Yes, it's possible that blowing up Michael Xavier Johnson with a robot-delivered bomb saved lives, but at the same time, this is basically one more step down the road of relying on extrajudicial killing to maintain law and order instead of allowing the criminal justice system to work as intended. In addition to robotic bombers, it's not difficult to imagine LE relying on heavily armed drones to take out suspects. And if it's a human rights violation for the POTUS to take out suspected terrorists with drones without due process, surely it's also a violation of civil rights if local and federal LE do the same thing.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent on Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Amendment case about police searches:

Whitewash all the things.

In some tangential synchronicity to this post about Don Quixote I learned from digging through some Ruby documentation that Cervantes and Shakespeare did not in fact die on the same day, since Spain had already adopted the Gregorian calendar at that point while England was still on the Julian calendar.

I've been binge-watching "The Expanse" and all the Don Quixote references have made me ponder how Cervantes basically anticipated a lot of the themes in "The Matrix" and in "Inception" and it's making my perception of "The Expanse" feel way more Philip K. Dick-ian than it might deserve.

I think one of the ways our culture contributes to ongoing violence is the way it consecrates and sanctifies Darwinian competition. So ultimately all our relationships are adversarial. You're either for us or against us. You have to pick a side. It's a zero-sum game. There's no room for more complex paradigms involving sincere cooperation and altruism. The idea that we're not just all selfish assholes looking out for #1 is looked upon with utter disdain and contempt.

I think it's going to be a while before all human manual laborers are going to be replaced by robots.

Tonight was fireworks night at Dodger Stadium, and as I watched bright colorful explosions in the sky from a distant hill, I remembered that it was around this time of year twelve years ago when I made a last-minute decision that would forever change my life in weird and sometimes quite traumatic ways.

I seem to revisit this topic from time to time. Usually in the context of trying to struggling through someone else’s code.

Keep the violins going, damn it.