IHeartBadCode

But that then begs the question, which court establishes that? Because in the Colorado sense, three different courts made determination on the matter. And Article I Section 3 Clause 7 of the Constitution seems to imply that there is a difference between the political ramifications and the criminal ramifications of acts. While impeachment is established in Article I of the Constitution as being vested for the President as the House to decide and the Senate to adjudicate. Nothing in the 14th, Section 3 seems to delegate the political ramifications to any one group.

So Trump isn’t guilty criminally of insurrection, but the 14th doesn’t seem to indicate that you absolutely need a criminal indictment to carry out the political aspects of section 3. Colorado’s determination isn’t robbing him of life and liberty, just of his qualifications for political office.

Well we could debate taking the driver’s license for people involved in a DUI about the same as this topic in the vein of “is this the right play?” The notion is that folks who are apt to take the mechanisms of Government and use them as such to violate an oath they took to defend the Constitution, are likely folks we don’t want to hand back control of those mechanisms so they can get another crack at it. Sort of how we don’t give folks in a DUI back their license until there’s been a clear “rehabilitation” or if we want to be pure cynical “a debt to society paid”. The point of not giving them their license right away is because they could potentially do a lot of harm with it being just handed back to them.

And you’ve indicated that it seems desperate. And yeah, the whole mechanism of disqualification and the whole fact that treason is one of the very few things in criminality that’s laid out by the Constitution, is such because nobody wanted people to just randomly start firing off disqualifications. It’s made to be a really, really, really, really last resort kind of thing. It’s supposed to be something that we try all these other hundreds of things first before using. So if it feels desperate in the sense that the word is defined as Having lost all hope; despairing it’s because there isn’t a lot of hope that the GOP has pulled itself together enough to prevent someone who incited people to storm the capitol and attempt to upend an election from taking the nomination again.

None of this developed in a vacuum. Trump has done and said things that few other Presidents have said and done and all the mechanisms before have in one way or another nixed the person from returning. Those functions have stopped working and that’s getting more into a complex topic about why and it’s a long history. But I can tell you there was a transformation of the GOP and how they conducted themselves pre/post Haley Barbour and it especially came to a head with Reince Priebus and you can get even deeper on how our forcing of a two party system has led to this.

But in summary, the GOP as a political apparatus has a great deal of control ceded to them via codification in various State laws. They are absolutely not just some group of folks coming together, lots of States have laws, rules, or regulations that basically establish them that say 3rd parties don’t get to enjoy. But the GOP has lost a lot of internal control and regulation of their own apparatus, I mean look how shit show the 2016 GOP primary was. Look at the 2024 GOP primary and how the person leading the nomination isn’t even in the apparatus ran debates. There’s zero control mechanisms working within that political group. That’s problematic because the GOP gets a free pass to get on the ballot in pretty much every State, by default they show up there.

So you’ve got a group that gets to be in the election without the normal State level checks and balances but that group has lost complete control over their political machine. That’s so many red flags that it is a red flag factory. So with all of those controls failing within that party, yeah, we’ve got to pull the emergency brake here. It is a big deal.

It’s giving him even more credibility

Well I’ll say this. Trump makes the point that the political elites run the show and what not. And yeah, as far as the two party system goes being forced down us, yeah, no disagreement there. But he advocates “none” for political apparatus control and that’s too far the other direction. And that’s actually a worse direction. Ideally I’d like something in the middle, but if we’re making it binary, I’ll keep the two party system as it is (just a personal taste).

And I think that really sums up what we saw in 2020 and what we are looking at for a 2024 run. You’ve got two really bad options here. One is obscenely bad and the other is just bad in the business as usual kind of way. So with all that said, as far as granting him “credibility” yeah, it highlights something wrong with what we got. But holy shit, there’s no part of what Trump is offering that we want to replace what we got with.

You know here in Tennessee I’ve heard a saying that came about with Governor Ray Blanton. “If you think the professional politicians are bad, just you wait till the amateurs show up.” I get what Trump is spitting here, but best I can do is buy about 10% of it because the other 90% is pure madness. So he, in my book, doesn’t get points for saying something that surface level is correct but deep dive into is a sea of authoritarianism horror.

With regard to the 14th Amendment Section Three, a person who has sworn an oath, and then engages in insurrection, is disqualified. Congress is given the power to “remove such disability;” this is wholly different from Congress being “the one who disqualifies.”

