Cheers!

I think that immunity for explicitly delineated powers makes sense purely from a logical point of view: the constitution says the president can do a thing, therefore a law saying they can’t do that thing is either unconstitutional, or doesn’t apply to the president.

Yea, it’s an interesting one. AFAIU, the delineated powers are basically command of the military and the power to pardon. I really don’t see how a Crime can generally be applicable to either of those. It’s not like “commanding the army” can just become a crime.

But regulating what the army can legally do … seems like a very natural thing. I don’t know if individuals of the military in the US can be responsible under ordinary law for anything. If so, then I don’t see why that would extend to the president should they order something that’s obviously a crime. If not, then that’s that. And again, there are probably natural exceptions to carve out regarding the very nature of military action that would lead to preposterous inconsistencies if they could possible be made generally criminal … where again, it seems to me that you don’t need immunity … it’s just the nature of the power that is amenable to falling within the meaning of legislative regulation.

Beyond all of that though … there’s the opening line of Article II:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America

WTF is “the executive power”?! I’m sure there have been attempts in the US to give it some shape … but I’d also wager it’s been left somewhat nebulous too, involving elements quite distinct from whatever powers Congress/Law can confer. Does that count as an enumerated power?

Otherwise … yea I’m with you. The “official acts” thing seems more than wonky to me … seems downright expansive. Excluding military action and whatever “fuzzy” powers may be considered intrinsic … I’d imagine most of the executive’s powers come from legislative laws. So the body conferring power can’t constrain it to “not doing something criminal”!!!

I’ve wondered since having a brief look at the decision that the SCOTUS is playing a game here … where they do not want Trump’s trials to affect the election and are hoping to clarify this decision and what “official” means at a later date after the election.

It’s reasonable to me to say you cannot sue the president for vetoing a bill, or criminally prosecute the president for commanding the military. The constitution says the president can do those things, and that the check on presidential power is congressional acts including impeachment.

Yea I dunno … why not just have no immunity? It’s not like the whole idea of the separation of powers is to ensure power is freely exercised … it’s the opposite.

If a president has to pause for a moment before doing something to ask their lawyer if it would be a crime … maybe that’s the point of having fucking legal system and constitution?

Sotomayer’s dissent provided pretty good evidence (AFAICT) that the framers would have put criminal immunity into the constitution if they thought it wise … because it was a known idea at the time that had been done by some states regarding their governors. They didn’t. Cuz that’s the whole point … “no man is above the law”.

And as for Congressional impeachment being paramount … I’m not sure that’s either necessary or even consistent with the Constitution (again, as Sotomayer’s dissent addresses).

For example … Article 1, section 3 (emphasis mine):

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

In short (AFAICT) … impeachment and general legal liability are not the same thing … and the latter totally still applies.

Beyond all of that, the general law probably achieves everything that the majority’s decision was worried about (while they were conspicuously not worried about all of the other things that one should be when crowning a king). Civil immunity is a well established doctrine (government’s just too big and complex a thing for civil responsibility to make sense). And while I don’t know anything about it, there are similar-ish ideas around criminal responsibilities that just don’t make sense for the very nature of a governmental responsibility, war, I think, being a classic example. Sotomayer again speaks about these things.

Overall, once you start to squint at it, the whole decision is kinda weird. To elevate the separation of powers to the point of creating literal lawlessness seems like plain “not seeing the forest for the trees”.

The bit I wonder about, without knowing US Constitutional law/theory well at all … is whether a democratic factor has any bearing. A criminal law is created by the legislature, a democratic body. And also caries requirements for judgment by jury. So couldn’t an argument be made that the centrality of democratic power in the constitution cuts through any concerns about the separation of powers that the SCOTUS had, and enables democratically ordained law to quash concerns about whatever interference the judiciary (or legislature?) might exercise with the executive.

I know there’s the whole “it’s not a democracy, it’s a republic” thing … but the constitution dedicates so much text to establishing the mechanisms of democracy (including the means by which the constitution itself can be altered) that it seems ridiculous to conclude that democratic power is anything but central.

Every browser released since 2020 supports this

It’s a little paranoid of me, but I like the idea that a basic web app I make can be thrown onto any old out of date machine, where ~2015 or younger seems about right for me ATM.

