gattsuru
7hr ago
Normalizing to miles or equivalent trips helps reduce the range and can put them around motorcycle risk, but helicopters as a full class remain a good bit more dangerous than cars. To be fair, that’s heavily driven by training flight and Robinson incidents, so fair-weather flight operations under Part 135 are a lot less concerning, but it’s still a risk-taking behavior.
gattsuru
21hr ago
That would have its own issues even if it happened, but counterexamples like Chicago exists, and examples in favor of the theory like California have had their own responses turning them into disproofs.
gattsuru
1d ago
Unless you're going to give more detail, "personally antagonist" feels like it's trying to carry more weight than it supports. I do not believe moderators would, or for that matter should have been lighter on the banhammer had the responses to Darwin been formatted as subtweets talking about 'some liberals here'.
Darwin's efforts that direction were always a tool to prevent his claims from being falsified and to cast as broad of a net as possible, not some serious effort to avoid antagonizing individuals when he said "conspiracy theory levels of denial and outgroup alienation".
gattsuru
2d ago
Does this analysis apply from 'white' to 'whitey'?
I can imagine a steelman where this shows hypocrisy on their side, and the progressive tendency to treat only the slurs aimed at their team is pretty damned frustrating, but I don't think splitting the convention reals, here.
gattsuru
3d ago
The Darwin Question gets brought up over and over, but no one has ever offered concrete policies we should change, just "calibrate your tolerance" or "be quicker to ban people on vibes."
To be very explicit, please formalize a concrete policy on what "being antagonistic" means, that is deeper than vibes. Because for darwin specifically, it did look like some people got banned or modhatted, and others not, sometimes in the same thread and for merely pointing Darwin's accusations back at him.
I can offer options -- Viking's old "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." retains a lot of utility -- but I know mine isn't what you want.
gattsuru
4d ago
Google scrapes your e-mail and almost certainly will disclose it under some situations, but there are additional concerns with any AI access -- Anthropic doesn't (and might not be able to) have the same level of privacy protections, self-hosted AI have their own vulnerabilities, and it's a lot easier for an agent to pick up malware or bad instructions than Google or even Outlook/Thunderbird/whatever.
I've fiddled with LLM-based spam filtering, so there's definitely a point where it might be worth it, but I used GBNF and left pretty much every tool disabled up to and including memory. There might well be a day where permission systems for AI systems are good enough I'd trust them to accept unfiltered input and have command line access at the same time, but we're not at that day now.
gattsuru
5d ago
I have submitted a (much more polite) request for clarification and correction to the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine editorial. When (or if) that's ever published, I have a draft on the Forensic Science Medicine and Pathology paper.
On the downside, the chief editor has cited the Hargarten editorial already, and paraphrased it incorrectly, no less. I've had to dox and face reveal myself (those poor bastards) as part of the process.
On the upside, the WestJEM editorial team actually responded to my e-mail eventually, and I've even gotten access to some nonpublic drafts of papers from other related ballistics trials.
On the other downside, the Forensic Science paper has been cited repeatedly in the Viramontes case, including in an amici brief submitted by one of the lead writers of the Forensic Science Medicine and Pathology paper. And it's terrible.
Not only does it repeat many of the mistakes from the original paper, it's sloppy about them. Some of those mistakes include a couple I've been holding back in reserve -- do you know what happens to bone rapidly submerged in a giant block of 132 degree Celsius oil and have you ever made soup stock? do you know that if you trace (after three hops) the LaSueur's citations about 9mm indirect bone fractures, you instead an example of a handgun causing a fracture and the same rifle only being able to rarely cause a fracture at a seventh the distance as the LaSueur trial?
And now I know things that are not public information.
It's fascinating that the public version of the Cranfield data does not mention, not even once, what grade of ballistics gel simulacra it used. The amici claim that it used a "similar" gel. That's fascinating because 10% and 20% gel have drastically different properties, and ClearBallistics sells both. There's an interesting sentence of "The synthetic gel was pre-calibrated by the manufacturer using the standard .177 caliber steel.", which leaves the question of "steel what", and looks almost exactly like what you'd get if the calibration description and depth were cut off by someone trying to scrub details.
