gattsuru
8hr ago
Yeah, that's absolutely fair, and 'constructive possession' is in many ways just the tip of the iceberg, as bad as the shoestring machine is. Stuff like autokeycard, the various recent regulatory changes, Abramski, so on, very much show the limits of textual formalism as a control protecting the actually disfavored, even to the point of blocking defendants from raising the text.
gattsuru
12hr ago
There's a lot of hilarious edge cases that proposal invokes -- could a gay man defend his partner's honour by claiming he just sucked at topping, missed the button every time? Was too short, just let the tip in? The Texas law in question prohibited stimulation with a sex toy (by a same-sex partner), but I've never seen evidence it was enforced; are we just giving up on that here? What happens with a penis sheathe? Strap-on over chastity cage (50+ images on e621)?
gattsuru
1d ago
Texas' law was somewhat unusual in that it had originally had prohibited heterosexual sodomy, but had been revamped, possibly by accident, such that only same-sex sodomy was actually punishable. Anal sex, among other things, was defined as "deviate sexual intercourse" regardless of who did it with whom, but it was only an offense if done with "another individual of the same sex".
((It also restricted homosexual oral sex, and possibly using a dildo or a sounding rod on someone else, though I've not seen any evidence of it actually being used in this way.))
And O'Connor's concurrence pushed on this hard: she held that it mattered that the state was expressed moral disapproval not of an act, but of an act being done by a group:
This case raises a different issue than Bowers: whether, under the Equal Protection Clause, moral disapproval is a legitimate state interest to justify by itself a statute that bans homosexual sodomy, but not heterosexual sodomy. It is not. Moral disapproval of this group, like a bare desire to harm the group, is an interest that is insufficient to satisfy rational basis review under the Equal Protection Clause. See, e. g., Department of Agriculture v. Moreno, 413 U. S., at 534; Romer v. Evans, 517 U. S., at 634-635. Indeed, we have never held that moral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest, is a sufficient rationale under the Equal Protection Clause to justify a law that discriminates among groups of persons.
(emphasis added)
But only O'Connor signed onto that concurrence, which even at the time came across as a nitpick. The majority opinion, which received five votes but not O'Connors, didn't rest on it being a status-based offense, in no small part because the courts were still trying avoid committing to treating homosexuality as a special status, with even status-based SCOTUS matters like Romer hiding behind rational basis. Lawrence argued certain types of 'intimate contact' outside the scope of the general police power, so it invalidated not just bans on (consensual private non-commercial adult) sodomy, but also a wide variety of other private behaviors.
The laws involved in Bowers and here are, to be sure, statutes that purport to do no more than prohibit a particular sexual act. Their penalties and purposes, though, have more far-reaching consequences, touching upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior, and in the most private of places, the home. The statutes do seek to control a personal relationship that, whether or not entitled to formal recognition in the law, is within the liberty of persons to choose without being punished as criminals.
This, as a general rule, should counsel against attempts by the State, or a court, to define the meaning of the relationship or to set its boundaries absent injury to a person or abuse of an institution the law protects. It suffices for us to acknowledge that adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons.
In theory. Like a lot of that era of SCOTUS jurisprudence, there's a decent chance that these lofty principles get smothered under balancing tests. It's not clear how this applies to situations like extreme BDSM; so far, the only relevant cases have generally alleged consent violations, sometimes pretty credibly. But where courts have had cause to evaluate restrictions under the assumption they would be applied in a consenting framework, they often do so by reframing Lawrence post-hoc, generally by promoting the O'Connor concurrence:
Under the Lawrence methodology, history and tradition continue to inform the analysis. See id. at 2598 (“History and tradition guide and discipline [the implied fundamental liberty interests] inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries.”). Yet, courts must consider not only the history and tradition of freedom to engage in certain conduct, but also any history and tradition of impermissible animus that motivates the legislative restriction on the freedom in order to weigh with appropriate rigor whether the government's interest in limiting some liberty is a justifiable use of state power or an arbitrary abuse of that power. In this respect, the conclusion reached here under the Glucksberg line of reasoning that there is no deeply rooted history or tradition of BDSM sexual activity remains relevant and important to the analysis. Also relevant and important to the analysis is the absence of a history of impermissible animus as the basis for the restriction at issue here. Sexual activity that involves binding and gagging or the use of physical force such as spanking or choking poses certain inherent risks to personal safety not present in more traditional types of sexual activity. Thus, as in Cruzan and Glucksberg, a legislative restriction on BDSM activity is justifiable by reference to the state's interest in the protection of vulnerable persons, i.e. sexual partners placed in situations with an elevated risk of physical harm. Accordingly, consistent with the logic of Lawrence, plaintiff has no constitutionally protected and judicially enforceable fundamental liberty interest under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to engage in BDSM sexual activity.
