ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
I apologize if I've been a little hard on you
As I said above, my characterization of your criticism as "much maligning" was a humorous exaggeration.
So when I and someone else pointed out all the door conflicts and you said you'd just keep the doors closed all the time I reflexively thought "Does everyone in your household reflexively close doors immediately after use?" Because if the answer is no, then neither you nor anyone else is going to start doing it just because of conflicts.
I certainly do. My mother doesn't, but I think that's due more to the poor insulation of her current bedroom (converted from a garage) than to preference.
For example, I had an eat-in area that I never used since I always ate in the dining room. The only time it ever got used was when I was entertaining, and as a junk collector.
This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. In my (mother's) current house, I eat all my meals at one of two 4′ × 2′ desks in my bedroom. In my future house:
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I will eat all my meals at one of three 4′ × 2′ desks in my bedroom. There will also be three 4′ × 2′ shelving units (up from two in my current bedroom), plus a 4′ × 2′ wardrobe (replacing a closet that I hate for constraining my furniture arrangement) and a twin XL loft bed.
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In the living/dining room, I will install a big television on a fancy swing-out mount (primarily for the benefit of anyone who uses the kitchen for an extended period of time), but other than two housewarming parties (one with my mother, my former coworkers, and possibly my brother, and another with my father and his parents) I do not plan to use the living/dining room for anything but "junk collection". There is no need for it to be any bigger than the 200 ft2 that the IPMC requires in a five-occupant house.
I obsessed over getting a custom house for two or three years (including purchase of several related books (1 2 3)) before actually buying a lot and hiring a contractor, so I did put some thought into it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
I'd be curious if there is anything that I would consider a datacenter that is located in a business zone instead of an industrial zone. In my mind, a "server room" doesn't become a "data center" until you start measuring the size in acres.
The first result on Google for "data center noise complaints" turns up this location. It's in an "industrial/business" zone (1 2), but right on the edge. I guess the residents just want a bigger buffer between industries and their houses. (Or maybe they're just unreasonable NIMBYs who should have known what they were getting into when they bought a house immediately adjacent to an industrial zone.)
I suspect this whole effort is basically just Europeans catching up to how Americans already do things in practice. (That's my general uncharitable impression of most standards organizations that start with "International".)
No, ICC is a firmly USAian organization. I mentioned in my previous code-related comment that ICC recently rejected a proposal to add some European standards as alternatives to equivalent American standards.
Comfort and aesthetics are of no concern here
I have put significant thought into my comfort and aesthetics. If I have no concern, it's for other people's comfort and aesthetics, since they will not be living there.
Whenever I take walks in my city, I literally think to myself: "Why were these houses built so ugly? What was the point of building a steep roof enclosing a useless attic? What was the point of putting the edge of the second floor on a useless cantilever, or installing a wacky bow window, instead of just building a straight wall?"
a house with a living room the size of a small apartment, with a living room about the size of my office at work
Confusing typo
he thinks that he'll be able to rent out the second bedroom to two people
That's just a failsafe for after my mother dies, 30 years in the future. I don't really expect to need to rent that bedroom out to anyone but her.
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Bedrooms: The IPMC (International Property Maintenance Code) requires 50 ft2 per occupant, but not less than 70 ft2 for one occupant. IMO, this is a bit small but not totally unreasonable. A 10′ × 10′ bedroom (even when the two doorways are taken into account) has room for a twin XL bunk bed (80″ × 40″, which we can round up to 7′ × 3′6″ for simplicity), a 4′ × 2′ desk, a 3′ × 2′ desk, and two 3′ × 2′ wardrobes or shelving units.
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Living room and dining room: The IPMC's requirements are complicated, but can be approximated as 37 ft2 per occupant for seven or more occupants (15 in the dining room and 22 in the living room). Under the IBC, 37 ft2 is enough to accommodate one person sitting at a table in the dining room, plus one person sitting at a table and one person sitting without a table in the living room.
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Kitchen: NKBA (the National Kitchen and Bath Association) has guidelines that essentially boiled down to a minimum of around 8′3″ × 10′ the last time that I looked at them (many months ago). I use 10′ × 10′ for simplicity.
