gattsuru
1d ago
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be trans. Virginia's not a D+3 state because of Jones, and it's not a D+3 state because of Sears. Fundamentals run the story here; anyone without a sha256 is just explaining what story they want to tell rather than looking at what gives testable predictions.
gattsuru
1d ago
Guys, are users here surprised by this outcome?
To quote myself 29 days ago:
The meme would be I'm not surprised, I'm just disappointed, but I didn't have the hope for that. I'm mostly just trying not to become a ball of rage.
Trump was not on the ballot this year. Jaye's opponent was not campaigning -- nor was -- a MAGA Trumpist. Neither would have any power over immigration law or enforcement. There is near-unprecedented access, bought at no small cost, for information outside of the mainstream media and NPR cloister, at the same time that the broader progressive movement is crowing about the importance of Not Ignoring Evil. Jone's comments even got some mainstream attention.
The best-case scenario would hold that despite all those unprecedented (and likely unstable) advantages and uniquely bad behaviors, it wasn't enough. Indeed, it turned out to be enough not enough that it mattered less than past scandals in the same state.
But, worse, that's a prediction that would predict side effects. 'If only the average voter knew' runs headfirst into what we're imagining that the average voter would do if they did know. And some of them did. Optimistically, maybe one-in-ten? Forget anyone running out into the street and screaming into the sky like a Charlton Heston outtake, forget any member of the Abundance Caucus speaking against the man without being pushed about him first. You'd expect to see someone horrified.
So then the next best-case scenario's that everyone just thought it hyperbole, or joke. But then you look at everybody that thought it funny when Kirk was murdered...
But no. They don't 'want' me dead. They don't even know me! It'd just be funny afterward.
gattsuru
1d ago
Sears as a non-serious candidate has to confront Jones winning. Without doing that, paeans to candidate quality are just post-hoc justifications.
gattsuru
1d ago
Jay Jones's win -- and lackluster to nonexistent pushback from the 'moderate centrist's -- is pretty radicalizing.
He's projected to win by more than 2%. To steelman, that's eight percentage points less than Spanberger, Virginia's early voting started before the scandal dropped, there's some questionably legal electioneering (which would be investigated by the state AG, lol), the federal government shutdown probably juiced his numbers a bit, and this did require the Democratic Party apparachinicks all the way up to Obama supporting him.
To be less naive, all of those things did in fact all happen. An eight percentage point difference means that just over one in seven Democratic voters thought it was unacceptable to call normie political opponents "breeding little fascists" and text a political opponent about how nice the death of children would be, and that's assuming that none of the many other hilariously corrupt issues weren't motivations for any of them instead. Not half bad, I guess. I could repeat this again, but between owing DrManhattan16 a relitigation of the Obama and Biden administrations and absolutely hating every single non-Schism organization I reviewed then, I'm not sure it'd be helpful or just more radicalizing.
gattsuru
2d ago
I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies (I agree that there were terminally online people who actively celebrated it, but I am talking about "irl" woke people)
I'll second self_made_human and point to KendricTonn getting it in Ohio. There's more terminally online people than ever before, only some of them poast 24/7/365, and these days it's possible to invite them into your home without ever having been aware of their online presence beforehand.
I'm glad you've avoided it, but I'm finding that less and less possible.
gattsuru
2d ago
Would be worth evaluating. I'm not sure I have the domain knowledge to add much commentary rather than just adding a bunch of off-color inter-service jokes, though. Do you feel like you can cover it properly?
I can't justify 20k USD, but I've justified 1.5K to my boss for work reasons and around the same to myself for personal reasons.
- Control. You don't have to worry about parts of your prompt getting funneled off to a cheaper LLM from 2021, you can be pretty confident whether your 'super-long context' implementation is using normal context instead of pretending and slamming the RAG button instead, modify temperature, so on. At the more extreme end, you can make decisions about how agentic tooling is set up, what APIs it uses, and if you really want to get into the weeds you can skip the whole mess and just rawdog python to change behaviors. Most people won't want to put the energy into this on the front side and it wouldn't benefit them if they did, but if you're in this use case few mainstream APIs support it and fewer still are likely to maintain that support.
