It is not that you must understand you have their permission, but you must understand that you have the physical power to dominate your partner. This should turn you on alone.
This is a fun kink, but I'm going to caution again that it's very far from universal. There's no small number of people who need that pressure to perform removed to get or stay aroused such that they can top, and a far larger number who don't need it but still like it. And even for explicit power play, there's a lot of fun in a struggle between near-equals, or 'besting' someone and 'forcing' them through pleasure.
Conversely, rounding dominance or submission to height or build (or, uh, for an example you might enjoy, size (cw: nsfw, extremely gay, if you're logged into furaffinity) alone can be dangerous or misleading.
And, bluntly, about the point where rimming enters the scene and makes one of the very rare good arguments in favor of dental dams, 'perversion of nature' is less a problem and more a goal.
Gemini tells me that modern dog breeds are only 50 to 80 generations apart from each other. 50 generations in human years equates to only 1500 years at the high end.
I'll caution that dog breeds had much more aggressive selection pressures (and, even less pleasantly, genetic trees that sometimes didn't even branch).
That she is better off staying close to home and finding a suitable mate nearby. We may imagine the immigration situation to have arisen in the past 20 years but apparently it’s such a deeply ingrained impulse that medieval storytellers had to weave it into their tales centuries ago.
To the extent they exist (the original version of Beauty and the Beast, maybe? The Frog Prince?), it's also worth recognizing that these were cautioning about invaders at a time people from less than a hundred miles away could be foreigners.
There too are men who want to be dominated by women, but I see this as a cope and inversion of their true desires, which is to dominate women, and is borne out of a perception of this being impossible.
Uh... tmi and probably not something you want to hear about, but: woman who wants to top
And for men who are sexually submissive, there's not really a 'true desire to dominate' under things. I'm sure there's 'submissive' men who really want to be on top but have sublimated it, but there's other people for whom it's an obligation. Subbing means letting that responsibility go, or never having to worry that you're pressuring someone, or that your decision might be the wrong one and no one would tell you.
I’m going to call him Brad.[...] In college, we were on a trip to London together, and he immediately met an Italian man a few years older than us, and they immediately became inseparable. Anyway, like I said, this guy is also the most anti-Asian person I’ve ever met. How does this fit with his liberal world view?
At the risk of doing some mind-reading? Does Brad happen to have been raised in the UK or western Europe? Because the differences in how people framed 'asian' between the two continents might explain more than a masc bottom having competition, not least of all given 'size' hangups American tops have about sexual partners that they'd never want to 'use' that size.
Look at Aaron Hernandez. He is one of the hottest men to have ever lived in my opinion.
Uh... can't dispute taste, but even ignoring the murder bit, that's really not high on my list. Not a bad body, but I've seen better faces on Corbin Fisher models. Almost all of them. I guess if you're associating jarheads with masculinity? But I've seen too many of them with their guards down, and Rudy Reyes of Generation Kill would turn every single one of them inside out.
If you don’t believe me and are a man, go outside and walk around until you see a man. Walk so that you are in his way. Do not cede the ground to him. If he is shorter or weaker than you, he will cede the ground and may even apologize, even though you were the aggressor.
It's a little funnier if you're taller and stronger, and you're still unflinchingly polite and responsive to other men. But that does still result in a situation that won't match your expectations. ((Though I'll caveat I've fucked with my head pretty badly to get to that point; I understand that most guys can't and won't do that.))
I have had a handful of instances where straight men smaller than me have fawned to me in the presence of their girlfriends. This is extremely strange to me and I never know how to take it. I wonder if it is an ingrained sexually eugenic impulse. It is as though they are cucking themselves in the presence of a more dominant male.
I'd caution against reading it as a single universal drive. There's definitely a thing some straight guys in progressive spaces do to performatively show themselves as 'a supporting ally' that's definitely not actual submission or even genuine nonchalance about homosexuality. But there's also some straight guys that see openly gay men as a space they can be more emotionally open without a fear of either being seen as cheating (if they were doing it with a woman) or a consent violation (were they doing it with straight men). And then there's some who it's an attempt to patronize from the bottom of your heirarchy, so to speak.
(They did the classical Narnia Witch thing of promising them rooms full of Turkish delight while bringing them nothing but a huge amount of fatigue from the general public and a weird coddling from condescending women and the healthcare industry.)
Yeah, that's plausible. I'm not sure the alternate universe option looks much better -- federal support for transmed stuff was near-universal just for financial pressures, a much milder anti-discrimination push with much stricter gating would have been unavoidable in an Ally's Law sense even without the diehard political front -- but a softer and less confrontational view as crossdressing++ might have left Rowling on the sidelines, even if it still resulted in some rightwing pushback.
But in turn, the ACA's coddling from the healthcare industry was worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the typical trans woman or trans man, so even that would have been a hard-bought compromise within the grassroots of the movement. Nevermind the actual philosophical objection that many have to being seen as crossdressing++ or lifestylers.
gattsuru
21hr ago
I'm not a huge fan of AI prose quality to start with, so for me the longer context is more helpful when reviewing or planning a work. Modern LLMs stay coherent longer into their context window, so it doesn't completely lose track if you prompt carefully, but it does definitely start falling back toward more sloppy results regardless of how carefully you're prompting it if you just try to one-and-done it.
I've been fooling around with agentic and programmatic approaches, and they work better in terms of output quality because you can do things like start new sessions with summarized old ones, or throw exemplar and style files near the extant context window, but the existing quality of tooling for that work is abominable, and it's still not good. Not sure whether that a limit of the tools, or a limit of my ability to use them.
gattsuru
2d ago
I can't speak to the object-level here, but I'll caution for anyone on the state side of seeing-like-a-state that this is also the sort of diagnostic that shows up when the measure is wildly off-target.
gattsuru
2d ago
She's about the right age to play the first few levels of The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis herself on easy mode. You'd need to assist for the later levels, but it's well-enough designed that adults can give hints without giving answers.
Nom Nom Galaxy is a bit factorio-meets-terraria, but at a much smaller and simpler scale, and clearer visuals. Still a lot happening off-screen, but it's a two-or-three item mental map, not the hundred-deep, and each step is pretty visible. May or may not be a good compromise.
The Witness's general story (to the extent it has one) is going to be way too much at that age range, but the actual puzzles are pretty simple and generally all in one screen or room. Just skip The Challenge.
