Keeping things on the down-low is simply the most pragmatic choice either way, for the foreseeable future. Yet I do not want him to have to live a lie.
One that the may not be obvious to you, or to even him yet, is that coming out is a process, and one that never ends, and for a wide variety of people, it's going to be more painful to be 'honest' everywhere than just being themselves. Coming out to you is a step, coming out to your mom if he does is another step. Even if you broadcast it from a megaphone while doing the full Folsome Street Fair on main street, there will still be people the next day you have to decide whether you need or want to come out to.
The flip side is that it's not a process that's fully under your own control. My brother got outed to our paternal grandmother by Facebook. I had to disclose to my employer once. The more you choose to do it, the less it can sneak up on you.
But that doesn't mean it's always better to be in control either.
Indian gay men are - like gay men anywhere - by my brother's account and my own observations as a regular at a gay pub in Scotland (the people are friendly, the drinks are cheap, and I have a good essay/attempt at ethnography up about it), primarily not looking for that.
I'll caveat that there's a reverse of the lemon problem, here. The people who are always down to fuck are always out on the market, and the people who want a long-term closed relationship aren't on grindr and aren't spending as much time at gay bars. There's places the two spheres meet, but especially given the various preferences and interests floating around, it's not necessarily obvious when you're crossing the boundaries.
There's also some messiness where a number of gay men self-identify as sluts but may not actually have casual sex or even want that high a body count. Sometimes that's because there's sluts-in-every-other-sense, and sometimes it's because they like the identity but don't actually have the drive. Hell, there's even people who love the idea of casual sex, but only with people they know so well and in such limited situations that it's basically just a small-case polyamory (or, hilariously, monogamy-with-named-sex-toys). 'Sapiosexual' is a really obnoxious self-identifier, but it is pointing toward and around a concept with some meaning, just corrupted as a signifier by the mess of people who kinda abuse it.
(I'm trying to write up something more serious for urquan on this, but I need to go into more detail for his use case.)
That may not be the most actionable information -- 'oh boy, tons of eligible bachelors that absolutely wouldn't give you a second glance' kinda sucks as a recognition point -- but I've... found it helpful to know.
I've made gay jokes at his expense, in the past, not knowing. He says he never minded and wants me to act exactly the way I always have, and I've agreed to this, and I'm still a little sorry. He's told me not to be. I think both of these positions can coexist without one of them needing to win.
I'll second other people saying that, especially if they were meant in good spirits, I'd rather people make jokes rather than walk on eggshells. It is kinda funny! It is something that's not really ever going to make 'sense' at a deep level to you! Just throw some self-deprecatory signs hitting your team too, accept a few jokes going your way, and it's how family should treat each other.
((Tbh, the most obnoxious stuff I encountered was were there wasn't any humor intended. There's still a very uncomfortable bit that, no matter how much my father is happy about my brother and his husband now, we'll both remember when he told us, trying to be nice and trying to be paternal, that he didn't care whether we brought home a white girl or a black girl or a hispanic girl, so long as we brought home a girl. The Saturday Night Live jokes were just funny.))
He is too ethical to trick even an eager straight woman into marrying him for the sake of cover, and he wants to be close to his real partner, whoever that turns out to be. He is also less than keen on permanently moving abroad, at least for anything longer than a residency. He wants children, biologically his, and I want this for him too.
That's... a difficult situation, and if it helps, give him my sympathies as someone who's had to make decisions around (lighter) variants of the same problems. A lot of the answers are going to depend both on what he's willing to do, what risk (and what kinds of risks!) he's willing to accept, and how much his biology is going to fight with him. I'll avoid repeating the obvious 'try to have it all' stuff or diving into useless esoteric options (eg: just find a trans guy who wants to get knocked up who cares whether that'd even work for him), but a few unintuitive options:
There are women who you don't have to trick. For a fujoshi or a woman with a very low sex drive, a closed-relationship-focused gay guy can be an even more-desirable-than-normal catch. Sometimes that's a lavender marriage (yes, there are lesbian fujoshi), but sometimes it's just what works for people. Doesn't even have to be a lie; you can honestly say that you married for the sake of kids, but you're great friends: then people who need to know can know and those who don't can decide what they want to believe. This has some good options on having biological children, if some that might make for a few uncomfortable discussions and maybe a bit of a boner-killer moment. There's levels of gay where the flesh might be unwilling but there's no mental objection (or even fingers that might be willing to put in the hard work when required), and on the other side, my brother turned down a threesome he really wanted because the third's girlfriend wanted in the room fully clothed. If your brother's toward the latter end, this probably won't work well even if the woman in questions swears she's lesbian or asexual. On the upside, if you don't particularly care about a woman's appearance, you get to select for personality, and there's a lot of diamonds in the rough.
