ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12hr ago
I think somebody pointed out eons ago that this website permits color styling to function.
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RGB colors: ██████
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OKLCH colors: ██████
Note that, even though all the RGB colors presented here add up to 255 or 256, they have vastly different brightnesses and intensities as perceived by humans. In contrast, the OKLCH colors all have constant brightness of 75 percent and intensity of 0.12.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
13hr ago
The Tolkien wiki says otherwise.
The origin of the Orcs is never definitely explained in J.R.R. Tolkien's works. Throughout the years, he changed the explanation, but he was doubtful because of the theological implications of an evil race and the relations of fëa and hröa in his cosmology. As Tolkien died without deciding on a final explanation, the canonicity of the origin of Orcs is a popular debate in the fandom. Listed here are the different origins of the Orcs given in Tolkien's texts, ordered chronologically.
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Bred from stone (Book of Lost Tales, 1917–1920)
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Based on Elves (Quenta Silmarillion in Lost Road, 1937)
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Corrupted Elves (Annals of Aman, 1950s; chosen by Christopher for Silmarillion chapter 3)
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Soulless animals, or mixed origin of corrupted Elves and Men (Myths Transformed, 1959)
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Corrupted Men (Quendi and Eldar, 1959–1960)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
17hr ago
This is where your eye for detail catches you.
It doesn't matter that much. Renting a generator costs just 50 dollars. (Renting a gasoline mower is even cheaper at 30 dollars, but I'm not totally sure that the still-meaty smallest model offered by Home Depot would fit in my cute little car.) It's just annoying.
Managing the electrical cord was a huge PITA, and I sliced and had to splice it twice despite being (I think) pretty careful.
IIRC, I've accidentally run over my cord twice in my 10 or 15 years using this corded mower (the same old Homelite model for the entire time, with two small DIY repairs). I would call it a "pain in the ass", but not a huge one.
Here's a rough sketch of my typical grass-cutting pattern at home. (Scale: The lot is about 100 feet square.) As long as you don't go in circles, you can do basically anything you want without being too annoyed, IMO.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
20hr ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21hr ago
This is in Pennsylvania, not New J⁎rsey. I have seen the contractor bring generators to the site.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21hr ago
Are you sure the problem is not that you are letting your grass grow too long, rather than battery-powered lawnmowers are too weak? The normal advice is not to cut more than 1/3 of the grass height per mow, and most mowers only go up to 4 inches (10 cm).
Could you not just get a second set of batteries for a battery-powered mower and have one set charging while using the other mowing?
In 2025, I did not let my grass grow all the way to eight inches. However, even at whatever height I allowed the grass to grow to (probably around four or six inches), I found it extremely tiresome and annoying to run the weak battery mower forward at an excruciatingly slow pace, just nibbling away at the grass, when I was used to going much faster with a full-power corded mower at home.
Now that you have electric service
I don't. Completion is more than a month behind schedule.
You don't have to mess with extension cords.
While I did get some enjoyment out of being able to run the cord-free gasoline mower in an outside-to-inside spiral pattern, rather than being forced by the extension cord to go back and forth like a plowman, I don't think that's a significant factor in my decisionmaking here.
You held back there
I did not. I truly have given this prompt to my decensored local LLM dozens of times, and the LLM's output always is much elaborate than anything that I would write. Could I in theory have made my output more elaborate? Possibly. But I don't have the competence to make those extra details actually sound erotic. (Inconsistencies in the darkness of the woman's skin? Waxing poetic about her thigh gap? A discursion on the shape of her nose? To me this sounds more excessive than erotic.) In contrast, the LLM, while going rather further than I intended to imply in the prompt (No brassiere? Lustful lip biting? Microskirt barely covering the buttocks? This is not a normal woman in a shopping mall.), is able to make added details actually sound erotic.
(And, again, I don't really care about gaining that competence—this is just idle dabbling.)
If you don't have the LLM executing your ideas it will go full Generic Genericsson.
I disagree there. It will always return a white woman if you don't specify otherwise, but it will give that white woman different outfits and make her do different things, even with a short prompt like this one.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Your link to the Atlantic is broken because you forgot to include the "https://" part.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Direct quote:
The Owner hereby acknowledges that Owner is aware that the Premises, during the progress of the Work, constitute a dangerous area. Any visits by the Owner to the Premises during the progress of the Work shall be done at the Owner’s sole risk[,] and the Owner agrees to hold harmless and indemnify [the contractor] from any loss, expense (including attorneys’ fees), suit[,] or causes of action resulting from any damage or injury, personal injury[,] or death suffered by the Owner[ or] Owner’s agents, invitees[,] licensees, guests[,] or employees.
