gattsuru
3hr ago
Millions of dollars of equipment, sure, but far more attainable than running GPT or Opus.
Technically speaking, you can run a 3T model on 25x DGX Sparks. Not fast, but it's around 150k if you include networking and power costs. If you really don't care about speed, you could probably get a couple second-per-token on older server hardware running fully CPU under 70k, though I wouldn't recommend it.
Allegedly some US officials are considering restricting US companies from using Chinese open models. Despite this claim being repeated across many outlets, I didn't actually find any evidence.
I'm also just not seeing a route to do it. Putting Moonshot on the BIS Entity List is the nuclear option, and it'd fuck up Moonshot's business and operations a lot, but I don't think it'd actually stop anyone from using their weights legally, and might not even do much to prevent them from doing future training. And I just don't see any better avenue.
Unlawful extraction from companies that have themselves unlawfully extracted? Again, really?
To be fair, a distillation attack typically involves massive numbers of smurfed requests, and doesn't have the fair use backing that normal transformative works would. I agree it doesn't make much philosophical sense, but it's not quite the same thing categorically.
But that could effectively ban open models if it's implemented such that only closed models pass, like how "nobody can sleep under a bridge" applies equally to rich and poor but only affects the latter.
There's also an issue where it might be only possible to pass without letting anyone access the model directly, regardless of how public. Pretty much every model is vulnerable to 'heretic' modification which changes the weights in minor ways to make it see any request as legitimate. These are widely available and, once discovered, can be performed by anyone with the weights and some hard drive space. It's mostly been helpful for writing smut in more 'circumspect' models, but there's already a lot of 100B-sized models that can independently discover serious dangers that are not well-known among the general populace (and, to be fair, some legitimate and safe uses of the model that also trigger those safeguards and thus are good reason to want a heretic model).
I doubt China will surpass American companies if they're training on American models, especially since America has more hardware.
Not so sure. Qwen3.6 was a major step forward compared to other models of the same time, and even now it remains a good example of good ideas being able to best raw hardware or parameter count to some degree. And there is the power-and-regulation issue, where especially if China decides to really hammer on the matter, the US advantage might not stay around.
gattsuru
20hr ago
If the appeals courts read it as a fighting words case, then there's a pretty big onus to review the facts de novo, and they're pretty favorable to Hendrix: the court has to hold that Hendrix's words were probable to cause an immediate violent response from the guy she said them to, and that she intended for them to provoke him. It's not a slam dunk, but it's her best-case scenario.
But they don't have to do that. Hendrix's conviction doesn't read as 'saying fighting words'; it's just disturbing the peace. If she was convicted because of a combination of words and actions, then the question of whether that conviction was really about the actions is a question of fact. And questions of fact get reviewed only for clear error, with a massive lean toward the findings of the initial court. And if you squint really hard, maybe the jury convicted because she was threatening! Or pushy! Or starting a loud argument in a public space!
You and I may know perfectly well that she's never have been tried without the word, but that's a selective prosecution argument, not impossible in a 1A context but a very steep lift regardless because it's near-impossible to prove.
So a motivated appeals court doesn't have to even examine the fighting words doctrine at all. And there's a lot of motivated judges to be found.
If it has to go to SCOTUS, that court has literally thousands of cert requests on an annual basis, and hears less than a hundred. They routinely deny more serious, wide-ranging, and impactful cases. John Roberts isn't going to bend over backwards for Hendrix.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yes I think physically abusing a child if true is worse than physically abusing an adult if true
From your link: "Cuyahoga County’s DCFS investigation into possible child abuse was “unsubstantiated”—that is, there was not enough evidence to support a finding of neglect or abuse." Now, I'd consider the facts separately from police or administrative findings. But it's a bit odd a look for you.
I'm not giving out bonus points just cause the abuse of adults was sexual.
What an odd thing to say.
Now he contests any intent on hurting her, and he contests it being at her neck, but it's clear he understands what she means by "poured steaming hot water on me" and refers to it as the water incident.