Ultimately, it's still a polyamorous relationship in the literal sense, if one where there third never gets dicked. It's also putting a massive amount of trust in a third party that you can't love and might grow to love you or need something more from someone, and to be blunt, while having little or no leverage over them. Optimistically, I know a few people who took this path and didn't divorce until after the kids graduated, and one who did and didn't divorce at all. You get a good idea of how much lust and love keeps most married couples from driving each other nuts once you see someone taking this approach. Even if that doesn't happens, it's a secret that has to last decades, and that's a lot of pressure, and I can't speak as to how the kids took it. I also don't know how prevalent fujoshi are in India, nevermind how he'd find one he likes well enough to spend decades with.
Being a unicorn isn't that bad, if you've got the right mindset. Chances are pretty good this makes biological children harder (barring finding a bi guy who likes the idea paternity roulette, tbf a surprisingly common kink) even if the couple in question wants kids, but if they do, you get to be the friendly uncle who's always around while skipping a lot of the bad parts of parenting like having to figure out discipline. There's jealousy in not being someone's one-and-only, but if you absolutely have to make a compromise on that, it can be both easier (they're not direct competition!) or harder (they can do something I can't, they're going to steal him!) where the one exception is a different gender. It's easier to be closeted, like this -- you'd be surprised how many older folk assume you're pining over the wife! -- but it's also even harder to come out.
There are risks, here, even with the compromises: being pumped-(and-pumped-and-pumped)-and-dumped does happen to gay unicorns as with straight women unicorns, like the fujoshi there's a risk of jealousy from the other partner and now it's fucking-polyamory, and this can get into weird legal situations even inside the United States or UK. I wouldn't even bring this up while he's with his current boyfriend, but if he's staying with him even as said boyfriend starts talking more and more as they start settling down, it's worth spelling out that this is a choice, even if he thinks he's not making any choice yet. And it is a survivable one, if not a perfect one.
Long-distance relationships can be both easier and harder than you'd expect. Having a partner that only exists through a VOIP call 300+ days a year sucks when you need a human touch, don't get me wrong, and I know more than one LDR that got really rough when the two long-time lovebirds found that they were only sexually compatible at a keyboard. You have a lot more space to select from, though, and a lot more people trying this stuff care about longer-term relationships to begin with. It's also easier to stay closeted (at least in meatspace), and a lot more compatible with a number of home obligations. On the gripping hand, though, this can turn into a massive psychological pressure such it feels like immigration to the LDR's homeland or emigration of the LDR Will Fix Everything, and that's both not true and can lead to bad decision-making with regret.
Also doesn't help with the biological child focus.
If anyone has practical advice rather than reassurance/validation, I'd be glad to have it. I'm not looking for confirmation that I'm a good person for loving my brother without conditions, which I do not consider an achievement. I want to know if there's something useful I can actually do.
Be a good sounding board. Especially if he doesn't have many meatspace gay friends separate from his boyfriend, it's very easy for a guy to go quite literally nuts as they stew over hard decisions without any external grounding (or falling down the /r/relationships or LLM rabbit hole for said external grounding, which will quite happily work toward driving you even more nuts). It's a really bad situation to be in, and I'm not exaggerating or hyperbolizing when I talk about this like going crazy. Having someone you can be out to, even if they can't empathize fully with a specific problem, as long as they're going to be honest and serious and open-minded about a choice, helps a ton at not getting unmoored or badly fixated.
