gattsuru
16hr ago
For tile, specifically, you'll usually see some waterproof membrane or backing board, leveled with grout of self-leveling concrete, then using thinset to keep the tile attached, and the finally grout to interfere the gaps.
I don't think I've ever seen that used for carpet, hardwood, or linoleum, and at least in my neck of the woods tile is rare outside of restrooms and kitchens. Both my current house, last rental, and several of the other houses I'd looked at when in the market had joisted floors, though I was specifically looking for houses with a basement.
That's definitely part of it; even for the specific question of bench trials brought all the way to final judgment, there's a lot of state courts (and even some state appeals courts!) that just don't do opinions for all but the most noteworthy matters.
I think some of the confusion is more about what counts as an 'order'. For laypeople, we tend to think of judicial orders as serious decisions: even if we recognize the difference between a final appealable order and something like a motion to stay, the latter's about as far down the line as we really put in the same bin.
But there's a lot of other things that are 'orders' in the sense that the court will fuck you over if you don't obey it, but not 'orders' in the sense of any serious legal decision. At the lowest level, there's a lot of stuff that's just 'we're going to next meet at X date' or 'parties should send me Y paper of Z pages on A, B, and C' subjects, withdrawal or substitution or an attorney, extension of time, yada yada. These are orders, technically, but they're just standard process stuff rather than serious evaluation of legal policy. In the middle, there's things like orders on motions pro hac vice, or discovery orders, or even demands to prepare around certain topics. These are 'decisions', but they're decisions that have a fairly standard answer, or where the logic underlying them is self-explanatory in the order.
At the higher end, there's stuff that could plausibly be serious and sometimes even final orders if granted, but basically never are and don't really need serious introspection to get there: this entry is an order on motion for judgment on the pleadings, and that'd be worth a long digression if it were actually granting judgement, but it's not, and it's very rare for that sort of order to exist. Recognizing a jury verdict is technically an order, and there's some ability for judges to issue things like judgment notwithstanding verdict, but it's not something you have to explain most of the time. Sometimes this stuff gets an opinion, and sometimes it doesn't, even when it's a final order.
By contrast, it'd be a little weird to see a final judgement for a federal case (where not settled, defaulted, consent judgements, yada), without an accompanying opinion explaining the law in detail. It probably happens, though the examples I can find tend to be civil forfeiture cases that are closer to default than I'd consider.
The messy bit is where, exactly, this order falls. Grants of writ of habeas corpus are kinda appealable orders, depending on situation, but they're not exactly the 'everybody's presented their full argument and had their day in court', either. I'd expect to see at least some attempt at a serious explanation for a high-profile case, but I can't swear every single one has been treated seriously by the courts, either.
((On the gripping hand, neither Grok nor Claude could find an example of a federal grant of the writ of habeas corpus without an accompanying opinion. Which doesn't mean much!)
gattsuru
1d ago
Necessary starting caveat: Unikowsky is an absolute putz when it comes to anything Trump-related, and his analysis should be recognized as on the "ought" side of any is-ought divide, and, more damningly, an "ought" that will not apply to any case where he doesn't like the victim. That doesn't completely destroy his analysis about AI effectiveness, but it does undermine how and what he's evaluating.
For more specific problems:
- Hallucinations happen. Newer models are better about avoiding them, but they're still prone to it. This is critical because, whether it's a hallucinated citation, incorrectly summarizing the contents of a citation, or hallucinating facts or claims by parties in the case, it's a central example of sanctionable behavior.
- Even large-context models struggle with the amount of information in a lawsuit, and most models aren't large-context (and many APIs will obfuscate when you're getting downgraded).
- Worse, they get loopy under certain nonobvious situations: going toward the last 20% of a context size, repeating a word too often during a prompt, so on.
- It can be very hard to get the LLM to understand core constraints for a specific environment. Citing out-of-circuit cases as if they were binding, not checking if a case was overruled or constrained to its own four corners, even basic formatting stuff can be a problem, here.
- Most LLMs, unless very carefully prompted, are people-pleasers. They'll quite happily give you the answer you want, even if you aren't explicitly saying what you want, even when this means disregarding well-known counterexamples
There's a defense that people, even lawyers or judges, make many of these same mistakes, and that's true. It's still a problem and a limitation.
AI can be a useful tool, but it's a tool.
gattsuru
1d ago
January 27th. It turns out a judge can read and write copy someone's homework without needing a month, sometimes.