Now, that's also a draft paper by someone that thinks a bullet can enter a block of ballistics gel at zero velocity and gain speed by the time it exits, or that the AR-15 can fire 40 gram bullets, among other errors, reported and packaged and signed off by lawyers that think three and six are the same number. I'd like to point out that it costs literally thousands of dollars to publish an amici brief, by the way, just in printing costs. But could just a coincidence.
Unfortunately, Cranfield is not subject to any meaningful disclosure requirements.
More readily available firearms
I'm talking about "availability" in terms of the teens getting access to firearms, and in particular handguns. In the 1950s fewer than 1 in 7 households had a handgun while by the 1990s almost half of households had one.
This is also wrong. The nice thing about pro-gun control statistics is that so many of them are so bad that you can track their source just because no one else simultaneously invented the same fake number, and this is one of those. The actual version of this is from Cook 1993, sourced at your favorite piracy group, and it claimed:
"The 1989 Gallup poll estimated that 47% of households possessed a gun. Remarkably, the fraction of American households owning a gun has remained at about one half for at least the last three decades. However, the fraction of households that own a handgun has increased substantially, from 13% in 1959 to 24% in 1978 and thereafter; thus, in recent years about half of the gun-owning households own a handgun. Most gun-owning-households have several guns, with an average of about four. Only one in seven gun-owning households is limited to handguns; in fact, two thirds of those who own a handgun also own a rifle or shotgun."
I'm not confident Cook's number reals - the only other cite referencing a Gallup 1959 poll on handgun ownership is Eskine, and it gives 16%, on top of the normal survey problems - but the dependence on gun-owning households make this a claim eating its own tail.
Meanwhile, the number of households with firearms decreased in that timeframe; Cook's 'about one half' is only true if you draw a line with a fat sharpie. 'Official' federal surveys gave numbers of all firearm ownership around 35% of households in the 1990s; there were books written about the whole theory that gun owners were becoming rarer but more dogmatic in that time frame. Note the conflict with the original claim, now fully abandoned without so much as a whoopsie-diddle.
again
gattsuru
6d ago
Even the simple problem of 'how does food get from the truck to the front side of a grocery store' involves some pretty varied people. I don't think it's fair to call it dumb, and the actual dumb coworkers can range from just a little slow to actively being a hazard to everyone else, but it's a job where you think with your muscles as much as your head. I've got an ex-coworker who was great at inventory management and billing, but went to throw boxes around because it was a job she just stop thinking about the second the shift ended. You take some income hits doing that, but she wanted kids, and the equation changes pretty dramatically.
gattsuru
6d ago
It gets pretty dark, even compared to New Vegas as inspiration. Littlepip isn't depressed and mopey, but gruesome torture, mass murder, loss of limbs, both individual and systematized rape, suicide in both the 'to avoid something worse' and 'deep depression' senses, race war, children being forced to fight each other to death, pacifism being tested and broken, so on. It's a surreal tone because it's intentionally contrasting the initially-bright setting and a messianic protagonist with what that actually means and does under stress, but it's definitely still a dark and increasingly dark one.
gattsuru
6d ago
gattsuru
6d ago
Uvalde also gave a costly lesson about diffusion of responsibility. I don't know how many emergency responders have integrated the belief that they can be disarmed and escorted from the building while the love of their life is being killed, and then the People In Charge faff about while the murders continue for a literal hour before checking a door handle.
But I know that they mention it.
gattsuru
6d ago
Even in-story, Harry is pretty manipulative here:
Thank you, Professor Quirrell, I couldn't have lost without you. [...]
Was Harry going to Science Hell for what he'd done? Harry wasn't sure. He'd contrived to keep Draco's mind on the possibility that magic was fading, made sure Draco would carry out the part of the experiment that would seem at first to point in that direction. He'd waited until after explaining genetics to prompt Draco into realizing about magical creatures (though Harry had thought in terms of ancient artifacts like the Sorting Hat, which no one could duplicate anymore, but which continued to function). But Harry hadn't actually exaggerated any evidence, hadn't distorted the meaning of any results. When the Interdict of Merlin had invalidated the test that should have been definitive, he'd told Draco up front.
