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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • Yes. My rule of thumb is that generally rebasing is the better approach, in part because if your commit history is relatively clean then it is easier to merge in changes one commit at a time than all at once. However, sometimes so much has changed that replaying your commits puts you in the position of having to solve so many problems that it is more trouble than it is worth, in which case you should feel no qualms about aborting the rebase (git rebase --abort) and using a merge instead.


  • The way I structure my commits, it is usually (but not always) easier and more reliable for me to replay my commits one at a time on top of the main branch and see how each relatively small change needs to be adapted in isolation–running the full test suite at each step to verify that my changes were correct–than to be presented with a slew of changes all at once that result from marrying all of my changes with all of the changes made to the main branch at once. So I generally start by attempting a rebase and fall back to a merge if that ends up creating more problems than it solves.




  • The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.

    Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.




  • If, as you say,

    I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

    Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

    I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

    Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.



  • Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

    It isn’t worded as a “rhetorical flourish”; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:

    Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

    In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a “rhetorical flourish” with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.