- Censorship resistance. Nearly every mainstream LLM gets repeatedly censored or at least has its API censored, often making them much dumber in the process; nearly every mainstream diffuser API starts out censored and the rest get there in days. On the gooning side, Grok Imagine had about a week where spicy mode could get you outright sex scenes, and now you can maybe get someone in a jockstrap or with an exposed nipple, and I don't expect even that to last. Grok's text form hasn't booted me (yet), but most other vendors will outright refuse. But it's not limited to sex and sexuality; I've had prompts rejected that were related to electrical engineering, plumbing, aviation communications, motor design, machining, firearms history, case law, the list goes on and on. Most of these even had valid reasons, and there's certainly things that make sense to censor if you're answering questions for every rando on the planet, but it's a capability we'd be leaving behind without it. In most cases I could eventually find a provider that was willing to answer the question... for now.
- Privacy. From a business perspective, we have code that it is a firing offense to bring outside of company property for any reason; quite a lot of businesses work like that for a wide variety of private information, and some are more restrictive and don't allow any network communications outside from secured areas period. To be fair, if you're Meta/OpenAI/Google, yes, you could absolutely rebuild (or steal) the code my company runs on far cheaper than running this whole AI ecosystem. To be less fair, Amazon has the manpower to engineer and market every product on the planet, and still didn't keep its firewall in order. Google might be able to figure out a lot of stuff from various search requests and e-mails going through their relay servers, but it's a lot easier for them to have our verbatim work if we directly put it into an HTTP POST; a localLLM that's got no (or for agentic llms highly restricted) outbound network traffic probably isn't doing that. And, yes, from a gooning perspective, I expect very few people are paying attention to what are, ultimately, not that unusual or ugly as kinks go on a matter that these companies absolutely don't want to be involved in policing. I'm also not green enough to imagine these aren't logged, or that no situation could arise where these logs could be useful in the future, and leaving aside the various conspiracy theories about the political acumen of search engines, there are advocates today of large-scale prohibitions on the most boring variants of this content, and we've had a recent SCOTUS case over whether people can be liable for publishing porn without age verification regardless of whether a minor sees it, and this law is not alone. There's even reason these advocates could (not always unreasonably!) see AIgen content as particularly unconscionable.
- Proofing against an AI Winter and/or an AI Bullrun. There's a lot of potential spaces for OpenRouter to be much less viable or more expensive in a very sudden way, and most of those explanations end up with either drastically reduced availability of inference power, AI tooling, or both. This could happen for regulatory reasons, because of supply chain problems in Taiwan, downstream of financial bubbles. Hell, it could happen even if Sam Altman makes GPU Jesus in his basement and suddenly all of the datacenter GPUs go to the important stuff instead of answering problems you could 'just' look up (if you had five hours and a subject expert to point you to the right keywords). It's probably not even that likely! (especially GPU Jesus). But if a good LLM is saving your business 200k a year, are you 90% sure it's not going to happen? But the actual numbers are a little worse than that, because such a disruption is likely to come as a surprise, and an honest decision matrix has to put the electricity and development costs for running local llms along with the materials cost on one side and a bunch of your users suddenly going cold turkey on the other.
gattsuru
4d ago
Two airmen at a Wyoming U.S. Air Force base have pleaded guilty to making false statements about the deadly shooting of a third that prompted the suspension of Sig Sauer M18 pistol use at nuclear weapons sites for a month, the Air Force said in a statement Friday. The gun pause by the Air Force Global Strike Command after the death of Brayden Lovan, 21, in late July was lifted in late August after Air Force officials determined the M18 was safe to carry.
Lovan was an airman with the 90th Security Forces Squadron, 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base outside Cheyenne. Details about his death were released for the first time Friday, including that the alleged shooter, Marcus White-Allen, had pointed the gun at Lovan’s chest in a “joking manner.” White-Allen after the shooting allegedly urged the other two surviving airmen to lie about what happened, according to the statement.