The Court therefore enjoins Defendants the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, its Director, and the Attorney General of the United States, as well as their officers, agents, servants, employees, and all persons in active concert with them and who have actual notice of this Judgment from enforcing within the jurisdictional boundaries of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (i.e., Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), the provisions referenced in paragraph 2 against the Plaintiffs to this action or anyone who is a member of one or more of the Plaintiffs as of the date of entry of this judgment.
This doesn't require any organization hand over their membership lists for a federal government group that hates them, but more critically, it also applies to all of the plaintiffs, not just the specific combination of buyers and sellers that the original version did that made it completely pointless. Now, if/when a Democratic administration wants to say fuck it and bring these enforcements again, there will be genuine risk that the seller is covered by an actual injunction. And it didn't even take a universal injunction to do it.
Just three days short of a year.
gattsuru
2d ago
The shop owner's a little too overtly villainous -- you do get real-world management shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly, yet that's almost all this guy does -- but having the other gobs be tempted by capitalism not because of lingering evil but because it seems like a reasonable approach helps temper it, as does other goblins only being in the coop for the minimum. There's more that could be explored, and it's hard to tell where the gaps are left undone for future comic material, which because the author isn't aware of them (or wouldn't run into them, just as Americans don't have to care about VAT-likes), and which because the author doesn't have a good grip or counter on them.
Still, nice to see someone trying to steelman their own positions, especially given the tendency of Marxists to be pretty shallow about it. I'd rather read well-executed works, even and maybe especially where I disagree.
As Eetan says, WoW popularized the specific shape of goblins as short green humans with a tendency toward capitalism and tinkering. There's a few other examples of hot goblins before then, but Blizzard very much standardized a form.
Some of it's just that spending enough time with an avatar in these sort of games makes it hard to avoid empathizing with that avatar, in some way. But while that worked out for the Draenai (and Charr and Asura from GW2, and whatever's hot in Overwatch), it's not like the WoW gnomes or dwarves took off, and even Tauren/whatever-the-fox-people are pretty marginal.
In terms of how and why that hits, it's similar to most other light forms of monsterfuckery, despite how much of an asterisk as it seems like 'monster' needs here. People like a characteristic. They know, and often don't like, the actual form of people who heavily focus around that characteristic. Doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter whether that characteristic actually attracts bad things or if it's just a side effect from pulling around the tail edges of a bell curve.
That's most obvious with kink, and why a lot of monsters like dryders or the entire ouvre of Interspecies Reviewers. Exhibitionists aren't just people who like being seen naked, bondage tops don't just like tying people up (and subs don't just like getting tied up), every kink has a stereotype and that stereotype's usually not wrong. But it also applies to hobbies, habits, modes of social interaction, yada yada. People around them will respond in kind.
A monster can be normal, whatever they do.
Why would male MMO players want a normal (... if busty) woman who happens to be a nerd, rather than a nerd that happens to be a woman?
((Heavier forms of monsterfuckery tend to get into specific sensations or physical actions that aren't possible or safe with humans. Goblins have a little bit of that with the size difference, but afaict it's usually not a theme.))
gattsuru
2d ago
He's on video specifically questioning church staff, being asked to leave if he's not there to worship, and then going on to 'interview' churchgoers for another nine minutes, starting minute 52 of the stream. Combined with intentionally entering the church 'when the moment is right', it's extremely implausible that did not intentionally interrupt service, and continue to do so after staff asked him to leave.
gattsuru
3d ago
((It's not clear that the sticker-price is something being seriously argued, rather than an opening-bid. It's a... very aggressive argument, and being independent from actual damages that would normally make it more desirable probably makes it less interesting as a final action for Trump, who definitely puts "I was right" as a high value.))
Courts do independently bring in external lawyers to support a legal brief, though the actual legal (and financial!) authorization to do so is very unclear. I'd expect that at a minimum.
Courts have an independent duty to consider standing, and defendants (and plaintiffs) can't wave that, even if they wanted. Only would clearly help with overtly pretextual lawsuits, though, which isn't really the case, here. There's an adversity doctrine argument against collusive lawsuits, but it's an incredible reach to apply it here.
(Defendants can waive statute of limitations concerns in some cases)
Settlements have to be evaluated by the courts to be 'real' settlements. That's historically been held more in theory than in practice, given the cy pres abuse back in the Obama era, but it could and likely would be brought here. On the gripping hand, you don't need a 'real' settlement to have a court case go away, or a lot of money to change hands.
