gattsuru
1d ago
I haven't seen Romulus, yet, and can only judge Prometheus and Covenant. Covenant wasn't as bad as Prometheus from an idiot ball perspective, though it had its stinkers, but if anything it managed to be worse about characterization. It's bad enough in Prometheus where the original 'androids can be asshole because they get bad or contradictory orders' had merged into just 'all androids are assholes', but in Covenant several of the demonstrated-by-five-seconds-later-gore human characters also seem like bizarre robots for all their reactions or motivations are shown.
gattsuru
1d ago
To be fair, Mackey's appeal was successful last week, and his case has been directed back to trial courts with orders to dismiss the case.
(Albeit for technical reasons related to trial proof, rather than the obvious first amendment problems.)
I haven't seen the last Jurassic Park, for reasons (cw: crude joke song), but the last one I did watch made ARK look like the height of skilled literature. Not because the CGI physics were any less realistic than WildCardPhysics, because hell no, or even because of good writing, because also hell no. Yet people were doing things! With actual motivations! And reasons to believe that their actions derived from those motivations, in ways that someone in the real world might even do. We're grading on a pretty steep scale, here -- ARK includes an NPC that injects Molten Science into his Veins to Become As A God (and is a not-very-subtle-critic of the british scientist) and another that basically does the same thing by accident, and players whose motivations often are little more than 'make a nice base' or 'beat the ark guardian' or 'wrongly believes something will work' or 'troll as many other players as possible without being too annoying' -- but compared to Brave or Mufasa it might as well be Shakespeare.
I've seen furry porn artists who've written scifi comics where the main characters spend almost the entire comic with their junks out, and still have more compelling characterization and plot!
And that's just bizarre. I don't expect blockbusters to be good or smart. I don't even expect them to avoid the various headscratchers or plotholes; cinemasins are actively obnoxious to me. It's somewhat understandable for something like The Lego Movie to have random asspulls or a main character that's an idiot. Why is the same true for the newer Alien movies? Why does the teenager -- or the adults! -- in the Beetlejuice sequel seem dumber and more cartoonish than Emet from Lego Movie, or sometimes even the same character in the original?
There's some economics arguments for why the writing and character points end up so bad so often, even when better choices are available even in the same movie, and there's some process-style arguments that having to start work on the major CGI-heavy shots early and separate from the writing team gives stories a glued-together feeling, but I dunno. It's not universal. There are CGI-heavy, or modern-economics-driven, or works that aren't aiming for the international market, or works focused on action, or even politically woke stories that still work as stories. Fanlore says Zahn supposedly offered to write the Sequel Trilogy for Star Wars. It's interesting to think about how much difference that would involve, even if executives insisted using the same characters and same major plot beats, but it's just as plausible we'd have a great script and an awful set of movies anyway.
gattsuru
1d ago
gattsuru
1d ago
VCL started in 1995, Furcadia in 1996, so toward the tail end of that time period there'd already started to be pretty dedicated online spaces. Early 1990s period you start looking at smaller websites like werewolfdotcom or USENET like alt.fan.furry (1990), and the line between furry and just-a-fan-of-media (or other related stuff -- a lot of modern therianthropy spread over early USENET group alt.horror.werewolves) was a lot more blurry. Some furry-specific MUCKs and MUDDs go into the early 90s, and there was supposedly a lot of early subcultures inside 'normal' MUCKs. At that point, they were pretty similar to modern-day furry communities, complete with the associated controversy. Back when google had usenet copies searchable, it was actually kinda impressive how much overlap to the modern era you could find: the zebra inflatable pool toy enthusiast has gotten into an ugly fight with the weird libertarian gundam lunatic, is it Tuesday again?
Supposedly the first physical conventions started around 1990 or 1989 with ConFurence, but a lot of early conventions had precursors as room parties or talks in more conventional scifi conventions a few years earlier. Not a lot of documentation on them, unfortunately; even historians like Fred Patten just have to kinda say they happened. Before that, you're mostly looking at fanzines, like Rowrbrazzle (1983) or Vootie (1976) (which as APAs were mostly artists or writers trading with each other), or for audience-oriented works Albedo (1983) or FurVersion (1987). Most of this was categorized as "funny animal" fandom at the time, but they still had the emphasis on 'underground' themes (not just sex; biting satire, less-cartoony violence, social themes, yada) that kinda differentiated the early fandom.