((Probably not helped by the guy in that case probably being a douchebag.))
gattsuru
1d ago
MindGeek claims to have the tech fully ready to go for a UK-standards version (and that's the subtext behind PornHub, a MindGeek subsidiary, not complying with the American age verification versions), and MindGeek says that it's actually in use in Germany since 2015. It's definitely the political economy of things.
gattsuru
1d ago
If you're just trying to receive e-mails, Mail in a Box works pretty well 99% of the time. If you're largely just sending yourself notifications, with an account that's not used anywhere else of significance, it works 98%ish of the time. ((And even that's overkill; a basic postfix relay works.))
If you're trying to send e-mail, it can be messy, and worse unpredictably messy. Mailinabox tries to solve the absolute horror story that mail config turned into, and to be fair a lot of the tedious config-twisting stuff is no longer as frustrating as it once was. You can do it... for a while.
The issue is not that you might send enough e-mail to hit an automated spam filter yourself, or even the risk that you might misconfigure things in a way that a bad actor can abuse -- that's a concern with near-any server, and there's a lot of things like a SIP PBX where you just recognize and mitigate it. With e-mail, however, your domain and/or IP address can end up on sizable DNSBLs because some IP address half an octet away fucked up, or because some sysadmin in Europe had a stick up their ass that day. Surprisingly big-name people can misconfigure their own stuff, and break because you're not big enough to have been made an exception, and not even have reporting turned on: it's happened to me.
E-mail can be done fine for a toy project, or where you're measuring reliability by licking your finger and sticking it in the air rather than by count of nines. If you're going to move the system you use to handle your bank account's verification to it, or how you send bills to customers, you gotta be willing to put a lot of effort in and realize it may not work.
gattsuru
2d ago
32GB was possible on Sandy Bridge processors (technically 2011), but mid-range Westmere and Nehalim processors only supported 16GB(ish) for most of the consumer market, and even the high-end Bloomfield capped at 24GB. I'm not saying you didn't do it -- I've got a couple Xeon systems from that era floating around that could have -- but it was absolutely not a standard use case.
A more normal midrange system would be closer to 4GB, with 8GB as the splurge. You'd probably end up spending over 400 USD in RAM alone, plus needing to spec up your motherboard to support it (thanks, Intel for the fucky memory controller decision).
gattsuru
2d ago
There is something distinctly humorous about the CUNY machete lady being at the Columbia protest, at least, but a lot of what we do see is a mix of local students and professional activists.
gattsuru
2d ago
You would have to argue that regarding the obvious and clear special concerns of a student-led protest movement
Are you going to spell them out, or just make vague motions about the horror or someone taking video of a public protest, or of someone in a stupid hat smirking at them?
Well, Meinecke did not engage with any counter-protesters and had his own location where he was protesting.
You want to try that, again?
Protestors surrounded Meinecke after about an hour. One protestor seized Meinecke’s Bible. Meinecke retrieved another Bible from his bag and continued reading aloud. Another protestor grabbed hold of—and ripped pages from—the new Bible. The altercation soon escalated. As protestors, some of whom Seattle police characterized in their written reports as Antifa, encroached, Meinecke took hold of an orange-and-white traffic sawhorse. Five protestors, some clad in all black and wearing body armor, picked up Meinecke and the sawhorse, moved him across the street, and dropped him on the pavement. One law enforcement officer who observed this interaction reported that “‘Antifa’ members . . . began to fight/assault” Meinecke.
Undeterred, Meinecke walked back to his original location by the federal building and resumed reading and held up a sign. While people gathered on the street, however, some approached Meinecke, knocked him down, and took one of his shoes.
gattsuru
2d ago
Ten years ago a brand-new processor would have been the Haswell- or Broadwell-era, and while you could get machines that could hold 32GB RAM, the H81 chipset only supported up to 16GB, going to 32GB would not have been standard, and it'd probably cost you upwards of 250 USD in RAM alone.
But more centrally, VSCode's linter and intellisense implementation is perfectly fine for mid-sized projects without a boatload of dependencies in certain languages. Get outside of those bounds, and its RAM usage can skyrocket. Python tends to get it hard (as does Java, tbf) because of popular libraries with massive and somewhat circular dependency graphs, but I've seen large C++ projects go absolutely tango uniform, with upwards of 10GB.
