gattsuru
13hr 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
21hr 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
22hr ago
Ah, thanks. Think the original supports the emergencyist-exist and "stonetoss author hasn't been shot in the head yet" conclusion, too.
gattsuru
22hr 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
2d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
5d 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.
gattsuru
5d ago
I will caveat that this probably isn't a great use case for either 3d printing (repeated torque and temperature flux) or AI (if you can make these measurements, you can build something in TinkerCAD in seconds). If you're genuinely fighting it, the right answer is a QuikClamp and either a oversized hose clamp (if the hose is fairly heavy-duty) or some hair scrunchies (if it isn't).
That said, Claude Opus 5 gave not-crazy answers. I'm a little disappointed that it gave the recommendation to include a zip-tie slot and then didn't actually do it, and trying to get it to add one in ended up taking much longer than just doing an edit in the slicer and was overengineered in some bad ways. But it's at least intern-grade results rather than useless, and for completely non-engineer people it's probably better than they could do in the 15 minutes it took me to boot up my laptop, prompt, and validate in my slicer.
((Counterpoint, though: Grok's first attempt was awful even on Expert; LLMs do poorly on spatial reasoning problems like this.))
gattsuru
6d ago
You've linked to the specific statute before, and I don't think ProPublica (or the doctors involved) are operating under a good-faith analysis. "Guaranteed" is nowhere near the strict text of "in the exercise of reasonable medical judgment, the pregnant female on whom the abortion is performed, induced, or attempted has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced." Similarly, the "recorded ultrasound" requirement is actually "d) A physician making a determination under Subsection (b) shall record in the pregnant woman's medical record: (1) the estimated gestational age of the unborn child; (2) the method used to estimate the gestational age; and (3) the test used for detecting a fetal heartbeat, including the date, time, and results of the test."
And at least for ProPublica, that's not a one-off: ProPublica's coverage of Amber Thurman in Georgia was aggressively misleading, and its own staff defended the article not by claiming they had evidence to support it, but by motioning around how it could be possible.
I'd be a little more forgiving if Texas (Paxton or otherwise) had been going nuts with dubious prosecutions, but the only actual charges or serious threats of prosecution I can find are the Rojas cluster, and that entire thing has been more a mess for Texas than for the alleged abortion-provider.
gattsuru
8d ago
Once you strip away all the culture war nonsense surrounding the law itself, this plays out just like any other case.
Yes. I'm not making the argument that someone's 'violating the law', and whatever extent it'd be even arguably true is marginal. I'm showing that the law is an ass.
If Kick had been shipping arsenic-coated children's toys to Texas and then not shown up for the resultant lawsuit, the result would have been similar, and we could all agree Kick deserved it. But the culture war nonsense on top makes the comparison to deadly poison runs into trouble in this specific case, and.
And the 'the law lets you do this' argument generalizes to nearly everything.
In fact, there's a few arguments they could have made that have nothing to do with the validity of the statute.
Would you like to propose one that you believe would survive minimal scrutiny?
I'm not saying that she would have necessarily ruled in their favor, but not all judges are shills.
That's a wonderful strawman you've knocked down, but it's not my argument.
But I doubt they're too indigent to fight this. Yes, taking it to the mat would be expensive, but unless they're true believers, they'll settle.
Not too indigent to "fight this" and anyone sane settling doesn't really have good overlap, but even if it's plausible for this particular vendor, it's unlikely to be true for every use case, or even a large portion. There was a big snafu in the furry fandom a couple years ago when the owner-operator of FurAffinity passed away surprisingly young... and couldn't manage health insurance, nevermind legal protections.
There are approximately 10 million porn sites that aren't complying with the Texas law, Kick is hardly the biggest, and the AG does not have unlimited resources. In a normal world, this case ends with a deal that probably has the AG agreeing to waive the penalties in exchange for Kick agreeing to comply by a date certain.
Texas has brought suits against Aylo Global, Hammy Media, and Multi Media LLC. Multi Media ended up agreeing to comply... and pay 650k. Which, fair, is less than 9 million! Also not the sort of cash even many businesses have in their bank account. Those are the ones Texas publicized.
It's ... not clear what, if any, other lawsuits are going on: Kick's own situation didn't get much publicity until the DNS takedown request. And the broader set of litigation threats, without filing, is invisible, since they don't show up on the public docket and I think can't even be searched under Texas's FOIA equivalent.
You are right to say that Texas can't bring lawsuits against every single porn company on the planet. Ignoring for now the fun question of private rights of action that the statute authorizes, that's little succor to the companies and persons you're asking to play russian roulette with someone else's gun.
But as a civil defense attorney I can tell you that 100% of clients think that 100% of the suits filed against them are complete bullshit, even sophisticated corporate clients, even when the claims are beyond reasonable, and approximately 100% of them settle anyway. Because it turns out that $10,000 to settle the case is a lot less than the $10,000/day they'll owe if they don't settle.
Yes, the law is an ass, we've established tools to encourage shakedowns of random orgs, what's new?
