VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12hr ago
I've seen a few YouTube folks commenting that the required budget to make a "real quality" film these days is surprisingly small. Technology has shrunk lots of things -- good cameras are affordable, decent CG and editing is doable on commodity machines, LED lighting is lighter and doesn't require huge generators and added cooling. Good screenwriting can't have changed in difficulty, can it?
But at the same time, it doesn't feel like we're in the promised golden age of DIY cinematic content. And there are plenty of folks making other sorts of videos, even really well produced ones. So I'm not quite sure what's missing.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13hr ago
When I visited NZ, I was pretty surprised by the fact that they just aerially drop broad-spectrum mammal poison in large areas of the country. With (almost) no native mammals (a few bats), I guess it makes sense ecologically, but from my continental (from-a-continent-not-an-island) perspective it's a choice.
EDIT: This is intended as an interesting tangential anecdote, not an allegory.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13hr ago
That seems quite possible, I'll admit. But I have wondered if this (and several similar brouhahas) could happen because the government has other reasons to not reveal the files that are known to the higher-ups on both sides of the aisle (classified, for example), but it's politically useful to hammer the party in power because it looks suspicious and there is little they can do about it.
For example, if the public were instead clamoring about child sexual abuse at Area 51, it'd be politically convenient to always blame those in power while neither side wants to "reveal the files" to prove that it's actually aliens whatever they do there, not child abuse.
In this case I don't doubt that Epstein was molesting children, but the supposed intelligence connections could be embarrassing for rather unrelated reasons ("reveals methods").
But the direct involvement of powerful figures sure is a juicy idea. Maybe it's even true.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14hr ago
True, but the idea of low-cost accurate cruise missiles was too much to ask for a couple decades ago. I don't see a reason the counter technologies (and current FPV drones seem weak to hard counters) can't see a similar volume production tradeoff.
LPI radar exists, but if drones are the specific concern you could just listen acoustically (or IR) to only turn it on when it's actually necessary to emit. Drones are loud.
Lidar (leveraging self-driving car sensors) might also be worth considering, but could still be prone to detection.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I'm somewhat surprised I haven't seen anyone develop a miniature-CIWS to counter drones yet. Something like a small phased array radar paired with a 22LR (lol) minigun (you don't want to have to manually cycle it when it misfires) at a price point that allows "slap one on every vehicle larger than a pickup truck". Nothing about the small quadcopter drones has enough redundancy to take much of a hit, it seems (and I doubt drone-dropped explosives do either), so I doubt it would take much firepower. Speed, precision, accuracy, and attentiveness are all problems that can be solved mechanically (see the CIWS). An effective range of even 100m would at least protect a moderate-value mobile asset pretty well.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I feel like we've heard more from Vance in the last six months than we heard from Harris for her entire term. Maybe some of that is at the President's discretion (giving speeches to NATO and such), but I think Harris could have been more visible if she wanted. Vance is posting that-which-Trump-is-probably-contractually-bound-not-to to X, and had that notable incident on Bluesky recently.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election
Trump nominally ran in the primary for the Reform Party in 2000 and lost to Pat Buchanan.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
The closest I'm aware of is the nominal academic license of Facebook's llama models that seems to have been largely ignored once they were out in the wild. At the time, Meta was trailing a bit, and it probably helped their mindshare overall, but they didn't bring any court cases that I'm aware of either.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
The Anthropic case there is focused on "Is it a copyright violation to train models on copyrighted data without licensed distribution?", which is an interesting question, but my comment is more on the separate "Is the resulting model I've trained something I can claim copyright over?" question.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions.
There are also benefits to calling your system a religion: "I want to smoke peyote" makes the DEA show up, but "I want to smoke peyote because of my religion", despite losing in court in Employment Division v. Smith spurned the passing of lots of RFRA laws, not to mention other religious carveouts like the Amish with Social Security, beards in the military, and such.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery
Synthetic Aperture Radar can do some of these conditions, but isn't exactly equivalent to visible imagery. The technology exists and there are commercial providers operating satellites that acknowledge working with the US government.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I remain of the opinion that it is likely (but not guaranteed) that courts will find "training models" to not be a sufficiently creative endeavour to merit copyright protection. "Throwing a bunch of data into the GPU blender and doing massive least squares" isn't IMO more creative than scanning a painting, compressing the works of Shakespeare with gzip, or having a monkey press the camera shutter.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
LaTeX users will probably type three hyphens for an em dash.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Somebody with her profile, especially if she was ever an actual intel asset, puts their fucking real name as their handle?
Ross Ulbricht was arrested for a similar OPSEC failure, so I don't think it's completely implausible. Per Wikipedia, "[t]he connection was made by linking the username 'altoid', used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname 'altoid', asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name." I won't discount parallel construction here, but I think there is a certain point in an effort like this when you realize "this is for real", but you can't easily scrub the account history: a new account would itself look pretty suspicious and probably point right back to the original -- "DM'd all the other mods and asked for a new account to be blessed" is itself suspicious if you don't trust all those mods, and it's visible to users that a brand new account was given mod access. Satoshi seems like an exception here, but I think it's hard to leave no trace in these sorts of situations generally.
Early Reddit also strikes me as a place where a power-user could steer the conversation more broadly in ways that would be useful to more than just intelligence agencies, or could just be a personal power fantasy. Bots weren't believable conversation partners a decade ago. Observably, various political activists have gotten a lot of mileage out of moderating default Reddit subs, so even if maybe the impact of that is fading today, I think "digital conversation influencer" might have been a playable role that would get one into real conversations in the halls of (non-digital) power.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Gatsby his way into the world’s elite
I do think that a reasonable intelligence agency might want to get into the social circles of a Gatsby character just for networking purposes, even if they weren't involved in the "mysteriously acquired fortune" part. And if they were open about the affiliation, it's not impossible to imagine Epstein a Gatsby character bragging about the contacts as a mark of social status (possibly to the consternation of agents trying to act quietly). Or that the "I have friends in the CIA" was quite grossly exaggerated from the truth: it's even possible someone else lied to him about such an affiliation and he ran with it.
That said, I don't have a strong idea on what actually went down in the Epstein affair, I just think it's important to consider all plausible avenues before jumping to conclusions.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Just like beards, they used to be non-conformist now they're common enough.
Hadrian has entered the chat.
I wonder if this is a universal human narrative: "Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism, but honestly I see everyone in politics playing it these days, like your observation here.
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