gattsuru
16hr ago
... I'm a bi furry, so I get what you're coming from. 'Ew, gay' wasn't just a joke limited to samef**s on 4chan, but a mainstay both in and outside of fandom spaces, tolerated in schools, and something I got from even my own family. I was a furry before SomethingAwful discovered The Easiest Target, and despite how much worse it got, it wasn't great before that.
But I also don't think it's terribly honest to compare that to a 'deepest worry' as the 'average bust size of the women in video games'. In tabletop, we're not just seeing people try to establish XX-phenotype'd space marines -- for screw over the lore or themes of 40k, it's not like the non-woke behavior from Games Workshop has been slow to do the same problems either. We just had a recent D&D history that couldn't hold its fire on calling its original authors every type of intentional evil under the sun, while people start reading entrails of games they've disemboweled for signs of The Dreaded Enemy. But those aren't concrete.
In literature, Correia's rant argument stands on its own, and there's been a prolonged campaign to try to get Sanderson, and then there's Mercedes Lackey. For video games, I'll point again to a guy getting driven of an open-source project he's run for more than a decade, in part by threats at his co-contributors' employment if he didn't step down, because he made rude comments about a (trans) spree shooter.
Nor are these rules that 'just' impact the big-names.
And I think that's kinda a distraction. The argument for against using 'gay' as an insult wasn't "we're gonna do it to 'straight white male', and it'll be fair, then". The argument for having options for a female character other than 'tits out McGee' or 'fridged' wasn't to make the only acceptable character archetype variations on Velma from Scooby Doo. I can (and have) made the argument that this was in part for the benefit of many of the people the LGBT and woke movements are themselves claiming to protect, jettisoned in favor of a world of bubble wrap.
But even that's a distraction: this retreat is bad not just because it hurts the subaltern, or betrays its own promises, but because it is wrong at its core, and to all it impacts.
I'm... kinda impressed by how bad that is. I get that no one reads the original text, but good lords, you couldn't get a sharper tonal or stylistic mismatch from Elligy's writing style with a steel blade and a whetstone.
The man wouldn't use the word 'lush' unless held hostage, and I think 'chambers of manhood' would by only work Red Triber frameworks as a testes joke.
EDIT: for contrast, the portion where a lot of the words he would use was lifted from.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yeah, the axeman there is definitely not just meant to be a power fantasy, but also be attractive as such, even if most (straight) guys won't spell it out. The ponytail is the cherry on top, but the giant skull codpiece and flashing abs are a Tell, and one that's perfectly reasonable if it's an option.
((I will join with the original complaints that the art and typography isn't good, though depending on time and cost constraints I can be more forgiving on that.))
gattsuru
1d ago
RPGnet (which famously explicitly banned any support for Trump on its discussion forums)
Or for ICE. Or for Dobbs, or any other abortion restrictions. Or a variety of police-related matters. And that's just the explicit rules! If you have an account with access to Tangency, look at the first and second debate threads -- I highlighted the thread closure on the assassination attempt, but the "A+" behavior thread that has someone I remember from my time highlighting how Trump ("literally"!) wants them shot is a pretty good and very far from unique glimpse into leftist and even some progressive-dominated spaces now. And especially appalling for anyone old enough to remember when Darren MacLennan and co were so very proud of very clear and thick line separate their normal free speech principles from an exception for nazis-and-only-literal-Nazis.
Sorry, for the most part I try to limit my pettiness with the principle of 'don't get your enemies free real estate in your head', but that site is just such a perfect example of the faults in its own philosophy that every time someone mentions it I have to check to see if it's at least stopped getting worse, and I'm always disappointed.
gattsuru
1d ago
Perhaps my conception of "real person" exists far out on the tails of reality, and people acting like ActBlue or MAGA surrogate shills online is a totally normal behavior for an average person to engage in.
I think it's even worse than that. It'd be one thing is this was just social media getting to a mechanic that thinks a 'clever' Dem-politician pencil-holder is funny, or a moron with a podcast that can't read.
This is the official GovTrack mastodon account, a site that people here use, myself included. Axios just revised a three-year-old story today to remove 'border czar' from Harris' list of accomplishments. Elon Musk put tens of billions of dollars into twitter to shitpost, and does it badly. I've worked on open-source code with someone who was really proud of having physically attacked Brandon Eich, and that's far from the worst I've seen there; my boss and a coworker have a conspiracy theory about the FBI and the Trump assassination that would be fascinating if they weren't doing it in a business meeting; a forum that once was a mainstay for me blocked discussion of the Trump assassination attempt as a thread the day of (literally as the second post) and never discovered one made the day after. KelseyTUoC spent the better part of a decade as part of the EA community, earned Scott Alexander's respect, and then got to work at Vox... except it was a problem before then, too.
