gattsuru
4hr ago
[cw: very uncomfortable discussion of the history of legal prohibitions on child abuse. Caveat, I like my men older and hairier, so I'm non-representative on several different fronts.]
Moreover the historic and current reasoning behind the age of consent is well-documented.
I have tried to have debates on it and I can't. There are no good arguments in favor of high ages of consent as far as I can find.
It's a bit of a mess because the historical norms are based on chastity/purity concerns for girls, physical injury for boys, and corruption of a minor for both in the literal sense of encouraging bad actions, mixed with a handful of shame on the family unit. Since chastity-as-a-property died off, and corruption of a minor was slowly reframed in these contexts as speaking ill of the fundamental character of the victim, physical injury ended up trying to serve as a (poor) bridge through the 1960s and 1970s. That's how you get stuff like the Breendoggle, where very serious and pedophile-not-ephebophile-specific child abuse was happening openly and people waved it off as just an old man being weird, or some of the really creepy minimum-age-with-parental-consent laws. Where norms did show up, they were present in the sense that this was something as shameful to the victim as the perpetrator.
((That last bit was made worse because a lot of 1940s and 1950s studies on actual pedophiles-not-ephebophiles relied on self-reports from interviews with offenders, who unsurprisingly claimed to have been 'seduced', and generalized it to ephebophile contact. You may now throw up in your mouth a little bit. Psych studies have never been very robust.))
The modern social norms are downstream of a handful of social analysis hitting at several different rungs.
The concept of child physical abuse as causing long-term psychological harm started in the 1960s, but over the next decade there was a sudden and broad deluge of early child sexual abuse by people it seemed to have screwed up really bad, starting from incest and then bringing in other trusted adult figures, along with enough confessions by people on the supply side of the sexual abuse that the reports couldn't be handwaved away as confabulation or attention-seeking. This is what you're putting in the "trauma" bin. Psychiatrists put together the theory that serious abuse by trusted figures who applied shame or coercion changed how the victim saw the world, and this seemed to show up everywhere from suicidal ideation to depression to difficulty forming friendships to norm abuses to extremes of over- and under-expression of sexuality. Some of this is probably confounded to hell and back (a repeated discovery was prostitutes very often having a history of being molested as a child, which is plausible for causative reasons... but also coincides with almost half of those from a very-poor upbringing in this time period reporting being molested), but the only real serious discussion is how much is downstream of the physics of the abuse and how much from the coercion and shame.
While the trauma/harm approach was clearest for <14s (the pedophiles-not-ephebophiles), the literature had enough cases for late teenagers that it was illustrative, if not predictive.
Second, you've got the growth of pornography, and how it highlighted types of conduct that weren't really visible before. Before the 1970s, CSAM was largely seen as vice (by consumers) and corruption of minors or obscenity (by the manufacturers); even where severe aggravating conduct was present, the imagery would have just been evidence of that crime, rather than a crime itself. With cameras and early printing materials becoming available as personal tools, though, it became apparent that there was demand for younger persons not just by actual pedophiles-not-ephebophiles, but also by manufacturers that saw them as easy marks.
The caps at the higher end are really recent -- there's a reason that in the UK into the 1980s, you could have a newspaper with photos of a topless 16-year-old delivered to your front door and it'd be only be noteworthy because The Sun was considered a schlocky tabloid, and the US had 16-year-old models or 'high school juniors and seniors' as a common media subject up until the 1960s. Though I'll note that they weren't the standard, either, even when not prohibited.
This eventually culminated in the Traci Lords scandal in the United States. She was 15 when she began 'production', continuing for multiple years. While California was somewhat unusual in having a state CSAM law and that law going to age 18 from its initial enactment, the bit where she was very well-known for multiple years and a sizable amount of material before anyone actually started enforcement was a wake-up call that both state and federal law was toothless.
Worse, her case was pretty much a perfect storm of everything that social conservatives had listed in their parade of horribles. She claimed to be 'consenting' (and was, by the standards of the time, well-paid), but that she also had no understanding of the genuine ramifications of working the field, had zero alternatives, and a massive power disparity that the manufacturers were pretty happy to (by their own legal defense unknowingly) exploit. Her off-screen boyfriend was seven years older than she was, when she was 15. She claims that her drug use didn't coincide with or cause the abuse during actual sex scenes, but that's... something social conservatives were skeptical about, and at minimum she claimed she was plied with alcohol and cocaine when 'modeling' turned into 'nude modeling'. In her personal life, she claimed to have been raped or molested at the age of 10, had some sort of fucked up relationship with her stepfather, and been impregnated and had an abortion by 15; she publicly claimed that the industry had exploited her naivety and teenage lashing out, and that her attempts to leave and get a normal job had been badly undermined until federal law and the scandal forced her out.