And that's going to be uncomfortable at times! I'm bi, and I still absolutely know more of my brother's preferences than I ever wanted to know. The watersports joke is not the worst of all possible worlds. It's still better than having family who can't tell if they're obsessing over someone.
gattsuru
23hr ago
I have some very bad or very good news for you about the entire kink of orientation play.
gattsuru
1d ago
It's less that you haven't proven it, and more that it feels like people started with the conclusion and then tried to look for any data supporting it. It's not just that this evidence sometimes has other alternative explanations (hell, some of the alternative explanations are a little sketchy themselves!); it's that there's no real 'okay, what falsify this' or even a 'okay, what would explain the same data with fewer epicycles'.
That doesn't make the theory wrong, but it makes it hard to feel any level of confidence.
Have you ever seen a lesbian look like her?
Uh... yes, actually. There's even one at the FRC environment I support, albeit caucasian and taller. For all the Subaru Flannel stereotypes are founded in reality, there's a lot of people outside of the stereotypes still. I have known (cis!) femmes who glorify the Barbie Doll look, obvious implants and all. I'm way too androphillic to get it myself, but different strokes for different folks.
Maybe things are different in China -- meyerlemon's response here seems like it was viewed from a literal funhouse mirror to Western Perspectives. But I don't have good sources clearly saying that it is different this way, either.
gattsuru
1d ago
I've run GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.6 on a desktop computer that set me back around 1.5k USD, including everything down to the power supply and case, just using an nVidia 3090 24GB and 224GB RAM. You get a significant performance penalty going with GPU+RAM compared to a pure GPU run, but it's nowhere near as bad as pure-CPU or CPU+SSD speeds. Not fast enough for synchronous work like a Codex replacement, by a long shot; for something you can set-and-forget a series of prompts to run overnight, it's fine and can churn out 10k-ish words at around 150w power consumption. For GLM 4.6 specifically you do end up needing one of the more heavily-trimmed quants, but you can run it down to 32GB VRAM + 128 GB RAM without cutting too hard on context.
((I will caveat that the heavily-trimmed quants give weird failure modes. I'd naively expected quantization to result in typos, logic problems, or looping, and sometimes that happens, but you also get bizarre focuses on certain names, places, or plot points not present in more-precise variants.))
That said, it cost me 1.5k USD at September 2025 prices, and even then I was making compromises on RAM to keep to budget (hence the bizarre RAM total). Wouldn't recommend it at current prices, since a rough estimate hits around 3.5k-3.8k. Putting more emphasis on VRAM might make more sense... which is a bizarre thing to say.
There's a lot of cases where a faster, lower-parameter model is a better choice, even with this setup. For synchronous work, smaller or MoE-focused models are night-and-day in terms of being able to just throw tokens at a problem. Even for async work, sometimes GLM-4.5-Air's (110B to GLM-4.6's 357B) going to save enough time and energy that it's close enough, and something like Cydonia (24B) can handle longer contexts surprisingly well if you prompt carefully. Hell, I've got a few models I've requantized down so I can run shorter prompts at the higher fidelity with all layers on GPU, and then drop down to a 'dumber' variant for long-context operations that would exceed VRAM.
gattsuru
1d ago
I'd... argue otherwise.
It's especially bad here, where the alleged source was almost certainly a malicious or self-serving motivation behind the lurid claims, but a probable cause affidavit is just that: it's not a claim something must be wrong, but that someone could be wrong. Like a grand jury indictment, the standards for a search warrant are hilariously low, and the people signing it off and executing it have very close to cart blanche. Not everyone being searched will have evidence of a crime, and not everyone being investigated will be guilty, necessarily.
Which makes it a problem when these things are world-upending, without any valid need. There may well be a scenario that requires a six-person team with assault rifles. As with countless other examples such as Malinowski and going all the way back to Ken Ballew, it's very hard to understand what is benefit derived from those tactics here, which look to be optimizing for shock-and-awe at the cost of not just inconvenience to the suspect, but danger to the community and even alleged victims.
That's a criticism that sometimes is delivered with perfect hindsight or expecting clairvoyant police and judges, but I think it applies here even when considering the least convenient world. In an alternate universe where Foreman had been guilty and had dangerous control over kidnapped women, and had been at the residence at the time of the raid, this raid could have easily resulted in the kidnapped women turned into hostages or 'made incapable of testimony' at the first kick at the door.
This is a consideration police do take, before serving even far more strongly evidenced search or arrest warrants.
