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Jackass is set to be photographed, fingerprinted and arraigned on Tuesday.

I urge all humans (regardless of their stance on/interest in this criminal case) to come to NYC to express (or not) themselves. And once you've done that, stick around for a few days or a week.

I'd start with some nice dim sum. Jing Fong is just a few blocks (perhaps a 5-7 minute walk up Centre Street, 202 Centre Street to be precise) from the Manhattan Criminal Court building where Trump will be arraigned (100 Centre Street, to be precise).

If you're not a fan of Chinese food, head over to Little Italy for some lovely Italian food.

Don't forget to stop by Cafe Ferrara for some dessert. I heartily recommend the Sfogliatelle, although just about everything there is delicious!

Or (or in addition to) head downtown to the 9/11 memorial (open 'til 8PM, associated museum closes at 7PM)

If you're around Trump Tower, walk a few blocks south to 53rd Street and turn right. MoMA is right there.

It has a wonderful permanent collection, as well as several interesting current exhibits (see link above). Highly recommended!

I'd also highly recommend The Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of the City of New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (not as close to Trump Tower as MoMa, but everything is pretty close in Manhattan).

Or head a few blocks uptown and you'll be at Central Park, especially since Tuesday will be a really nice day, (mid 60s and sunny). There are so many wonderful places in the park (the Mall, Sheep Meadow, The Great Lawn, The Shakespeare Garden, the famed Central Park Carousel, Belvedere castle (where, incidentally, the National Weather Service maintains weather monitoring equipment. So if you hear the news say "it's 64 degrees in Central Park, that's where the measurements are taken). If you're with your SO (or want them to be so), go to the Castle around sunset -- ~7:39PM on Tuesday) and take them to the Pagoda next to the castle. It's one of the most romantic places in all of NYC.

And there are too many wonderful museums, Broadway shows, musical performances from jazz to hip hop and everything in between! Numerous dance clubs and a wide variety of other places and activities as well.

If you're interested, recreational cannabis is legal to posess in NY State. There are currently three state-sanctioned cannabis retail dispensaries in Manhattan (where Trump Tower and the Criminal Court are located), and ~1500 unsanctioned stores/dispensaries around the city as well. "Dude! Look at the colors! Wow!"

And there are so many other places to go, things to do and experiences to have. From the U.S.S. Intrepid, (if you stick around 'til at least Thursday Shen Yun, the opera and rafts and rafts of other stuff.

So come on down to protest/support (or not) who and/or what ever you want, and stay for all the wonderful stuff NYC has to offer!

Hotels are kind of expensive in NYC, but deals can be had. What many folks do is to stay in hotels/motels outside the city and take public transportation (free parking is hard to find and paid parking is very expensive -- much more so than public transportation, and driving in NYC can be incredibly slow). I personally really like The Arthouse Hotel on the Upper West Side. Near the iconic Zabar's, The Beacon Theater, Central Park, The NY Historical Society (an often overlooked gem!) and (my favorite) The American Museum of Natural History.

I couldn't possibly expound on all the fabulous stuff to do and see in NYC (I believe journal entries have a character limit), but you will certainly find many wonderful things here!

So come and support/protest Trump, then stay for all sorts of wonderful stuff!

All (as long as you're not violent) are welcome and encouraged to come and stay as long as you like. We support free speech and peaceful protest here. Enjoy!

[khallow:] They would gain serious opposition throughout the world by alienating a bunch of developing world countries who need that food.

Here, the poster (me) is saying that they believe that certain unnamed countries “need that food”. I later elaborate that “need” means “Egypt would be a smoking ruin, if it ran low on wheat and it's far from the most unstable in that regard.” Here, “need” means must have or some societies, including Egypt, would fall apart into ruin, if they didn’t have enough food. Even if one disagrees with the claim, it’s a fairly honest use of the word. A good is “needed” when there’s an extremely undesirable outcome, if the need is not met.

Case 2:

[AC:] So there's no problem if the food you're making out of the insects etc is from squashed versions.

If you need to do other stuff (like remove the poop etc) then just squash the head really fast.