You mean the Html template Element? I’ve never really got that to work, but I also never seriously tried.

Yea. From memory, it’s just an unrendered chunk of HTML that you can select and clone with a bit of JS. I always figured there’d be a pattern that isn’t too much of a cludge and gets you some useful amount of the way to components for basic “vanilla-js” pages, just never gave it a shot either.

Yea, I’m unclear on how you can take web components and still have widespread browser support (not knowing enough about their ins and outs).

Plain template elements are widely supported and have been for ~10 years (which ideologically matters to me along the same lines as the top post’s article) … perhaps a little bit of hacking together can get you close with just that?

But nah. These goobers got high off npm modules and did shots of JSX in the bathroom at lunch time.

Fucking LoL!

Anyone here have thoughts about doing basic interactive stuff with at most vanilla JS?

You need to see it to believe it I think. I was generally on the side of “too complex” but then came across instances perfect for it and used it right away and found it pleasant.

I’m still generally on the side of “too complex” though, and think there are probably better things for PSF to work on (cough packaging cough).

Maybe the better analogy is that with vim and nano, we see many text editors and IDEs with GUIs.

Interesting. I’m not so sure about the divide you draw between vim/nano and GUI IDEs. Historically vim and nano were basically the GUIs of their time. Preceding vim was ex and ed, which were basically CLI text editing tools build for the actually printed on paper typewriter interfaces computers like PDPs used to run. If you’re not familiar, and you think vim can be obscure … try running ed MYFILE! It’s basically a sort of grep and sed REPL for editing text (where, interestingly, historically tools like grep actually came out of ed not the other way round). Vim can be used in a sort of ed mode with vim -e (AFAIU it’s actually ex mode, which is a more advanced version of ed).

So I’d say vim is more like any sort of GUI/TUI or text editor plugin for git and git is like the old ancient CLI equivalent ed that no one knows about or uses anymore because having a visual mode just makes too much sense.

And this is basically where I fall … I think a vgit should exist, that provides a terminal TUI of some sort, and that as with vim and ed it should totally supplant git while also having a CLI mode too. That this hasn’t happened, back to my original point, is a problem and honestly a little strange.

Ha yea … who’s also been using his own customised emacs from an ancient 90s version for ages.

yea this all generally tracks.

The kind of “polish” I’m talking about is the sort that a good UI/UX/GUI dev would do by tracking common user behaviours and needs or having testing users run the app through its paces. All of these confusing instances where better terminology, commands and error messages would come up through a process like that.

Now, one could say that this is a dev tool which shouldn’t need to go through that process. That developers should be expected to understand the tool’s inner workings and conceptual model well enough to not need any of that. But that gets back to my initial point. Git is so popular and basically ubiquitous now that that policy makes little sense. Many devs who use or are expected to use git are not capable of getting to terms with git’s internals to the point of never having difficulty with the UI, either because of a lack of time, capacity or skill. Moreover, the time required to get familiar with git enough to never find the UI frustrating should not be underestimated … it’s not just conceptual but technical and specific to git’s implementation details to the point of just knowing how the UI/CLI has been implemented.

If you want to trash such developers … go ahead … but they’re still developer’s doing work and it’s to the industry’s benefit to have a standardised and powerful VCS … which means that at some point it’s worth thinking about meeting developers where they are.

Beyond all of that … one could also say “fuck that” and talk about how being popular and “the standard” requires being better. Git’s centrality to the dev workflow as at text-editor levels. But while text editors have a portable format (IE “plain text” and character encodings) and so enjoy pretty healthy competition (vim, emacs, sublime, VSCode, Jetbrains … etc) … VCSs, AFAICT, don’t have the same portability and neither the competition. I’m actually curious now … are there drop in replacements for git that provide complete compatibility but are completely different implementations?.

It’s interesting, IMO, to think about why/how this has come to be, but in the end, it means that there’s a lot on git’s shoulders here. Even a little bit of an improvement can go a long way, and so being critical (rather than cultishly defensive), I’d argue, is the correct aspect here on utilitarian grounds.