These aren't astroturf, or rando nutjobs who have nothing to their name but politics, or AI, or rats following the Pied Piper, or nineteen-year-olds fresh-faced to the internet, or whatever. This is what they are under the mask.
Beneath that, Trace and Its_Not_Real have been having a twitter debate over The Machine and its output, and I think it's bad enough that Trace's defense is literally pointing to "Hanania/Karlin", but the more critical problem is that even were it true (which I'm far from sold on), The Machine has lost any capability to credibly present the truth, and very few people care.
I wrote, three and a half years ago, about how I didn't see a path back to trust in academia. But why would they care? In many ways, things have gotten worse for the academics, but academi_a_ has been doing fine. Even individual schools and journals with massive scandals have quite happily shaken them off and gone right back to it. Sometimes bad actors manage to get fired, but sometimes they get a TV show. In some cases, and I'll point to Wansink again, the policy proposals and even individual papers don't suffer much even after everyone discovers they were always made up from whole cloth.
Why would anyone expect that to stay to one poorly-demarcated field?
gattsuru
2d ago
There have actually been historical Editing Wars over spoilers (including some involving Gerard of the recent TraceWoodgrains expose, who's generally been on the 'just spell it out' side).
But more often, especially for smaller publications, it's that you're either going to have articles from wikipedia to tvtropes written by a) the author or publisher or a related team or b) a particularly neurotic fan. That's not even specific to books! It's not that surprising that Darkship Thieves (estimated readers in the low-thousands) has a really crappy tvtropes page with the vast majority of content coming from one troper. This game has had literally hundreds of thousands of players, and it's got five writers, most of which didn't do jack, and none of whom could reveal the full plot (the game uses a season system, and the second half of the zones won't unlock for another few days).
gattsuru
3d ago
They've not made the timeline too clear, but yeah. You could even use the same excuse for Frantz themself.
But I think that's an exception that swallows the rule. A lot of cancel culture involves people with petty disagreements getting blown out into public spaces; dismissing a cancellation because it's driven by a flame's drama turns quickly into throwing out major cases.
gattsuru
3d ago
In many ways it's worse: the meaning of that document rather changes connotations when you find out Ozy's significant other 'contributed' a bunch of e-mails with Scott just after the NYTimes article, all of which Scott had asked him to keep in confidence, and one of Ozy's first examples of compassionate, integrated feminism argued that all that open-minded tolerance from Excluded only applied to "perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", ie her side specifically to bash Scott.
Maybe Ozy has all the strength of principles about not prosecuting people, but without the ability to present anyone who won't on their side, it's little more than standing on laurels and calling on an army to do the dirty work.
gattsuru
3d ago
gattsuru
3d ago
Yeah, baring evidence not presented yet, Cheatle just seems at worst incompetent and at best woefully hands-off, rather than malicious. I absolutely would like to see more serious consequences where evidence of bad behavior is clear -- Shelton Snow doesn't seem to have even been fired, and plausibly violated some laws; the various defiance of subpoenas or lying before Congressional committees -- but the part where they're almost never fired or forced to resign makes it kinda hilariously optimistic to ask for criminal prosecution.
But it isn't constitutionally prohibited, or even prohibited by statute. There's even statutes that are supposed to specifically prohibit government employees doing this sort of bad behavior. They're just never or almost never enforced.
gattsuru
4d ago
I think it's less about what constraints exist, and more what it takes to meet those constraints. In modern Windows, you absolutely will segfault (in C/C++; in managed languages it's usually a memory access violation) if you try to set an instruction to a non-executable page, but you can easily change a memory page from non-execute to executable in a non-privileged usermode. Jumping instruction to a stack buffer is absolutely bad as practice, and you can and should (and almost all compilers by default do) avoid marking the stack and global memory segments as executable, but some code can require it and many compilers allow it. Same for stack or heap segments: if you just call malloc with defaults, you can't execute the data there; if you set an execute flag, you can.
I haven't done much low-level work in Linux, but from my understanding, mprotect/mmap are the usual go-tos when setting up a JIT- or JIT-like solution. As long as you're accessing memory your process 'owns' (and isn't part of the OS syscall reserved space), you can get away with a lot even under unprivileged usermode.