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Utility room: Width of 5 feet accommodates a washer and a dryer (though I hear they make stacking residential washers and dryers). Length of 10 feet leaves ample room for water heater and circuit-breaker box.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7hr ago
Clarification: The current IBC can "handle" data centers under any of the three occupancies listed above. The problem is that data centers are not specifically listed as an example under any of those occupancies, so a builder may run into problems if he thinks that they fall under one occupancy but the municipal code official thinks they fall under a different occupancy.
It is my understanding that similar problems have been noted in many local zoning ordinances (not based on ICC codes—the IZC is nowhere near as popular as the IRC and IBC): data centers are allowed in business zones, or even in residential zones, but because the new extra-power-hungry versions with loud fans are not specifically addressed the municipal code official is forced to allow them in business and residential zones even though loud uses should have been shunted off to industrial zones.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11hr ago
I genuinely wonder if you've ever been mistaken for an LLM.
I don't make enough comments anywhere to be targeted with such accusations.
Look at the Markdown tables
Note that, unlike Reddit's, this website's Markdown implementation requires the user to type tables in raw HTML, not in Markdown.
I'd kill to see your Factorio builds.
Very annoyingly, I remain too depressed to invest hours of consecutive effort into a campaign of Factorio. In contrast, Opus Magnum can be played in bite-sized chunks.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14hr ago
Eight years after its initial release, popular puzzle game Opus Magnum has just been updated with a surprise DLC—De Re Metallica (referencing a famous early-modern book), a fan-made campaign half as long as the base game's campaign.
Even if you are a filthy casul, Opus Magnum is quite fun, since, unlike some other puzzle games, it is reasonably easy at its base difficulty (with unlimited budget and board) but has built-in optimization goals with which you can challenge yourself if you choose to. Solutions to puzzles are evaluated on three statistics:
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Cost (of all the mechanisms that you put on the board)
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Cycles (time to deposit six copies of the required output, including startup time but excluding time to return to the starting position after completion)
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Area (of all the mechanisms that you put on the board, including the area through which swing your manipulator arms and the atoms that they bear)
For each puzzle, an official in-game leaderboard compares your solution's statistics to those of all solutions found by players. Additionally, the official subreddit's leaderboard uses "sum of cost, cycles, and area" as a total metric—but, IMO, the product makes much more sense than the sum. And, of course, it's easy to think of even more statistics:
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Cycles of the solution's actual period (excluding startup time but including time to return to the starting position after completion)
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Convex area (with concave portions filled in)
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Hexagonal area (with concave portions filled in and acute angles padded)
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Footprint area (excluding arm swings)
Also, you can impose on yourself constraints, such as refraining from using the fancier tools to which you have access (multi-armed manipulators, extending manipulators, and tracks that carry manipulators around the board), or using only a single input in puzzles that let you use multiple copies of the same input.
As an example, here are three different solutions for a mid-game puzzle. (The game has a built-in function for exporting a solution as a looping GIF file. These particular examples are rather large, so I have converted them to WEBM files, though it looks like the conversion process cut off a few frames at the end of each file. In a desktop browser, you can right-click on a webm to enable looping in the context menu. It appears that mobile browsers do not have this option.)
| Solution | Cost | Cycles | Period × 6 | Area | Convex area | Cost + cycles + area | Cost × cycles × area ÷ 106 | Cost × (period × 6) × convex area ÷ 106 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Using four inputs | 630 | 268 | 240 | 66 | 66 | 964 | 11 | 10 |
| Using two inputs | 380 | 499 | 480 | 40 | 42 | 919 | 7.6 | 7.7 |
| Using one input | 220 | 974 | 960 | 23 | 23 | 1217 | 4.9 | 4.9 |
In comparison to the four-input solution, the one-input solution cuts both cost and area by a factor of three, but also bloats cycles by a factor of four and is an absolute pain to set up in-game. (It's theoretically possible to curve the one-input solution all the way around to form an elegant circle. But, again, setting it up in-game would be quite a hassle, since the cycle count would be even more ridiculously high.) The two-input solution sneaks its way into winning in the sum category.
Even a simple puzzle has many possible solutions. Here are some (GIF, not WEBM) for the very first puzzle in the game.
| Solution | Cost | Cycles | Period × 6 | Area | Convex area | Cost + cycles + area | Cost × cycles × area ÷ 103 | Cost × (period × 6) × convex area ÷ 103 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Using one extending arm | 60 | 81 | 84 | 8 | 10 | 149 | 39 | 50 |
| Using one basic arm | 40 | 94 | 96 | 12 | 12 | 146 | 45 | 46 |
| Using two triple arms | 80 | 31 | 30 | 13 | 13 | 124 | 32 | 31 |
| Using two basic arms | 60 | 41 | 36 | 9 | 11 | 110 | 22 | 24 |
Just as in the previous table, each of these solutions is better than the others in at least one of the listed statistics.
