Once I was tasked with doing QA testing for an app which was planned to initially go live in the states of Georgia and Tenessee. One of the required fields was the user’s legal name. I therefore looked up the laws on baby names in those two states.

Georgia has simple rules where a child’s forename must be a sequence of the 26 regular Latin letters.

Tenessee seemed to only require that a child’s name was writable under stone writing system, which would imply any unicode code point is permissible.

At the time, I logged a bug that a hypothetical user born in Tenessee with a name consisting of a single emoji couldn’t enter their legal name. I reckon it would also be legal to call a Tenessee baby 'John '.

Some of them think that communism is so perfect that any communist state (i.e. a state that plans to build communism one day, but doesn’t claim to have done so yet) can’t backtrack and will only get closer and closer to communism over time. Claims that Russia is no longer communist, and is just an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy, must therefore be lies made up by the west to trick people into not trying to build communism here. Russian troll farms will find communities of people who think this, and make posts agreeing with them and telling them that everyone’s super happy in Russia and anything bad is made up.

It’s also stethoscope theory, which is much more plausible:

Maybe XT-1 woke up with tattoos like this, but it said Dave the lab tech was here, and Dave was the only one to enjoy it.

It’s not Kessler Syndrome until it’s so bad that we can’t feasibly launch anything new. A single cascading collision chain might calm down again after breaking a lot of stuff without any catastrophic long term impact if all the debris ends up either in a stable orbit that can be predicted and avoided by other objects, or unstable orbits that decay until the debris falls out of orbit.

I’ve definitely noticed less shininess than the same filament was getting at the same temperatures on my previous printer, except for the first layer. As the first layer prints without part cooling, my guess is that the extra part cooling versus the other printer means it’s setting before it’s had time to self-level. If that’s right, then turning down the part cooling (and then also the speed so you can get away with the reduced part cooling) would make things shiny again. I’ve not bothered investigating that, as most of what I print is either functional, where I wouldn’t care about shininess, or gets painted, where any shininess would come from paint or clearcoat.

As someone who’s just spent half an hour reading Wikipedia thanks to this thread, I can now dispense a summary of what I read to make it feel like I didn’t just waste a chunk of time I should have spent in bed by wasting another chunk of time I should be spending in bed.

Fats are made out of fatty acids, which are carboxylic acids with a longish carbon chain. A saturated fatty acid only has single bonds between carbon atoms, a monounsaturated fatty acid has a single double bond somewhere in the chain (and these are sometimes things that turn into buzzwords, e.g. omega three oils are ones where there’s a single double bond three along from the end of the chain), and a polyunsaturated fatty acid has more than one double bond.

Single bonds in a carbon chain can only be one way around, so you don’t get isomers of saturated fatty acids, but double bonds in a carbon chain can be in either of two orientations. If the hydrogens are on the same side for both sides of the bond, that’s the cis orientation, and if they’re on opposite sides, that’s the trans orientation. Most natural unsaturated fats are cis, so they generally don’t get explicitly labelled as cis fats, and just the trans ones get the extra label. Notably, though, vaccenic acid, which is about 4% of the fat in butter, is trans by default, so it’s cis-vaccenic acid that gets the extra label.

Unsaturated fats tend to be more liquid at room temperature, but can be made by growing cheap vegetables. They also go off faster as free radicals can attack the double bonds. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature, but mostly need to come from animals or more expensive plants (palm fat is an exception - it’s cheap and mostly saturated). It’s therefore desirable to use industrial processes to artificially saturate fats, and we can do that by heating them up and exposing them to hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst like Nickel. You don’t necessarily want to fully saturate your fat, though, so might stop part way, and if you do, unless you intentionally tweak the process to avoid it because it’s the 21st century and you’re legally obliged to, you get some of the partially hydrogenated fat switching from cis to trans.

Over the course of the last century, we realised that (except for a few like vaccenic acid) trans fats are harmful in lots of exciting ways, e.g. messing up cholesterol, blocking your arteries, and building up in your brain. They’ve therefore been banned or restricted to certain percentages in a lot of the world. You can get a similar effect by fully hydrogenating things to get safe (or at least safer) saturated fat and mixing it with the unmodified fat, or by switching everything that used to use hydrogenated vegetable oil to using palm oil, which is one of the driving forces behind turning rainforests into palm plantations.

Apparently, this was twenty five minutes of writing, so I’m nearly up to an hour of thinking about fats.

When they first started ramping up ads and demonetising more videos for being insufficiently advertiser-friendly, they probably still had enough goodwill from users that if they’d immediately launched YouTube Premium and presented it as a way to both remove ads, and support video creators that couldn’t rely on ad revenue, it would have been decently successful. A good number of YouTubers who had to switch to sponsorships and Patreon could have been pushing for people to subscribe to Premium instead of play Raid: Shadow Legends, which presumably would have boosted subscriber counts, and might have been enough to make YouTube profitable and much more pleasant for both free and premium users than it is today. Instead, they burned through a large amount of goodwill before implementing Premium, so people were already more reluctant, and for a long while it only shared revenue with a select few channels who were already raking in ad money, and was unaffected by view counts, so early Premium subscribers were paying Logan Paul even if they never watched that kind of video, but weren’t paying the channels they actually watched.

