The Columbus Statue case has the summary here, punchline here.
Tesla vandal suspended one day here. Unpaid, so there's that, except for the part he was being paid when he did said keying.
The ICE (and ice) statute story is here, though I'll caveat that I'm skeptical Lang gets an actual trial, one way or the other.
The church service protestriot is the Don Lemon thing. It's hard to point to nonexistent state charges, but I can't find any. It's also worth spelling out that the only prosecutions have been federal, and that they've taken some pretty direct pushing given federal magistrate judges waffling on charges where they'd normally rubberstamp indictments on ham sandwiches.
The filming mosque thing is Sally Ness. It's kinda in a goofy space where Ness technically 'won' on the constitutional claims eventually, but didn't actually get any serious injunction or damages, and the state is just running a slightly different version of the same statute that the city was using before. State AG intervention is here, though given we're talking Keith Ellison 'defend unconstitutional thing' is less inflammatory claim and more day ending in y.
Anti-ICE checkpoints don't really have a good unifying story, but there's mainstream coverage, and none of them have the word 'arrest'.
gattsuru
2d ago
It's got a developer with more programming background than (I think) ThomasdelVasto has, but I'll point to Three Kingdoms Strategem. It's very much emphasizing the retro bit for speed of development, but I could believe Petersen's <six month estimate more than I do the GTA6 release date.
gattsuru
3d ago
Zorba’s rant general advice on engines holds pretty strong today: Godot’s closer to Unity in ease of use and Unity’s licenses are worse and worse-supported now than then, but the ranking matches my feelings. That said, as bad as getting a wildly mismatched engine can be (eg, it is technically possible to do an action game in newer RPGmakers; it just sucks), for simple projects the perfect is the enemy of the good enough.
Make sure the engine can deploy to the target environment you want, check if any game BBC in the engine rhymes with your concept, and that the license isn’t ruinous, and pull the trigger.
Feasibility… depends on scale, and how much no experience is.
Claude and Codex can do a lot for someone who doesn’t know what a class is, but if you every want to look under the hood you’ll need at least a 101-level understanding of primitives vs classes, object instantiating, method calls, flow control, and dealing with coordinate systems from hell. For simple projects you can avoid that sorta inspection, but it’ll cost you a ton of time and tokens.
Scales’ the other half of things. Even if you can get consistent character art out of a diffusion model ten times faster than a conventional artist, trying to make a 100-plus character roster might still cost weeks and months in a 3d environment or with dozens of complex sprite animations. On the other hand, if you’re aiming for 2010-mobile game level complexity, it might not even be a week to a prototype.
gattsuru
4d ago
Brendan Eich literally got punched in the face over it, it wasn't news, I only know cause the guy who did it bragged about it and considered it wasn't enough punching, and that's the background radiation.
I don't know.
I wasn't channeling Wittgenstein (just) to be an obnoxious putz. I've been genuinely trying to figure out whether we have different models of what's actually happening in the actual world in the past tense, whether you're trying to challenge people solely on matters of foreward-looking tactics, a combination of both, or some other different thing. At some times, it seems like you're just trying to draw some line sufficiently far away it's not crossed today, and I think that's wrong and I've got a lot of arguments against it and keep trying to get you to spell out a line that wouldn't be clearly too late for any meaningful defense or countertactics. At the most charitable, presumably sometimes you're using those to springboard off into discussions of comparative analysis for past equivalents?
But then other times you seem absolutely steel-clad insistent that there's nothing unusual about some of the forces getting applied, or that it's not "state-level or institutional" process literally while I was linking to two in five workers going through those struggle sessions, and the rest working under their output, and pointing to the federal rules requiring them. Even here, where you've stipulated some of these things happened, you're both stipulating and redefining down to "cases from California which offend every classical liberal sensibility but which do not, in my mind (but apparently do in yours) round to "We live in an authoritarian dystopia where you are not allowed to disagree with leftists."" The original form was "You will still be able to proclaim your right wing views in public"! Is this an admission with a massive retreat, are you saying you don't think the state of California suing people counts as making it harder to proclaim some right wing views in public, are you saying that only a complete ban on disagreement with leftists in every sphere of discussion in every space counts (and count for what), or what?
gattsuru
5d ago
About half-way through Bennett's The Tainted Cup, essentially biopunk Sherlock Holmes. It's a genre where I can't really rate it til the denouement, and it's about as woke as you'd expect something published in the mainstream in 2025 to be, but it's been reasonably well-written so far.
gattsuru
6d ago
It's kinda a mess. On one hand, the US military as a policy doesn't like contractors putting conditions on use of material. That's not the hard-rule that they want to pretend it is, as anyone that's remotely familiar with a leased military base can tell you, but it's also not something made up for this one exercise.
