Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

The Videogame Sequel Doctor takes on Tears of the Kingdom. #TotK

(With apologies to Key and Peele, who are kings of comedy while I am a mere King of Thieves).

(Caution: Small Tears of the Kingdom spoilers)

https://personal-blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/videogame-design-doctor-totk/

@codinghorror This anecdote is always funny to me in light of the fact that the German occupation of Norway in World War II almost immediately kicked off a rail strike. ;)

@SwiftOnSecurity Indeed. It seems clear (has seemed clear for years) that Russia supported Trump, but Russia supported Trump because they recognized him as a stumbling block to American international ambitions, not an active asset. It was going to be harder for the US to thwart Russian ambitions if the President sucked.

He was just the worst option on the table and I think even they were surprised when Americans picked him.

@RichStein @mattblaze I've definitely seen this hypothesis floated. The notion that he expected to be able to use the information in those documents as future leverage against political opponents... Somehow disregarding or failing to understand the fact that he no longer had the right to possess those documents when he's no longer serving the American people.

@lauren The good news is that for federal crime, she's obliged to follow the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

The minimums for what Trump is accused of are basically already "This man dies in prison."

(* This man specifically; Trump is 76 and not in super-great health).

@lauren It’ll be interesting to see what that means.

On the one hand: yes, bad sign because one assumes her inclinations haven’t greatly changed.

On the other hand: the vector for most judges over their careers is deeper into the legal system. If she has aspirations of one day being higher on the ladder, this kind of feedback from higher courts is exactly the kind of thing she should be responsive to.

This case will highlight what kind of judge she is.

@jonny A blockchain where the root node encodes "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

There are no subsequent nodes.

@Br3nda It seems borderline unfair to drag J.R.R. Tolkien for his incredibly male-centric fantasy adventure novel written in the '50s.

... not inaccurate or incorrect, at all, just unfair. ;)

Some notes on chapter 1.1 of #Knuth 's "The Art of Computer Programming (volume 1)".

https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/knuth-1-1/

Watched the “Fairies” episode of #Bluey.

You know, of all the ecological disasters visited upon Australia by the Colonialists, we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the introduction of the Greater Brittanian Seelie Court Fae to the continent.

… which party that was a disaster for, I don’t know. I’m not honestly sure who wins in a fight between a Bwbachod and a cassowary.

@lauren Definitely possible, but interesting to see how it will go.

A firm's ability to pull straight from colleges is directly tied to reputation. Right now, Google has great rep in spite of everything (this may be more a comment on the industry as a whole than on choices Google has made, but I digress). But rep can shift rapidly and students are fickle.

I remember when IBM started running ads that were basically "Come work for us."

@lauren I think #Google is forgetting the old wisdom that brought about microkitchens and perks at work in the first place... You're not competing with other companies to hire and retain Googlers, you're competing with *the Googlers themselves,* the alternate lifestyle where instead of working for your conglomerate they freelance or form their own startups. Why should they come work for you when they could work from home where the snacks are in the kitchen?

This generation of Google leadership seems to be excited to test that hypothesis. We'll see how it works out for their retention numbers.

@Renegade_GDI@mastodon.world Nah, I think he’s just kibitzing on the state of American law, which often looks quite frankly ridiculous from a Scandinavian point of view.

Northerners I know honestly wish they could think less about American law; problem is the US is so big it has an outsized influence on the rest of the world (both because when we go nuts, we tend to take international agreements that are maintaining peace with us, and because people sometimes get the fool idea in their heads “We should do it the way the Americans do it, it works great for them”).

@urusan Baby's first pigeon-hole principle.

@Renegade_GDI@mastodon.world @ernie I believe he's giving his own common-sense reading of the phrase, which differs from the American legal interpretation of it.

@2ck I just started taking a second run at Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming," four years after my first attempt.

Got past the first chapter, but only because I'd taken a detour in the intervening years through the mathematics of mechatronic control systems and had seen what a "state vector" is.

And even then, I want to yeet the phrase "It is obvious that" and all its variants into the sun.

@VerinEmpire @catvalente Him being whisked off to jail doesn't actually make it impossible for him to be elected president.

There's nothing in the Constitution that immediately prevents the voters from electing someone currently incarcerated, and the US's political tradition (our first President was a seditionist who led a military uprising to wrest control of the Colonies from the legitimate government and duly-elected representatives in London) would suggest that we'd be hard-pressed to morally justify denying him office if the people called him to take it.

Seven injured in a shooting in Richmond after a graduation.

Just life in America.

https://personal-blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/i-dont-know-how-it-gets-better/

@aja@mathstodon.xyz @Popehat In MIT's Law Unit, do they also learn about manus rea?