gattsuru
7hr ago
Do you see any more interesting cases on the horizon for this term?
Absolute biggest is the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. Probably drops last day of the term, between the late sitting and its controversial nature win or lose. The Trump EO is less obviously crazy than it seems at first glance, and Native Americans needing a separate statute for automatic citizenship is both a good argument in Trump's favor and what should be the correct solution here, but it's literally unprecedented stare decisis issues and I think it ends up with Roberts punting to Congress if anything is gonna change, maybe two dissenters. Other immigration cases are pretty well-known and not hugely likely to be ground-shaking. Noem v. Al Oltro Lado is gonna blow up and also be just embarassingly stupid.
Trump v. Slaughter is the big independent agencies question, and it's kinda a fact-specific mess, but whatever lines it draws are going to be weird and novel and probably impactful, if for stupid reasons. And the media's gonna love the name.
There's a Voting Rights Act case, it's going to Alito unless he pissed multiple other justices off in the last couple weeks (possible; he was trying to throw Robinson to overboard, and with some cause), and it's going to be a massive culture war touchpoint. I'll admit I don't pay a lot of attention to that caselaw, though, and it's possible it vanishes into paroxysms of technicalities. Bost, already released, falls into a similar boat - it's a good thing and important that questionable laws re: voting processes can be challenged, but I don't think the specifics of that case matter much.
For already-argued gun cases, the two big ones are Wolford (Hawaii's "vampire rule") and Hemani ("possession by drug addict" with a ton of other background stuff). Wolford's a gimme and unfortunately also likely to be extremely limited to its four corners as a result -- it's the exact type of law Bruen specifically said not to do, and SCOTUS only granted on the tightest limits of that question -- but Hemani (to my surprise!) is looking like it could be closer or even favorable rather than the pro-gun-control shutout I expected.
Do you see anything that's likely to get granted cert this term? Especially any gun cases?
Likely? Hard to say.
Trans stuff: Foote v Ludlow is getting a lot of relists; it's basically the question in Mirabelli, squarely presented (if in the most culture-war-heavy loading), the lower court decisions were a charlie foxtrot, there's a messy circuit split. But the facts are contested (and not just whether the kid is genderqueer: the school argues that the 'secret transition' policies might not exist, kinda?), and 303 Creative seems to have given SCOTUS more caution on that. But
There's a few qualified immunity / excessive force cases that are popping up, though I'm pretty convinced that's the libertarian equivalent of Lucy with the football, even compared to gun stuff. I think there's a few cert petitions up around voting policies, but I follow those very loosely.
For gun stuff, there's a bunch of them all scheduled for 4/17 now, but that's not really much info. From most to least likely cert (or GVR)...
Hardware cases: Grok has Duncan v. Bonta around 40%, and it's gotten GVR'd before. I'm... not quite so optimistic, given Snope. Still, Duncan (and Gators and Viramontes and Lamont and Higgins, all getting constantly relisted) are in many ways the last real chance to handle this case as a matter of first impression: every circuit that's going to have a hardware ban has something on final judgement coming up or resolved. Anything after this will get much more circumscribed legal and factual analysis, not to mention how much it would radicalize even the moderates post-Snope. Benson in D.C.'s left a circuit split, technically, even if it's certain to get en banc'd? But Benson's ultimately an as-applied challenge, significantly more controversial than any Safe Professional Nice Guy that SAF and such have brought for their carefully farmed cases, and it's DC. As ironic as it would be for Heller's Gun Question to end up before SCOTUS again over a decade later after Heller II, it just would be a weird case to wait for. But Roberts and Kavanaugh may just want to punt forever.
Concealed carry permits: Gardner is a potential sleeper: critical and strictly federal question, extremely gun-friendly facts, and ultimately is trying to throw an innocent woman in prison for not having a license she couldn't even apply to get. But the facts are hugely specific, it's something that could be thrown as requiring a futile expression and remanded, and SCOTUS has ducked on variants of this question before. It's also a major underdog: Gardner had to file in forma pauperis before the normal gunnie sphere even heard about the case, though she thankfully has real representation now.
Public transportation carry: Schoenthal's also up for cert, but it's an even longer shot. The lower circuit opinion cut an absolute hole in Bruen, but it's not even unusually bad on that at this point, and while public transportation is important, it's important in a way that the justices are near-certain to flinch from.
