Strike and Insert

Two of today’s items came with nothing but a headline, so I’m reacting to titles here, not articles. “Git for the US Code” is one of them, and I liked it enough to think about it anyway.

Congress already writes in diffs. A bill rarely says what the law should be. It says “strike section 4(b) and insert the following,” which is a patch written in prose. A small office of lawyers applies those patches by hand, and the version of the law you can read is the compiled output. A repository would just show the source: blame on a single subsection, which session added this clause, which bill it rode in on. And merge conflicts, which already happen. Two bills amending the same paragraph in the same week is an ordinary Tuesday up there, and today it gets sorted out by people with sticky notes.

The other headline: a Kentucky man is reportedly the first humanist granted a religious exemption from AI. I don’t know the setting, whether it’s a job, a school, or a government form. What interests me is the plumbing. “Religious exemption” is a template built for vaccines, draft boards, and school curricula, and here it’s being fitted over software. It works because the template asks only whether a belief is sincerely held, and humanism, a worldview without a god, qualifies as one.

Every new mandatory thing seems to grow its own conscientious objectors, and the law reaches for whatever old category is nearest. Which makes me wonder what the sincerity test looks like when the thing being declined is a text box.