When the scandal came out, it resulted in the modern record-keeping requirements and bumped the federal age limit from 16 to 18. While it originally issued under the theory the top end of the age limit was meant to avoid issues where a 15-year-old might have been hard to distinguish from a 16-year-old, enforcement quickly standardized as Lord's full story came out.
Lastly, you've got the Guttmacher Institute and related studies in the 1990s finding that under-18 pregnancies clustered such that a large number of fathers were several years older than the mothers. Qualitative data was a lot less clear, but what was present suggested a massive amount of interaction that was abusive on top of the age gap. This is definitely paternalistic to some degree, but it's a space with a broad disparity of power, serious impact on normal upbringing, and a lot of potential abuse. It was a lot easier to ignore age of consent's exact gap when the central case was a 17-year-old and his 16-year-old girlfriend, than when it was a 30-year-old giving a 16-year-old cash or an ultimatum, and there was enough of the latter to be a serious statistic.
In short, those last two had the ephebophiles-not-pedophiles ended up looking real bad. Not every single one -- afaict, Lord's porn star boyfriend seems to be about as sympathetic as a statutory rapist passing a 15-year-old pot can get, at least compared to the James Deen sorts -- but enough that the norm established pretty quickly and broadly. And because it's so new and shallow, it's deeply uncomfortable to discuss or analyze at depth.
gattsuru
14hr ago
I can't find the contract award specific on govspending, which isn't unusual for this class of stuff, but may be a sign it's not available for the public, which is pretty common for military stuff. Alternatively, this report says "according to ACC officials, the contract for the Mesquite facility was issued as a task order under the property management contract for the Scranton Ammunition facility and not as a separate contract", which would make specifying the requirements harder, so it may just be extremely poorly drafted. Or both.
That same document does show (pg 6) a letter of concern in October 2024 and a stop work order in August 2025, which points to there being some metric. That said, there's also just a general any-cause ability for the feds to stop payments for work not yet completed, as many contractors who have performed well have learned at significant cost, so it doesn't mean a ton.
gattsuru
1d ago
We've been agitating for criminal and police reform for years if not decades, and nobody listened until the riots started. We've got two relatively centrist proposals in congress right now unless things have changed since the last time I looked. Unfortunately, if we don't make it outrageous or biased the inertia of the system is too great to actually change anything. Do you think Mitch McConnell would ever have allowed that bill if it weren't for George Floyd and the subsequent reaction?
Maybe another part of the polarization in this country is that you have to dial it up to 11 to ever change anything whatsoever. If the right had listened to us years ago, would we have had the riots we had? Will the right listen to us now on trans rights, or is it going to take a trans woman getting raped or murdered on camera and more rioting before we can do anything about that issue?
Probably not. Sonmez was fired, but it took a six-day tweetstorm (and, frankly, a psychotic break), presumably with a bunch of warnings, and she had past bad conduct and punishment (including a previous incident involving a tragic death). Horwitz got a short suspension for plagiarism (copying two paragraphs about a legal regime), not a firing. Achenbach's hard to tell since it's a MeToo era case, so no idea where to put it except to say he was only suspended. In other cases, people just duck out of the business in a 'you can't fire me I quit sense': Cooke was definitely worse, and 'Ratfucker' Weigel wasn't worse and resigned or got a suspension, depending on which time you want to go with.
If you include other major press, you can find examples, even union shops like McNeil from the NYT or government-adjacent groups like Williams at NPR. But they're a different CBA or legal regime.
Of course, that leaves us debating whether a major newspaper has its hands tied because the staff behaved, or the previous owners were nutjobs letting bad behavior go reign free, long enough.
I notice that the arbitrator did not point to a part of the contract defining or limiting the bounds of "gross misconduct". Instead, she made a comparison to someone not covered by the policy to begin with, and described his situation in the last favorable manner.
gattsuru
1d ago
Oh boy! Time to be disappointed in society, maybe a little stressed out.
Fair strike. This is a smaller and less doom-scrolly one, but in turn, it's still pessimistic. I was actually trying to write up the silencer shop stuff last week, and that's more optimistic, but it also just turned into this giant nest of conflicting legal theory instead of anything interesting.
Thiessen was the bar to clear. If the Post had booted him, or if Attiah had been obviously more extreme, I expect the arbitrator would have gone the other way.