Yes, it is usually an extension problem, but given that you'll end up needing to install a few extensions for almost every language you work with just to get them compiling (nevermind debugging!), and that it's often even Microsoft-provided extensions (both vscode-cpptools and vscode-python have bitten me, personally) , that doesn't actually help a lot. Yes, you can solve it by finding the extension and disabling it, and sometimes there's even alternative extensions for the same task that do work.
The normal case isn't much worse, and sometimes is better, than alternatives like IntelliJ/PyCharm. But the worst cases are atrocious, and they're not just things hitting some rando on a github issue with some weird outlier use case.
gattsuru
2d ago
There's been a number of other things going on in this space, either from financial drivers or more straightforward legal ones. You've already gotten a post on gumroad, but itch.io has been doing a slow-march version where they don't block adult content sales as a category, just individual pieces of adult content, which has kept going apace.
I've not found good proof that there's something Operation Chokepoint-like going on, but with the timing and the variety in impacted content, it's increasingly hard to believe that this is all occurring randomly.
On the direct legal attacks, in the furry sphere, some places have complied with local bans (eg, e621 blocks North Carolina, while others have largely ignored them and hoped they don't get made examples. There's good reason that they're rather paranoid about having to keep name-identifying records, since people have blown zero-days on FurAffinity.
gattsuru
2d ago
Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
That's nice and all, but there's quite a lot of us, and certainly more than enough to keep a number of content providers afloat. (Sometimes in surprising ways: the original writer of the Burned Furs manifesto has made a small part-time career in monsterfucker porn.) Fek is at 9k USD a month still, and while I actually appreciate the mechanical stuff he did with Spellbound (cw: technically has one girl, but gaaaaaaay) enough that I kinda want to see it cloned in a not-porn game, given the repeated hiatuses after burnout if anyone was going to get reasonably-motivated chargebacks, he'd be the first hit.
gattsuru
2d ago
Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.
I think this would be plausible for a wide-spectrum ban on porn, if still uncertain since these companies have little trouble working with businesses that have increased chargeback risks otherwise and just slamming on fees.
I don't think it's remotely plausible for the common levels of specificity involved, here. There may well be higher (or lower) rates of chargeback for incest porn, or hypnosis or forced TF kink, or dragon dongs with too much red dye, but I'm incredibly skeptical that a) card companies have the data to actually know that, b) that these rates are so much higher that they can't be resolved by fees, and c) that there's no more immediate and less-financially-direct motivation.
gattsuru
2d ago
This is already the norm for legally-sanctioned protests, though, right? As I mentioned in other replies, it is common for police to prevent counter protestors from intruding on the space of protestors and vice versa.
That's actually a fun question! The rules for how police can separate protestors and counterprotestors are complex. And this clearly flops many important prongs of that test.
The video looks like it is taken at a courtyard, one of a dozen around the University. They aren’t holding captive the main amphitheater at Columbia or something, where yeah there would be a concern regarding the reasonable use of university amenities.
This thread is south of this video, which was from Yale, about access to a building. And I buy people being blocked from just a few public fora about as much as I buy someone being a 'little bit pregnant'.
Ironically, you could even argue that the courtyard is seeing greater facility during this protest, given the population density from the looks of it.
It was great, for the one side able to use it, isn't the most compelling argument for neutral access to public fora.
gattsuru
2d ago
That’s a moderate argument in favor of unsanctioned protest, if somewhat marred by one of its (first!) prongs turning into whether people like the protest goals or not.
But I don’t need an argument in favor of unsanctioned protest: my metrics there are far simpler. My problem here is not the presence of a protest, but your advocacy of a norm where whatever protest group that takes a public forum first gets to exclude people who disagree with their message.
There might be some edge cases where that’s an unfortunate compromise we have to take, but under vague concerns about ‘confrontation’ are little more than carte blanche
gattsuru
3d ago
I'd caution that :
- Python's support for the singleton pattern is kinda jank, due to lack of first-class support for private constructors or access modifiers.
- While there's a lot of arguments in favor of the singleton pattern with an interaction controller for bigcorp work, in small businesses it can be a temptation with serious tradeoffs. Refactoring (whether to add an intermediate object between World and Agent, or if you end up needing multiple World objects such as for a fictional context) can be nightmarish in Python, even if all the interaction logic is properly contained. And it probably won't be properly contained: marketing and customers can end up demanding bizarre requirements on near-zero notice that can require information from multiple different singletons, and if you end up hiring (or taking interns!) as a small business rather than at the FAANG level, those people (and I was one of them once!) will often break around the interaction controller unless aggressively managed.
gattsuru
3d ago
Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, along with a couple other umbrella groups, have jointly claimed credit for both the Columbia-specific protest and the follow-on encampments at a number of other schools. There's a fair criticism that there's at least a few rando Garbage People in the hradzka sense running around, or even agent provacateurs, but this isn't some Stand Alone Complex where the simulacrum had no real original version.
