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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • Everything about this seems almost designed to murder small businesses.

    Those with enough capital backing, resources and funds can take the hit, maybe cut some expenses, shedding crocodile tears about how terrible the economic impact of this trade war has affected them while dispassionately watching scores of no-longer-employees pack their things and try to figure out how to tell their kids that the promised trip next month they’d been looking forward to all year is cancelled.

    Edit: This might have been ambiguous. I was trying to highlight how big corporations can survive by doing what big business does to protect the bottom line. Small businesses, obviously, can’t do that.






  • Edit: let me rephrase. Your original comment didn’t mention what you did. You made a snide remark about reading comprehension when you didn’t even reread your own comment. That’s just hostile for no reason.

    – Original reply:

    Because that’s what the other person asked. “Secluded myself” isn’t really an answer. I can seclude myself counting leaves in the forest, lay down and stare at the ceiling, walk circles around my room and try to make them perfectly circular…

    It’s not that you have to tell; saying “I don’t know” or “I’d rather not say” would be an answer too. But you made a snide remark regarding the other person’s reading comprehension (why?) and fail to properly comprehend their question (or mine).


  • I’m autistic, which results in me deconstructing and analysing jokes instead of laughing (often to the displeasure of the people who think I didn’t find their joke funny – I promise, if I’m taking the time to disassemble your joke that means I found it funny and want to understand why).

    The flipside is that I occasionally crack out carefully engineered bangers, because I understand the importance of a setup, building expectations and putting the brain on one track of thought, then capping it off with the “derailing” of those expectations. The shorter you can get it, the less time the brain has to get off track on its own, diminishing that derailing effect.

    Of course, getting the inspiration and figuring out a way to put that into practice is it’s own unpredictable beast, and some jokes just fall flat despite my effort. Sometimes I misread the room or the audience too. I’m not a particularly talented comedian.

    But at least I’m not a setup without a punchline.



  • A definitional concession to make exponential series work. xn for n ∈ (0, 1) is the nth root of x, which gets ever closer to 1, while x^n for n < 0 equals 1÷ (xn). Between them lies the neutral element with respect to multiplication 1 (neutral meaning that x × 1 = x; a factor of one doesn’t actually change anything). Hence, x0 = 1.

    That rule breaks down for x = 0, obviously. Negative exponents don’t work at all because they’re division by zero, while all exponents > 0 result in 0. Semantically, 00 probably should be undefined, but the neutral element rule does provide a definition. There also isn’t really any reasonable use case where you’d need that to be consistent with anything else.





  • It’s not the goal itself that’s the issue. Protecting kids from harmful content until they’re ready to deal with it is absolutely a worthwhile endeavour.

    But the means to that end often pose a massive security and privacy issue.

    You’re supposed to give all your identifying details to some website and trust them, that they’ll use it only for the legal purpose of verifying that identity and promptly deleting them, rather than selling them to criminals who now have everything they need for identity theft. Hell, just storing them is a risk because we all know how many companies (and people) treat IT security as an afterthought at best and a breach compromising the identification of thousands of people would be a fucking nightmare.

    And what if your kid tries to circumvent it? Now their face is out there on some server, whether or not they succeed. Is that really better?

    The argument is that the onus should be on parents to protect their children and help them find their way safely, rather than compromising everyone else with poorly thought-out and invasive policies.