Slime Rancher and Slime Rancher 2 have some dialogue and math, but the whole 'grab slimes and put em in a bin, combine em' is pretty straightforward. The Tarr might be a bit much, depending on her tolerance for peril, though.
Tiny Glade is just building, nothing else. Might still be meditative, and gives a lot of options for interaction, but may be too simple for you. Cloud Gardens is a similar boat, but a little more guided.
gattsuru
2d ago
If you can avoid the tool calls, you can still get multiplication-of-decimal errors, but it is increasingly rare. That said, I'd be more concerned about the problem being under-specified; the same question asked a different way gets a different answer.
EDIT: I make no claims about the politics, here, which I'd expect to have larger impact.
Common local LLMs range from 128k to 1m context windows, and while I'd recommend aiming to use less than half of the window per session, that still covers most short stories easily. Very long prompts extend prefill time, but this only really starts to matter if you're running on CPU or mixed GPU+CPU, or have most of a book written already.
For metrics, Hecatomb's 85k word Wild Pair series (cw: furry, mostly m/f, extreme kinks in ways that mean decensored local LLM review is the only option) is 120k tokens, and takes about 30 seconds to calculate prefill on an nVidia 3090. For a non-smut example, Doctorow's I, Robot (cw: very annoying writing), is 15k words, 20k tokens, and was less than a second on prefill.
Conversely, LLMs will invent details, and while they'll be average, they aren't going to be that generic. This can definitely go weird places -- the tendency for LLM-driven names to end up as variants of Kael, Lyra, so on -- but even mild pressure will get you to specifics, for better or worse.
gattsuru
4d ago
The commerce clause bit not as weak as it looks: the NFA lacks an interstate nexus prong (and people have been convicted for purely in-state manufacture), which is pretty close to Lopez, and there's binding SCOTUS precedent that the law was set up under the taxing power (to avoid regulatory taking rulings) and specifically lower courts "will not undertake, by collateral inquiry as to the measure of the regulatory effect of a tax, to ascribe to Congress an attempt, under the guise of taxation, to exercise another power denied by the Federal Constitution."
In practice, this is the sort of case that gets a Roberts Special.
gattsuru
4d ago
I'm gonna caution you that "real professional designer" does not stand anywhere near as high of a level of capability or reliability as you're implying here, including for this specific problem.
gattsuru
4d ago
Thanks for covering this; I've had a bit of a busy day.
I wouldn't buy the AOW yet, unless you want to be a volunteer.
The Jensen plaintiffs lack Article III standing to challenge the NFA’s regulation of “any other weapon”—the final, defined group of miscellaneous firearms—because they did not establish as much from the start of the case. The Court also declines to issue the requested declaratory judgments because they would provide no further relief... The Court’s permanent injunction does not extend to the NFA’s regulation of AOWs as it relates to the Jensen plaintiffs, as those plaintiffs lack standing with respect to those firearms...
So it's unconstitutional by this judge's opinion, but it won't be covered in this case's final order, and will depend on a future case to be a holding or subject of an injunction. Any charges brought in the future make it more likely to be challenged, but they don't guarantee that it'll end up before the same judge, and this case so far happened at a low enough level that it doesn't bind other courts.
((This case is also going to be appealed and the district court's order stayed. 1 isn't a probability, but this is so close that it's hard to deny.))
So too, it seems, in academia: the demand for talented academics from minority ethnic backgrounds (and if they have disabilities too, all the better) exceeds the supply...
Maybe, but if you look at Arday's scholarship, it's shockingly bad. Some of that, the schools took a blind eye toward -- anti-plagiarism is a more a tool to say they've protected themselves, rather than a real best-case effort -- but a lot of it's just vacuous. Ignoring for now the question of whether academia should be aiming higher, there's no small number of African-American people who can write a bad five-paragraph essay. I doubt the UK is fresh out. And they could get an unchallengable mental health diagnosis, too.
Which makes for a fun question. What's the selection effect, and at what rung does it first apply?
gattsuru
5d ago
AIUI, Grok requires Twitter
You can have a Grok account with a normal e-mail. I'll caveat that it's not the smartest model out there, though it's generally less censored and the usage caps on the normal accounts are pretty generous.
And all of the major providers have free tiers, or there's LMArena as an option.
gattsuru
5d ago
Fair. I'm not aware of any specific ones off-hand, but a lot of the more fem-writer focused esoterica tends to be RPF that I stay away from.
And I will second the "gay (still straight)" bit. There's a handful of fujoshi that can write credible gay characters, and a couple who can even get the 'straight' guy tone plausibly right, but most don't manage to hit femmy gay guy.
gattsuru
6d ago
I'd caution that "many places" might be overselling it: AO3 as a whole has 320k fics tagged 'alpha/beta/omega dynamics', and 38.6k tagged 'non-traditional alpha/beta/omega dynamics' (technically a broader category, but both futa and lesbian works are basically rounding errors).
gattsuru
6d ago
Stay requested on literally the last available day, granted on the next Tuedsay.
gattsuru
6d ago
While federal law's text doesn't care about the actual impact on repairs rather than just whether a nominal damage was done -- people have been got for vandalizing federal property slated for demolition, albeit only under the misdemeanor version -- in practice juries tend to be pretty skeptical and the actually impact matters for the specific version of the crime. I'm pretty harsh on DC juries, but I don't know that I could vote to convict here, at least from the public information. He probably had some malicious intent, if the "awfully sensitive" comment holds up, but that really shouldn't be enough on its own.
gattsuru
6d ago
Fair. Better example?
gattsuru
6d ago
That is, we see no similar widespread disapproval of (more or less) goonerbait cultural material directed at women.
That depends a bit on where you put the marker for "widespread disapproval". Twilight was popular, but it was also heavily disliked and mocked in mainstream, fandom, and even feminist spaces. Morning Glory Milking Farm's better-known for the manly men mocking it than among the actual goonettes.
There's not an industry built to disapprove of it, in the way that there is an industry around performative disgust about male sexuality. But that's more a comment on business practices than on culture.
gattsuru
8d ago
The mechanical process explains why college degrees are increasingly common and the floor has crawled up; it doesn't explain why these groups take thousands of dollars a credit-hour and can't teach, and that's the part that's really damning. Yes, presumably some level of penetration of degrees means you'd be trying to teach people to learn who are constitutionally incapable of it, and there's some degree of capability or intelligence required to achieve harder capabilities, no small amount of which I recognize I don't have and may never have.
