ToaKraka
Dislikes you
No bio...
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
We have licenses and background checks and rules about straw purchases because the idea is to control who has firearms. If someone buys a gun and then gives it to his cousin none of that makes sense.
Buying a gun for another person is illegal only if the other person (1) is ineligible to buy a gun on his own, (2) intends to use the gun in a felony, or (3) intends to give it to a third person who meets criterion 1 or 2. NB did nothing illegal here.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
To clarify: Many US houses do not have basements, and instead use crawlspaces or slab-on-ground floors. But such houses still have their footings placed several feet underground, rather than using frost-protected shallow foundations in order to dig down only 12 or 16 inches (30 or 41 centimeters).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
we like strategy games
Among video games, Crusader Kings 2 and 3, Europa Universalis 5, and Victoria 3 can be played cooperatively.
Our number one game together is Gloomhaven
Among board games, Bios: Origins (play first as a subspecies of humanity, then as a language, then as a religion, and finally as an ideology, from 4 million BCE to the present) and High Frontier (play as a spacefaring country) can be played cooperatively.
Friday Fun Thread project: Assemble a few dozen photos of celebrities (or just stock-photo models) of various races, solicit ratings from users of various races, and determine correlation.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
TIL: With International Residential Code § 403.3 or ASCE 32, it is possible to build a house on a "frost-protected shallow foundation" that is as shallow as 12 inches (30 centimeters)! This is accomplished by using rigid foam-board insulation, buried surrounding and/or underneath the foundation, to artificially raise the frost line from its normal depth (typically several feet). This works for a heated building in the entire contiguous US (plus Alaska as far north as Anchorage), and even for an unheated building (or a heated building with too much floor insulation to heat up the ground; only with ASCE 32, not with IRC § 403.3) in nearly the entire contiguous US (all but North Dakota, the northern half of Minnesota, the northeastern corner of Montana, and cold spots in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Hampshire). According to the commentary to ASCE 32, this has been standard practice in Scandinavia since the early 1970s, but wasn't added to the IRC's predecessor until year 1995.
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September 2021: Aldemar is hit by a truck, and accumulates significant medical bills with Medicare before dying.
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September 2022: Walter, the administrator of Aldemar's estate, sues the trucking company for wrongful death.
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December 2022: Medicare estimates that the medical bills will amount to 60 k$. This is not a final determination.
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May 2024: The lawsuit ends in a settlement. The company agrees to pay 500 k$ to Walter, and Walter agrees to pay the medical bills (whatever they turn out to be after negotiation with Medicare).
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June 2024: Medicare determines that the medical bills amount to 40 k$. This determination can be appealed.
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July 2024: The company pays 460 k$ to Walter and 40 k$ to Medicare. Walter objects: The settlement says that the company must pay 500 k$ to Walter and nothing to Medicare, so this 40-k$ payment to Medicare is completely gratuitous and outside of the agreement, and the company needs to pay another 40 k$ to Walter.
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August 2024: The trial judge agrees with Walter. "I didn't award them extra money. I gave them what they bargained for. Your client voluntarily paid something else."
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November 2024: The trucking company appeals.
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October 2025: The appeals panel affirms.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
As a card-carrying nigger (of Caribbean descent), after perusing Google Images, I will rate both Harris and Jean-Pierre at 3 out of 5. Jean-Pierre may get an extra −0.5 for having a fat face, but it's a close call. She definitely gets an extra −0.5 when she uses a weird asymmetrical straightened hairstyle.
Culture-war-related court opinion:
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NB (♂) and LB (♀) are in the process of divorcing. LB obtains a restraining order against NB, claiming that NB (1) has been harassing LB both in person and via text, (2) owns a gun, and (3) "has made vague statements that LB believes are suicidal".
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In this state, a domestic-violence restraining order requires the officer to seize the defendant's (1) guns and (2) permit to buy guns. After being made aware of the restraining order's existence, NB goes to the police station, where an officer asks him about the gun. However, NB cannot remember where he left the gun! At first he says he left it at his cousin's house (intentionally, to prevent his anger issues from leading to violence during the divorce process). Then he says it's in a storage unit. And finally he remembers that, though he originally left it with his cousin, the cousin later gave it to NB's sister and informed NB of the further transfer. He retrieves the gun from his sister's house and gives it to the police.
