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Joined vor 3 Jahren
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Cake day: 12. Juni 2023

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  • There aren’t really prosecutorial appeals for grand jury “no true bill” decisions, so this won’t be going to the supremes at this stage. However, there’s also nothing to prevent the prosecutors from trying again in front of a new grand jury. In practice this is pretty uncommon, likely because the judges presiding over grand juries take a dim view of lawyers who waste the court’s time (much like any other judge).

    A common reason to seek a new indictment would be if new evidence has come to light, and thus there are new facts for a new grand jury to weigh. I wouldn’t be surprised if these prosecutors try again, even though it’s a stupid move. Motiviations like “maintain credibility with my peers” and “don’t be an incompetent nincompoop” are clearly foreign to Trump’s DoJ.

    On a related note, double jeopard prevents someone from being tried twice for the same crime, but an indictment isn’t a trial. A trial does not start until after a grand jury returns an indictment, so double jeopardy doesn’t apply here.


  • There is an option to pay for Extended Security Update (ESU) support for Windows 10. It’ll give you access to critical security and Windows Defender antivirus updates, but no fixes or updates to features. There are three ways to pay:

    • “Free” if you’re syncing data to their cloud (pay by letting them datamine your data and settings)
    • With Microsoft Reward points, which I believe are primarily earned by using Bing (pay by letting them datamine your searches)
    • For $30 a year, at least for the first year, though I’ve read the price goes up each year as they want to drive everyone to Win11.

    The program would conceivably allow you to kick the can down the road, possibly as far as Oct. 2028. Personally, I opted instead to switch to Linux months ago instead, and don’t regret my choice.



  • It’s too early to lay blame. Every commercial aircraft has very clear maintenance schedules, including procedures that would have included a through inspection of the part that appears to have failed on this plane (aft lug to which the engine pylon was attached). The NTSB prelim report does not call out any failure to adhere to the maintenance schedule.

    The NTSB investigation has found signs of metal fatigue in the part that failed, but the defect was located such that it wouldn’t have been visible on an external inspection. The next inspection procedure that could have caught the issue wasn’t due to be performed until another 8000 or so cycles (takeoffs and landings) on that particular airframe. This looks like it’s shaping up to be an engineering failure, where the manufacturer of the aircraft has significantly overestimated the durability of this particular part.







  • Some of my all-time favorites! I imagine there were precursors in terms of game design, but these were the first games I ever played where the enemy AI seemed actually intelligent. Like, guards would notice if you made noise, or if a torch had been extinguished. If they found the body of another guard they’d start searching for you. Pretty standard stuff these days, but that was a very fresh concept at release.

    The studio behind Thief (Looking Glass) collaborated with Irrational Games on System Shock 2. Thief 1/2 and SS2 both used the Dark Engine, which leads me to my favourite piece of game dev lore/trivia. Because Thief was developed first, the game engine had code for sword parries. During SS2’s development they had persistent issues with that parry code activating when it shouldn’t. Testers would be trying to bean a psychic monkey with a pipe wrench and the monkey would parry with an invisible sword.