One set of allegations is that he literally poured boiling water on her, from a pot on the stove. Another is that he sprayed her with water from a kitchen sink. One of these is a serious allegation of criminal assault, and any pretense that Miller would not have intended injury would be a cruel joke. The other is inadvisable horseplay. The Snopes link has direct images, as presented by Moreno, of the alleged injuries.
I'm not a doctor; it's a single click and five seconds to evaluate.
I don't think this meaningfully proves what you're trying to prove; it picks up the goalposts and sprints for the horizon.
gattsuru
1d ago
Fair, though it depends on there being a chance of a relatively-easy win at the Supreme Court. Zero isn't a probability, but this case's cert chances are about as close to zero as it gets.
gattsuru
1d ago
(Morbid humor:
He's running for a +5R-+8R district, and his opponent (despite being literally named Poindexter) has some actual union bonafides, so there's a decent chance this sinks Miller, especially if the child abuse gets substantiated. Unfortunately, he didn't have a primary challenger. He could drop out until August 5th, but it's going to be a pretty hard battle to do it and I don't think he has the stones for it.
((Though there's very much a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' here: Ohio's general voting population just doesn't care that much about an under-limit crash where no one was hurt but a lamppole, or about MDMA use. That might genuinely not have even have counted as driving under the influence under state law at the time of the crash.))
Hot off the Platner scandal, here comes Max Miller one upping him.
That is a fascinating choice of words where one party was credibly accused of multiple counts of rape, and it's not the "one up".
And the daughter for some reason seems to be scared of her father, so even if he didn't cause this particular injury it's not a great sign.
I'll caveat that they're in a very messy divorce and custody proceeding, and there's serious questions that one has (alleged misdiagnosed) BPD (and, tbf, I'd only be surprised for Miller in the sense that he doesn't seem likely to get diagnosed by consent). And the guy's a genuine putz and has been known to be one for a long time, ranging from fighting a glass window at a hookah bar to allegedly slapping Grisham. Which remains a good argument about him not getting reelected, but it makes the factual claims specific to each case a lot less strong than they look at first glance.
Likewise, it's very strange that his alleged expulsion didn't surface in the first election, and the claims are messy: both Mother Jones and the court filings jump between whether Miller "faced" expulsion or was actually expelled, and despite Mother Jone's attempt to frame the court transcript carefully, Miller did specifically deny (and offer to prove non-existence of) the expulsion to the New York Post. The stairs incident was brought up in 2021, but it's also almost twenty years after it allegedly happened now, released by someone who's name isn't on the record, and echoed by people talking as much about rumors or 'fits his character' than actually seeing whatever happened.
There's credible reasons no one can find proof - the former would only exist in records protected by federal law, the latter was allegedly a high-school party where no one was injured and the core of the allegation is just shoving someone at a wall - but it's still not very persuasive on its own.
The child abuse one and the water incident are the most impactful, but they're also the most dependent on facts not in evidence. The child's injuries were investigated and the allegations found "unsubstantiated", and the prosecutor's office that would have been involved doesn't exactly scream 'MAGA diehard'. The boiling water one fell in similar bounds, and was messy enough That Right-Wing Rag couldn't come out and call it clearly proven. The reddened skin is more than we have for Katie Portner, to be fair!
But if you are going to say "they" like crime, "they" have a strategy, etc., you need to talk about specific groups, not big nebulous groups like "the left." Unless you want to defend the proposition that literally everyone on "the left" likes criminals and dislikes people who arrest criminals.
Would you allow that? Because it doesn't seem hard.
There might be violent criminals that no one's going to accuse the Left of liking, such as the Olympic Park bomber (although.... There are definitely 'criminals' like Dexter Taylor that none of the institutional and anti-racist left cares about, no matter how grossly unreasonable their charges or sentence. The steelman is the same argument with asterisks and fancier words. If you want to be charitable to a fault you can give a paean to criminal justice reform and trying to fight recidivism in the dumbest way possible when anyone notices the constant and consistent low-ball numbers going left-ward, and when people notice the harsh punishments going one direction wave your hands about anti-racism and sentencing disparities.
