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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   308 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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An AI covered Eminem's "Without Me" in a soul/R&B style and it works incredibly well.

Chinese learners, where do you start? It's a tonal language with an impenetrable writing system. I know there are other Category 5 languages out there, but this one is probably the hardest to start, right? Japanese was easy to start; just read Genki and start doing the homework. Anyway, how do you start learning Chinese?

I'm going to a funeral. Any recommendations for funeral-friendly jokes? (I'm not going to tell risky jokes at a funeral; I just thought "funeral-friendly jokes" would be a good "Friday Fun" prompt.)

Will echo the funny PG-level anecdotes as an approach if you're speaking

Another thing I'd suggest is making a dedicated effort to engage with smaller groups and individuals. When someone dies, the unique person they were to all of those different combinations of other people dies with them.

When a buddy of mine died, I talked with his mom about how dedicated a friend he was. Our teenage pothead team reminisced about freezing in the backyard treehouse with the 2-liter coke bottle bongs he'd slapped together for the night. I let another friend her vent about how strange it was to have a slightly-inconsiderate-lover-but-still-a-good-guy pass away while those strange and sexual memories were still so intact.

My condolences as well.

Funny anecdotes are likely the ones that will be the most appreciated, as long as the deceased is not the butt of the joke.

Depends on the funeral. Attendees will be much more open to jokes at the funeral of an 80-year-old practical joker who died peacefully in their sleep than at the closed casket funeral of a teenaged drunk driving victim.

Stick to jokes the deceased would have loved, even better if they're jokes the deceased loved to tell all the time. Frame it as a remembrance rather than just an attempt to lighten the mood. In general I would also recommend being a little overly careful/conservative. Humor can be very soothing on the grieving, but you dont want to risk being insensitive.

Edit: Sadly while the post rendered correctly in the preview, it looks like some of the tags do get stripped when they get published in final form. I guess because arbitrary xml has some theoretical vulnerabilities. I guess we'll have to live without math support for a while longer.

The Motte has (limited) math support!

Inspired by the recent discussion of innumeracy, controversies caused by the refusal to specify problems symbolically, as well as past lamentations about the lack of math support I endeavored to research the simplest way to add MathJax to the codebase for limited TeX support. During my journey I discover that W3C has apparently been working on web native math in the form of MathML since 1998. It has varying implementation completeness for its 2½ components. There is semantic MathML, Presentation MathML, and MathML Core. The good news is The Motte appears to freely pass along the raw MathML XML tags, the bad news is implementation appears to then depend on the users browser. Fortunately, it seems like at least Core is implemented in most modern browsers. I have tested the latest Firefox for Windows and Android, as well as Chrome for Windows and Android.

The raw code is a bit of a mess. To render:

x=−b±b2−4ac2a

The LaTeX:

x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^{2}-4ac}}{2a}

becomes:

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mfrac><mrow><mo>−</mo><mi>b</mi><mo>±</mo><msqrt><mrow><msup><mi>b</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>−</mo><mn>4</mn><mi>a</mi><mi>c</mi></mrow></msqrt></mrow><mrow><mn>2</mn><mi>a</mi></mrow></mfrac></mrow></math>

Fortunately there is a relatively easy workaround. There are a number of applications that support translation, including online. Allowing you to construct decently complex equations. e.g.:

L=∫0∞Bν(T)cos(θ)dν=2π515k4T4c2h3cos(θ)π=σT4cos(θ)π

The rendering is still not perfect, but much better than plain text.

@ZorbaTHut thanks for all the hard work you do keeping the site running. DM me and I'll send you a patch if you want a note for the 'Formatting help' page, and that's somehow easier than just adding it the next time you're working on the code base.

Oh man, I don't know if this is a promise or a threat, but if we got even basic LaTeX support, I can imagine writing so many more math posts here. Hopefully more Friday Fun than Culture War.

Court saga:

  • A municipality has an ordinance requiring a towing company that operates in the municipality to have a storage lot within the municipality.

  • 2013: A towing company with a storage lot in an adjacent municipality sues, arguing that the ordinance violates a state law that requires municipal towing ordinances to be "non-discriminatory and non-exclusionary".

  • 2015: The municipality settles the lawsuit by agreeing to change the ordinance to require a towing company to have a storage facility within five miles (eight kilometers) of the center of the municipality, as the crow flies. (Unfortunately, this lawsuit is too old for any of its documents to be available in the state's online judicial database.)

  • February 2020: A second towing company with a storage lot 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) from the center of the municipality sues, arguing that the new ordinance still violates the state law.

  • October 2020: The trial judge dismisses the lawsuit, finding that the five-mile radius is a reasonable method of ensuring convenience for the municipality's residents.

  • 2022: The appeals panel vacates and remands for further proceedings. The municipality never actually stated on the record its rationale for the five-mile radius (other than that it included the first company), so the judge had no basis to infer a rationale.

  • 2024: The municipality states on the record that the five-mile radius was picked as a "reasonable distance" for the convenience of its residents and police officers. The trial judge rejects the second company's arguments that any radius not measured from the edge of the municipality (which is approximately an 8 mi × 3 mi (13 km × 5 km) rectangle) or along roads is unreasonable, finds the five-mile radius reasonable, and dismisses the lawsuit.

  • 2025: The appeals panel affirms.

Here is an extra-detailed floor plan for a two-story house.

  • Dashed lines: Footings, foundation walls

  • Solid lines: Rooms, drywall, studs, sheathing, continuous insulation, portals, doors, door swings, windows

  • Dotted lines: Roof overhang, gutters

The footings, insulation, and rafters are based on the harsh climate of Fairbanks, Alaska (snow load 67 lb/ft2), and can be reduced in size if the house is built in a warmer location. (The International Residential Code's prescriptive tables top out at 70 lb/ft2, so for anything higher than that an engineered design is required. The highest snow load listed in the International Building Code (for ASCE 7 risk category II, which applies to houses) is 432 lb/ft2 in Whittier, Alaska, which is warmer than Fairbanks but has a wetter climate.)

Fun fact: If you are nostalgic for the days when gamepads were as light as feathers, you may be able to drastically cut down on weight by simply removing the rumble motors! The linked guide instructs you to desolder the wires, but merely cutting them works just as well if you are removing the motors rather than replacing them.

What's with the doors opening into each other?

IMO, it's an obvious way to waste less area on door arcs.

Is this allowed by the fire code? IMO, it's a terrible way to save space, too.

My Texan mind simply can’t comprehend the prospect of hundreds of pounds of snow sitting on my roof.

As for controllers—do you actually like them lighter? I feel like the heft of a Switch pro controller is much nicer.

My Texan mind simply can’t comprehend the prospect of hundreds of pounds of snow sitting on my roof.

Snow load at the northern edge of Texas reaches 19 lb/ft2, which is almost as much as the 20 lb/ft2 of live load for people walking on a flat roof.

As for controllers—do you actually like them lighter?

I don't care much about the weight (though, having removed the rumble motors from my Xbox One controller, I do think it now feels better to hold), but I hate rumble and disable it in every game I play, so why not remove rumble motors that I never use? (Some Internet searching indicates that people with arthritic or otherwise-unhealthy wrists also like lighter controllers.)

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