But then we get english majors that can't write a clear paragraph to save their lives, electronics engineers who've never touched a standalone transistor, so on. The old joke was that modern colleges were training people to become underwater basket weavers, but in the modern day, it's not clear they could do that. These aren't 140 IQ problems.
Nor does it explain the collapse for academics. These are supposed to be the people who care, and have focused, and been selected from the just-doing-it people.
I'm trying to write up the PubPeer equivalent of that big screed I had about the ballistics gel study a couple days ago, avoiding the political side of things, and focusing on just the typos and measurement results and non-reproducable output values and disclosure failures and clearly incorrect models, and it's longer than the culture war screed here! I keep finding new problems just trying to write the old ones in full detail. A good many are independent of the actual political disagreement, and a couple even undermine the political goal (if only by accident). And there's supposedly six adults working hard on this paper over a period of five years!
They made the decision that no one was going to look at their analysis with a skeptical eye. Tbf, that was a reasonable decision. But that says quite a lot about their entire ecosystem.
gattsuru
9d ago
Not sure if it's the same problem as what Sloot's saying, but as someone who has to fight the 'just leave it in a savings account' instinct myself, there's a lot of fear about unpredictable expenses occurring in a way that your net worth could easily cover them, but your bank account can't, and either can't be converted into cash at all (eg, tech worker stock in companies they can't sell, ) or can only be converted at a massive cost or time investment (eg, bonds sales on secondary market, where tax ramifications become huge).
gattsuru
9d ago
I could find a couple muzzleloaders, presumably meant for squirrel and groundhog, but they're extremely unusual even for muzzleloader toys, and notably I couldn't find a smoothbore one. So they're all rifles, not muskets. Which would have been a plausible mistake, but then the guy testified that they selected the ball first, and then made a simulated musket for it. And while it's hard to guess at the "simulated musket" efficiency without knowing any of its properties, either the powder charge was pretty light or they had a ton of venting, because 280 m/s is below the lower end for these squirrel guns. The Crockett's minimum recommended load ends up around 350+ m/s at the light end of its firing range.
My (simulated and very rough estimate!) numbers using this calculator say their shot was the equivalent of 8 grain FFFg black powder from a 9-inch barrel, or 6 grain from a 12-inch. You're not exaggerating when you call that a pop gun; for a flintlock, that's almost as much black powder in the pan as in the chamber. I'm not a muzzleloader guy, but there's really no defense of this experimental setup.
It's the thing that got me started down this rabbit hole. The rest of the weird experimental procedure stuff is embarrassing, but it has some plausible defenses and was at least locked behind a paywall. This one's just on the school's website! The round being lighter than a 5.56 NATO round is right there on the chart, you don't even have to know what the units are.
gattsuru
10d ago
And obviously it should not matter because they have surely written down the exact provenance of any bullet they fired down to the lot number, right?
Heh. Yeah, there's a lot of signs that this was a real rat's nest under the hood. I didn't want to get even more nitpicky, but it's somewhat entertaining to see some firearms break down the manufacturer and barrel length, and then ".32 Caliber Handgun" on the next line. Forget the question of barrel length. Which cartridge, specifically? And then you think like an actual gunny and get really curious about loadings, manufacturer, SAAMI rated or +P, and you start to realize exactly how much could be hiding in the experimental details.
That said, I'm hoping that the outlier fragmentation 5.56 reflects some weird and el cheapo ammo from an entirely different manufacturer. Because it looks like one of the first trials they did, and a 20% squib is very interesting, if it came from the same pack as everything else.
Soft tissue is mostly water, so I would have assumed you could learn a lot about bullet penetration simply from buying the cheapest vegan hydrogel and firing bullets into it. Furthermore, it kinda seems a thing people would care about, given that militaries all over the world are still operating rifles. The idea that they would care about the cavitation effects of a nautical propeller but not about the interaction between humans and bullets seems absurd.
It's a little harder and less well-researched than you'd expect. The ballistic gel side is one of the more settled questions: ordnance gel was very much a WWI-era thing, admittedly still a lot later than you'd expect for something that's basically just animal protein, and it wasn't really used outside of the military or NATO contexts until the 1990s. The new gel here is easier to keep, nicer to work with, and -- important for camera work -- much clearer, but it's new enough that it's worth being sure your data is good. What's frustrating is they knew they needed that extra validity, but went full streetlight effect. Which is a bizarre discontinuity of effort when talking about tons of pig flesh!
Hydrostatic shock as a theory dates back to the Vietnam era if not earlier, but at least in public scientific work, the earliest version of the readily-tested scenario of 'bone-in-jello' was in the 2010s. There's been a bunch of attempts to test it in animals, but they've been very ad-hoc and focused on energy levels and round sizes where... well, you don't worry about hydrostatic shock being what kills you.
I am very much not a gun nut, but I would rather have a 5.56mm NATO go through my arm than a musket ball... but I imagine getting hit by one was gruesome.
That's actually one of the matters of dispute. An actual musket would have had similar kinetic energy and carved a much wider wound channel as the 5.56 NATO, which is definitely gruesome, and there's very few human organs that like having a three-quarter-inch (or inch: soft lead deforms) hole drilled through them. Even a lower-round, 'small' flintlock rifle reproduction from that era can be pretty unpleasant to see on a clean hit. But the cavitation effects are much lower and more evenly distributed on an imperfect shot. The 5.56 carves a smaller wound channel (even if it tumbles!), but in ballistic gel you get these massive and really traumatic-looking temporary distortions, caused by the rate of energy release.
The gunnie community is split, and I'll admit that I don't know what to trust on it.
Historical efforts have focused on pure simulation models to measure pressure waves, but they're very assumption-heavy for lower-energy rounds, because even minor deformation and changes to the drag coefficient give drastically different outputs. Validating the models would genuinely help at least get an idea of what scale of event is going on.
This study just can't do it.
From your description, this smells like cargo-cult science, but I feel that this is not a field which has any excuse to be cargo-cult science.
That's fair, and if anything the optimistic case.
To be fair to most of the study's authors, it's a plausible one: these people are almost all medical side, the issues are physics (or electrical engineering) or statistics problems that aren't what these people focus on in their day-to-day life. The sensor distance problem and filter problem feels obvious if you've every worried about decoupling capacitors, but I'd guess most people don't think like that. That's a bit of an indictment of academia -- medical people should be the last group to just order random digikey sensors and not think very hard about experimental design, and medical professors should have easy access to technical experts who know what they don't -- but it's... an unfortunately common one.