But then I'll point to Matthew Dolloff again.
If I were to tell you there was a vehicular homicide attack this week, and that the murderer had a long history of past association with violent crime before this event but was left off with a slap on the wrist in the one case he was convicted over, what do you think the odds would be for political alignment? Because a 7B LLM can tell you, and that single fact distinguishes the case from the counterexamples someone like MKC's going to try and reach for. Hell, if I scratch out vehicular homicide, there was a mass shooting, too, and guess what?
Because there's a connecting thread, here, even as Tuscon Arizona and Germany are geographically and politically quite far from each other.
And the trivial disclaimer that would cover even the most self-aggrandizing defense progressives bring up doesn’t seem likely to actually solve your Reddit complaint.
The asterisks and handwaves are pretty naked. Yes, there's a tiny number of people who are leftist or liberal and Actually Committed To The Bit, and a larger number that pretend at it when it doesn't cost them anything. We have numbers, here: at most one-in-seven Democratic voters thought this wonderful array of comments weren't okay, and that's assuming that none of Jay Jone's many other scandals persuaded a single person. Is the requirement here sated if the OP had stuck "A strong majority of the progressive movement and almost all of its major advocates and leadership" in place of the first "They"?
Ten months ago, in response to the Kirk shooting, I gave you a list of varied bad actors ranging from federal Congress down to my own literal recreational social environments, predicting that none of them would be punished in the immediate aftermath. None of them were, and the only arguable examples in the following ten months was James getting suspended for other unrelated conduct, and TheSchism -- the 'we absolutely don't allow dehumanizing our political enemies place' -- have its eventual retrospective include "Kirk should not be dead. But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing." go unmoderated.
gattsuru
1d ago
I'm sure she will. But the standard of review is pretty deferential, Minnesota is heavily slanted when it comes to the appeals bench, and Hendrix isn't going to get (or be able to get, or be able to distinguish) the sort of legal force necessary to show up as anything more than an example of an 'unsophisticated' defendant.
Which might cost her less than she makes in GiveSendGo funds? But that's a hilarious indictment of the entire legal system, and requires approximating tail end risks.
gattsuru
1d ago
The Post Millenial has the jury instructions (... hosted by scribd, because fuck everything).
They are very much what a lawyer trying to cover the bases looks like, rather than a serious grappling with the First Amendment concerns... but that's probably enough to let the conviction hold, especially since the only review Hendrix gets is a universally DFW-aligned state bench (the only federal court that could hear her case is SCOTUS). In practice, she's going to be a moron for appealing anyway -- there's no way it costs her less than a thousand bucks or a couple hundred hours to actually bring the appeal, winning won't get her money back, and she's not going to win -- but that doesn't make the justice system look better.
gattsuru
3d ago
Oddly, she wasn't convicted for yelling at the kid, presumably because the fighting words doctrine would be especially inapt there.
gattsuru
3d ago
In addition to first-party updates and collabs, I'd hope for good modding support: the game could do a hell of a lot if it attracts some of the ARK and Minecraft modders. The infrastructure isn't there for it in the game yet, though.
gattsuru
3d ago
I like matcha, but I also like glass jelly and root beer, so some of this might just be a raw different tastes thing. That said, there are some fantastic options for boba; most shops will have mango tea and coconut jelly as an option, and so long as you get it low sugar it's very hard to dislike.
gattsuru
4d ago
What's the term for "This nonsentient tool that I asked to write a character summary and run a linter just installed python and a venv that I thought I'd blocked it from doing." Because that seems something different from error/loss, and it's something I hit with Pi-agent, a pretty minimal skill harness, and a 26B model.
gattsuru
5d ago
There was a bit of a bump in the Steam Hardware Survey, but it's held in the 3.5%-4% range, and there's no real breakdown of how and what demographics.