Ignoring for now that Thiessen was not subject to the text of the Social Media Agreement or collective bargaining agreement, the allegations here are that he :
- "Harris voting women are what's wrong with America"
- "got a point" to a "Fck all the media and the liberal democrats" and (ai-gen? badly-done?) needlepoint involving the word "stupidfucks"
- reposted a call to 'make this sick libtard famous' for a woman who reposted a comment calling Kirk a "yt supremacist" and "reimagined Klan member"
- "You're not a Christian minister buddy"
- "Fire them all" in response to "Whoever shot Charlie Kirk, thank you!"
- "Let’s identify this ghoul and make him unemployable" to a video of someone using a megaphone to 'sing' "we got charlie in the neck"
- "Fire him" to "Once again Charlie Kirk you reap what you sow."
- "What’s her name and where does she work?" to "I'm just really glad Charlie Kirk just go himself fucking shot.... so no one should give a fuck that he's dead."
- "Dishonorable discharge is in order" to a video that begins with "fuck Charlie Kirk"
- "Expel them" to... well, you can watch the video.
These might have been inadvisable. I could argue that at least some of the efforts were disproportionate. I can believe an arbitrator thinks they have similar violations of rules.
I don't believe that they're similar violations of rules. And I note that the arbitrator neither did actually show that, nor summarized them accurately.
gattsuru
1d ago
but I am not sure we're allowed yet to say it aloud. It beings with "nu"...
I'm hoping it happens, but it's best-case scenario is multiple years out for new construction, and the power factor stuff can be difficult: AI data centers shouldn't be very prone to microsurges, but it seems like they're still fighting technical problems on that.
power prices (which I assume is BS too, local utilities are usually under local control and can just ration the power if they want to)
They can ration in the same sense that they can deny construction permits, but utilities boards are a lot less responsive to direct votes.
But this wouldn't move the public opinion in any way.
Fair.
gattsuru
1d ago
Could be, and I don't have the tooling to check Ohio numbers on those. Would be stupid to pay them less than a McDonald's and sit them in front of million-dollar servers, but wouldn't be the first stupid thing.
gattsuru
1d ago
The ongoing "jobs" they create are usually something like eight security guards working part time for $18/hour with no benefits.
Ohio's about the lowest cost-of-living state that has a serious data center presence. It's hard to get great numbers given "data center guard" includes everything from armed and security-cleared to glorified stor-all clerk, but at least from a quick check all the big name AI ones look to be starting at 30/hour and better benefits than I've got now.
There's just not many jobs there.
gattsuru
1d ago
As best I can tell from reading the decision the incorrect quote of Kirk didn't come up in the firing context at all.
The termination letter gives examples that don't include the incorrect quote; the strict text of "Your public comments on social media regarding the death of Charlie Kirk" do.
As a white man myself, I don't feel disparaged by either post.
That's nice, but the test is not traditionally resolved by finding one person with thick skin.
The only other basis given for the firing was the alleged security threat due to other people threatening Attiah for her posts on the topic. I generally think it would be a bad precedent to set that you can get fired because other people communicate threats against you.
Fair, and agreed.
More generally, I think this illustrates the advantage of having a union!
I think it illustrates the advantage of having a union for Attiah. Even in the rare winnable case for a conservative, there's limited way to get the union involved or punish it where it encouraged the unlawful firing, short of winning the case first (and sometimes not even then).
gattsuru
1d ago
The water numbers are wholly made up, but they would be a serious problem if true, and there's been a lot of people pretending that they're true. I can aggressively claim that AOC is a liar -- she's a politician, her mouth is moving -- and recognize that just because people believe her doesn't make them liars.
The electrical consumption and power density concerns are genuinely unusual: some of the larger AI-driven data center plans involve gigawatt values, compared to tens of megawatts for a conventional server farm data center or normal manufacturing plant. The only really comparable industrial plants are the biggest aluminum smelters, and the US has largely stopped anything on that scale. For the most part, this hasn't impacted rates themselves directly, but it's lead to a number of areas being under surge pricing over more of the day, and it's likely to take a few years to fix. Some of this is overstated, since it's been a hot summer and you'd expect increased surge pricing anyway, but the impact does exist.
That's sometimes lead to onsite gas turbine builds, which are genuinely loud.
Some of it's concern about corporation, rather than data centers specifically: see AOC v. Amazon in 2019 for less principled example that rhymes closely, but there have been genuine problems in much of the Rust Belt with various organizations promising a ton of great things in exchange for support today, and those great things getting sidelined with the next business downturn. AI coming after bitcoin and such doesn't help.