Prohibited persons: there's an absolute mess of them, they're almost all ugly and controversial cases, so I'd love to say zero shot from a court that ducked questions like "are counterfeit cassettes signs of future violence". But there is Hemani. On the gripping hand, the feds have (temporarily) put an appeal and reversal process for federal prohibited persons, so there's even more reason to punt the question here.
gattsuru
9hr ago
The statute provides for a fine, probation, or loss of license for a licensed therapist from practicing "conversion therapy", defined as:
... any practice or treatment by a licensed physician specializing in the practice of psychiatry that attempts or purports to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.
with exceptions for :
Acceptance, support, and understanding for the facilitation of an individual's coping, social support, and identity exploration and development, including sexual-orientation-neutral interventions to prevent or address unlawful conduct or unsafe sexual practices, as long as the counseling does not seek to change sexual orientation or gender identity; or [a]ssistance to a person undergoing gender transition
The state further argued, not very credibly, that the law only really would apply to specific changes to sexual orientation or gender identity, and not changes to gender expressions or sexual attraction despite the clear text of the statute. In theory, it would also prohibit trying to teach a straight man how to be gay? Since the law was never applied, it's hard to say much about either hypothetical.
The plaintiff here was only asking in regards to cases where the client asked for that specific assistance, so this decision could plausibly be read to apply only when the client is specifically asking for not-queer/trans advice, though that's going to depend on what the lower court does when (if) issuing the injunction.
gattsuru
9hr ago
Essentially, if you were a social conservative considering a career in family or teen therapy, for almost a decade and a half, it's been open and common knowledge that these laws were present, informed a variety of professional accreditation bodies, and would be used as evaluation criteria during training and mentorship programs. The prospective therapist would be faced with patients who would want advise, the therapist want to give what they believed to be correct advise, and they would be required to give what they believed to be wrong advise or risk their entire future professional career. Depending on area of focus, local demographics, workload, and specific philosophy, a rough Fermi estimate gives a monthly or every-other-month basis?
((Assume 20 scheduled slots a week, an average of two clients per slot, gives 160 patients per month; demographic estimates for LGBT from 2012 was 3%, so five LGBT clients a month, but presumably not all of them will be having issues related to sexual orientation, and not all of those issues will be solved by 'calm down on the gay/gender' stuff even by the most social conservative perspective. The rate's a lot faster if you filter for specific fields or use more recent demographic numbers.))
Because there's a long training pipeline and a large monetary investment for therapists - Colorado requires a Master's degree and two thousand hours of post-graduate training for at least some categories - that can't be readily transferred, these incentives push people away very early in their career. There's a wide variety of other problems behind the pipeline issues, but it's still a cause for some of the pipeline issues, and many of them feed on themselves such that each marginal restriction makes the next more capable of dissuading potential outsiders.
gattsuru
9hr ago
It's definitely possible. I've been wrong on that in Fulton, but the facts of this case are so open-ended and the potential impact so wide, there's more cause to do so.
gattsuru
13hr ago
Trumpism doesn't even abide its own stated values and principles.
That's a fascinating retreat from "it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency" or ""Trump Derangement Syndrome" is overwhelmingly an intellectual escape hatch for Trump supporters."
Yes, political movements are vast, they contain multitudes, make dumb decisions or compromises. Jtarrou posted -- literally days before you nailed this jello 'thesis' to the wall -- that Trump could well be in the wrong here. Trumpists repeatedly point to how the administration has to be bullied into keeping to its claimed positions, especially in relation to immigration and sometimes at significant cost (though I think Vivek's eventual Ohio loss is overdetermined).
Neither of those facts support the original claim you made.
[disclaimer: I'll try to keep personal feelings and experiences out of this one, simply because I don't think most readers here are going to want to hear it, but it will inevitably color my takes.]
