Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
9hr ago
This is in reference to the production of fiction.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
13hr ago
Perhaps some useful additional context: ShiftUp are also the developers of the gacha game Goddess of Victory: Nikke and that game has characters that I think could be argued are both children and sexualized. For example Alice or Liter.
On the main topic: I don't think it matters at all whether Evie looks particularly childlike or is particularly sexualized. She's not a real person and so her depiction and sexualization fail to have any of the features that make it bad when it's done to a real person. For any kind of depiction or action beyond a sexualized one I think most people understand this latter fact intuitively.
If you, as an individual, are aroused by a sexualized depiction of a minor then you may want to seek help from an appropriate therapist. But declaring, preemptively, that it is immoral to create fictionalized depictions because they might arouse pedophiles is insane.
A Tumblr post, amusingly, gets this right:
"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.
"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.
"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.
"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.
I've only quoted the top post for brevity but the whole thread I've linked is good, IMO.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19d ago
At the very least you would think they would cut off trading in the market at the end date. The impression I get is a lot of people are mad because they traded after the 8-K came out and therefore regarded the bet as a sure thing. Same for the "clarification." Why allow people to continue to trade after either of these events?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
20d ago
Are prediction markets still culture war? I bring this up because there's been some... controversy surrounding Polymarket and its resolution of a bet earlier this week. The market in question is this one regarding whether Microstrategy will sell any Bitcoins by a certain date. In particular I want to draw your attention to the recently resolved sub-market for May 31st. If you expand the history of the market you'll notice some very odd behavior for the odds. On June 1st, after the deadline for the sale had passed, the odds briefly spike up over 56% before crashing to essentially 0. Why did people become so convinced that Microstrategy had sold bitcoin in the window? And then why did people become so convinced that Microstrategy hadn't?
They might have been convinced in the first place because on June 1st Microstrategy published their 8-K which said they had sold 32 Bitcoin between May 26th and May 31st. That seems like a good reason to believe that Microstrategy had sold bitcoin before May 31st! Unless you thought their 8-K was a lie. It seems like it was a mistake to let people trade after it was public information which way the bet would resolve, but that's what happened.
Then why did the odds crash back down to near 0? Well, on June 1st the market was updated to add this disclaimer:
No information from MSTR, on-chain data, or consensus of credible reporting confirmed that MicroStrategy sold Bitcoin within the market's timeframe.
Confirmation achieved outside of the market's time frame does not qualify.
We’re aware of the dispute on this market. If a clarification is to be issued, it will be at 1:00 PM ET on June 1. If no statement is issued at that time, then there will be no clarification by the Polymarket team. The orderbook will be cleared at 1:00 PM ET, regardless of whether a clarification is made.
It's true that in reality Microstrategy did sell bitcoin before May 31st. A bunch of people did correctly predict that. But the market pays out to people who made a false prediction because the evidence that Microstrategy sold bitcoin didn't come out until the day after the deadline!
This isn't the first time a prediction market has had some controversy over how they resolved a market. Kalshi had a similar scandal earlier this year concerning its resolution of a market on whether Ali Khamenei would remain in power in Iran. This ones feel pretty blatant as a resolution for certain polymarket insiders who control how markets resolve via crypto vote, though.
There's often an assumption that prediction market odds track some kind of real probability of an event (predicetion markets themselves certainly lean into this) and that therefore their resolutions will track reality. I think this is a reminder that this is less true than we might suppose.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23d ago
I have no love for the United States' copyright and IP regime but, as a developer of enterprise software myself, I have a lot of sympathy for the developers I suppose. Unless you have planned from the beginning for the idea that your game should be runnable without access to a server or that your server must be runnable on random consumer hardware I can see why it would be pretty difficult to backport that capability. Thinking in terms of my own product, you would need to replicate an extremely specific network and storage topology to get my software running and releasing a version of our software where you didn't have to do this might as well be asking us to rewrite the software from scratch. I don't know what the internals of various gaming company servers look like, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were similar. Especially in our modern era of cloud computing.
Egregious example: Microsoft plans to remotely disable Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac. To be clear, this software was a one-time purchase and works completely offline, Microsoft even explicitly stated at one point it would continue to function. I can't even play devil's advocate.
I am not sure this framing is quite correct. It sounds like Office 2019 for Mac shipped with a local certificate that does the verification of license keys. Microsoft has renewed that certificate but distributing the renewed certificate still requires an update to the software containing the certificate. Microsoft isn't releasing an update for Office 2019 since it has been out of support for 3 years. If they no longer have the source code this may be very difficult to do. They should not have made representations that it would work in perpetuity knowing this limitation.
