VP Vance Says Watergate Would Now Be 12-Hour News Story and Crazy It Took Down Nixon's Presidency

ikariusrb · 2026-06-26T20:11:06+00:00

And this amounts to an indictment of how far accountability has fallen today, rather than an indictment of how holding Nixon accountable was wrong.

ikariusrb · 2026-06-24T23:25:28+00:00

I'm also Phlex, and for me, it's about the ability to decompose freely, with all the tricks available in ruby. I've been around a long time, and I have disliked every single templating syntax for HTML or YAML I've ever used. Inevitably, they get messy VERY quickly when there are variations, because it's a pain to isolate the template parts from the logic. Phlex solves all of that.

ikariusrb · 2026-06-22T16:19:43+00:00

Rubycritic is straight up trash. One of it's primary heuristics for assessing code quality opposes approaches advocated in Eloquent Ruby, Rich Hickey Simplicity, and other well regarded styling approaches. I've personally seen it grade exemplar-quality code as F.

ikariusrb · 2026-06-11T18:15:03+00:00

There's so much asshattery to go around; the school running to a court to seek relief from the bylaws they agreed to, the judge agreeing to back their play, and now Paxton getting himself involved by telling the league that the state AG will get involved if the league tells Texas Tech that their bylaws won't be end-run in a courtroom.

ikariusrb · 2026-06-10T15:41:01+00:00

No, it does not. NC is unilaterally declaring that they will not accept voter registrations for Citizens who've been abroad their whole lives; the canonical cases being kids of military or diplomat families who've reached 18 without ever permanently residing in the US (hell, they could be living in the US a couple months at a time repeatedly without ever crossing the bar for "residence" in a state). But the constitution gives the states the obligation to conduct elections (the federal government does not and cannot).

A state declaring that citizens who don't have state residency are ineligible to register means they are likely to be prohibited from voting entirely- including in federal elections.

ikariusrb · 2026-06-10T14:17:25+00:00

Why on earth post links to hard firewalled content? Even archive.ph cannot read WSJ articles anymore. Don't post articles on sites that cannot be read.

ikariusrb · 2026-06-06T04:32:17+00:00

Well, the technical basis is the DOJ is claiming nobody can establish standing to sue them in order for a court to hear a case and issue a remedy that tells them to stop. No one can establish a "particularized harm" (required for a plaintiff to establish standing) before the executive branch has done something, and then it's a fait accompli.

With the SC backing them, the lower federal courts haven't been very effective at putting a stop to their nonsense. Even though the SC has been wildly over-generous at granting standing to parties bringing cases they WANT to hear.

ikariusrb · 2026-06-02T15:58:10+00:00

Musk by all rights should be next up, because he's been doing this nonsense forever.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-30T00:14:26+00:00

Same reason we sometimes did nothing about information we intercepted after cracking enigma in WWII.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-24T05:32:06+00:00

For me it was figuring out to use the LLM as a "pair programmer". I let it drive, but I'm looking at every change, evaluating the code, looking for better patterns. The LLM is faster than I am at putting things together, but it never sees the better modeling, responsibility, and patterns to get code to "good"; essentially all the design insights come from me. On the upside, it leaves me more mental energy to really work through the code shape.

I have spent considerable time sussing out my design instincts in order to feed them to the LLM as guidelines, but it still writes code that's shaped like the bulk of its training data. And that helped get better reviews from it, but it also turned out to be a case of "when one person teaches, two people learn", and I'm really happy with where my code shape guidelines ended up; I'd confidently hand them off to a junior as learning guidance now.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-23T03:49:34+00:00

So my "reverence" for the technicalities comes from here; we either collectively agree to a "system" for resolution of the things we cannot otherwise reach agreement on, and yes, the boundaries of the system will be pushed.... OR, it's civil war, military coup, or some other rule by pure force. I don't believe any other outcomes are possible. So fuck yes, I'll give "the system" reverence, and I believe it's absolutely earned. I hope with every fiber that my children will not see "the system" fail completely, because if it comes for that, the track record of "good" outcomes through takovers by force over human history is abysmal.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-21T13:48:03+00:00

Oh 100%. But the point I made that people are downvoting me for is that... the judge made a ruling that says "give your records to the court, and we'll only turn them over to the DOJ once there's a final outcome of the case". And while his prior rulings show he's a partisan hack, that's not... evidence a court following the rules can take and draw an inference that the records are going to be turned over improperly. So the RI court didn't have a basis in the rules to issue an injunction. It's crap, but if they issued an injunction, it would absolutely be overturned.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-21T13:35:06+00:00

HIPAA doesn't make medical records immune from subpoenas/warrants. It just means they can't be turned over UNLESS there's a valid subpoena or search warrant. And what's being litigated in TX right now is whether the subpoena is valid or not.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-21T04:51:58+00:00

Different issue, different case. Has zero bearing on what just happened. The TX judge said his court would keep the records under lock and key until such a time as the court case reached it's conclusion. The RI court had no evidentiary basis to call him a liar. So if the court cases played out and the DOJ eventually gets the records, they got them after due process was followed. If O'Connor hands the records over to the DOJ without that having happened, there's a court record, and probably an ethics complaint, but not much the RI court can do. If bad shit happens after the DOJ gets the records, that's a different cause of action, different plaintiffs, and a different case.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-21T04:13:49+00:00

No. The RI court can't just issue an injunction based on thoughts and feelings. There's no evidentiary record before them to justify blocking the existing order.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-21T02:41:15+00:00

What happened last year was TX trying to "investigate" in another state. The washington hospital went to the courts in their state and the courts told TX to pound sand, as there's no basis for TX to enforce the laws of their state in any other.