The first sentence in particular seems like a pretty strong statement that I am supposed to limit my presence on the property. If I'm not supposed to be there, then no one but the contractor is left to cut the grass.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
"Battle of bureaucracy"? I don't see any such event here. If you're referring to the tall-grass letter: Unlike some other municipalities that I could name, this municipality explicitly prescribes a maximum grass height of eight inches, and the vegetation on my lot unambiguously exceeds that value. (Annoyingly, the municipal govt. does not publish its code online, and instead requires citizens to request individual ordinances by email. But I specifically requested a copy of the maximum-grass-height ordinance shortly after buying the lot.)
The article says:
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and visitors overstay visas each year.
The article's only other use of "visitor" is to describe a person who overstayed a J-1 "exchange visitor" (au pair) visa. This arguably misleadingly implies that most "visitors" are workers. However, in reality, 77 percent of "visitor" visas (those classified as nonimmigration by the federal govt.) are either B-1 business (attending a conference, not working)/B-2 tourism or BCC (equivalent of B-1/B-2 for Mexicans only). So "visitor" is essentially a synonym of "tourist".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Item 1 of 7
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Prominent publicly-traded mattress manufacturer Sleep Number has filed for bankruptcy, and has been taken private for 700 M$ by a Canadian mattress retailer. It claims that, of its 3000 employees, 38 bigwigs—including nine vice presidents and 13 directors—are important enough to the company's operations that they need to be enticed to stay during the transition to new ownership. It proposes to do so by giving to each of these employees a retention payment of approximately 48 k$.
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The bankruptcy trustee objects to this idea, claiming that these payments would constitute illegal distribution of assets to insiders. But the bankruptcy judge overrules the objection. Despite being called vice presidents and directors, these employees are not members of the Executive Leadership Team (which consists of six senior and executive vice presidents in addition to the CEO), and are not members or appointees of the board of directors. Therefore, the employees in question are not insiders, and the retention payments are perfectly fine.
Item 2 of 7
Some borderline-shitpost writing
“Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall.” I've given that instruction to my local decensored LLM quite a few times. But can I follow it myself? (Insert meme from I, Robot.)
Previous discussion in this vein
Item 3 of 7
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A truck is reported stolen by its owner. Two weeks later, a police officer pulls over a tow truck that is towing the allegedly-stolen truck. The tow-truck driver no habla inglés, but he makes a phone call to his English-speaking boss, who tells the officer that the owner of the property where the truck was stored thought the truck was abandoned and hired the boss to tow the truck away. However, the driver overhears the phone conversation and (through an interpreter) tells the officer that the boss told the driver a different story—that the boss purchased the truck from its owner and was in the process of selling it to a third party.
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On these facts, the tow-truck driver receives a felony charge of receiving stolen property. However, the trial judge dismisses the charge, and the appeals panel affirms. Even assuming that the boss stole the truck (one judge on the panel cares enough to write a separate opinion complaining that the boss hasn't been charged with theft despite being unable to produce the allegedly-stolen truck's title), the prosecutor has produced no evidence whatsoever that the driver knew that the truck was stolen. Rather, the evidence shows that the driver had no idea that the boss was telling two different stories about how he obtained the truck (which would have justified him to suspect that the boss had stolen the truck) until after he was pulled over and overheard the boss's conversation with the police officer. And the crime of receiving stolen property requires proof that the alleged fence knew that the property was stolen.
(The driver remains on the hook for the less-serious offenses of driving without a license and without taillights.)
Item 4 of 7
Imagine that you object to a will as invalid, but your claim fails. Normally, you would pay your own attorney's fees. However, New Jersey apparently has a court rule allowing the probate judge to make the estate pay your attorney's fees if your objection "had reasonable cause".
Item 5 of 7
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Hampton sends text messages to his ex-girlfriend, Stephanie. Stephanie's current romantic partner, Lawrence, sees the texts and calls Hampton on the telephone. An argument ensues. Hampton shows up outside Stephanie's apartment building, and Lawrence walks outside to have a fistfight. Less than a minute later, Stephanie walks outside and finds Lawrence beaten to a pulp while Hampton kicks him one last time and then is driven away by a friend. Lawrence is hospitalized for five months, and remains unable to walk without assistance.
