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Comment I don't normally answer mentally feeble Anons (Score 1) 251

But you're making an argument that's been so easily and laughably debunked that I just gotta pile on.

Imagine trans-ness is left-handedness. For centuries, left-handed kids were abused into the Right Way (no pun intended, and also an oddly astute observation on today). After the stigma of left-handedness was rather quickly done away with, we saw an absolutely meteoric rise in the number of kids identifying as Leftie...until it plateaued, at a representative level. Turns out that when you suddenly free a group to exist, they have a period of massive growth as they become free to be recognized, and then they settle down into a normal, accepted, if small part of society.

Kids aren't all suddenly being "brainwashed" into being trans, rather the kids who are actually trans are feeling safe to come out now. Your dreaded "unreal rise" is not only very real and accountable for, it'll stabilize at (i'd guess) 1.5-2%. That's how people under 18 identify, and despite people like you I'm postulating America has become safe enough that most trans kids will come out now.

Comment For those of you who don't grok Calvinball: (Score 1) 113

Calvinball is described on the Wiki thusly (emphases added):

Calvinball is an improvisational sport/game introduced in a 1990 storyline that involved Calvin's negative experience of joining the school baseball team. Calvinball is a nomic or self-modifying game, a contest of wits, skill and creativity rather than stamina or athletic skill. The game is portrayed as a rebellion against conventional team sports and became a staple of the final five years of the comic. The only consistent rules of the game are that Calvinball may never be played with the same rules twice and that each participant must wear a mask.

When asked how to play, Watterson stated: "It's pretty simple: you make up the rules as you go." In most appearances of the game, a comical array of conventional and non-conventional sporting equipment is involved, including a croquet set, a badminton set, assorted flags, bags, signs, a hobby horse, water buckets and balloons, with humorous allusions to unseen elements such as "time-fracture wickets". Scoring is portrayed as arbitrary and nonsensical ("Q to 12" and "oogy to boogy") and the lack of fixed rules leads to lengthy argument between the participants as to who scored, where the boundaries are, and when the game is finished. Usually, the contest results in Calvin being outsmarted by Hobbes. The game has been described in one academic work not as a new game based on fragments of an older one, but as the "constant connecting and disconnecting of parts, the constant evasion of rules or guidelines based on collective creativity."

Also, that is such a perfect description that's how I'm gonna refer to SCOTUS from now on: The Calvinball Court.

Comment Re: for the Corey Hart fans (Score 1) 115

I'm hearing they bought frickin' DISINFECTANT LAMPS so it's not that the cheap garbage didn't block the harmful stuff, it was literally engineered to only emit UVC, and TWELVE WATTS of it at that. I do hope nobody goes blind, but I also hope their recovery is long and agonizing (have had both corneal sunburn and corneal sutures, it's horrific).

Comment I dunno, remember all the Microsoft code leaks? (Score 1) 41

NT and 2000 back in, what, 2003? XP and Server 2003 a few years back, and Cortana last yearsloppy sloppy! Anyway, every time one of these drops there's massive, urgent, HAIR ON FIRE ZOMG warnings for coders to not even let the mere thought of reading them even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing their minds, since if they did take so much as the tiniest glance at them, MS could claim that any code they ever wrote again was tainted by the stolen IP.

It's hardly an obscure legal concept, either, else cleanroom design wouldn't be such an important field of coding.

Comment Seems the author doesn't know there's 2 waveforms (Score 3, Insightful) 187

The Schrödinger equation, the heart of this entire argument, has two forms – the time-dependent, and the time-independent. The time-independent is much easier to solve, but is much more general...it's the one that results in the "empty space" concept. Then again, actually visualizing the time dependent one still involves a very small (2e10-10 cm) and very light (9.1093837e10-28 grams) electron appearing at one point in a given space, which reduces that space's mass to as near zero as makes no difference.

Also it's been 25 years since I suffered through CHEM 404: Phys Chem II - Quantum Mechanics, and I'm drunk, so whatever.

Comment Re:Brother printer (Score 1) 72

Amen to that. I bought a $100 Brother laser a while back, it's only B&W but the only things I ever need to print at home are B&W and that's once every six months (mostly tickets/boarding passes/return labels); I actually got it because my cheap little Epson all-in-one kept drying out from lack of use. If I need to scan, I have a very high-end flatbed scanner on the desk next to the printer, and if I need a color print it's going to be a photo so I'm gonna be paying a print shop anyway.

People are stupid.

Comment Re: What phone? My Galaxy S23 will shoot pure raw (Score 1) 104

Yeah, for premeditated "real" photography I almost always use my DSLR or film, but "the best camera is the one you have on you" so it is nice to have the option with the phone. Then again, as I said I generally like the automatic output (big fan of Velvia and phones seem to strive for that look these days) so oftentimes I'm content just leaving it in Photo modeâ¦

Comment What phone? My Galaxy S23 will shoot pure raw (Score 1) 104

The optional "Expert Raw" mode on the Galaxys will spit out a straight, completely un-computationally-twiddled raw image to drop into Lightroom. I usually just leave it in regular and let it do its thing, since I don't mind the enhanced imagery, but in that line of phones at least the feature is there.

Comment Re:Waterproofing (Score 1) 218

A non-negligible number of people who swim for exercise like to listen to music while doing it, same as runners or walkers; they get some waterproof headphones and put their waterproof phone in an armband. Sure, it's not the most common situation, but it's far from an edge case. Also, us dedicated runners won't let a deluge stop us, I've definitely had my phone get soaked badly enough to damage it if it weren't proofed many, many times. Might even happen today, I'm slated for 10K regardless of that flood watch.

Comment Re:192GB RAM may not be enough... (Score 1) 79

I think it's more about the minute flexibility – if you have 5,000 engineers, a request per head every hour is trivial, but a request for every little "let me change the shape of this part by just this much, show me" could easily add up, if it can be processed in less time locally. I am just spitballing, though.

Comment Re:192GB RAM may not be enough... (Score 1) 79

Computational fluid dynamics is a workstation use case that can require a fuckton of RAM; it's advantageous to load the entire dataset into memory to most effectively feed the processing units. It's not uncommon for engineers in the automotive or aerospace industries to have a 5-figure tower (x86 Mac Pro, HP Z, Dell Precision) with over a terabyte of RAM and several RTX/Radeon Pro cards at their desks so they can do CFD runs on whatever they're designing at their leisure – it's a lot more effective and efficient than having to submit every changed design to the supercomputer queue and wait on the results.

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