ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3hr ago
the decision to automatically change all Reddit links
It's a setting in your account, not something forced by the administrator.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
This child was born very prematurely, at only 26 weeks of gestation. It quickly became apparent that the child had suffered severe brain damage, resulting in severe cerebral palsy and a visual impairment. This was compounded by frequent and severe epileptic seizures, which were largely unresponsive to medication. This left the child restless and unable to sleep for long periods. The child also had mucus in its lungs, which made breathing and swallowing very difficult.
Given the cumulative effect of these conditions, it was clear that the child would not live to adulthood. The doctor also determined that the child's suffering could not be alleviated through medical treatment. The doctor and parents, therefore, decided to actively end the child’s life.
The committee concluded that the doctor acted with due care and made the right assessment. “All facets of ‘being human’—regarding motor skills, behavior, and personality—were severely impaired and were not going to improve,” the committee said. “Despite all medical and non-medical interventions, the parents and the doctor observed no improvement in the child’s condition and were convinced that the child was suffering unbearably and without prospect of relief.” It added that the doctor strictly adhered to all due-care requirements.
The Netherlands changed its euthanasia law in 2024 to allow for euthanasia on children between the ages of 1 and 12 under very strict conditions. These include that the child must be experiencing hopeless and unbearable suffering, there must be no other reasonable solution, and the doctor must have at least one other independent physician assess the case.
The original report mentions further (via Google Translate):
The epilepsy caused coughing fits and a swallowing disorder. In the months preceding the death, the seizures during mealtimes increased significantly.
The extensive brain damage had severe consequences for the child's functioning. There was a very severe developmental delay with an estimated developmental age of six weeks, while the child was nearly two years old. There was no verbal development whatsoever, and the cerebral visual impairment further limited the possibilities for any contact. Due to the combination of these conditions, only minimal communication with the child was possible. The child was severely multiply (intellectually and motorically) disabled, and the prognosis was that the child would remain dependent on care for life for all activities of daily living.
The extensive brain damage had severe consequences for the child's functioning. The child had sputum clearance issues, meaning that loosening and coughing up mucus from the lungs and airways was difficult, which, in addition to shortness of breath, poses a significantly increased risk of respiratory infections. The child's rattling breathing was clearly audible, and increasing shortness of breath was visible. Furthermore, the respiratory problems could worsen over time due to scoliosis. The doctor stated that the child exhibited an unsafe swallowing pattern, making it easy for the child to aspirate and for food or stomach contents to enter the airways, posing a risk of aspiration pneumonia (lung infection caused by aspiration). The likelihood of death at a very young age due to complications was considered very high.
The BBCode markup language used by most forum software (XenForo, phpBB, etc.) does not create paragraphs, and instead renders everything with line breaks, as you describe. The same is true for imageboard software and WYSIWYG email software. But that is bad formatting. In contrast, the Markdown markup language used by Reddit and by this website enables proper paragraphs to be typed.
Wikipedia:
A paragraph is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system, paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose.
The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph in prose: related thoughts are grouped into units.
The standard formatting for paragraphs in print is a horizontal space (indent) at the start of the first line, though default CSS on the Internet instead uses a vertical space between paragraphs (like stanzas in print).
A newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. A newline is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.
The individual lines in a poetic stanza are not separate paragraphs. Rather, they are lines within a paragraph, intentionally created with line breaks rather than being generated automatically by the text-layout algorithm.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
That's two stanzas/paragraphs, each composed of four lines that were created by inserting three line breaks. This is completely different in meaning from eight separate stanzas/paragraphs, or from eight separate lines in a single stanza/paragraph.
HTML specification:
The
pelement represents a paragraph.
A paragraph, in HTML terms, is not a logical concept, but a structural one.
The
brelement represents a line break.
CommonMark specification:
A sequence of non-blank lines that cannot be interpreted as other kinds of blocks forms a paragraph.