Written works existed throughout this period, and a lot of the early zines had written stories as part, but outside of dedicated publishers the line between furry and non-furry is really hard to figure out from the modern day. Alan Dean Foster's Quozl (1989) and Spellsinger (1983) were very often referenced by furries (though I can't really recommend either book), but afaict ADF himself wasn't. There may be a way to distinguish those stories (or even Cherryh's Chanur Saga 1981) from those of Bernard Doove's chakats (1996ish), but you don't really get dedicated furry publishers until nearly 2000 (with the still-extent Sofawolf).
gattsuru
1d ago
There's been a recent scandal where the Minnesota Department of Human Services released a policy requiring:
And that's just an example I pick because it's recent, newsworthy, and about as well-proven as possible. The Moderate Centrist Establishment Candidate Joe Biden sued dozens of cities over 'discriminatory' neutral tests of ability for firefighters and police officers, along with a wide variety of other woke policies; the moderate centrist people confronted with this class of problem answered that they still got successful moderation, and when questioned on that, answered shut up that's why.
People run on different things. But they do this.
gattsuru
1d ago
It's a very powerful and Apache-licensed set of models for (short) video generation. It has its limitations, especially keeping consistency across longer videos or handling multi-subject topics, but you can do some impressive stuff.
It's also... uh, very popular among certain crowds; FurryDiffusion has a channel of just animation-showcase, and while it's not the only competitor there, it and its derivatives represent themselves very well with a lot of videos I'm not going to link here. And while (focused-on-) human porny LoRAs aren't the only thing that shows up for WAN on civit.ai, especially sorted by likes or downloads you're going to get a lot of R, X, and XXX spoilers. As you might guess, both the porn and not-porn stuff can get weird.
gattsuru
2d ago
His distinction:
But the power to decline to enforce a statute just isn’t the same thing as the dispensing power; the former does nothing to alter the potential liability that those who violate the statute might face; the latter at least purports to render them formally immune.
Seems both threadbare and tremendously wrong, though. The various and length delays to the ACA's individual and employer mandate were not only retrospective, nor accompanied by anyone panicking that they could face future liability had the government changed its mind afterward. The DACA authorizations left specific people immune to civil litigation even well after a different President was elected specifically on the matter of changing the rule, and courts stayed those changes!
gattsuru
2d ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
Yeah, from the legal realist perspective this whole debate is pretty settled. It'd be nice if "X shall Y" meant something. It doesn't. Even if you want to cordon off immigration law as enforcement discretion -- pretty hard to do honestly, given the only enforcement in this law is the fed AG going after companies -- we have other examples. King v. Burwell is best-known for its denouement, but earlier parts of the case dismissed challenges to the continuous delays in the employer mandate as unredressable, and it wasn't even a surprise then. That, likewise, included a disclaimer that the government would surrender any possibility of future lawsuit on the matters in the covered time period.
Without explicit mechanism for private modes of action available to actual people (and that's not a guarantee!), or a one-off 'special solicitude' from SCOTUS, "shall" means less than a Zoomer saying "literally". Yes, businesses acting in violation of the law could theoretically get punished under a different administration, despite this 'dispensation' -- it wouldn't even trigger the various rules against ex post facto laws for a bunch of reasons, though there would possibly be some due process concerns -- but anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows that it's either not going to happen, or will only happen if a Dem President wants to (threaten to) completely crush some disfavored business.
