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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Not really. Using % of forecast area as % chance of rain inherently gives equal weight to your position being anywhere within that area. Even if you limit the forecast area to the 5m or whatever it is radius that smartphone GPS is typically accurate to which a weather app could theoretically do, simply using % of the forecast area covered as % chance of rain inherently gives equal probability of you being literally anywhere within that 5m radius. It would obviously still be more accurate, but those numbers wouldn’t be the same thing.


  • A couple things. First, you might need to freshen up on your Schoolhouse Rock, because this is not true:

    The 60 vote thing is true. It’s referring to the filibuster and cloture procedures in the Senate.

    When a bill comes up for consideration in the Senate, first it gets brought up for debate. A filibuster is when someone usually opposed to the bill makes this debate go on as long as possible to delay a vote on the bill. This process has been shorthanded a lot in recent years so senators merely need to indicate intent to filibuster so that the Senate can still attend to other business such as committee hearings and the whole chamber isn’t locked in by the filibuster.

    Since the entire GOP is bent on obstructing the Democratic party agenda this means in practice that you need to use Cloture to end the filibuster and bring the bill up for a vote. This is why we see so many things crammed into the Budget Reconciliation bill. It’s one of the only bills that can’t be filibustered like that. For pretty much all other things if you don’t have 60 senators willing to vote for Cloture the bill is dead on arrival.










  • My understanding is the majority of detransition occurs due to financial reasons. So basically “I can’t afford my HRT anymore,” or “I can’t afford top surgery right now so I’ll go back to presenting as a woman,” or what have you. Then once the financial issue is gone a lot of those resume transition.

    Full on “I thought I was trans but I’m actually not” detransition seems to be pretty rare. Almost like the current standard of care does a pretty good job at weeding out the people for whom transition isn’t the best treatment option. But to the conservatives who’ve decided this is their new culture war front if literally a single person ever regrets their transition, that’s enough to ban it for everyone.


  • So most of these bills ban pretty much all medical interventions for anyone under 18. Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, surgery, the whole nine. Some go further and are trying to ban it for anyone under 26. You could theoretically still get counseling but you wouldn’t be able to actually do anything.

    And yeah sure, on its face that might seem reasonable. Wouldn’t want impulsive teens rushing into big irreversible medical changes on a whim right? But those safeguards already exist. You can’t just walk into a gender clinic as a 10 year old boy, say the magic words “I’m actually a girl,” and walk out with an appointment for bottom surgery and a prescription for titty skittles. It takes long term counseling, social transition steps like trying out a new name and pronouns, wearing clothing that aligns with your gender, etc.

    In reality that hypothetical 10 year old boy walking into the clinic is going to get extensive counseling. From that counseling he might try out using a different name, she/her pronouns, or dressing in more feminine clothing. She then might get prescribed puberty blockers here to make sure she has time to do all of this and be sure of herself without being forced into male puberty. A few years go by and last statistics I saw something like 2% of people at this point say, “No I think I actually am a boy,” and they go through that slightly delayed puberty. But almost all progress to HRT and later surgery.

    Do some people later truly regret their transitions and try to go back? Of course they do. But realistically, transition already has basically the lowest regret rate of any medical procedure out there. A higher percentage of people regret getting something like a hip or knee replacement surgery than regret transition.

    Puberty already forces your body through permanent changes that can range from easy, to nearly impossible to reverse. That’s why puberty blockers are so important. Imagine if as a young cis boy through some rare medical issue you start going through female puberty. But you’re a boy! You know you are. You’ve got a penis and everything.

    But now you’re growing breasts. Like big enough that you can’t really hide them. Big enough that they get in the way, they’re heavy, and you have to wear a bra otherwise they hurt like hell. The other boys in your grade stare at you or bully you because you’re a boy but you’ve got bigger tits than a lot of the girls in your grade. Soon everyone starts mistaking you for a girl. Guys start hitting on you even though you’re a guy and you’re attracted to girls. A lot of the girls aren’t interested in you because they’re attracted to more… Traditional looking guys. You get told that you should just accept it. After all you look just like a girl. But you’re not a girl damnit. You’re a boy. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Now imagine they tell you they can’t do anything about it until you turn 18… Or maybe 26. Sounds terrible right?



  • Delaying until after the election was the main point yeah. He did get a couple other goodies from it though to my understanding. Presumption of immunity and not being able to admit testimony or communications of the president and his staff being the big ones from what I’m reading.

    But absolutely Remand is the big prize for Trump here. Having the case remanded back to the lower courts all but guarantees that it won’t be concluded before the election. Hopefully it doesn’t entirely gut the other prosecutions as well but I don’t have a lot of faith that it isn’t going to basically kill the other cases.





  • #include <stdio.h>
    
    int main() {
    
    Long long x = 0x7165498511230;
    
    while (x) putchar(32 + ((0xC894A7875116601 >> ((x >>= 4) & 15) * 7) & 0x7F));
    
    return 0;
    }
    

    Might be wrong on a few things here as I haven’t done C++ in a while, but my understanding is this. I’m sure you can guess that this is just a very cheekily written while loop to print the characters of “Hello, World!” but how does it work? So first off, all ASCII characters have an integer value. That 32 there is the value for the space character. So depending on what ((0xC894A7875116601 >> ((x >>= 4) & 15) * 7) & 0x7F)) evaluates down into you’ll get different characters. The value for “H” for example is 72 so that first iteration we know that term somehow evaluated to the number 40 as 72 - 32 = 40.

    So how do we get there? That big number, 0xC894A7875116601 is getting shifted right some number of bits. Let’s start evaluating the parenthesis. (X >>= 4) means set x to be itself after bit shifting it right by 4 bits then whatever that number is we bitwise AND it with 15 or 1111 in binary. This essentially just means each iteration we discard the rightmost digit of 0x7165498511230, then pull out the new right most digit. So the first iteration the ((x >>= 4) & 15) term will evaluate to 3, then 2, then 1, then 1, etc until we run out of digits and the loop ends since effectively we’re just looking for x to be 0.

    Next we take that number and multiply it by 7. Simple enough, now for that first iteration we have 21. So we shift that 0xC894A7875116601 right 21 bits, then bitwise AND that against 0x7F or 0111 1111 in binary. Just like the last time this means we’re just pulling out the last 7 bits of whatever that ends up being. Meaning our final value for that expression is gonna be some number between 0 and 127 that is finally added to 32 to tell us our character to print.

    There are only 10 unique characters in “Hello, World!” So they just assigned each one a digit 0-9, making 0x7165498511230 essentially “0xdlroW ,olleH!” The first assignment happens before the first read, and the loop has a final iteration with x = 0 before it terminates. Which is how the “!” gets from one end to the other. So they took the decimal values for all those ASCII characters, subtracted 32 then smushed them all together in 7 bit chunks to make 0xC894A7875116601 the space is kinda hidden in the encoding since it was assigned 9 putting it right at the end which with the expression being 32 + stuff makes it 0 and there’s an infinitely assumed parade of 0s to the left of the C.