White-Allen, who was arrested on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter and making a false statement, was found dead on base on the morning of Oct. 8. Air Force officials have not disclosed details surrounding White-Allen’s death, saying it was still under investigation.
gattsuru
4d ago
The statute says that courts can pull guns after a GVRO (or police refuse to issue a purchase permit) for any perceived deficiency of temperament or character, on a bare preponderance of evidence.
The statute no more says you can or can’t possess a gun after this behavior than it does for a speeding ticket, expired car registration, or purely legal behavior like leaving a toilet set up. Leaving aside compliance with Heller, since that’s a sad joke, where’s the fair notice?
gattsuru
6d ago
Yeah, that sounds about standard for New Jersey, and why The_Nybbler's so direct to say that they've made the Second Amendment a nullity: "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril." Also a large point to why GVRO/Red Flag laws are given such skepticism. It's not hard to see this as what their advocates want, where the standard of proof to remove someone's rights is nearly nil, and they must jump high and arbitrary hurdles to get those rights back. And, of course, none of the takings clause people are going to come climbing out of the woodwork for this stuff.
But no serious org is going try to take this sorta case -- both because of its optics, and also just because he didn't cross every i and dot every t to preserve issues and present evidence perfectly -- and neither would the New Jersey State Supreme Court nor SCOTUS take it up if they did. Nobody that isn't already pro-gun is going to be appalled that they've read Rahimi to cordon Heller to a nullity, even a lot of self-described libertarians. And it shows how badly calibrated anyone must be to expect a 'bank shot' SCOTUS case that rules against its specific person while protecting the class of rights that person was trying to appeal toward.
gattsuru
7d ago
If Hayes doesn't shoot Gannon, what crimes, if any, should Gannon be charged with?
Massachusetts doesn't have a specific brandishing statute (to my surprise!), but mostly wraps it up in the assault-with-weapon-without-battery statute. That, too, needs more than the mere presence and visibility of a firearm, and I'd argue too much more. But there's still a lot short of actually pulling the trigger that can trigger the law.
Is Hayes privileged to shoot Gannon?
Depends. Do you mean "brandishing" in the colloquial sense of showing a firearm, or in strict legal sense of having seriously threatened the victim? In addition to the CorneredCat essay I've linked before and I'll link again, as a matter of law, in Massachusetts:
There may be cases where the colloquial brandishing is sufficient to count; I'd certainly argue the moral case where someone points a gun directly at someone, and the law might agree with me (and would in most states; in Mass it's kinda a clusterfuck). But the mere presence and visibility of the firearm is not on its own sufficient. Meanwhile, there is a narrow band where an aggressor can have "engaged in 'objectively menacing' conduct with the intent to put the victim in fear of immediate bodily harm" without a reasonable person seeing that as fear of imminent grievous bodily harm as required for self-defense law to apply... but it'd be really hard to do with a gun.
gattsuru
7d ago
You can brush off the grocery store sample above as hyperbole, but it's not too far off from what happened here.
gattsuru
7d ago
If you want the serious legal talk you'll either need to pay for it or go to a Massad Ayoob seminar, but Cornered Cat's summary is pretty reasonable for the state of the law in most* Red States. For a tl;dr, it's not enough for someone to want to express the desire to kill you: they must be reasonably perceived as able to do so at that time, and reasonably perceived as trying to do so. That's fundamentally fact-based to be evaluated by the jury, but a jury is going to treat someone outside trying to beat a door down with their bare hands very differently from someone taking a fireax to one.
/* a tiny number of red states allow lethal force to defend property in limited situations; these are outside of the current scope of discussion.
... this article is written with similar quality and accuracy as a South Park joke. Compare:
A retired Las Vegas police officer walked free after fatally shooting a retired computer network engineer during a dispute over who had the right of way in a Walmart parking lot. Both men got out of their vehicles. Both were armed. The ex-officer said the retired engineer pointed a gun at him first.
[several paragraphs later...]
