Show me what Stalinism looks like
This is what Stalinism looks like

By the way, his sister does cool math art. https://bathsheba.com

Being targeted by Nazis doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. And thus, there’s nothing you can avoid doing, that will protect you from Nazis.

One of the writers has said it was about nuclear armageddon, so there’s that.

To be clear, it was the '80s. Everything was about nuclear Armageddon.

While you’re fact-checking Was (Not Was), be aware that some of the historical events alleged in “I Feel Better Than James Brown” may not have occurred literally as described.

I was attending Mardi Gras with Fidel Castro
Buxom cross-dressers threw fake gold coins at our feet
As we discussed the fate of the Revolution.
Suddenly, CIA men dressed in bikinis
Tried to stab us with fountain pens
But Fidel blew mustard gas through his cigar
And immobilized the lot of them.
Nineteen tequilas later, we had a deal:
Havana goes back to the Mob,
And Fidel and I open up a chain of Kentucky Fried Chicken shops.

It is, alas, unknowable whether Mr. Was actually felt better than James Brown. How do you feel?

For that matter, immunity from criminal charges for attempting to pardon oneself is not the same as the pardon being valid.

Better do it in DC. Murder can be charged under state law, and the presidential pardon power only applies to federal charges.

Supreme Court judges must be confirmed by a majority of the Senate before being seated.

The immunity from criminal prosecution has to do with official acts, not personal acts. It wouldn’t apply to Biden personally shooting Trump.

It would apply to a military proclamation as commander-in-chief that the Trump movement is a domestic insurrectionist movement that carried out an armed attack on the US Congress; that the Trump movement thus exists in a state of war against the United States; and directing the US Army to decapitate the movement by capturing or killing its leaders, taking all enemy combatants as prisoners of war, etc. (Now consider that the Army is only obliged to follow constitutional orders, and would have Significant Questions about the constitutionality of such an order.)

Further, the immunity is only from criminal prosecution and would not protect Biden from impeachment and removal from office by Congress while the Army is still figuring out whether the order is constitutional.

They should take down their shorts.

If your input is limited to ASCII, sure.

But ASCII is only a 7-bit standard, and only supports those characters needed by American English computer users in the 1960s. Lots of characters you might see in “plain text” are not part of ASCII; including all accented characters, all non-Latin alphabets, and many common symbols and punctuation marks including these: £€¢©™°

(Yes, you could get accented characters in the pre-Unicode days using 8-bit “extended ASCII”, e.g. IBM/Windows code pages. However, those are not really ASCII and they will break if the text is interpreted as the wrong code page.)

Unicode collation is the Right Thing today.

I’m confused. To me, “building a tree” and “parsing” are the same thing. If you end up with a tree representation of the structure of your document, the thing you did to get there is parsing.

A war crime occurred when Hamas put a military installation in a civilian hospital.

Once that happened, attacking the hospital to get at the military base is not itself a war crime.

You might wish it was, but that’s not what the law says.

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible, by requiring the programmer prove to the compiler that the code is memory-safe. This allows memory-safety with no runtime overhead, but makes the language comparatively difficult to learn and use.

Garbage-collected compiled languages — including Java, Go, Kotlin, Haskell, or Common Lisp — can provide memory-safety while putting the extra work on the runtime rather than on the programmer. This can impose a small performance penalty but typically makes for a language that’s much easier on the programmer.

And, of course, in many cases the raw performance of a native-code compiled language is not necessary, and a bytecode interpreter like Python is just fine.

The best code editor is the one that works well with your other tools, including your compiler and your keyboard.

Corollary: If you use an unusual compiler or an unusual keyboard, this may change what the best editor for you is.

Some other ways:

Cultivate bitterness.

Find the pessimists in your organization, and disappoint them.

Make mean cynicism a part of your workplace culture. Do this by example: Promote mean cynics and put them in charge of things. But do it also by conversion: Behave in a way that makes mean cynics’ view of the world correct.

Reward bad personal habits to create internal conflicts between work and health.

If someone skips sleep to finish a project, give them a bonus. This gives them an internal conflict between approval and health, and teaches them that they can sacrifice their health to receive a reward.

Encourage a hard-drinking culture in teams that have stressful roles that demand team cohesion, like SRE or Ops teams with on-call requirements. This gives them an internal conflict between their support network and health.

If someone is sick, injured, bereaved, or otherwise suffering: Make it clear how much their condition is inconvenient to their coworkers, and how much their projects are impacted by their absence. Assure them that all will be well once they can conclude their personal problems and commit to the team. Do not, however, offer them any specific help; if they express specific needs for accommodation, disregard them as idle and unrealistic wishes.

There’s good money in “based on a true story”. Conspiracy theories sell books, get eyeballs on web ads, make fame, and boost political campaigns. When a person is rewarded for turning their speculations or outright lies into “nonfiction” form, they’re likely to persist in doing it.

You should probably be more concerned about DNS than HTTPS. DNS is a point where government censors actually do go after web sites they don’t like.

If DNS is transiently down, the most common mail domains are still in local resolver cache. And if you’re parsing live user requests, that means the IP network itself is not in transient failure at the moment. So it takes a pretty narrow kind of failure to trigger a problem… And the outcome is the app tells the user to recheck their email address, they do, and they retry and it works.

If DNS is having a worse problem, it’s probably down for your mail server too, which means an email would at least sit in the outbound mail spool for a bit until DNS comes back. Meanwhile the user is wondering where their confirmation email is, because people expect email delivery in seconds these days.

So yeah … yay, tradeoffs!

(Confirmation emails are still important for closed-loop opt-in, to make sure the user isn’t signing someone else up for your marketing department’s spam, though.)

The only way to correctly validate an email address is to send a message to it, and verify that it arrived.

If you’re accepting email addresses as user input (e.g. from a web form), it might be nice to check that what’s to the right of the rightmost @ sign is a domain name with an MX or A record. That way, if a user enters a typo’d address, you have some chance of telling them that instead of handing an email to user#example.net or user@gmailc.om to your MTA.

But the validity of the local-part (left of the rightmost @) is up to the receiving server.