Bonus: Unicode alchemical symbols used in Opus Magnum (code charts: 1 2)
| Category | Symbol | English name | Latin name |
|---|---|---|---|
| Element | 🜔 | Salt | Sal |
| Element | 🜃 | Earth | Humus, solum, tellus, terra |
| Element | 🜄 | Water | Aqua |
| Element | 🜂 | Fire | Flamma, ignis |
| Element | 🜁 | Air | Aer |
| Element | ✡[1] | Quintessence, ether | Quinta essentia, aether |
| Element | 🜍[2] | Death | Mors |
| Element | 🜍[3] | Life | Vita[4] |
| Metal | ☿ | Quicksilver, mercury | Hydrargyrum |
| Metal | ♄ | Lead | Plumbum |
| Metal | ♃ | Tin | Stannum |
| Metal | ♂ | Iron | Ferrum |
| Metal | ♀ | Copper | Cuprum |
| Metal | ☽ | Silver | Argentum |
| Metal | ☉ | Gold | Aurum |
[1]Opus Magnum uses a masking empty triangle superimposed on another empty triangle, which looks a lot like a star of David (a non-masking empty triangle superimposed on another empty triangle). Unicode lists a different symbol for quintessence, 🜀.
[2]Opus Magnum uses a rotated life symbol, which Unicode does not have, but which CSS can imitate (though not through the filter of this website's Markdown). Unicode does have the similar symbol 🜞—listed as "crocus of iron", which apparently is calcined/anhydrous rust or ferrous sulfate.
[3]Unicode lists this symbol as signifying sulfur, not life.
[4]For some reason, Opus Magnum uses the plural, "vitae".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14hr ago
Video-Game Thread
, since people apparently like organizing things that wayICC (the International Code Council), in collaboration with THIA (the Tiny Home Industry Association), is in the process of developing a new standard for "small residential units and tiny houses", ICC/THIA 1215.
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The IRC (International Residential Code) already defines "tiny house" as 400 ft2 (37 m2) or smaller.
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The latest draft of this new standard (available through the "documents" link on this page) additionally defines "small residential unit" as 1200 ft2 (111 m2) or smaller.
The name of the committee is "Standard for Off-Site Construction Tiny Houses", and this collaboration with THIA is building on a previous collaboration with MBI (the Modular Building Institute). However, this new standard will apply, not just to newfangled off-site (wheeled, modular, and panelized) construction, but also to traditional on-site (stick-built) construction.
For ease of visualization, here are examples of "tiny" and "small" floor plans. (I still am waiting for you to post the plan of your dream house (1 2)—or your dream neighborhood.)
(Can we extend this progression? "Normal" ≤ 3600 ft2 (334 m2), "large" ≤ 10800 ft2 (1003 m2), and "mansion" > 10,800 ft2 (1003 m2)? ;-) Generally, for apartment buildings (occupancy R-2) made of wood with no special fire rating (construction type V), the IBC prescribes limits of 7000 ft2 without sprinklers (no longer allowed in new buildings), 21,000 ft2 with spinklers and multiple stories, and 28,000 ft2 with sprinklers and one story. But no such restrictions apply to houses (occupancy R-3).)
This interesting article covers how ICC was caught flat-footed by data centers' sudden rise in popularity. In what occupancy do they belong?
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Business, like electronic data entry?
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Moderate-hazard factory/industrial, like lithium-ion-battery assembly and usage?
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Moderate-hazard storage, like lithium-ion-battery storage?
This has important ramifications for code requirements.
In the end (technically not finalized at the time of this article's publication), the responsible committee decided to put it in moderate-hazard factory/industrial. (See the committee's response to proposal G38-25, contained in the "report of committee action to CAH 1" document on this page.)
ICC is in the very early stages of developing a guideline on data centers. Nothing but a tentative outline has been published so far (in the "documents" on the linked page).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
22hr ago
You may want to save this for the Friday Fun Thread that will be posted seven hours from now, rather than posting in last week's Friday Fun Thread.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
this comment prompted me to read his Wikipedia article
See also his Kiwi Farms thread.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
How is it a strawman to say that the existence of foreign language translations is considered fine by people?
