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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • 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.





  • I’m not sure why it’s “obviously” good to move from one mechanism to two: as a user I now have to categorise every path to work out which is appropriate.

    What I said was less about adding to a function signature than it was about adding to a facade - that is, a system boundary, although the implementation may be the same depending on language. People typically use exceptions pretty badly - a function signature with a baggage-train of internal exceptions that might be thrown by implementation guts is another antipattern that gives the approach a bad rep. Errors have types too (or they should have), and the typical exception constructor has a wrapper capability for good reason.







  • That’s the thing about dog-whistles.

    The defence you posit is the same as a politician chosing words carefully to imply one thing, while technically not lying: for aome reason they think that’s a defence, but were a six-year-old try it they’d be straight off to the naughty step.

    She lit a fire which was fanned by agents provocateurs from outside the country (ie, Farrage and Yaxley-Lennon). The useful idiots picked it up and rioted with it.



  • I’d be cautious about the “kill -9” reasoning. It isn’t necessarily equivalent to yanking power.

    Contents of application memory lost, yes. Contents of unflushed OS buffers, no. Your db will be fsyncing (or moral equivalent thereof) if it’s worth the name.

    This is an aside; backing up from a volume snapshot is half a reasonable idea. (The other half is ensuring that you can restore from the backup, regularly, automatically, and the third half is ensuring that your automated validation can be relied on.)