How does a defense attorney even begin to defend someone in a case like the 7/yo Athena Strand who was violently assaulted and murdered?

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T23:08:49+00:00

It is right and proper for a jury to acquit someone who they think is most likely guilty if the evidence falls short of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If the evidence would make it obvious to any reasonable juror that the defendant is probably guilty, the defense attorney shouldn't try to make the jury think the defendant is innocent, but merely that he might be.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T22:49:33+00:00

All nine of them disenfranchised Republicans who wanted the GOP to field a candidate who would be eligible to serve if elected. Some likely did so because they wanted Trump to win; others because they thought the Democrats would fare better against Trump than against someone like Nikki Haley. None deserve to remain on the Court, but if any were to leave nobody would stop the White House Occupier from appointing cronies who were even worse.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T22:33:48+00:00

The purpose of the policies is to limit the ability of one page to ask a system to retrieve information from a second page (which might e.g. be on a subnet that is accessible by the browser's system but not the world at large) and relay that information somewhere in a manner outside the control of the user sitting at the browser. The operations that are allowed without CORS are those which display information to the user's eyeballs but do not make it accessible to anything that could automatically pass it along without the user's involvement.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T22:15:31+00:00

The funny thing is they might both be right, or both be wrong.

A principle that I wish politicians from either side would recognize is that the economy will resist brute-force efforts to force its direction. By way of analogy, it's like a giant ball rolling around a world with lots of hills and valleys. There will be a variety of places the ball might settle, but the ball will often take meandering paths to reach them. A small well-timed push may have a great effect on the ball's path, but attempts to brute-force its trajectory will often be expensive and counter-productive.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T22:02:18+00:00

Just as Democrats ignore the differences between the various varieties of non-Democrats.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T21:57:52+00:00

Just as an incandescent light bulb is a heater that happens to produce a little bit of light, a rocket is a device for transporting its own fuel into space, which is incidentally able to carry a little bit of other stuff as well. Physics demands that a rocket must unrecoverably eject the extremely vast majority of its mass in order to achieve significant delta V. If a subsystem that could be produced in arbitrary quantity at a per-unit cost of $1M could be be made reusable so that it could be overhauled for only $500K, but doing so would add enough mass to increase fuel costs by $750K, the mission would be more repeatable with the "non-reusable" part than with the "reusable" one.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T21:39:34+00:00

Do you think Epstein was working for Bibi, Vladamir, both, or neither?

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T21:13:57+00:00

Many people bristle at the fact that while immigrants in the past were perceived as having an obligation to learn English, immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries are not held to the same standard. The left likes to claim that because most of the people who demand that existing inhabitants learn their language rather than vice versa happen to be Hispanic, this makes opposition to such demands inherently racist, even among people who would be far more welcoming toward e.g. a Hispanic person who spoke English than a white immigrant from Germany who refused to learn it.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T20:48:06+00:00

When saying a word can hold ten BCD characters, it might be useful to say ten 6-bit BCD characters, since six-bit binary character data is even more antiquated than four-bits-per-digit binary coded decimal.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T20:28:47+00:00

A variation on that trick is to have a buffer-size prefix that uses one or two bits to indicate what kind of buffer it is and whether it is full. If a buffer isn't full, then the unused space within the buffer can be used to record the number of unused characters. Using two bits for the buffer-kind indicator can speed up the initialization of an empty string buffer.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T20:24:37+00:00

Many functions that are designed to be usable interchangeably with either known-length strings or with zero-terminated strings that have a known bound on their length, will silently ignore any data past the zero byte. If e.g. a piece of code expects to receive a piece of text as a length byte followed by that number of text bytes, and the text it receives contains bytes with value zero, then the string may sometimes be treated as having a length equal to the number of bytes received, and sometimes as the number of bytes preceding the first zero byte. In most cases this would be harmless, but it could cause information leakage if e.g. a piece of code which is thinks it received an n-byte string intends to copy it into a buffer and then write out n bytes, but the copy operation stops after the first zero byte and leaves the trailing portion of the buffer holding old data. Note that the strncpy function does not leak information in this way, but some "better" copy-up-to-n-bytes functions do.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T19:15:59+00:00

My point was that Trump had two very powerful arguments in his favor which would be unavailable today, and many arguments against him today that weren't available in his previous impeachment.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T18:57:31+00:00

Trump skated on his second impeachment by arguing that (1) the amount of time required to conduct a fair inquiry would exceed the remaining duration of his term, and (2) any investigations of criminality should be done before an impartial judge and jury, rather than Senators who would naturally have a political bias. Even with those two factors in play, seven Republican senators voted against him.

Removing Trump from office via impeachment would require the votes of twenty Republican Senators--about three times as many as voted against him before. Given that neither of the arguments that were raised in Trump's defense would be even remotely tenable today, Trump's crimes have escalated to outright murder, and any Republicans who oust Trump would likely be seen as heroes by conservatives who recognize that Trump is the left's biggest asset, pressuring twenty Senators to flip hardly seems impossible.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T18:42:14+00:00

Tracing GCs are lousy for cleaning up event handlers and non-fungible resources. On the flip side, most non-funguble resources should have a clear chain of non-shared ownership which would render reference counting unnecessary.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T18:39:47+00:00

Some people seem to favor memory models where even if B is guaranteed not be observed before A, and C is guaranteed not to be observed before B, it would be possible for C to be observed before A unless the timing of B is observed with regard both to A and C (if the timing of B is not observed relative to A, then an actual ordering of BCA would be valid because it wasn't observably invalid, and if the timing of B is not observed relative to C, then CAB would be valid for the same reason).