It's just really easy for them to not, when they're morons. My personal favorite example is the FBI leaking to press the location and time of the search of a suspected mad bomber, presumably not for the purpose of maximizing casualties if he went Molotov, but there's a long and storied set of examples. Some of that's bad-but-at-least-foreseeable motivations -- arrest warrants in particular tend to get served at home despite it being well-known to be dangerous as shit, because SCOTUS hasn't slapped down searches-while-executing-arrest nearly aggressively enough. A lot of it's just how things have always been done.
That's still not reason, alone, to keep doing it that way.
gattsuru
1d ago
People proposed this theory back back when Wu came up on the Old Reddit, along with the theory that she was an intentional CCP op. It's plausible, in the sense that it could happen, be hard to prove, and would have some explanatory power, but there's basically no attempts by those KFers to consider what would disprove it. I'm not going to say either has to be false, but I remain skeptical.
gattsuru
3d ago
No one prints on cotton towels for POD, they are all really terrible polyester microfiber items that the customer also hates.
Polyester's so much more friendly with sublimation, and screen-printing so hard to do on small (and semi-automated) orders, that it's hard to really serve this section. If you were doing them in-house, a DTG printer's surprisingly cheap in those formats and pretty capable for cotton terrycloth, but I dunno of any vendor doing that as a POD service.
gattsuru
3d ago
Designing items myself gives me a bit of a moat between myself and the bulk of the drop shipper industry people who either have to buy designs from other designers or have to sell the same generic goods that everyone else is trying to sell so they must differentiate heavily on marketing, brand positioning, funneling, conversion tactics or whatever.
Hm. I've been looking at side gigging some small run stuff, but I've been worried that this moat isn't likely to survive long, if it's even alive at all, now. The furry fandom's kept a large portion of the previous demand for normal artists, partly because of the various politics, and partly because non-artist furries have awful tastes (myself included)... but there's already content you can get from AIgen in minutes that you can't get from a normal artist in months, if at all.
It is a numbers game. I have made over 40,000 unique designs over the past 10 years or so. In the beginning I didn’t know what people wanted so I made 100 different designs at a time, then had to wait and see what people bought. Out of 100 designs maybe 10 of them would sell at all. I would take the 10 that sold and make 100 more variations of each of those, then just keep doing that.
From the inside, does this feel at all like you're getting Whispering Earring'd? People who go hard onto this philosophy seem like they become little more than conduits for the algorithm -- not just extremes like Mr. Beast or Linus Tech Tips who praise A-B Over All, but even some pretty small-time 'winners' seem to take massive swerves to whatever gets hits. It seems like it should be possible to find a decent middle-ground (eg dejojotheawsome on YouTube seems to be doing a bunch of horror mod minecraft stuff for the hits, and then Vintage Story for fun), but that's hard to tell from outside.
gattsuru
4d ago
I couldn't tell you the last time I saw an obviously trans person in public, and I've never seen a furry despite the fact that they hold a national convention in Pittsburgh every year.
Does this reflect the world, or just your area of it being selected away?
I'm in a suburban/exurban bit of a Red State, and there's a trans woman at one of the local Jimmy Johns, a couple trans men at Kroger. And in addition to me being a furry - admittedly only one that's only visible in terms of stickers or pins - I've seen actual fursuiters at a (local grocery chain) and at the local Ren Faire.
And Anthrocon in Pittsburg is one of the the big conventions, 17k+ people. Even smaller ones like FurTheMore (about a tenth of the size!) in Baltimore you're going to see fursuiters walking to the convention center if you're at downtown and driving at the right time. Or at least I did, and I wasn't even in Baltimore for the convention (or even for fun).
gattsuru
6d ago
Normal commercial flight occurs between 10k and 40k feet (and usually in the 15-25k levels). That's about 0.2 atmospheres outside of the aircraft, and typically 0.7 inside. It's enough to be absolute hell on your sinuses if you have a sinus infection, and you'll go unconscious in seconds without supplemental oxygen, but it's not going to cause any nitrogen narcosis issues worth mentioning.
