jack_h

I'm reminded of a number of critiques that have popped up over the years such as "C Is Not a Low-level Language: Your computer is not a fast PDP-11" and others I can't remember at the moment. In essence our "low level" languages are designed to run on an abstract machine that hasn't changed much since the 70s while the actual hardware it's meant to abstract over has become incredibly sophisticated. As a simple example consider how many programming languages have something simple like SIMD support without dropping into compiler intrinsics or relying on the optimizer.

I've actually created some experimental DSL embeddings around this idea before as I find it a fascinating area. Skimming through the Vx docs it seems like it is moving some of the abstract machine into the type system for greater flexibility.

If you change what the 2nd says then it would be interpreted differently. That would not have the same practical effect either, it would invalidate a chunk of the Militia Acts of 1792.

I understand that one side of this debate really looks towards the prefatory clause as somehow being operative, but that doesn't even mesh with contemporary usage of the pattern. Two very analogous examples:

> The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a State; it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this commonwealth.

-- Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, pt. I, art. XVI.

> The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a State; it ought, therefore, to be inviolably preserved.

-- New Hampshire Constitution of 1784, pt. I, art. XXII

This was in fact a very common construction in early American legal history. While membership in civil society may impose civic duties and responsibilities the foundational philosophy underpinning these amendments, including the 2nd, is that civil society could not abolish natural rights. The right to self-defense is deeply rooted in English common law stretching back nearly a thousand years. We therefore arrive at my two original quotes from Representatives Bingham and Howard addressing what they considered a weakness in the original construction of the Bill of Rights for which the people had no redress; Howard even mentions the operative clause specifically. They are not the only ones to mention this either given the backdrop of Southern Black Codes.

> He should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.

-- Samuel Pomeroy, Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1182

> As citizens of the United States [blacks] have equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.

-- James Nye, Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1073

The Second Freedmen’s Bureau Act even plainly states that "the right… to have full and equal benefits of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty, personal security, and the acquisition, enjoyment, and disposition of estate, real and personal, including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens of such State or district without respect to race or color, or previous condition of slavery."

To say that incorporation doctrine of any variety would not incorporate the 2nd would be to ignore both founding era law, philosophy, and the context surrounding the passage of the 14th which would render it a useless doctrine.

> There was a want hitherto, and there remains a want now, in the Constitution of our country, which the proposed amendment will supply. What is that? It is the power in the people, the whole people of the United States, by express authority of the Constitution to do that by congressional enactment which hitherto they have not had the power to do, and have never even attempted to do; that is, to protect by national law the privileges and immunities of all the citizens of the Republic and the inborn rights of every person within its jurisdiction whenever the same shall be abridged or denied by the unconstitutional acts of any State.

> Allow me, Mr. Speaker, in passing, to say that this amendment takes from any State any right that ever pertained to it. No State ever had the right, under the forms of law or otherwise, to deny to any freeman the equal protection of the laws or to abridge the privileges or immunities of any citizen of the Republic, although many of them have assumed and exercised the power, and that without remedy.

-- John Bingham, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 2542

> Such is the character of the privileges and immunities spoken of in the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution. To these privileges and immunities, whatever they may be -- for they are not and cannot be fully defined in their entire extent and precise nature -- to these should be added the personal rights guarantied and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as the freedom of speech and of the press; the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances, a right appertaining to each and all the people; the right to keep and to bear arms; the right to be exempted from the quartering of soldiers in a house without the consent of the owner; the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures, and from any search or seizure except by virtue of a warrant issued upon a formal oath or affidavit; the right of an accused person to be informed of the nature of the accusation against him, and his right to be tried by an impartial jury of the vicinage; and also the right to be secure against excessive bail and against cruel and unusual punishments.