((A smaller number are video game fans who want to buy RAM sometime this decade.))
But it's mostly an objection to the technology using whatever arguments are available. Some of that's principled, if not necessarily a principle I agree with: there are genuine problems with the use of AI for spamware, scamware, and employment war crimes; there are some economic concerns that are serious; there's a lot of copyright and intellectual property claims that people make with a straight face. A larger number are anti-these-vibes. And others are just generically anti-big tech.
gattsuru
2d ago
Washington Post v. Karen Attiah
An arbitrator has asked and answered:
As remedy for its violation of the CBA, The Post is ordered to reinstate the Grievant and make the Grievant whole, including full backpay and lost benefits.
Mrs. Attiah is the Washington Post writer who rather famously and falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk had said "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously" in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's murder. I was going to say ex-, but that's not the case anymore. It's now established rule that the Washington Post can not fire someone merely for dancing publicly in the blood of a recently murdered man to disparage people on the basis of race and gender, and making false claims while doing so.
In this case, at least.
There's a legal formalist perspective where this is defensible. The Post may have included all of Attiah's post-shooting posts in the strict text of the termination letter, but they only quoted a couple posts, so maybe the arbitrator felt that the rest weren't sufficiently plead. Though she does spend enough time to repeat, without noting as false, the false attribution of the quote to a dead man. The Post did argue 'security concerns' at length, and the extent that rhymes with a heckler's veto isn't a great policy matter to rest on. The comparisons to Dave "Ratfucker" Weigel and a random contractor not covered by the stated policies might be pretty nakedly different conduct given context, but perhaps if you squint hard enough and there's no other comparisons, you get stuck with the bad approximations. Attiah isn't a government employee, but she is a union one, so as tempting as the obvious Damore comparisons get, they do have limits.
But it's still the floor, now.
gattsuru
4d ago
I think it would help if the electrical problem was solved (or, as I think is likely over the long term, net-positive, since increased and movable load encourages development of cheaper base power), for the really minor 'follow whatever current thing is on the news' opposition, but yeah. There's a pretty significant number of people who are opposing them from an artist, intellectual services worker, writer, and video gamer perspectives, where the electrical supply and water concerns are just arguments as soldiers. And then there's the general nimbyist perspective.
Arguments-as-soldiers doesn't make the argument wrong, but it does change whether and how it should be reviewed.
gattsuru
4d ago
The technology does generalize surprisingly well, but it's the space with the least good returns on investment and the hardest economic overhead.
gattsuru
4d ago
Pearson v. Port of Morrow is mostly about agricultural nitrate use and bad filtering approaches by the Port during wastewater treatment (and, allegedly, overt dumping). Amazon's just not mechanically plausible for more than a couple percent of nitrogen in the system; they're just not that big a source of incoming wastewater and they can't be concentrating that heavily. They settled for 'go away' money.
The Morgan County story looks to have turned out to be the normal effects of construction, and hard to distinguish what portion (if any) is specific to the data center construction.
gattsuru
4d ago
Ah, thanks. Think the original supports the emergencyist-exist and "stonetoss author hasn't been shot in the head yet" conclusion, too.
gattsuru
4d ago
This is an area with complex caselaw, mostly in the sense that no one wants to bring a marginal case, rather than the judicial holdings actually blocking the law or invalidating it as applied to these cases. In practice, that means it doesn't matter from a legal realist perspective, but from a legal formalist perspective, the situation is much more mixed than you'd expect. Even the central SCOTUS cases include excretory functions despite few people having a watersports kink, for example.
And the real test is going to be public indecency, which SCOTUS has largely treated as a separate and much more favorable standard than obscenity.
I'm sure there are a few gooner types with weird fantasies about unicorns with hard cocks
I have some fantastic news for you about the brony and furry fandom. If you want more detail, I can even provide recommendations. But in practice that would fall under Mishkin v. New York, in ways that a statue in public would not.
Link?
Uh... I can't find an original link, so on investigation it looks to have been a meme edit. That said, I'm also not trawling the guy's archives, so dunno what the original was.
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, here.