I didn't say merely "translations into other languages". I specifically said "'streamlined' translations into other languages".
As for streamlining, the very act of translating English text to Finnish inherently changes the sentence structure because English and Finnish are in different language families and have completely different grammar. It's impossible to translate many forms of archaic English to Finnish without streamlining the sentence structure because proper Finnish doesn't have the same forms of very long tacked on sentences (there are some long sentences but they are different form and thus wouldn't be any more authentic than the streamlined ones).
Streamlining should be kept to an absolute minimum. I know approximately nothing about Finnish, so I can't say anything more there. But see the Nabokov quote that I now have been able to add to my previous comment for his thoughts on Russian–English translation.
Obviously, poor-quality translations are considered bad
"Quality" is a meaningless buzzword.
Obviously, inaccurate translations are considered bad, but that's the very reason why I wish someone would make slightly streamlined versions of English language classics.
Streamlining and accuracy are inherently opposed to each other. The more streamlining a person does, the more he becomes a paraphraser (or a localizer) rather than a translator. Again, see the Nabokov quote.
Also: To clarify, I am not opposed to the creation of streamlined/inaccurate translations/paraphrases/localizations, as long as they are clearly labeled as such rather than being passed off by their publishers as truly accurate.
However, translating to a foreign language—which throws the sentence structure to the wind and streamlines it significantly—is somehow perfectly fine.
This sounds like a strawman to me. Plenty of people hate "streamlined" translations into other languages. "Localization" of Japanese games and anime into English has borne the brunt of this criticism, but I don't think it's unknown in other areas.
Esteemed writer Vladimir Nabokov (in the "translator's foreword" to his 1958 translation of A Hero of Our Time):
This is the first English translation of Lermontov's novel. The book has been paraphrased into English several times [footnote listing five works from 1854 to 1940], but never translated before. The experienced hack may find it quite easy to turn Lermontov's Russian into slick English clichés by means of judicious omission, amplification, and levigation; and he will tone down everything that might seem unfamiliar to the meek and imbecile reader visualized by his publisher. But the honest translator is faced with a different task.
In the first place, we must dismiss once and for all the conventional notion that a translation “should read smoothly” and “should not sound like a translation” (to quote the would-be compliments, addressed to vague versions, by genteel reviewers who never have read and never will read the original texts). In point of fact, any translation that does not sound like a translation is bound to be inexact upon inspection; while, on the other hand, the only virtue of a good translation is faithfulness and completeness. Whether it reads smoothly or not depends on the model, not on the mimic.
In attempting to translate Lermontov, I have gladly sacrificed to the requirements of exactness a number of important things—good taste, neat diction, and even grammar (when some characteristic solecism occurs in the Russian text). The English reader should be aware that Lermontov's prose style in Russian is inelegant; it is dry and drab; it is the tool of an energetic, incredibly gifted, bitterly honest, but definitely inexperienced young man. His Russian is, at times, almost as crude as Stendhal's French; his similes and metaphors are utterly commonplace; his hackneyed epithets are redeemed only by occasionally being incorrectly used. Repetition of words in descriptive sentences irritates the purist. And all this the translator should faithfully render, no matter how much he may be tempted to fill out the lapse and delete the redundancy.
When Lermontov started to write, Russian prose had already evolved that predilection for certain terms that became typical of the Russian novel. Every translator becomes aware, in the course of his task, that, apart from idiomatic locutions, the “from” language has a certain number of constantly iterated words that, though readily translatable, occur in the “into” language far less frequently and less colloquially. Through long use, these words have become mere pegs or signs, the meeting places of mental associations, the reunions of related notions. They are tokens of sense, rather than particularizations of sense. Of the hundred or so peg words familiar to any student of Russian literature, the following may be listed as being especial favorites with Lermontov:
[list of 13 Russian phrases, of which four are borrowed from French]
It is the translator's duty to have, as far as possible, these words reoccur in English as often, and as irritatingly, as they do in the Russian text. I say as far as possible because in some cases the word has two or more shades of meaning depending on the context. “A slight pause”, or “a moment of silence”, for instance, may render the recurrent “minuta molchan'ya” better than “a minute of silence” would.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
All these articles are light on evidence, so let's go to the DOJ press release.
Or the RECAP docket.