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The trial judge credits NB's claim that this was just a failure of memory in a stressful situation, rather than an intentional series of lies. However, the trial judge also finds that "when possessing a firearm one must have it guarded, protected, and secured where you can control that possession, and clearly that wasn't the case for a period of time", so NB lacks the "essential character of temperament necessary to be entrusted with a firearm", "it is not in the interest of public health, safety, or welfare" for NB to possess guns, his gun is forfeited to the government, and his permit to purchase guns is permanently revoked. The appeals panel affirms.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
I wonder whether jails in densely-populated places like Chicago (total inmates 5900, largest single facility designed to hold 1500) are worse than prisons in sparsely-populated places like Wyoming (total inmates 2500, largest single facility holding 700).
God, I hate I-frames. They're a stupid, "gamey" mechanic that should be replaced with actually reactive animations. If you dodge a hit, you dodge it by not letting it hit you.
Exanima implements this idea, but I've watched several hours of gameplay and it doesn't look very fun.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
*insert leftist talking point here* because Jesus said to be compassionate in the Bible somewhere
No, I'm not a Christian, and I have nothing but contempt for your backward religious beliefs.
So, yeah, this argument wouldn't work on me, but maybe if I use it on you you'll do what I want.
Dark Souls 2 has a reputation for being very unfair because people try to play it with the camera lock on, a mechanic that restricts your movement when activated, and predictably get bodied by the mass of enemies that jump them. If you learn to play with the camera unlocked and dodge without rolling, it’s a whole different experience.
As a person with hundreds of hours in Dark Souls 2 who finished his latest playthrough literally yesterday, I am inclined to disagree with this assessment. I personally find that using the lockon even during multi-enemy "gank" combats is basically necessary, in order to avoid having to manually mess with the camera in the middle of combat.
With that said, there is one non-obvious trick that I have noticed: if you are dealing with two enemies that are close to each other, and you press the attack button and then switch your lockon from one enemy to the other while your character is winding up, you often can trick your character into attacking the space between the two enemies, thereby damaging (and hopefully staggering) both of them simultaneously. And of course running around the arena rather than rolling (and while being careful to avoid triggering the slow animation that happens when you try to turn 180 degrees while holding down the run button) definitely is an important tactic.
Notably, there are no I-frames at all in Silksong. (I believe the same was true in Hollow Knight, but it's been a while.)
Hollow Knight has a move that grants I-frames, the one where you dash forward.
I actually kind of resent the Dark Souls comparison. I've barely played a real Dark Souls game, but I actively disliked Elden Ring (despite its, too, having incredible aesthetics and ridiculously deep lore). So many of the bosses felt exactly the same—oh, here's a screen-filling attack, I've memorized how many frames it takes so I can dodge-roll at the right time. Oh, whoops, it was his fake-out attack instead, now I'm dead. (I guess I should have allocated my stats differently in their ridiculously-badly-explained leveling system so I could take two hits instead of one.) And I hate that other games considered soulslikes (Salt & Sanctuary, Nine Sols) have latched on to this style, too. You know, you can have a good, challenging game without making it ALL about I-frames!
The other thing that Hollow Knight and Silksong do better than almost any other game is rewarding exploration. In most games, finding a secret wall will give you a small optional upgrade, and you do it because you want the 100-% completion mark. In Silksong (even more than in Hollow Knight), finding a well-hidden secret wall might unlock a key quest item, or a hidden encounter, or even an entire new zone.
You may like Dark Souls 2 more than Elden Ring, as IMO it satisfies both the "less mindless mashing of the roll button" and "more rewarding exploration" criteria. (It's my understanding that Dark Souls 2 is a controversial member of the series. But I haven't played any other Soulslike games. Some 4chan users feel that Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring degenerated into mindless "rollslop" in comparison to Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls 2.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
As a way to test it, I wanted to check something that could be easily verifiable with primary sources, without needing actual Wikipedia or specialized knowledge
I'm no expert but my guess is that most of the articles are similarly schizo crap. And undoubtedly Elon fanboys are going to post screenshots of this shit all over the internet to the detriment of everyone with a brain.
On the other hand, the admin of the Kiwi Farms says: "This article on the Kiwi Farms is perhaps the best and most neutral article I've seen on the Kiwi Farms." So perhaps more effort was expended on controversial topics.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
country (or collective of countries)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
Somebody recommended Proton and then deleted his comment, so I guess I'll replace him.