A line ending (not in a code span or HTML tag) that is preceded by two or more spaces and does not occur at the end of a block is parsed as a hard line break (rendered in HTML as a
<br />tag).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
now
It's always done this. Reddit allegedly used to do the same many years ago, but removed the feature.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
I believe that the answer given to that problem in past discussions on this website⁎ is: a previously-conscious child has a future expectation of consciousness (barring an unrecoverable coma), while a never-previously-conscious fetus has no such future expectation.
⁎Which I failed to find in a few minutes of searching, so I unfortunately am forced to write this comment instead of just giving a terse "previous discussion" link.
Marketing article from the developer
At its core, Cuties! is a community-based user directory. It allows people to find each other and vouch for friends.
Cuties! is for intellectually-curious, open-minded, and embodied communities. Someone described it as “intellectual hippies”. I would add people who have a creative online presence, such as a Substack or twitter.
It’s a 2∶1∶1 gender ratio of men∶women∶nonbinary.
Metrics: 28K page views/mo, 4.6K visitors/mo, 2K sign ups, 1.1K published profiles, 660 monthly active users, 115 self-reported met ups, dozens of friends + relationships, 2 engagements, 1 baby.
In comparison, Duolicious has 16,000 active users—male∶female∶nonbinary 5.4∶1∶1.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
It's a dating service that uses questions to determine compatibility. If you're looking for "the smartest possible matches", its search function lets you run filters on the answers to specific questions: e. g., "Do you enjoy engaging in deep, intellectual conversations with a partner: Yes", "Is it crucial for your partner to enjoy a good debate or intellectual discussion: Yes", and "Is the only thing worse than a landlord, a landlord who invests in multiple properties, and is that such a bad thing that it should be illegal: No".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Previous discussion of Duolicious: 1 2 3
I think multiple "rationalists" have started dating and matchmaking services, but I don't recall any off the top of my head.
tl;dr: A child is a person in possession of the right of self-ownership but not yet competent to exercise that right, so it is placed under the pseudo-ownership/trusteeship of its parents. (The parents are not allowed to harm the child through action, but are allowed to let it come to harm through inaction, and are allowed to sell the trusteeship to others.) The child can assert its right of self-ownership and end the trusteeship once it is competent to do so (e. g., by leaving the parents' household).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Think about what they look like when you delete the narration and consider only what's inside the quotation marks. In option 2, the Grandmaster's speech is missing a period, while in option 4 the period is retained.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
I remember deciding at a fairly young age that many punctuation rules around quotation marks were indefensible, but especially the rule about placing the period inside closing quote.
To be fair, the quotation-mark rigmarole is slightly more complicated than it seems at first glance. Unraveling it may be more trouble than it's worth, when the customary format is so ingrained into depictions of speech in literature.
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"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian," the Grandmaster lectured. "Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
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"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian", the Grandmaster lectured. "Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
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The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian, the Grandmaster lectured. Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty.
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"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian [the Grandmaster lectured]. Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
Of these options, I am inclined to think that the fourth one is the least bad, but I still hesitate to actually implement it.
Anyway, regarding non-speech-related quotation marks: I don't recall whether I started paying attention to quotation-mark rigmarole before or after seeing a few online comments about "programmer quotation". But, once I did start paying attention to the issue, it was obvious to me that the standard format was execrably ambiguous. (It wasn't until years after coming to this conclusion that I started noticing the insane number of square brackets that judges are forced to use because they insist on keeping the standard format.)
How do you decide when it's acceptable for your personal style to deviate from normal formatting conventions?
It's all about avoiding ambiguity and confusion.
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While I have noticed the difference between "professionally edited" and "professionally-edited", I haven't paid much attention to it. I think I've seen situations where the adverb is sandwiched between two adjectives, or between a verb and an adjective, and not preceded by a comma, so omitting the hyphen would lead to ambiguity regarding which word the adverb is intended to modify, but I cannot recall a specific example off the top of my head.
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I occasionally make explicit differentiation between "you (singular)" and "you (plural)", in situations where the number is not totally obvious.
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I have a habit of saying "year 2026" instead of "2026". Is it really necessary? Probably not.
