gedhrel

Excel famously misidentifies all trees as dates.

The score for "The Mission" is another absolutely cracking one.

Experience. For what it's worth, the instinct I distrust is absolutism.

I think it's like the distinction between art and obscenity; it's not a nuanced distinction in the case in question. If it were, I'd largely trust UK courts to get it right (they are by-and-large capable of this, and much less politicised than their US counterparts).

It's a real pity they've ruled out the major course that could help rectify this.

I don't doubt that the parliamentary committee on ethics is looking at it.

I'm coming around to it.

I think unqualified freedom to say anything can lead to negative utility, pragmatically speaking. Malicious lies bring less than nothing to discourse.

I'm concerned that the libel system can be abused, of course; and I don't approve of arresting octogenerians under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for shouting "nonsense!" at Jack Straw. But I don't see there being a need to draw a distinction between online and in person speech, and I think that incitement to riot isn't something I'd typically defend.

Having said that: I hope the woman in question (who has a history of being a deniable pot-stirrer) gets a trial rather than copping a plea, because the bounds of these things are worth testing.

That's a cracking article.

My own use of jvm errors tends to follow the same kinds of patterns: I think the major fault with that model is having RuntimeException as a subclass of Exception, because it's really intended for abandonment-style errors. (The problem is that lots of people use it instead as an exception system in order to cut down on boilerplate.)

I find it eye-opening that the author prefers callsite annotation with try (although I'm not going to argue with their experience at the time). I can see this being either "no big deal" or even "a good thing" to Rust users in particular - mutability and borrowing annotations at both callsite and definition aren't required to make the language work afaict (your ide will instantly carp if you miss 'em out) but the increased programmer visibility is typically seen as a good thing. (Perhaps this is down to people largely reviewing PRs in a browser, I dunno.) Certainly there's tons of good food for thought there.

In which case, perhaps unqualified "freedom of speech" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

(I appreciate that Chomsky's opinion resonates more with 1968 than now.)

Have you seen pictures of the sub? What makes you think the wiring was all hidden?

You joke, but watch this:

https://archive.org/details/take-me-to-titanic

from 29 minutes in. A last-minute adjustment before launch plugged in a thruster backwards; no protocol to check the behaviour prelaunch. They doscovered it when they got to the bottom.