Aloha 243 is one of the clearest examples where the aircraft was maintaining absolutely no air pressure, and outside of the poor flight attendant sucked out of the aircraft, injuries were limited to debris.
gattsuru
7d ago
To steelman, there's genuine problems with paperwork and compliance overhead, especially in more marginal cases. The United States doesn't really keep centralized databases for a surprising amount of important details. If you need a replacement birth certificate, for example, at best you have to dial into your birth state (and more often birth county's) offices. In rare cases, they just don't have it; either it wasn't filed correctly, or was filed and lost. It's usually not absolutely insurmountable - though it might escalate to a point where you have to get an administrative or court finding that you were born - but it can range from obnoxious to expensive. That's doubly true for people already on the margins: if you're couch-surfing it's a lot easier to lose an envelope of vital records, and a lot harder to give a mailing address for a certified form that can take a month to get there.
Ostensibly, you need these records to do a lot of other stuff: most employers have to get a photo ID and social security card, which generally rounds to the same set of problems. If you're outside of the normal business world, though, there's a lot of people that don't.
gattsuru
7d ago
Officially, every state is 'compliant' with the RealID act, but in practice every state but Washington has a non-RealID (aka 'non-enhanced') driver's license option. Almost every current driver will have had to get a renewal since the switchover, so at this point if you're not using a RealID that's by choice... but the paperwork overhead is genuinely annoying, and I can't find good numbers on how many non-RealID driver's licenses are being issued.
((Most states allow noncitizens to get a RealID-compliant card, but it's specifically marked 'non-citizen'. It's also not supposed to be issued to anyone without 'legal presence', though between the various messes and in-name-only compliance that's a bit flakier.))
gattsuru
7d ago
What’s the story there if you care to explain? Who is she...
Wu was a popular persona in the physical electronics space from 2016-2022. Some of that's downstream of her... assets, but she also provided a decent amount of hardware, software, and general guidance work, and while a lot of the actual hardware stuff she did was more focused on getting attention than genuine novelty, it at least passed the poc || gtfo test. Her biggest impact was explaining the cultural and social touchstones of a lot of Shenzen's lesser-known or 'obvious' bits, to the point she was doing semi-regular talks on the matter. Since this coincided with a lot of casual and hobbyist electronics people starting to trawl Shenzen, she got a good boost or two from 'bunnie' huang, and that
... and why is she censored?
No idea. As you say, it could just be 'slutty' outfits, the lesbian Ughyr partner, or saying naughty things, although she'd been doing all those long enough that the censors would be pretty late. It could be that the norms changed. It could be that she'd been talking them up as ways to criticize Western governments more than China, and that was being read differently by her censors; it could be that her wording had changed in ways to subtle for me to recognize that they did; it could be any of a thousand other things.
But I think it points to the ideology mattering more than the private business, at least in her case. She does still give the pro-Shenzen writeups, even if that's the only social media she does now.
I'll caveat that relatively small no-name accounts get smacked for often more-arbitrary causes than hitting a big business; the tea leaves for this point pretty heavily to the powers that be getting their collective panties in a twist over some queerbating.
That doesn't mean the CCP necessarily cares about Jiang, but it doesn't mean they're ignoring him.
A lot of the newest hotness has been a little too automated for my tastes, and haven't had much free time, so mostly screwing around with older configs.
Successes :
- Writing's still surprising me. The prose quality is still lackluster, and there's been very few times where I haven't wanted to revise whole sections, but I've gotten into the mid-5k word and low-10k word ranges with a coherent plot, characterization, and escalating tension.
- Some of that's smut, with its lower bar (hurr hurr), but some of it isn't.
- And, perhaps more useful, includes criticism of things I've written conventionally. Sometimes pretty biting criticism!
- Simple webdev stuff has kinda worked. I'm not a webdev guy, and a lot of my requirements are stupid (oh boy aspnet, I sure do love aspnet!) and use cases simple, but it hasn't really mattered whether Grok, Claude, or Qwen for simple one-off-stuff that's just meant for a short-term use.
- FRC students have been using it on and off. I try to emphasize the limitations and make sure they understand what the code is doing, and sometimes it's just not capable of handling their goals, but it's been useful as a reference tool in environments where a lot of the info is outdated or outright wrong. Which is weird, given the general code quality of FIRST-specific tools...