-- Jacob Howard, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 2765

It's correct to say that the second amendment was a limit on the federal government only as decided in Barron v. Baltimore (1833). Total incorporation was the intent of the 14th even though the courts ultimately re-affirmed Barron in US v. Cruikshank (1876) which was a 14th amendment case over the 1st and 2nd amendment. De Jonge v. Oregon (1937) overturned part of Cruikshank by incorporating the right to peaceable assembly from the 1st, later that year Palko vs. Connecticut created selective incorporation doctrine and incorporated double jeopardy from the 5th, and of course McDonald v. Chicago (2010) overturned the other part of Cruikshank by incorporating the 2nd. All this to say, incorporation doctrine is pretty convoluted. If you think that the 2nd amendment should not be incorporated but the rest should then that would make things even more absurd. There's just no way via either total or selective incorporation that you can exclude the 2nd without it becoming nine judges determine what rights the government grants you, thus defeating the entire purpose of the bill of rights.

Market economies create economic cooperation. The dinner you ate required countless people from ranchers, farmers, mechanics, chemical manufacturers, steel manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, paper manufacturers, tubing manufacturers, oil manufacturers, fastener manufacturers and countless others working on intermediate factors of production. None of them deliberately and knowingly cooperated, rather prices in the market economy allowed for decentralized cooperation between people who don't even know each other. That is the power of market economies. Command economies cannot deliberately arrange cooperation at the same scale due to information being too disbursed and rapidly changing.

So you are correct that cooperation can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions; those conditions require a small population though.

I'm not saying the government shouldn't be held accountable, merely that the due process clause of the 14th amendment is the wrong vehicle. The right to due process in the case of deprivation of life does not mean any deprivation of life such as due to accident or negligence. It's more about the state executing you for a crime. Engineering a way to get rid of people would just be murder, there's no get out of jail free card there.

The preamble isn't a source of any substantive power.

The second amendment is a pretty well articulated negative right in the same manner as the first or the fourth in the classical liberal school of thought. These are natural rights that individuals have and the bill of rights merely states that these are outside of the government’s sphere. The technology being used whether it be voicing your opinion on the internet, your house being secure from searches with thermal cameras without a warrant, or using modern firearms doesn’t alter the right or the government’s relationship to it.

The fourteenth amendment, specifically the due process clause at issue here, says that if the government exercises its power to deprive you of life, liberty, or property it must provide due process. In this case the government was not exercising such a power. It does not say that the government must provide clean water, in which case our understanding of what “clean” means would mirror the technological indifference of the aforementioned rights. Due process clause is just a really bad vehicle for this type of grievance.

> “He’s correct. … Why wouldn’t it [evolution] apply to universes when it applies to everything else?”

I kind of wish the article touched on "everything" a bit more. Biological evolution is not the only process characterized by variation, selection, and retention repeated over time. Language is another system that displays these properties, something known before Darwin wrote "On the Origin of Species". Darwin himself noted this in terms of morality in "The Descent of Man" whereby certain morals could help some tribes to outcompete other tribes allowing those morals to become more prevalent. Friedrich Carl von Savigny noted this in relation to the law. Carl Menger noted this in relation to money, markets, division of labor, the law, and the like. I think one of the most profoundly insightful books I've ever read was F.A. Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit" where he ties a lot of these threads together.

So while the "birth" and "death" of universes may be a bit too analogous to biological evolution specifically, I think it is entirely plausible that the order we call the universe could arise from some process of variation, selection, and retention repeated over time.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.” - F.A. Hayek

> What if we completely redesign housing: making it a universal right, while keeping market-like mechanisms for creating and improving it?

What follows is a list that basically says the State ultimately owns everything, but markets kind of exist insofar as it coincides with a goal of the State (universal housing). This is basically Fascism.

How is there a big difference between those two things? People want Netflix, people also want the output of AI whether that is lobster Jesus or something else. This seems more like substituting what people want, which clearly includes AI, for what some people think others should want. I can guarantee you there are people who don’t want Netflix and think it’s a waste of resources that encourage people to binge TV, become a couch potato, and end up being drags on the healthcare system. Should their preferences override those who do want it?

