Gene_Parmesan

I'm a lawyer. I've explained this so many times it's starting to bore me, but I have to keep doing it.

Jury nullification has never existed as a right in any common law system. It is merely a descriptive term that lawyers use to describe a situation where a jury decides to ignore the law. Lawyers cannot instruct juries on its existence because, in the law, it doesn't exist. It only ever happens because juries cannot be punished for deciding contrary to what the law says; their right to their own reasoning is sacrosanct.

It describes a situation where the jury ignores the law, and lawyers can never instruct juries to ignore the law, in any circumstance. Lawyers can never say "I know the law says X but if you ignore that, we can't punish you hint hint."

It is a term that describes a crinkle in the law. It does not exist as a right, and juries are NOT entitled to do it, but at the same time, they cannot be punished for doing so.

People who whine about jury nullification are one step below 'sovereign citizen' types in terms of driving me nuts with their willful misunderstanding of the law.

> I’m sure they won’t even talk to anyone not willing to pay $100k+ per year.

Wouldn't surprise me. We had a vendor whose product we had used at relatively reasonable rates for multiple years suddenly have a pricing model change. It would have seen our cost go from $10k/yr to $100k/yr. As a small nonprofit we tried to engage them in any sort of negotiation but the response was essentially a curt "too bad." Luckily a different vendor with a similar product was more than happy to take our $10k.

I found the early game changes incongruous with the core design of the mod as well. The mod is about logistical challenges - specifically where trips are high volume but high cost. I don't know why a mod about that in the context of space exploring needed an extended burner phase, for instance.

There's a lot of theorizing that early sapiens intentionally set fires to clear thick, impassable forests and kill game in the process. The cleared areas would make post-fire hunting easier as well.

I don't know if this is the same wave, but a few years ago they declassified footage from military planes actively tracking UFOs. In the wake of that there was a bit of a flurry of naval and air force personnel saying they've "seen things." The UFO community - of which I am not a part - seems to have been veritably foaming at the mouth ever since.

Personally I'm always more interested in the conspiracy behind the conspiracy. It is undeniably more likely that the Pentagon has, for some reason, started quietly pushing out things in this vein than it is that actual aliens are flying around. I'm very curious as to what their motivation might be.

There's a lot of evidence, for instance, that during the heyday of Area 51 they knew they had to get out in front of civilian sightings of odd aircraft, and that project bluebook was essentially them just cross referencing sightings with classified test flights. So I'm curious about what they might be trying to get ahead of here.

> Having the same shallow conversations over and over with different individuals

I'm ADHD-neurodivergent so I get the point here, but think of this phenomenon as verbal handshaking. The point isn't the subject matter of the conversation, it's everything else about the exchange. You could almost get the same effect just from spouting word salad at each other, the content doesn't matter. It's how people feel out others whom they don't know very well, with a lot of observation gathering going on. There's a social dance you typically need to go through before someone else will feel comfortable engaging you on a more personal level.

I simultaneously agree with you (tor being another prime example of this -- they may not be able to see which tor sites you're visiting [unless they control the exit node] but they sure as hell can see you're using tor), and also think that at some level, the "what have YOU got to hide?" attitude is purposefully encouraged by the intelligence agencies as a way to slowly erode privacy expectations. "Good people don't need an expectation of privacy" is the start of a really dark path.

I think dev wages will stagnate across the board. I think the simple existence of the fear of being replaced by never-tiring, always-working AI will subconsciously prime devs to be willing to work for less. Devs have been in a market with a significant shortage of skilled labor; can we say that remains true after GPT hits the mainstream even more than it already has?

Especially when the system we're discussing is literally the most advanced AI model we're aware of.

Still not enough. Seriously. Once information is out there it cannot be clawed back, but legal agreements are easily broken.

I worked as a lawyer for six years; there are extremely strict ethical and legal restrictions around sharing privileged information.

Yes, this is exactly my issue. Libertarianism only lasts as long as it's not your $3bil at risk. Then it becomes "oh but the government can't let ME fail."

So isn't it on the programmer to ensure the safety checks are enabled if appropriate? I agree with the gist of your statement, I'm just not sure how this is the responsibility of the language itself. It ships with the option to build via a safe mode. I don't think it's a moral imperative of the language designer to ship without an unsafe mode. Even rust has unsafe blocks.

In most engineering professions, it's the engineer's responsibility to ensure appropriate levels of safety, not the CAD software used to build the blueprints. But every situation doesn't have the same level of safety required; backyard sheds don't have the same needs as skyscrapers.

I see an unfortunate number of people who seem to think that the only way to not get taken advantage of in life is to be cynical, and that living with empathy and joy is equivalent to allowing yourself to get walked over.

In my worldview/self-understanding, having solid boundaries is a core requirement of living joyfully. You have to love yourself in order to live joyfully, and having & enforcing clear boundaries is a requirement of loving yourself (where love is used as an active verb). Allowing someone else -- a company or a person -- to violate your boundaries is not compatible with actualized self love.

The main goal is peaceful contentment regardless of what the world does. Pursuing happiness as in euphoria is a fool's errand. Euphoric feelings are not something we can ever generate on demand. Instead, the goal is to control what you can, which is only ever your response to the world.

There's a sense in which this feels selfish -- which it is, but that's okay. I would say one thing companies certainly do is try to make people feel guilty for prioritizing their own mental health and wellness. Don't let them do that. Having boundaries at work is not something to be guilty about. For instance, I do not work more than 40 hours in a week without abnormal extenuating circumstances. I've made that extremely clear to management. I've certainly had a supervisor or two try to push the envelope, but I just make sure to not let the envelope get pushed. That doesn't mean I'm not living joyfully or with empathy. I can enforce my boundary without getting defensive, guilty, angry, or any other negative feeling. In fact, I've found that me pushing back goes much more smoothly when I do so calmly and without anger or defensiveness.

By the way, no one's saying this is easy. What happens when a family member dies suddenly? No one in existence can prevent themselves from having an uncontrolled negative emotional reaction to tragedy. That's okay. Perfection is not the goal, just continual improvement.

> even more extreme

I'm a musician & amateur home producer, and this extreme approach of yours is exactly what I recommend to people (and what I do myself) to overcome the feeling of "I can't get started because what I start on sounds bad and I have an overwhelming fear of making something that sounds bad." Turning it on its head by purposefully trying to make the cliched, trite, and generally whack song I can, can be immensely freeing.

Failure as a VC-funded enterprise != failure of the underlying 'thing' as a concept. A programming language seems to be a weird fit for the VC model in the first place, no?