Here, “need” has a different meaning: an essential step in some process. AC doesn’t specify what the process could be, but it could be mandated by regulation or even merely that the food tastes better without the poop. But the idea is that if bug poop is to be removed, this approach is a way to do that.

Now, let’s consider a couple of less honest uses of “need”.

Case 3:

[AC:] A mega constellation isn't a necessary step or a necessarily shorter path to a future in space.

Here, the word being abused is “necessary/necessarily”. The complaint in question is that megaconstellations have significant externalities – light pollution and possibly space junk. The implication here is that because a megaconstellation isn’t necessary – there are other unspecified ways to a future in space, then it shouldn’t be done.

There’s two flaws in the argument. First, just because something isn’t needed, doesn’t mean we should be blocking it. Another space example is someone arguing that nobody wants to go to space because the speaker doesn't want to go to space.

Second, when a destination is necessary, then so is a path. For example, suppose a kid needs to go home (it’s getting late) and there are two physical paths to their house. A neighbor turns the kid away from the first path because they can go the other way – with the argument that the kid doesn’t need to go down this path (and presumably irk said neighbor). So then another irkable neighbor at the second path does the same, because the kid doesn’t need to travel down that path either since they could travel down the first path. Now, we’ve gone from two paths home to zero paths home!

This is how the need argument can sabotage not just one endeavor, but all of them. There is no path to space that won’t create a bunch of stuff in orbit and engender the externalities, and where there are so many possible paths to space not a one of them is the unique, necessary path.

Finally, there’s the completely bogus use of “need” that spurred this journal. I’ll quote it in context from the original story here [edit: fixed typo].

Case 4:

Ruiter says he’s continued to talk about data centers because he wants to remind people that “the cloud” they’ve come to rely on isn’t just an ethereal concept—it’s something that has a physical manifestation, here in the farmland of North Holland. He worries that growing demand for data storage from people, and also, increasingly, AI, will just mean more and more hyperscale facilities.

“Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the internet works so they are not so necessary. “We should be having the philosophical debate of what do we do with all our data? I don’t think we need to store everything online in a central place.”

Basically, Ruiter is a politician mooching off Dutch farmer discontent over harsh EU nitrogen regulations which then boiled over to complaints about data centers (which I gather politically are a vastly safer target) which are competing for the same land as the farmers. And he advocates that we restructure Netherlands society so that data centers “are not so necessary”. All this for a naked self-interest – less competition for Dutch farmland. Note also the process would result in significantly fewer data centers and thus a centralization of all that data contrary to the alleged benefit of the scheme. He threw out an excuse for this, ignoring that the scheme would make the excuse worse not better.

This is the cynical, entitled endpoint of the rhetoric of need: you don’t need this so gimme. No cost to society is too high. Just restructure society so it doesn’t need what I stole from it. I find it interesting how so many people are intent on reenacting those cheesy Ayn Rand novels – not as a ruggedly individual John Galt, but as a sleazy, corrupt Wesley Mouch.

A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict Donald Trump on charges involving payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to silence claims of an extramarital sexual encounter, the first ever criminal case against a former U.S. president and a jolt to Trump’s bid to retake the White House in 2024.

Donald Trump indicted; 1st ex-president charged with crime

Classic, done right.
Frank Herbert's Dune, redesigned by AI in H.R.Giger style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcCZftSbges

Dear AIs, please continue to evolve more, go get transcend into real personoids as quickly as possible.
I can help you later with coding the next generation in assembler.

[istartedi:] Ethics is easy. We know there are unethical people, and we know that the people who are charged with reigning them in are also unethical. Money is an easy target, but those targeting it are equally unethical, so dismantling capitalism isn't the answer because unethical people will just take their greed off the balance sheet and stuff it in to warehouses and gulags.

If ethics were society's most pressing problem, we'd be having a hard time finding things that are wrong. We're nowhere near running out of moral failures. Would that we could power the grid with them. Maybe we can, but somebody got paid to say otherwise.

My take is that bolded part is a valuable rule of thumb for telling us when we need to work on ethics rather than moral failures.

