ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
27m ago
How do you get into the kitchen? Through the master suite?
The line between the dining room and the kitchen does not represent a wall.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
May I enquire as to why you censored the term "closets"?
I personally dislike closets (which, being immovable, needlessly constrain the rearrangement of furniture) and much prefer shelving units and wardrobes. Past discussion: 1 2
I'd also say that having the kitchen and dining room on separate floors is a bad idea.
Read what I wrote again. For code-compliance purposes, the living room is on the first floor and the dining room is on the second floor—but, in everyday life, the room labeled "living room" serves double duty as either a living room or a dining room depending on circumstances, and the room labeled "dining room" serves as a living room for the people occupying the upstairs bedrooms.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
One floor plan that I can't get right is a five-bay colonial with a mudroom-style entrance. I am looking at something like 13.2 m × 8 m or 12.8 m × 8.4 m (so that the footprint of the house is around 100 m2).
Extremely lazy spitball sketch (though possibly a bit too big)
But, no matter how I try, I can't design a staircase that feels natural without interrupting the regularity of the façade.
I don't get it. What does the stairway have to do with the façade?
Traditional foyers are designed for people who have no coats or wet boots or kids that track dirt everywhere.
Just add a closet under the stairway, and/or a wardrobe next to the wall.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
A mildly-interesting two-story house design (including a version with cl*sets, plus one-story parent designs for comparison purposes): In theory (to satisfy code requirements), the living room is on floor 1 and the dining room is on floor 2. But, in practice, the room on floor 1 serves both living and dining purposes, and the room on floor 2 is just an extra living room.
Whether it makes sense hinges on how the first-floor room is reconfigured between living and dining uses. Obviously, folding tables and folding chairs are perfect for dining use. For living use, folding couches apparently are available for purchase, though I'm not sure how compactly they actually fold up. Alternatively, perhaps the folding chairs and folding couches can be replaced with comfy, headrest-equipped office chairs that can serve for both living and dining.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
17hr ago
Assessments of economic freedom/property rights:
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Fraser Institute: US 8.10/7.59, UK 7.88/8.06, India 6.58/5.43
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Heritage Foundation: US 72.8/91.6, UK 70.4/93.6, India 52.5/48.3
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
We have too much petty crime, yet qualified immunity seems to boost it, by shielding cops from punishment for not handling it.
I think that failure to enforce laws and qualified immunity for violating rights are entirely separate issues.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
When it passes a resolution (example), the United Nations Security Council often says at the end that it "decides to remain actively seized of the matter". Apparently, there exists an official list of all the matters of which the Security Council is seized. At present, the list contains 49 active items that actually have been considered in the 2023–2026 period, plus another 16 stale items that were last considered before 2023 but to whose deletion a UN member objected in the latest annual review of the list. (For example: India's 1948 annexation of Hyderabad has not been considered by the Security Council since 1949, so it was highlighted as due for deletion from the list in January, and by default it would have been deleted in March. But Pakistan objected to that deletion, as it has done for many years. So, officially, the Security Council still is seized of that matter. Likewise, the UKGBNI has forced Russia's 2018 Novichok poisoning to remain on the list.)
For each item, the list gives only the first date of consideration and the latest date of consideration, so actually finding the related records can be a bit of a pain. (For example: The latest date listed for "the situation between Iraq and Kuwait" is 2025-09-17. Can you search for documents from that specific date in the UN Digital Library's interface? No—if you try to filter by what is labeled "creation date", you actually get a filter by what appears to be upload date. Rather, the best method is to search for the literal text "17 September 2025", which reveals the relevant resolution (regarding repatriation of Kuwaiti corpses and property (particularly, Kuwait's national archives) lost in Iraq's 1990 invasion) and meeting transcript.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
The other thing that I recall is Alex Jones supposedly paying out $1.4 billion with court ordering to liquidate everything he owns, be it InfoWars or his personal assets. I am not sure whether this is a normal practice in the USA, especially for verbal crime.
That was a special case. Jones failed to comply with the judge's orders regarding discovery, so he was punished with a default judgment—i. e., he was not permitted to make arguments reducing the damages claimed by the plaintiffs. (At least I think that's what happened. IIRC, some people on this website think that the judge's orders were not reasonable, or Jones did make good-faith efforts to comply with them but the judge unreasonably interpreted those efforts as bad-faith, or something like that.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
the UK trying to eliminate juries
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
the dumb media narratives that sustain the freaks' existence
The existence of lolcows is not sustained by media narratives. Rather, they exist in their niches of the Internet regardless of media attention.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
it's 60 k$
A cursory search indicates that the cheapest new US vehicle with three rows of seating (not counting the Mitsubishi Outlander, whose third row is literally child-sized) is the Kia Sorento at just 34 k$, not 60 k$.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
prostitution [without qualifier]
vs.
gay sex in societies that are hostile to homosexuality
You probably should also clarify "prostitution in societies that are hostile to prostitution".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Thirdly, collision avoidance/lane departure tech on company trucks. Apparently these have a false trigger rate somewhere above zero. Of course, most of the drivers I hear from wish we'd go back to manual transmissions.
