ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4hr ago
Nothing is certain. Maybe I'll become unable to tolerate the moderators. Maybe I'll fly to Australia to fuck a prostitute and get stabbed in an alley by a thug. Maybe my depression will get worse and I'll shoot myself in the head.
I'm just another random fake person on the Internet.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5hr ago
A cursory search indicates that "self-leveling concrete" can be used as underlayment, but I guess it's much less common than plywood.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5hr ago
The Associated Press: In January 2025, Mexico passed a constitutional amendment banning the sale (but not the possession or use) of electronic cigarettes (vapes). A law to actually implement the ban was passed in December 2025. Naturally, the cartels have taken over the market.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
For example, Pennsylvania Rules of Appellate Procedure § 1925:
Upon receipt of the notice of appeal, the judge who entered the order giving rise to the notice of appeal, if the reasons for the order do not already appear of record, shall within [60 days] file of record at least a brief opinion of the reasons for the order, or for the rulings or other errors complained of, or shall specify in writing the place in the record where such reasons may be found.
But that's specifically for decisions that are appealed.
The Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction portray:
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Joists
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"Subflooring" of plywood
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"Underlayment" of plywood, required for some finishes but not for others
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Finish
A cursory Internet search indicates that the underlayment may alternatively be fiberboard, particleboard, etc.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9hr ago
According to the US Census Bureau, of all single-family houses completed in year 2024:
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26 percent have non-slab foundations (i. e., joists in the first floor). Regionally, it's 61 percent in the colder Northeast and Midwest (where the footings must be placed deep even for a slab, so you may as well add a basement), versus 18 percent in the warmer South and West.
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53 percent have more than one floor (i. e., joists in at least one non-first floor). Regionally, it's 80 percent in the Northeast (presumably due to higher population density) and 51 percent in the other three regions.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21hr ago
Related article:
The saga of Judge Pauline Newman is well known. For three years, the Federal Circuit has not assigned any new cases to Judge Newman because she refuses to obtain certain medical tests. Back in April 2023, I described this process as a stealth impeachment. A judge without any cases is no longer a judge.
I suspect the most obvious reply is that there is a difference between impeaching a judge and simply taking away their cases. After all, Judge Newman retains her fixed compensation and title. I am not so convinced. A judge's job is to decide cases. Imagine that Congress passed a statute providing that any judge who rules against President Trump will no longer be assigned any new cases, but they can keep their salary and title. Or what if Congress were to pass a statute divesting jurisdiction over every suit filed against the executive branch in Boston, and reassign those cases to the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas. How would Judge Young and his colleagues respond?
Imagine that a federal judge decided that he would no longer offer any rationales for his decisions. He would simply invite the parties to court, listen to their arguments, and announce a judgment for the plaintiff or the defendant from the bench, and then adjourn court. Following that oral order, the clerk would enter a judgment for the prevailing party. The judge explains that he only needs to issue an order, and no statute requires him to explain his reasoning. The Circuit Court consistently reverses this judge's rulings, and grants writs of mandamus, but the judge continues his practice.
Based on this "pattern or practice" of rulings, many litigants in the district file misconduct complaints. Could this complaint proceed, and if so, could the Judicial Council order that no new cases would be assigned to the judge until he begins to issue reasoned decisions for at least some of his rulings?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Erotic authors and artists have been depicting """goblins""" as women who happen to be very short and have green skin for many years. It doesn't even count as a fetish at this point.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
I started using this manual procedure many years ago, after Fanfiction.net blocked the automatic-download website that I was using at the time and then blocked the automated-download program that I clumsily wrote for myself in Baby's First Java.
ArchiveOfOurOwn already has built-in downloading capabilities.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
In a recent conversation with [Alex Pretti], his parents, who live in Colorado, told him to be careful when protesting.
“We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”
(It appears that statements allegedly made by them regarding his "unusual behavior" are fabricated.)
ToaKraka
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2d ago
ToaKraka
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2d ago
The linked page does clarify that it's 17 % Pakistani, 6 % Indian, 4 % Bangladeshi, 1 % Chinese, and 3 % "other Asian".
If you're interested in running LLMs locally, but you don't care about playing ultra-graphics-heavy games, then you can buy a special AI-focused graphics card that has gigantic VRAM but a weaker processor. According to PassMark and Newegg:
| GPU | 3D graphics rating | Computation rating | VRAM (GiB) | Price (k$) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti | 23 | 11 | 16 | 0.6 |
| Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 | 39 | 25 | 32 | 3.7 |
| AMD Radeon RX 9070 | 25 | 15 | 16 | 0.6 |
| AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 | 27 | 15 | 32 | 1.3 |
The R9700 is just an RX 9070 with extra VRAM stapled on! (Alternatively, if your computer has a full-size motherboard, you can combine two RTX 5060 Ti cards. This cannot be done with two RX 9070 cards.)