In theory, anyone with an IRS balance is being harmed by a massive giveaway, but courts have universally rejected taxpayer standing, and with good reason. The House, with the power of the purse, does have legislative standing in a lot of cases and might have it in face of a large giveaway -- but individual legislators might not, and there's a lot of messiness about how they could argue about the facts. And, ultimately, there's a 'you and who's army' problem.
On the gripping hand, the courts might well just move so slowly that someone else is the President by the time it gets anywhere.
gattsuru
3d ago
It's very hard to turn it off for any one specific thing, extremely prone to reverting, and sometimes just twigs itself into an error state for no perceivable reason. GPO helps, but it surprising what's missing. The AI stuff is getting the most flak, but it's been a problem dating back years before Attention Is All You Need with OneDrive and with the Office365 world.
There's a few arguments in favor of these technologies. I hate OneDrive, but I've also spent an hour this morning recovering data for an employee that didn't realize his 'backup' thumb drive had an expiry date, and forcing online backups may well be the only way for normies to have backups. Natural language text and image search is an incredibly compelling use case for LLMs; the new OCR is incredible compared to what's available five years ago; Office365, as bad as its version control and collaboration is, still works better than non-techies shipping files around by e-mail and getting into version control hell.
But Microsoft seems hellbent on simultaneously making them impossible to opt-out of and incredibly shitty to use in any way but the default, or to opt-out for specific situations. WhiningCoil's use case is one of the most obvious problems -- you really don't want to mix a framework upgrade and a refactor, and an LLM's going to do that far more often than a simple script would -- but it's everywhere now. And it's not like there's any serious business case for most of it: Microsoft isn't getting any serious amount of cash from people using Edge.
gattsuru
3d ago
I think that there is an extremely high level of agreement on the left that Kirk's death was both bad in its impact on the world and unjustified based on Kirk's actions.
This very much doesn't match my experience. The most visible and highest-level politicians on the left spoke against it, mostly. The rank and file were revolting, and that includes people in real life in red states, and some close enough to me that I'd worked with them on volunteer projects or let them live in my house.
gattsuru
3d ago
Hm. I still think you two are talking past each other, but if you're both talking past each other, I owe you a mea culpa here.
gattsuru
4d ago
I'm pretty rough on carry bags, but I don't hurl it like a discus, either. Haven't had any damage to my laptop yet... but it's one of the last good ThinkPad models. The only real padding is more intended as reinforcement material, so I don't think it's enough I'd be comfortable using the thing to carry a laptop when bicycling or something where a completely uncontrolled impact is plausible, and I don't think any of the other variants are much better there. The best I've seen from them is the B-15 Pilot variant, and it's still only fairly thin 'leather' padding with some reinforcement.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any good inexpensive ones that are much better.
gattsuru
4d ago
Both of the pen-and-paper type and the small laptop definitions. Although the pen-and-paper side is a little aspirational: I tend to end up giving up the paper notepads nearly as often as people ‘borrow’ usb chargers permanently.
gattsuru
5d ago
Can you provide any examples of European sympathy when Thierry Breton decided to teabag Americans?
gattsuru
5d ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but federal immigration statutes require serious offenders to serve their terms here in full for local offenses before they can be subject to deportation. ICE can't just legally take some guy who's just been convicted of murder or rape and deport him.
It's 8 USC 1231(a)4.
If every one was going to languish in prison eternally, though... well, someone would complain about wasted tax dollars, but it wouldn't get that much of the Red Tribe's dander up. The problem's that a far greater number end up revolving door inmates.
What sanctuary cities do, if what I've just researched is correct, is not cooperate with ICE detainers, which are requests to hold somebody up to 48 hours after their release once they've served their sentence.
Sometimes. Most sanctuary cities/states will comply with ICE detainers for "serious felons" being released from prison, specifically, though the dividing line there gets messy since many sanctuary cities also have standing policies by their prosecutors to "consider the avoidance of adverse immigration consequences as a factor in reaching a resolution". They usually won't for those completing a jail or noncustodial sentence, and will almost never do so where they've arrested an illegal immigrant and choose to not bring charges. Many will also refuse to notify the feds on finding undocumented immigrants and some specifically prohibit releasing immigration-related information: this is probably illegal where enforced by law, but it still happens.
gattsuru
5d ago
I do not think The_Nybbler was referring to "their strongest form."
... are you using "strongest" here to describe most extreme, or most defensible? Because I'm talking about the former.