I wouldn't dismiss their concerns so quickly. The collision-avoidance "feature" on my Mitsubishi Mirage (just a beeping/flashing warning, not a newfangled one that brakes automatically) had something like one false positive per hour on the six-hour drive that I took earlier today (taking a non-Interstate scenic route, so maybe less relevant for truckers).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
in a 30-mile radius
That's unreasonably picky. Try increasing the radius. Also, don't forget to answer a bunch of the 2000 questions.
Remember that this website is rather small. As I understand it, the creator got a reasonable number of users by advertising on 4chan (there's still a dedicated thread on /soc/, though he no longer participates there) and Twitter something like a year ago, but you still can't expect to see a zillion people on it.
To clarify, Duolicious does not use your answers to these questions for pairing directly. Rather, it distills from these questions your positions on 47 personality traits, and uses those variables for pairing—but it also lets you filter by individual answers in the search interface. Full explanation
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Has nobody created a dating app that allows you to autistically file a 100 fields of highly-specific information and search against them?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Technically, it's only published by Larry Ellison's daughter.
"The Studio is Owned by a Nepobaby"
This is false, and the true version of this claim is kind of a nothingburger.
Megan Ellison is the daughter of Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder and once the richest person in the world, according to the Financial Times. In 2016, Megan founded the game publisher Annapurna Interactive.
Since then, the company has published many successful indie games, such as Stray, Outer Wilds, and What Remains of Edith Finch, developed respectively by BlueTwelve, Mobius Digital, and Giant Sparrow. Annapurna doesn't own any of those studios. In fact, the publisher doesn't own any game studios as subsidiaries.
Mixtape was developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur, founded by musician Johny Galvatron, and published by Annapurna. So the studio isn't owned by a nepobaby. However, it's true that the game was funded by one. But so were all the other games published by Annapurna Interactive, and if you enjoy indie games, chances are you have enjoyed a game that was published by them.
In an interview with Kotaku, creative director Johnny Galvatron explained that developer Beethoven and Dinosaur spent that little bit extra moolah to license all of the songs in perpetuity. That means, presuming the heat death of the universe doesn't happen first, Mixtape will be available to purchase indefinitely. Publisher Annapurna also made it clear on Bwitter that those saying the game would be delisted because of licensing issues "was a lie", so that puts a pretty firm cap on that one.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
not gentle fixfic, but brutal nonconsensual editing
trying to get it to keep it reading in full without it deciding to start skimming
Paper:
Context Length Alone Hurts LLM Performance Despite Perfect Retrieval
Our systematic experiments across five open- and closed-source LLMs on math, question answering, and coding tasks reveal that, even when models can perfectly retrieve all relevant information, their performance still degrades substantially (13.9–85 %) as input length increases but remains well within the models' claimed lengths.
See table 2.
Despite achieving nearly perfect performance on the vanilla needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) test, most models exhibit large degradation on tasks in RULER as sequence length increases.
What is the current largest context window for an open LLM?
Does not matter as all these long-context models develop dementia when using 10 % of their context window.
This should link to the twitter trend
Note: This link works only for people with Twitter accounts, and is not supported by Nitter.
Kavanaugh concurrence:
As I see it, the conflicting contextual considerations make this a close case as we determine how to construe and where to draw the line on the statutory phrase “with respect to motor vehicles”. In the end, I do not believe that Congress, through such oblique language in an economic-deregulation statute, simultaneously (i) allowed state tort suits against negligent trucking companies and (ii) categorically preempted state tort suits against upstream brokers who negligently select an unsafe trucking company. The brokers and their amici raise serious concerns about the repercussions of state tort liability against brokers, and they may of course (among other possibilities) ask Congress and the President to change federal law. But, as of now, federal law does not preempt state tort liability against brokers for negligent selection of trucking companies.
Industry news source:
The Supreme Court just told every freight broker that it can be sued
The legal standard is ordinary care. The question a jury will now be permitted to ask in every state in America is whether the broker exercised reasonable care in selecting the carrier. That means: Did you check the carrier’s safety record? Was the carrier’s FMCSA data available to you? Did the data show elevated crash rates, conditional safety ratings, high out-of-service percentages, or prior enforcement history? Did you have a documented process for evaluating carrier safety? Or did you book the cheapest truck and move on?
If you are a freight broker operating in the United States today, the preemption defense you have been relying on since 2023, when the Seventh Circuit decided Ye v. GlobalTranz, is gone. You are now subject to state tort law in every jurisdiction where you arrange transportation. The carrier you select, the safety record you ignore, the data you decline to check, all of it is discoverable. All of it is admissible. All of it can be presented to a jury.