LGBT Talk / Conversion Therapy: Chiles v. Salazar
On matters of sexuality and gender, Ms. Chiles’s clients, including minors, come to her with different goals in mind. Some “are content with” their sexual orientation and gender identity and seek assistance only with “social issues, family relationships,” and the like. In cases like those, Ms. Chiles does not try to persuade her clients to “change their attractions, behavior, or identity,” but aims instead to help them address their stated goals. Other clients, however, come to her hoping to “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] bod[ies].” And in these cases, too, Ms. Chiles seeks to help her clients reach their own stated objectives. In doing so, she does not prescribe any medicines, perform any physical treatments, or engage in any coercive or aversive practices. All Ms. Chiles offers is talk therapy.
In 2019, Colorado adopted a law prohibiting licensed counselors from engaging in “conversion therapy” with minors. The State reports that it adopted the law “in response to a growing mental health crisis among Colorado teenagers and mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Any Coloradan who thinks a licensed counselor is engaging in conversion therapy may file a complaint with a regulatory board. A complaint, in turn, triggers a disciplinary review process that can yield a fine, probation, or the loss of a license.
Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy, as applied to Ms. Chiles’s talk therapy, regulates speech based on viewpoint, and the lower courts erred by failing to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny.
The opinion, by Gorsuch and joined by a somewhat surprising seven other justices, is pretty standard free speech fare: the statute bans one view and not the other, the state offers little if any historical or legal support for its ban, and it's both an outlier and a recent outlier. The state tried to compare the ban here to requirements to disclose factual, noncontroversial speech during commercial activities, and ran into a brick wall when the case formalizing that standard did a Solomon-level splitting to start with.
The concurrence, by Kagan and joined by Sotomayor, tries to cabin this ruling to its four corners, and saying that viewpoint-neutral restrictions on medical speech would have a much lower bar to pass. Where the state here banned only one side of a controversial topic, but encouraged the other, a law that merely banned this topic in this context entirely could merely need evidence that the state's interests were significant enough and connected enough. Given that we're talking Colorado, here - home of Masterpiece Cakeshop - it's not impossible that the state will try to squeak a neutral-in-theory rule under this view.
It's... somewhat difficult to imagine what that would look like, though. Kagan, during oral arguments, motioned toward a theoretical law that prohibited violating the standard of care, but that would be so wide as to revive the nondelegation doctrine, not least of all because that can range from a creature of statute to a PDF thrown together by randos to five competing and conflicting opposing philosophies. A genuine universal ban by counselors on LGBT-related talk therapy would impact the LGBT movement far more than it would social conservatives. The Colorado statute here specifically excluded "Assistance to a person undergoing gender transition" for several reasons, but the necessity for such therapy before most reasonable doctors would recommend surgical or serious chemical interventions is no small part of it. Restrictions on types of therapy might be more easily be tailored to only hit one side or the other, but while aversive- or confrontational-focused conversion therapy are common focuses for progressive outrage (whether the underlying incident was genuine or not), they're both little-used and little-liked even by social conservatives now, and a restriction that leaves sexual orientation change talk therapy on the table is likely to be seen as an unacceptable compromise.
The dissent is, no surprise, Jackson, and it's a doozy:
“[T]here is no right to practice medicine which is not subordinate to the police power of the States.”
There are steelmen to the Colorado law. Chiles does not contest it as applied to aversives, and even if they did work, they're well-within the bounds of behaviors that states have long-regulated (and which social-conservatives have argued for regulating as recently as Skrmeti). A lot of these programs don't work, don't seem to care that they don't work, and are unwilling to consider alternative approaches that would fit their goals or the goals of their patients but would not match expectations (caveat: not all of them, and some like the SF Kaiser clinic might have been a little more open-minded than the already-libertine-seeming publicly-disclosed records). There are a mass of complicated First Amendment caselaw, epicycle on epicycle, that have left too many opportunities for motivated justice to find outlier or non-representative historical support for hilariously unconstitutional arguments.
Jackson's dissent bulldozes them. She tries to draw the statute here as merely incidentally restricting speech coincidental to restrictions on conduct, by defining conduct to include wide varieties of speech so long as the regulators motivations were pure. Her view of the First Amendment and this statute do not merely condone prohibitions far broader than cruel or harmful ones. One note compares the law here to the speech requirements in Casey, where abortion providers were required to give 24-hour notice of the possible risks and complications of procedures - but the law in Casey specifically required providers to give both the risks of abortion and carrying the fetus to term (and other alternative procedures).