I couldn’t agree more here. The notion that the one that removes the disability indicates that someone added it. Being silent on the who isn’t an oversight by those who carefully framed the 14th. There’s a realization outright that calling out traitors and ensuring that they cannot attempt rebellion was a role for anyone who swore to uphold the Constitution. To vest the power in a single branch is just inviting those seeking a rebellion to overtake that branch and call it mission complete.

My favorite part of the word salad that is their argument is that the Supreme Court of Colorado erred but a lower District Court that found that Trump took a different oath was correct.

But the district court ultimately concluded that section 3 was inapplicable to President Trump because he never took an oath “as an officer of the United States.” App. 282a (¶ 313) (“[T]he Court is persuaded that ‘officers of the United States’ did not include the President of the United States.”)

Because we literally have the minutes of the discussion when the 39th Congress discussed the 14th Amendment and indicated that Section 3 would “obviously apply to the President” and that the explicit mentions in Section 3 were to alleviate confusion.

Why did you omit to exclude them [The office of the President and Vice President]?

— Sen. Reverdy Johnson (D-MD)

Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States’

— Sen. Lot Morrill (R-MA)

Senator Morrill shut down outright the notion that section three could ever be considered as “not applying to the President”. That’s how obvious it was to the people who wrote the Amendment that the entire point was that “we had a civil war, but just because we won did not mean the Confederates nor their rebellion would cease to exist”.

More to the point.

This is to go into our Constitution and to stand to govern future insurrection as well as the present; and I should like to have that point definitely understood

— Sen. Peter G. Van Winkle (R-WV)

So let’s be entirely clear here. Section 3 absolutely applies to the President and it absolutely applies to ANY insurrection. There are zero other ways to read this. We literally have the minutes of the discussion at that time. This isn’t like we don’t know what they intended, they were very clear that future people would try this shit and they absolutely wanted that eventuality covered. And Congressional record is acceptable evidence into the Supreme Court. If SCOTUS today ignores this record, I mean fuck, there’s not a slicing it any other way than they’re attempting to play favorites.

And on that, I highly doubt they’ll buy this argument that Section 3 doesn’t apply. Now they may find something else, but that it doesn’t apply to the President, oh hell no. There was nobody in the Senate or House who questioned if Section 3 applied to the President during the 39th Congress. It did and saying it doesn’t is some revisionist bullshit.

Now they do mention “Rucho v. Common Cause” in the argument. In this they’re trying to portray that “is someone disqualified” as a political question rather a legal one. Courts aren’t allowed to weigh in on political questions.

They also mention roles of Congress via the 20th Amendment, Article II, and section 5 of the 14th Amendment. And via these they indicate that it’s implied that Congress is the one who disqualifies. However, they fail to mention the 10th Amendment where if the Constitution is silent on the matter and Congress has passed no law, then the law falls onto the States and the people thereafter. So the question that can be raised is Colorado’s 10th Amendment right superseded by this “implied” Congressional consent?

It would give the SCOTUS a get out of jail free card by basically saying “well it’s not up to SCOTUS, it’s up to Congress” and calling it done. However, it would weaken one of their favorite things, State’s Rights. Because the ability to determine disqualification on things like citizenship and age are very clearly at the State level, that’s even a question. So it would make things this weird thing where if it’s age or natural born status that’s the States but someone with intent to hand the US over to Russia, nope that’s Congress.

And above all else, why the fuck would we have an electoral college if some of the biggest issues on qualification are up to the whims of Congress? Like that does even make sense. But I think the electoral college should go away anyway, but that’s a me thing.

At any point. There’s wiggle room for SCOTUS to massively disappoint yet again! But on the question of does this apply to the President or not. HELL FUCKING YES IT DOES. Every record we have points to that conclusion. If Colorado’s Supreme Court can err, so can the court that Trump is relying on to be correct on this issue.

He’s just tired from the pudding pop.

I think that’s what people dislike the most. That Stefanik used her massive amount of bullshit to false dilemma Gay into a bad PR light. But Stefanik is also alumni of Harvard, in fact she was at one point VP of Harvard’s Institute of Politics. She’s got skills to pay the bills, especially when it comes to the way faculty speaks at Harvard. Gay walked right into it and that’s something she should have seen coming. That’s part and parcel, as much as we like to bemoan it, of politics. Perhaps one day we will reach a political climate where we frankly and openly discuss the woes of society and address them outright. But boy oh boy is someone fooling themselves thinking that day is today. Which as an aside is why I’ve always had issues with the mantra of “when they go low, we go high”. No call their bullshit out and stone their ass for going low, damn it!