California's Protect our Games act. Passed the state assembly (not yet law). It requires publishers to post a notice 60 days before shutting down their game, and provide some offline functionality or refunds, although it doesn't apply to subscription games (and may have other exceptions). Backed by Stop Killing Games.
I find it funny that this law seems like it could easily be more punitive to companies I think are much more pro-consumer than those that are anti-consumer, due to the subscription carve-out. Expect to see a bunch of companies add a $1/year subscription to their games to exempt themselves from California's law!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
26d ago
Maybe It will Happen this year and they won't need to change the law to create a $250 bill with Trump's likeness!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
28d ago
My impression is the 10,000 subsidiaries would get one joint-vote. The charter has provisions for the case where a single voter is entitled to vote as both a resident and property owner (still only one vote) and where a voter owns multiple pieces of property (still only one vote). It is a little unclear to me what the legal arrangement looks like where a piece of real property has multiple owners but I suspect they would still only get one vote.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
28d ago
It helps to read the decision. Relevant background:
In 2008, the Delaware General Assembly amended the Charter of the Town of Fenwick Island ("Fenwick"), a small coastal community, to allow Fenwick to expand it's voter registration rolls to allow individuals to cast votes on behalf of trusts, limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations that own property in Fenwick. Today, the overwhelming majority of legal entity property owners in Fenwick registered to vote, and on whose behalf votes are cast, are trusts.
In this action the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, a corporation ("Plaintiff"), challenges these provisions, asserting that Fenwick's Charter violates the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution by way of "vote dilution;" i.e., the dilution of votes of human beings by votes of artificial legal entities.
The judge did not find some generalized right to vote for corporate entities. Rather:
1. In 2008 the Delaware legislature amended a town's charter to permit voting by certain corporate entities that owned property in that town.
2. The ACLU sued claiming the Delaware constitution only permitted natural persons to vote.
According to the judge's analysis:
1. The Delaware Constitution's Election Clause consists, in its entirety of "All elections shall be free and equal."
2. Who is eligible to vote in a municipal election is generally governed by a municipality's charter (under Delaware state law).
3. Permitting non-natural-person voters does not violated the text of the Election Clause in the Delaware Constitution.
Apparently, there are other municipalities in Delaware that have similar arrangements. The judge mentions the City of Wilmington explicitly. The judge only briefly mentions the corporate personhood thing since it's not essential to their analysis, but the ACLU argument relies heavily on it.
The question is less "do corporations have the right to vote?" and more "does the Delaware constitution forbid the Delaware legislature from giving corporations the power to vote in municipal elections?"
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally. The way war is fought today it seems to me women could substantially contribute in a way that was much less true before the industrialization of war. Especially in an existential context, it would seem foolish not to bend all society's available capacity towards survival. I find some amusement in the fact that, historically, this has been the more feminist/leftist position on the draft while the more conservative position has been keeping a gender-segregated draft.
Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".
What, exactly, does this entail? Are we going to restrict women's ability to work outside the home? Bring back a form of coverture? To me this reads like another of those situations where a hypothetical burden on men, regardless of its actualization, is used to justify oppressing women in a way that does not seem, to me, very justifiable.
Is presidential corruption still culture war?
You may or may not remember that back in January of this year President Trump, in his personal capacity, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion in damages related to leaks of his tax returns by a contractor back in 2018-2020. I don't want to dig into the merits of the case as such, except I'll note the legal discussion I've read seems to have a consensus that the case is very weak. It is also very unusual for a sitting President to be suing the government he is in charge of. There are obvious conflicts of interest involved. So much so the judge in that case issued an order for the parties to explain how they are actually adverse to each other, how they disagree, so that the cases and controversies requirement of the constitution is satisfied.
As of today, it seems we may never find out how good the claims are or aren't, how adverse the parties are or aren't. Trump filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss his lawsuit, pursuant to the establishment of a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund". It's not even clear to me the fund is going to be administered by the United States government, as paragraph C provides:
Within 60 days of the Effective Date, the United States shall provide the U.S. Department of the Treasury with all necessary forms and documentation to direct a payment of $1,776,000,000 to an account for the sole use by the Anti-Weaponization Fun ("Designated Account"). The corpus of the Anti-Weaponization Fund's funding does not represent the value of any claim by Plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants' claims.
Is this going to be the new normal? If you're President and Congress won't give you the money you want to pay your friends and allies you can get however much you want with this one weird trick!