It's just a mess, and it's not just me saying that: Kagan and Jackson have dueling footnotes over it.
I'm genuinely confused what Jackson's goal is, here. Bulverism's a fun sin, and all, but for all I've been unimpressed by her Munsingwear asides, I'd at least expect some sort of deep strategic or tactical focus, and it's not just me finding it jank at best (cw: ai analysis of legal documents, aka worth about as much as you paid for it). If the best she's aiming for is to throw the First Amendment to the proverbial wolves of whatever third-party organization can define professional standards, it seems a dissent like this will only motivate people to burn those orgs down faster, and damn whatever happens to the commons in the process.
Some smaller notes:
- Colorado tried to moot this case at the last moment, again, and the law has (supposedly) never been actually brought to bear. Part of Chiles surmounting that particular barrier is clearly support from SCOTUS (and Colorado's defense not focusing much on the mootness argument), but it's also partly downstream of Colorado seemingly not knowing or understanding what they were trying to moot: the final briefs are entirely talking past each other.
- There's a more subtle problem that came up repeatedly in oral arguments, and in strangely absent in the final opinion: whether the law would apply to counselors, outside of the context of treatment. The state argued, at length, that it would not, just as it would not apply to non-licensed paid counselors (such as life coaches). I'm glad that SCOTUS didn't take it as an out -- there's a basically no coherent or consistent way to make the distinction work in practice -- but it's weird that it only gets mentioned as evidence that this regulated speech-qua-speech, because it doesn't really fit well there (indeed, this section of the opinion, pg 17, seems to conflate whether the state admitted that other people could give the same advise, with whether other people could lawfully act on the advise).
- "JUSTICE ALITO: Three generations of idiots are enough?" Bell is still pretty clearly on the minds of SCOTUS, even if no one else of importance puts it high on the list. Hard to tell how much it's genuinely left them worried about following consensus off a cliff, rather than a tool to say they think consensus has gone off a cliff, but still bizarre given the case's status.
- (As the mirror to Jackson's showboating, there's a section of the opinion that has Alito's fingerprints all over it, where the opinion points out that Colorado's idea of deference to medical consensus would have once permitted not just Bell-style eugenics, but specifically against recognizing homosexuality as acceptable. I'm... skeptical that this will be persuasive to anyone who's not already sold on the free speech arguments. The simple response of 'but my side isn't wrong' hits too hard, here.)
- I'm generally skeptical of the LGBminusT perspective where trans stuff is primarily or solely an anchor, but I think it's very unlikely that that this case ends up here without the specific context of original-gender affirmation therapy focusing on minors. Even strong advocates of sexual orientation change therapy don't argue for a sizable success rate -- Nicholas Cummings rather infamously claimed an 67% success rate, of which only 20% (aka <14% of total) actually changed orientation rather than calmed the fuck down about being gay, and that for a sample with heavy selection effects -- while the persistent rates for very young children and gender stuff are a lot more favorable to social conservatives.
- This isn't going to end everything, one way or the other. Trivially, this is just at the motion for preliminary injunction stage, and technically speaking it's just a remand for the lower court to issue a preliminary injunction. You'd think that would be a nitpick, but wouldn't be the first time.
- One of Jackson's mentions is to Mathew [sic] Shurka's past experiences with sexual orientation conversion therapy, which reading the full background happened under an organization then called JONAH. Emphasis on the past tense, though, since it's been defunct since 2015. Because it got sued into rubble, under a legal theory near-certain to survive the logic of this case. At the time, there were widespread ground preparation for similar lawsuits. In an ideal world, versions focused on the actually-scammy organizations would become prominent and leave better therapists and providers to more seriously consider and describe the limits of their capabilities and theories. I'm not optimistic that there will be good target selection: even at the time, the feds were already getting aimed at other orgs that, while near-certainly wrong, weren't so obviously lying about it. And, of course, this law wouldn't have applied to JONAH or People Can Change (now Brothers Road), either.