Note, however, that Proton does seem to have unnecessarily strict spam blacklists. For example, emails from Questionable Questing and Archive of Our Own never get to my inbox or even my spam folder on Proton, so I've been forced to keep using my old Gmail account for those websites.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
Proton even has an LLM assistant, though it's based on open-source models and expensive to use with a pretty small token/week limit.
You forgot to mention that it's advertised as having privacy, unlike its competitors.
How is Lumo different from other AI assistants?
Lumo is built with privacy in mind. Unlike other AI assistants, it does not collect your data to train its models or keep any logs of your conversations. Your data is protected by Proton’s strong privacy principles.
How are my chats stored?
Your chats with Lumo are stored with zero-access encryption, so Proton can't see your chat history. Only you can securely access your conversations by logging in to your Proton Account.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
You can't expect everybody to be able to get lastname dot com. Personally, I use firstnamelastname at firstnamelastname dot com, though some may find it excessively long.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
The more important question is: Which ones are cooler—lawyers, doctors, programmers, or engineers?
I'm an engineer (civil), but I vote for lawyers. Engineers merely apply the simple guidelines that have been laid out for them by the researchers of AASHTO, ASCE, et cetera. But the guidelines laid out for lawyers in documents like the Restatements (to say nothing of the tens of thousands of judicial opinions) need real brainpower to understand and apply.
its ban on pesticides
To avoid confusion, I will point out that this language appears in a March 2017 draft, but not in the version that was actually passed by the General Assembly (with only Israel and the US opposed) in December 2017, and not in the similar 2021 resolution (also passed with only Israel and the US opposed) that was the first result of an Internet search for "united nations food human right". Also, other resolutions in the same vein have passed with Israel and the US not opposed, most recently in 2024.
And those people are prosecuted for fraud. Here in PA, the OIG has an entire section dedicated to public benefits fraud that prosecuted between 30 and 100 cases per month, most of them felonies, most of them for making these exact kinds of misrepresentations regarding eligibility requirements. The liberal appointees running these agencies don't shy away from this, and they talk in press releases about how fraudsters divert funding from people who actually need it.
This is just an anecdote, but my father happened to work in another state's equivalent department, and he once (three or four years ago, I think) complained to me about how his bosses would regularly fail to prosecute the fraudsters that it was his job to uncover. IIRC, he said that over multiple years he nagged his bosses to prosecute one particular person, and eventually the culprit was diagnosed with cancer and his bosses used that excuse to close down the investigation as bad PR.
But this was in a different state, and he may be biased against the department. But on the third hand it's the same state as @The_Nybbler's.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
The pension system determines salary based on average of your highest three years, including overtime.
That's interesting. My state government's pension system doesn't include overtime in pension calculations. And it was increased from the highest three years to the highest five years in 2010.
It really seems like some court at some point needs to question whether marijuana really fits the definition of a Schedule I controlled substance.
Apparently (article, opinion), this happened back in 1994, but the appeals panel found that the DEA's interpretation of the statute was not unreasonable.
Our review of the record convinces us that the Administrator's findings are supported by substantial evidence. The Final Order canvasses the record at length. It recites the testimony of numerous experts that marijuana's medicinal value has never been proven in sound scientific studies. The Administrator reasonably accorded more weight to the opinions of these experts than to the anecdotal testimony of laymen and doctors on which petitioners relied. The Administrator noted that
[w]ith one exception, none of [these doctors] could identify under oath the scientific studies they swore they relied on. Only one had enough knowledge to discuss the scientific technicalities involved. Eventually, each one admitted he was basing his opinion on anecdotal evidence, on stories he heard from patients, and on his impressions about the drug.
These findings are consistent with the view that only rigorous scientific proof can satisfy the CSA's "currently accepted medical use" requirement.
But that was 30 years ago, so perhaps more scientific studies are available nowadays.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
8d ago
2D or 3D? IMO (as a civil engineer), 2D CAD software is pretty easy. (QCAD is very similar to the MicroStation v8 and OpenRoads that I've used at work.) But I don't know much about 3D CAD software. (OpenSCAD is great but perhaps a little clunkier than desirable. I didn't like FreeCAD when I tried it a while ago.)
This scientific article on wolf species and subspecies spends several paragraphs discussing this issue. tl;dr: In modern taxonomy, ability to interbreed is only one of several factors that inform the definition of a species.
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