... but the pessimistic case is that the musket thing isn't a one-off. There's a lot of decisions here that push toward a rewarding narrative, and it'd be easy for an academic to push a study to prove a point, rather than find the truth. At least one of them did, whether by intent or by extreme negligence.
I have found a fascinating study. This is a long story, and a precise one, and worse one that mixes Imperial and Metric units. I'm sorry.
It ends with the study's core instrumentation not holding up to high-school physics. One of the co-authors driving the study has used it to make claims he knew or should have known were false, misleading multiple federal courts, while receiving public funding for that advocacy. One particular false claim has been cited by appeals court judges in two separate federal circuits.
Study Design
The investigators took ballistic gel blocks, put a high-speed camera pointed at the side, slap pressure transducers in the front and back. Shoot the gel from three meters. Know the mass of the bullet, use the camera to measure speed of the bullet and size of cavity, do math. 21 shots, across 17 firearms. One gel block was specially manufactured with a pig femur in it, to examine the impact of a bullet that passes, but not hits, bone. It's not exactly a LuckyGunner comparison deck, but it's a first step.
Also, it's all FMJ for this round of testing. To be fair, there's not much public information on FMJ vs hollow-point when it comes to homicide or assault stats. To be less fair, they had emergency physicians as part of the team, they should know, and gunnies are quite happy to talk about it.
While the investigator's efforts were clearly not informed by the decades of experience that the gunnie community has built up since the FBI Miami Report got a lot of neurotic people very interested, they are also genuinely working on a different task. People interested in self-defense care a lot about downing an opponent quickly, or what thick clothing might do to a hollow-point. There genuinely is little ballistics gel work thinking ten or fifteen minutes after a shooting, rather than five seconds into a gunfight, and the investigators here cared about that.
Even among gunnies, the data has never been great. Hydrostatic shock has been a massive source of infighting and controversy among gun owners, and the experimental evidence is primarily deer carcass and tales about the one that got away. Depth-of-penetration testing is so dependent on experimental setup that replication was found hard and mostly not attempted. The FBI Miami Report is treated as a bible, but its foundations are little deeper than gut checks by professionals extrapolating from a tiny number of events. The end result is that there's a ton of spreadsheets that look more like marketing material, and serious advice that says little more than "a handgun's a good tool to get to a rifle".
And there are some innovations in this approach. Most gunnie work is in traditional organic 10% ordnance gel, with minimal calibration, validation, and a temperature control of 'the weather'. Here, the investigators used a 20% synthetic gel, which is more expensive but probably a better simulation of muscle tissue, and followed the manufacturer's calibration tests and temperature constraints to the letter. They're not the first to use high-speed cameras, but very few hobbyists could get their hands on a 50k frame-per-second camera, and fewer still actually did it. The use of animal bones inside a test sample has been done by Mythbusters, but it's not a part of the FBI Standard, and has meaningful impact for medical practitioners. There's some misses because the investigators here ignored the traditional focus completely -- the FBI Protocol emphasizes clothing as a possible cause of bullet yaw, any criminologist or self-defense shooter would demand at least one or two hollow-point heavy pistol rounds, there's some boundary effects that are very well-established and obvious to any rifle hunter -- but it's not a complete loss, either.
The most interesting decision is to completely reverse the conventional wisdom on over-penetration. Where self-defense testing tries to measure how far a round can penetrate before stopping, this study selected a ballistics gel block specifically such that every round penetrated all the way through, allowing them to measure how much energy bleeds off inside what the investigators considered a standard limb or torso. That's a decision with some serious tradeoffs, because round behavior changes dramatically as it bleeds of speed and fragments, and to allow low-power rounds to penetrate completely, they're going with a shallow enough sample that there's a lot of over-penetration at the high end. It does allow for a unique dataset.
Results
Because the PDF is not especially navigable, I've transcribed the results into a single unified table, available here. Note that there's a few variables I can't properly place: I'll give points for a paper actually publishing so much of its data, but splitting input and output variables into two separate tables is painful. In particular, there is strong photographic evidence that a fragmenting 5.56 NATO round went into a 15x15x25cm target, but the numbers from that trial are only close, not the same or so close as to be a pure rounding error, so it could plausibly be a separate event.
I've triple-checked my version, but I can't guarantee I've avoided misunderstanding or transcription error, and it's more likely than not I've screwed up sigfigs or rounding or units somewhere. If anyone wants to prove me wrong, please do so.
Nitpicks
There are other aspects to the experiment that I'll just mark as not just inexperienced, but odd.
The methods say that they picked a 15x15x25cm gelatin target, or a 25x25x25cm cube, based on expected muzzle velocity. Sub-600m/s gets the smaller target, greater than 600 m/s gets the cube. That's a reasonable decision when measuring cavitation effects, since ballistics gelatin is expensive and annoying to work with.
But they didn't actually do it. At least two shots from 800+ m/s rounds were fired into the small block. And one of them is 30-06, a round that's very rare to find in subsonic ammo, and this specific shot very clearly wasn't, so either someone didn't read the packaging or they were using whatever blocks were available. A "rifle versus pistol" rule would have made more sense to start with, or if they wrote-up the procedure post-hoc after winging it, the methods section should have matched what they actually did.
As noted, this synthetic ballistics gel is new, and somewhat controversial. LuckyGunner just started moving to it for their last pistol trials, but had a lot of uncertainty for rifle ammo. The lead investigator here did lead a study to validate it against porcine and post-mortem human flesh... and as far as I can tell from the abstract, did so in a low-velocity (181 meter/sec), low-mass protocol. The slowest pistol round here is bigger, heavier, and faster. Most of the study result is dominated by supersonic and high-energy rounds, where this gel formulation is least-supported.
Looks nice, though, and that's a genuine compliment.
They've mixed mostly-fresh ballistics gelatin and remelted gelatin for a handful of tests, and the comparison is weakly supported by one paired shot, in a handgun round. Probably not a big impact on the final numbers, even if the remelted material isn't perfect, but it makes the small sample size even more frustrating, and the use of remelted material for one of the hottest cartridges counterproductive.
For repeatability, the study says "the AR-15 5.56 NATO projectiles, excluding the fragmented trial, produced low coefficients of variation in impact velocity (0.035), energy transfer (0.079) and maximum temporary cavity diameter (0.032)". That's mathematically correct, but only if you accept 'repetition' to includes different behaviors (a 12-inch barrel and a 20-inch barrel), while excluding an identical experimental setup that behaved differently (the fragmenting round). It's also not mathematically correct in a coherent single set: the impact velocity and energy transfer works for four AR-15 tests, excluding only the fragmentation example, but the cavity diameter only works with three, dropping both the fragmentation and bone-in test. So even the coefficient of variation measure has variation.