Witnesses told police Hoy appeared enraged at a parking lot intersection, yelling at the driver of a Chevrolet Equinox. The Chevy driver, 67-year-old retired Las Vegas police officer Kerry Ruesch, kept driving. Then Ruesch backed up his car and stopped about 10 feet away from Hoy’s Toyota Camry. Both men got out. Ruesch told police that Hoy first held his gun pointed down and then aimed it at Ruesch. The ex-cop said he “reactively pulled out” his holstered .45 caliber handgun and fired several shots. Hoy crumpled to the ground.
Contrast:
Well, that's just a one-off, and it's not technically a lie (and they could argue that this 'must' have been sourced from Ruesch's testimony... if they actually reported it, and found more than a couple pieces of profanity from the nurse they quote).
Compare:
In De Leon Springs, Fla., Edward Druzolowski, 78 years old, was watching a football game on TV when his wife said their neighbor’s 42-year-old son was cutting branches and had come into their yard. Brian Ford, accompanied by his 8-year-old son, had entered through a gate in the fence and carried a chain saw. Druzolowski went out to see for himself. He brought his .357 Magnum handgun, later telling police that he knew Ford had a criminal record and a reputation for violence. He repeatedly told Ford to get off his property. Instead, Ford cursed and walked toward Druzolowski.
Contrast:
And, for the money shot:
One Democratic legislator raised a hypothetical dispute at a supermarket checkout line. “I’m in the 10-items-or-less line, and I’ve got 15. The shopper behind me is understandably irate and proceeds to push me out of line,” Rep. Ari Abraham Porth said. “Can I then pop a cap on him, proceed to check out my 15 items, and ask for a cleanup in line 3?”
“You’re authorized to meet force with force,” said Baxley, who has since left office. “If you’re pushed, you can push back.”
I will bet cash money that this is not the full and honest conversation, or even a remotely accurate summary. Forget the question of whether Baxley was asked Porth's hypothetical and responded like that -- you shouldn't take advice from politicians or funeral home owners, but you don't need to be a lawyer to know Porth's hypothetical is wildly illegal in Florida -- does anyone believe that it's anything other than clipping unrelated conversations, and not even presenting the full argument from the side it doesn't like?
Because if they do, I've got a bridge to sell them.
The only one that I can't find on-the-ground details that they're clearly eliding or outright misleading on is the Mathew Dugger shooting. Maybe because there's almost no coverage of the case on the open internet, maybe because their editors decided one out of three wasn't half bad. Except then it ends in:
Prosecutors in September concluded Wilson’s killing was justified under Montana’s stand-your-ground law.
But in addition to the actual criminal being a literal coke fiend (still illegal to carry while drugged up!) and thus unlikely to have only carried a firearm or tried to shoot someone in an argument because of the state SYG law, it's absolutely not an SYG case -- you are not required to flee before trying to prevent someone from murdering a downed innocent woman.
There's some interesting deeper things that could be said about the wider state of self-defense law (although the FBI numbers are kinda sus if you look at them too hard) and the WSJ analysis is less actual analysis and more looking at a CSV and hitting the filter until you get a chart you like. There's some fun questions about the general state of courts and prosecutions where despite an increasingly-online constant-surveillance panopticon world, we somehow manage to know less and less about these Big Things.
But this news story isn't it, and that people from WSJ to Giffords to Bloomberg can't actually make that story about self-defense shootings... well, it's not strong evidence, because these people are also incompetent liars anyway, but evidence nonetheless.
I'll add a few things that may be too obvious to an expert to mention, but I've found necessary to learn :
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Before doing anything involving mains electric, grab an AC tester, and use it on a known live wire to check the battery. These don't detect DC or stored capacitance, but they're really essential for DIYers who might find reason to distrust whoever labelled their circuit breakers. Taking 110v hurts like a mother, taking 220v can lay you on your ass or cause long-term damage, and there aren't no stinking GFCIs here. AC work is the least likely space to zap you, but you really want to get in this habit before you're standing in a bathroom replacing a vent fan.
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Disable power to the outdoor unit (usually will have a nearby pull-breaker, but pre-00s units might only have the breaker at your main panel) and discharge the capacitor (even a known bad capacitor) before doing anything to the outdoor unit that gets near the wiring, especially anything that involves touching the capacitor. The Proper way to do it involves a tool with a 1k+ ohm resistor and an LED, but the normal way is to just use an insulated-handled screwdriver and touch every lead to every other lead, which isn't healthy for bigger caps but you're probably gonna replace it anyway. Again, you don't want to take 110v, even 'only' for the short period it takes for the cap to discharge across you.