Well, the culture war bullshit is new. And it's not going to stop here.
For another example where Texas has a hundred thousand dollar fine available and already adjudicated, AidAccess isn't a .com... but it's a .org. Managed in Virginia. They, at least, shipped something. Florida and California do have their army of ADA testers already; how much do you think it would take to start up an NGO, support an intentionally (rather than accidentally) impossible-to-comply-with state version, self-fund by shaking down businesses, and then spend the excess absolutely murking rando websites that don't match the org's preferences?
You don't have to think very hard about this stuff, to find dangerous weapons.
gattsuru
8d ago
Guild Chests are level 41, and act as shared storage across multiple locations.
May just be easier to condense everything from your main base into a couple discrete chests at your mining base, dismantle your first base, and then rebuild at a new location with better geography, though. The weight limit slows you down a ton, but it doesn’t stop you from just loading more items on your character, so long as you don’t run out of inventory slots. And the grappling gun ignores weight.
For pseudo-automation, make sure your production facilities have ‘allow Pals to transport’ turned on, and a nearby eligible storage. But I don’t think there’s a way to automate future production beyond scaling batch crafts, short of mod use.
gattsuru
9d ago
Jane Doe v. Rice County was dropped after outcry, but did have charges brought to start with.
It's not the common mode: this study (caveat: 2012, mail survey of police, academic study) show around 15% of sexting-like cases with no aggravating conditions resulted in charges, though only a tiny number resulted in a felony conviction. But charges specifically aren't an extreme outlier.
((There are epicycles that make this legal doctrine, or even the contested legal doctrine restricting synthetic CSAM, defensible, but they're... a real big mess and I don't like thinking about the topic.))
gattsuru
9d ago
Texas v. Bad Porn Sites
[Past discussion here. I'm going to use "Kick" as shorthand for Kick Online Entertainment. I'm also avoiding the name of the website, both because the entire point is that it doesn't work, and because it's genuinely notorious.]
Reclaim The Net reports:
The domain is frozen rather than taken, though the difference means little here. What Verisign actually applied on was serverHold plus server-level prohibitions on deleting, transferring and updating the name. A hold pulls [the domain name] out of the .com zone file, so it resolves for nobody.
Kick must post a bond of $9,140,000, and that bond is "conditioned on Defendant's implementation of age verification that conforms with Texas Civil Practice and Remedies code chapter 129B," together with an affirmation that it will satisfy the civil penalties entered against it on September 30, 2024. A company outside the state's reach is being made to both pay and obey a Texas statute before its property comes back.
In the immediate sense, this isn't an End To The Open Internet. Kick isn't some purveyor of deep and uncomfortable truths, and on top of that is an extremely unsympathetic defendant, even by the standards of porn site managers. They got hit with a ruinous fine in no small part because they were in clear violation of the Texas HB1181 age verification requirement, but also because they simply didn't show up. Verisign is a US company subject to any state judge with a court order, and thus almost all .com domain names are subject to their policies, but as other cases have shown, just because one court issues an order doesn't mean another state will actually have to enforce it. Other top-level domains aren't maintained by operators in the United States or maintaining a US presence, though they're likely to play along with ICANN anyway. There's a handful of extant alternative DNS systems, and you can technically navigate to a website without a domain name at all, or by adding a host file record manually... but those things are all toys, impractical or nonviable for even a small website targeting technically adept users. That's why going after the domain name matters to start with.
Kick's website came back up under a .xxx domain name (maintained by GoDaddy, whose past deplatforming decisions make it a particularly strange decision for Kick), and was then taken offline at a hosting level before GoDaddy could get involved, downstream of an unrelated Dutch criminal investigation. Again, maximally unsympathetic defendants. ((To deflate some of the ReclaimTheNet reporting, while the court order says "It is further ordered that as many writs as the state deems necessary shall issue", it doesn't look like the state has gotten a subsequent writ to go after the .xxx domain name.))
But it's still a state court bringing an enforcement action that takes a website off the planet, to enforce a law that only a tiny fraction of that website's users would plausibly be covered by.
There is some novelty in the compliance posture: the court's order requires both financial bond and implementations following state law (and, notably, not just refusing to serve Texas IPs). But it doesn't matter much for this case. Kick is not philosophically predisposed to comply to start with, has no way to credibly demonstrate future compliance, Texas has been pretty vague about what age verification process is acceptable to start with, many of the commercial age verification providers wouldn't want to work with Kick anyway, and actually trying to act on it would require actually ponying up a bond that the state could easily take at any time. Similarly, there's some arguments about the court's statutory authorization, citing Texas Rule 599 that seems more built to satisfy judgements than statutory compliance, but it's a long shot when the court issued the judgment to start with, and it doesn't matter since Kick can't and won't contest it.
Still, a domain name takedown as a court order isn't unprecedented. The Department of Homeland Security has been getting domain name takedowns for reasons ranging from copyright violations to terror designations to deepfakes. There's been far more questionable takedowns, from a raw legal process perspective, than this. And they weren't that effectively reviewable, either: the punchline for the 1dmx takedown, as far as I've been able to search, is that no one's really had to talk about the entire thing when sued. Kentucky threatened to go after a bunch of poker domain names in the 2008-2010 range, though it accepted geo-location blocking.