As for why git is in its current situation (without having really thought about it before) … I’d actually speculate that there’s something insidious here regarding it’s imperfect/confusing UI. Namely that it has a monopolising force. Once it’s gained critical mass, and once there are enough devs out there who have deep and experienced understanding of the tool, and enough internet content capturing that expertise, then moving off to another tool which doesn’t have the same established expertise is prohibitively difficult. Comparing here VCS to text editing and programming languages may be part of it, where the basic difficulty of doing VCS (at least in so far as the complexity is exposed to the user) is likely somewhere between that of a text-editor and a programming language. In a similar vein, the solution space for VCSs is probably relatively small while text-editors and languages enjoy a good deal of design variety. And so, there’s little interest or inventive or even capacity to come up with interesting alternatives for what is a relatively difficult/complex kind of tool, which gives any established VCS a good amount of competitive protection and inertia.

Keep in mind though, I’m not talking about the UI here, but the core functionality. That many GUIs exist shows that the UI is a relatively open design space. But that git itself has hardly explored that space on their own is my critique (where comparing to text editors like vim/nvim and emacs and the built-in features they have might be informative here).

Yea, I think they’re all different. Alternative shells are about more than polishing a UI, and in many ways so are distros. And text editors are basically platforms and have been for a while, though it is interesting to single out git as being more like something like vim compared to other CLIs (as you say, it’s different). But even so, it’s not nearly a platform like a test editor, most apps for it a UI wrappers that don’t alter its core utility/function, to my point.

Because this is a casual discussion and that’d be more effort than I’m willing to put in. Also, your premise is false: it can both be trivial NON-trivial to implement something better and relatively obvious that a better implementation could exist.

Also, if you’ve encountered these sorts of discussions before, I’d dare say it’s because people often avoid flame wars and you give off flame war energy.

I’ve mentioned two pretty concrete examples: be like mercurial and have a built in GUI. The basic commands being janky is also pretty concrete given the recent additions that have been made to correct that. But I don’t trust that you want a discussion because you’re being pretty demanding and aggressive here. Sea lioning would be somewhat apt … there is such a thing as meeting people where they are … do you have an example of something people often criticise about git that you don’t think can be improved or not easily? “Why is it so hard for replies to actually have a discussion rather than be demanding, argumentative and aggressive”

I mean sure. I personally haven’t researched and become an expert on this … it is an early-user’s misconceptions thread after all. And a dev can justifiably reflect on all of their tooling and consider their general usability against their popularity.

However, by the same token, your lack of any counter examples isn’t exactly highly credible either.

Nonetheless:

• Whenever I’ve seen an opinion from someone who’s used both mercurial and git, their opinion is always that the mercurial interface and model “actually makes sense”
• AFAICT, the git CLI (at least up until the more recent changes) has widely been recognised as being unnecessarily janky and confusing especially for common and basic tasks
• Apart from that, many devs have shared that they always struggle to remember git commands and always need to rely on some reference/cheat-sheet (obligatory XKCD), which IMO is a product of it both having a poor CLI in need of polish and being a program/tool that isn’t naturally constrained to CLI usage but rather naturally implemented with a graphical of some sort.

If it were really that big of a problem, someone would have made an effort to resolve it. The fact that people still use it anyway suggests to me that it’s a bit of an overblown issue.

As I said in another reply … how many GUIs and text editor plugins are there for git and how many use them?

What other CLI tool has as much work put into GUIs, wrappers and plugins that do not try to replace the underlying tool/CLI, even accounting for popularity?

If there was actually a persistent productivity hit from its interface, one of the weird wrappers would have taken off, and replaced it.

How many use a GUI or text editor plugin (eg magit) for git? AFAICT, such things, as a category, are rather popular.

That given its popularity it would be more user friendly. Every good dev tool will have its internals or more advanced features. Git is no different. But it sure feels like it never took the idea of a polished user experience seriously. Which is fine. It’s a dev tool after all. But the UI conversation around git has been going on long enough (here included) that there has to have been a significant global productivity cost due to the lack of a better UI.

in line with map_enthusiasts: [email protected] (and also [email protected] , which is smaller IIRC)

Big issue IMO. Never touched it for that reason.

A personal knowledge system has to be designed to last the rest of your life.

I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.

Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.

EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.

your own hacked together wrapper around sqlite as a plugin for your text editor of choice