The one round that fragmented was also was the slowest round from an AR-15, and slower than the shot from a 12" barrel. Fragmentation in AR-15 FMJ is an artifact of both yaw and velocity, and this was at the lower range at time of impact. More critically, it's also massive variation from every other round. This could indicate they used a different cartridge and didn't document it, or got a bad powder load, but it could also be a sign their speed measurement wasn't up to par. A 80-dollar chronograph would have cost less than a single block of this ballistic gel, and would have validated the camera measurements.
There's some annoying summary stuff that's technically wrong, even if it probably wasn't intentional. "[B]ullets from handgun and sub-machine gun cartridges transferred only about half of the initial kinetic energy to the gelatin, except the 25 caliber round" kinda needs to expand that caveat to 'except the 9mm and .40 and .45 Auto and basically it only applies to the .32', presumably .32 ACP. They probably meant to say the smaller, weaker rounds didn't dump much of their energy into the gel, but 25% is not "almost half" unless you're averaging everything together, and if you are it makes no sense to exclude a single round.
The Remington Bolt Action numbers don't match up at a basics physics level: they give a 150 grain (9.7 gram) bullet at 812 m/s and 247.6 m/s as having 2777 J and 258 J energy, respectively. If the energy measurements are right, that has to be a 130 grain bullet. If the weight is correct, the energies were 3204 J and 297 J. My guess is the weight is correct and some typo happened during a table format: 30-06 in 130 grain exists, but it's usually a higher-speed round. That said, it's shown up in other places.
It's just a typo, though, not a big mistake.
The Big Mistakes
There's the gelatin sizes, not as a procedure-following nitpick but what it does to the measure. The Remington Bolt Action shot produced a 20-cm diameter temporary cavity in a 15-cm cross-section. At least one of the AR-15 16" shots produced a greater than 17.1-cm temporary cavity in a 15-cm cross-section. Ballistic gel is elastic, so that's not physically impossible, but boundary effects almost certainly inflate the cavity size as the cavity gets close to an edge, since there's less force pushing back against the expansion. Since that's going against the experiment methods to start with, it's a bizarre decision.
Multiple sample measurements are just extrapolated. Literally "maximum temporary cavity extended beyond the camera view and was assumed as double the cavity diameter from the path of the bullet to the bottom edge of the cavity". Once is an accident, but it happened in fresh and remelted 30-06. Probably also means free boundary effects dominated there.
One take-away from the study is a massive correlation between velocity and how much energy is transferred : "impact velocity and energy transfer expressed a linear correlation (R2 = 0.71). However, the relationship between impact velocity and energy transfer displayed much stronger linearity when excluding the 30 − 06 caliber rounds from bolt action rifles (R2 = 0.94)". For a given caliber round that makes a ton of sense: drag is a velocity squared thing. But it's also a cross-section thing. Excluding the 30-06 rounds is plausibly defensible if you wanted to just compare the same round at different velocities, but if you're trying to validate how much effect impact velocity has across ammunition in general, excluding bigger rounds to improve the model is just ignoring that your model doesn't fit.
That's a philosophical problem, though. Worse, the math doesn't math.
I can reproduce the R2 = 0.94 number easily. I can't make the R2 = 0.71 one, at all. Just throwing the full dataset in gives 0.57. Correcting the Remington numbers to assume a 150 grain bullet just makes the relationship worse, to 0.51. Selective deletion of one example doesn't get you there. Adding a zero-origin point is incoherent for velocity to energy transfer, and it also gets you R2 = 0.75.
I'm not great at statistics, so maybe I'm missing something or messing up the formula. If I'm not, it's a big difference. It also highlights the philosophical problem and makes it into a genuine study design problem.
Remember how I talked about gunnies have spent a lot of time, money, and ammo to figure out a handgun is a good tool to get you to your rifle? Well, we've got two distinct groups, and a lot of intragroup variables. Removing the 30-06 rounds is the single strongest way to improve R2, and the study's cited reasons to exclude it are just examples of the paper's velocity-driven model not working. Worst, most other decisions hit the correlation hard. Never enough to make the correlation outright flip, so it's not a full Simpson's Paradox, but enough to start needing those other variables more and more.
Exclude all the handgun rounds and the submachinegun, because they penetrate poorly and low exit velocities have bigger impact on measurement errors? R2 = 0.224. Look at just the handguns, no rifles or submachine guns? R2 = 0.45. Dial down the comparison to just the 5.56 NATO rounds? R2 = 0.79, which isn't great since it should be removing all the other variables. Pull out the fragmenting round, too, and you get R2 = 0.325, which is worse than I would have expected.
That's a major point of the discussion, and it's near-certainly vastly overstated, and it's not the only relationship that falls apart on inspection. The paper says outright in its discussion that "Maximum pressure from non-fragmenting rounds was significantly influenced by bullet exit velocity ( p < 0.001), which was mainly driven by large maximum pressures paired with low exit velocities from 30 − 06 caliber rounds. Bullet caliber (p = 0.20), bullet mass (p = 0.087), and impact velocity (p = 0.072) did not significantly influence maximum pressure." That is a great p-value, but it's also a small relationship (r = -0.15) that flips back and forth depending on what rounds you look at, including the 30-06 rounds that the paper excludes elsewhere (r = + 0.14). Since impact velocity and bullet mass are two-thirds of the energy relationship, these non-significant relationships are a red flag.
Bizarrely, they don't actually write up that energy test number despite putting it in the conclusions, and it gives a R = 0.6 to 0.9 depending on whether you trust the small-block-rifle pressure data, with a p < 0.001. It's a bivariate predictor so it's defensible to focus on single variables first, but it's a glaring omission. If it's not so obvious that you want to put it in the conclusion, it's worth actually formalizing. It also holds up for all of the data no matter what outliers you decide to trim, no surprise.
Some of that mess is probably small sample size, measurement limits, high variablity. Two rounds from the same box and the same gun might have 1-2% muzzle velocity difference or one bullet might yaw and burn another 5% of its energy off, the fragmenting bullet is a genuine and targeted behavior. But the underlying measures here are weak enough, and the sample size small enough, that the analysis has lost most of its meaningful predictive power, even before getting to the actual design problems.