ETA:
ABC reports that the fund will be overseen by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, but the members will all be removable at-will by the President.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
I mean, even absent transfers I am very confident modern womens' income exceeds their historical counterparts. Modern economies rely vastly less on muscle power than they did historically.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Archive link since the post now appears to be deleted.
I think the obvious common denominator is that there's much less social, legal, and economic pressure on women to marry compared to history. Women today are able to support themselves and participate equally in society in a way that was not true even 100 years ago. This gives women a lot more power to say no to men they otherwise may have married in the past.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
I clicked through and read the article and the perspective therein was so foreign I feel like I'm being trolled. I don't even know where to begin.
Yes restaurant critics review the entire experience of going to a restaurant. They do not obsessively focus on establishing which one has the better tasting food. Am I the crazy one? Is the taste of the food the only thing normal people care about at a restaurant? I am pretty confident people who are into, like, fine dining care a lot about atmosphere and presentation and ambiance and so on. Going to a restaurant can be an Experience!
The analogy with taking medicine feels so insane. The vast majority of people taking medicine are not doing so for pleasure, they are doing so for purely functional reasons. That is not, to my mind, how people engage with entertainment or art. People can be, and often are, induced into engaging in pleasurable activities by a good story about a thing or a sense of novelty. I cannot tell you how many books I've been induced to read because they had a cool design on the cover rather than by my expectation they would be good (often wrong!)
And, like, the context outside an artistic work can obviously inform one's enjoyment of that work. Has Scott really never had the experience of enjoying something more due to knowledge not contained in the work itself? Has he ever had an in-joke?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
As far as I know, the law in US federal states and Western European countries is usually that a husband may not have a paternity test done on the child or children unless the wife agrees to it in writing and the family court permits it (in case of a divorce).
I think this is less broadly true. I'm not familiar with Europe but based on my research on the United States there are only 15 or so states that seem to have any regulation of genetic testing of another person. To the extent this conduct is prohibited there, it's prohibited under general genetic testing/privacy/medical decision laws (requiring consent of both parents) rather than some kind of specific anti-paternity-testing law.
More broadly, I think the law recognizes an obvious distinction between legal parentage and genetic parentage. There's an (often rebuttable) presumption that the two are the same but they don't have to be.
Imagine a couple adopt an infant. They remain together for several more years and then divorce. Can a court order the non-custodial parent pay child support to the non-custodial parent? Should the biological parents (if they are even identifiable) be on the hook for the child support? There's no question here that the parents are not the biological parents of the child but I think courts would still happily order one to pay child support. There's an obvious analogy to a situation where a man signs a birth certificate. Acts as a child's father for some years. Only for it to come to light they are not genetically related.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
The reasoning in the original preliminary injunction is that the President doesn't have statutory authority to make these kinds of alterations. I don't really see how these events bear on that reasoning. "The president was attacked at a private location while attending a private event as an invited guest, therefore he does have the statutory authority to build the ballroom!" Like, what?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Courts are the entities that our system designated to resolve legal ambiguities. Largely for reasons of expediency. Court interpretations of statutes or the constitution can be overridden by the legislature or by amendment but, in the moment, we need someone to decide.
These questions come up in the context of pending cases. Take the example of Wickard below. Whether he was in violation of federal law and must pay a penalty turned on whether his growing wheat was "interstate commerce." If judges are not empowered to answer this question, what does this case look like? Is it put on hold until Congress passes a law? The constitution is amended? Can anyone get their federal prosecution deferred by finding an ambiguity (according to who?) that would require a statutory or constitutional amendment to clarify?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
On the narrow question in Rucho, I don't see why allegations that districts were drawn for partisan advantage is nonjusticiable while other questions of district drawing (ex, racial discrimination) are. If the court wanted to declare that any question of why districts were drawn particular ways were nonjusticiable that would be consistent. But they haven't done that and I am skeptical they will so I don't see why a partisan motivation, specifically, is nonjusticiable.