Modern systems can come with PaX/grsecurity or (much more often) SELinux, which tries to block creation of writable-executable segment or conversion of writable segments into read-only-execute ones, which might be what you're thinking about. But few people use PaX at all, and SELinux's rules are limited. Turning off PaX requires admin (and a kernel restart, usually), as does swapping SELinux configs, but SELinux in particular has a lot of intentional workarounds even under its more restrictive settings.
Not all approaches toward 'live' updating code operations do this approach -- some take the jankier 'map same memory twice under different configs' (oh boy, cache inconsistency!), and there are definitely advantages toward having your virtual machine be the only 'executing' code while all the data is segregated by page. But it's definitely a common practice for certain types of operation, for better or worse.
gattsuru
6d ago
There are a few exceptions for #2 -- there is a small genre of indie games what have never returned to their pre-release pricing, with Minecraft and Factorio being the most famous -- but in turn these are high-variance choices, and many in that genre flop badly. Similarly, while Humble Bundle has gone pretty far downhill recently, you can ocassionally find times where the minimum price on a bundle is under the historical sales price for just a couple of the games.
((Although the latter usually means a lot of the games are trash: cfe the current Astragon bundle, which is technically a price savings if you're just gonna play Bus and Construction simulator... but you're not.))
gattsuru
6d ago
A driver (and most applications) can call an arbitrary address. In modern (WinVista or later) Windows, applications use Virtual Address Space, where the called memory locations are mapped from arbitrary numbers to MMU addresses (which the hardware itself then maps to actual memory cells), and these do a lot of work to keep you from accessing the data or MMU addresses of another process. But their protections against you doing stuff with your own memory are pretty much just limited to 'do you really want X'.
There are some locations that are protected from external access in almost all cases -- the CrowdStrike bug here showed up as NON_PAGED_AREA because 0x0-0x1000 is almost always specially reserved for Windows purposes regardless of your application, which Windows does nope about letting you touch -- but for areas that you reserved, Windows doesn't really care what the data source is. Doesn't need to be kernel, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't even need a UAC prompt.
If you're interested, rammap is a good tool to understand what this looks like without having to load up a full debugger and some sandbox or virtualization-heavy software.
gattsuru
6d ago
Does anyone disagree with me that the amount of value destroyed by this failed patch outweighs all of the economic value CrowdStrike has ever provided?
I think it depends a lot on what your next alternative is. The morbid possibility is that CrowdStrike could be incompetent and also beat their customers rawdogging the internet. Even if this incident cost 1b USD, that's something like fifty major ransomware strikes. CrowdStrike could conceivably have blocked that many this year.
Of course, CrowdStrike isn't the only alternative. Businesses can use a variety of other protections and/or make themselves more robust to successful attacks. Whether they're more reliable or not is a !!fun!! question, but underneath that, there's a funner one: could businesses have made it? Contra a lot of reporting, I don't know that every regulated company has to use CrowdStrike specifically, but I do know that for even low levels of regulated industry it's a very common requirement that's accepted as a box checked, where alternatives that I could find required additional support not all IT teams would be able to provide.
gattsuru
6d ago
The problem with turing machines is that pretty much everything becomes equivalent at high enough levels of generality. Windows EXEs (and DLLs) have a specific format that make it impossible to load an empty or (most) malformed files, but if the surrounding format is correct enough you can absolutely have it followed by a bunch of nonsensical instructions and memory locations -- there is a checksum, but (infamously), it isn't actually mandatory to load or run.
Worse, there's no rule that your executable is the only place that such instructions can come from, and few architectures try. Even in Harvard architectures like Atmels or PICs, there are specific instructions to transfer from the data bus into the program and vice versa. Modern operating systems on von Neumann architectures try to stop you from doing so by accident, by setting memory pages as either instruction or data, and in modern Windows machines further isolating data instructions with DEP, but it's ultimately just a set of flags.