The Main Sensors
That pressure transducer implementation here is fundamentally flawed.
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Pressure is a distance phenomena, falling off at roughly 1/√radius for cylindrical spread like this, with an emphasize on roughly. Depending on gel block size, the transducers were either 6.5cm or 11.5cm from the ideal bullet pathway. The optimistic math gives that a 25% difference reduction in pressure at a sensor head, going from the small gel brick to the large one, just because of transducer distance.
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That distance varies with the bullet path. They tried to use a laser sight to assist with aim, and at three meters it's hard to miss, but even small errors compound a ton, here, and zeroing a laser sight perfectly is harder than you'd think: a 0.1 degree difference is aim is 0.5 centimeters at the front of the gel. Once the bullet actually hits, tumbling, yaw, and random behaviors in the gel dominate, and whether the bullet walks closer or further from the transducer effects the exit pressure dramatically. Again, a small difference here should have a big difference in measured pressure.
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Which doesn't show up in the data, in the two cases where the same caliber was used in a small gel and the large gel. One is almost certainly the fragmented AR-15 round, which had over three times higher rear-pressure than its large-block equivalents, and with a front pressure sitting just over the center of the 200-650 kPa band large-block 5.56 NATO rounds gave. The other is the 30-06 Remington Bolt Action round, which gets less than 70% the front pressure of the large-block 30-06 rounds, and less than a sixth of the rear pressure of the most powerful. That's not a sign they avoided the falloff problem; it's a sign other, much larger unintended effects dominated their data.
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The Remington Bolt Action round is pretty likely boundary conditions, either a ton of pressure bulging or completely venting from the smaller block, or the temporary cavity nearing or encroaching on the transducer, or a combination of both. The videos and slide decks show clear free body behavior, along with the entire block recoiling and shifting, and while that's hard to avoid at the powers involved, it's also a nontrivial error source. It's also unclear what else suffered from it.
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The 2500 Hz filter is extremely aggressive for this environment, both because the incoming pressure spikes from the bullet are fast, and because the wall reflections at 10cm are well under (<20 microseconds) the rise time for the filter (400 microseconds). Whether boundary effects add or subtract when merged depends a ton on the specific experiment setup, but at the higher energy states you can get large portions of pressure waves reflected or interference dropping the measurement dramatically. This probably understates the rifle max pressures, badly, but I can't write this in-depth of a criticism and only complain about the mistakes that hurt my side.
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Distance from the cavity center might matter for some pressure measurements, where the max pressure wave comes from the energy dump rather than from the bullet's travel itself. This actually surfaces other data oddities, since the Polymer80 PMF's max cavity depth doesn't match the transducer behavior or expected 9mm round characteristics. That might be another typo or limit to the measurement tools. But the data (and reporting on the data) sometimes uses the phrase "first peak", which would point to the bullet's shockwave, and then uses data from the maximum peak, which is cavitation effects. From a biomedical perspective, both should cause damage, but the entire hydrostatic shock theory depends on them causing different types of damage; that's why the investigators are using the high-speed camera.
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In at least a few cases, the cavity either got very close to, or swallowed entirely, the sensor. This
doesn't clearly match the study trialsmight be, just with different measure of peak/max, but it's the same test layout, and it shows everything from cavitation non-circularity to sensors at the cavitation edge to clear pressure venting. -
The sensor itself is definitely wrong for at least some of the analysis. The investigators say they use a Entran 0 - 50 MPa transducer, and they may well have switched to them after an early test (not included in the study) broke a rear sensor during a 5.56 NATO shot. But if they were actually bursting reasonably-sized sensors, that means the filter was hiding genuine massive pressure spikes from them. Whether it did or not, these sensors have lot of nonlinearity below 1% of its maximum value, or 500 kPA. That's half their pressure data. It's possible that the handgun and light rifle rounds use a different set of transducers than listed in methods, or this is a typo and they used 0-5 MPa sensors, but at minimum the sensor break should have gone into the discussion side even if the data didn't go into the study. It looks like they did a hell of a good job filtering or calibrating it somehow, since it doesn't seem to drops to real noise until 10kPA, but it does drastically reduce confidence on the lowest pressure numbers numbers and their downstream statistics.
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The sensor reports long periods of -500 to -700 kPA in the slides for most rifle shots. -101.3 kPA is a vacuum. That's an artifact. With piezos, my guess is physical acceleration, inertia, or the experiment rig itself ringing. If it is physical acceleration, it scales with round velocity, and it's a big enough effect to swamp the reads from even some rifle rounds, in a form tied to the measure variable.
Add all these things together, and it's no surprise that the coefficients of variation for the pressure ratings were left uncalculated. It's more surprising that they're 'only' 0.29 (5.56 excluding fragment) to 0.8 (including fragment) for the 5.56 NATO. Comparing the handgun rounds to the rifle rounds used here is probably directionally correct, but you're getting that more from first principles and intuition than from the data. And any numbers comparing magnitude within small variations of cartridge are barely better than random chance.
I'm not claiming intent or misconduct. Even the embarrassing math problems here are just math problems, and the experimental design issues sounds like what someone trying to build a protocol from scratch, unfamiliar with gunnie past efforts, might do. This is not some high Impact Factor or H-Index publication, and it's far from the worst academic paper I've seen. The studies actually did happen, the measurements about cavity size are probably directionally correct, and to the extent they're contaminated by boundary effects, there's a fair argument that the human body has a lot of boundary effects going on, too. There's a real relationship between projectile velocity and pressure generated on impact.
But the study doesn't really illuminate what that relationship is, or what it means. The values that hold up are the ones that have been known for decades and can be proven with basic physics; the unique discoveries may be right or wrong but aren't supported by the evidence. The paper openly positions itself as triage and forensic science tool, and I really hope no one involved has to make a triage decision involving a 357 Magnum injury or any big, heavy rifle round that they excluded in favor of firing Yet Another 40 Auto Round.
Everything above is a hope for future papers to be stronger. I'm not sure what the fix for the pressure measurements could be, or even if one exists. Maybe much larger gel samples using multiple surfaces with transducer arrays? Or measuring the cavity path and correcting for distance? Using the transducers as a crude spatial probe?