PmMeClassicMemes does not seem to be saying "immigration laws should not be enforced" (in fact he says the opposite), and I don't know of anyone other than the most radical leftists who'd agree that literally no one, not even a convicted felon, should be deported ever.
That's nice, and all, but it's a formulation literally only you have ever said, here, and it completely swallows the difference between Nybbler and PmMeClassicMemes' position since both eVerify and direct deportation are immigration laws (hell, even Biden-esque operations are technically 'enforcing' the law, just not in any serious way). If we go back to Nybbler's actual claim, that people believe "going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten", we see that PmMeClassicMemes clearly does not want immigration law used against actual illegal immigrants, even illegal immigrants with previous criminal histories. Nor is that specific to PmMeClassicMemes, as we can see by the regular refusal by sanctuary jurisdictions to refuse to honor immigration detainers at jails, or the unending panics over Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Yes, you can imagine the actual enforcement that might be accepted or acceptable to you. But you're the one that had to bring up convicted felons. PmMeClassicMemes hasn't even used the term "convicted" or "felon" in the last month; no example brought here acts as a case where Go 100% Deportation. Maybe he agrees with you, maybe he sets the line a little higher (I don't particularly care if someone sold bootleg cassettes, for example) or a little lower, whatever.
But Nybbler's statement wasn't "literally no deportation against anyone, ever, in any situation, no matter the case". He said "going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten". That's not the same thing.
The_Nybbler seems to be merely taking a shit, as he usually does, on people who have moderate-to-strong opposition to the maximal position.
Perhaps, but coincidentally he's also pointing out that people claim that eVerify policies would be just, that deporting immigrants is not, and they happen to come from immigration maximalists, and they're not very credible about that first point.
We happen to have an immigration maximalist in this thread making these specific arguments.
You're calling it a strawman.
gattsuru
6d ago
I think nuance could exist in objections similar to the ones provided: a post that considered things like how sanctuary city policies have actually interacted with enforcement of deportation orders rather than The One Time Someone Got Caught, or whether immigration lawyers might lie in pleadings or asylum filings. I don't think it was shown, here, or that it'd be consistent with PmMeClassicMemes' other recent public positions.
There's nothing wrong with holding those positions. There's nothing illegitimate with arguing them! But they exist, in their strongest form; they are not strawmen.
gattsuru
6d ago
I'm really happy with this soldering iron. Yes, I also have a standard weller rework station for serious work (which cost nearly three times used what this did new), but 95% of the stuff I do it's completely sufficient, the thing's easily luggable, I've ended up needing to solder in the field more often than I'd like to admit, and it's just an absolute joy to work with. There's still occasional situations where everything's so tightly spaced that I needed to haul out the old benzomatics, so I wouldn't complain if someone manufactured a version with a built-in battery, but being able to switch from wall power to a cheap usb battery pack and back is way more convenient most of the time.
These toolkits. They're not good -- the magnet inside the driver is held in by hope and prayer, the spadgers are about as strong as toothpicks, and the suction cup is aspirational -- but they cover pretty much any small electronics situation you're going to run into, and when someone inevitably loses the 5.5mm or the tweezers, it's just not that big a deal.
A good, quality, canvas satchel ('messenger bag') or hard-shell briefcase. Daily usage sorta thing, and extremely high-variance: I've seen mediocre bags in the 300+USD range, and 'classy' ones can get ridiculous (and I don't trust real leather to survive what I put mine through), but the low-end is crap that falls apart into plastic flakes in months if not weeks. And then there's also surprisingly good options in the 40-80 USD space. The ones I've been happiest with so far are Rothcos. They're not perfect. As you'd expect from a Chinese clone brand, there's some awkward design decisions, and I'd recommend hitting the shoulder straps with some reinforcement stitching. But compared to how floppy anything cheaper and canvas gets, or how quickly anything pleather degrades, it's a great sweet spot.
gattsuru
6d ago
Multiple honest posters here have claimed that the lack of E-Verify mandate means that everything else is unserious and that failure to do so is why "many conservatives who actually care about immigration are pissed at Trump".
For the specific combination that employer mandates are the only reasonable approach and that going after illegal immigrants is cruel :
...
how and why do they have the time to go get this guy who appears to be causing no issues, other than being illegal? I understand that in the minds of many, that is sufficient, and that anyone who's illegal should be deported - ok, but what is pursuing that goal worth? Is it worth sending agents of the state to chase people down? T
...
