Patrick Dark

IOCCC winner code entry

This IOCCC winner entry (International Obfuscated C Code Contest) made me smile. The code draws the current moon phase to the console.

Why on Earth is chess even divided by sex??? Oh yeah, sexism

In other words, a Texas court has to rule that Democrats vacated office by refusing to attend a special session with the explicit aim of preventing Democrats from being elected.

Republicans could, y’know, just win more seats, but instead choose to maximize wasted votes with packing and cracking.

When corporations donate to campaigns with the tacit expectation of a quid pro quo, that’s apparently “free speech”, but when legislators seek contributions to mitigate a naked attempt to rig elections, that’s “bribery”. Corrupt Texas Republicans have turned the concept of bribery on its head.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

Normally, I’m not a fan of using quorum as a vehicle to effect government policy, but there’s really no way to fault Democrats here since the whole point of the gerrymander is explicitly to deny Democrats legislative representation. Why show honor to a Republican Party that is shamelessly corrupt?

I think in an effort to point out Christian hypocrisy re: male sexuality, some on the left have lost sight of the fact that we were critiquing draconian religious views and not sex itself and have instead become the Puritans they were attacking. Leftism should be on the side of sexual liberation.

I think the president just plainly stating that he's firing the person who produces economic data because he doesn't like the numbers officially pushes us into a new era where you just can't believe government data anymore.

Don’t like the numbers? Fire the person who compiled them.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —1984 by George Orwell

“I am not a crook.“

Remember when the truth mattered?

More evidence that the “America Party” was just a ruse, likely so people would stop attributing a politically devastating quote from Elon Musk stating that empathy is the greatest weakness of Western civilization to the Republican Party itself.

Time for a coal renaissance. As if it isn’t hot enough outside.

It’s laughable that people really think Donald Trump is playing 5-D chess and going to implement a Great Leap Forward past communist China using arcane technologies like coal and oil. (Remember, Trump hates electric and green.)

Worth remembering: The Constitution explicitly gives the power to set tariffs to Congress. They could stop this nonsense by the end of the day.

I saw a YouTube documentary recently that indicated that the reason for CEO pay getting out of control and becoming completely disconnected from the amount and difficulty of work they do relative to other workers is the legalization of corporate stock as a form of pay.

I think Senator Klobuchar would be more effective making the case that Donald Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to impose tariffs and is usurping Congress’s authority.

Worth remembering that Donald Trump does not actually have the legal authority to impose blanket tariffs tomorrow absent an emergency; there’s no law to that effect.

His trademark power to coerce other nations into economic submission by royal decree is essentially made up.

I think one means to securing apps is to enforce a general requirement that the entire app be served from a single domain.

It’s much harder to monitor a network when one app connects to everything like microsoft.com, live.com, azure.com, inappcenter.ms, msn.com, skype.com, trafficmanager.com…

Kind of amused that mega corporations continue to make the case that app store payment monopolies are for protecting users when their app safety reviews amount to analysis automated by AI that’s been repeatedly shown to allow malware to slip through.

I love imagining a world in which Trump illegally takes power for a third term but follows the law in every other respect.

Zohran Mamdani versus Hakeem Jeffries

*grabs popcorn*

So the takeaway from Elon Musk, America’s richest man and CEO of Starlink and Tesla, is “white men” should remind white women that they’re “built to be traded to another tribe (or captured)”.

Funny how there’s this strange disconnect between being rich and intelligent, capitalist and meritocratic.

Why would we make a trade deal with what Republicans have decided to call the “51st state”?

Not sure how they do it legally given their independent redistricting commission, but, if California were gerrymandered, apparently Democrats could rig control of its House delegation 50 to 2 (currently, it’s already a lopsided 43 to 9), which could yield seven seats in that one state alone.

I wish senators would do something more substantive like hold a vote on recognizing Palestine as a sovereign state with Jerusalem as its capital. I’d be surprised if such a motion could muster even 27 votes.

There are too many bills making statements that would have little effect even if passed.

Worth noting that the company hacking European journalists’ American iPhones is an American company with Israeli ties.

Is the US a beacon of freedom or a bastion of tyranny?

More food for thought: even under the relatively benign rule of Barack Obama we were hacking allies like Brazil and Germany.

Large raft of issues fixed in iOS (support.apple.com/en-us/124147) as well as macOS (support.apple.com/en-us/124149).

It’s interesting that for the iPhones the vulnerabilities simply state “memory corruption”, but for Macs Apple is much more explicit about the vulnerabilities: they can grant root.

Where’s the Department of Government Efficiency to fire Donald Trump for “waste, fraud, and abuse”?

Seems like a strange choice given that Donald Trump spent the 2024 election denying any association with Project 2025.

I think it’s ironic that the Palestinian movement is a quest to control Jerusalem for the greatness of Allah and Islam, yet Allah will apparently not come to their salvation.

All of the resources spent on rockets and enforcing Sharia law should have been spent on food and creating a durable peace.