- Been vibe-coding (vide-building?) a homelab rebuild. My current home server setup is very traditional (installing things without wrapping them in four layers of containerization, like an animal), and I'm probably gonna stick with that, but it's been helpful to see how the other half lives, and a lot less frustrating than trying to get the right docker flags and commands from the normal documentation.
Failures :
- Very long form writing is struggling. Took a shot at phailyoor's trial, but while there's definitely some battles won against the old exponential explosions from context window scaling, most of the 100B+ param models go from 4 t/s at the start to <1 t/s by 5k words in. Which wouldn't necessarily be a critical problem, since I can just run it overnight, except the models also sometimes go wonky -- either looping around the same few paragraphs repeatedly, or adding tangents -- that make the most naive attempts at setting up a 'run-and-forget' run unpalatable.
- Spacial manipulation is Not Doing Great Bob. I had a problem that was effectively two axis of living-edge hinge, and to be fair that's a weird and uncommon problem, but it's ultimately either calculus or solvable by exhaustion (or Fusion360, which is nearly the same thing), but even the closed models just panicked over it and tried to send me to completely unrelated tools.
- Similarly, TRELLIS2 and Hunyuan3D are simultaneously impressive and absolutely useless. Sometimes they fail to produce a useful image, and that's mostly understandable (as funny as it is for extrapolated magnets to end up monopoles or video game characters to turn Janus-faced literally), but they can often give nice-looking models... that are absolutely unusable, with complete disconnections, unnecessary duplicated 'layers' of meshes sharing the same texture, random islands of tiny features, so on.
- Ironically, either my expectations for smut and fiction are higher than for professional writing, or the LLMs are worse at it, specifically. I've beaten the purple prose, em-dashs, not-x-but-y, and weird misplaced detailed from some form-letter grade business writing stuff out of even pretty dumb LLMs. But sometimes you can get an LLM to make surprisingly detailed conclusions that are pretty far outliers (discount code: knot) and then other times it misses really obvious stuff (including an actual 'how make babies'-level problem, and that was in an M/F attempt!).
- Weirdly bad at picking out names. Whether for characters, for programs, even individual variables. Not necessarily unimaginative, but repetitive (why does GLM love the name Kael?). Dunno what the hell's going on there.
- Trying to get something like VideoContext-Engine running. Still screwing it up. Not an LLM problem, just haven't had the time to figure out Yet Another Stupid Cuda Fuckery.
gattsuru
10d ago
Obviously it's nothing inherent in the architecture and there are workarounds, but I don't see those safeguards being removed anytime soon.
Uh, if you have access to the raw weights, it's surprisingly easy to change refusal behaviors. There's downsides to the various approaches -- I've been using GLM-4.5-Air-Derestricted, there's probably some impact on intelligence, and it's almost disturbing what it's willing to treat as 'normal' that the base model would recognize as weird -- but if you want to simulate a 4channer, it'll do pretty well.
gattsuru
10d ago
Finished Stoneblock 4, at least to opening up the creative chapter. Mixed feelings, like a lot of FTB modpacks, it's got a good early-game but gets bogged down as you go on, and it suffers a lot from making certain progression assumptions that the actual content doesn't back up. By the point you're doing actual automation challenges you have so many raw materials anything you can't just Replicate can be solved with simple spam, and by the point you've unlocked much of the combat stuff you have to beat the hardest available boss first and then it's just facestomping a bunch of also-rans. And it doesn't help that I'm not a huge fan of Mekanism, even if building a silly-large reactor is kinda entertaining. But there's a lot of effort that went into polishing the content and order that was there. Probably 3/5.
Trying Society: Sunlit Valley. It's not the first Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley-but-Minecraft-like I've played, but it's far more committed to the bit. (Most) crops and animals are tied to the day/night cycle for growth and harvest, there's a large number of new processing blocks that are similarly tied to daily cycles, equipment has to either be found in-world or upgraded from stone-iron-gold-diamond-iridium (lots of things drop gold gear!), a lot of fabricated materials can be purchased from villagers, and focusing on profit or collecting a variety of materials for the Community Center. Not perfectly happy with the pacing and progression. Since villagers are used for a pretty wide variety of important components and items you'd normally craft, and only certain materials sell for meaningful amounts of money, that means a lot of optimal play has you either grinding beer, simple meals, or raw ore to immediately dump for sale. On the other hand, props for being one of the first modpacks to put Create late in progression, and still make it meaningfully useful and powerful. But I also haven't had much time with it.
