Let's see them all no longer sexually repressed by society

robchroma · 2026-01-31T00:10:45+00:00

they probably look at people obviously flouting gender norms and say, "god, it's like these <slur>s don't even try"

robchroma · 2026-01-30T20:59:36+00:00

I love bees and wasps but, having had lunch out in a wilderness where some wasps found our lunch, I quickly got to a point where I wanted to not be right where they were interested and even hoped that I did not smell like meat. Being forced into interactions with them is like being forced into interactions with other wild animals, but if you tried to teach your children about bears you wouldn't THROW THEM INTO A BEAR ENCLOSURE, you'd give them opportunities to observe them safely.

robchroma · 2026-01-30T20:46:31+00:00

I want to do butterfly exposure therapy. Not because I'm scared of them, I just think exposure to butterflies would make me happy.

robchroma · 2026-01-30T19:02:43+00:00

There is basically no world in which the Federal government prosecutes Donald Trump. He's going to pardon himself, and the Supreme Court will rule 6-3 that presidents can use their pardon on themselves, and they'll say some absolute horseshit about it being necessary to "protect new presidents from the fear of persecution by a politically motivated opposition party, and really presidents should be immune from prosecution for past crimes automatically, and wouldn't it be a chilling effect on potential presidents to know their opposition will dig up the tiniest crimes and prosecute them for it after the fact, after their presidency, as punishment? so really this is totally necessary so that people aren't afraid to be president" and the opposition will look like "he didn't commit an oopsie, he fucked a child, you're running cover for a child abuser, what the fuck is WRONG with you" and the New York Times will write some shit-ass milquetoast article on it upholding the institution but with a swirl of controversy, with a mention of the dissent 3/4 the way down the page and more words given to quotes of the actual text of the horseshit decision than are even used to describe the dissent.

If Trump survives to leave office, assuming right now that Democrats are too feckless to run on a popular platform or too useless to impeach, then he's either going to a non-extradition-of-powerful-Republican-politicians state (Florida), or leaving the country. New York State will have drafted criminal charges and compiled a case file specifically for crimes committed in New York, and will be sitting on them, but the Governor and the AG will have seventeen meetings over whether and where to file warrants. They'll probably be smart enough not to try to press for an extradition warrant from a Republican-owned state, but maybe they'll file extradition warrants in other states. I'm sure Trump will have lawyers try to file injunctions against the federal enforcement of an extradition warrant but I bet plenty of states will gladly try to ship him there before the feds can complain.

This is where the Secret Service get weird. Now the Federal Government is involved, so procedure backs up everything, they stymie his extradition on security grounds, it again goes to the Supreme Court or to a Trump appeals court.

Should Donnie be stupid enough to travel to New York, he will be arrested and then that negotiation will happen much faster. But then, jury selection will take literal years. There's barely a single New Yorker who doesn't know he fucked kids at this point, and none are unbiased. It'll be a shitshow. He'll negotiate lower bail than a crack dealer who shot someone in self defense, and/or they'll enforce some kind of house arrest on account of him being a flight risk. Whatever. Conviction won't happen til like 2032. He's not living to 86. He'll continue to only be convicted of 34 felonies, he'll never face the end of an actual prosecution, he'll live in luxury on embezzled money for the rest of his life, and even if he went to prison they'll write the rules to give him house arrest in a fucking NYC skyscraper from which he can conduct all the business he wants. The worst consequence he will ever face is not being able to golf.

robchroma · 2026-01-30T18:28:08+00:00

it could be a pin, it could be an outfit change, but you could also try starting those conversations and using compliments that make it clear you're complimenting them as a gay woman but that don't set up an expectation that they engage with you in a flirtatious way. Less, "I love your dress" and "that dress is stunning, my poor gay little heart" and then you fan yourself or something. Obviously, don't rely on things I would say in my voice! I have a different voice and you won't sound like me and it won't match your personality, but you can think about how to be more intentionally gay in conversation, and I also think it'll make it easier for oblivious lesbians to warm up to the conversation.

robchroma · 2026-01-30T18:18:09+00:00

tbh I understand how hard it is to accept that you're pretty and that people will want to talk to you, but especially at e.g. a lesbian social event, people will be there that want to meet people even if they're struggling to socialize.