People like Rufo will read into this as “it’s a win against DEI” but the reality is, this event is just one of many in a complex string of things that play into an over arching attempt by some to maintain the “good old boys” way of life. There’s multiple aspects of “good old boys” like “Make America Great Again”, “the war on Woke”, and what not. But there’s a need to remember that as much as these folks like to talk about meritocracy, that’s not actually what they want. Or at least they do a lot of things to demonstrate that, that is not what they want. And this whole episode of these President’s falling to the traps of Stefanik are just yet another demonstration that they aren’t after quality or work ethic, they are after preserving a way of life they feel is under threat.

expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life.

— Christopher Rufo (via X formerly Twitter)

That’s what this ultimately plays out as. They’re under the impression that asking folks to equally weigh all factors in a position without undue passion is some form of racialist ideology. When in fact it’s just Rufo’s lack of knowledge at real world inequality. They’re not exposing rot, they’re just going after folks they have a grudge with. Stefanik wasn’t asking genuine questions to further testimony in collegiate response to a world event, she was just hawking got’chas and she’s insanely good at doing that.

Out of all of this, I think that’s the important aspects to see in this. It’s folks trying to preserve something that we should have in my opinion done off with already. But unfortunately the Associated Press has decided to write an article on the “munitions of the right” which is just more code for “let’s make left/right politics even more polar.” Stefanik is a demonstration of how Congress is becoming worse. She’s very smart and only really foolish people sell her short of that, but bullshit is selling like hotcakes in Congress right now. And to me the “why does bullshit and Dark Brandon sell” is a better question. Because if the goal is to actually reach that day where we talk frank about social ills and address them, we have gone into hyper reverse on reaching that goal. And this piece from the AP really smacks of the drivel that fuels that vehicle. I don’t think that should be our goal (or at least not the primary one, politics isn’t black and white for a reason), but for those who want that as a goal, this piece is classic anti-that goal with it’s quips that exist to only further polar opinion on the matter. When in reality, Gay likely going back to work in a position that she can sow seeds that may one day change the calculus of the traditionalist alumni that she faced as President. Yes, it is sad that it has taken Harvard this long to have a black person as President. Clearly the alumni of Harvard are having a hard time with it to the point that they are feeling fine to overtly suppress such. But the kids today are tomorrow’s alumni and sometimes taking the longer approach is better. Yes, it is shit. But the more I see the younger generation, the more I see a very clear change for the what I would consider better. And there is a lot of very unhappy people about that trend.

We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America

— Christopher Rufo (via X formerly Twitter)

And this is the whole thing. Republicans talk a big game about meritocracy, but they themselves do not believe in it. There’s a lot of the Dunning–Kruger effect within Republican ranks, this is why they rely so heavily on grifting. They are for the most part faking it till they make it (or most likely get called out). George Santos is like the extreme end of this.

So the question is why does this ideology contrast so heavily with things like DEI? And the reasons are to promote keeping a silent status-quo. White guys hire white guys, that’s just the straight and narrow about it. And folks like to push, “Oh well I’m judging them based on merit!” That’s where that Dunning-Kruger effect comes in, because there’s a lot of blatant faking it going on.

I mean, we joke, but white guy saying the internet is a series of tubes is likely faking knowledge, just kind of calling as I see it. And there’s a lot of that. Not just lawmakers, I see it in IT all the effing time. Like my previous employer, it didn’t go without notice how the backend development group was a guy’s club. And they may say “Oh well it’s all based on merit”. Nah, friend, we had at least two “Postgres Devs” who hadn’t the faintest clue about what an Index is. It’s a hard sell on the merit thing.

And I see that a lot. And I’m not one to judge on folks who are missing some knowledge, I’m not holding a bar at folks being able to recite from memory how to do a red-black tree in C++, that’s not really important. But what I do have issue with is when there’s an almost implicit grant for men on knowledge. Because one of those devs that didn’t need to be there was in the running with someone else who happened to be a woman, and we just happen to hire a guy who was actually good at spitting bullshit. Perhaps that’s the manager that hired the person’s fault or whatever, but it gets into that silent status-quo. Like, maybe the manager wasn’t actively thinking in their mind, “this person has a vagina, there’s no way I believe them!” But he totally was like “Oh man this guy is funny as shit and brings a special energy to everything”.

