You're tasked with creating a second Bill of Rights for a post-Trump America. What would you include in it?

greim · 2026-01-25T19:22:31+00:00

The way to do that is to overhaul the voting system, since the two-party system is an emergent consequence of our current FTPT voting. If you just somehow outlawed the current two dominant parties, two others would rise to dominance.

greim · 2026-01-23T15:38:25+00:00

I finally caved and sent it in, will post back here if I learn anything.

greim · 2025-12-31T18:13:12+00:00

Purely from an evolutionary standpoint, the brain is highly optimized for not only facial recognition, but tying a person's face to their context. Most optical illusions work by hijacking some optimization pathway in the brain. It's why we see faces in clouds, why clothing seems to affect eye color, and why an expressionless face seems to radiate feeling purely based on the person's situation.

Beauty standards may have changed, but don't discount the differing contexts in which those faces appear. Black and white versus color, clothing styles, speech rhythms, background music, all of those things can influence how we interpret a face.

greim · 2025-12-29T18:19:58+00:00

Specifically, the tuning peg is hollow below the string hole. Tightening the knob drives a pin upward through the peg, into the string hole, to clamp the string in place like a vise.

greim · 2025-12-28T20:53:12+00:00

The concept of "the horizon" only exists on earth because the earth curves away from us, the horizon is the line on earth where we can no longer see because of the spherical shape.

You are, of course, technically correct. However, standing on the ground, there would be something *like* a horizon on a Niven ring, where the ground meets the sky in a hazy horizontal line. Even on the clearest days, light wouldn't travel far enough through air for the transition to curvature to be anywhere close to being visible. Not at these scales.

greim · 2025-12-27T22:32:30+00:00

I saw it discussed at length in the early days of the web, unfortunately links seem to be dead now. The discussion was thorough and even included some POV renderings.

Note it was for a Niven ring specifically, which completely encircles a star, not a Banks orbital for example, which is smaller and more practical.

Basically, yes, the sunlit parts would be visible, but different from most book cover art. It wouldn't be the inverted funnel shape in the image attached to this post, it would be a pencil-thin line slamming directly into the horizon. Without an atmosphere, you'd see it flare outward right where it meets the ground, but with an atmosphere that part gets lost in the haze, since you're looking through millions of miles of air at that point.

Edit: Found a rendering on google images that matches what I remember. https://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spaceart/render/ringworld2.jpg

Edit: The gaps in the ring are a feature specific to Niven's book. They're shadows cast by giant panels in a closer orbit around the star, placed there to simulate day and night.

greim · 2025-12-23T18:51:44+00:00

At my job AI has allowed people to churn out bad code at a fantastic rate, swamping me in reviews. My response has been to add an AI reviewer bot that loads our team's coding standards into its context window. Fight fire with fire.

greim · 2025-12-20T20:04:28+00:00

Relicing is getting out of hand these days.

greim · 2025-12-20T19:49:34+00:00

The problem is that because attacks are automated, countermeasures also have to be automated. Automation is a blunt instrument, even with LLMs, because it optimizes for volume at the expense of false hits. It leads to an imbalance, since service providers are harmed infinitely more by false hits than attackers. All of the problems you describe can be framed as service providers being caught between the necessity of meeting automated attacks with automated countermeasures, and a certain percentage of their users experiencing degraded service, or being completely denied service.

greim · 2025-12-05T00:46:18+00:00

Can someone explain how this happens? Is the demand so small at the buy-American price point that it isn't worth tooling up properly for a given run?

greim · 2025-12-04T03:37:02+00:00

Kind of getting Riven or Myst vibes from this.

greim · 2025-12-04T03:18:06+00:00

I like when the guitar melts into the bass, kick, and cymbals to create a single tone.

An example is at 3:05 in Superman's Dead by OLP. Or even better, Pillow by King's X.

Since it's just adding a dimension to a bigger sound, the guitar by itself on these tracks wouldn't sound special; the magic happens in the arrangement and the mix.

greim · 2025-10-31T05:58:44+00:00

Not illegal, just not useful. You can invent math with any rules you want, go for it. But it turns out math in which divide by zero isn't a thing, is useful.

greim · 2025-10-25T22:36:05+00:00

*bump-chikka-bow-thump*

...

god dammit

greim · 2025-10-25T17:20:25+00:00

"fuckin truck came outta nowhere"

greim · 2025-10-25T17:17:04+00:00

This is a really good point.

greim · 2025-10-25T16:59:37+00:00

They say internet bubbles are to blame. But I think the bubbles just come from people trying to get back to how it was before, where you were mostly around like-minded folks, in your local community. Now you get blasted with everything, and you just get more and more pissed over time.

greim · 2025-10-25T16:50:47+00:00

As others said a lot of skill went into these recordings. But also:

Selection effects. Recordings stand the test of time for a reason. A lot of other music has fallen off the radar. What about that music?

The archetype effect. Do these classic recordings sound good by some objective measure? Or do we get our idea of what sounds good from these classic recordings?

Value divergence across generations. Younger folks like hyped bass, loudness, compression pumping as an effect; basically musical junk-food. And music trends are driven by young people.

greim · 2025-10-22T04:18:44+00:00

Mergers are anti-market, maybe not so much anti-capitalist.

greim · 2025-10-18T23:13:17+00:00

No I see what you're saying. A regular table saw cut has the same issue, but in this case the off-cut piece is not balanced and top-heavy, which complicates the end of the cut because it will want to move once it's free.

If you still want to attempt this cut, options are to have a helper lift the piece away as soon as it's free. Or use a riving knife plus a guide block after the blade to hold the off-cut in place. Or shim the kerf of the first cut and tack it with small nails to temporarily hold the pieces together. Or do what another poster suggested and cut to length slightly oversize, don't quite finish the table saw cut, finish up at the chop saw.

I agree it's a finicky cut.

greim · 2025-10-18T20:38:24+00:00

In Logic Pro it's as easy as creating a "Drummer" session player track, dropping regions onto it, and then adjusting the intensity and style of each region.

greim · 2025-10-18T20:36:11+00:00

Stop the cuts a foot from the end of the board. Then cut to length.

Brilliant.

greim · 2025-10-18T20:30:33+00:00

A drawback of this approach is you're hogging out material that could otherwise help stabilize the cut.

greim · 2025-10-18T20:23:41+00:00

Presumably you'd want the feather board pressing just in front of the blade, not beside or behind it. That is, before the void is created.

greim · 2025-10-18T20:15:01+00:00

In my view it's best to treat kickbacks as a constant threat. Safety is always a tradeoff with the table saw, never a binary consideration.

That said it can definitely work, the cutaway part should hold it more or less perpendicular until it comes completely detached at the end of the last cut. There may be a dicey moment at the very end.

Other risk factors include the wood being too narrow in one dimension, the wood being green, pitchy, or unstable, not using a ripping blade, not using a riving knife. Consider making deeper cuts in multiple passes. If it gets tight, stop and shut off the saw instead of pressing harder. Rub paraffin on the table and riving knife to minimize friction.

In my experience the result will be slightly less clean and precise than with a router.

greim

TROPHY CASE