timorl @timorl@qoto.org

Names in mathematics are so bad and so nondescriptive that I'm genuinely shocked that they came up with a name as plain and useful as "zero divisor"

TIL that ignorance of the law doesn't always hurt

In many criminal law systems you are not committing a crime when your (possibly mistaken) view of the factual situation doesn't constitute a crime, even when what you are actually doing does constitute a crime, as long as your mistake is "excusable". For example, if you take someone else's items believing they're your own (e.g. because they are very similar in appearance), you aren't committing larceny. (PL ref: art. 28 KK, CH ref: Art. 13 StGB)

Similarly, if you believe that factual situation matches a situation where a justification (e.g. self defense, or higher need) would cause your action not to be a crime, it is not a crime even if you were mistaken, as long as the mistake was excusable (e.g. if you destroy a car window to reach a realistic looking doll which you believed to be an unconscious child, you aren't committing the crime of property destruction). (PL ref: art. 29 KK, CH ref: Art. 13 StGB)

What I learned today is that you are not committing a crime when you are excusably mistaken _about the law_. Obviously, definition of "excusability" of the mistake does lots of work here -- IIUC the standard test is (a) would a typical person similar to you in education and background suspect it's a crime (b) did you have an opportunity to learn/ask whether this action is legal. (PL ref: art 30 kk, CH ref: Art. 21 StGB[*])

I find this very surprising, because it's a direct contradiction of 'ignoratia iuris nocet'.

[*] the Swiss law narrows it down to people who didn't and couldn't have known that it's a crime; I'm not sure if that should be understood in the everyday literal meaning of that phrase -- the context in StGB seems to suggest that it's intended to be slightly wider, so I suspect that this phrase has some specific meaning.

h/t to @freemo who caused me to look up all those things

Shenzhen I/O should have a realism option. When it's set to high, you need to search all over the web and pay over 200 CNY download fees in paid forums before you get the leaked datasheet you need. If you are unlucky, you have to reverse engineer the chip specification from schematics of an existing design, or if you are especially unlucky, you need to hunt all over Taobao for commercial products that internally use the chip you need for reverse engineering. #electronics

Here is a thread with short updates on what is going on in case you were not following it or got confused by many different reports. #Belarus #Poland #EU #Refugees

Weirdest thing I've seen recently: omc, the OpenModelica compiler, tries to open all its input files (including libraries) for writing. It then closes them, reopens for reading, and proceeds as one'd expect.

It turns out that it does that to determine whether they're read-only: https://github.com/OpenModelica/OpenModelica/blob/81537a472c9f54ea14ecf335343005f18f4e83af/OMCompiler/Compiler/runtime/systemimpl.c#L366

Why? Well, it puts that information in some parser data structure: https://github.com/OpenModelica/OpenModelica/blob/cb76b3bfcad9782ea93ef88aa0979e00ad9ca942/OMCompiler/Parser/parse.c#L420

Why? Well, it uses that when printing an error message, so that the error message can say whether the file is writeable: https://github.com/OpenModelica/OpenModelica/blob/187041202b77c6b2c406f27d1e7add6db6016548/OMCompiler/Compiler/runtime/ErrorMessage.cpp#L136

Why? I have no clue.

How do I know? It messes with gittup's determination of what's an output of a compilation command.

Stworzyli darmową alternatywę dla wadliwego i drogiego systemu szkolnego. Miasto nasłało policję

https://ithardware.pl/aktualnosci/stworzyli_darmowa_alternatywe_dla_wadliwego_i_drogiego_systemu_szkolnego_miasto_naslalo_policje-18528.html

it's aaron swartz remembrance day today and i feel like i should use this to talk about something i think about a lot and that i think should be more widely talked about.

aaron's death was murder. it's as simple as that. the way the us justice system deals with hackers and other "national security threats" (and just the US justice system in general) is explicitly to break people. it's psychological torture intended to either make you bend to their will, off yourself or just become a psychological wreck that is no longer a risk to the system. i don't think it's really possible to understand this until you're subjected to it yourself, and unfortunately i'm subject to a small degree of the same pressure.

the main weapon the US justice system uses to break people is uncertainty, you don't know what's going to happen to you, you don't know when it's going to happen to you and you might just not hear anything for a year. but during that entire time you're aware of the fact that the US may be watching you at all times, they can use all tools at their disposal and anything you say or do can and probably will be used against you in your case. i'm still not entirely sure how good it is for me to talk about this stuff, i'd talk about it a lot more often if i knew (or not at all). they also break you with the conscious misunderstanding of facts, of what you've done, the fact that they do not care about the publics opinion, they make it very clear that they can do with you whatever they want. this all on top of the usual pressure such as like the prospect of the actual sentence itself, the money this kind of case requires, the constant fear of losing even more, not knowing when and if ever you can freely speak and travel again, not knowing when your last free day for the next two decades will be and the painful realization that there is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't just another sealed indictment waiting for you around the corner.

it's hard not to break under this pressure. i fully understand the decision of everyone who broke under this, rest in peace aaron, rest in peace kevin, rest in peace everyone i forgot about. i will try my best not to break, purely out of spite, out of anger in the name of everyone who broke before and because i have the small advantage of not actually being in the US. but let me tell you, if i do break, please don't hold it against me, understand that this is not something any human should ever have to go through, no matter what they may or may not have done.

this is not a call for sympathy, this is a call for anger.

Do you know of a succinct description of the mapping between Mastodon concepts (such as "public"/"unlisted"/... sharing modes, or visibility of replies) and ActivityPub activity entries (such as to,cc,bto,bcc,audience fields)? I would like to:
a) understand how various things I could send as a client to a Mastodon server correlate with things that I can do in a typical Mastodon client UI,
b) understand semantics of various Mastodon concepts better.

#lazytoot #activitypub

Hahaha, obczajcie film akcji na stronie głównej GNU: https://www.gnu.org/
10/10, klimat jak w "Szklanej pułłapce 4.0"

You know, if that law forbidding gatherings with the goals like “propagating homosexuality” actually passes in Poland, there’s only one good option: BE GAY, DO CRIME

(Reposted from Birdside, thread)

Today, the Polish parliament will read a proposed law that makes it illegal to "promote homosexuality", including - I am not exaggerating - pretty much ANY positive talk of LGBT+ people and their rights in public settings.

And foreign media seem almost entirely silent on this.

The law was drafted a while ago, but didn't get into the Parliament for procedural reasons.

It EXPLICITLY bans e.g.:

Kelber‘s Law: Wann immer es heisst „irgendwas Sinnvolles geht nicht, wegen Datenschutz“ liegt es NICHT am Datenschutz.

2016 jonny: "papers are cool, but what if they weren't static pdfs?"
2021 jonny: "need to clean up the build tooling of my paper so that when people PR contributions we can autodeploy to web and bioRxiv so the paper can embody a noncoercive decentralized governance system"