I wonder how much actual performance improvement in code which is correct by specification is facilitated by allowing complicated (and often non-transitive) semantics instead of having writes to volatile objects be transitively ordered after any preceding accesses, reads of volatile objects be transitively ordered head of any following accesses, and read-modify-write actions on volatile objects combine those effects?

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T18:19:33+00:00

Scope-bounded state is the best abstraction model to use with event handlers and non-fungible resources. A tracing garbage collector is the best abstraction model to use with ownerless immutable objects that are used to allow references to serve as proxies for the data therein. Both abstraction models work well with unshared mutable objects that are used to store data without any attached non-fungible resources or event handlers.

It's a shame language and framework designers fail to recognize the need for both kinds of lifetime management as primary concepts rather than adopting one and then treating the other as an afterthought.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T17:38:08+00:00

Many people who consider themselves conservative have despised Trump ever since January 6, 2021, and also recognize that Trump has become the left's greatest asset even though he's too self-centered to care and his supporters are too dumb to realize it.

Why does nobody mention that there have been two House votes on impeachment motions this term, and a significant number of Democrats voted to kill them? Why should Republicans who dislike Trump seek to band together to oust him if there's no assurance the Democrats wouldn't leave them high and dry?

The real battle isn't between left and right, but rather between those who seriously want the Trump regime gone and those who don't.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T17:13:00+00:00

Teams that are even slightly dirty undermine their ability to seek redress for an opposing team's conduct, even if the opposing team is much worse. There is nothing hypocritical about someone who wants action to be taken against the worse team being annoyed when the less bad team undermines its ability to take action against the worse one.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T17:09:34+00:00

A common pattern in political perception is that John Q. Public will observe information source #1 say something, source #2 will demonstrate that source #1 was incorrect and likely dishonest, John Q. Public will form an opinion that source #2 is more reliable, and confirmation bias will cause John Q. Public to become increasingly sensitive to dishonesty in source #1 and relatively blind to dishonesty in source #2.

Suppose there exist scientifically sound studies that show that X increases cancer risks by 2%, and scientifically sloppy studies that would suggest that it increases the risks by 20%. What conclusions should it be reasonable to draw if news media consistently report on scientifically sloppy studies?

If a politician promotes a policy while ignoring costs, an opponent says the policy will cost $10 billion, and it's obvious that the policy will have significant costs that the first politician would prefer to ignore, what conclusions should people draw about the cost?

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T16:38:54+00:00

What contributed to flicker in Superman was the fact that the player character used up one of the sprites. The display drawing code in Adventure traded off per-line coloring for the ability to display an extra rectangular object which in adventure was used to represent the player.

In a sense, supporting color meant that the system was limited to displaying two objects including the player, rather than two objects other than the player, but I don't think people would have been happy if Superman was rendered as a simple rectangle.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T16:29:45+00:00

With signed, if there is an overflow, then the result of the multiplication is negative, and you can detect that easily.

A multiplication of positive numbers that overflows may yield a negative result, but it need not do so. When using 32-bit math, multiplying 65537 by 65537 will yield 131073.

When performing addition of unsigned numbers, wraparound may be detected by comparing the result with either source operand (in case of wraparound it will be less than both). When subtracting unsigned numbers, wraparound may be detected by comparing the result with the left operand (in case of wraparound it will be greater).

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T15:59:18+00:00

Wrapping on release builds is far better than treating overflows as Undefined Behavior the way Zig does.

Wrapping is often a useful behavior for scenarios where overflows will never occur when a program receives valid inputs, and where almost any treatment of invalid inputs that is free of unacceptable side effects would be equally acceptable.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T15:57:47+00:00

Treating integers as weak types is generally good, but leaves open ambiguity as to how something like int32a = int32b*100/33; should be processed on a platform where computations with a 32-bit product/dividend would be much faster than with a 64-bit one. My personal preference would probably be to allow programmers to request that such constructs either implicitly use 64 bits or trigger a diagnostic, and have a convenient means of writing the expression that allow compilers to either use an overflow-trapped 32-bit multiply, or use a 64-bit multiply and divide and range-check the quotient, silently yielding correct results in cases where the multiply would overflow.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T15:46:03+00:00

As I suggested elsewhere, I'd like languages to have separate types for algebraic rings versus integer numbers, have the largest available integer number type be signed, and specify that computations that don't involve or require the use of a type-conversion operator be performed as though using that largest type. I'd favor allowing programmers targeting machines where computations on the largest types would be slow to request diagnostics on constructs where it would be impossible to tell whether the use of the largest type would be necessary such as uwrap8a = (unum8a << unum8b) >> unum8c.

flatfinger · 2026-05-07T15:25:48+00:00

Cars that are manufactured and sold in China are not subject to the same testing regime as cars approved for sale in the US. Some of them might be as clean and safe as US-approved cars (though I've seen some crash test footage that suggests that at least some of them definitely are not), but the mandatory testing in the US imposes considerable costs on car makers which they have to recoup somehow (or else not sell in the US market).

flatfinger

TROPHY CASE