Which would be fine if Vladeck were some naive rando who still thought the text of the law mattered, or predicating his analysis as clearly on the "ought" side of the is-ought dividing line. But no. The House of Representatives couldn't challenge these rules even if it specifically involved the government's taxation power; claiming that a random competitor might succeed in a challenge of an enforcement discretion letter raises serious questions about anyone with nontrivial knowledge of relevant caselaw's competence or honesty. And Vladeck works as a professor of law, at a school that charges thousands of dollars a credit-hour to listen to him!
gattsuru
3d ago
If you just want to keep using a supported operating system without buying a new PC (or motherboard; most of the issues in consumer hardware are due to the TPM2.0 requirement), you can bypass almost all of the relevant hardware checks, either by hand with a registry edit from the install environment, or by using programs like Rufus that will do it (as well as disabling some telemetry and enabling a local user) with a single checkbox when burning to USB drive an ISO you can download from Microsoft.
Most 'legit-ish' vendors for LTSC will be closer to the 300 USD range (a la CWG), and they're still not entirely compliant with Microsoft's rules for resale. I used to recommend the Microsoft Action Pack if you needed a bunch (typically 40 USD per OS license, and a bunch of other shit, at the cost of annoying certification requirements), but that sunsetted at the start of this year and you can't buy into it at any price now.
There's also a 'extended' support license for Win10NormalUser. The enrollment process is stupid, but the price is good even if you don't want to use Microsoft Points... but there's no guarantee about when MS will change the deal again.
Otherwise... MAS people are respectable. I can't condone the cool crime of flipping Microsoft the bird, but if you're not in a corporate environment I wouldn't expect an audit over it either.
While some of them are just (ab)using bulk OEM pricing and international sales, a lot of the cheap second-hand licenses, even from professional-looking merchants, are either messing around well outside of their purchase agreement, or outright money laundering with stolen credit cards, similar to the 'steam key' reseller gray market. This usually won't burn you, but it has significant ethical concerns and can theoretically result in the key being revoked. And, of course, there's concerns when giving your credit card information to people who could be credit card thieves.
gattsuru
4d ago
Louis McMaster Bujold is always a blast. Sometimes a little preachy in the later works, but great howdunnits. Miles, Mutants, and Microbes is a little weird of an anthology since "Labyrinth" touches on topic the topic but not as heavily on the plot points of the other two works, while Diplomatic Immunity is more
DI can stand alone or as a sequel to Falling Free, but it's an odd editing decision, even by Baen's standards.
You see that Vorkorsigan-like tones more often in fantasy -- Diana Wynne Jones is a little less high social drama but similar -- but it does seem pretty badly underserved in scifi. Maybe some of the Ciaphas Cain series, if you're into Warhammer?
There's some technical parts to how LLMs specifically work that make it a lot harder to police hallucination than to improve produce a compelling argument, for the same reason that they're bad at multiplication and great at symbolic reference work. A lot of LLMs can already use WestLaw and do a pretty good job of summarizing it... at the cost of it trying to cite a state law I specifically didn't ask about.
It's possible that hallucination will be absolutely impossible to completely solve, but either way I expect these machines to become better at presenting compelling arguments faster than I expect them to be good researchers, with all the good and ill that implies. Do lawyers value honesty more than persuasion?
I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing.
One would think! And yet.
gattsuru
6d ago
gattsuru
6d ago
It's an impact, but it's likely to end up a bigger impact in the sense that this is the first time a federal gun law has been actually rolled back instead of merely sunsetted or outdated.
A 200 USD tax isn't trivial for a gun accessory, especially an expendable one, and having zero tax might allow some manufacturers to start building out entry-level silencers so the cost-of-first-hit isn't 100+ USD on top of the tax. But while that's part of why the NFA was annoying, it's not the biggest or even a primary part. And I'm not even sure we'll see much drop in MSRPs. From the sellers side, they still count as 'firearms' for FFL purposes, you'll still need an SOT, there's still going to be a ton of legal risk, and there's still a hell of a lot of overhead. From the buyer's side you aren't any less afraid of 'oil traps' or accidental 'transfers' or the ATF giving you a free colonoscopy.
((Yes, theoretically zeroing out the tax should also make enforcement of the whole registration schema impossible, but we know how that goes.))
Meanwhile, the parliamentary stuff is pretty obnoxious. I expect a dem appointee to be biased, but Byrd Ruling modifications of a law that has been defended in courts as a tax literally dozens of times is appalling.
gattsuru
7d ago
The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.
Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.
Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.
gattsuru
7d ago
while something like this gets AAQC'd.
I would be very, very, very interested to see you explain exactly what in that post you believe is objectionable, "hostile", or "delusional".
gattsuru
7d ago
My typical rule-of-thumb is 1/4 lb per adult per meal if you have a lot of sides, 3/4 lb per adult if meat's most of the food. Lot of it's going to depend on how long the guests are staying (one meal or two) and how picky you'd expect them to be if you run out of one protein. Probably going to end up with a decent amount of leftovers unless they're staying for both lunch and dinner. That said, almost all of these will store well in a fridge for 4-6 days, and they'll mix in well with pasta (everything but the chicken) or rice (everything) dishes pretty easily, so as long as you've got fridge space I dunno that I'd be that worried about leftovers.
I don't grill often, but there's a lot of great kabob recipes that just can't be done in an oven or air frier. Might take one variation on that.
Can't say anything on the alcohol side; I can barely drink beer or wine, and while I can drink hard liquor I've never developed enough of a taste to distinguish more than rough categories.
I'm not convinced darwin2500 needed a permaban, but if you want a long-form discussion of why he was a bad poster, I wrote one here (and against some of his AAQCs here). And it's not like that was some all-encompassing list; many of his worst behaviors were well after that summary, and I didn't even include all the bad behaviors before that summary (open question: can Darwin2500 use CTRL+F?). _Viking's "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." kinda sums it up.
There's (unfortunately) a number of posters that you could pick out for each of darwin's individual ticks except from the right here (well, most of them), but there are very few, if any, that manage to combine all or even a sizable section of them all on their own.
gattsuru
7d ago
I'm... hesitant to go with any of the easy answers. The Bulwarkist side of no-longer-Republicans-if-they-ever-were exists, but it's tiny. The Republican minority outreach should expect to see incoming demographics who don't like The Gays, but the difference just isn't that big. Measurement problems are endemic to modern polls, but there's a lot of reasons to suspect that they'd result in these polls going more toward the demographics most gay-friendly (younger, more urban, more online). And while it's possible for some number of people to be rounding 'gay marriage' and 'trans stuff' together, either out of confusion or treating the movement as a whole, there's too big of a difference in poll numbers on gay marriage and trans stuff for that to shake out right either.
I think there's some genuine disagreements on policy that have become a lot more apparent in the last three or four years. MacIntyre likes to Darkly Hint in ways that wouldn't be accepted (or even necessarily understood) by a lot of Red Tribers, but matters like surrogacy, limits of workplace conduct, interactions with media, the bake-the-cake movement, these are things I see from not-especially-online people in the real world.
I'd like to think that there are workable compromise positions, but they depend on actually understanding and respecting the other side, and I thought the same about trans stuff.
gattsuru
7d ago
And FFXIV : Endwalker (cw: level 90 spoilers).
gattsuru
7d ago
To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.
I'm not disagreeing with the factual findings. Literally in the post you're replying to, I said:
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition.
Indeed, the question raised by the petitioner during appeal was specifically "the trial court improperly relied on his current physical condition, age, and stated reasons for seeking expungement". While I don't think that's meritless -- I raised some statutory interpretation questions, again literally in the post that you're replying to -- I do fully recognize that there's absolutely zero chance of them being successful. Likewise, I recognize that because of the commitment's age bringing any serious challenges to would be difficult even were New Jersey and its federal circuit any less biased against gun rights, and because of the petitioner's age and the speed of New Jersey courts, any Second Amendment-related or due process legal challenges would be doomed.
My argument is that these are bad; that they defy broad rights and due process and justice, and yet can't be meaningfully challenged and won't be meaningfully recognized. We've had this distinction before.
T.B. in this case might have failed a test for expungement in a fair system, but he didn't get a fair system. Instead he got one where his rights could be taken away in an ex parte hearing with no due process or representation and standard, and to retrieve those rights he could present only limited information against an explicitly adversarial judge who could moor any denial in anything the judge wanted under any standard of evidence and using any information or no information at all. Indeed, he didn't even get a system interested in pretending to be fair, where the judge can make some handwave toward what T.B. would have to do in order to comply with the law.
