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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

    The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

    Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

    The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn’t like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

    Voting third party basically doesn’t work. Any time its been significant, it’s just caused a spoiler effect.







  • Apparently that might or might not be a mistranslation?

    https://www.etymonline.com/word/checkmate

    mid-14c., in chess, said of a king when it is in check and cannot escape it, from Old French eschec mat (Modern French échec et mat), which (with Spanish jaque y mate, Italian scacco-matto) is from Arabic shah mat “the king died” (see check (n.1)), which according to Barnhart is a misinterpretation of Persian mat “be astonished” as mata “to die,” mat “he is dead.” Hence Persian shah mat, if it is the ultimate source of the word, would be literally “the king is left helpless, the king is stumped.”




  • And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

    This is facile.

    According to Microsoft, about 70% of security bugs they see are memory safety issues.

    Yes: if you introduce memory safety, there’s still those 30% of security bugs left. But, well, I’d rather worry about 30% of issues than 100%…

    Similarly, I use libraries that eliminate SQL injections unless you really go out of your way.