On the broader question I don't think it would be unreasonable to read substantive requirements for district drawing into the equal protection clause. Ideally these requirements wouldn't reference partisnaship as such but I think the natural effect of such requirements would be to reduce the possibility for partisan gerrymandering. I think when people complain about a lack of representation when discussing districts like Virginia's new 11, 7, 1, and 8 they are getting at something real and constitutionally cognizable. Compare also the TN 2020 map with the 2024 map. Am I to believe the interests of the people of Nashville are equally well represented when they are all together in the 5th district as when they are split between the 5th, 6th, and 7th district? And the constitution has nothing to say about this effective denial of the ability of a political community to have a representative represent them?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
The obvious solution is for Congress to just pass a law ending the practice for everyone. The Redistricting Reform Act has been introduced in ~every Congress since 2006 but has never gone anywhere. The most recent version has 55 cosponsors in the House. All Democrats, of course. Frankly, I think the best outcome would have been Rucho v. Common Cause coming out the other way. Since any legislative solution operates to the disadvantage of some fraction of the people who would have to endorse that solution. Something only a half dozen or so legislative bodies in the United States have managed to do.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
If you are a programmer I recommend clicking through to the referenced red team blog and reading some of the technical details they have revealed. "Crash any OpenBSD host with carefully crafted TCP packets" seems pretty bad. And finding bugs in cert libraries where they only verify that DNs match rather than verifying thumbprints is a classic.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
I suspect a lot of discussion of athletics focuses on biological advantages because the discussion is often about elite athletes. At that level, it can be assumed people have coaches, regiments, etc that are dedicated to squeezing every ounce of advantage out of things they can be doing to improve their performance. So focus goes to biological advantages. Not because those are the biggest differentiators across the entire performance spectrum, but because they can be large differentiators at the level of elite athletes. At a more beginner/amateur level more hours spent practicing is almost certainly more valuable than all but the largest biological advantages. Like, the reason I could squat 400+ lbs five years ago, but can't now, is not because I am became biologically incapable of squatting 400+ lbs in that time, I just spend a lot less time in the gym than I used to. At non-elite levels the amount of time and effort you put in can have very large effects.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
I work for <large software company> that provides me access to Claude Opus 4.6. My work is primarily in a several-million-line-of-code legacy service written in C#. I use Claude itself generally via the GHCP CLI. I broadly agree with the analogy that it is comparable to having a junior dev or intern to hand to actually write changes you need done. My best results at one-shotting a change are when I give Claude a change that's probably in the few dozen up to 100 line of code scope. Beyond that, it can be hit or miss as to whether Claude itself will successfully break up a change into smaller chunks or whether I need to do that preemptively. Probably the biggest benefit Claude enables is improving parallelism. I spend much less time actually typing code and more time getting other things done. If all I did was sit and stare at Claude doing changes I could otherwise be doing, I would probably be less productive by using it but I largely don't have to be. I can tell Claude to make a change and then go do something else, come back and iterate, rinse and repeat.
For now, it seems like a very useful tool but I am not particularly worried about it taking my job. I also have not used it in a context where I am exposed to how much it costs so it's unclear to me if the ROI is there either. I will say that I often have better results when I do things like give it more context, especially specific in-repo examples, and the different harnesses I've used (VSCode integration, Cline, CLI) do seem to make a substantial difference to its output.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
It's a little bit of SCOTUS trivia but the "Chief Justice" is just a particular seat on the court. Only 3 (of 17) Chief Justices were raised from an Associate and only 5 had ever been an Associate before becoming Chief.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
This past Wednesday at the Supreme Court saw oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara. For those not following along this is the birthright citizenship executive order case. You can find the full transcript here.
As someone who listened to the live audio and has now read back over the transcript a couple times I think things went pretty poorly for the government. So much so I wonder if this was the straw that broke the camel's back with respect to firing Bondi. I'm very confident this case is going to be 7-2, if not 9-0, against the government.I'm not going to rehearse all the arguments, it's very long.
The government's oral argument mostly focused on the idea that for a child to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States for the purposes of the 14th amendment their parents had to be domiciled here. Where domicile requires (1) lawful presence and (2) intent to stay. The justices (principally Gorsuch, ABC, and KBJ) poke a bunch of holes in this argument. Pointing out both practical and theoretical issues with both parts of the definition. It is not my impression that the justices were especially convinced by Sauer's answers to those questions.
The respondent's oral argument, by my read, was much more focused. Why did Wong Kim Ark mention domicile in some contradictory ways as to whether it mattered? How to understand the association between the posited set of exceptions. If the different language of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was any guide in interpreting the 14th amendment. Interestingly Justice Alito even jumped in on this first one to volunteer a reason why Wong Kim Ark might mention domicile in the question and the holding without having incorporated it into the relevant test.
This is all tea-leaf-reading, of course, but my current read is the government is very likely to lose.
Because characters in fiction aren't real? The thing that is bad about CSAM is the part where a person was abused to make it. There's no equivalent in fiction.
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