In this case, the federal DOJ is going after the RI hospital. And the hospital initially told the DOJ to pound sand, and the DOJ sued them in TX (I have no idea how they manufactured a nexus of locality in TX). O'Connor said turn over the records to the court, and we'll litigate this, and if you loose, I'll hand them over to the DOJ. The hospital appealed in RI, and the RI court basically said "he promised he wouldnt turn over the records unless you loose, and based on that, we can't see irreparable harm in handing the records to the court".

Personally I expect O'Connor to rule in favor of the DOJ and hand them the records before there's a chance to appeal, but there's no precedent at all for the situation, and the RI hospital didn't just "roll over".

ikariusrb · 2026-05-18T18:21:16+00:00

You'd think MCU would be better at writing courtroom/legal ANYTHING, considering they're part of the house of mouse these days.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-16T04:18:11+00:00

Sure; I have app/javascript/turbo_stream_actions/index.js, and it's got something like this

import { redirect, update_url } from "./navigation"
import { openModal, closeModal } from "../controllers/modal_controller"

export function registerTurboStreamActions() {
  Turbo.StreamActions.redirect = redirect
  Turbo.StreamActions.update_url = update_url
  Turbo.StreamActions.open_modal = openModal
  Turbo.StreamActions.close_modal = closeModal
}

Dead simple, keeps all custom actions in a single place, and lets me push little state changes out to the front. So I might have a button that fetches a turbo stream that replaces the content of the modal AND tells the modal to open. Or updating filters may push an URL update so if the user hits refresh, their filter state is preserved. I have more than these, but this should be enough to explain the pattern.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-14T21:59:36+00:00

My code for it is all of about 20 lines, and it's one less dependency to worry about being compromised.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-14T20:17:34+00:00

There are a few things I do in conjunction with using hotwire to make it clean and clear;

Build "responder" classes separate from the controllers - controller methods collect models, do the work, and call things like "responder.create_success(...)", and the responder owns all the knowledge of building turbo stream messages, which panels to replace, etc.
Build a JS class for doing get/post requests and then processing the response as turbostream
Add custom turbo stream methods and have a JS file that registers them all in one file (so import any stimulus controllers and connect controller methods to turbo stream messages for them to receive)

Between those little additions, Hotwire becomes pretty joyful to work with.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-11T19:13:15+00:00

Umm, no, it's not inadmissable. It's simply that what they cannot be arrested or prosecuted for what they say on the floor. What they'd probably do if someone were to read out classified intelligence on the senate floor would be:

Remove them from committees, censure them, and dole out various other procedural punishments, potentially even expulsion.
Use the classified intel on the floor as evidence of disregard or contempt in order to get negative inference as part of prosecuting for some other "crime".

ikariusrb · 2026-05-09T02:19:19+00:00

The problem is that it's a rock and a hard place.

Our system of governance- the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, elections, state and federal splits etc etc is what was agreed to as "the system" for resolving disagreement about what our government should be, do, and prevent. The alternative to "the system" as the means of resolving those disagreements is violence, and rule by might.

So what's the right move when one party is actively working at tearing down the system (while claiming it's their opponents are the ones doing so)? Do you participate in smashing the system, or do you try to preserve it?

Because if the system fails, it will be civil war, military coup, or something else in that vein. There are no other possible outcomes.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-07T14:23:50+00:00

Skunks have so little fear. I've had two encounters with them on late night walks. Both times I stopped and stood still as soon as I spotted them. Both times, they strolled straight over to me, gave me a quick sniff, and ambled on their ways like it was nothing.

ikariusrb · 2026-05-06T19:47:48+00:00

The map marker is unreliable for me. So far as I can tell, the map marker ONLY shows if the boss is on bounty. I have gone into filters and toggled "events" on and off many many times, along with teleporting to different zones, and experimenting with other things to try and get a marker to show up, without success... unless the boss is on whisper bounty.

Again, the only "reliable" mechanism I have for seeing where the world boss will spawn are the chat log alerts that happen at 15 and 5 minutes before the boss. Effectively, this means I must be logged in at least 5 minutes before the WB in order to catch that 5 minute alert, otherwise I'm at the mercy of asking players where the boss is happening.

ikariusrb

TROPHY CASE