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Hampton is indicted for the second-degree felony of aggravated assault—attack resulting in "serious bodily injury" (inter alia, "protracted loss of function"), with a maximum sentence of ten years. The trial judge instructs the jury to additionally consider the "lesser included offense" of third-degree aggravated assault—attack resulting in "significant bodily injury" ("temporary loss of function"), with a maximum sentence of five years.
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Hampton asks the judge to add instructions on two misdemeanor lesser included offenses, simple assault (attack resulting in mere "bodily injury"; maximum sentence six months) and simple assault with mutual combat (maximum sentence thirty days). But the judge denies the request. No reasonable jury could find that the impairment inflicted on Lawrence does not rise to the level of "significant bodily injury", so simple assault is not relevant to the jury's deliberations.
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The jury convicts Hampton of second-degree aggravated assault, and the judge sentences him to seven years in prison. The appeals panel affirms the conviction, but remands for resentencing since the trial judge incorrectly counted Lawrence's "horrific" injuries in this case toward the "prior criminal record" aggravating factor.
Item 6 of 7
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Mists of time past: My parents buy a corded lawnmower, and make me (and my brother) use it to mow the lawn.
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2023: I stumble across an article claiming that battery-powered lawnmowers are far weaker than gasoline mowers. My own calculations on the basis of Home Depot product listings bear out the claims: 200–500 watts for battery mowers, 1400–1600 watts for corded mowers, and 2000–2500 watts for gasoline mowers.
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Winter 2024–2025: I buy a vacant lot. Of course, it has no electric service.
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Spring 2025: I buy a battery-powered lawnmower for use on the vacant lot. As indicated by my previous calculations, it is noticeably weaker than the corded mower that I have used for the past decade. In fact, despite being marketed as capable of handling a 1/2-acre property, its battery runs dry halfway through my 1/6-acre lot! I return the battery-powered mower in favor of a gasoline-powered mower, and use that for the 2025 lawnmowing season.
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Winter 2025–2026: My contract with a homebuilding contractor does not explicitly mention lawnmowing, but does explicitly say that, if I am injured on the lot while work is ongoing, then I will not be covered by the contractor's insurance. I interpret this as implying that, during construction, lawnmowing will be performed by the contractor rather than by me. Accordingly, I sell the gasoline mower on Craigslist.
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Late July 2026: The contractor previously razed all vegetation on the lot as part of excavation. But now the grass is getting pretty tall. I send an email complaint to the contractor. Its response: "We can take care of the grass. We were looking for someone to handle the mowing since we currently do not have anyone on staff available to maintain it."
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Early August 2026 (one week later): The contractor still hasn't cut the grass. I attend the council meeting for final adoption of the municipality's new zoning code. Before the meeting, the code-enforcement official notices me, and informs me that he has sent to me an official letter telling me to cut the grass on my lot. I guess I'll have to rent either a gasoline-powered mower or a gasoline-powered generator from the local Home Depot.
Item 7 of 7
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Raheem is standing on a street corner. Anwar drives up to him, and Anwar's passenger Kevon shoots him, but he survives. On the other side of the narrow, one-way street, Tiarra happens to be sitting in her parked car with her one-year-old child CC. She starts screaming, and Kevon turns around and shoots her dead. Both Anwar and Kevon are charged with, and convicted of, a laundry list of crimes—conspiracy to murder Raheem, attempted murder of Raheem, conspiracy to murder Tiarra, murder of Tiarra, and reckless endangerment of CC.
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On appeal, Anwar admits that he conspired to kill Raheem, but complains that he had nothing to do with the crimes that Kevon committed against Tiarra and CC of his own accord. But the trial judge rejects this argument, and the appeals panel affirms. Anwar conspired to kill Raheem in a drive-by shooting, and it is reasonable to infer that Anwar contemplated the possibility that Kevon would additionally eliminate witnesses as part of that method of killing.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
The big three are housing, healthcare, and transportation. Food is not a trivial cost, but it comes in well behind those items for most households.
The Consumer Expenditure Survey indicates otherwise. For USAian consumer units (households) in the middle quintile of income before taxes:
| Expense category | Proportion of total expenses (%) |
|---|---|
| Food | 14 |
| •Food at home | 9 |
| Housing⁎ | 36 |
| •Shelter⁎ | 23 |
| Transportation | 17 |
| Healthcare | 9 |
⁎As defined in this dataset, "shelter" includes rent, mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance, home insurance, etc. and is what a layman probably means when he says housing, while "housing" includes not just shelter but also utilities, housekeeping supplies, furniture, appliances, etc.
