an act of an insane person? It’s apparently legal, now. Do you broadly think that using violence against tyranny is insane? Our founders committed their lives and fortunes to the violent overthrow of tyranny. It would be much easier, sitting in the oval office, with legal authority granted to him by the very people he would be targeting, to authorize the extrajudicial execution of a few traitors. Do you think that extrajudicial execution is insane? Then you’ll have to admit that most presidents in the last few decades were insane, especially Obama. Is it only insane when the target is white people in power, rather than brown-skinned people overseas?

I’m not commenting, at this time, on whether it would be moral, or wise, but insane? I can’t see how.

Oh, they can read, they know exactly what they are doing. The Republic has had enemies within from the start, and now they control the most powerful branch of government.

But who, who is “you” in this scenario? Who do you think can just tell the court “no”? Let’s be specific.

Thanks for sharing this, it’s quite interesting. I found a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

Apparently, as you did suggest, “base 1” is a name that is used, but is somewhat a misnomer.

The article mentions that Church encoding is a kind of unary notation, which I would not have thought of, but I guess it is.

Enjoyable little rabbit-hole to zap my productivity for the day.

You seem to have missed the important phrase “in source code”, as well as the entire second part of my comment discussing that runtime functions that parse user input are different.

At the (SQL) database level, if you are using null in any sane way, it means “this value exists but is unknown”. Conflating that with “this value does not exist” is very dangerous. JavaScript, the closest thing there is to a reference implementation for json serialization, drops attributes set to undefined, but preserves null. You seem to be insisting that null only means “explicit omission”, but that isn’t the case. Null means a variety of subtly different things in different contexts. It’s perfectly fine to explicitly define null and missing as equivalent in any given protocol, but assuming it is not.

Closer to tally marks without clustering

Who calls it that? Who even uses that enough to have given it a name? Seems completely pointless…

It’s been a long time, but I’m pretty sure C treats a leading zero as octal in source code. PHP and Node definitely do. Yes, it’s a bad convention. It’s much worse if that’s being done by a runtime function that parses user input, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that somewhere in the past, but no idea where. Doesn’t seem likely to be common.

It’s better to have useful comments. Long odds are that somebody who writes comments like this absolutely isn’t writing useful comments as well - in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it happen. Comments like this increase cognitive overhead when reading code. Sure, I’d be happy to accept ten BS useless comments in exchange for also getting one good one, but that’s not the tradeoff in reality - it’s always six hundred garbage lines of comment in exchange for nothing at all. This kind of commenting usually isn’t the dev’s fault, though - somebody has told a junior dev that they need to comment thoroughly, without any real guidelines, and they’re just trying not to get fired or whatever.

Characterizing the voters as “lazy” is really failing to understand how bad legislators stay in office. We need to reform our electoral systems to make legislators more accountable to democratic oversight, not impose arbitrary limits that take the power away from the voters.

With term limits, the Congress would lose institutional knowledge. When a new member of Congress came in, they would only have lobbyists to give them introductions, teach them the ropes. Legislation is a difficult job that requires professionals, not just a bunch of newbies. We would be absolutely signing over the Congress to complete corporate control.

More democracy is better.

Less democracy is worse.

I think you’re underestimating the extent to which they really want these things, or their donors do. These issues aren’t new, and many of them either trace back to before the founding of the country, or are proxies for other issues which do. They’re just feeling bold these days.

I must not be educated. Please, what are the dangers of communism? And what, exactly, do you think the word “communism” means?

Why? Can you provide an accurate definition of communism, and a theory as to why you think it cannot be done without becoming a dictatorship? Can you provide an accurate definition of capitalism, and why you think it is more free?

Putin isn’t a communist, though. Far from it.

I mean great, I support this, but 450 people is “a massive march”? How did 75 organizations only come up with 450 people? That’s only 6 people per organization. Here’s hoping this grows a lot by the convention.