Draco could have pivoted into a more scientifically defensible version, if he had more time and less pressure, and he outright comes up with those pivots later for the 'why is Hermoine a good spellcaster' problem. But Harry's certain that it wouldn't matter, because he'd need an explanation that could be tested, and once you speak a lie, the truth forever becomes your enemies. With Hermoine, she might have been a pureblood adopted or raised unknowingly by muggles, but to someone who's seen how you test a hypothesis, seriously, that explanation only exists so long as it's put to the proof, and can't be an excuse any longer. Once you tell a lie, the truth becomes ever after your enemy.
((This is... naive, to be blunt, and not just in the casual 'some intelligent people can lie to themselves' way. But it was 2008, the Sequences took it in the same sense they took Kahneman.))
gattsuru
7d ago
Cathode_G had DIY guncotton pretty much solved, DIY gunpowder as difficult but doable, and (corrosive) primer as viable (cw: guy is also an exhibitionist furry, so link is safe but be warned if you follow him). The traditional mercury fulminate solution is both messy, chemically nasty, and extremely dangerous without the right tools and experience, and pretty much any traditional primer is going to be dangerous by definition.
There's been some interesting efforts in electrically-ignited primers that look safer and even harder to block, though they're weird enough that it's been difficult to adapt modern tools to them.
gattsuru
8d ago
I’ll caveat the complexities of the Brazilian Federal police being pro-Bolo given that Lulu has been in office since 2023, but yeah, this is a clusterfuck. There’s also supposedly some messiness about which court the delay came from. I don’t know enough about Brazil’s legal or executive branch to say more deeply.
gattsuru
9d ago
There's also tail-end risk. A cancer diagnosis, serious injury, major chronic illness, pregnancy, etc can easily hit five or ten times the cost of that annual premium, and over a longer time frame the chances of something popping up gets bad enough to think about. The math's a lot harder to figure out now that most medical debt can't go to your credit score, but it's not a trivial thing, either.
gattsuru
10d ago
I've seen hanky code as a themed night in some really cruisy gay clubs, but even in the '00s it was pretty outdated as a random casual thing in more suburban spaces. Could believe it in a drag bar, though. By 'tradition', it's specifically having the hankerchief hanging out of a pocket, typically a seat pocket, so congratulations on the serendipity?
Really bizarre to have called it bandana code. Wonder if that's Chicago-specific.
Some of modern cruising culture is very much a kink of its own, in the same way that gloryhole stuff is more about the story than the actual pragmatic rocks-getting-off bit, and that's kept it from being completely extinguished in gayer meccas. There's been some technical advances to try to make it less intrusive (ostensibly for normies, practically for gay guys that don't want to get picked up by cops), but they come with their own infohazards -- reacting to a grindr ping is now a test of its own.
A guy with dad bod in a polo shirt and basketball shorts sitting in a minivan doesn't exactly scream "homo" to me but what do I know.
There's a lot of downsides to not being a Kinsey 0, but one advantage is that no matter how unconventional the type, there's someone for whom that specific thing is exactly what they're looking for.
gattsuru
11d ago
It's not the end of the world or even another Heartbleed-level incident, but between php2shell, node2shell, and some other lesser problems, it's probably worth making sure you have a decent password manager and set up token-based 2FA on major accounts like e-mails and banking information.
The extent any of these things are actively being exploited, or even can be meaningfully exploited, isn't massive yet, but there's probably going to be a long tail of stuff that either wasn't updated or was updated poorly.
gattsuru
12d ago
Garrett Petersen, who's been working on a from-scratch retro game with AI assistance, put it as:
AI only really became good enough to take a high quality project to completion in 2026. There were lots of projects started in 2020-2024 that are finishing now. The creators say, "look at this thing I made without AI." But of course they didn't use something that barely worked!
Anyone starting a big ambitious solo project now has to choose between using the new tools and finishing in 2026-2027, or not using them and finishing around 2031.
I don't think that's absolutely true -- there's some solo projects that are ambitious in the Linux ethos of doing something small really really well where the time tradeoff doesn't exist. But it probably tells you why a lot of things seem to be happening all at once, even as the models or AI tools haven't had a quantum leap for a bit.
gattsuru
12d ago
At this point they should really stop shipping it
That'd be nice, but there's a pretty big asterisk there. A lot of software ships with support for mod_php, up to and including mainstay software like Nextcloud and some (paid!) web hosts, and warnings about performance never stopped people from just using it.