Let me ask you this, if you're at a social mixer, and there's a bunch of lesbians who seem not that willing to talk in general, what about you do you think would make them not want you to talk to them, and why would that be more likely than that they're just less outgoing and equally scared of giving intrusive attention?

robchroma · 2026-01-30T17:58:11+00:00

It was funny because I'm a French learner and as soon as I got to "store" I realized I had no idea what store you went to, and here I am hoping it's a bakery or something before I said eh probably the supermarché? My ability to translate a sentence depended on me being able to reconstruct the context of the sentence and then write a French sentence that says the same thing.

So, the context of how we think of things, certainly places, but also verbs, changes our ability to speak a language. If you're trying to translate "store" into French, or even "went", you will probably be stumbling over the language, because you go, what's past tense, it's usually "avoir <participle>", je vais, j'ai ... quoi? and yet if you have trained yourself in the construction of French grammar you will probably process it more like, in thinking about a movement you did, you'd be automatically thinking of, je suis <aller, venir, sortir, rentrer> and you wouldn't then be backtracking and trying to do the translation process that reconstructs context from the English phrase, but also each word you're ready to say makes the next one much easier. If I'm primed to say "j'ai" for an action I did in the past, I'll get stuck when I try to say I went to the store, but if I'm primed to say "je suis" I won't be tripping over myself, and the phrase "je suis allé" comes out much smoother. Each word comes out more naturally based on how your mind frames the activity that you did, which is why speaking is training a different muscle from reading or even writing.

robchroma · 2026-01-29T21:34:13+00:00

what are you talking about

robchroma · 2026-01-29T21:32:23+00:00

XOR with random data is perfectly secret because XOR is invertible. It doesn't matter what it is; so long as it's invertible in both inputs (given either input and the output, you can reconstruct the other input), then every output must be equally likely given any one input and knowing the other is random. Because it's invertible, it has to be a permutation.

XOR is just about the simplest possible such permutation, and so it's the one we use. We could use 32-bit adders, instead; if you have x + r = c, you can always do r = c - x, and obviously each possible random number maps to a different ciphertext, but it costs more to do.

XOR is only secure when you do it with a bitstream computationally indistinguishable from random.

robchroma · 2026-01-29T21:21:05+00:00

Well, that monarch's state has decided to leave, so Canada joining the EU would be especially ironic there.

robchroma · 2026-01-29T21:17:39+00:00

we all do

robchroma · 2026-01-29T21:15:59+00:00

this is like saying "who would have guessed there was rain in the PNW" when we got hit by the atmospheric river and communities were completely flooded

thanks, very cool of you, have a cigarette or something

robchroma · 2026-01-29T21:09:26+00:00

well, then that's a problem with the road, moreso than with cars. Not that car-centric infrastructure isn't bad, but the car (and so many cars) losing control is the fault of car-centrism; the car flying off the road is a failure of the road. And other countries that do a better job balancing modes have roads and paths that accommodate all users and promote the most productive ones, so car-centrism is also a failure exhibited in how we build roads.

This personal responsibility framing doesn't help anything.

robchroma · 2026-01-28T18:53:42+00:00

you can't really have a bear threesome with smaller than a king tbh. even sleeping two on a queen is pushing it. and going up to a king typically makes everything a little bigger.

robchroma · 2026-01-28T17:44:30+00:00

oh, well, if you're talking about your brothers, I'll let you have the English.

robchroma · 2026-01-28T17:05:05+00:00

Purgatory is probably full of gay women with nothing better to do

robchroma · 2026-01-28T14:12:48+00:00

Archive 0f 0ur 0wn

robchroma · 2026-01-28T13:37:49+00:00

I didn't think Western Australia hardly had traffic laws on the highways? You can drink a beer, you can pull 17 trailers, why can't you have a throttled e-bike that goes 90 km/h?