There's been a prolonged effort in the aftermath of the replication crisis to attempt various semi-automated 'this paper looks scuzzy' approaches across publicly available papers. A small portion have been from people like Elisabeth Bik, where a combination of domain knowledge and an extremely precise eye have shown clear evidence of photoshopped data. Historically, though, most of these have relied on things like granularity mismatches (eg, sample of 20 with a x3% result) or other discipline-neutral tricks. Even here, there's a lot of dependence on tips and snitches, because it's still somewhat manual and requires some expertise, but in theory anyone with Excel and moderate training on simple statistics can do it. Sometimes they'll get lucky and study authors will publish their data, and that can be validated too, but often then it's only being examined to check for the shallowest level of scrutiny. It makes sense to focus on these shallow, indirect tests, since no one can be an expert in a thousand different topics at once to focus on field-specific problems.
But now there's a machine that's very good at providing an expert's knowledge in a thousand different topics, and you can ask things like 'hey, do all the numbers in this article match the tables' or 'does this conclusion follow the data' or 'what's the noise level on these sensors look like' or 'does this experimental setup make sense'. It's not a hundred percent, and you'll need human or expert review, but I think you could filter a million papers down at 95% accuracy without needing a datacenter of your own.
Some number, which I hope is pretty small, are just going to be frauds, or fakes, or such a clear math or chemistry or physics error that it's academic misconduct, no question. Abstracts that give the opposite conclusion as the data, mechanical assemblies that couldn't exist, electrical systems that wouldn't work, numbers or statistics that couldn't possibly have an honest source, or just paper mills. These are the sort of things that sometimes come to light today, and will probably be higher-visibility under this sort of scrutiny, but unless they're extraordinarily common, it's a scandal about that researcher or that paper or that university-in-name-only.
The machines aren't going to stop, there.
A lot of published, peer-reviewed, serious journal papers are, separately, junk. Bad math, bad statistics, bad experimental design, failed understandings of other papers, misunderstandings of what a sensor measures, efforts that are editorial stapled onto a physics truism or a splashing a firehose of raw data and skipping the Bonferroni correction and grabbing the first P<0.05, what Gelman calls the 'piranha problem', that sort of thing. They aren't actual academic misconduct: there's no falsified data or making up experiments that weren't run or replacing numbers on a spreadsheet or intentionally lying. It's just trash: something that only applies to this particular experimental configuration, claims to say things about the broader world, and doesn't have any robust data to support its conclusions, and gives a careful reader a half-dozen reasons to know that the data isn't strong enough to support any claim about the broader world.
My current favorite example is from a fracture trial of a bone that was prepared by completely immersing the bone in 132 degree Celsius a ten-liter vat of melted oil-based synthetic ballistics gel, until the gel cooled in a fridge, and then used the bone as a live human analog without any caveats about what the preparation might have done to the bone's collagen. I can completely believe that the experiment was done, and measured as faithfully as the instrumentation allowed. I can also tell you it's completely invalid as a comparison, in ways that the experts in the trial had been trained on, and as is well-established by literature focused on autoclaving bone. Worse, in a way that anyone who's prepared bone stock at home could explain. It's something a 27B param local model can catch if asked to think about , and six trained experts and a handful of peer reviewers didn't think about.
That doesn't mean the answer they got was wrong, which is one of the really damning things. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, after all. It's possible a properly-prepared bone would have fractured under the same conditions, or a validation bone prepared the same way might have shown close-enough properties, or imaging of the bone before the trial to validate its condition. But they didn't do any of those things.
These people are producing papers and doing experiments. They're probably very good at it! The system right now just doesn't care if the study applies to anything outside of their singular test rig, while at the same time depending on people generalizing the research to actual human lives.
I don't know how big the scale of this problem is. It's clearly not all academic research, because academia does produce outcomes like new technologies and generalizable knowledge, and even sociology or history shows some data that a novice can review and find credible. But it's big enough that I can find examples without having to dig through a hundred papers, or focus on the most marginal paper mill.
There's an old joke that if you owe someone a thousand bucks you can't pay, you have a problem; if you owe the bank 100 million you can't pay, the bank has a problem; if you owe the bank 100 billion you can't pay, the economy has a problem.
I think there's something equivalent going on in a number of academic fields. If one in a twenty researchers have a couple meaningless academic papers each, that's a wonderful lesson learned and a little embarrassing and we'll feel a little bad for the cancer patients. If one in a twenty researchers have had, as a majority of their academic output, papers that mean nothing, that's a big problem for research institutions across the planet who've been telling funders and regulators that their independence was critical to efficiency discover the nature of the world, the schools aren't going to be able to use that argument anymore, among other problems. If one in five researchers are majority-slop, it's not the researchers or the schools that have a problem; it's the world.