There's a trivial sense where they're bad in ways that undermine all of the defenses that you entered this discussion with. But there's a more general one where it's no defense at all to say that the bad procedures are established by statute, and that the biased judges are just part of a biased system, and that there's just going to be people who fall between the awkward interactions of laws that don't mesh together, and that people simultaneously should know that any constitutional or due process arguments would actively doom whatever trivial chance their 'conventional' petition might have and that outside observers can't point to the blatant disregard for constitutional rights or due process.
There are imaginable universes where we are, as a society, so attached to legal formalism that all of these things weigh against constitutional rights, and the constitutional rights lose. There are imaginable universes where all those frictions and safety risks weigh against constitutional rights, and the same happens.
The courts can, have, and did in the last week jump over themselves to protect the rights of a murderer to 'prove' that he might have only planned and assisted with the murder of an innocent woman. The courts can, have, and did jump over themselves to defend an illegal immigrant who beat his wife and allegedly participated in human trafficking from getting deported, with everyone on the Left and their dogs and you specifically talking up the importance of due process.
We aren't in those universes. You know we're not in those universes. That this disagreement is only imaginable for matters that happen to line up with your political goals leaves any argument presented under them as below contempt.
gattsuru
8d ago
It's possible, but I'm skeptical -- AI isn't as bad as people say, but I don't think it's quite there yet, and more critically there's a massive space for additional programmer output -- and a lot of this stuff is happening at the same time that Microsoft is demanding vast increases in cheaper workers.
I'll second the fear bit. I'm a child of divorce, my current significant other is a child of divorce. My workplace is small and not hugely representative, but I've seen more divorces happen among people working here than marriages or childbirths combined. From the numbers, just under one in three children will watch their parents divorce before they reach adulthood; one in five of all adults are divorcees.
It'd be a different matter if most of these divorces were the advert model where a deadbed room and some court hearings lead to a couple parting ways, and 'amiable' divorces do presumably exist. But I've seen maybe one, and those close I've heard about are pretty far removed.
((I haven't actually seen the weekend prison stay, though I'll admit that's probably an artifact of class-and-culture stuff. I have seen everything from 'announcing divorce with a bulk withdrawal from a shared bank account' to 'left photographic evidence of infidelity in space with the teenage kids' to 'clearly false allegations to get the significant other fired', and those are just the claims that I'm extremely confident on. Nor, to be clear, is all the bad behavior coming from women, or even relationships involving women, even in this list.))
And that's the unofficial side of things. Amadan can critique the hypothetical worst-case scenarios, and does so with cause. Alimony is rare (although I'm skeptical of the 10% number that's going around, which seems to be cited from a Marquette University game-of-telephone from a study that was hilariously limited, page 75), income-limited to (often well-)under half of income, and usually time-limited. Child support is much more common -- though not strictly tied to marriage -- but it has caps too and depends on the existence of a child. The extremely rare cases where these combine to exceed half of income usually reflect either unusual changes in employment immediate around the divorce or bizarre situations.
But the official rules, while not as bad as the hypotheticals, are still absolutely terrifying, and they often break down badly at the edges.
There's a fair argument that these are controlled (if not _well-_controlled) detonations of a relationship that was already ticking, and I've watched a few where the divorce, ugly as it was, wouldn't have been as bad as a continued marriage: in addition to the classical physical abuse or addiction, there's the schizophrenic break, the propositions to an older child, the embezzlement. Yet I've also seen a number of cases that should have fallen into the 'amicable' divorce setting, falling apart over short-term infidelity or incompatibility or differing goals, and they've included many of the worst results. I don't have to talk about what the divorcees would have done in a counterfactual or with a time machine, here; at least a couple were Borderer enough to say if their partner was gonna cheat on them they wish they could have just exchanged some hall passes... months before the divorce proceedings plummeted into child service calls and severe drug addiction, respectively. Yes, revealed preferences and all, but it's still Not Great Bob.
It's not the only cause for the collapse of relationships, or even the only cause for fear of marriage specifically, but it marrs the matter heavily.
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