And that’s that meritocracy Republicans want to preserve and DEI seeks to introduce an element that’s outside of that silent status-quo. Suddenly, these managers can’t look at that “special energy” the same way as they used to. There’s other things that they have to measure along the way. And don’t get me wrong, hiring someone for the sole reason “they are a black woman” is not correct, but Claudine Gay’s ascension is not strictly because of that. And the fact that Christopher Rufo attempts to surmise it as such is a big display of this faking knowledge. Because the hiring her is way more complex than Rufo can actually comprehend, he’s just faking his “knowledge”. Much like his Master of Liberal Arts ass trying to surmise CRT, literally nothing he has said on CRT bears any kind of actual knowledge behind it, it’s all surface level musings that he panders as “fact”. And Claudine Gay’s resignation is complex too. So the folks saying she’s being bullied out of her spot are glossing over a lot of the complex interactions in politics and money that Universities do actually have.

Gay is returning to her position as faculty and Dean of Social Studies which she has enjoyed since 2015, of which she obtained that position through a very complex history of academic excellence. The plagiarism claims were reviewed by independent bodies at Gay’s request and their findings were summarized by the Harvard Corporation here. In which they found two things indicated by omission from citation, but those omission from citation did not rise to the standard routinely used by Harvard for plagiarism. But no one mentions this, that it’s been looked over and she did not meet the criteria for plagiarism and that finding absolutely played a role in considerations.

But more importantly this. Gay is not leaving Harvard, in fact, I would argue that she’s moving back into a position where she can do more work than where she was. Harvard is clearly not ready to advance outside of their own silent status-quo, there’s a lot of “traditionalist” who form the bulk of Harvard’s philanthropy. And Gay may have looked over the sentiment and come to the conclusion that now was not the time to push on that from the position she was in at that time. It’s fairly complex and until she actually spills beans about it, we can only at best speculate. But yeah, the poor performance before Congress played a role, President’s from Universities have a very big PR role they fill and poor performances play a role in that.

So they will probably have to argue that the ratifiers of the amendment were so worried about insurrectionists taking over government that they wanted to prevent it, but not enough they thought the presidency should be barred to insurrectionists

Except we have the record for for their debate saying that the 39th Congress who passed the 14th Amendment knew that the Office of the President was indeed an office to be guarded. The reason they enumerated the others in Clause 3 was because multiple people wanted to ensure that those folks too were covered.

But even if the President isn’t enumerated Trump has this problem.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

— US Constitution, 10th Amendment

So it not being specified by the Constitution nor being codified by Congress as law, how States want to look at the 14th is up to them. So even if SCOTUS wants to play the “The President is not listed” card. It’s not explicitly denied. The tenth amendment indicates that if it’s not denied, States get to run with it.

What SCOTUS can rule upon is “due process” which is asserted by the 14th clause 1. SCOTUS could indicate that the process by which Colorado took doesn’t meet this bar. But then, SCOTUS would kind of be on the hook for indicating “well what is the official process?” And if they say “Well Congress has to make it up” then we fall back into the “if Congress doesn’t say anything, States get to run with it” problem that the 10th amendment grants.

See Colorado isn’t trying to impose their will unto everyone, which means this squarely falls into a “State’s rights” kind of thing. And that’s going to get tricky for the Conservatives to word salad themselves out of that corner they’ve painted. That’s not to say they won’t, but it’s going to be an interesting read to say the least on how they rule.

I can understand their hesitancy to rule with Colorado because then it’ll open a floodgate that we all know that particular states will attempt to abuse. But boy oh boy have they been so strong on States should get to do what they want so hard that this kind of thing was just waiting to come back and bite them on the ass.

One of the specific issues from those who’ve worked with Wayland and is echoed here in Nate’s other post that you mentioned.

Wayland has not been without its problems, it’s true. Because it was invented by shell-shocked X developers, in my opinion it went too far in the other direction.

I tend to disagree. Had say the XDG stuff been specified in protocol, implementation of handlers for some of that XDG stuff would have been required in things that honestly wouldn’t have needed them. I don’t think infotainment systems need a concept of copy/paste but having to write:

Some_Sort_Of_Return handle_copy(wl_surface *srf, wl_buffer* buf) {
//Completely ignore this
return 0;
}

Some_Sort_Of_Return handle_paste(wl_surface *srf, wl_buffer* buf) {
//Completely ignore this
return 0;
}

Is really missing the point of starting fresh, is bytes in the binary that didn’t need to be there, and while my example is pretty minimal for shits and giggles IRL would have been a great way to introduce “randomness” and “breakage” for those just wanting to ignore this entire aspect.