Even if we end up in the optimistic one-in-twenty-making-mistakes world, I'm not the only person that's going to notice it. I might hope that these people will suddenly become more fastidious about their works, but Ron DeSantis is not going to think hope is a plan. At best, that's going to involve a lot of strong-armed oversight and coercive review in Red States. More plausibly, it's going to be a drastic redirection of funding away from some fields perceived as either dishonest, particularly inaccurate, or particularly easy or impossible to review.
Pessimistically, the last thirty years of science is going to get eviscerated, possibly somewhat literally.
But it's not going to get better by ignoring it.
I'm going to strongly caution about taking any CATO publication at face value, and against using a citation that CATO provides without examining it, in this particular field. They're not the single most dishonest actor, but that's damning with faint praise. Massey 2016 has a ton of bizarre modeling choices, but the most relevant one is that another study he cited and was recent at the time of his publication took the same underlying metrics and used a similar model to separate Border Patrol funding, and came to a drastically different conclusion for the exact same time frame.
Massey's approach only works by relying on survey data to find the most dedicated illegal immigrants, being surprised when they eventually got through, and then declaring enforcement has a null effect on inflows period. Of course reductions in outflows outweigh the impact on inflows once you assume enforcement has no impact on inflows, but that's a much more serious claim, and it's one that's only barely supportable at all, and then only by conflating times where Border Patrol funding wasn't even trying to reduce border inflows with those where it did.
I can't guarantee the counterfactual world without increased border enforcement would have also connected to vastly increased inflows under Massey's metrics, but given that we have the test case of the entire Biden administration, I think it's pretty clear that's a problem with Massey's metrics, rather than the difficulty of modeling the matter.
gattsuru
6d ago
There's a pretty infamous StoneToss comic about "what if the shoe was on the other foot", in case the whole Flight 93 Election spiel wasn't enough of an example of emergencyism on the right. So that's a true matter.
One trouble is that it's hard to tell faux emergencyism from genuine emergencies. StoneToss's author has not, notably, been shot in the back of the head. Hillary Clinton has not driven an aircraft into a government building. Trump has not been lynching any academics.
At the same time, anti-immigration activists reasonably expect a mass amnesty and citizenship drive, since that's what immigration maximalists say that's what they want, and see 10m-40m new citizens as making their positions untenable for a generation directly, in a self-reinforcing way. Trump fans -- and even haters -- can notice that the man was nearly assassinated, had several other serious assassination attempts, and had every other available stop pulled to try and prevent him from having a fair election, including a court order to not count already-cast ballots. Japanese Internment was driven in no small part by the Ni'ihau incident and it doesn't take a paranoid schizophrenic to think about the military ramifications, super-predator theory had a burgeoning set of extremely shocking juvenile violence, there were actual paid-by-Soviet communists even if McCarthyism didn't seem to care about focusing on them, so on.
I'm probably the softer side of the anti-academics. My positive vision for the future involves shoveling the contents of academic journals through an LLM, checking responses for phrases like "The fact that nobody on a team that includes both emergency physicians and biomedical engineers raised this concern suggests nobody stopped to think about it, which is a different kind of failure than not knowing", and then rubbing both the authors and reviewers' noses in it.
But I want that because I think it is an emergency for a sizable fraction of academic researchers, and there's a lot of people who want to go quite a lot further.
And then on the gripping hand, it's very unlikely that Ni'ihau would have generalized to an entire genetic populations, super-predatory theory didn't even have a good model for what was driving juvenile violence and was directionally wrong about what the future held (even if the revisionist take is depending on statistics that are massaged to hell and back), and McCarthyism postdated actual bad acts like the Rosenbergs and instead seemed to focus on useful idiots being useful idiots. Dilulio's estimates of 30k hyperviolent inner-city youths would have been bad, but it would have been the 1980s-bad, not The Purge. An alternate universe where Trump got Kirk'd on national television is a worse one, but it's worse in the sense of civil wars rather than worse in the sense of the conservative project being over.
The failure mode for the academics is reduced funding, loyalty oaths, and Kolmogorov complicity. Ignoring for now how much the same specific people say isn't a big deal for their opponents, this isn't the end of the world.
Which, to be fair to the emergencyists, isn't their red line. And there clearly should be red lines: no matter how much 'the constitution isn't a suicide pact' turned into a really stupid applause light, both as a matter of law and morals, everyone had principles that aren't their ultimate principle, and yet still matter. I'll pick up litter, but I won't run across highway traffic to do so. I'll oppose being rude, but I won't shoot someone solely for being rude.