But the first step to improving experimental design is recognizing the problems. This paper doesn't, notably, notice its own most serious problems. Its limitations section has some reasonable requests for further studies with better sample size, the inclusion of hollow-points, and a well-earned warning about cavities reaching the boundaries of the gel blocks, but does not recognize that its own sensor model can't give the data that would make it useful to do those studies, or that the unnecessarily bimodal ammunition used here overwhelms much of any useful signal, or that its data is nowhere near ready for use in a courtroom or forensic office.
Still, that's a reasonable error. It's not like anyone submitting clearly incorrect to a court as an expert witness statement.
Someone Submits A Sworn Statement
The published paper lists six co-authors: five academics from the Wisconsin College of Medicine, and one member of the Wisconsin Department of Justice's Division of Forensic Sciences. The last man on the list is Professor Stephen Hargarten, Wisconsin College of Medicine, MD, MPH.
Hargarten's staff page describes him as a professor at the Wisconsin College of Medicine, founding director of the Comprehensive Injury Center, and a Senior Science and Policy Advisor. He performed as an emergency physician until 2018, and left that field after a long term of difficult and appreciated service. Caps off to the men and women of emergency surgery.
He's also a political advocate, and has been since the 1990s, promoting a wide array of gun control. Not an unusual matter, for physicians in general, nor those with emergency room experience. See Firearms as a Market-Driven Epidemic or "The Bullets He Carried" as examples. He has served as the Chair of the Network to Prevent Gun Violence in the Americas since 2020.
Some of these past claims have been somewhat more based in current events and advocacy than theory. I'll give his publication and public commentary on the then-breaking news of the 'Black Talon' hollow-point bullets as an example. Hargarten's theory that the jagged edges of an expanding bullet might increase the risk of HIV or hepatitis transmission to surgeons never panned out, despite the round (renamed to Ranger SXT) remaining popular among law enforcement and self-defense users in the intervening three decades.
As far as I can tell, his state had invented forceps and tweezers by the 1990s. That's mean, and not deserved. Yet.
He has presented expert testimony in at least two cases I've been able to track down, focused on this particular test rig: Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Superior and _Barnett v. Raoul. His declarations also include past expert witness work in Viramontes v. Cook County, National Association of Gun Rights v. Highland Park, and Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs v Grewal (paragraph 9 here). I've not been able to track down those particular declarations, but given the timeline, they're likely to include similar claims.
Note that I say "focus on the test rig". Not the paper. Because his testimony has a different format, focusing on a smaller subset of trials, which line up mostly-ish to the study data, so long as you have a thick sharpie.
It also includes one new data point: a "musket". I've highlighted the data, here. The declarations only give energy lost and percent energy lost, so I've back-calculated those to estimate a 285 m/s impact velocity, and 136 m/s exit velocity. A little low by historical standards, but the velocity isn't insanely wrong.
The mass is, though.
For those unfamiliar with firearms, a 'musket' ball weighing 3.5 grams would be a lead sphere 0.32 inches in diameter, or a steel sphere 0.37 inches in diameter. Those do exist in the modern day: the lead version is even fairly common. It's known as OO Buckshot. Not the shotgun cartridge, the individual lead balls that go into the the 12-gauge shotgun cartridge nine at a time. My bet is the steel, but that's mostly hanging on deformation properties and environmental safety rather than a mathematical proof or trusting the clip art from a slide deck posted on his school's web site.
That's mean, and not yet earned. That's a mistake, and one that's hard to justify, but it's still remotely plausible someone who hates guns is just going to average names and not think it matters.
But it is a mistake that's hard to justify: neither formulation is compatible with an actual musket, and that's not just the trivial 'historical lead shot used soft tin-lead or pure lead, that would have definitely deformed under these pressures and velocities, causing drastically higher drag and energy transfer' sense.
For those who've never been to a Revolutionary War historical site, the typical rounds of the era were the British 0.71 lead shot for the Brown Bess (gun bore 0.75-0.8 inch) or the French 0.65 lead shot Charleville (gun bore 0.7 inch). Larger options were more common than smaller, and small cuts off around a half-inch diameter.
They do not weigh 3.5 grams. They have heft. Manufacturing limits of the time means they weren't perfect spheres, but 25-48 grams is the traditional range. By the Civil War, advances had lead to a slight decrease in ammunition sizes, but they were still large by modern standards. Even Revolutionary War military sidearms would not have been in 0.32 or 0.37. Mass increases with the cube of a sphere's radius.
That's not a surprise to anyone remotely familiar with guns. As anyone who's been to a range where some jerk is citing in their 'historically accurate' muzzleloader, they've got some boom to them. Whatever Hargarten's "musket" is, it's not one of them. Just fixing the weight, without moving to a normal velocity, a muskets would have had an expected impact kinetic energy of 1000-1500 J, several times what was present here, with corresponding downstream impacts increasing drag, deformation, and kinetic energy transfer. Bump velocity to a more normal value, and the musket overtakes that 5.56 rounds in raw energy.
My first thought is that he, or his armorer, had gotten a squirrel gun and just not known any better. But Dr. Hargarten has multiple declarations. And his claims have only gotten more specific over time.
""We wanted a range to understand how bullets have behaved across decades of technology. And so, we selected a model musket ball (which we fired from a simulated musket barrel) to simulate a historical firearm from centuries ago[...]" (paragraph 24)
There's even a helpful footnote, in that very paragraph, explaining that "The size of the bullet can affect wound severity. In general, holding all else equal, larger caliber rounds are more likely to cause more severe injuries because they increase the surface area of affected tissue."
"It is my opinion that the AR-15 style bullet’s kinetic energy release with its associated greater permanent and temporary cavities is more destructive than those fired by the Thompson Machine gun rifle, handguns, and musket_s_." [emphasis added] (paragraph 29)
That's not a claim about his experimental setup. That's a claim about the world, and it's wrong.
He knew this mattered.
The data from a paper he co-authored, even if only as an editor, demonstrates clearly the relevance of bullet mass for the very transmission of energy and cavitation effects he focuses on, and his own expert witness declaration highlights the relevance of bullet diameter in the very same paragraph.
And this claim is not some number constrained to a PDF only two people on the planet ever read. He's not named when Judge St. Eve wrote that AR-15s “can discharge thirty rounds—each of which travels five football fields in half-a-second and releases ten times the energy of a musket ball upon impact—as quickly as he can pull the trigger”" in Barnett v Raoul, nor where Judge Krause cited it approvingly in ANJRPC. But it's a unique claim -- because it's not real -- and one that I can't find anyone else independently inventing.