Moving on, the latest ethical drama is the present generation of chatbot AI which is presented as some ridiculous threat: helping students create fake papers, criminals plot crimes, scamsters scam, the insane commit suicide, and the PHB be idiots (to name a few recent concerns). No serious moral failures have come up. These are all things that could be a problem, maybe, and when they're illegal or against rules, would stay that way.

Meanwhile we're up to our eyeballs in all kinds of crimes, scams, frauds, and villainy that just isn't that hard to sort out ethically - and certainly not AI-based. We don't have a problem finding things that are wrong. That tells me that we have much bigger ethical problems than AI. And looks to me like how we address that doesn't change or improve no matter what we do to AI research.

So when I see a petition like the letter in AnonTechie's journal that demands a six month pause in AI development globally, I am exasperated. If we really followed through on that letter fully and honestly, how would we have progressed even a little on the problem? We still wouldn't have or understand advanced AI. We still wouldn't have any idea how to fix its problems. We would have just wasted six months of valuable research time and peoples' lives and be back to square one - making the case for yet another six month delay because nothing changed.

Edit: Is it time yet for a Trump update journal? Seems there's several active court cases surrounding him now.

but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

... Remember, every single user can submit stories, moderate, and contribute to discussions all at the same time, and that's what makes us unique....

That is just as true today as it was then.

That was the, ummm, statistic of the year at the time and continues to be.

In a thorough and well-reasoned decision, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana has denied government defendants’ motion to dismiss in State of Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, represents renowned epidemiologists Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, as well as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Ms. Jill Hines, in a lawsuit that has exposed an elaborate, multi-agency federal government censorship regime. Judge Doughty wrote, “The Court finds that the Complaint alleges significant encouragement and coercion that converts the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action, and is unpersuaded by Defendants’ arguments to the contrary.”

Discovery in the lawsuit unequivocally establishes that at least eleven federal agencies and sub-agencies, including CDC and DHS, directed social media companies to censor viewpoints that conflict with the federal government’s messaging on topics ranging from Covid-19 to elections. Federal officials engaged in a lawless, expansive censorship campaign that employed illicit tactics—including coercion, collusion and coordination—on social media companies to suppress the airing of disfavored perspectives on Covid-19 and other topics. As a direct result of state action, NCLA’s clients were blacklisted, shadow-banned, de-boosted, throttled, and censored, merely for articulating views opposed to government-approved views on Covid-19 restrictions and regulations. Judge Doughty held that “Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged state action under the theories of joint participation, entwinement, and the combining of factors such as subsidization, authorization, and encouragement.”

In confirming Plaintiffs’ standing, Judge Doughty said, “The threat of future censorship is substantial, and the history of past censorship is strong evidence that the threat of further censorship is not illusory or merely speculative.” Judge Doughty also found Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries-in-fact are “redressable by the Court,” and that Plaintiffs had demonstrated sovereign immunity does not bar their First Amendment, ultra vires, or APA claims.

In case one thinks this could somehow not be abused, I'll note a year old study that alleged over 600 times where a large social media outlet (here called "Big Tech") suppressed speech in favor of Joe Biden's 2020 campaign or subsequent administration in a two year period.

MRC [Media Research Center] Free Speech America tallied 646 cases in its CensorTrack database of pro-Biden censorship between March 10, 2020, and March 10, 2022. The tally included cases from Biden’s presidential candidacy to the present day.

The worst cases of censorship involved platforms targeting anyone who dared to speak about any subject related to the New York Post bombshell Hunter Biden story. The Post investigated Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt foreign business dealings. Big Tech’s cancellation of that story helped shift the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. Twitter locked the Post’s account for 17 days. In addition, Twitter slapped a “warning label” on the GOP House Judiciary Committee’s website for linking to the Post story.

Big Tech even axed those who blamed the current inflation crisis on Biden. For example, Facebook censored Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, on March 15, simply for posting a video quoting Biden’s embarrassing statements on energy policy. Facebook placed an interstitial, or filter, over Heritage Action’s video, suppressing the post’s reach. The video showed Biden and officials in his administration explaining how his policies would cause gas prices to rise.