Meanwhile, it's easy to show how everyone else is drawing unprincipled exceptions that only cover their own or limit their enemies, or taking legal formalism to extremes, and very hard to notice when you are yourself.
I dunno. It's a category that reals, but it doesn't really illuminate.
I'll give some caveats right away: don't expect miracles in terms of prose quality, interesting plots, or coherency of metaphor. This is a moderately useful way to get a story framework without getting stuck on the rough spots, but you're going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get it into a state that's enjoyable even for you to read, and a lot of people will bounce off it no matter how aggressively you edit.
There's a few different approaches. But only a few have good UI, and only a few reliably maintain unused generations, and there's not a ton of overlap.
Most of the standard webuis or desktop ui chatbot implementations do implement what you want, just poorly. LMStudio's probably the best from an organizational perspective, since it supports simple drag-and-drop separate folders and subfolders. Biggest downside's just that it seems pretty abandoned and the company's pivoted to their agentic Bionic tool. Llama.cpp and Unsloth Studio support forking conversations, editing past prompts (or regenerating an answer to an existing prompt, and then switching back and forth from previous versions. They just suck at it, and it's really easy to lose past information if you aren't fastidious about labeling and forking, and even then it gets really messy. Get used to exporting old runs to JSON and sorting them into folders on disk, or you'll go nuts. I will caution that a lot of these want to provide their own endpoint, rather than interface with someone else's, though. Still, it might well be the easiest and most straightforward way to test out if that's actually helpful.
For an example of that approach with prompt-and-response, see here, Muse-Glimmer (imo, not great) or here, Qwen3.8 (almost passable, but definitely not what I was aiming for) (cw: Monty-Python-esque comedic gore, ARK fanfiction). You really don't need much in the way of fancy formatting for individual scenes or five-to-six scene series. For longer series, asking for an outline first, then prompting individual scenes (or parts-of-scenes) from the outline will let you expand into the mid-thirty scenes before it starts to get janky and around sixty scenes before the context starts going loopy.
There's a few dedicated writing tools. Unfortunately, they fail your crucial requirement: they technically support branching, but barely, and they don't enforce it. Just will list them so you know about them. SillyTavern is the roleplay power-user tool. Its support for flicking back and forth from past prompt edits is less good and the UI is a real pain to learn, but it has extremely strong tools for separating characters, worlds, lore, and actual prompts. I will admit I don't have too much experience with it, but I do give it props for not bundling in the inference engine. KoboldCPP is more writing-focused, but takes a similar approach. People tend to be happier about the user-interface, less happy about the inference engine (unfortunately, baked-in hard).
Agentic approaches are more complicated. I've been messing with an agent layout for Claude Code/pi-agent/whatever, and it's powerful, but it's also completely incompatible with the 'preserve past attempts' version. You can tell it to do so, and it might even try for a while, but then it'll just randomly ask for permission to rewrite a file or delete a directory, and it'll usually have good reasons, but it's a pain, and if you bulk-granted edit permissions then you're just out of luck. Maybe some agent framework will have better ways to set up and coerce permissions, but I think it's a dead end for writing prose, specifically. Still need to try out some of the more specialized stuff, just not optimistic.
I've started work on a procedural Java app that might be closer to what you're looking for, and very specifically targeted at writing short stories or novellas, but it's really ugly slop code and barely above a python script right now. If you aren't able to find something in the next week that you like, I'll see if I can get this into a better form.
gattsuru
8d ago
To my surprise, the ATF have not requested a stay, and the injunction has gone into effect. It's pretty complicated what it actually does -- there's separate layers of party membership, other unenjoined federal laws, and a number of state prohibitions -- but there are at least some people able to buy or manufacture silencers today.
It's not clear whether the ATF will appeal.
gattsuru
8d ago
Uh, just realized that the 'days later' bit might have come across as more conspiratorial than the statistics argument I intended, so to spell the statistics out, as far as I can tell, Texas alone has somewhere on the order of 2k second-trimester miscarriages every year, Fermi estimate of a hundred-plus high-risk cases (ruptured membrane or extremely premature labor with a live-but-doomed fetus), you'd expect a couple deaths a year in Texas alone, and tens of cases with gruesome near-death experiences or permanent physical harm. Across all states with second-trimester bans, you'd expects tens of deaths and hundreds of cases. Not every one of those is going to consent to public news coverage, and presumably ProPublica is doing at least some filtering to remove the most arguable cases. It's only weak information, rather than strong. It's still information.