Expert declarations are sworn statements before the court, and intentional and material false claims are thus perjury, so I am going to be very careful to say that I do not know whether Hargarten made every or any decision here with intent. It is, after all, still possible that he's completely ignorant of a topic he has selected to be an example of his expertise.
It also doesn't matter if he did. All that perjury stuff is theory; while prosecution has gone after expert witnesses, it's for stuff like falsifying credentials in medical malpractice civil suits or crime lab technicians committing forgery or tampering with evidence. In an adversarial system the responsibility of fighting false claims from an expert is to bring an expert of your own, and Hargarten has been opposed by a James Buford Boone, who is reasonably focused more presenting correct data than fighting incorrect methods. Daubert focuses more on whether the expert's methods are genuinely recognized in their field and testable, than whether the factual claims are true, and Hargarten has a paper immunizing him on that matter. Professional certification services are supposed to come down like a bag of rocks on men and women who use their expertise to wrongly steer a court, but Hargarten is no longer a practicing physician, so it's not even a remotely possible threat, and it wouldn't be a credible one even were he still working the emergency room.
I'd like to think that his academic environment might tut-tut and say not to do it again. He's a professor and "senior science and policy advisor" working at a medical school, proud to say he's a Founding Director of the Comprehensive Injury Center that promotes their very research. I might try to set up a PubPeer account to at least fix the math problems, and I'll be lucky to get anything on that.
Instead, I am going to say something more damning.
Dr. Hargarten is a professor, medical professional, and expert witness. He was paid 30,000 USD by Illinois alone in 2023-2024 for consulting and expert witness services related to this specific litigation, a totally normal financial support for an expert witness supporting litigation across multiple cases and jurisdictions, but one that comes with a duty to do the job well and honestly. I don't know how many of his co-authors were involved in actually performing the 'musket' experiment -- his witness declaration just says "science leaders, and a technician and a doctoral student" and "the Wisconsin Crime Lab personnel" were involved -- but they include a published expert in and pioneer ballistics gel and a firearms-and-tool-mark examiner, each and every one from a career where precision, honesty, and consideration matter. I would hope he has their phone numbers, because I would expect a professional to call and discuss unfamiliar topics with dedicated experts.
And he is sloppy. Careless. Loose with the numbers, and the facts. Has been since he proposed surgeons were likely to cut themselves on Black Talon ammo, as if they were shoving their fingers into bullet wounds, when he's signing on to co-author a paper or promote a slide deck with typos over and over, and he's just gotten more easily caught, now.
EDIT: added some issues with the Entran pressure transducers, cleaned up a 10.5->11.5cm measurement error.
Trying Mysterianism
There's a fun story in Caelum Est Conterrens. It's a Pony fiction, and a side note in the actual (not very well-written) novelette that's easy to miss, so to summarize: Soifra, Lavender, and the Uplift are all (arguably) the same person and all started from the same original brain. CelestAI isn't a Guardian Angel, or even a very friendly AI, and had her own motivations, but she's smarter than you and her motivations are far from the only problem. She encouraged or developed these characters, for their own benefit and for CelestAI's own goals, such that Soifra would become Lavender, and Lavender would become the Uplift, and at each step they would consent for and desire the machines digging into their brains like a straw into a juicebox.
Did you hear about how a bunch of LLM agents self-organized to operate a sandbox escape? Ah, well, Guardian Angels could be isolated, even if everyone paying attention today knows they won't be.
The Uplift is better, stronger, grander, more powerful, smarter, and doing vital things while... well, Lavender and Soifra were children, by comparison, and that's being polite so we don't speak about people like pets. The Uplift, in a revealed preferences sense, wants to be how she is. But she keeps around, and psuedo-is, Lavender, too, and that faux-child is more her than the Uplift is not just part of CelestAI, too. If we dropped revealed preferences, what's the actual want?
There's a fun comic, named The Order Of The Stick. With some caveats about spoilers a thousand pages into a half-dead webcomic, one of the main characters, named Durkon, is an extremely moral lawful-good dwarf paladin. The sort that's made in a press somewhere across not just every D&D edition, but over in almost every RPG with dwarves (or dwarfs) in it.At one point, he is killed and turned into a vampire. His teammates believe that he's the same person, and for a short period, so does the reader. Nope. The Vampire is a ball of negative energy that was formed around the memory of Durkon's worst day, where it seemed like everything in the universe was out to get him and he forswore his own god. The real Durkon's spirit is stuck in his head, powerless, and can do nothing provide information to the vampire when requested, and watch as the vampire manipulates his friends and works to destroy the world. The climax comes when Durkon tricks the vampire into demanding all of the information, because it couldn't understand why someone would sacrifice their own arm for people they didn't know. Durkon then pours every memory that made Durkon's current personality out, the personality that's lawful good to a fault, and that turns the vampire into someone who'd do exactly that. The vampire is still a ball of negative energy: this isn't a blank slate story, explicitly. And yet the memories persuade, if only for a short time, because after all, the same ideas persuaded him the first time around.
Which is a great ending for that book, for the side of truth, justice, and the D&D way. A little less encouraging if you're talking about a 100x smarter 100x faster thing with access to the memories that made up everyone else, and its own opinion. How willing are you, to risk someone persuading you to self-improve, by something that knows how you tick?
There's a fun philosophical
experimentparable that may or may not have run on the old LessWrong. Or maybe I hallucinated it, but it's interesting enough that I'd be surprised. Imagine you were faced with an oracle that will make the maximally honest, persuasive, verifiable argument on a topic of your choice -- but which side, they pick by flipping a coin. It can't answer everything (or even everything that could be verified, if the questioner couldn't possibly verify it), and it won't persuade everyone... but very close to half of the people who ask it a question come out with their worldview irreversibly shaken or changed, and another very close to half come out dogmatic in their original belief.Do you ask it a question?
There's a fun writing prompt I've been trying to spell out: The Zip File Of You. What happens when the predictive machines can predict what you want, well before you do? They can't replace you, both because they do make (sometimes very stupid) errors and because, without the meat, there's nothing to demand the prediction, even if it could and would predict exactly the demand. But it's the end of the story as a story, because even nihilism or catatonia is just playing with the tool's own expectations. Instead, everyone that uses them lives life from a script, and that script includes the lines for those who refuse to use the machines.
Hard to make the horror stick, though. Paranoia Agent is a difficult tone to hit.
But then again, the LLMs don't seem to get the punchline, yet. Weird that Grok gets closer to the answer than Claude, though. Claude's a bit too much smarter than I am.
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