I think you have the wrong end of this stick. See the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior for an example. There have been several iterations of this ship name since the first was bombed by the French secret service in 1985.

Your argument ignores two things.

First, the US constitution as it currently stands admits modifications. Amendments are version bumps. My understanding is that they’re harder to come by these days.

Second, the constitution may be written but the interpretation is always changing. In particular, the interpretation of laws around restriction of free speech have lots of history of being interpreted in ways that may or may not be congruent with the intentions of the original authors, who’re dead, so we’ll never know the truth of it. It’s only been 107 years since the US Supreme Court decided that anti-draft speech in time of war COULD BE ILLEGAL. Apparently that was partially overturned in 1969.

Thirdly [naming, caching and out by one bugs!] it is far from clear that a written constitution will lead to a durable republic. It’s only been ~250 years. Too soon to tell.

> Second, the constitution may be written but the interpretation is always changing

It’s okay if the change is because you think the new interpretation is closer to what the constitution originally meant.

It’s democratically illegitimate to change the interpretation otherwise. A written constitution is already an impingement on democracy. But how can it be that whoever is doing the interpreting is allowed to restrict democratically adopted laws in ways the constitution didn’t originally intend to restrict them?

There is no right to vote in the constitution as written and interpreted in the 1700s. There is also no guarantee of freedom of speech. The first amendment was considered a rule that only applied federally.

What's democratically illegitimate is everything you wrote in this thread.

If your state government threw you in jail for what you just wrote that would be perfectly aligned with your "original understanding" interpretation of the U.S constitution.

> code for radiation hardened environments

I’m aware of code that detects bit flips via unreasonable value detection (“this counter cannot be this high so quickly”). What else is there?

For safety critical systems, one strategy is to store at least two copies of important data and compare them regularly. If they don't match, you either try to recover somehow or go into a safe state, depending on the context.

At least three copies, so you can recover based on consensus.

If your pieces of important data are very tiny, that's probably your best option.

If they're hundreds of bytes or more, then two copies plus two hashes will do a better job.

Ah, true! You just restore the one that matches its hash. Elegant.

A single hash should be enough.

Yes, but what's easier depends on layout. "Consensus" makes me think of multiple entire nodes, and in that situation you can have a nice symmetry by making each node store one copy and one small hash.

If you're doing something that's more centralized then one hash might be simpler, but if you're centralized then you should probably use your own error correction codes instead of having multiple copies.

In many cases the system is perfectly safe when it shuts off. Two is enough for that.

“never go to sea with two chronometers, take one or three”

Seems like chronometers would be a case where two are better than one, because the mistakes are analog. If they don't exactly agree, just take the average. You'll have more error than if you were lucky enough to take the better chronometer, but less than if you had taken only the worse one. Minimizing the worst case is probably the best way to stay off the rocks.

And for breaking failures, two is way better than one! Having zero working chronometers would be bad.

And come to think of it, if the two chronometers are wrong in different directions, then the average could be more accurate than either of them.

I use ZFS even on consumer devices, these days. Parity checks all the way!

You can have voting systems in place, where at least 2 out of 3 different code paths have to produce the same output for it to be accepted. This can be done with multiple systems (by multiple teams/vendors) or more simply with multiple tries of the same path, provided you fully reload the input in between.

A watchdog guards against unresponsive software. It doesn't protect against bad data directly. Not all bad data makes a system freeze.

I’d upvote this a hundred times (which seems very in keeping with modern democratic (small ‘d’. Put away that axe Eugene) norms) not because I love the solution, which is necessarily janky, and not because I like the author’s prose style, though I do, but because it ought to be a cause of embarrassment to Apple that this sort of folderol is needed.

Art is only interesting if it elicits an emotional response in the viewer. Otherwise it is illustration.

And the wonder of it is that we can all have different responses to the same thing. (The Mona Lisa is a waste of canvas and oil - a hill I will die on).

> The Mona Lisa is a waste of canvas and oil - a hill I will die on

Seems like Mona Lisa elicits an emotional response in you as a viewer ;)

I get what you're saying though. I always "correct" people that claims some piece of music is "bad", there's no bad music, only music you don't like.

I cynically believe that many people will force themselves into having an emotional response if the art piece matches with what they understand as having currency with the type of people they seek to emulate and the rarified scene they want to be a part of.

The Mona Lisa is a panel painting and doesn't use canvas.

I think I read here on hackernews that the Mona Lisa doesn't look at all like it did when it was freshly made. If I look at the restored copy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_(Prado)#, I at least find the silk very nice.

Your quote needs a “sometimes”. For every murderous, blood-soaked dictator who experienced pitchfork-o-clock there are several others who died peacefully in their beds at a rote old age. Louis the n-teenth lost his head. How about Louis 1-(n-1)?

Recommendations?

For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride with nevertheless believable physics. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "down to Earth" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience. Avoid reading summaries of any of these books beforehand. They're best enjoyed going in blind.

I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.

If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could give you some recommendations from less well-known authors and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of what you're looking for (military/space opera/other, ftl/aliens?, etc). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.

* Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much more satisfying read.

Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is clever and disconcerting.

Other book recommendations:

- valuable humans in transit by qntm

- the old axolotl by Jacek Dukaj (skip the tv show, it is very different from the book)

- the Agent Cormac series by Neal Asher

- the night’s dawn trilogy by peter f hamilton (his books are borderline fantasy, but he writes such deliciously monstrous villains)

“Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty's brow, Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:”

How certain are you of this? I only have anecdata, but when I tried to use a 3rd party agency to hire someone in France, from Ireland I got the process through several layers of management, up to and including the CEO and COO of my American employer, and HR, and legal counsel, only to be warned away in the most emphatic terms by external counsel. They told us of the risk of large fines and jail time in France for executives of companies doing this.

As I said, anecdotal, and a few years old.

> They told us of the risk of large fines and jail time in France for executives of companies doing this.

Just for hiring someone from France?

just for hiring someone in France via a third-party employer of record.

I think it's largely to do with the whether the games are PvP multiplayer or not. I.e. many such games have anti-cheat systems that embed in the Windows kernel (or something like that - my Windows internals knowledge is... slim).

I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.