((The less charitable take on 'umbrella group' is that they're both just front groups for the actual coordinating organizations, but by definition I can only point to the subchapters and related organizations giving extremely similar messaging on short notice, or other more subtle signs that they've got intercampus communication going on that doesn't match the paper or training from the public faces.))
gattsuru
3d ago
That seems a near-universal recipe to surrender any and every public to whatever jackass is willing to occupy it first, and then insist that they feel unsafe because The Wrong Person walked close to them or took pictures of their public protest. Dissolving 'starting a confrontation' at all makes the fundamental flaws of this framework, if anything, more apparent.
gattsuru
3d ago
There's nothing like the partial class concept from C#, though I agree it would be really nice if there were.
You can kinda fake it by exploiting the heck of out inheritance, in a couple different ways, depending on what level of composition you're aiming to be able to do. If you want selective import of behaviors (and to avoid the diamond inheritance problem, mostly), you can do something like :
agentInfectionLogic,py:
wasInfected = False
countedInfections = 0
def incrementInfection(self):
self.world.totalInfections += 1
if self.wasInfected:
self.world.redundantInfections += 1
self.wasInfected = True
self.countedInfections += 1
def infectedCount(self):
return self.countedInfections
agentFileLogic,py:
def loadInfectionInfo(self):
temploadInfections = 20
for x in range(temploadInfections):
self.incrementInfection()
# do an actual file load here.
def saveInfectionInfo(self):
tempfile = self.infectedCount
# save an actual file here.
agent,py:
class Agent:
from agentInfectionLogic import infectedCount, incrementInfection, countedInfections, wasInfected
from agentFileLogic import saveInfectionInfo, loadInfectionInfo
def __init__(self, ownerWorld):
self.world = ownerWorld
And then calls like world.knownAgents[0].loadInfectionInfo() or world.infectRandomAgent() would work as normal, and you can even swap between different experimental forms by having from agentInfectionLogic import infectedCount, incrementInfection, countedInfections, wasInfected or from testAgentInfectionLogic import infectedCount, incrementInfection, countedInfections, wasInfected (or even a mix-and-match between the two).
Agent.py has to know about what's going on, but to everywhere else, anything imported into agent.py looks identical to as if it were coded into that file or class. Eventually this turns into a full module, where the __init__.py file holds the glue and then you have better names for your actual logic .pys, but when that makes sense depends a lot on the scale of your project.
I'm... not very good with Python, but my understanding, a toy example would be :
main,py:
import agent
import world
agentCount = 20
infectionCount = 25
world = world.World()
print("Starting...")
for i in range(agentCount):
world.addAgent(agent.Agent(world))
for i in range(infectionCount):
world.infectRandomAgent()
print("Total Infections :" + str(world.totalInfections))
print("Total Redundant Infections :" + str(world.redundantInfections))
for i in range(agentCount):
print("Agent #" + str(i) + " Infections:" + str(world.knownAgents[i].countedInfections))
world,py:
import random
class World:
knownAgents = list()
totalInfections = 0
redundantInfections = 0
def addAgent(self, newAgent):
self.knownAgents.append(newAgent)
def infectRandomAgent(self):
random.choice(self.knownAgents).incrementInfection()
agent,py:
class Agent:
wasInfected = False
countedInfections = 0
def __init__(self, ownerWorld):
self.world = ownerWorld
def incrementInfection(self):
self.world.totalInfections += 1
if self.wasInfected:
self.world.redundantInfections += 1
self.wasInfected = True;
self.countedInfections += 1
Note that if you're using raw python3.exe or a basic IDE like IDLE, all three files will need to be in the same folder, or you have to treat them like modules. Better IDEs like PyCharm will handle most of this for you, though I'd recommend experimenting before futzing with it a lot.
__init__ is a python builtin capability that's pretty equivalent to Java Constructors. The first argument for any class function will act as a reference to the instance of that class being called for that function, regardless of name -- do be careful getting a convention for that early and often, or it'll drive you up the walls. self is popular in pythonic circles, but I've seen a surprisingly large project that took the convention of this<className>, probably downstream of java or C# devs.
Only your main simulation file really should need to import the files that make up the actual objects. The class objects themselves don't need to know about each other, even if they're calling methods or fields specific to the other class, because that gets looked up during live runtime operations.