But one of those agree to disagree. I think the level of hands off Wayland went was the correct amount. And now that we have things like wlroots even better, because if want to start there you can now start there and add what you need. XDG is XDG and if that’s what you want, you can have it. But if you want your own way (because eff working nicely with GNOME and KDE, if that’s your cup of tea) you’ve got all the rope in the world you will ever need.

I get what Nate is saying, but things like XDG are just what happened with ICCCM. And when Wayland came in super lightweight, it allowed the inevitably of XDG to have lots of room to specify. ICCCM had to contort to fit around X. I don’t know, but the way I like to think about it is like unsalted butter. Yes, my potato is likely going to need salt and butter. But I like unsalted butter because then if I want a pretty light salt potato, I’m not stuck with starting from salted butter’s level of salt.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just weird like that.

Over on Nate’s other blog entry he indicates this:

The fundamental X11 development model was to have a heavyweight window server–called Xorg–which would handle everything, and everyone would use it. Well, in theory there could be others, and at various points in time there were, but in practice writing a new one that isn’t a fork of an old one is nearly impossible

And I think this is something people tend to forget. X11 as a protocol is complex and writing an implementation of it is difficult to say the least. Because of this, we’ve all kind of relied on Xorg’s implementation of it and things like KDE and GNOME piggyback on top of that. However, nothing (outside of the pure complexity) prevented KWin (just as an example) implementing it’s own X server. KWin having it’s own X server would give it specific things that would better handle the things KWin specifically needed.

Good parallel is how crazy insane the HTML5 spec has become and how now pretty much only Google can write a browser for that spec (with thankfully Firefox also keeping up) and everyone is just cloning that browser and putting their specific spin to it. But if a deep enough core change happens, that’s likely to find its way into all of the spins. And that was some of the issue with X. Good example here, because of the specific way X works an “OK” button (as an example) is actually implemented by your toolkit as a child window. Menus those are windows too. In fact pretty much no toolkit uses primitives anymore. It’s all windows with lots and lots of text attributes. And your toolkit Qt, Gtk, WINGs, EFL, etc handle all those attributes so that events like “clicking a mouse button” work like had you clicked a button and not a window that’s drawn to look like a button.

That’s all because these toolkits want to do things that X won’t explicitly allow them to do. Now the various DEs can just write an X server that has their concept of what a button should do, how it should look, etc… And that would work except that, say you fire up GIMP that uses Gtk and Gtk has it’s idea of how that widget should look and work and boom things break with the KDE X server. That’s because of the way X11 is defined. There’s this middle man that always sits there dictating how things work. Clients draw to you, not to the screen in X. And that’s fundamentally how X and Wayland are different.

I think people think of Wayland in the same way of X11. That there’s this Xorg that exists and we’ll all be using it and configuring it. And that’s not wholly true. In X we have the X server and in that department we had Xorg/XFree86 (and some other minor bit players). The analog for that in Wayland (roughly, because Wayland ≠ X) is the Compositor. Of which we have Mutter, Clayland, KWin, Weston, Enlightenment, and so on. Which that’s more than just one that we’re used to. That’s because the Wayland protocol is simple enough for these multiple implementations.

The skinny is that a Compositor needs to at the very least provide these:

• wl_display - This is the protocol itself.
• wl_registry - A place to register objects that come into the compositor.
• wl_surface - A place for things to draw.
• wl_buffer - When those things draw there should be one of these for them to pack the data into.
• wl_output - Where rubber hits the road pretty much, wl_surface should display wl_buffer onto this thing.
• wl_keyboard/wl_touch/etc - The things that will interact with the other things.
• wl_seat - The bringing together of the above into something a human being is interacting with.

And that’s about it. The specifics of how to interface with hardware and what not is mostly left to the kernel. In fact, pretty much compositors are just doing everything in EGL, that is KWin’s wl_buffer (just random example here) is a eglCreatePbufferSurface with other stuff specific to what KWin needs and that’s it. I would assume Mutter is pretty much the same case here. This gets a ton of the formality stuff that X11 required out of the way and allows Compositors more direct access to the underlying hardware. Which was pretty much the case for all of the Window Managers since 2010ish. All of them basically Window Manage in OpenGL because OpenGL allowed them to skip a lot of X, but of course there is GLX (that one bit where X and OpenGL cross) but that’s so much better than dealing with Xlib and everything it requires that would routinely require “creative” workarounds.

