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nwallin

4693

Karma

2017-08-25

Created

Recent Activity

  • I was on a jury a few years ago. The defendent was a homeless person with mental health issues. The cop was obviously lying about the one thing that was the core element of the crime. It was like a child telling the truth about every element of the indoor soccer game expect the part where they were the one who kicked the ball.

    The jury was me, (white) nine other white people, and two brown people. Me and the brown people thought the cop was obviously lying, and was therefore not guilty. The nine other people thought he was guilty.

    Like the cop was obviously fucking lying.

    After three days of deliberation we declared a hung jury.

    I was speaking with the prosecutor afterwards and he mentioned they were going for the felony version of the crime instead of the misdemeanor (he was obviously guilty of the misdemeanor, the felony depended on the element the cop was lying about) because the dude was a bad dude and they needed to get him.

    I looked him up when I got home. (I didn't look him up during the trial, they expressly forbid you from doing that) He had done something bad and went to prison for four years. He did his time and got out. They were still trying to throw the book at him for bullshit.

    I looked him up recently. He was never convicted of anything ever again, but died in jail two years after we declared a hung jury. Prosecutor got what he wanted in the end, I suppose.

  • AirGas prioritizes industrial users, in the case of helium, copper welding. Argon is perfectly good enough for almost all welding purposes, but copper is different because of its heat conductivity. The heat from the weld really wants to go anywhere else. Helium has substantially higher heat conductivity than argon, which allows the heat to flow from the electric arc into the metal faster, resulting in better welds.

    Obviously you can't have oxygen in welding gas; it would oxidize the shit out of everything.

    A little bit of oxygen in party balloon gas is beneficial. Some kid will breathe it, and when they do, you didn't want them to asphyxiate themselves.

  • My experience is that it's really easy to subtly fuck something up if you're doing a bunch of trig in code. If there's something subtly wrong somewhere, everything seems to work for a while, then one day you hit gimbal lock. Then you have to add a special case. Then you hit gimbal lock somewhere else in the code. Or you have tan spit out +/- infinity or NaN. Another special case. Or you have acos or asin in their degenerate regions where the minor imprecision isn't minor anymore, it's catastrophic imprecision. Another special case. Trig heavy code will work 0% of the time if you have an obvious bug, or will work 99% of the time if you a subtle bug, and once you start chasing that long tail you're just adding 9s and will never get to 100%. And if you have code that will run thousands/millions of times per frame, you need a lot of 9s to make sure a user can get through minutes or hours of using your software without hitting bugs.

    Doing the same work sticking strictly to vectors and matrices tends to either not work at all or be bulletproof.

    The other thing is that trig tends to build complexity very quickly. It's fine if you're doing a single rotation and a single translation, but once you start composing nested transformations it all goes to shit.

    Or maybe you're substantially better at trig than I am. I've only been doing trig for 30 years, so I still have a lot to learn before I stop making the same sophomore mistakes.

  • That's not true. The Bible provides a recourse for unwanted pregnancies in the form of a procedure to perform an abortion.

    Which is another reason the Bible should be banned from being accessed by minors. If a child needs an abortion, they should consult a medical professional. They should not read about how to perform an abortion in an app on their phone and attempt to perform the procedure themselves.

  • The law pertains to providers of covered application stores or operating system providers. Or, not and.

    They are not a covered application store, but they are an operating system provider, so the law does apply to them.

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