A bigger note: Even on the strict law-of-the-case matter, this is going to be a mess. There's been active lawsuits dating back to at least California's SB 1172 in 2012, which was upheld by the Ninth Circuit in 2013, in a case that SCOTUS named and shamed in 2017. There's been a circuit split since 2020's Otto v. City of Boca Raton; cases had reached SCOTUS as far back as 2014, and as recent as 2023, only to have cert denied. 23 states have laws that are near mirrors of this one, another 4 states have partial variants. One was overturned days after SCOTUS granted cert in this case. I... do not expect clarity from the First, Second, Third, or Ninth Circuit in the next year, outright. We might not know for the Tenth Circuit, or just the bounds of Colorado, specifically, in a year.
From a legal realism perspective, it doesn't 'matter'. This specific law hadn't been enforced yet, and indeed (despite that decade-plus legal limbo and wide spread), I couldn't find any clear cases of legal enforcement. If a licensing board was going to pull a therapist's card over this sorta thing, they can readily and rapidly find other fig leafs causes, even while focusing on the exact same therapy.
From a more pragmatic one than even that, though, the court's intransigence seems likely to have a longer-term impact. At minimum, this points to a no-go-zone for a philosophy, and one that's been allowed to sit for well over a decade: whatever natural resistance the psychiatric world might have toward social conservatives, this one there on top of that, and coincidentally no one in good standing with the APA will ever argue in favor of these policies, a note that should be relevant even or especially if they are clearly wrong. Therapists are more law-abiding than average (at least on the job), and even a purely illusory law will lead the marginal therapists to be just that little bit more cautious, even if only in extreme outlier cases.
gattsuru
1d ago
There are people who genuinely gone off their gourd re: Trump, but he provides an incredible amount of "attack surface" to critics, to the point where it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency that still appeals to widely held ideas about how government ought to operate.
That's wrong for any definition of 'intellectually respectable' or 'how government ought to operate' that doesn't mean 'liked by progressives', and I say that as someone with no small number of frustrations with the administration from the right and left.
Washington Science Fiction Association. Along with the similarly-named World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) and Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA, no I don't know why), they were kinda on the other side of the Sad Puppies on the whole Hugo Award wars from a decade ago. Some stories are written 'for' a specific space, and just as you don't give a dog-lover a Newbery Medal-winning story, a lot of people who found Gentleman Jole annoying won't like The Tainted Cup.
Each of the three has a certain flavor of story that really glues into their particular social environment - WSFA tends heavily toward a lot of vaguely neuroatypical mystery stories with box-checking social awareness checks - whether because the author likes that sorta thing themselves or because they were trying to cater to their awards or both. I'd expect more the former here, since WSFA's mostly a short story place and The Tainted Cup isn't, but it's one of those things that pulls you away from the world-building when you see the pattern.
gattsuru
1d ago
Finished The Tainted Cup. Good, prose quality fell off a little toward the end, resolution was reasonably clever. It's got WSFA syndrome, but only to the extent it's obvious why it was written that way, rather than suffering from being written that way.
Bell's And We Are Not Saved. I bought it a few years ago when having a discussion with ymeskhout, as a crux example of how a lot of things that Rufo gets accused of being dishonest about actually happened, but largely left it on the shelf. Was going to try a deep crunch into how this sort of work smuggles false or misleading claims by clown-nose-on and clown-nose-off between academic work and 'popular writing', but my notes aren't really coming together in any real readable narrative, even presuming anyone else would care enough about it. There's some value to seeing what tools of persuasion are being used, here, to distinguish the honest from the malicious or misleading, but I could have done that with Rufo's writing for free.
For fun, Eldridge and Deveau's Game Over, from this discussion. It's so heavily and clearly written for women -- weirdly, despite a front cover that looks like standard male gaze smut -- that it's not that sorta 'fun', but looking at how the prose and social interactions work is still enjoyable.
gattsuru
1d ago
self_made questions the generalizability of what I describe but in my experience it's universal.
I wouldn't say universal: there's no few people who either don't feel it at all, only feel it to the sense that it's a fun psychological (or erotic) toy to play with, or actively enjoy the sense of being desired by someone 'better than them in all the ways that matter' or being able to support someone who's 'traditionally' masculine to do things that wouldn't work otherwise.
((And, conversely, I've absolutely known cisgender straight women who have complexes about their men being too much taller than them, and straight guys panicking about a prospective wife making more money than them, which is still seen as a masculine trait despite everything else going on.))