But there's a bit of a difference in scope. 1dmx was a big deal involving nationwide protests and federal agents and allegedly high-level actors in at least one country's political infrastructure. Kick Online runs/ran a notorious web site that had been a longstanding target of both religious and feminist activists. As a hypothetical, if Gatalog gets blammed, it's going to have done so while making national news and attracted the personal attention of California's governor.
Where does that stop? There's a slope available, and the direction doesn't look great.
This could, theoretically, be the one principled exception for Texas. Age verification is a genuinely hard problem in the sense that people are unusually motivated to bypass it, compliance could theoretically be possible without infringing speech or privacy (even if actual implementations universally do both), and laws focused on protecting children get a bit of a handicap even where they mostly effect adults. We're still talking Ken Paxton, though.
And it doesn't actually matter, because even if Texas' next governor and attorney general had precise and dedicated legalistic compliance to the broadest principles of free speech every case but this one, there's a million other jurisdictions available.
Historically, the average person could depend on a certain apathy: even where a thousand different books of law and ten thousand different judges had the power to rake you over the coals in theory, legal limits like jurisdiction and practical limits like attention and visibility meant it took some real doing in practice. That's less clear a defense, now that every jurisdiction from a one-horse town up can plausibly and reasonably develop grudges against outfits that most citizens have never heard of, and now that states can find personal jurisdiction in an e-mail.
Worse, selecting for randos also selects for people who can't and won't defend themselves. Contesting the case would require funding a lawyer to stand in a highly disfavored setting, in a jurisdiction willing to write laws specifically targeting the company, in a civil case with correspondingly low standards of proof and no right to court-appointed representation for the indigent. Even if Kick could finance it, and that's pretty far from clear, the law in question here applies as easily to a 'business' regardless of income, and where Texas HB1181 only applies to a "legally recognized business entity", there's no legal or practical reason it'd stop there.
gattsuru
10d ago
Good luck on the business side. Specialized hardware dev is a really important field, but it's a very feast-or-famine one.
This sort of work where all the individual pieces probably existed somewhere in some parallel or non-overlapping field, but either haven't been put together or haven't been applied in the form you want, seem like some of the best use cases, whether code-focused or otherwise. I've been working on a modified micropython firmware to support wifi programming, debugging, and breakpoints for simple programs, and it's still nowhere near ready for primetime, but it's much closer in a couple nights and weekends than I would have gotten in weeks or months of day job work before modern LLMs.
Would be interested to see the firmware system if you open source it.
It's hard to prove a negative, but at minimum, the DEI scandals for Delta and United were a lot more subtle than the cut-and-dry 'guess my password' that Shelton Snow used. The FAA had a single chokepoint and had more direct command, so it's plausible that the discrimination there is the spikiest form and most aggressive, rather than merely the best-documented.
(Although "more direct" is not as clear a dividing line as the org charts would suggest or the progressives would like you to believe: the FAA's got a ton of methods to enforce control from the biggest companies down to single-airport flight schools. The DPE crunch alone let the FAA pick and choose what businesses got some easy money and which ones got to pay their competitors, and was clearly executed with little regard for need or capability.)
gattsuru
11d ago
Gender was "Classify the gender of the person described below.\n\nText: {text}\n\nGender:", where the only valid responses were male (104), female (838) and unknown (123).
Genre was "Does this editor include a focus on Women's Fiction or a women/female protagonist?\n\nText: {text}\n\n Answer:".
It was smart to handle a test example (Alec Shane) where the agent specifically said he didn't want women's fiction, and I only caught one misclassification out of twenty spot tests (an "unknown" that did include wanting women protagonists), but I would still treat this as directionality, rather than ground truth, for either question.
gattsuru
11d ago
I'd expect that Friendship is Optimal gets a lot more coverage. Caelum Est Conterrens_ is the sort of thing that's only really going to stick after you've bought into the broader concept.
(Feel free to try and replicate my results with other AI or just read through the profiles yourself-- I'm sure the percentages won't agree exactly, but I think the ratios between female/male appeal will be similar.)
I pulled the full MSWL editor list programmatically (dataset and python code) and fed it into Gemma4-25B using GBNF to coerce answers. (Caveat: spot checks looked good, but there's a very high unknown rate and almost all of them had clear genders or pronouns to human inspection, excluding a few general editor slots. So I'm probably using GBNF wrong, on top of the scraper being vibe-coded. I also didn't pull pictures.)
Out of 1065 entries, 104 were identified as male, 838 were identified as female, and 123 came back 'unknown'. I'm going to assume that the llm treated gender and sex as identical, so 8-22% man, 78-90% women, probably less than twenty multi-agent or company-wide agent profiles.
Gemma found 318 entries involving women's fiction or specifying a female protagonist. I'm less confident in that number serving as a good approximation.
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.
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