gattsuru
11d ago
No, more that it's seems kinda confused for a technical person to make such a claim as if it means something. If by 'enriching' we mean just the whole centrifuge deal, obviously reactors don't do that directly (modulo some liquid sodium-fuel mix stuff not relevant here or anywhere not currently on fire). If we say specifically 'enriching uranium' in the sense of getting weapons-grade uranium from the output, than obviously not, because they burn a fissile fuel from one starting isotope to another, so by definition and by the nature of the uranium fuel cycle a uranium-fueled research reactor doesn't output higher-density U-235 (uh, technically, for times less than 20k years).
But reactors naturally change the isotopic makeup of whatever fuel (and everything else!) that's stuffed into them, that's what 'react' is talking about. The normal fuel cycle doesn't enrich uranium, because they essential convert the majority from U-235... but converting into Pu-239 is one of the main immediate steps. That's the normal next step in the uranium fuel cycle, and it's nuclear bomb material.
Not all plutonium is useful for making bombs, and indeed that's a good part of what makes modern power reactors nonviable for producing weapons: the very rapid cycling and burn rate of fuel that's required to get a high proportion of Pu-239 is intrinsically opposed to running a nuclear power plant, in ways that can be observed from space.
However, research reactors work by cycling input material through a high-intensity bath of neutrons at a controlled rate. Some of those processes are slow, both in time and in neutrons, but others are not. There's some efforts to make it hard to turn a research reactor into a ghetto breeder reactor, and more ways of making it really obvious, but even before considering the age of the reactor here, none of these are impossible or insurmountable tasks.
I'm not a technical expert or professional for this specific field, so I may well be missing some information. Hell, there could be some information I'm not even allowed to know about the statement here. But at least from the publicly available info, this is a definition of 'doesn't enrich uranium' that would exclude a breeder reactor. It's arguably whether it's even technically correct, and it's really hard to believe it's meaningful in the sense it was phrased here.
gattsuru
11d ago
Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium,
I make no analysis about the broader situation, but this seems incredibly confused, game-of-telephoned, or taken out of any useful context.
Ideally, this is the sort of mistake someone gargles their SIG over, but the combination of diffusion of responsibility, fog of war, and the possibility of genuinely insurmountable mistake means it's probably going to just end up rhyming with other past errors.
It's remarkable that there's so little discussion of contemporary historical events on here.
I'm in the pinch point of several business decisions and the FIRST FRC comp season, so for now even my normal targets-of-discussion (subscribestar TOS clench, federal courts behaving badly, gun law) just go into the bullet point file to be filled out later, and I'll admit that foreign policy has long been one of my weak spots. But there's also a lot of FUD going around, here, and while there's some cowardice in not committing too heavily to positions that could be proven wrong, there's something to be said for people not making vastly confident positions first and then just ignoring their mistakes after.
Could someone like Pete be imaginable as the Secretary of War – no, Defense – in 2023? 2019, even? 2016?
It's... uh, not a position that has had a long and unbroken history of Absolute Winners. The 2021-2024 option might have sounded more professional, at least when he showed up to work, but he didn't exactly cover himself with honor when it comes to not killing civilians and children with misaimed drone strikes. I guess he didn't get a high score?
gattsuru
14d ago
Huh. I guess I was thinking of the older MindGeek AgeID system, which seems to have been sunsetted before being broadly implemented. The OfCom list there looks nearly identical to the proposals most American social conservatives (or anti-social-media people) have proposed, when they've considered any detail, with the sole exception of 'phone-based filtering'.
All of them seem to have similar privacy concerns: there's still a single point of data ownership that connects a user's meatspace name to their account(s). The ICO double-pinky-swearing people to safety doesn't really seem that persuasive from a security perspective.
gattsuru
14d ago
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the UK system (from my understanding, users have to buy a card from a retailer that validates age, typically in person?), and it has some obvious and well-documented faults. But it’s still not quite as stupid as asking people to upload their photo ID.