The World Wide Web Consortium has just published a very interesting note on how text-to-speech programs should deal with ruby/furigana text (tiny kana/pinyin/bopomofo characters that sometimes are written alongside kanji/hanzi as pronunciation aids; 1 2 3).
Premise: You want to make a personal copy of an online story that you're enjoying reading.
Problem: Story-hosting websites are likely to have anti-bot measures—or you just don't want to spend time figuring out the intricacies of automatic downloading tools.
Solution: Just manually smash that Ctrl-S key combination in your Web browser before reading every chapter! Once the story has ended (or has become boring), manually opening your several dozen HTML files in your favorite plaintext editor, deleting all the irrelevant cruft (Javascript, website infrastructure, reader comments) above and below the text of each chapter, adding proper heading elements, and assembling the results into a single unified file (and optionally compressing the HTML file into an EPUB file; note that this does require XML compliance, which can be a mild hassle for certain websites that disgustingly fail to properly close their p and hr elements) is the work of less than an hour.
(RoyalRoad does insert into each chapter an anti-piracy warning ("Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.", "Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.", "Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.", et cetera) that is hidden by the site's CSS and therefore is revealed in your CSS-free local copy. But, since you aren't a bot, this warning is fairly easy to remove with a simple Ctrl-F for the warning's telltale HTML pattern (e. g., </p><span or </p><p), which appears nowhere else in the files. And, if you're so extremely lazy that you don't care about seeing an immersion-breaking sentence or two in every chapter, then there's really no need to remove the warning at all, since you aren't uploading this file to Amazon (whose own automated systems presumably would see the warning and reject the upload) for the purpose of the industrial copyright infringement that I've seen authors complain about.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Why is every named person in this article Muslim? Is it really that bad?
Statistics page: In 2021, Birmingham was 31 percent Asian. This is up from 27 percent in 2011 and 20 percent in 2001, so presumably the figure is even higher among working-age people.
Logistically how do garbage men strike for a year? How are they paying their bills?
BBC article: The union pays them 70 pounds per day, and some have gotten second jobs.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
The Guardian: The garbagemen of Birmingham, center of England's third-largest urban area, have been on strike for almost an entire year—since March 2025. The contractors hired to replace them joined the strike in December.
I am sure tourists and legal foreign students do not count, right, right??
The Constitution doesn't explicitly address this topic. But an initial draft of the Constitution used the word "inhabitant", and the first Census-related law passed by Congress used "inhabitant", "usual residence", and "usual place of abode". So the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the government is allowed (but not required) to include temporary absentees (federal employees, such as soldiers, who are living abroad for their jobs) in the population of a state. The same logic presumably applies to the exclusion of temporary residents (such as tourists and foreign college students).
The Biden executive order linked above reflects this practice, explicitly using the words "usual place of residence", though Congress has not bothered to put similar language into the currently-applicable law.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Astral Codex Ten article on the topic
Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?
Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
I recommend typing "& mdash;" and "& ndash;" without the spaces.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
*All em-dashes artisanally crafted by hand.
You placed this footnote on an en dash, not on an em dash. The difference between the two characters was recently discussed here.
And then you used an em dash later in the same comment. Such a blatant inconsistency gives your detractors a lot of ammo…
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
He seems to regard the protesting as mostly a harmless social activity that he groups together with going to record stores and restaurants. I get the sense his wife is basically dragging him to this ("I am not as brave as my wife, who acts from a strain of moral clarity that can sometimes be daunting") and he is playing the role of an agreeable husband that regards this like his wife dragging him to a museum or board game night, so he is happy to go there and shout obscenities for a few hours in between other tourist activities. I know it sounds cliche, but there is just such beta energy radiating off the entire post.
This comment excerpt gave me a fun idea: The Chad harem/offspring-maxxxing doctors and lawyers explain to the autist incel programmers and engineers their personal understandings of how friendship and romance work!
Even before I realized that familiarity inevitably breeds contempt and stopped making attempts at pseudo-friendship, I absolutely hated the idea of obtaining an actual friend or a romantic partner only to be constantly forced by that person to do random things in which I had no interest. It seemed like a continuation of how my parents would torture me by making me join after-school clubs and dragging me to museums, concerts, and weddings.
I assumed that any friend or romantic partner would require me to do such things. But now @daguerrean says that only an inferior, weak-willed "beta" man allows his romantic partner to lead him around by the nose to random events. So, is it normal friendship/romance behavior to drag the other party to an event in which he is not interested, or not? Has my entire life been a lie?
The 14th Amendment seems unambiguous at first glance.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
Trump did attempt to exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment base in his first term, but before any illegal-free numbers could be published (which was necessary for adjudication of the legal issue) he left office and Biden returned to the old policy.
I was introduced to Paradox Development Studio games through Europa Universalis 2. I was too young to actually understand how to play properly, so I just played as the Mamluks (the biggest blob on the map at game start), took out loan after loan to fund my massive armies, and got confused when I went bankrupt. I eventually found a cheat or a console command or something to give me infinite money, but the experience still left me very leery of taking out loans.
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