A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • It’s reasonable to me to say you cannot sue the president for vetoing a bill, or criminally prosecute the president for commanding the military. The constitution says the president can do those things, and that the check on presidential power is congressional acts including impeachment.

    Yea I dunno … why not just have no immunity? It’s not like the whole idea of the separation of powers is to ensure power is freely exercised … it’s the opposite.

    If a president has to pause for a moment before doing something to ask their lawyer if it would be a crime … maybe that’s the point of having fucking legal system and constitution?

    Sotomayer’s dissent provided pretty good evidence (AFAICT) that the framers would have put criminal immunity into the constitution if they thought it wise … because it was a known idea at the time that had been done by some states regarding their governors. They didn’t. Cuz that’s the whole point … “no man is above the law”.

    And as for Congressional impeachment being paramount … I’m not sure that’s either necessary or even consistent with the Constitution (again, as Sotomayer’s dissent addresses).

    For example … Article 1, section 3 (emphasis mine):

    Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

    In short (AFAICT) … impeachment and general legal liability are not the same thing … and the latter totally still applies.

    Beyond all of that, the general law probably achieves everything that the majority’s decision was worried about (while they were conspicuously not worried about all of the other things that one should be when crowning a king). Civil immunity is a well established doctrine (government’s just too big and complex a thing for civil responsibility to make sense). And while I don’t know anything about it, there are similar-ish ideas around criminal responsibilities that just don’t make sense for the very nature of a governmental responsibility, war, I think, being a classic example. Sotomayer again speaks about these things.

    Overall, once you start to squint at it, the whole decision is kinda weird. To elevate the separation of powers to the point of creating literal lawlessness seems like plain “not seeing the forest for the trees”.

    The bit I wonder about, without knowing US Constitutional law/theory well at all … is whether a democratic factor has any bearing. A criminal law is created by the legislature, a democratic body. And also caries requirements for judgment by jury. So couldn’t an argument be made that the centrality of democratic power in the constitution cuts through any concerns about the separation of powers that the SCOTUS had, and enables democratically ordained law to quash concerns about whatever interference the judiciary (or legislature?) might exercise with the executive.

    I know there’s the whole “it’s not a democracy, it’s a republic” thing … but the constitution dedicates so much text to establishing the mechanisms of democracy (including the means by which the constitution itself can be altered) that it seems ridiculous to conclude that democratic power is anything but central.




  • Quoting from Sotomayer’s dissent (pp 29-30, paragraphing my own):

    This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Kore- matsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting).

    The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world.

    When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.

    Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to as- sassinate a political rival? Immune.

    Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.

    Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon?

    Immune. Immune, immune, immune.


    They go on with an incisive critique of the majority’s reasoning:

    Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trap- pings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.






  • Yea anything big and mainstream just seems super shallow.

    I’m not on top of things to compare accurately, but it was always kinda like that (and is like that here sometimes too). But whenever I’ve gone back, I’ve definitely felt like it has gotten somewhat worse. Some of that could easily be a shifting standard from spending more time on other less “mainstream” platforms though.



  • Yea, the point of any thing like this would be to provide a better grip on what’s going on with these phrases and to break down the opacity of their coming from another language.

    The thing with latin though is that it isn’t quite an alien language to english speakers … so many components of it have ended up in language that an english speaker can kind of “triangulate” some of it.

    The “ad” in “ad hoc”, for instance. It’s the same “ad” in “advance” or “addition” “admit”. And “hoc” is related to English “here”. It literally means “toward this (thing)”, which takes on the meaning “for the purpose of this thing” … that is, being “for a specific thing”, not “general purpose”.


  • Seems to miss some big ones and providing understanding of them.

    “Et cetera”

    • “and other things”
    • abbreviated to “etc”
    • not pronounced “excetera” … but honestly I wouldn’t worry about it because this is the sort of alteration the Romans would have made and did make, and language is always evolving.
    • IMO, basically a distinct English word now

    “Exempli gratia”

    • “for the sake of an example” / “for example”
    • abbreviated “eg”
    • basically a distinct English word now in the abbreviated form, pronounced “ee gee”.
    • easily substituted with a plain English translation “for example”

    “Id est”

    • “that is”
    • abbreviated “ie”
    • like the above, basically a distinct English word now, IMO.
    • easily substituted with its plain English equivalent: “that is”
      • especially given how close the Latin is to the English …. Notice how similar the two phrases sound … that’s not a coincidence, these languages are related after all.

  • [email protected]

    It’s for learning rust (the programming language) and the lemmy code base itself as a sort of “reading club”. If you’re the type of person who might be interested there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it already. We’re currently working through The Book (conventional learning resource) through a couple of Twitch streams and regular posts/discussions.

    More collaborative learning activity is plenty welcome!






  • Actually, I think you’re spreading some false-hoods here.

    I’ve spoken to the core-devs about this here, and they acknowledged that being able to follow people/users would be a generally good idea, but felt that it was a lot of work and so not a priority at the moment.

    I’m with you on the desire of a platform the fuses the two general mechanisms (groups and users), and I think a groups-first platform like lemmy can bring something valuable to how a user’s feed would work … but the reality is that this sort of thing is just not in the fediverse’s DNA at the moment. These aren’t for-profit companies that need to wheel out features constantly to keep their stock price up!

    There’s an exception to that though … friendica, hubzilla and streams, the sort of alternative timeline or “ancient magic” for the fediverse that predates ActivityPub and mastodon by long margins. They have clunky UIs, but are quite feature full, and happily combine both groups and users.


  • Yep. And then you realise that “move semantics” aren’t just a safety net that you have to “fight with” but actually a language feature against which you can develop/deploy desirable patterns.

    A minor thing I noted reading your code snippets was that I immediately noticed, like at a gestalt level, the lack of ampersands (&) and therefore references and could immediately tell that this was a “faux-O”/pipline style system. Not too bad for a syntax often derided as messy/bad.