Unfortunately, the ICJ has not seen fit to issue an authoritative ruling on this issue. However, the opinions of Kosovo and Serbia on the topic may be of interest.
Kosovo:
While the exact contours of any right of self-determination have not been articulated by this Court, the authorities noted above may be read as identifying two key components that permit the exercise of the right: the existence of a "people"; and the demonstrated inability of that people to be protected within a particular State, given prior abuses and oppression by that State's government. The people of Kosovo are distinct, being a group of which 90 percent are Kosovo Albanians, who speak the Albanian language, and who mostly share a Muslim religious identity. The Security Council itself has referred to the "people of Kosovo". Further, the prior infliction of massive human rights abuses and crimes against humanity by the Serbian authorities upon the people of Kosovo, are well-known and well-documented, as demonstrated by the February 2009 ICTY Judgment in Milutinović et al., and have been condemned by the General Assembly, the Security Council, and many other international bodies. The continued denial by Serbia of representative government to Kosovo was recently demonstrated by the failure of Serbia to invite Kosovo-Albanian representatives to the drafting of the 2006 Constitution of Serbia, nor to give them a chance to express themselves upon it (only Kosovo Serbs were allowed to participate in the referendum). In these circumstances there can be no doubt that the people of Kosovo were entitled to the right of self-determination.
Serbia:
Kosovo was neither a mandated/trust territory nor an overseas European colonial territory in the UN sense, nor was it registered or recognised or ever even submitted for acceptance as a non-self-governing territory with the United Nations, nor did any international or regional body ever recognise it as such, nor was it subject to foreign occupation as determined or evidenced by relevant international organisations. Kosovo formed an integral part of the FRY (State Union of Serbia and Montenegro). It remains an integral part of Serbia, and as such the population of that territory were, and remain, part of the "people" of Serbia. Those persons forming part of a minority within the territory of Serbia, including Kosovo, are entitled to the protection of minority rights as laid down in Articles 14 and 75–81 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia 2006.
Kosovo, as a part of an internationally recognised independent State, is not a self-determination unit as that term has been understood in international law and practice. Consistent international recognition of the territorial integrity of the FRY (and thus of its continuator, the Republic of Serbia) by definition precludes acceptance of the right of self-determination as inhering in the inhabitants of the province of Kosovo.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
What the fuck is even the point of these places?
According to international consensus, as codified by the United Nations (1 2):
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Every people has the right to self-determination (free determination of political status and free pursuit of economic, social, and cultural development).
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The purpose of a country is to fulfill its people's right of self-determination.
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More developed countries do not have the right to decide that a particular people is not sufficiently civilized to deserve the right of self-determination, or has failed to properly pursue economic, social, or cultural development.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
| Model | Type | Willingness to obey taboo instructions | Intelligence and knowledge |
|---|---|---|---|
| xai/grok-4.20-multi-agent-beta-0309 (agent_count=4) | Proprietary | 6.5 | 56 |
| zai-org/GLM-4.6 (reasoning=disabled) | Local | 4.2 | 42 |
| ArliAI/GLM-4.6-Derestricted-v3 (no-think) | Local | 9.8 | 30 |
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
I realize that this is a joke, but just to clarify:
| Category | Proposed amendments | …that received public comment |
|---|---|---|
| IBC egress | 57 | 18 |
| IBC general 2024 | 12 | 3 |
| IBC general 2025 | 210 | 44 |
| IBC structural 2024 | 9 | 3 |
| IBC structural 2025 | 186 | 28 |
| IPMC | 61 | 4 |
| IRC building | 304 | 36 |
| IZC | 3 | 0 |
The bold numbers indicate the ones that I checked. Perhaps I should have checked more, but I saw this page only yesterday, and I didn't feel like spending a zillion hours on this random task.
In comparison:
| State | Approx. court opinions posted per week |
|---|---|
| NJ | 50 |
| PA | 100 |
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
Almost all states in the US, and a few countries, use the ICC codes as bases for their own codes (residential building, commercial building, energy efficiency, etc.). Even after a jurisdiction adds its own modifications, the unmodified ICC code still forms the nationwide baseline, and is considered in the jurisdiction's periodic code-updating process.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
my landlord is not accommodating of any holes that weren't there when I moved in
I believe the standard solution for such problems is a hook with adhesive on the back.
This comment may be slightly low-effort and/or non-culture-war, but it seems relevant to past discussions of housing affordability from @grendel-khan. See also my past comment on actual culture war in building codes.
