I am not sure because this assumes a very well informed and educated population.
Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins.
So democracy is good but you need some sort of trust in the middle. With this backward law, the trust is eroding.
> Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins.
I think people might agree with that if they alone were going to get the money, but far too many people vote against their own interests to keep "the wrong people" from getting anything. They'd never allow a "give everyone 10M" referendum to pass.
We want the population to be well informed. But when you consider the history of literacy, journalism, and what media most people have access towards, that assumption was never really true in the first place. People were always getting propagandized as soon as they had the power to vote or even merely chose among suppliers. Probably long before that too.
The current government refuses entry for political opinions by forcing people to give away their phone passwords. It is like a political test purge on a small scale showing what will happen to the country the minute they can free themselves from this pesky constitution.
Not sure what your definition of forcing is, but you are well within your rights to decline to provide any passwords in the US. You may not get the device back (or want it back), but in theory nothing should happen to you.
It feels so common actually that I would not even bother sharing them. ChatGPT gives me hallucinated URLs all... the... time. Like several times a day. You can fix it by prompting it to Google the subject or research it otherwise it just vomits garbage.
LLMs are not databases, they are text processors that need to be trained on ungodly amounts of data and can sort of kind of double as a database, though a very fallible one. Inject ground truth and you're cooking; don't and it's a crap shoot. (not saying anything new here, but it bears repeating).
P. Give me quotes from Aristophanes describing the Peloponesian war as unfortunate.
A. Yes — Aristophanes, the Athenian comic playwright, lived through almost the entire Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) and his plays are full of bitter humor about Greeks destroying each other. He often portrays it as an unfortunate, fratricidal conflict.
Here are a few key passages (in translation):
Acharnians (425 BCE)
Written during the war’s early years, it shows a farmer sick of the fighting:
• Dicaeopolis (the main character) laments:
“This war, which has come upon us all, is nothing but Greeks fighting Greeks.”
He later makes a private peace treaty with Sparta for himself, mocking the idea that the wider war must continue when ordinary people suffer.
Peace (421 BCE)
Produced right before the “Peace of Nicias”:
• Trygaeus, the hero, flies up to heaven to free the goddess Peace:
“It is monstrous that Greeks should destroy one another, while barbarians stand by laughing.”
This captures Aristophanes’ view that the war was not only ruinous but also shameful, as it weakened Greece before foreign enemies.
In sum: Aristophanes consistently portrayed the Peloponnesian War as a tragic absurdity — Greeks killing Greeks while the true enemies (Persians/“barbarians”) watched and benefitted. His comedies combine satire with a deep sense that the conflict was fratricidal and unnecessary.
P. You said Dicaeopolis (the main character) laments: “This war, which has come upon us all, is nothing but Greeks fighting Greeks.” Where is that quote?
A. Good catch — let’s pin this down carefully.
In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (425 BCE), the character Dicaeopolis indeed complains that the Peloponnesian War is a fratricidal war among Greeks, but the exact wording depends on the translation.
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Where it appears
• Early in the play (lines ~100–120), Dicaeopolis is waiting for the Assembly to begin. He grumbles about the war, saying essentially that it is:
“A war of Greek against Greek, when we should be standing united against the barbarians.”
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Examples from published translations
• Benjamin Rogers (1924 translation):
“I am heartily tired of these Grecian wars, of Greeks fighting against Greeks.”
• Alan H. Sommerstein (Loeb Classical Library, 2002): (lines 116–118) “It’s not right — Greeks at war with Greeks, while the barbarian looks on, laughing at us.”
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Needless to say, that quote is nowhere in the Acharnians - nor anything roughly equivalent. Not only that, in the later response it attributes to the play "Acharnians" the quote it initially attributed to the play "Peace".
Machine code. Assembly is higher level. since data and instructions can be mixed machine code is harder to decode - that might be a byte of data or an instruction. Mel would have [ab]used this fact to make his programs work. It is worse on x86 where instructions are not fixed length but even on arm you can run into problems at times
No you cannot. While it is 1 to 1, you still need to know where to start as if you start at the wrong place data will be interrupted as an asm instruction and things will decode legally - but invalidly. It is worse on CISC (like x86) where instructions are different length and so you can jump to the middle byte of a long instruction and decode a shorter instruction. (RISC sometimes starts to get CISC features as they add more instructions as well).
If the code was written reasonably you can usually find enough clues to figure out where to start decoding and thus get a reasonable assembly output, but even then you often need to restart the decoding several times because the decoder can get confused at function boundaries depending on what other data gets embedded and where it is embedded. Be glad self modifying code was going out of style in the 1980's and is mostly a memory today as that will kill any disassembly attempts. All the other tricks that Mel used (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel) also make your attempts at lifting machine code to assembly impossible.
It definitely isnt a 1:1 process, as there are multiple ways to encode the same instruction (with possibly even having some subtle side effects based on the encoding)
I dislike Python for that reason. I don't love the offside-rule syntax, but compared to how often I have an issue with software written in Python due to some old/deprecated/broken packaging issue...
I've lately been pretty deep into 3d printing, and basically all the software has Python...and breaks quite easily. Whether because of a new version of Pip with some new packaging rule, forced venvs...I really don't like dealing with Python software.
I used virtualenv for the past 15 years and I don't recall it changing significantly. I don't get why people use new fancy tools like pipenv/pyenv/poetry/uv and then complain that there are too many tools to learn. There is nothing wrong with just using virtualenv. It has its warts but it always worked for me and it's stable.
I think if you had chased every single latest hotness then you would have hit lots of breakages, but depending on what you are doing and where you are running (and what dependencies you are using) then I think you could easily have something from 10-15 years ago work today. Part of the trick would have been to aware enough to pick the boring long-term options (but at some level that applies to every language and ecosystem), but the other part is understanding what the tools are actually doing and how they are maintained.
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