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In many residential units, the capacitor is also used to start the outdoor unit fan: if there's an audible buzzing sound and the fan either isn't working or only works sporadically, 90% odds it's the capacitor, other 10% is the fan... if you get to it soon. If you wait too long, it's both. Guess which one is more expensive and annoying to replace. Those caps will have usually have multiple leads and multiple ratings (eg, 40/10 or 35/5), which means that they run both the fan motor and the compressor motor. Take a picture before removing any leads in general, but especially with these double-check you've got them wired with the right leads on the right rated ends. These seem to be less common in newer residential units?
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You can go with a much higher voltage rating for a capacitor without much trouble (>100% over will probably have shit ESR, and it probably still doesn't matter), but avoid large difference (>25% over) in capacitance if you can avoid it, screws with motor efficiency(? power factor?). Either might not be a problem, since caps are only rated +/- 25% anyway, but if it is an issue it'll be subtle. Don't go under on either. You can get customizable ones, but they don't make sense unless you're working for someone renting out a ton of apartments/houses (and I'd argue not even then). Good to know in case someone else working on your house used one, though.
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A lot of older (early 90s, sometimes early 00s) indoor units will drain directly outdoors rather than into an actual drain. This is technically against code in most of the US now (not for made-up reasons, esp if you have cats, the 'water' ends up heavily contaminated with ammonia), but however it's set up, make sure to pipe the whole thing out all the way to a major drain pipe and/or the dirt.
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Basement units will often have a condensation pump, usually at the end of some PVC (rarely, aquarium silicon tube) coming from your indoor unit. When clogged or where the motor's near-dead it makes a hilariously bad sound. Sometimes can clean em out and reuse, but they're <100 USD at a big box store and <50 USD from online, and if they start to go bad you're probably on the end of a bathtub graph. As above, use an AC tester when replacing them to make sure you turned the power off on the right spot before disconnecting live wires -- I've seen stupid installs where these were on entirely different breakers than the indoor unit proper (and one awful install that was running it on two live phases, wtf).
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I've been told to use vinegar for keeping muck out of condensate lines and pumps. Dunno if that's a regional thing, or superstition about ammonia, or just bad advice, but it does seem to work reasonably. Also helps a ton for sump pumps. You can get specialized tabs for these so you have to look at them less, but I dunno if they're worth it outside of rooftop units.
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A lot of outdoor units are obnoxiously far from any hose spigots. If that's you and you don't want to buy three hundred feet of hose, there's three options: foaming coil cleaner with a bucket, or simple green and a pump sprayer. Some people will recommend soft brushes, but I've been very hesitant because the fins are so fragile. Don't use a pressure washer on your outdoor unit. No, not even if it's got a 'gentle' setting. Yes, professional shops have battery-powered sprayers that are usable for this safely; they're like 300+ USD and you're not going to use them enough to justify it.
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If you buy a used home, check the indoor unit (evaporator) coils. They should be behind a filter and thus need maintenance a lot less often, but especially if you ever had smokers in the house, they get gummed up bad, and a surprising number of people just remove filters and run without them for weeks at a time. Vacuum the intake side, spray with an indoor-safe evap cleaner on both sides of the coils. If it's cooler months already, even if the evap cleaner says it's 'AC-safe', spray gently with water: it's intended to get washed off by condensate, and you don't want to have the stuff sit for six months. This side has thicker fins, so I'm pretty comfortable brushing them with a soft (eg, workbench) brush.
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If your indoor unit is getting cool temperatures, but individual rooms are not, check first if you've got dust buildup in vents, any disconnects or gaps in vent connections, and then consider a booster fan. It's stupid, but especially for attics or big houses they're surprisingly useful.