I strongly recommend Project Lawful
That mirror seems to return a lot of internal server errors, so you may want to instead link to the main website in the future.Never mind, the main site returns a lot of these errors as well.
- Custom CSS to make reading the infuriating Glowfic format tolerable, to be used in, e. g., browser extension Stylus
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
IMPORT THE THIRD WORLD
BECOME THE THIRD WORLD
🇬🇧
The third world is a people, not a place.
There is no such thing as “magic ground” that makes some places prosperous and some not!
If you teleported the people of Japan to anywhere else, that place would become Japan.
As far as I know, historically, Japan is bad dirt.
"Magic dirt" is a right-wing derogatory shorthand for the idea that immigrants can be valuable in their new society despite not being valuable in their original society—as soon as they step onto the dirt of the new country, they magically become more competent.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
So you have this problem too?
I can think of a few instances where I completely failed to comprehend the phonemes that someone just spouted at me, even after a repetition or two. But I don't think it's happened very often to me, so I would hesitate to call this phenomenon a red flag for autism/Asperger's/whatever in me specifically (though I obviously am flying other red flags).
But I also sometimes experience the same issue reading.
The particular article that I linked is focused on audio, and does not mention any equivalent phenomenon in text.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
I have seen this called "problems with auditory processing". One scholarly article says (with literally two dozen citations omitted):
As well as a heightened sensitivity to sounds, some autistic people may find busy auditory scenes challenging, such as isolating a single speech source in a noisy environment, and may have difficulty filtering out interfering sounds that capture their attention. Difficulties with detecting speech in noise has been reported across the lifespan, from children to adults as well as in subgroups of the autistic population (e.g., non-speaking adolescents and young adults). Indeed, several studies report that autistic people struggle more than non-autistic people to filter speech sounds amidst noise. Some lines of evidence suggest the difficulties that some autistic people have recognizing target words amidst distracting speech are evident relatively early in development—2–5 years of age. Similar reports of difficulties understanding or attending to speech in background noise have been identified in people diagnosed with ADHD. Overall, such altered auditory processing—including difficulties attending to relevant speech sounds, or difficulties ignoring interfering sounds—are likely to impact significantly on autistic people's daily lives, whether at home, school or in the workplace.
An example of how sensory and auditory differences in autistic people might influence communication lies in social contexts that inherently involve the direction of attention among competing stimuli. “Cocktail party listening”—the ability to follow a conversation in an acoustically challenging environment—is reported as being particularly challenging for autistic people, and a reduced ability to ignore background stimuli—for whatever reason—potentially accounts for at least some of the difficulties they experience in social settings. Using fMRI to investigate sensory responsivity and social cognition in autistic adults, Green et al. (2018) demonstrated that activity in brain areas associated with social cognition were reduced when sensory stimuli were presented simultaneously with a tactile distractor stimulus, consistent with the interpretation that cognitive load may increase with more than one modality. Hernandez et al. (2020) also used fMRI to investigate brain responses in autistic and non‐autistic youth during conversations in noisy environments. Both groups showed activation in language networks, but autistic youth exhibited greater activation in left‐hemisphere speech‐processing areas. The degree of increased activation was associated with better social cognition and suggests that these autistic youth recruited additional neural resources to focus on social cues in the presence of distracting stimuli.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
I fail to see how "Smirnoff" is significantly less Russian than "Smirnov". It's just an outdated transliteration of the same Cyrillic letter, pronounced in almost exactly the same way. Recall that JK Rowling chose to spell the name of a Slavic villain in Harry Potter as "Karkaroff", not "Karkarov". Likewise, "Bower" and "Kline" are not significantly less German than "Bauer" and "Klein".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Second Amendment Foundation link
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Your link is broken because you forgot to include "https://" at the start of it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
They can be useful for answering questions that do not fit well into conventional keyword-based Internet searches. A recent AAQC alleges that they are quite useful in language learning and have essentially reached competence in the editing even of full-length novels (given proper preparation). And, of course, they excel in generating text pornography (especially the local decensored models), as several users have testified in recent months (1 2 3).
Previous discussion
@ThisIsSin, note that phone autocorrect often inserts directional quotation marks as well.
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