On the other hand, this is one of those technologies that's unusually dangerous in unobvious ways. A guy that makes missiles doesn't have to get contractual assurances that Schmuck A isn't intended to shoot them into a busload of American orphans, because if they were going to do that no contract would stop them. Trying to use an LLM for hypersonic missile defense is, presumably, not obviously batshit insane, and would easily be plumbing new depths of stupid ways to start WWIII just because someone thought the temperature value needed to go up a bit higher.
On the gripping hand, there's particular reasons to be skeptical of Anthropic, here. Their position and the nature of the technology gives it unique capability to check for compliance, and while I don't think the company would blow up a massive contract just to get a short-lived news cycle falsely claiming Republicans were doing something awful, I absolutely think individual employees would. Even outside of the politics, leaving interpretation of where an 'autonomous lethal system' begins and human-assist ends, or where 'mass domestic surveillance' begins and 'a test of any sensor system ever' ends, and whatever favorable Californian court hearing Anthropic could bring is... not a pleasant consideration. There's a more cynical take where laws prohibiting a behavior don't real where governments don't want them to, while contract requirements could, but it runs face-first into Anthropic not being particularly focused on the money, and that's about all you could recover.
On the other gripping hand, there's a lot of reasons that Anthropic is skeptical of the military (and intelligence) sectors, here. Those legal constraints have turned to anarchotyranny already, where they mean require thirty levels of approval for a data collection that's never going to be read and will be deleted, but the NSA has their warehouse and a lot of very long gloves.
On yet another side, there's a problem where supply chain issues are Big Problems when they involve anyone this distributed. I'm not even in the military, and I've been pretty badly screwed over by a fuel vendor deciding that they just Weren't Really Feeling It before. The possibility that someone might cut off translation and transcription services can get people killed if they're in the air and dependent on them. Even if this disagreement was focused on something where I might sympathize with Anthropic on, it's a major warning shot to a government organization based around not getting warning shot.
But it's also both unprecedented and very rapid escalation.
gattsuru
7d ago
Hormones for children . - They always play this game where they pretend getting them is difficult and you need to jump through all these hoops so no one could get them by accident. Never mind the gatekeepers (gender clinics) are also the advocates.
To be fair on hormones, there was a nearly two-decade period where the Official WPATH-approved Protocol for adults was to require 'three months lived experience' -- aka looking like a bad crossdresser, full-time, at your work -- before prescribing hormones or surgical interventions, including levels of 'surgery' that was just laser hair removal. In a lot of places, even fairly friendly psychotherapists would draw that out to six months.
I think the WPATH-approved approaches are pushed way too hard the other direction, but the trans activists were reacting to policies that did genuinely exist as recently as the Obama administration. Wish there were options other than complete bans that leave a lot of people stuck with surgical interventions they might have been able to otherwise avoid, or extremely sketchy application on 12-year-olds without any admission when they don't work... but the Litany of Tarski still rules.
The argument I constantly see is that the lefties on reddit seem to think that conceding any argument to the right is a slippery slope to Kristallnacht.
The problem's that it's worked, precisely because the activist branch pushed that hard and in that direction, and now it is going to be a serious problem for a lot of people when the pendulum swings. The framework where access to hormone therapy was access to early and fast gender transition was the only thing that could prevent thousands of people from A Heroing themselves was misguided at best, but it was a massive thumb on the scales for any and every risk-benefit analysis, and empowered a lot of motion claiming that opposition could only be downstream of rabid hate.
Now, there's a lot of not-psychological needs, and a lot of reasons for the social conservatives to hate. At best, the pendulum's going to have someone somewhere stuck paying out of pocket for stuff that they're now much more dependent on getting, whether that's 'just' dependent to 'avoid body hair' or dependent in the 'don't make sex hormones on their own' sense, and I'm not optimistic it's going to end there.
Honestly, I would be perfectly accepting if a trans person would be willing to say, "Yes I know it's silly but my brain kicks me whenever I'm misgendered so please just go with it."
Yeah, but we'd need both that -- already pie-in-the-sky thinking -- and, simultaneously, a social conservative branch willing to just go with it.