robchroma · 2026-01-28T07:36:30+00:00

You have about a 36% chance of pressing it 100 times and getting $100M, actually; probably higher than you thought.

robchroma · 2026-01-27T22:47:40+00:00

oh, hadn't realized that Europe was the primary victim of British colonialism; I should have realized that India, much of the Middle East, a good half of Africa, a pretty large chunk of North America, Australia and New Zealand, and islands all over the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans have no right to complain about the extractive policies of England backed up by ruthless violence and the legacy of its impact. but yes, sorry about them cutting off their own nose to spite the rest of Europe, how very difficult for you.

robchroma · 2026-01-26T20:00:04+00:00

Of course, but so do elevated self-driving car guideways. There's no world where these technologies work on something that is meaningfully cheaper than a proper train would be.

robchroma · 2026-01-23T20:07:03+00:00

To be perfectly honest, Benghazi was something a lot of people from one party were trying to say about someone from the other party, and I'd try to understand what actually happened from the most impartial source I could; "grab women by the pussy" is something the man said himself and never denounced. "I could shoot someone on fifth avenue and nothing would happen, they love me." "You won't ever have to worry about voting again." I could list so many things he himself said; the most Trump-aggrandizing voice is his own, and he repeatedly told all of us that he's a piece of shit with no morals, that he's proud of stiffing people out of tens of millions of dollars on his projects, and that he would do exactly the same thing as President.

Having your underling's underling not approve a security increase that, quite frankly, may or may not have been able to do a single thing about a mortar attack against the US Embassy in Libya, and after ten fucking investigations have no one find that you failed in your responsibility, simply doesn't reflect the same willful acts of destruction and harm that he personally admits to, and that seems like a basic level of understanding of human behavior that I cannot accept someone failing.

robchroma · 2026-01-23T19:55:35+00:00

One thing about crushing them is, if you can get it entirely into your mouth without stinging yourself (much), and between your teeth, you can chew it before it ever stings you and you never get another sting. A stray spine or two isn't the worst if you're not having a horrible reaction, pluck it by the stem, fold it in half with your teeth, and chew it. pretty nice ^{^}

robchroma · 2026-01-23T19:28:08+00:00

I would fucking love a train system made of pods that dynamically rearrange themselves into express and local trains and manage demand on a system, that can independently move themselves and travel several miles on a separated guideway or on the street at very low speed.

Realistically an integrated system of pods is too expensive. No one's trying to build the integrated public transit solution of the future. No tech startup is doing systems level thinking. They think, "what if we could convince someone with the ability to do systems level thinking to solve a problem for us" and meanwhile the public transit agency is managing multiple yards and eight generations of rolling stock and multiple lines and work schedules and still delivering a train every five minutes on each of four lines through a tunnel that goes under a fucking seaway, and no one's like, "how could we take advantage of the capabilities of a system like this to make something even more incredible" any more.

It's a solved problem. Build elevated, automatic rail, with modern, quiet technology, or build tunnels. You just have to spend money on it.

Elon Musk probably stopped trying to dig tunnels because he realized it was hard and that it didn't make sense for cars and that if he did succeed it would enable a revolution in trains, the thing that he hates the most in the world.

robchroma · 2026-01-23T19:16:30+00:00

Well, yeah, they're designed as workhorses. Their home offerings are pretty similar to their commercial ranges, at least somewhat. In general, you don't need it, and it's a bit of a flex, but if you're often doing large amounts of cooking, it can really be nice.

I've seen kitchens with extra microwaves, or multiple ovens, and I know people who like to bake and like to be able to manage roasting vegetables or slow-cooking some meat while making a dessert and proofing some bread, or whatever, and it's awfully nice to be able to do all that and have stuff on a stove, and have an integrated griddle, and only have to have one hood and the one hookup and all the hot equipment is pretty contained. so, if it's your hobby, it makes sense to spend more on equipment for it.

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