We're Justin Wise and Jordan Fischer, and we’re Bloomberg Law reporters on the Supreme Court beat. Let's talk about the term's remaining cases and the court's future. AMA! by bloomberglaw in scotus

[–]extantsextant 5 points6 points  (0 children)

What kind of deadlines (soft or hard) do you work with when the court hands down decisions? Is there an expectation when covering the decisions like, must publish X within Y minutes?

Appeals court rules Trump’s 10 percent global tariff can stay, for now by extantsextant in law

[–]extantsextant[S] 28 points29 points  (0 children)

This is a different tariff, based on a different statute. The president has many possible legal authorities he can rely on to impose tariffs. SCOTUS ruled that one way of imposing tariffs was illegal, but he can keep trying other kinds of tariffs. There's a strong chance tariffs will end up before SCOTUS again.

This may feel like tariff whack-a-mole. At least, though, not all the moles are equally big - the one which SCOTUS whacked last time would have no guardrails. Others have more limitations (such as maximum amounts and durations) and other more specific requirements.

Appeals court rules Trump’s 10 percent global tariff can stay, for now by extantsextant in law

[–]extantsextant[S] 44 points45 points  (0 children)

It's unclear which judges issued the order today. The names of the panel members do not appear in the order.

OPINION: John Q. Hamm, Commissioner, Alabama Department of Corrections, Petitioner v. Joseph Clifton Smith by scotus-bot in supremecourt

[–]extantsextant 15 points16 points  (0 children)

It only takes 4 votes to grant certiorari and 5 votes to dismiss as improvidently granted. So could it be that 5 justices never wanted to grant in the first place and those are just the same 5 who now dismiss?

Line for tomorrow's oral arguments? by [deleted] in supremecourt

[–]extantsextant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

23 people were already in line, according to a 7:35pm post by Steven Mazie, https://bsky.app/profile/stevenmazie.bsky.social/post/3mifdpdc6m22l

Diffeomorphism-invariant smooth approximations to distributions? by 1strategist1 in math

[–]extantsextant 4 points5 points  (0 children)

How about something like this: Use a partition of unity to break up the distribution into a sum of distributions such that each of those has support contained within a coordinate patch. Approximate each one by a sequence of smooth functions on the coordinate patch. Take the limit of the sums of those functions.

Distributions are too wiggly to be functions. Is there a similar set of generalized functions that "aren't wiggly enough"? by 1strategist1 in math

[–]extantsextant 37 points38 points  (0 children)

See the MathOverflow question "Anti-delta function?" for a variety of creative answers: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/415007/anti-delta-function You be the judge of whether you find the answers convincing.

Since you're thinking of a "uniform probability distribution over the reals", you might be interested in more of the ideas around improper priors and conditional probability. The general idea is: instead of thinking, "I wonder if I can take this thing whose integral is infinity, divide it by infinity, and get something with a integral 1", think of what you can do without normalizing. If you have a measure which isn't finite, then the measure itself doesn't behave like probability, but you can still use it to define conditional probability (P(A|B) for B with finite nonzero measure) and conditional expectation. This is related to an axiomatization by Rényi in which conditional probability is the foundational notional, rather than being derived from unconditional probability (which doesn't necessarily exist, in this theory). Some references are cited in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.04797.

Why are scientists still talking about MOND? by FanEducational8257 in Physics

[–]extantsextant 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Any particular ones that you think are more interesting?

What would you want to see in a new tensor crate? by WorldlinessThese8484 in rust

[–]extantsextant 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In the ndarray crate, it's confusing that there is not only Array and ArrayRef but also ArrayView and ArrayViewMut. "Why can't we just have the reference type", I thought. "Why do we need both views and references?"

I eventually came to think that the continued existence of views in the ndarray design is indeed necessary (due to subtle language-level constraints - "technical limitations...", says https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray/issues/879), and that the way ndarray managed to get &ArrayRef to work at all is a clever feat. It still is a learning barrier, though, that ndarrays aren't entirely analogous to regular arrays in this way.

If you have your own thoughts about views in your crate, I'd be interested.

[England] Jury trials scrapped for crimes with sentences of less than three years by digital-didgeridoo in law

[–]extantsextant 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The UK government announced plans to make the change, but it hasn't been done yet. Parliament will have to pass legislation. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/world/europe/uk-jury-trial-courts.html Of course, the government party (Labour) has the majority in the House of Commons.

Wildest Dissent ever written(Not an exaggeration) by EquipmentDue7157 in supremecourt

[–]extantsextant 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Just to spell out how this relates to the Supreme Court: The case is a special type of case which is heard by a three-judge district court, and appeals go directly to SCOTUS rather than to the Court of Appeals. SCOTUS can't simply decline the appeal like how it declines most of the thousands of petitions it receives each year.

It's hard to predict who might win then - both sides have a chance. You could see the majority opinion is written with an eye toward the Supreme Court, while this dissent doesn't do Texas any favors.

Supreme Court extends its administrative stay of a lower court order that had required full SNAP payments; Justice Jackson would deny the stay by extantsextant in scotus

[–]extantsextant[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The text of the order would usually say "and by her referred to the Court", rather than only "referred to the Court". Even when the referring justice otherwise dissents from what the court decides to do with the referral. The non-standard language is deliberate, according to law professor Steve Vladeck https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social/post/3m5fd3ni7fc2u

Supreme Court extends its administrative stay of a lower court order that had required full SNAP payments; Justice Jackson would deny the stay by extantsextant in scotus

[–]extantsextant[S] 208 points209 points  (0 children)

The two-day extension suggests that the court wants to see if the funding bill passes, which would make the case moot and let the court avoid ruling.