I ran the printer’s pre-sliced 12-minute benchy with cheap Geeetech PLA filament, and it didn’t come out great, but then realised that when I’d removed the nozzle clog that was there from the factory (apparently they test some nozzles during QA, so mine had some dregs of filament with a lump that needed a cold pull to shift it) I’d accidentally plugged one of the part cooling fans into the wrong header and it wasn’t running. After fixing that, it came out much better than what you’ve got here, despite a pause part way through due to trying to do it with the tail end of a roll.

I’ve read that the throat cooling isn’t great for PETG as the fan as it draws warm air from inside the toolhead shroud, and there’s an alternative one on printables that avoids this problem (although a duct to isolate the fan and its cutout in the shroud from the rest of the shroud interior might be simpler), so that could be related as you’re running PETG.

I don’t think their comment was pro-Iranian-post-revolutionary-government. The Shah was awful, was installed by the CIA, and did kill political opponents. US-backed governments don’t typically fall to revolutions, so a lot of people must have been upset to have enough of them to manage that. It’s generally accepted that what came after the revolution was worse, but it’s not just nutters, Stalinists and tankies that recognise it was also bad before, and got that way because the British wanted oil.

As far as I’m aware (which is a bit more than average as I’m British with an Iranian grandparent), both of you posted correct things. If the Shah hadn’t started killing anyone who disagreed with him, it would have been harder for the religious extremists to kill the rest. It’s not like you can ever assassinate all your political opponents as everyone knows other people, and those people don’t like their friends and family being murdered.

My brother frequently demands a source when I tell an anecdote, then misuses Hitchen’s Razor to accuse me of making the anecdote up. This would be understandable if it was as a pics or it didn’t happen response to something outlandish, but it’s usually for something entirely mundane that was barely interesting enough to mention in the first place.

Conspiracy theory: they realised this news was about to break, and removed the comment section because they expected a shitshow where every one of their customers saw comments pointing out their crimes.

As a dub watcher, the comment section was important. The dub comments were the only place to see what an unsubtitled background sign said or which scene had been cut from the manga that explained why something weird happened without there being comments from sub watchers full of spoilers for a couple of episodes later, which they don’t consider spoilers as the subtitled version of that episode was a week old.

There’s no such thing as a Nobel Prize winning economist. Economists got upset that there wasn’t a Nobel Prize for them, so came up with The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and then pretend it’s the same thing.

It makes sense, but it also makes sense to design society so that situations where it’s helpful happen as rarely as possible. If some people are predisposed to being a good firefighter, it doesn’t negate the fact that you don’t want buildings to catch fire in the first place, so you still want to teach children not to play with matches, teach adults not to keep lighter fuel near their heater, and ban companies from selling combustible cladding to insulate tower blocks. Prevention is better than cure. You just then have a load of people who aren’t great at being anything except a firefighter, ready for fires that never happen, and under the current system, forced either into jobs they’re bad at, or into chronic stress to get consistent productivity.

I said he more-or-less killed him, not that he actually killed him. Care was not taken to ensure he’d be revived or revivable. He was left forgotten in a pocket. The likely outcome was that he remained forgotten and didn’t get wet until he’d been dropped under some furniture, crushed like a stock cube or gone mouldy. Maybe he had dependents, like a young child who’d have died without their parent. It being theoretically possible to revive someone later doesn’t make turning them into a dehydrated cube meaningfully better than making them dead if you don’t have a strong plan with a failsafe to make sure they stop being a cube. Even with guaranteed revival, if they’re a cube for long enough that they notice the lost time, it’s just like roofying someone and holding them hostage for a while. Do not turn museum guys into dehydrated cubes.

If not for an accident where he ended up in a washing machine, he’d have been left as a cube indefinitely. From a cube’s perspective, there’s no difference between being a cube and being dead.

Upstream Firefox doesn’t comply with FDroid’s rules (thanks to the ‘proprietary bits and telemetry’ Handles mentioned), so is only available from the Play Store or as a loose APK that won’t auto-update.

A plumber or a sparky doesn’t just maintain one house, and if they’re just doing maintenance, probably work on hundreds of houses a year. Maintaining your own house takes a fraction of the time and effort of working a housing-related trade full time.

He did more-or-less kill, and then steal the identity of, the museum guy. He’s not a paragon of virtue, either.

A big part of the reason was that Facebook offered game studios a big upfront sum if they made their games work on whatever headset they were selling at the time in standalone mode with no major caveats. The headset only had an anemic mobile GPU, so was only capable of as much as mobile games were doing at the time. A bunch of studios took them up on this offer, and cut back their projects’ scope to be viable under the hardware constraints, so nearly everything that got made was gimmicky mobile-style minigames, and obviously that’s not what makes people want to drop hundreds of dollars on hardware, as they can get their fill by borrowing someone else’s headset for an hour.

Mobile GPUs have improved, so standalone headsets aren’t as terrible now, but we missed the expensive toy for enthusiasts and arcades phase and soured most people’s opinions by making their first VR experience shovelware.