(edit: specifically, the class calling the constructor for an instance of an object needs to import that object. You could have, and it would probably be cleaner, to import Agent within world.py and not from within main.py, and do the agent constructor in the form :
def addAgent(self):
self.knownAgents.append(agent.Agent(self))
But I've been burned before in python environments where I ended up with my class imports spread throughout for hundred places and it being a nightmare to refactor or rename or handle versioning, so my preference for non-giant projects is to centralize imports, and for giant python projects you probably should be breaking it into modules.
Yeah, seconding both prongs, here: a) IDEs are important and b) Python IDEs near-universally suck. If you're in the Java sphere before, PyCharm is kinda the Intellij-for-Python, for better and worse, and there's a large faction that loves VSCode for eating all of their RAM handling multi-language projects reasonably, but for the love of god don't try to build class-ful python in IDLE.
((I'll generally advocate PyCharm for new programmers, as annoying some of the Intellijisms can be, but if you're more acclimatized to and have already set up Eclipse it's definitely not worth swapping.))
gattsuru
3d ago
Are we gonna get body-cam footage and be able to come to an independent judgment on the conduct of the government in the course of the raid?
No.
The Department of Justice confirmed to me and @JohnBoozman last night that the ATF agents involved in the execution of a search warrant of the home of Bryan Malinowski weren’t wearing body cameras. We will continue to press the Department to explain how this violation of its own policy could’ve happened and to disclose the full circumstances of this tragedy. Mr. Malinowski’s family and the public have a right to a full accounting of the facts.
gattsuru
5d ago
Maybe. There's a lot of people who came away from Loper v. Raimondo thinking that SCOTUS was pretty willing to toss the Chevron under the bus, but then Cargil had a place where the regulatory agency claims to have read the law wrong for twenty-plus years, disclaims Chevron, and most tea-leaf-readers are thinking it'll come out okay. It's just too useful to leave the actual law to the regulatory agencies.
But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
I can't find any records involving either person in the Pennsylvania court system, though given how crappy most court records are, that doesn't mean much.
The underlying complaint is here, and seems to be resting heavily on past adjudications by the State Board in 2010 (for Herr) and 2018 (for Wentworth). Like most state licensing laws, the definition of veterinary practice in Pennsylvania is very broad :
"Practice of veterinary medicine" includes, but is not limited to, the practice by any person who (i) diagnoses, treats, corrects, changes, relieves or prevents animal disease, deformity, injury or other physical, mental or dental conditions by any method or mode, including the prescription or administration of any drug, medicine, biologic, apparatus, application, anesthetic or other therapeutic or diagnostic substance or technique, (ii) performs a surgical operation, including cosmetic surgery, upon any animal, (iii) performs any manual procedure upon an animal for the diagnosis or treatment of sterility or infertility of animals, (iv) represents himself as engaged in the practice of veterinary medicine, (v) offers, undertakes, or holds himself out as being able to diagnose, treat, operate, vaccinate, or prescribe for any animal disease, pain, injury, deformity, or physical condition...
It's not obvious that ultrasounds (or possibly(?) selling bull semen?) are covered, and there's not a ton of great pragmatic arguments for it, but the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders. And for a wide variety of reasons this sorta thing is near-impossible to practically challenge even were courts willing to push back on it.
Given some of the coverage, though ("both men were advised by their former attorneys not to pay the fines or appear in court"), I'm not sure what happened was completely without any court behavior -- this may be referring to the 'court' of the board licensing group, which is more court in the kangaroo sense, but it also could be about enforcement summons for a conventional court. An actually fake arrest warrant wouldn't be unprecedented, but it's left me noticing I'm confused.
That said:
Rusty Herr was arrested the very next morning, April 11, at 6:30 a.m. at his home in Christiana.
gattsuru
7d ago
it took urban liberal Jewish/* lawyers to deploy it in practice?
I think urban liberal would have stood stronger on its own.
Charging someone with attempting sodomy, if we're taking the metaphor that direction, kinda just makes it funnier.
Dunno. There are sheathes that are like condoms in being full-enclosed (still not rated or tested as contraceptives, though I'd expect that regulatory reasons drive that more than practical ones), but most of them range from an eight-inch to more than a quarter-inch of silicone all around. Their point is to alter texture, appearance, and/or girth/length, but especially since some are dual-use as dildos or even intended for women or trans men to wear, the line between stimulating the prostate with a sex toy and stimulating it with the top's dick isn't very clear.
At least to my intuitions, a condom is very much the same underlying sex act, but there's a point where a gal wearing the same sex toy can hit the same button that makes it a lot harder to call the penis doing the stimulation. But my intuitions aren't anywhere near yours.
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