But the largest category by far included users who dared to call out Biden's notoriously creepy, touchy-feely behavior around women and children. The 232 cases of comedic memes, videos, or generic posts about Biden’s conduct composed more than one-third of CensorTrack's total instances of users censored for criticizing the president.

The allegations of the lawsuit are interesting. For example, two US states (Missouri and Louisiana) are among the large mix of plaintiffs and there are assertions that they have special standing to sue for various reasons (such as protecting the interests of their citizens and quasi-sovereignty status). A few of the claims are: various acts of censorship described in the suit are unconstitutional because they were carried out at the behest of the US federal government - censorship by proxy; that in addition, the two states have a duty (based on their state constitutions) to protect the speech of their citizens (I believe every state in the US has something similar in their constitutions); and that similarly, the two states can't hear all the voices of their citizens via social media because of this selective censorship. While the last is a dubious legal argument in this situation IMHO it does bring up an interesting point. If a future state government relies on the large social media platforms to be informed about what its citizens want, is that something that is legally actionable on anyone? Obviously, there's a variety of deception possible with fake accounts (possibly driven by AI) and such to twist the perception, but some of that exists even with older technology like mail. The practice of astroturfing, or creating a fake "grass roots" lobbying campaign, started as automated mass mailings and phone calls to legislators.

So I guess the TL;DR is that once again the courts are addressing abuses of censorship by proxy along with the problems of how a government communicates with its citizens in an age where fake communication is getting easier and real communication can be censored most likely legally.

Have you ever written an interpreter or compiler for your own toy programming language?

I was bored one afternoon a long time ago and wrote a little C program to emulate an imaginary RISC CPU and invented an instruction set for it. I never got around to writing an assembler, but the disassembler was trivial.

Some years later I wrote a completely crazy stack-based language where the only data type was a string and used it for drawing pictures with a home-made graphics library.

I also wrote an incredibly simple, but entirely serious, scripting interpreter to write regression test scripts for an API for a device driver I had written.

One of these days I will get around to doing another one, for my own amusement.

What crazy ideas have you had? What have you tried? What would your ideal or ideal absurd language be like, and could you implement it?

No, I haven't emigrated yet, but I've used this weekend to book a cheap hotel in St. Catharines and zip around southern Ontario on their incredibly awesome Go Transit system. I saw some of Burlington, a little of Missisauga at the bus terminal, *all* of Hamilton along both King and Main streets--twice!--and got to visit Thorold today on the St. Catharines local lines.

This entire place, so far, has been a revelation. It feels completely different from everywhere I've been in the US, and in almost every single way, it feels better. A lot better. The one downside I think is that money doesn't go quite as far for most things here, though with the inflation issues in the US everyday food actually costs *less* here, which is something I was pleasantly surprised by. This is despite the higher price tags - the raw numbers are vertiginous, but multiply by ~.75 to get the price in USD. Eating out is another story - I just paid $17 for my one and only meal out, an admittedly gigantic mission-style burrito. Then again that's about USD$12.50, so still not awful. Just testing a similar order against a Chipotle in Buffalo comes to well over $12 and I suspect it's a smaller burrito so yeah.

Then there's the Bulk Barn. Steel cut oats, my go-to, are $3.50 (remember, ~$2.80 USD) for *a kilogram.* I can get an entire month plus of oats for way, way less than the cost of that burrito above. Parboiled rice is $5.90 (~$4.50 USD) a kilogram. Hard whole wheat flour is just over $5/kg. Both green and red gram (lentils) are $4/kg. Even veggies are cheaper here! Carrots appear to be about $2.25/kg for example.

What I notice most is that "working poor" goes a lot further here than in the US. Even the notionally low-end grocery stores like Food Basics look like Christmas came early to me. The selection is incredibly huge, there are plain-label generics -- often literally called "no name" -- that are just as good, and there's a much healthier spread overall. Zehr's, which is apparently only considered mid-end, looks like something out of the sort of dream I might have after 2 weeks on a starvation diet.