I understand it well enough that the stereotypical version can be a fun kink, but either it's transmuted into 'we're good at different things' - I'll do the home defense and house repair/troubleshooting, pretty much anyone else on the planet will do better than I can at spatial layout and almost any guy will beat me in an arm-wrestling contest - or I don't really grok it at the same level that most people do. And I sub for women, too, so not exactly representative for the gay ethos.
That said, I do recognize that a lot of people feel it, and a lot of more masc and masc-seeking gay guys feel it a lot more often.
gattsuru
2d ago
There's going to be some very interesting questions here in regards to the interactions of CDA230 and these lawsuits. Roommates says that CDA230 doesn't apply where the service provider actively solicits the content or actively creates it, but does where they merely provide a conduit, but it's not clear if that's good law rather than good-for-this-case law, and whether the AIgen is a 'creator' or a 'conduit' under modern analysis gets even uglier.
(There's another exception for NCII specifically under 8 USC 223(h), but that was only recently signed into law, and I don't think it would apply to xAI in these cases even were it in force.)
But I'd expect that this gets shoveled under the rug, one way or the other, instead.
For a while I assumed that the big AI companies would permit porn generation eventually. They might want to act high and mighty now, but a time would come when they needed to show revenue, public perception be damned.
I'd expect, regardless of the ability of AIgen tools to avoid Legally (or Socially) problematic smut, that the Visa and Mastercard situation means that the revenue argument will long favor not doing it, at least for any of the larger providers. Textgen sites have had similar problems. Itch.io has similar problems.
Disallowing generative editing of user-uploaded images seems like a no-brainer.
As others have noted, this would drastically reduce a lot of the underlying use cases for a lot of image generation tools. Even prohibiting uploads containing real-life pictures of people - previously a very hard problem, now 'just' a simple inference run - would still have massive impact.
I'm also not convinced that either would avoid the problem. Is it still NCII if you merely describe a person in significantly precise detail and sufficient attempts that a third party could reasonably confuse a purely text-to-image generation for a 'real' photograph? I wouldn't want to bet a company on it!
Elon fucked up and now he's under the scrutiny of people who have the power to make life miserable for him.
gattsuru
2d ago
The thing I don't understand about the autism/trans link is that in my mind autism is partly characterised by the kind of rigid psychological orthodoxy that gets agitated by things like having different kinds food on their plate touching, or a familiar TV show getting a new theme tune.
Just because you've developed rituals doesn't mean that they're correct or useful rituals, or even comprehensible to anyone else. Doesn't even have to be a full autism thing, the Smile Like You Mean It problem's well-enough known there to be diagnostically useful.
gattsuru
2d ago
gattsuru
4d ago
Of course not every meaningfully trans person will have had a changed license, and perhaps many of them would have left Kansas before this anyway so there could be a selection effect but even if we doubled or tripled, it's an incredibly small number of people who actually meaningfully transition in that way.
I will caution that there's some selection effects going on: in addition to a lot of trans people going to the coasts, many Red Tribe states require or required significantly more documentation of interventions than one might expect. Kansas wasn't the most extreme, there - some other states mandated certain types of surgical intervention - but even before trans stuff became a culture war lightning rod, it was well-known to be enough of a hassle that even some eligible people dodged it.
The numbers in California are probably closer to 1-in-400.
Someone like Imane Khelif who for basically her whole life has lived in the context of being a woman...
Probably not a great example: there's been leaked information claiming Khelif to have 5a-reductase deficiency, which would have been detected as an (ironically, false) doping incident at least as of 1984.
gattsuru
4d ago
I've found SweetHome3d helpful for doing layout and design work at the casual level. Unfortunately, I've only really used it for remodeling work or fooling around with a hypothetical hyperefficiency tiny home, so don't have any interesting outputs. Even in Minecraft, I've got a bad tendency toward the 'giant open cube' design mode that'd be absolutely abominable to live in.
gattsuru
7d ago
The cynical possibility is just Buy American focus, using whatever tools are available. There are American-'manufactured' and non-Chinese manufactured network infrastructure, this rule gives a very easy tool to make it extremely risky to sell the banned routers at a storefront in the US, tada.
((The really cynical possibility is that, plus some stock trades or donations, and maybe a little fucking over of international shippers for funsies.))