There are arguments against doing this, in favor of having a having your base program load from more conventional configuration files with a strict format (eg JSON), or even having a very limited programming language that your core driver then 'runs'. They have some tradeoffs! But ultimately the problem is a lot more boring: in each case, you have to be able to recognize and respond to a corrupt file. And that's a solved problem! But you have to recognize it.
gattsuru
6d ago
I'm not sure what you're using to support that. Damore's been working for some unnamed startup in Austin since 2018, according to his LinkedIn page, and it doesn't even look like a lead (or single-digit-number) position. That looks a lot more like 'right-leaning tech company' than fuck you money.
gattsuru
7d ago
People say that, but there are parts of the US with very broad restrictions on what at-will employees can be fired for (California), or do not have a default assumption of at-will employment (Montana), and they are not especially resistant to cancel culture. Indeed, many cases the labor protections are what demands firing of some righties.
gattsuru
7d ago
'Proven' is hard, but "One doctor’s campaign to stop a covid-19 vaccine being rushed through before Election Day" comes to mind every time people start drawing really complex theories for the surge in vaccine skepticism on the right. The weird last-minute process change to drop the 32-sample threshold is less well-known, but it's... hard to see the daylight for the official justification.
gattsuru
7d ago
Yeah, the paranoid option is that there was some serious zero-day that they were trying to react against, it worked fine on the development environment, and they made a tradeoff of the risk of this sort of incident against not pushing the big red button.
But being derpy is always an option.
gattsuru
7d ago
It's not clear how much of it's Trump (and co's) doing, but it's worth noticing how different the current GOP platform is on internal culture war stuff than the 2016 one. There's still red meat, most overtly on trans stuff and school vouchers, but it's a very long cry from wanting Windsor overturned. And even the trans stuff is relatively restrained (if, imo, sometimes bad policy!) by the standards of a document that normally tends to be written by the hardest social cons
He's a little more partisan, charitably because of things like Baude/Paulsen, less charitably having seen a niche for Not-Obviously-Crazy Guy Providing Trump Legal Foundation. But that's kinda a different frustration.
I'll use this piece as an example. It's not wrong (uh, mostly; the aside about no one following Barrett on or off the court is especially lackluster as a contrast to Thomas), or even particularly partisan (uh, mostly; the swipes and 'compliment' at Sotomayor).
But break out the argument in reverse. Blackman wants to persuade you that "Even if an erroneous precedent cannot be overruled, courts should isolate the damage, and decline to extend it to new circumstances." Literally the subhead and closing argument. That's not an unreasonable thing to say! What's the buildup to it?
- Robinson was peak Warren Court activism.
- Thomas wanted to overrule Robinson.
- The majority said that this case was not implicated by Robinson.
- The plaintiffs wanted to extend Robinson.
- The majority said they don't want to.
These are reasonable as summaries of the case, even if some progressives would want to emphasize different parts instead. They slot very nicely around his argument. They're also just not evidence for or against that argument; at most, the last point is just an example of a court doing that.
If Blackman was trying to present a story of the case, this would be compelling, but he's not. It'd be fine if he was providing advocacy as a purely normative matter, but he's not really doing that, either. He's telling you that you (or the courts) should do all these things, but every point on his list could come back with a time machine and a goatee and turn out to have happened the opposite way, and he'd still believe and tell you the same conclusion. These bullet points are not evidence; they're part of a story he's putting together such that the conclusion fits. It makes sense, if you already believe him, but if you don't there's absolutely nothing here that can or should change your mind.
He doesn't always fall this way -- he links to a (rarely downloaded) paper he wrote on the topic that is... not great, but at least winks underlying facts, this is a pretty direct normative argument, this is extremely bound to specific facts. It's not even always bad when he does this sort of narrative-writing framework-shifting stuff.
But it's something he's doing, in ways that aren't visible to many readers (myself included not that long ago!), where that invisibility seems likely to be bad for many of his readers.
gattsuru
9d ago
To be fair, I'm not sure he believes it.
There's a point, here, if he did. There's a (neurotically) strong libertarian argument that goes something like a) Law is enforced at the barrel of a gun, b) every law has to have a punishment against violators to be meaningfully enforced, and no matter how many layers deep you try to bury the punishment it either boils down to a stern talk or serious harm and usually the latter, and c) no system of punishment will be clear from abuse or corruption, and our system is particularly bad. Every small tax means some fraction of a person strangled, every locked building or stupid regulatory rule means some fraction of someone getting shot by the feds, banning drugs pushes people to less safe drugs from less trustworthy sources that fry their brains, prison sentences mean rape (and 'consensual' sex that isn't), so on. That doesn't make every law automatically invalid -- sometimes people need shooting, and sometimes even shooting people that don't really deserve it is worth the cost -- but it resists the urge to flinch away with caveats about how all these problems would go away if people Would Just comply, or if only the police behaved better, or only the fuehrer knew, knowing that they never will.