This decision removes the federal shield that was blocking an old theory. Negligent hiring is a tort theory that has existed for generations. The Restatement (Second) of Torts, Section 411, imposes a duty of reasonable care in employing a contractor for work carrying a risk of physical harm. Barrett cited it in the opinion.
Plaintiffs' attorneys who handle commercial motor vehicle crash cases have been building these case files for years, waiting for the preemption question to resolve. The dockets are ready. The carrier safety data is public. FMCSA’s SAFER system is free. A broker’s carrier selection history is discoverable in litigation. The inspection records showing which carriers a broker habitually dispatched, and what those carriers’ safety profiles looked like at the time of dispatch, are all federal records.
The first wave of post-Montgomery negligent-hiring suits against brokers will be filed within the next few weeks. They will name brokers who selected carriers with known safety deficiencies, conditional ratings, elevated BASIC percentile scores, prior out-of-service orders, and authority less than 18 months old. The discovery requests will seek the broker’s carrier vetting policies, internal screening criteria, communications with the carrier prior to dispatch, and any safety data the broker reviewed or failed to review.
If a broker has no documented carrier vetting process, that absence is itself evidence.
Kavanaugh flagged this in his concurrence, and it deserves its own discussion. The FAAAA mandates minimum insurance coverage for motor carriers. It does not mandate comparable coverage for brokers. The existing broker surety bond requirement under 49 U.S.C. Section 13906 is $75,000. That is not liability insurance. That is a financial responsibility bond intended to ensure payment to carriers and shippers. It does not cover tort claims.
Most freight brokers carry some form of general liability and contingent cargo coverage. Very few carry the kind of excess liability coverage that would respond to a catastrophic negligent-hiring verdict. The nuclear verdict environment in trucking litigation has produced eight-figure and nine-figure outcomes against motor carriers. Those same jury dynamics now apply to brokers.
The insurance industry has not yet priced this exposure. When it does, freight broker premiums will adjust. The adjustment will be significant for brokers who cannot demonstrate a documented, data-driven carrier selection process. The adjustment will be less severe for brokers who can show that their vetting methodology is systematic, repeatable, and grounded in publicly available safety data.
The carriers a broker habitually selects, their safety profiles, their authority ages, their crash histories, their inspection outcomes, all of that is now part of the risk profile that an underwriter will evaluate.
This is not complicated. The court did not rewrite the rules of physics. It removed a procedural shield. The underlying obligation to exercise reasonable care in selecting a carrier is the same standard every other industry participant already operates under. Shippers exercise care in selecting carriers. Carriers exercise care in hiring drivers. Brokers are now held to the same standard.
Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is not just a broker case. Kavanaugh acknowledged this implicitly when he discussed 3PLs, freight forwarders, and digital freight platforms that make carrier selection decisions. The opinion is written about brokers because C.H. Robinson is a broker. But the logic applies to anyone in the supply chain who selects a carrier and has access to publicly available safety data showing that the carrier presents an elevated risk.
The court said that requiring a party to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier concerns motor vehicles. That is a principle. It does not stop at licensed broker authority holders.
Shippers who select carriers directly are not preempted and never were. But shippers who relied on the assumption that their broker’s preemption defense would insulate the entire transaction from negligent-selection liability need to rethink that assumption. The broker can now be sued. The broker’s defense will include evidence of what the shipper knew, what the shipper required, and the shipper’s own carrier-selection criteria.
Associated Press:
Supreme Court revives suit against major logistics company with potentially big effects on industry
The Trump administration and companies such as Amazon had argued that letting the suit go forward would expose logistics companies to liability under a “patchwork” of state laws.
Montgomery’s appeal was backed by more than two dozen states. They said a win for him would help bolster safety in an industry that moves billions of tons of goods across billions of miles every year.
The ruling could have far reaching effects if brokers can be held liable for the actions of the trucking companies they hire, said Brian Watt, who runs a freight logistics company in Florida.
Brokers will now have to focus more on the safety records of the truckers they contract with to haul all kinds of goods, including hazardous materials, instead of just looking for the cheapest and fastest option.
The Transportation Department has been cracking down on the trucking industry over the past year by trying to force unqualified drivers, trucking companies and schools out of the industry.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
I haven't played Starcraft (I'm not a big fan of the genre—my knowledge of it is limited to watching my brother play through the Age of Empires 2 campaigns as a child), but I feel obligated to call out what appears to be an unnecessarily egregious mangling of the original quote.
Tassadar, your taste in companions grows ever more inexplicable. Executor, prepare to take Tassadar into custody.
I don't know what you mean by that. My bathrooms and laundry/utility rooms are cramped enough that the accusation may be accurate there. But my kitchens, living rooms, and dining rooms are ample. And I believe that my bedrooms permit a few different configurations even at maximum occupancy—and how often are bedrooms at maximum occupancy anyway? (For example, the design that I am having built will have nominal occupancy of five but actual occupancy of just two.)
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