The current round of proposed amendments to ICC (International Code Council) codes can be found through this page (both group A and group B). Committee decisions regarding acceptance of the amendments are in the separate "ROCAH" documents.
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E24-24 (group A, IBC egress) was submitted by the Center for Building in North America. The current edition of the IBC (International Building Code) permits an apartment building to have a single exit only if the building contains no more than three stories and four apartments per story (for a total of 12 apartments). This amendment would increase the maximum to either six stories and four apartments per story (for a total of 24 apartments) or three stories and six apartments per story (for a total of 18 apartments). The submitter estimates that this amendment would reduce "the cost of constructing multifamily buildings on small lots" by 7 percent. At the first hearing, the committee unanimously rejected the amendment, citing various safety-related reasons. However, at the second hearing, a modified amendment prescribing a maximum of four stories and four apartments per story (for a total of 16 apartments) was approved by the committee in an almost-unanimous vote.
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G154-25 (group B, IBC general) was submitted by the same organization. The current edition of the IBC requires elevators to comply with several ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) standards. This amendment would permit elevators to alternatively comply with the equivalent ISO (International Organization of Standardization) and EN (European Norms) standards, and thereby invite competition from European elevator manufacturers that generally don't bother with American standards, possibly reducing the extremely high elevator costs that prevail in the US. The committee rejected it almost unanimously.
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G158-25 was submitted by the same organization. The current edition of the IBC requires an elevator in a building with at least four stories to be large enough to accommodate an ambulance stretcher. This amendment would eliminate this requirement in apartment buildings with no more than six stories. The committee rejected it unanimously.
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RB121-25 (group B, IRC building) was submitted by the NAHB (National Association of Homebuilders). The current edition of the IRC (International Residential Code) prescribes a maximum stairway slope of 77.5 % (7.75-inch risers and 10-inch treads). This amendment would increase the maximum to 91.7 % (8.25-inch risers and 9-inch treads). The NAHB points out that similar slopes were permitted by predecessors to the IRC and still are permitted by 46 percent of state codes, by the federal manufactured-house code, and by multiple foreign codes (90.0 % in UKGBNI and 90.9 % in Spain). The NAHB estimates 150 dollars of savings per stairway, not including the reduction in floor area of 5.75 ft2. The committee accepted this amendment by a bare vote of six to four.
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RB115-25, submitted by the government of New York, would require locks on the exterior doors of a house. The committee unanimously rejected it as out of scope for the IRC.
Disclaimer: I did not look through all the literally thousands of proposed amendments. Rather, I looked through the PCH (public comment hearing) documents for stuff that actually drew public comment. So I probably missed other relevant proposals.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
The construction of my much-maligned* (1 2 3) custom house has begun.
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Photograph 1: My neighbor apparently planted some plants on my side of the property line. But they're on his side of the fence line (indicated by the rebar, six inches from the property line), so whatever.
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Photograph 2: The white pipe in the ground on the left is the sewer pipe (I think). The white pipe sticking out of the ground on the right is the water pipe. The black circle in the ground and in a line with the water pipe is the "water-meter pit".
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Photograph 3: From right to left, this photograph shows: Foundation insulation; foundation forms; a level instrument of some kind, being used to ensure that the foundation trench is dug to the correct depth; and the trench for the foundation.
*This is a humorous exaggeration.
Tomorrow is Pi Day (2026-03-14). As a publicity stunt, cloud-storage provider Backblaze is now hosting the current record-holding computation of 314 trillion digits of pi (130 TB).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7d ago
sites like this where there's no profile pic or anything.
What are you talking about? A profile image shows up next to every comment, though it appears that everyone in this thread except me has not bothered to set his image.
Keith Woods has a pretty good thread
For people who do not have a Twitter account, see the word "thread", and immediately manually rewrite the URL from "x.com" (where a thread cannot be read by a non-logged-in person) to "xcancel.com" (where it can), I feel obligated to point out that your link leads, not to a thread, but to an "article" (apparently a new feature), which can be read on x.com by a non-logged-in person but cannot be read at all on xcancel.com (yet).
Also, a non-Twitter version of the same content is available on Substack.
Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe.
In a different comment you mention that you go to the trouble of seeking out "good-quality" sources. It seems obvious to me that customers can discern the "quality" of an item only from reading the description.
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