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While I was working as a civil engineer, people would get annoyed at me for differentiating between "I-295", "US 130", "NJ 42", and "CR 514" even though my employer's official style guide prescribed "Route 295", "Route 130", "Route 42", and "Route 514". To be fair to them, it is at least arguable that the differentiation is unnecessary in my state, because there are no duplicated highway numbers there (though I'm pretty sure there is at least one state in the US that does have such overlapping highway numbers). But IMO it is useful to know what kind of road you're talking about without having to look it up.
Et cetera.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
I have not yet come to a firm conclusion regarding whether I agree with this particular rule. But I do appreciate your drawing attention to it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
I find it hard to believe you are being serious here
Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions. Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto). Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.
Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike. But, after seeing hundreds of authors on ArchiveOfOurOwn and RoyalRoad use line breaks as improper substitutes for paragraphs (and use paragraphs with nonbreaking spaces as an improper method of increasing paragraph spacing), and after seeing dozens of appeals judges use hyphens in wacky ways, I have reached the limits of my patience.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Previous discussion (buried in a culture-war thread rather than top-level)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
The base image is a common meme. (I manually darkened the skin of the human a little, since this particular instance is supposed to represent Africa.) For the text, I just used Arial Black in white with a black outline.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Nah, you can totally buy a single lot and contract the building (on spec) with reasonable margins—my wife did it for quite a few years.
This doesn't make sense to me, though.
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I can see why a consumer would want to take advantage of the economies of scale inherent in buying a speculative house in a large subdivision.
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And I can see why a consumer would want to avoid the hassle of buying a medium-sized lot, subdividing out just the small piece that he wants to build on, and selling the rest of the lot back into the market.
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But why would a consumer buy a developer's random spec house with no economies of scale and no subdivision, when he can just get a construction loan that converts into a mortgage all by himself? My own experience shows that getting a custom house built involves some hassle, but it isn't that much hassle (so far, at least), and it must be far outweighed by the comfort of having designed precisely to your preferences the home that you will inhabit for the next several decades.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Has authoritarian political views
I find it amusing that you'd have such criteria when two or three of your other criteria sound like something a grammar Nazi would care about.
Is religious
What's the problem with that? We all hold some beliefs we can't justify from the ground up. I've never seen Antarctica, but I have to believe that it exists if anybody talks about it.
People who make things worse for everybody else:
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Those who deny the validity of scientific investigation (including supply and demand)
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Those who don't bother to avoid ambiguity (i. e., foisting onto others the burden of reconstructing their intended meaning) in communication
And of course anybody who disagrees with you at all, even on something as minor as favorite food or preferred HVAC temperature, must be distrusted at least a little.
Distrusted in what sense?
For Alfred to assume that his random classmate/coworker/whatever Beatrice agrees with him on everything is charitable, but naive. Inevitably, if Alfred interacts with Beatrice, he will learn that she disagrees with him on minor topics—perhaps a few, perhaps a zillion.
If Beatrice disagrees with Alfred on a zillion minor topics, those minor disagreements are not in themselves sufficient cause for Alfred to dislike Beatrice. However, those minor disagreements do indicate an underlying difference between Alfred and Beatrice, and should lead Alfred to assume that Beatrice probably disagrees with Alfred on a zillion major topics as well—i. e., to distrust Beatrice. Even if those major topics are not known to Alfred, it is well-advised for him to assume that, if he bothers to learn more about Beatrice, then he eventually will come to learn her opinions on those major topics, and to dislike her. Familiarity breeds contempt.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Reading some of your questions, I don't really know where the conversation possibly could go from there.
Do you have a preference for the texture of facial tissues when you use them to wipe your nose?
Are we trying to find out if I have some kind of touch sensitivity?
That particular question actually was asked by the other party (Pseudo-Friend Six), not by me. (I'm referring back to the original spreadsheet in saying this, as I did not copy from the spreadsheet to the Pastebin text file the identity of who asked each question. Remember that approximately half of the questions in that text file were asked by each party.)
Why did you dislike the people you attempted friendship with?
It's been more than a decade since all my pseudo-friendships were terminated, so it's hard to remember specifics. But in general: In the long term, there always end up being far more reasons to dislike (or at least distrust) a person than to like him.
