Nah his grandma used an IUD. I lost a lot of uncles that way

or less likely than one-in-a-million

I dunno, they all look pretty angry already

You’re welcome, it was a very valid question

Let’s say I’m writing a computer game, which features a robot holding a gun. I have a list of vectors representing the 3D model of the gun, but how do I know where to draw those points on screen? To transform the gun model to screen coordinates I just need to do this simple process:

1. scale the gun model so it’s the right size for the game
2. rotate and translate it so it will be in the same coordinate space as the robot’s hand, where the wrist joint is at (0,0,0)
3. rotate again to reflect the current angle of the wrist, now it aligns with the forearm
4. translate by forearm length so the elbow joint is at (0,0,0)
5. rotate again to reflect elbow angle, now it aligns with upper arm
6. translate by upper arm length so the shoulder joint is at (0,0,0)
7. rotate again to reflect shoulder angle, now it aligns with body
8. translate by shoulder position so body center of rotation is at (0,0,0)
9. OK let’s just assume we’re defining body position directly, so we’ll apply another rotation and translation to reflect the robot’s position, now our coordinates are in “game space”
10. of course the “camera” through which we view the action might be moving as well, so we’ll need another rotation and translation so transform the coordinates into “camera space”
11. we need to apply 3D perspective to get the on-screen coordinates. If the z axis of camera space were in the direction we are looking, with 0 at the view point, you could get x and y screen coordinates by dividing camera space coordinates by z, and scaling the result as needed to fit the screen

Oh dear, that wasn’t so simple. Are we going to do this for every vector in the gun model? Well, as it turns out, the first 10 steps are all linear transformations that can be represented by a matrix. And we can encapsulate the entire process by multiplying those matrices together, so instead of 10 operations, we can combine it into one, a single matrix which will take us all the way from the gun model to a position in camera space. So we just need to pass the graphics card some instructions to tell it what to do, plus the list of vectors for the gun model, plus the combined matrix for transforming them.

There’s many other cool things to do with matrices in graphics programming but that’s a starting point.

A little at a time. We need to get comfortable doing this to cockroaches before we can start large scale testing on humans

Another quick fix is to set up a “Note to Self” group in Signal (make a group with 2 people then remove the other member). Nice tidy way to move things around, with a history of things you moved earlier

That’s hilarious. I do hope it gets evaluated at run time. That way you could have a program that works most of the time but if some rare circumstance caused it to execute commands in a sequence where the correct level of politeness was not maintained it would get the hump and crash

For me I found casual or occasional smoking could too easily become “just one more”. I hated the fact that it had a grip over me but I needed a more definitive reason to quit. What worked for me was when my sister told me she was going to have a baby. I didn’t want that kid to have smoking adults in her life. Which meant I had to quit, and hopefully that would help my sister to quit as well. I don’t know if my actions made any difference but she did quit. Doing it for a kid was a powerful motivator for me. When she gave me the news, I put down the phone, tossed my remaining cigarettes in the trash and left it at that. Not even one last one. I knew I had the motivation I was waiting for and that was the end of it.

I guess everybody has their own way that works for them and you just need to find what that is.

My PC had been running like shit for a while and I was already weighing up options for replacing it, when I got the popup message from MS about Windows 10 expiring, and how my only option was to dump the PC. So I installed Linux out of pure spite. Runs like a dream now. Thanks Microsoft!

“I want another chance!”

My 5 year old kid likes to say this, when I’ve finally imposed some consequences for doing something she shouldn’t be doing after she’s ignored my repeated requests to stop doing it. She usually says it while still doing the thing that caused the issue in the first place.

Confession: I actually watched the ESC this year despite my moral qualms. Sorry.

But it really struck me how fake it has become. The “performances” in the final were just recordings of the ones shown in the qualifying rounds (probably weren’t even live then). Words said by performers at the end of the song were chopped off. At the end when they showed clips of the performances with the performers in the “green room” reacting to them, pretty sure these were the same shots they used in the qualifying rounds. No continuous shots connecting the presenters to the performances. Every element of the show compartmentalized and combined using stock shots to fill in the gaps. Doesn’t even resemble a live show. I wonder how much of this is required to ensure that nobody says anything about Israel, or shows or wears any unauthorised symbols, and that any undesired crowd noise can be edited (sounded like that happened when Israel phone vote was announced). Fucking weird.

Of course the ludicrously high phone vote for Israel was expected. But what is the deal with Switzerland’s entry getting zero phone votes? That was really strange. Maybe the organizers agreed to donate all Switzerland’s phone votes to Israel.

Anyway, the whole thing is so fake and fucked up, I won’t be watching again. I feel sorry for the performers and the countries who try to contribute something good, it’s just wasted on Eurovision.

That’s 65% more bullet per bullet!

Or kill just half of them and then, as a compromise, only kill half of the ones who are left (repeat until total remaining Palestinians is less than 1)

Also, web pages that keep trying to force you to use the app if you access them on a smartphone, but then the app only has half the functionality of the web page

Is it necessary though? Microsoft have already been campaigning pretty hard to get people to switch to Linux. Telling people their perfectly good PCs won’t work anymore because the operating system is expiring, and they can’t even “upgrade” to Windows 11 is a pretty powerful message.

Any answer is correct as long as you don’t pick it at random. I’d choose (a) because I’m too lazy to read the other options

Yeah option b should definitely be 0% for added fuckery

Extroverted showy types are also not showing you who they are underneath.

It’s great if you want to do a kids party invitation or something like that