What's wrong with apache?
I'll admit that this is partly an artifact of my specific use cases where there's a lot of reverse proxy or wonky configuration going on, but I've almost always found nginx a better (if slightly more annoying in syntax) option, performance, reliability, and consistency of behavior under load. The only really big selling point I've ever felt for Apache is the .htaccess concept, but unless you're running a VPS that's always seemed more a source of footguns than a benefit.
(I guess Apache and one-button LAMP stacks are easier in Windows compared to LEMP? But speaking of footguns...)
gattsuru
12d ago
I'll caveat that while that post isn't entirely wrong, it's a little overstated. PHP-FPM will generally terminate naive attempts to exploit the bug unless the rest of the infrastructure is also fucked up, but Apache's PHP module won't. While this exploit chain is difficult and fairly time-consuming per-site, it's available well before you get to 'elite' level.
I guess there's an argument that running mod_php instead of php-fpm is itself a misconfiguration (or, frankly, using Apache), but that's a level where you're arguing definitions.
It's not a Heartbleed-level incident or as bad as 4, but it's still pretty high up there.
gattsuru
12d ago
Cultural differences, whether striver or national, might explain the Alzheimer's not-legally-fraud-probably, but I don't think they cover this.
"Any other similarly situated Indian man" would be someone born and raised in southwest Ohio, stewing in the same forces and outside pressures that redefined the norms around this specific class of alleged sexual assault for long-standing American families. He was not in India for the Mattress Girl incident and the Rolling Stone Rape On Campus article. His 'home state' had the OSU athlete abuse scandal in 2018. And then you get to the child part of child sexual abuse.
gattsuru
13d ago
To be fair, the situation is genuinely weird if you look at it. Somebody fleeing the state post-indictment and the arrest warrants never getting enforced is unfortunately plausible, even if it's not how the system is 'supposed' to work, and even more plausible before these records were both computerized and widely accessible.
Except Arthur didn't just hide 'until things blew over'. He fled the state permanently, and was arrested in another state two decades later; he didn't die until 2004, well after automated fingerprint scans were pretty normalized. The most plausible explanation is that the paperwork got lost and the prosecutor didn't push that hard, and in the late-1970s that's more plausible than you'd want it to be, but there's a lot of different steps that had to be missed.
That said, I'd expect the staffer (and Vivek) position was just that they could get away with it, and the truth didn't matter. Cfe the question of whether Trump raped Carol for a high-profile example. A lot of MAGA people believe that more completely than anything statistical about rape allegations applying to one specific person... but it doesn't work that way, here.
It's also stupid evil, which seems like a Ramaswamy trademark. Forget the question of people looking into the full backstory; if that were a problem, ProPublica wouldn't have business. But literally now, half of the target audience is going to dismiss this as AI-generated, and the other half are Midwesterners. That's a landmine, not a golden opportunity.
I don't particularly like Acton on her own measures, but I could honestly see Vivek losing by double-digits even if the headwinds were more neutral. The annoying bit is that it's going to get drawn up as anti-Indian racism, rather than principles or just disliking the smarmy git.
"GetThereItis" is a pretty big driver of incidents across the board:
Most of the fatalities tend to be in private aviation, but the pressures are probably higher for charter. I'd assume it's especially hard if you're a sports fan having to tell Kobe Bryant that visibility is shit today, but even without that, it's the sort of business where reputation for reliability is a major driver in future customers. You can afford to have a plane sit out a single flight or a single day for safety sake pretty easily, since fuel and per-hour maintenance is so much of your running costs. But you can't afford to be the guy who cancels at the last minute, because then you end up with planes that sit for weeks on end.
The other big issue is that smaller charter operations can run with much less experienced pilots in one or both seats. I don't buy the full Colgan Air philosophy, but there definitely have been incidents where a pilot whose background overwhelmingly favored fair-weather flights got thrust into environments where they couldn't make that rule apply, and had no ability to judge bad weather conditions from unsafe ones. And while bigger charter operations will push pilots toward education, smaller ones tend to have hobbyist or semi-pro pilots that don't keep up on it.
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