> What does a cheap microcontroller core need? Let's inspect what they are used for. Typical use cases are to interface with and quickly reconfigure hardware blocks in a larger chip, eg in an MP3 player, an SD card, or a USB stick. The hard work is done by custom IP and the CPU core is just there to occasionally prod a register or configure something.

This is not the only reason to use a microcontroller or 75% of microcontroller vendor (e.g. STM) offerings would have no customers. Not everyone has custom IP that does all the work either, that’s actually fairly rare. It’s odd to pigeonhole microcontrollers like this just to go on a fairly lengthy rant about interrupt latency as if that somehow makes RISC-V unsuitable to what is an incredibly diverse application space. Maybe the rest of their post has better arguments, but I’m not impressed enough by the first one to keep reading.

That's not what CU held. The idea that corporations have legal personhood with some degree of rights is much, much older than Citizens United.

Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that created Hillary: The Movie which was critical of Hillary Clinton. They wanted to distribute it shortly before the 2008 primaries. The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibited corporations from using general funds for electioneering or speech that advocates for the election or defeat of a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election.

The Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from stopping an incorporated association from independently spending its own money for political advocacy of a candidate. To put it another way, if I can spend my money to advocate for or against a candidate, why can I not get together with some friends to pool our money and incorporate to do the same? If this had gone the other way would you be okay with a corporation being forbidden from releasing a video critical of Trump shortly before the 2024 election?

There are roughly two orders of magnitude more microcontrollers in the world running code than application processors. GC is not acceptable on a microcontroller due to the extreme resource constraints. The GP post is correct, Go can replace some use cases for C, but it does not replace all use cases and GC is part of the reason.

Perhaps you could expand upon the parallels you’re seeing as it seems like you’ve fundamentally misunderstood my post.

> ... there is actually an ever-increasing number of things that used to have an absolute right (scientifically proven) answer that become controversial. Climate change. Vaccines. Whether the earth is round - that kind of stuff.

I think there are multiple things here that need to be disentangled. The first is that just because science "proves" something that doesn't mean the political, civil, or economic path is nearly as clear cut. While there certainly are people who just deny these things outright there's also the camp that accepts the scientific result but disputes how to deal with it as a society.

Second I've seen an alarming rise in what I would characterize as scientism, a belief structure around science itself where the "acolytes" of science do not understand the science themselves, but use it to reinforce their own worldview in the same way that deniers (heretics really) use other sources to reinforce their worldview. I have seen this play out within my own social circle as people will defer to experts as if they are a clerical class with divine authority to determine ultimate truth. To give an example in a much less controversial arena, how often have you witnessed people adopting fad diets because the "science" shows X is good even though the actual backing papers, that no adopter has read, are much more murky at best? This is an understandable consequence of having a limited lifespan where not everyone can know everything therefore heuristics must be used to comprehend the world, but the flexible heuristic which can lead to a change of opinion can be swapped out for a rigid belief that permits no change of opinion unfortunately.

Last I think this ultimately stems from what F.A. Hayek called constructivist rationalism[1], the idea that we can rationally construct our own social order. I share your own concern about mistakes that affect all of us specifically regarding philosophies that adopt constructivist rationalism such as the family of collectivist ideologies (socialism and the like) which are currently on the rise. My conclusion is that civilizations will evolve according to the culmination of all individual actors' actions and I personally have a limited role to play, although I am a classical liberal. Your last question unfortunately can lead some to conclude that a much more dictatorial society is necessary to produce a result that may itself not be possible and instead lead to an even worse result than the alternative.

[1] I highly recommend The Fatal Conceit by Hayek if you want to challenge assumptions your own worldview likely rests on without even knowing it.

UBI would be pure deficit spending which would basically double it. Our interest is already the #2 federal outlay at $1 trillion (defense is #5 last I heard) and we're already in fiscal dominance. So the end result is UBI would trigger much higher inflation which would make those UBI checks worthless.