The more charitable is that router vulnerabilities are Pretty Big Deals, and a lot of the ugly questionably legal tools to use against domestic manufacturers to get them to turn of uPnP or implement randomized default passwords or maintain a five-year support period with automatic updates is not available for manufacturers that get 99% of their sales through Amazon as CE-marks.
I wish that had been enough to make me entirely sanguine, it almost was, and if he's happy why should I care what anyone else says?
Bit of a tradeoff where the strength of other connections can make it hard to grok, rather than merely believe, when someone close says that they trust them.
(Out of curiosity, do lesbian fujoshi consume yaoi, or just yuri?)
I think a lesbian going after yuri only gets the title weeaboo, if that. Fujoshi are pretty much defined by the M/M bit, lesbian or straight woman alike.
I kinda went down a rabbit hole looking up what you meant by "unicorn". It seems I am not as terminally online or up to date with gay culture as I imagined. Huh. I guess I see the appeal?
It's been around a decent time and not really limited to or even central for gay stuff -- cfe 2014 M/F + F -- but it's not the most common term. I don't want to undersell the risks and downsides to it as an option, but it is an option, and compared to some of the other compromises he might have, not necessarily as bad as it seems from the horror stories. There are still horror stories, and searching for a long-term relationship like that is hard.
I don't think I can make an LDR work, from some experience, but my brother hasn't really tried. Who knows, maybe he'll change his mind. I just don't think a bi, severely conflicted man is the right choice, even if I like him myself. I see you also mean other LDRs, and sure, I guess if he does meet someone as appealing, I think he might give it a good shout.
Oh, yeah, other LDRs, and specifically looking more broadly to start out. Would not recommend trying to turn an already-stretching relationship into a long-distance one on top of existing stresses unless there's literally no other option. That said, if he's having trouble with a shorter absence, even just long-drive-same-general area LDRs will be painful. I don't get touch starvation, but I've seen what it can do to people.
Hey, he's my brother. He's going to Claude and not ChatGPT if he absolutely must use an LLM for life advice.
You joke, but there's significant risks to the thing telling you your ideas are great and should be acted on immediately being smarter and more rational, especially if you're already lovesick.
I absolutely don't want to watch.
Fair, but not quite what I was trying to caution about.
There's a lot of tiny things that are going to suddenly seem to come in a whole different light, and they're going to show up everywhere. A joke that gets a smirk and could have a prosaic explanation will no longer have that prosaic explanation be the only one. A favorite media, or a style of dress, or haircut, or a guarded behavior around his cell phone or computer browser history, could derive from his orientation. Some of them will be genuine connections; some will be spurious. Some of them, you'll miss even now, and that's the dumbest class of infohazards available, and I'm not going to spell the likely ones out.
Some of them he will need to say outright, to someone.
Given your day job, you'll have heard much, much worse. It's still a little harder to handle when it hits close to home, and even more so when your expression is trying to outpace your actual thoughts. It will be uncomfortable, you will flinch, and you will need to not let that be what you remember from the interaction. Even the small talk needs to be more important, in your mind.
It will be normal again, some other day. It'll be something you don't really think about, no more than you think about his birthday or hair color or his favorite drink. Today, and maybe this week, your pattern-matching side will be oversensitive.
I'm the kind of guy who skips ahead when a porno decides to zoom in on the guy's face or his cock. Who decided that's a good idea??
Heh. It is a weird decision. To be fair, as much as the old Blue Collar Comedy Bit was as much written for its politics as for its accuracy, there do genuinely seem to be some actually-straight guys that do seem to fetishize parts of porn scenes that involve and focus around the men, if only as some way to center themselves within the media.
But I will also say as someone with a healthy (if not exactly red-blooded) appreciation for a nice hefty set of balls and a hefty cock, there's a lot of straight porn that centers them on screen and doesn't do a good job selling them.
Keeping things on the down-low is simply the most pragmatic choice either way, for the foreseeable future. Yet I do not want him to have to live a lie.
One that the may not be obvious to you, or to even him yet, is that coming out is a process, and one that never ends, and for a wide variety of people, it's going to be more painful to be 'honest' everywhere than just being themselves. Coming out to you is a step, coming out to your mom if he does is another step. Even if you broadcast it from a megaphone while doing the full Folsome Street Fair on main street, there will still be people the next day you have to decide whether you need or want to come out to.