That said, Linus's "linux challenge" this year went from the normal joke where it seemed like he was intentionally trying to fuck things up, to a pretty serious effort where a handful of the people stuck with it at the end, and I have had actual students actually interested in trying it out.
gattsuru
6d ago
Botched several connections on v0.1 of the educational robot mainboard (thank you Chinese display board for having your FPC pins start with 1 on the right), but got enough to implement the inter-circuit comm UART, negotiation, and watchdog behavior. Next big push is trying to get over-wifi debugging running; it's theoretically plausible and realistically a nightmare with warnings like "don't use the second core of this processor defined by its multicore capability". Got some fixes in, and trying to figure out if I'm willing to deal with tuning my own NFC sub-board before I order v0.2.
Trying to throw together an agentic layout for editing, proof-reading, summarizing, pulling style notes from, and continuing a story. There's a lot of attempts, here, at varying levels of success, but the state of the ecosystems is just absolutely terrifying, and that's the '''good''' stuff rather than OpenClaw. Not just the obvious but hard problems like 'how do we set up permissions and access rules', though it's disappointing that the answer to that is near-universally 'docker' at best. I get the core idea of content-as-code, but holy shit people. Just because you want your LLM to be able to modify your template files doesn't mean they need to sit in the same directory as your output files!
gattsuru
7d ago
Fair. I'll admit I lost interest in the books pretty early, so probably munging some stuff.
gattsuru
7d ago
Early anime convention norms were weird: a lot of their institutional genealogy derived from watch parties and the movie equivalent of tailgating. Some of the awkward spots were people taking online mannerisms to reality, but there's also a lot of places where a norm developed organically in smaller and intimate settings, then melted when it went super-Dunbar.
I thought the show played the long-standing incest side up? Or did they only run the 'get caught and shoved kid out window' incident from her adulthood? At least in the books, it's pretty explicit that Jaime and Cersei screwed disturbingly early.
If so, fair, will focus the complaint on Daenerys
gattsuru
7d ago
Goblin Slayer's fair, but it's a little noncentral. Even stuff like Brand New Animal that screams furry and ended up with a small gooner-focused fandom (6k images on e621) is a lot cleaner as an actual work.
The sexposition in Game of Thrones was gratuitous (and kind of fun sometimes), but at least they were adults.
Cersei Lannister is 15 at the start of the series, and Daenerys Targaryen is 16 or 17. At least it's an improvement over the books: Daenerys is 13 there when she's 'married' to Drago, but still made the feminist crowing pretty awkward back when Season 1 first came out.
gattsuru
7d ago
Got her PhD in 1999, so my guess would be early-50s to mid-50s.
Some of the weirdness is an aspect of this form of academia having aimed for obscurist focuses, but I think her position is still pretty vapid underneath that.
gattsuru
7d ago
Yeah. You need a flat or mostly-flat edge a little wider than the rivet head; anything too curved will slip over the rivet, and anything sharp will dig into the surface of the plate instead. And they are much stronger, which matters more with decent quality knives than walmart-grade ones (440j isn't brittle, I'll give it that), but since you're using a knife like a chisel on metal, you want every bit of redundancy you can get.
While there's a few other cases the tantoized shapes make sense (uh, mostly leather or upholstery work?), for most cases I wouldn't recommend it.
gattsuru
7d ago
Sorry, typo. Removing rivets, generally from joined plates. If you ask a mechanic, the 'right' way to do it involves a properly matched good quality drill bit, but if you have a good knife or even a wood chisel (and don't mind permanently damaging the knife/chisel!) you can get almost all aluminum rivets out with just the heel of your palm, and some steel rivets out with a good hammer.
gattsuru
8d ago
Most "US" multitools are based around the gerber style, which usually ends up around a 2.5" 'primary' blade. You'll see Swiss Army keychain knives that closer to what you're thinking and are someone common (if considered very much a 'for kids' product, especially Scouting), but the last time I've seen one of the multi-tool-but-tiny versions was well before COVID.
They may be more common on the coasts; New Jersey and Massachusetts have much closer norms around >3 inch knives than the midwest or southwest does.
gattsuru
8d ago
I realize this is a common cultural difference even within the United States, but there's a lot of relevance, anywhere from opening packages to cutting zip ties to prying out heat-set inserts to breaking open containers to stripping cable to trimming plastic nubs.