This is what’s great about Wayland, it allows KWin to focus on what KWin needs, mutter to focus on what mutter needs, but provides enough generic interface that Qt applications will show up on mutter just fine. Wayland goes out of its way to get out of the way. BUT that means things we’ve enjoyed previously aren’t there, like clipboards, screen recording, etc. Because X dictated those things and for Wayland, that’s outside of scope.

And before anyone just indicate “Oh but they’re in the White House”. Let’s not forget Melania Trump’s perspective on Christmas at the White House in 2020.

Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration? But I have to do it!

Also something Trump pointed out in the speech.

Afghanistan Surrender

Buddy Trump, you ordered the troops out of there. I mean it was “so bold™” that FoxNews was liberally sucking what can only be scientifically classified as Trump’s penis. Biden was just following up with the order that you gave. WTF _ LOL?!

Most of the ads I’ve seen appear to be targeted at conservative Americans, as they’re all latching onto a mistrust in U.S. President Biden and the federal government

LUL. Well at least they know their mark.

中華人民共和國政府僱員 A: 您认为我们应该针对谁？

中華人民共和國政府僱員 B: 那些买马膏来治病的人怎么样？

中華人民共和國政府僱員 A: 木瓦哈哈哈!!

Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj, carried out his cyber attack using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel television and a mobile phone. He broke into the company’s internal Slack messaging system to declare: “If Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code.”

I just read some dumb fucking shit from the Wayfair CEO telling everyone they need to blend their personal and work life together because no one is rewarded for laziness, or some shit.

Bitch! This kid right here is a fucking genius and y’all locking him up for life because his intelligence hurts somebody’s bottom line. That’s the key take away here. Y’all don’t want actually smart and inventive people, you want slaves.

This kid just MacGyvered the shit out of a triple-A game studio and absolute best we could do is lock him up for life? Ridiculous. This whole capitalism shit is a fraud.

What’s getting yanked is that older phones won’t connect to Android Auto enabled vehicles if the phone is running Android Nougat. It must be Running Android Oreo or later.

For those not remembering, Nougat was released in 2016 and went out of support in 2019. By the most recent metric (Dec. 2022) about 4% of all Android devices currently run Nougat. So this will affect all fifteen of the people still running this OS.

Most devices that were originally sold with Nougat have an upgrade path to Oreo. The bigger problem is folks who purchased devices with Marshmallow (orig. 2015) or Lollipop (orig. 2014) who stopped receiving upgrades past Nougat. These are the devices that will most likely be impacted by this change.

Personally, I like to keep my devices for at least five years, so them deprecating 2016 and earlier is okay with me.

I wish there was like a way to just have a 1-to-1 voice conversation with someone on my phone and it be universally supported across all phones.

For those looking for Mozilla’s back and forth on this since 2017.

This ends when we kill these f–kers

And yeah, just for anyone wondering. This is a violation of 18 USC § 875(d). Literally saying that about judges carrying out their duties is an actual violation of Federal law punishable by about a year in prison for first offense. Not to mention that it can be construed as obstruction of justice (if you live within the State), which carries it’s own penalties.

That’s what the AI wants you to think!

Yeap, that’s all it is plus the PCB and accessories. Looking at it, looks like a 74HC00 - quad NAND gates, 74HC14 - Schmitt trigger inverters, 74HC74 - A dual D flip-flop, and a 74HC153 - dual 4 input mux.

The clock isn’t even a 555, just an RC circuit passed through the Schmitt trigger and the provided hardware XOR is where our NANDs come in.

It’s a neat little project but I think good CPU lessons need to have a MAR/MDR/CIR and show the fetch, decode, and execute cycle. Because a lot of modern concepts derive from asking the question of “how do I optimize that?”

Emirati authorities have put in place laws that reflect their values

Yeah how’s those apostasy laws? Oh! Lookie there, it’s death. Noice. But in fairness I wouldn’t recommend the United States to folks based on my experience of having lived here all my life. So I think it’s fair to live and let live at the end of the day.

That said, challenging a fine and that challenge resulting in an increased sentence encourages folks to accept guilt when it may not be due. I don’t like it when they do it here in the US, I think it’s fair to indicate that it’s not liked anywhere else.