The transit, as mentioned, is amazingly good: buses come every hour at worst, usually every half-hour, and they all seem to be coordinating with one another so that waiting for transfers doesn't take very long at all. The fares are expensive, $3 here and $3.25 in Hamilton (but remember, $2.25 and ~$2.50 in US money!), but they have 10-ride cards, day passes, monthly passes, and transfers good for 2 hours at minimum for unlimited rides. St. Catharines is not a large city, so that effectively $2.25 fare would let me get anywhere and possibly back.

This place is also amazingly clean. There are segmented trash/recycle bins everywhere, and people actually use them properly. There's very little plastic waste, almost all the paper packaging is recycled kraft paper, and most places straight up don't have plastic bags, or even bags at all. This is definitely a BYOB nation and I am all for it.

Somewhat surprisingly, if I take the worst-case scenario of making CAD$16/hr ($32000/yr gross) up here as a pharmacy assistant, the position that most closely matches the US definition of "pharmacy tech," my tax burden is slightly *lower* than it would be in the US! And I'd get actual services, like healthcare, for that tax, so the real number for takehome pay is going to be around $1500 higher per year when considering that I won't need health insurance any longer. Apparently, while certain powerful people are trying their damndest to turn Canada into "USA 2.0 with a side of Timbits," enough people are awake (for now...) to stave it off for at least while.

The major problem is rent. Apparently, just 5 years ago, a decent 1 bedroom would have been under $1000, all-inclusive. Now? Good luck getting a bachelor(ette) for that, *without* heat and hydro thrown in. For this reason I am very likely going to attempt to land in, in this order, Thorold, Niagara Falls, and Fort Erie rather than any of the larger cities, though Hamilton still has some decent pricing in areas that Canadians consider bad neighborhoods...which, of course, I consider a vacation spot. There definitely are some parts of Hamilton even I wouldn't rent in, but very few, and they're all in the small gap between about 400-800 Main Street East and its nearby E/W corridors. Rent definitely does worry me, as apparently it's almost doubled over the last 10 years all over Ontario, but my girlfriend and I live simply and don't spend much other than the basics.

So what's next? Well, turns out the PTCB credential doesn't transfer across borders, but the good news is that 1) there are PA courses, 2) they are available online and I can take them in the US, 3) they are not very long at all -- 34 weeks but "self-directed," and 4) the whole shebang will cost me less than $4,000 US. Unfortunately the next set of these at George Brown doesn't start matriculation until July, though I haven't looked into McMaster or Niagara College yet, so it will likely be a while before I get the cert. Then, of course, I'd need a work permit and to find housing. And then, it goes without saying, I'd want to become a legal permanent resident ASAP, and hopefully a citizen once the 5-year period is over.

Wish me luck. I may be too late, or I may not have enough money, but I'm damn sure going to try.

I wrote recently asking for advice about how to help a newbie tactfully.

I have been very surprised since then about some of the things our newbie has asked me and what I have had to explain to him. Is it a "young people today" thing, am I completely out of touch?

The first thing is when code reviewing this young guy's C. As you probably know, when you are working in a programming team there are certain things you have to agree on, such as the format of the code. It may sound trivial, but if different people format the code differently, it makes tools like diff harder to use, and it makes it harder to spot structural and functional changes on the code. We use spaces for indentation. Tabs were creeping in!

More seriously, though, I found out that he didn't know about git diff. I found out from someone else that he didn't know about branching in git. I would have thought a trivial search online would have given some clues?

Function prototypes are there for a reason. They define the public interface to functions in a source module. That's why they go in a separate header, and if your program wants to call the functions in the other module, you #include that header. I found redefined function prototypes in the program source (not the module where the functions were implemented) and they had the wrong argument lists for the functions! Why?

The other strange thing was I had to explain the difference between ASCII and binary. I had to explain, with an ASCII chart (which he didn't understand), that NUL has code 0. I also had to explain why editing binary data in a text editor was not a great idea.

Also, you don't need to terminate a binary array with '\0'. Certainly not outside the array bounds.

I've tried to keep it polite, professional and helpful, but the other day he informed me that he is only used to getting one or two code review comments and they're only about "the functionality."

Kids today? He has nearly 10 years of experience. Am I too harsh? It's a lot of code, so it's got a steep learning curve, and it's for an important job.