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Cake day: September 14th, 2024

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  • pulled right from the fuckin court documents

    The “court documents” are filings by the parties. You’re summarizing litigation documents filed by Twitter, in a motion to dismiss, which is a phase of litigation before either side comes forward with any evidence.

    The court hasn’t ruled on anything, so you’re just repeating statements that one side has claimed. I’m pointing out that the other side is claiming the opposite.

    The suing company isn’t going off anything but fucking assumptions.

    They’re not required to come forward with evidence (and litigation procedure doesn’t even give them much of an opportunity to come forward with evidence at this stage). What they have come forward with is literally sealed by the court, so unless you’re leaking confidential court documents you don’t have any idea of what they’re claiming. Take a look at the docket.

    If you’re going to be aggressive in this comment section, at least learn the very basics of the thing you’re being aggressive about. It’s clear you don’t know the basics of this type of litigation, so it might help if you show some intellectual humility, take a step back, and let the knowledgeable people actually weigh in, to be able to evaluate the publicly filed documents in an informed way. Whatever it is you’re doing instead, looks pretty bad.



  • exasperation@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzLiterally Nineteen Eighty-Four
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    20 days ago

    recipes are basically an engineering text

    I would love to see more systematic recipe formats.

    Around 15-20 years ago there was a website called “Cooking for Engineers” that used a table format for recipes that was pretty clever, and a very useful diagram for how to visualize the steps (at least for someone like me). I don’t think he ever updated the site to be mobile friendly but you can see it here:

    Cheesecake
    Dirty Rice

    He describes the recipe in a descriptive way, but down at the bottom it lists ingredients and how they go together in a chart that shows what amounts to use, what ingredients go into a particular step, what that step is, and how the product of that step feeds into the next step.



  • exasperation@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzHmmmm
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    23 days ago

    The law falls back to a bunch of hidden rules if the language isn’t explicit.

    “No vehicles in the park” is a simple rule, but then poses problems when you have to ask whether that includes baby strollers, regular bicycles, or electric assist bicycles, whether there’s an exception for ambulances in an emergency, etc.

    Somewhat famously, there was a case a decade or so ago where someone was prosecuted under Sarbanes Oxley’s obstruction of justice provisions, passed to criminalize Enron-like accounting coverups. The guy was convicted for tossing undersized fish overboard to avoid prosecution for violating fish and wildlife rules. The statute made it a crime for anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. So the Supreme Court had to figure out whether a fish is a “tangible object” in the meaning of the law, when it is clearly a “tangible object” within the normal meaning of the term, but not the type of object that stores records, as everything else described in the criminal statute.

    So that just means, in the end, simplicity of language can betray complexity of meaning underneath. Lawyers tend to prefer to make things clear up front so that there’s no uncertainty later on, and that just leads to unreasonably complicated language.



  • exasperation@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzHmmmm
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    23 days ago

    You don’t need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.

    For lawyers, it’s the opposite, actually. Lawyers are overly cautious and choose to explicitly define terms themselves, all the time. If they can reference a definition already in a specific law, great. But they’ll go ahead and explicitly make that link, instead of relying on the reader to assume they know which law to look up.

    So any serious contract tends to use pages and pages of definitions at the beginning.

    Imagine programmers being reluctant to use other people’s libraries, but using the same function and variable names with slightly different actual meanings/purposes depending on the program. That’s what legal drafting is like.


  • exasperation@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzHorrors We've Unleashed
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    25 days ago

    Probably. But it’s also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.

    One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.

    For humans, it’s estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.

    But that’s the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?

    And then there’s unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.

    So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don’t sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.




  • We shall name it of course after our beloved queen.

    Yes, of course. Sorry.

    Let it pass and hail to this glorious land, Virginia!

    Er…What? Who’s Virginia?

    The Queen of England, you dog!

    Oh, right. Except…I don’t know how to put this. She’s not called Virginia, but Elizabeth.

    I’m well aware of that, but she is, I trust you will agree, a virgin.

    Er… Yeah, as far as I know. I mean, I’m sure she is.

    But do we want to name a country after that fact?

    Source