Doc Avid Mornington

Not actually a doctor.

  • 0 Posts
  • 262 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle
  • No. I do not have a birth certificate, I lost it several years ago and haven’t obtained a replacement. More importantly, this is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Voter fraud is almost entirely non-existent. As I recall, the only instances of voter fraud that were uncovered in the massive amount of litigation after the 2020 election, were a tiny number of Trump voters, encouraged by his lies about how easy it was, and found out by his insincere attempts to prove Democrats were doing it. The risk of imprisonment is sky high, the payoff of one vote is rock bottom. But you know what does actually influence elections? Voter suppression. Trump wasn’t legitimately elected. It’s very clear from the statistics that if everybody who had a legal right to vote, had been able to vote, and have their vote counted, he would have lost, by a lot. And this measure is just designed to suppress more votes.






  • Bringing up his actions in a different job doesn’t really seem to have bearing on comparing administrations. Biden has a pretty bad history prior to his presidency as well.

    But also, and more importantly, judging progressiveness just by final results, without referent to the era, is not useful. By this logic, the Biden administration could literally be rolling back progress, and as long as they don’t go too far, we’d still have to call them “more progressive than FDR”. The only useful way to judge progressiveness is as progress made - or at least progress worked for - from the starting baseline.

    I think it’s reasonable to say Biden has had the most progressive administration since LBJ. I was really surprised by how good he’s been, relative to my expectations.



  • If your SQL model has nulls, and you don’t have some clear way to conserve them throughout the data chain, including to the json schema in your API contract, you have a bug. That way to preserve them doesn’t have to be keeping nulls distinct from missing values in the json schema, but it’s certainly the most straightforward way.

    The world has more than three languages, and the way Java and Python do things is not universally correct. I’m not up to date on either of them, but I’m also guessing that they both have multiple libraries for (de) serialization and for API contract validation, so I am not really convinced your claims are universal even within those languages.

    I am not the other person you were talking to, I’ve only made one comment on this, so not really “hellbent”, friend.

    Yes, I am pretty sure I read the comments, although you’re making me wonder if I’m missing one. What specific comment, what “case specified above” are you referring to? As far as I can see, you are the one trying to say that if a distinction between null and a non-existent attribute is not specified, it should universally be assumed to be meaningless and fine to drop null values. I don’t see any context that changes that. If you can point it out, specifically, I’ll be glad to reassess.






  • At the (SQL) database level, if you are using null in any sane way, it means “this value exists but is unknown”. Conflating that with “this value does not exist” is very dangerous. JavaScript, the closest thing there is to a reference implementation for json serialization, drops attributes set to undefined, but preserves null. You seem to be insisting that null only means “explicit omission”, but that isn’t the case. Null means a variety of subtly different things in different contexts. It’s perfectly fine to explicitly define null and missing as equivalent in any given protocol, but assuming it is not.






  • It’s better to have useful comments. Long odds are that somebody who writes comments like this absolutely isn’t writing useful comments as well - in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it happen. Comments like this increase cognitive overhead when reading code. Sure, I’d be happy to accept ten BS useless comments in exchange for also getting one good one, but that’s not the tradeoff in reality - it’s always six hundred garbage lines of comment in exchange for nothing at all. This kind of commenting usually isn’t the dev’s fault, though - somebody has told a junior dev that they need to comment thoroughly, without any real guidelines, and they’re just trying not to get fired or whatever.



  • Your comment was, as I stated, nearly non-sequitur because you only responded to one word of the first sentence of givesomefucks’ comment:

    I wish the Dem party compromised as much with Dem voters as they did with trump supporters.

    You responded to the word “compromised”. You responded as if you were responding to a general senseless rant against the very idea of compromise at all, a position which is not even present in that first sentence, and has nothing to do with the rest of their comment, or the overall point they were making about the belligerent and dismissive attitude Biden takes toward Democratic voters, and what different approach would actually win elections - I’ll quote the rest so you don’t have to scroll back:

    That’s the best way to get Biden the votes necessary to prevent Trump.

    Not the current strategy of:

    Fuck you, you’ll vote for me or get the fascist again

    Like, this should be an easy victory for any halfway decent candidate. Instead we get an 82 year old that won’t stop shit talking his party’s voter base for not wanting to fund a genocide rather than social services.

    In my comment, I attempted to clarify and expound on what would work, what they are actually doing, and the great gulf between these, trying to bring it back to givesomefucks’ actual comment, rather than what you imagined to respond to. Instead, you’ve responded, again, to a comment not actually made - accusing me of somehow “demanding” something. Where did I demand anything?

    And yeah, the filibuster isn’t real. A simple majority of the Senate can pass anything they want. They can drop the filibuster as a rule; they can carve out a general exception; they can even just choose to suspend it for that single piece of legislation. If a simple majority can pass any legislation they want, given that they actually choose to, then the filibuster is absolutely not real. It’s smoke and mirrors so they can blame the other guys. In fact, it’s probably not even constitutional - there’s no constitutional support for it, and the founders were explicitly against including any kind of supermajority requirement.