My uses are a little more common than most people -- I carry the cheapest tantoized blade possible because I've had to derivit aluminum plate in the field enough that it's a parlor trick -- but still, I work in a field with soft hands.
I try not to carry to public events like a concert, but I'll admit I've had to throw mine away a couple times because I just forgot I had it on me and went to a venue that banned them.
ANJRPC v. NJAG Case Law
The Third Circuit has found:
Mea culpa, I expected a loss or a close and constrained ruling, but this is about as broad as the gunnie side of the equation could hope for. The court has directly overturned the state's aggressive (and expanding) assault weapons ban as to rifles, the magazines ban to 10-round limits and strongly motioned about 15-round limits, and it even sent the case back to the district court to take a deeper look at the pistols, shotguns, and 'other weapons' with a pretty strong implication that the bans on those should fail, too. Doesn't mean the lower court will take that seriously, but it's strong encouragement.
The breakdown is interesting.
Freeman, who wrote the fire-breathing main opinion, is an early Biden appointee. In a fairer world, this sort of adherence to the Constitution come hell or high water would be a feather in her cap for cross-party appeal; in this one, it's just going to make her enemies on 'her' nominal side and maybe buy some discretion should a conservative Senate ever go hog-wild investigating Thackerisms. Not that a lifetime appointment as an appeals justice is a bad job. New Jersey built the law here with a ton of interlocking 'workarounds' that didn't exist in practice, with a permit that literally never issued and an attorney general carveout that closed in 1990, and Freeman tears into them fully on the record rather than letting the state skate on them. She's joined by six Trump-appointed judges, two Bush-appointed judges, and one other Biden-appointed judge (Montgomery-Reeves).
Most of the concurrences are just doubling down on that, and giving the state even less benefit of the doubt. No explicit writing from Bove, which would have surprised me but for how complete Freeman's opinion is.
The plain dissents side are pretty unsurprising, except to notice how bizarrely bad they are, even taking their legal positions for granted. Shwartz (Obama) claimed, and three other judges sign onto the claim, that "semiautomatic weapons are unlikely to aid in hunting for food or trophies given the destruction they cause to the target". That's not a serious matter available for debate, or a remotely defensible one; I'm hard-pressed to come up with a justification for it beyond intentionally signaling complete lack of knowledge about basic firearm functioning. Krause (Obama) opens her dissent with a paean to gun manufacturers having "pumped a sufficient (yet undefined) number of them into nationwide circulation", which is very hard to make fit with economic demand so severe that a small industry built up around people throwing together their own, and then later approvingly repeats a claim (from St Eve, a Trump appointee!) that a bullet from an AR-15 "releases ten times the energy of a musket ball upon impact", which is either very confused or simply wrong, since the two rounds from a normal rifle have near-identical muzzle energy and similar impact energy. Smith (Bush) has a one-page dissent motioning to Bianchi, which a) thank you very much Kavanaugh, very useful percolation and b) seems really unlikely to persuade any one of the four SCOTUS justices that already said in Snope's dissent-from-cert-denial or 'statement' that Bianchi was likely in direct conflict with past SCOTUS holdings.
It's worth spelling out how long the case has been bouncing around, and how little intervening SCOTUS jurisprudence seems to have shifted anyone's positions. Shwartz wrote one of ANJRPC's first three-judge appeal opinions in 2018, and while it actually said intermediate scrutiny at the time, it's pretty much the same logic as his position now. Hardiman, Bibas, Porter, Matey and Phipps all dissented from the original denial en banc hearing in November of 2020, before SCOTUS GVR'd the case, and Shwartz, Krause, and Restrepro all voted against rehearing the case back then.
((There's some minor comedy in the breakdown when you look at the original panel: the case was plucked up for en-banc review before judgement after SCOTUS GVR'd it in 2022, but the panel was Freeman, Shwartz, and Smith, aka a 2-1 loss for ANJRPC, and one where Freeman would have been a Biden appointee dissenting in favor of gun rights. Since Freeman had three months between oral arguments and initial en banc, there's probably a fantastic story we'll never hear about how much of this opinion started as a dissent.))
