But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

I recommend picking up Graham Hutton’s short text Programming in Haskell, Second Edition. Even if you don’t end up using Haskell in “real work” (and you might!) it will teach you a remarkable number of things about how functional programming works.

The term “open source software” was coined specifically to refer to software licensing that recognizes a particular set of freedoms. It is not a generic term for source-available software, and never was.

One of the freedoms of open source is “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.”

Calling the Hippocratic license family “open source” is inaccurate, since its entire goal is to discriminate against certain fields of endeavor.

It’s better described as a sort of source-available license.

• The compiler hates you
• The compiler sees nothing wrong with your code and is just giving error messages to look busy
• The compiler was written by a maniac with a semicolon fixation
• The compiler could optimize your code, but it’s just not feeling it today
• The compiler wonders why you can’t match braces right like your brother does
• The compiler had a torrid affair with a Perl interpreter in 2006
• The compiler likes big butts and cannot lie
• The compiler wants to grow up to be an IDE but hasn’t told its parents they need to send it to GUI school yet
• The compiler reads Nazis on Twitter but only to make fun of them
• The compiler works for the Servants of Cthulhu

What’s Greek for “persona non grata”?

Jury nullification is a real thing, but it is often misunderstood … mostly because right-wing libertarians and sovereign-citizen kooks have spent decades pushing conspiracy theory about it.

It isn’t an affirmative right of individual citizens to get onto juries and individually block the enforcement of the law. An individual juror cannot nullify. Rather, jury nullification is a logical consequence of two important rules in our legal system:

1. Double jeopardy: if a defendant gets a “not-guilty” verdict from a jury, that defendant cannot be retried for that same crime.
2. Juror independence: the judge cannot order the jury to return a particular verdict, nor punish them for the verdict they return.

Double jeopardy is in the US Constitution. Juror independence is inherited from English common law, where it was established in 1670 in an infamous case where a judge imprisoned and tortured jurors for not returning the verdict the judge wanted.

Because of these two principles, if a jury returns a “not-guilty” verdict, the defendant goes free; even if the verdict seems blatantly contrary to the facts and the law. Even if the jury is blatantly wrong, nobody in the system has any authority to do anything about it — not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the cops.

If you are summoned to be on a jury and you make it clear that you do not intend to judge the case on the facts and the law, you will be dismissed from the jury in voir dire. If you preach nullification to your fellow jurors, you might cause a mistrial: the defendant will not be freed; the court will just get a new jury, and the defendant will go back to jail in the meantime.

A mistrial does not free the defendant. A hung jury (refusing to come to a consensus) does not free the defendant. Only a not-guilty verdict frees the defendant.

That’s a fake.

So does voir dire.

Jury nullification is a real thing, but it is often misunderstood … mostly because right-wing libertarians and sovereign-citizen kooks have spent decades pushing conspiracy theory about it.

It isn’t an affirmative right of citizens to get onto juries and block the enforcement of the law. Rather, it’s a logical consequence of two important rules in our legal system:

1. Double jeopardy: if a defendant gets a “not-guilty” verdict from a jury, that defendant cannot be retried for that same crime.
2. Juror independence: the judge cannot order the jury to return a particular verdict, nor punish them for returning a verdict that seems contrary to the facts and the law.

Double jeopardy is in the US Constitution. Juror independence comes from English common law, where it was established in 1670 in an infamous case where a judge imprisoned and tortured jurors for not returning the verdict the judge wanted.

Because of these two principles, if a jury returns a “not-guilty” verdict, the defendant goes free; even if the verdict seems blatantly contrary to the facts and the law. Even if the jury is blatantly wrong, nobody in the system has any authority to do anything about it — not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the cops.

If you are summoned to be on a jury and you make it clear that you do not intend to judge the case on the facts and the law, you will be dismissed from the jury in voir dire. If you preach nullification to your fellow jurors, you might cause a mistrial: the defendant will not be freed; the court will just get a new jury, and the defendant will go back to jail in the meantime.

A mistrial does not free the defendant. A hung jury (refusing to come to a consensus) does not free the defendant. Only a not-guilty verdict frees the defendant.

A hatchback full of SD cards can beat that easily, though.

Goddamn tree jizz!

There are 10,000-year-old arrowheads sold for that much or less. They’re not scarce or sacred or anything; they’re literally weapons that were made in mass quantities for warfare or hunting.

Doctors can tell you how to save children’s lives. But they can’t make you want to.

I think it’s pretty neat when people get to do stuff they like with other people who want to join them.

“… and he was aiming for John Connally.”

Here’s my peace proposal: Putin goes out a window, and Zelenskyy gets to be Tsar of the traditional territory of the Kyivan state.

The unofficial sequel to Untitled Goose Game is Little Kitty, Big City.

Ideologically, Leninism supported vanguardism, a variation on Marxism that said that the Communist party was supposed to drag the early-20th-century proletariat into the revolution, instead of waiting for late capitalism where the proletariat would (according to Marx) naturally become revolutionary. This, and the notion of “false consciousness”, authorized Communist parties to go against the expressed (democratic) will of the proletariat, on the theory that the proletariat’s judgment was clouded by false consciousness, while still claiming to act in the interests of the proletariat.

Basically, “we (the party) know better than you (the people)” was ingrained into Leninism from the beginning, and the major communist revolutions either were or became Leninist. Maoism was a branch off of Leninism as well.

Are you saying he’s a Keir Blair?

“Buffy” was originally a nickname for “Elizabeth”, but then the TV show happened, and Buffy Summers is not an Elizabeth.