Some of the latter does exist: I work in a moderately Red Tribe sphere in a fairly Red Tribe state, and we've had a trans employee that was willing to put up with a gender-neutral restroom while the mechanics weren't going to make a big deal out of there being a gender-neutral restroom, and outside of an older guy trying to take me aside and gently inform me that They Hadn't Always Been A Woman, it was just something no one mentioned. But that did also happen post-Bostock, and I'm not sure it'd have gone the same way even five years earlier or later. Worse, a lot of 'oh, they're not all obnoxious gits' only happened downstream of that coordination being possible in turn.
gattsuru
7d ago
To steelman, if the (admittedly hyperbolized) Parable of Stanislav Petrov wasn't going through the head of every single Anthropic employee involved in negotiations the entire time, Altman done goofed worse than he'd expect.
There's reasons that the US military takes it as principle that they won't be restricted in the use of a system by a contractor, period, but at least since the 1960s we haven't had to worry that the 'don't do something incredibly stupid' needed to be a contract requirement.
gattsuru
7d ago
Realistically, securing the American Olympians would not have involved the FBI...
This, at least, has not historically been true, and has not been true for nearly thirty years; the Centennial Park bombing means that the FBI has treated every Olympics as a hotspot that requires pre-event and during-event oversight. ((There's actually a pretty long list of things that fall into this category.))
That's separate from the question of whether Patel, specifically, needed to be or should have been anywhere near it, or having been there, whether it was necessary or appropriate to also gladhand the people his organization was supposedly protecting.
At this juncture, the Court finds the Third Circuit’s framing in Defense Distributed to be persuasive. In Defense Distributed, authored just two weeks ago, the Third Circuit analyzed whether an attempt by the Attorney General of New Jersey to enforce a criminal ghost gun ban violated the First Amendment. Def. Distributed. As part of the relevant analysis, the court grappled with whether the computer code used to print ghost guns qualified as First Amendment Protected speech. The Third Circuit held that “computer code can be covered by the First Amendment” but “coverage cannot be assumed because code is inherently functional.”
Importantly, “the determination of whether code enjoys First Amendment protection requires a fact-based and context-specific analysis.” Critical to this analysis is:
the technical nature of the code (e.g., source code or object code), how that code is used in context (e.g., precisely how the writer or user of the code might interact with the code), who is communicating through the code and the intended recipient of the communication (e.g., programmer-to-human communication, human-to-machine communication, and so forth), for what purpose or purposes the computer code operates (e.g., to perform a function, to express an idea, or some combination thereof), and what, if anything, the code communicates.
Fatally, neither the Complaint nor Motion contain facts sufficient for the Court to apply these factors.
The complaint was filed on February 11th, 2026, aka two days before the Third Circuit filed its phony baloney test.
gattsuru
7d ago
I'm genuinely unsure whether normal non-alcoholic people would avoid drinking vodka straight because they it's difficult to keep that much vodka down straight, because anyone who tried would become an alcoholic or would have to already have a strong tolerance, or because it's 'only' an order that would get you weird looks and doesn't match typical tastes.
gattsuru
7d ago
[caveat: I haven't read this book, and am not an alcohol person]
Is that 'can't' in a social or philosophical sense, or in a pragmatic one? I barely drink alcohol at all and my tastes are weird, but I can tolerate a couple ounces of Everclear or Smirnoff straight where I start struggling halfway through a normal glass of red wine. It's really easy to get drunk doing it -- a single 3-ounce is between one and three beers, depending on proof -- but if you're sipping it over a few hours that wouldn't be enough for someone with moderate tolerance to really deep in their cups.
I agree with your conclusion about what it's supposed to say, but more because of the ritualized nature and seeming 'need' for it, rather than the amount of alcohol alone or form he was taking it, especially if the amount doesn't increase over time.