There's a complaint that the majority opinion feels a bit like an amici brief to Viramontes. Montgomery-Reeves's (Biden) concurrence is circumspect to say the court should have waited for SCOTUS before issuing their opinion, but it's not a subtle subtext from a couple dissents.
The mirror to that is that the dissents aren't. Krause's legal theory, defining 'common use' to require common wear for self-defense, is outright incompatible with the history from Heller and makes little if any sense to apply in this route for a bare possession ban. Shwartz promotes the "dangerous and unusual" = "unusually dangerous" rule from Hanson and NAGR, but that's just the interest-balancing test that SCOTUS had repeatedly tried to slap down. Chung's position is straddling both. I'm not going to pretend John "Article III Is <Not> Worth a Dollar" Roberts is steel in his principles, but it's hard to see him reading these dissents as anything but an argument to reward lower court defiance of SCOTUS dicta, and harder still to see these arguments in any other form.
Practical Ramifications
A big question is what, precisely, the court case actually means.
As The_Nybbler is sure to point out, this doesn't actually help with New Jersey's FPIC, where the state has banned mere possession based on people being really annoying. For procedural reasons it's near impossible to challenge a specific FPIC denial in federal courts unless and until SCOTUS grants cert for a state court decision because petitioners are encourage to bring their statutory appeal in front of a state judge (and may have to in order make their claim ripe and redressable for a federal as-applied lawsuit), but once they've done so federal district and appeals courts are constrained from reviewing a case or controversy that has already been litigated in state courts. That's the San Remo trap in takings clause jurisprudence, but applied with a felony charge. There might be workarounds -- San Remo got a bypass through Knick -- but Knick took decades, and is pretty tied to takings clause process stuff. Facial challenges are a little easier to bring, but post-VanDerStok, they're also facing a hell of an uphill battle, because no matter how arbitrary the 'essential character and temperament' requirement might be, not issuing permits to a convicted felon is legitimate. There's a tension here where SCOTUS seems to bring that Salerno 'no set of circumstances' strictly or not depending on the context, but even if FPICs are closer to Heller than VanDerStok, it's a long shot.
New Jersey's post-Bruen tantrum bill still makes carry licenses incredibly difficult to get and useless if achieved, and while Koons is still outstanding and before the same court, a ruling in this case is only tea leaves for a ruling in Koons. Outside of pure impossibility, the court here doesn't really handle pretextual restrictions. And there's obviously no ruling on the pistol, shotgun, or other weapon restrictions; that's on the lower court.
But there's also the question of the four corners of the ruling itself.
This is a first, both as an en banc circuit court striking down a broad assault weapon/magazine ban, and for a gun case with a broad and immediate impact. Bruen and Heller and McDonald were all permission to get a license or registration that previously wasn't possible at all, leading to Heller needing to wait months to register his specific gun from the case (and being denied for a semiautomatic handgun), and to New York City spending years with fewer issued carry permits than before Bruen. Here, removing the law it itself a categorical switch, and one that covers a wide variety of locations, both in New Jersey and in Delaware, and blocks some Pennsylvania bills that were getting increasing political pressure. But.
New Jersey residents can't go out and buy an AR-15 legally, yet. Under federal court rules, the opinion drops (in cases without a federal law), then there's a two-week period to submit a request for a stay or rehearing, and then a week after that, mandate issues to the lower courts. The precedent is set with the ruling, but the law gets to stay in effect until mandate issues, or if a stay is granted, until the stay concludes. That'd be July 31st for New Jersey's deadline, and August 7th for the mandate issuing. Possibly plus a couple days; ANJRPC is saying that the court clerk is planning to actually issue on August 10th.