No - they're simply sweeping up whomever they can find, arresting people with valid paperwork, who entered lawfully, on the basis that the government has decided it wants to re-think prior decisions. This policy is illegal, cruel, arbitrary, and capricious. This is what ICE is doing in Minnesota - illegally kidnapping lawful migrants. If this alone is not worth taking to the streets to protest, what is?
gattsuru
6d ago
gattsuru
7d ago
I'll caveat that, in addition to various legal penumbras and interpretations that might make a frictionless-cow-spherical-plane model of these laws complicated to bring to bear, there's a more direct issue where the law is enforced by a system, and the system does not want to accept charges even where the crime was clear and documented.
gattsuru
7d ago
It's far from perfect, but the big explosions in FFXIV I've seen are things like 'guild relationship problems' or 'rando loots the free company chest's gil stores', rather than the more standards Barrens chat or outright griefing. Even gameplay-focused pain points like someone pulling early on an S-rank or trying to sneak a newbie into an 'experienced' party aren't anywhere near as common as you'd expect compared to WoW, and casual play it's outright expected and player-enforced for people to be patient with 'suboptimal' play.
That said, I'm not sure how much in a result of the teaching -- though the number of times Bartle-style player archetypes show up in minor NPCs is pretty noteworthy -- so much as selection effects, Pavlov, and arguably Proteus Effect. If you put hundreds of hours into getting through the main story quest to current-game content (dozens of which are cutscenes!), you're going to be the type of person that wants to do that sort of gameplay. And for quite some time, that was really the only option. Even now, with paid level boosts and story skips, it's a non-trivial investment per character.
I'd also add that there are morals and explicit morals beyond the social ones. I don't think anyone could play GTNH, Factorio, Satisfactory, or even The Witness without seeing problems in the world as things to be solved, and it's as close to explicit as any Jonathon Blow moral could be with The Witness's true ending.
gattsuru
8d ago
One of the underlying problems reflect a large-scale normalization of 'de-arrest' tactics, where protesters work to free arrestees or prevent police from detaining them. It started being used seriously in 2020, but in those contexts it was largely recognized as a legally risky maneuver only really available when protesters vastly outnumbered police. The recent protests have mainstreamed it thanks to political advocates claiming (afaict, wrongly) that ICE has no arrest powers involving any action by a US citizen, and local police being actively instructed to not support ICE in any way and that being interpreted (afaict, not wrongly) as permitting widespread violations of local laws so long as ICE are the targets.
So you get a lot of people doing things that look like directly impeding federal law at best, and more often look extremely dangerous, and convinced that they're totally in the free and clear.
Does this also come with an explanation why no one knows the names Malinowski or Finicum or Shaver? Why there was a front page post on Reddit yesterday comparing Rittenhouse?
I’m reserving judgement until we have more information in this case, with my gut leaning lightly toward bad shoot (though not necessarily criminally bad), but whether a shoot is bad or not, or committed by a state agent or not, does not control whether it is a source of outrage.
There's been recent, massive, and overwhelming change to see conceding any genuine motivation for the political enemy as not merely misguided or wrong, but active and malicious betrayal. The Blue Tribe's further down that slope, but the Red Tribe isn't exactly slow at it, either.
((for an extreme example, I'm trying to write up the Varian Fox verdict, and it's a mess because the only people covering it are the ones that are absolutely uninterested in the pro-trans viewpoint, while the pro-trans people are largely unaware it happened.))
I don't know the cause. It's tempting to point at the growth of 'animus' as a Kennedy-school legal theory, or social media filtering, or increased polarization, or the takeover of HR-focused careers, or just external pressures making being the knee in search of careerism.
But it's bad, and it's getting worse, rapidly. There's always been a little on the edges, where knowing enough about guns set you outside of the acceptable discussion window with gun control advocates, even when that knowledge was necessary to make the very laws gun control advocates wanted. Now, it's hard to think of a culture war fight were that isn't the norm.
Perhaps worse, even for those of us autistic enough to be skeptical and analytic, where do you think the information's going to come from? A Blue Triber that goes looking up some Red Tribe values, you're going to be lucky if the best you find just looks like an overt scam site; more likely you'll get to something like thefp or fox news that 'everyone knows' isn't even a good model of what Red Tribers think, and completely disconnected from reality. And Red Tribers going to wikipedia can honestly say the same thing. What's left? Talk to your Other Tribe friends?
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