((And if Burden drinks herself or is ever prepared drinks by her ex-husband, it might also be intended to say something about reciprocity of interest: there's something very 'try to hit requirements without understanding purpose' to vodka over ice that isn't even hitting the tryhard noob levels of throwing Old Fashioneds or Negroni at someone.))
gattsuru
9d ago
It teaches some useful stuff and probably means I can trust you with a crimp tool if I need wires run, but the higher-tech sides of it aren't very useful for the overwhelming majority of people and the useful sides aren't very high-tech. And like A+, it's been absolutely swamped with rubber-stamps.
gattsuru
9d ago
To be fair, it was surprisingly annoying to get Discourse to be consistently performant just shy of a decade ago, and that was before you risked being bombarded by random and poorly-written AI scrapers. My impression, admittedly as a not-web-dev, is that the rdrama codebase is somehow one of the better options, but it's still easy to get surprise problems even in good codebases.
gattsuru
10d ago
Uh... I dunno that you need a cutting-edge model for that. I used a similar approach for this (cw: bad Jupiter Ascending fan-script). It's not good -- I'd say not even good as fanfiction -- and it's not even what I'd want written for the setting, and it's admittedly only into 13k words. But while it took three layers of "let's take these characters and flesh them out", "let's add this setting flesh out into a story outline", and then finally prompting the actual story, it did do it with minimal human intervention and none of it actually drawing the story plot. Putting even trivial effort into feedback, guidance, and pacing during the final prompting sequence would probably have helped a ton.
My problems are more than the character voices are really samey, the setting doesn't get enough interesting exploration, the twist doesn't get enough emphasis (and frankly isn't that interesting even in outline form: "why would anyone be willing to risk eternity for an unproven chance? Well, we happen to have a big pile of people that risked their lives and were trying to kill for a tiny improvement. Having eternal life only available to the elite kinda makes that a day-to-day thing."), and it keeps throwing extra characters in with too much detail rather than using the ones I was trying to emphasize. It's not necessarily incoherent, just bad.
((The LLMs do eventually notice that it's a Jupiter Ascending-with-names-filed-off-story if you try your review. Not sure whether that hurts or helps it as analysis, but given that the character tones sound nothing like their film counterparts I don't think it pollutes too much. And while my original fic efforts have been on content that you... probably will find even less appealing to read, original fic does work.))
I've got a busy week, but I might see what I can get out of a local LLM aiming for the longer form 30k words target, just to do a compare and contrast.
gattsuru
10d ago
There's... a lot of messiness, and a lot of different motivations. Someone like Dean could probably give the better Rules For Rulers analysis, but from what I've been told:
There's a complex relationship between cartels and local police. The cartels obviously don't want any interference with their people or operations, but they do at least like if their corrupt police stay bought and collaborative, and it's not worth losing the latter just because of a parking ticket. Small enforcements happen without too much (condoned by leadership) fuss; big enforcement starts street warfare. A decade ago in northern Mexico I'd had it summarized in the Juarez/El Paso area as 'you screw around with a pot shipment it's just a game, you screw with cocaine shipments you'll get a show of retribution that could hurt someone, you screw someone that matters over on a lot of money you die, you screw with the leadership or take a bribe and double-cross then they'll kill you and your family'. Dunno how accurate that is on the exacts, and I'm sure it's drifted since, but that's the rough theory. The cartels had a threat raised if anything targeted their higher-ups, their higher-ups were successfully targeted, the cartels don't want to let those threats seem empty. See Culican as a well-known prototype, but it's supposedly common knowledge among Mexican government officials.
The economics of cartel mid-level employees are a mess. Like most tournament economics, the average member gets crap pay, but is motivated because the winners get massive prizes. Even 'better', there's always dead men's shoes available above you. Killing any member of leadership means there's now a lot of empty slots on the ladder, either because they've been directly emptied, because the guy got a promotion, or because they were emptied as a result of conflict between the tournament contestants. Some seemingly-random violence is negotiating who and what gets to win, some of it's to prove capability, some of it's to distract military and police presence so that those attacks aren't readily achieved, and some of it's psychopaths thinking they can prove themselves or just wanting to have fun while management is distracted or a little more bloodthirsty than normal.
All (or at least almost all?) cartels get funds through 'protection' money. My impression is that most of it by count is more a nice bennie for the mid-level people running the 'protection' schemes rather than any serious effort the cartel leadership likes, but it's a thing, and some industry-sized protection schemes are big enough the leadership does care. Sometimes unrest means higher 'protection' fees someone might not be able to pay, sometimes the new boss needs to be paid in addition to the old boss, sometimes this rando might be a good example of why 'protection' fees are important even if he wouldn't normally be asked to pay them.