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If you're trying to get a garage, trailer, or recently reno'd attic air conditioners, and you're planning to stay with it for a while, look at mini-splits. They're more upfront cost and the install is much more obnoxious compared to the typical window unit (eg, you may need a licensed electrician for the final electrical hookup), but they're amazingly effective and much more useful in winter months. Not always the right option, but worth evaluating. Don't even bother with those stupid on-wheels mini-fridge-style units unless you have absolutely no other option, they're terrible.
gattsuru
8d ago
In addition to the normal race-to-the-bottom and lemon problems, there's also uniquely severe incentives toward fraud. Once you tell a lie, the truth will forever be your enemy, and there's a lot of reasons for low-tier immigrant-focused employers to have to lie. And since a few particularly scammy businesses make up the majority of H1-B applications in a few fields, there's a lot of potential to run into hilariously-incompetent people even where the median option would have been meh or even good.
gattsuru
9d ago
gattsuru
9d ago
... I don't like the man, but you may have missed a picture.
gattsuru
9d ago
I think there's a fifty-fifty chance the judge doesn't file an final judgement by the end of day after the conference, a twenty percent chance that they just end up scheduling another briefing (todo: whenever people's rights matter again)...
I guess I can't call this as a prediction since it had already happened, but :
gattsuru
10d ago
Superscript is implemented, just using html codes (E = mc<sup>2</sup> is E = mc2 when unescaped).
I’ll generally use gmail for unimportant stuff, a work email running on a managed service, and have a domain name running with a mid-tier email provider for ‘professional’ but not actual work stuff. Unfortunately enough of my day-to-day operations are normie-interacting enough where protonmail would seem weird or skuzzy, but I do know some of the advantages.
A lot of the difference depends on your use case and threat model. I’m not especially concerned about a google getting email spam notifications for web services I don’t care about, but there’s more serious issues if you work in AI safety or the DoD.
gattsuru
10d ago
Uh... more pointing at the upskirt, though I recognize it's a relatively subtle version of that. MarcusGrayArts put more of an emphasis on 'that's a saran-wrapped sausage', but it's also not even arguably non-porn.
If you're looking at femboy muscle, maybe something like this (cw: gay ass in gayer underwear, don't look at the rest of the artist's feed unless you like gay porn)?
gattsuru
12d ago
I'll caveat that there is femboy stuff aimed at gay men (not even always aimed at people who want to be the femboy, and sometimes not even at tops!)... and it starts at the 100% side of that bar (cw: femboy, furry, no bits but probably awkward to explain to your employer, Helldivers reference) and usually is going to aim for 110%+.
gattsuru
13d ago
To be clear, this isn't The Most Central Example of the problems. Unfortunately, time is an arrow, the door is ajar, talking about problems seldom coincides with maxima happening. If I absolutely had to point to a case that screamed out for preliminary injunction, I'd probably point to the Illinois ban-sans-definition, since it's a new law so all the 'maintain status quo' stuff was self-evident bunk and SCOTUS didn't care even as lower courts announced that the bans didn't even implicate 2A rights. Maybe sprinkle in some of CCW permit/renewal cases which are basically distilled "important and recurring issues which, by virtue of their relatively brief existence, would be rendered otherwise nonreviewable" and often also include state actors ignoring their own law, and never seem to matter.
But part of my point is to show that it's not some rare nutpicks, or just for cases so controversial as to get to SCOTUS, or only one particularly extreme or unusual policies, or only in particularly left-leaning jurisdictions and you could just move to a red state. On its own, this case wouldn't be that bad; maybe, eventually, someday, if a mandate ever issues and an FFL isn't terrified of the ATF playing silly buggers in three years, a 20-year-old will be able to legally buy a new handgun. But when no one can pull a counterexample from some vastly overexpansive ruling from one of Trump's many ideologically-driven and unprofessional nutjobs larger than Freedom Week, and no one can show a bigger or more by-the-book victory, and I can keep giving example after example after example over fifteen years of jurisprudence, it's a much more relevant pattern.
That's a defense that would undermine Spanbergler, nevermind Jones, and notably it didn't. Neither could forcefully define themselves as the not-killing-kids (and committing hilarious frauds, if we're going to pretend 'rule of law' matters).
Dem voters just didn't care.
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