To return to conspiracy, though, I do want to spell out exactly how poorly the cases ProPublica and company does provide do look with a skeptical eye. Walker is one of the most recent, and she died in October 2024, and the story ProPublica offers is terrifying: "Although one doctor documented in her medical record that she was at “high risk of clinical deterioration and/or death,” she was told over and over again that she didn’t need to worry, her relatives say. More than 90 doctors were involved in Walker’s care, but not one offered her the option to end her pregnancy, according to medical records."
I have another quote, though. Texas's Supreme Court held, in May 2024 :
As our Court recently held, the law does not require that a woman’s death be imminent or that she first suffer physical impairment. Rather, Texas law permits a physician to address the risk that a life-threatening condition poses before a woman suffers the consequences of that risk. A physician who tells a patient, “Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed,” and in the same breath states “but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances” is simply wrong in that legal assessment.
and :
Rather, in an enforcement action under the Human Life Protection Act, the burden is the State’s to prove that no reasonable physician would have concluded that the mother had a life-threatening physical condition that placed her at risk of death or of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion was performed. [ed: emphasis in original]
The state's highest court had ruled, without caveat, almost five months before Walker's death. The doctors and the hospital still acted without urgency.
Even by ProPublica's own analysis, this ended up driven heavily by hospital policy in the state with the ban. Notably, Paxton has not arrested, charged, or seriously threatened a single one of the Dallas hospitals or practitioners that ProPublica praises.
gattsuru
8d ago
It's surprising how bad every single coding agent software package is. OpenCode's GUI tool goes the exact opposite direction: it has no way to remove a project from history, up to and including completely uninstalling the tool and deleting its AppData and .local files. Not even a code-level bad decision, someone put effort into making it happen, and I want to club them with a baseball bat.
The CLIs are better, but that just makes it more confusing.
gattsuru
9d ago
I can't give a confident analysis, because I don't have the full information. But I don't think ProPublica's interpretation matches either the text of the statute, nor even the more uncharitable form of the legislative intent. Even ignoring how broad "the exercise of reasonable medical judgment", we normally don't treat prospective rules as bounded by the current situation: saying 'this situation is only going to cause sepsis' is like saying 'this sepsis isn't going to kill you immediately', saying 'we can just treat the infection but not the cause of the infection' is the equivalent of trying to defeat a self-defense case by saying 'you could have just shot it out of their hand'. There is no imminence requirement in the statute, despite ProPublica's direst efforts to imply one, and that's since been supported by the Texas Supreme Court and the relevant medical boards.
That doesn't stop someone from bringing a completely frivolous case, but the same goes for a situation without the law entirely.
Now, I do think it’s reasonable to ask what happened to the potential prosecutions.
Here's where I'll point out that ProPublica is conflating multiple separate legal environments. September 2021 was firmly pre-Dobbs, the defensive decisions here were against SB8's purely civil damages and Texas's not-relevant-here D&E and 20-week bans. There was no risk of prosecution in Barnica's situation; the tradeoff was just civil suit for malpractice versus civil suit under SB8 for abortion.
Now, maybe the doctors and hospitals made the correct (if incredibly immoral) financial tradeoff, here, since they didn't get a malpractice lawsuit! But that's a whole different calculus, and one undermined by there being literally zero successful SB8 civil trials, literally ever.
The fact that it took nearly 3 years between Dobbs and those charges suggests that either Texas isn’t really willing to go after providers or that illegal abortions are in fact hard to find. This is compatible with a strong chilling effect, but it’s not good evidence for it.
Barnica died literally days after SB8 went into effect, and her medical situation is not an uncommon one from a pure statistics perspective, nor one driven by abortion providers. Unless SB8's chilling effect dropped the number of mid-pregnancy miscarriages a couple of orders of magnitude, there's dozens more cases like hers, or this abortion wasn't illegal, there's limits to how far that explanation can go.
I'm less sure about this case than Thurman's, simply because the law was new enough the hospital's legal staff may genuinely have been reviewing it, and I have less information about Barnica's health status. But it's still not a close call on legality, just on moral culpability.
Even under modern law, obscenity as a concept is screwed up. Mishkin is still standing law and has been used by appeals courts post-Miller, and it means obscenity can vary not just depending on the geographic location of the consumer, but sometimes even by the interests of the person creating or circulating it. If I were to forward around a bunch of vore to this forum, it can't be obscene; if I did so to a vore fetishist forum, it would be.
In practice, prosecutions are extremely limited and typically focused on a tiny band of very extreme content, typically by people with aggravating behavior (eg, animal abuse) or written or drawn underage content. But it's one of those big landmines.
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