Posts on Random Domain

Party of One - How the Constitutional Court manufactured a right to be an independent candidate

Sat, 16 May 2026 13:34:00 +0200

In June 2020, the Constitutional Court handed down New Nation Movement NPC and Others v President of the Republic of South Africa and Others [2020] ZACC 11. The order, in the part everyone quotes, says this:

It is declared that the Electoral Act 73 of 1998 is unconstitutional to the extent that it requires that adult citizens may be elected to the National Assembly and Provincial Legislatures only through their membership of political parties.

But neither the court, not anyone else, actually read the Electoral Act.

Politics in Robes

Mon, 11 May 2026 18:36:21 +0200

Politics in Robes: A Political Critique of Maya CJ’s Judgement in EFF v Speaker (CCT 35/24)

The first judgment in Economic Freedom Fighters and Another v Speaker of the National Assembly and Others [2026] ZACC 17 is being read, in the public conversation, as a vindication of constitutional accountability against a recalcitrant parliamentary majority. That reading is comfortable, and it is wrong. It is comfortable because it tracks an emotionally satisfying narrative: a powerful President accused of corruption, a governing party closing ranks, and a Chief Justice who refuses to let the matter rest. It is wrong because it mistakes the form of Maya CJ’s judgment for its substance. The substance, prised free of its rhetorical packaging, is a piece of constitutional politics. The first judgment delivers, by judicial means, a censure of President Ramaphosa that the National Assembly declined to deliver politically. It is not the role of the Constitutional Court to be the appeals branch of a defeated opposition motion. Maya CJ’s judgment treats the Court as though it were.

Test-Driven Development in the Age of AI: Why Natural Language Can't Replace Formal Specifications

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 21:10:00 +0200

I recently worked on a project where I wrote the unit tests first, then had Claude Code generate the implementation that passed those tests. The experience crystallized something I’ve been thinking about: natural language is fundamentally too ambiguous to be an effective specification language for software, no matter how smart our LLMs become.

This isn’t a hot take about current AI capabilities. This is a statement about linguistics.

Are We Re-Inventing Linguistics?

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:33:00 +0200

Every time I have read a new post offering advice on how to work with an LLM, be it with prompts or context, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some unifying “theory of language” that explained what made a prompt good or bad.