Example reasons to dislike a person:
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Is religious
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Uses "they" as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender
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Uses line breaks rather than paragraphs for no good reason, on a platform that differentiates between them (e. g., Markdown or raw HTML, not email or BBcode)
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Places a hyphen between a number and its associated noun for no good reason (e. g., "after 10-years of imprisonment" rather than "after 10 years of imprisonment"; note that "a 10-year term of imprisonment" is fine)
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Has authoritarian political views
And of course anybody who disagrees with you at all, even on something as minor as favorite food or preferred HVAC temperature, must be distrusted at least a little.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Well, what was the issue?
I hated myself more and more for continuing to interact with them in a close, friendly manner despite disliking them. (See my flair.)
They didn't want to fill out your forms or they didn't want to send you a form to fill back?
Making them fill out a form
spreadsheet-filling game
I think you've misunderstood what I said. The participants in my pseudo-friendships didn't send forms full of questions back and forth. Rather, we sent each other questions and answers via Facebook messages, perhaps one to five at a time. The spreadsheet was only a tool to ensure that both parties participated more or less equally, rather than allowing (or forcing) one person to spam a zillion questions.
Inspiring controversy on Reddit today is an extremely long-winded comic, "I Don't Like My Boyfriend". Each of its 12 panels was posted as a separate image, so here are some consolidated renditions for your convenience.
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One image, millions of colors (11 MiB)
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One image, 256 colors (2.3 MiB)
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Text (5.8 kiB)
In this comic, a woman contemplates how she doesn't like her boyfriend (who is drawn as a short, fat Chudjak). She finds him boring and annoying. However, he is smitten with her, and she has never had any friends, let alone romantic partners, other than him. She wonders whether she is just an unlikeable person, and should be more grateful for having hooked a person with such low standards. The general opinion of commenters seems to be hatred for the woman.
This actually matches my personal experience with attempts at friendship (1 2) somewhat well! I eventually couldn't tolerate my pseudo-friends any longer and kicked them all to the curb, and the commenters seem to think that the woman depicted in the comic should do the same with her romantic partner.
Do you have any thoughts on this topic?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
I don't recall whether you are/were a Civil PE
I technically am eligible to take the exam and obtain a professional engineer's license, but while I was employed I saw no reason to go through the process, since my employer offered no incentive for it. Previous discussion
(It was hilarious to see all the best employees constantly leaving for private employment in part due to this reason. Compare this recent announcement of special bonuses, and even special positions, for licensed employees at NYSDOT.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
I don't have a college certificate on the topic. But, as I understand it, the business of single-family-residential real-estate development consists of several different paths.
(1) Buy a medium-sized lot; subdivide it into a few small lots; and (a) sell the small lots to people who want to build custom houses, or (b) collaborate with a homebuilder to build on the small lots "speculative" houses that you'll sell to people who want to buy new houses.
(2) Buy a large lot; subdivide it into many small lots, plus drainage features and new roads; give the new roads to the municipality; give the drainage features to a homeowners' association; and (a) sell the small lots to people who want to build custom houses, or (b) collaborate with a homebuilder to build on the small lots "speculative" houses that you'll sell to people who want to buy new houses (getting a bulk discount with the homebuilder either way).
Regarding options 1b and 2b, people tend to dislike my house designs. Regarding all four options, I do not have access to a small loan of one million dollars.
Why does it matter if a disused tunnel is in disrepair?
The opinion indicates that the tunnel's failure is causing subsidence in a roadway above it.
How much do you think the land is worth?
As I said above, each of the two lots is assessed by the county govt. at 30 k$. Zillow does not have Zestimates for them, but does show that many comparable lots within a few hundred feet have recently sold for 30–40 k$.
Previous discussion
The pseudo-friendships were terminated in the 2015–2016 period (shortly before I graduated from college). I did not begin to suffer from depression until 2022. And the "physiological effects" of forcing yourself to associate with people whom you have grown to strongly dislike cannot be ignored.
More options
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