That’s presuming you can get the system without getting OFCOM and that whole related mess — the ease of the system for normies may well have made that more palatable politically! — but my guess is that they’re separate results of different political drives.
gattsuru
15d ago
For another 'fun' example:
Herrera has become the district’s de facto GOP nominee in the wake of Gonzales’ departure from the race. A he firearms manufacturer and YouTuber who’s known on the internet at “The AK Guy.” went viral on Friday after a clip surfaced where he is seen boasting about his copy of Mein Kampf.
“That’s my copy at my house next to a bunch of the German stick grenades,” Herrera said in the video. In the clip, he appears to pull up a photo of it on his phone to show one of the hosts. “I got the 1939 edition printed in English, just because I thought it was wild that you couldn’t buy it on Amazon, but you could buy The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.” (Hitler’s hateful, antisemitic book appears to be available on Amazon).
... Herrera is an extremely well-known guntuber, and, to spoil the punchline, the clip is from an Unsubscribed episode where Herrera spends almost as much time making fun of Hitler as talking guns. The segment is literally titled "Hitler was a bad writer".
There's things you could say here. They're lying, they know they're lying, they know anyone who cares is lying, and they probably don't even think that their audience is this stupid and gullible so much as just to lazy to care about the full text of what they wrote. One could spend a ton of effort to show how that this guy isn't evil, or that this isn't anywhere near the same organization's behavior in an easier case, but that's missing the point: yes, the news media is hilariously biased, where have you been the last few decades. In any reasonable set of laws, this could be defamatory, but the problem isn't the statutes or the line between opinion and slander, when judges can move it back and forth depending on whether they like the victim.
It's that this is what people want. Eat at Arbies!
Bit of a tradeoff where the strength of other connections can make it hard to grok, rather than merely believe, when someone close says that they trust them.
I think a lesbian going after yuri only gets the title weeaboo, if that. Fujoshi are pretty much defined by the M/M bit, lesbian or straight woman alike.
It's been around a decent time and not really limited to or even central for gay stuff -- cfe 2014 M/F + F -- but it's not the most common term. I don't want to undersell the risks and downsides to it as an option, but it is an option, and compared to some of the other compromises he might have, not necessarily as bad as it seems from the horror stories. There are still horror stories, and searching for a long-term relationship like that is hard.
Oh, yeah, other LDRs, and specifically looking more broadly to start out. Would not recommend trying to turn an already-stretching relationship into a long-distance one on top of existing stresses unless there's literally no other option. That said, if he's having trouble with a shorter absence, even just long-drive-same-general area LDRs will be painful. I don't get touch starvation, but I've seen what it can do to people.
You joke, but there's significant risks to the thing telling you your ideas are great and should be acted on immediately being smarter and more rational, especially if you're already lovesick.
Fair, but not quite what I was trying to caution about.
There's a lot of tiny things that are going to suddenly seem to come in a whole different light, and they're going to show up everywhere. A joke that gets a smirk and could have a prosaic explanation will no longer have that prosaic explanation be the only one. A favorite media, or a style of dress, or haircut, or a guarded behavior around his cell phone or computer browser history, could derive from his orientation. Some of them will be genuine connections; some will be spurious. Some of them, you'll miss even now, and that's the dumbest class of infohazards available, and I'm not going to spell the likely ones out.
Some of them he will need to say outright, to someone.
Given your day job, you'll have heard much, much worse. It's still a little harder to handle when it hits close to home, and even more so when your expression is trying to outpace your actual thoughts. It will be uncomfortable, you will flinch, and you will need to not let that be what you remember from the interaction. Even the small talk needs to be more important, in your mind.
It will be normal again, some other day. It'll be something you don't really think about, no more than you think about his birthday or hair color or his favorite drink. Today, and maybe this week, your pattern-matching side will be oversensitive.
Heh. It is a weird decision. To be fair, as much as the old Blue Collar Comedy Bit was as much written for its politics as for its accuracy, there do genuinely seem to be some actually-straight guys that do seem to fetishize parts of porn scenes that involve and focus around the men, if only as some way to center themselves within the media.
But I will also say as someone with a healthy (if not exactly red-blooded) appreciation for a nice hefty set of balls and a hefty cock, there's a lot of straight porn that centers them on screen and doesn't do a good job selling them.
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