The interfaces between cartels (and other gangs) are, unsurprisingly, worse.
gattsuru
11d ago
Yes, and there's also been issues where left-leaning administrations have partnered with overseas European (and Australian) governments and regulatory organizations that have coincidentally threatened or targeted political speech by Americans. I'm trying to keep to the most obvious and least complicated examples, but it does both show that it's a serious concern in terms of possibility, and in terms of clearly being within the interest and goals of left-leaning organizations.
gattsuru
11d ago
Some cis woman 'bimboization' is about not wanting to be responsible for her own desires (or missteps) or cognizant of her own fears or shame, especially in written formats. Not a common kink, but neither is it anywhere near as rare as you'd think. For cis guys who like the kink, it seems more about ease of access and forwardness of desire.
gattsuru
11d ago
Hm. I guess this is one of the lines in your posts that I find hard to parse... could you expand on what you mean, with the "who could have a thing done" thing?
Uh... sorry, trying not to get too prurient.
There's a lot of scripts and modes of discussion that occur between potential or new romantic partners. They vary a lot between the sexes and sexual orientations. At least in my experience, the ones for a man going after women, or propositioning sex within an existing but new relationship, are kinda a mess, filled with minefields and potential miscommunications and active hostility. It's not that the gay versions are always easier to read, or always work, or avoid costly side effects, or are even that different -- I've got my horror stories, it's definitely easy to swing and miss, and that's on top of the alcoholism problems.
The straight scripts seem just fucked.
I might want to invite someone over for tea and some good cardio regardless of gender, so it's not seeing the women as Madonnas and the men as whores. But I can probably come up with a plan, even a likely-doomed plan, for the latter. Even inside established relationships, there's a lot of expectations that men initiate sex or perform desire, but only in the ways that the women want done to them, and that's a list that is neither well-documented nor consistent.
That was definitely surprising, and went contrary to my understanding of how such things tend to go.
Can't find it, but it's certainly a believable result. The median chaser-trans interaction is probably pretty rough, but ultimately, they are just guys with a lot of focus on a kink. That doesn't necessarily make them bad people, just a potential trouble that has to be negotiated. Part of why the discourse gets so toxic in reddit environments is that it's something that should be solvable.
gattsuru
11d ago
Sometimes, but more... with some warning about more explicit detail than you'd probably want to know:
Pregnancy concerns specifically get complicated. There's a lot of ways to avoid them pretty effectively, and some gay guys are under the (not entirely correct) impression that just being on testosterone is itself effective birth control. But you do see some who are really into the idea in fictional contexts and get grossed out because an IUD isn't perfect.
((And they tend to be polarizing for trans guys, where either it's something out of Alien as a fate-worse-than-death, or they get out of high school with an exact number of kids that they want. But I have met a few exceptions who like the idea but aren't sure they're ready for it, a la Daxhush, and there's a lot of cis woman who have similar divisions, so not sure how much of that's downstream of trans stuff as how much is downstream of the whole progressive culture.))
gattsuru
11d ago
I'll second the Guards series as Pratchett's strongest work: it has the broadest and most serious engagement with the philosophy, and the Thud! and especially Night Watch have some masterful writing. Only real downsides is that Jingo is a pretty dated, and The Last Continent is merely good and sets up later stories, rather than being great. If Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms don't do it for you you're not going to like any of Pratchett's writing, but they're really good stories.
Rincewind's saga is rough and early enough that it barely fits into the rest of the setting, and even the standalone Death works like Thief of Time require a lot of buy-in. The Witches series can be a good second set, starting with Wyrd Sisters, but they have kinda the opposite problem, where they're very much send-ups of mainstream stories that can be a little trite if you've seen other Shakespeare or Disney pastiches.
gattsuru
11d ago
lol jk, there's basically zero chance of a cert grant on these facts
While reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, Doctorow is up there with Jim Cramer when it comes to counterpredictions and bad or misunderstood models. He's not saying things because they're true, or because he believes they're true, or even that he's really capable of 'belief' in any externally validated way. He's saying them because he thinks they'll persuade his readers, and you should take that as the insult it's intended as.
Again, that doesn't mean that he's wrong. Indeed, he's particularly frustrating even when I agree with him! But you'll notice none of the evidence he brings actually supports his argument, and often isn't even evidence.
If you actually have a link to a specific one, I'll either quite happy point out specific parts to the pattern or eat crow. But if you notice it, you'll notice he can't stop doing it.
((which makes the recent 'ai transcripts as "like masturbating in front of a stranger"' , yes that's a direct quote, a little interesting in a way he didn't intend, and doubly stupid in the way he did.))
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