But New Jersey resident can't go out and buy an AR-15 practically, yet, because in the state, it's only legal to buy a firearm from an FFL with a state Retail Firearms Dealer's License. Those regulations mean that the merchant has given permission to regular warrantless searches, and a single illegal transaction (even if under a law he or she can't be prosecuted for at the time of inspection) could mean waving goodbye to the licenses and thus business. The various laws about import and transfer weren't cleanly blocked by this opinion, cfe again Nybbler's complaints. And it's illegal for a New Jersey resident to go out-of-state to buy a rifle from someone, or for an out-of-state FFL to sell a gun to New Jersians, even if the buyers were willing to roll the dice on the possession ban.
Magazines, however, don't hit any of those requirements. The big vendors aren't going to ship them to a New Jersey address because they'll get sued, and even a meritless suit is expensive as hell. And New Jersey has been aggressive about lawsuits targeting vendors who sell lawful gun components under other theories. But in practice, there's a lot of merchants who were selling normal magazines, and an even larger number of private sales that would be practically impossible to trace or recover damages from, and they've all had very good business the last week and a half.
From a purely legal perspective, that's banned by the law, which is still in force. In practice, the state of New Jersey is physically incapable of bringing a case to trial in a month, and it would struggle to bring a case to trial before the end of SCOTUS's next session, and pretty much restricted to the case where SCOTUS GVR's ANJRPC post-Viramontes. If you think SCOTUS won't actively support the ban here, New Jersey's ability to actually convict under the law is nearly a dead letter. But before mandate issues, a police officer arresting you can argue that the unconstitutionality of his behavior was not clearly established, and you still get to spend days, weeks, or months in jail, have an arrest record, and have your FPIC(s) revoked for it. Of course, it's not like police arresting people over an unconstitutional statute reliably breaks qualified immunity even after literal decades after final judgement, so that's always at least a possible problem, but here it's more on the plausible side.
So I don't recommend, for your first state felony, taking a photograph and posting it on social media. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but it's probably not the best plan.
No small number of people did it, though, and given things like California's Freedom Week, there's not-crazy motivations for everything up to the photograph part.
Legal Strategy
Which means a big question is what New Jersey does. California's Freedom Week was a week because California sought, and received, a stay. Courts have traditionally been very generous when staying rulings affecting a significant law, and SCOTUS in particular has been much more willing to stay pro-gun rulings than anti-gun ones. The smart money was that New Jersey would seek a stay and request cert from SCOTUS. Even if the state didn't receive cert, or even if they lost the case, the law could stay in effect for several months longer. Which also allows the state's legislature to write workarounds and successors to the law, like a slightly-less-impossible registration or permitting requirement. ANJRPC themselves predicts:
So far, New Jersey has not, and has not yet committed to doing so. New Jersey's Attorney General doesn't even have a current statement on their website; it posted an image on Facebook without any clear statement beyond "considering our options". There's been a sequence of short e-mails that have gone out to merchants from the state police, but that started by giving the wrong date and has since turned into 'wait for further guidance'. It's possible the police don't know, either.
So there's some difficult questions, here. And it's not clear what New Jersey's legal side is doing. Possibilities:
fantasieshopes that there would, at some point, be a Second Amendment loss so severe that an anti-gun state would accept it rather than risk SCOTUS making a disliked standard apply across the country. There's been a few close examples, though typically motivated by other forces (eg, Range was a Trump DoJ refusing to appeal; NYRSPA I and Teter v Hawaii were tactically mooted). It's hard to see the benefit to that, here: SCOTUS already has granted cert in Viramontes on assault rifles, and has Duncan, Lamont, and Gator's Custom Guns sitting on ice and available to grant for magazine bans. But I guess appealing it might inform SCOTUS of a circuit split, as if 28(j) letters didn't exist?I dunno. This case isn't equivalent to Obergfell, or Lawrence, where laws across the country were changed overnight in manners that had street celebrations acting on the newly recognized rights. It's limited to a single circuit, and even the broadest ramification is going to get some resistance, and that resistance isn't going to get the Kim Davis treatment. But it could mean something for hundreds of thousands of real people, as much as The_Nybbler's not going to be able to join that cohort without fleeing the state.
Maybe. This is the commitment now to say it's matters if it does, and it matters if it doesn't.
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