But White has never made those arguments. Even in Garner's case, which is about as sympathetic to his positions are possible, it was always just that the Cops Were Bad. And he can't, because he wants to have the power of the state at hand for too many trivial things.
Okay, well, there's a steelman where even if White doesn't believe it for everything else, Immigration Is Genuinely Different; enforcement is unusually difficult, and no small number of immigrants are, if not legally refugees, at least fleeing from poverty in countries with high rates of violent crime. But White's not making that argument, either, here. It's that his enemies, the ones here, want to do these awful things themselves, and White doesn't even try to Pepe Silvia a how, nevermind a why, into place.
That's not the point of the whole mess. If you somehow pinned him down (without getting blocked) he'd probably point to the Flores homicides, or less charitably the alleged ICE eugenics, but there's reason he doesn't point to them or anything else here.
It's like trying to disprove that "jailers could not possibly be so incompetent, cruel, or indifferent as to let such a high-profile prisoner commit suicide" by providing thirty-five really compelling examples of deaths or near-deaths in jails and prisons, until you look again and only three of them were suicides (and one attempted suicide), one of which involved the jailers literally urged the victim to kill themself, none of which were high-profile. He has more examples of jailers killing their charges directly, ie exactly the sort of thing that proposed in the Epstein conspiracy theories he's supposedly trying to debunk! But you agree with what he's saying until you realize that he's not saying anything about the original question.
That's not an optimistic thing -- in many ways, it makes a lot of his earlier works (that I trusted too!) a good deal more painful to read than if he'd merely had his brain dribble out one ear in the meantime. And it's worse when you start seeing that pattern show up more and more (for a still-right-wing example, see Blackman at Volokh, and to a lesser extent on the libertarian side Balko) as you look for it.
gattsuru
9d ago
There was a pretty serious boycott targeting Bud Light specifically highlighting Mulvaney's ad. It's not clear she could be cancelled in the fired sense -- from my understanding, this sort of influencer stuff is usually done as one-off contract work, if that -- but afaict the beer company has studiously avoided committing for or against any further ads with her, the ad company cut a lot of staff after, and a couple execs 'went on involuntary leave'.
gattsuru
9d ago
I'll second this with roystgnr's caveat about it being a lot worse where people like Comperatore are victims, and also point to people who've made similar arguments in other contexts. FCFromSSC has pointed to the celebrations around the murder of Aaron Danielson (and conspiracy theories about the police shooting of his killer), but there were also significant efforts to explain how Lee Keltner or Jessica Doty-Whitaker 'deserved' it, and state prosecutors gleeful that their campaign lead to Jake Gardner's suicide.
Most sushi is intended to be eaten immediately after being partly-dipped in a mix of soy sauce and
green horseradish'wasabi', so the MSG part's usually covered in that context.Meat alone-style (sashimi) and meat-on-rice-alone-style (nigiri) are... well, advocates will call them 'subtle' flavors, and if you do have sensitive tastes for meat or fish there are some interesting things better shops do with a light glaze that can't be done with cooked fish, but they're also still going to be pretty bland.
For rolls (maki or uramaki), much of the purpose is to make flavor combinations that wouldn't work otherwise. You could make a plate with grilled salmon, marinated with mango and cucumber, topped with seaweed flakes, served over rice, but it'd be drastically different than the sweet-vinegar rice and uncooked mango common to sushi rolls -- cooked cucumber can't be crisp, mango used in a marinade will be less intensely sweet, and the cooked plate would almost always want a long-grained rice with little seasoning or even a 'wild rice' for flavor. For sushi, the meat is more there to provide a strong base and some mild fatty flavors (modulo smoked salmon in heavily Westernized sushi), while the nori (dried seaweed) and other fillings are supposed to play a bigger role in what you describe as the taste.
((And even smoked salmon rolls avoid the intensively fishy smell of pan-fried or grilled fish. I don't mind it, but a lot of people do find it to detract from the meal.))
Some purists will still complain that Americanized maki goes too hard on, and I'll even agree with them in some cases (Flaming Hot CheetosTM Sushi is an abomination that not even Taco Bell has been willing to accept, yet), but the typical store or homemade maki leaves a lot of space to make it flavorful without making it overpowering.
Alternatively, look for 'poke' bowls, which tend to mix a lot of the same base materials with a lot more fixings, and can give a better intro to the underlying core flavors will still having a heartier feel and texture to them.
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