The flip side is that it's not a process that's fully under your own control. My brother got outed to our paternal grandmother by Facebook. I had to disclose to my employer once. The more you choose to do it, the less it can sneak up on you.
But that doesn't mean it's always better to be in control either.
Indian gay men are - like gay men anywhere - by my brother's account and my own observations as a regular at a gay pub in Scotland (the people are friendly, the drinks are cheap, and I have a good essay/attempt at ethnography up about it), primarily not looking for that.
I'll caveat that there's a reverse of the lemon problem, here. The people who are always down to fuck are always out on the market, and the people who want a long-term closed relationship aren't on grindr and aren't spending as much time at gay bars. There's places the two spheres meet, but especially given the various preferences and interests floating around, it's not necessarily obvious when you're crossing the boundaries.
There's also some messiness where a number of gay men self-identify as sluts but may not actually have casual sex or even want that high a body count. Sometimes that's because there's sluts-in-every-other-sense, and sometimes it's because they like the identity but don't actually have the drive. Hell, there's even people who love the idea of casual sex, but only with people they know so well and in such limited situations that it's basically just a small-case polyamory (or, hilariously, monogamy-with-named-sex-toys). 'Sapiosexual' is a really obnoxious self-identifier, but it is pointing toward and around a concept with some meaning, just corrupted as a signifier by the mess of people who kinda abuse it.
(I'm trying to write up something more serious for urquan on this, but I need to go into more detail for his use case.)
That may not be the most actionable information -- 'oh boy, tons of eligible bachelors that absolutely wouldn't give you a second glance' kinda sucks as a recognition point -- but I've... found it helpful to know.
I've made gay jokes at his expense, in the past, not knowing. He says he never minded and wants me to act exactly the way I always have, and I've agreed to this, and I'm still a little sorry. He's told me not to be. I think both of these positions can coexist without one of them needing to win.
I'll second other people saying that, especially if they were meant in good spirits, I'd rather people make jokes rather than walk on eggshells. It is kinda funny! It is something that's not really ever going to make 'sense' at a deep level to you! Just throw some self-deprecatory signs hitting your team too, accept a few jokes going your way, and it's how family should treat each other.
((Tbh, the most obnoxious stuff I encountered was were there wasn't any humor intended. There's still a very uncomfortable bit that, no matter how much my father is happy about my brother and his husband now, we'll both remember when he told us, trying to be nice and trying to be paternal, that he didn't care whether we brought home a white girl or a black girl or a hispanic girl, so long as we brought home a girl. The Saturday Night Live jokes were just funny.))
He is too ethical to trick even an eager straight woman into marrying him for the sake of cover, and he wants to be close to his real partner, whoever that turns out to be. He is also less than keen on permanently moving abroad, at least for anything longer than a residency. He wants children, biologically his, and I want this for him too.
That's... a difficult situation, and if it helps, give him my sympathies as someone who's had to make decisions around (lighter) variants of the same problems. A lot of the answers are going to depend both on what he's willing to do, what risk (and what kinds of risks!) he's willing to accept, and how much his biology is going to fight with him. I'll avoid repeating the obvious 'try to have it all' stuff or diving into useless esoteric options (eg: just find a trans guy who wants to get knocked up who cares whether that'd even work for him), but a few unintuitive options:
There are women who you don't have to trick. For a fujoshi or a woman with a very low sex drive, a closed-relationship-focused gay guy can be an even more-desirable-than-normal catch. Sometimes that's a lavender marriage (yes, there are lesbian fujoshi), but sometimes it's just what works for people. Doesn't even have to be a lie; you can honestly say that you married for the sake of kids, but you're great friends: then people who need to know can know and those who don't can decide what they want to believe. This has some good options on having biological children, if some that might make for a few uncomfortable discussions and maybe a bit of a boner-killer moment. There's levels of gay where the flesh might be unwilling but there's no mental objection (or even fingers that might be willing to put in the hard work when required), and on the other side, my brother turned down a threesome he really wanted because the third's girlfriend wanted in the room fully clothed. If your brother's toward the latter end, this probably won't work well even if the woman in questions swears she's lesbian or asexual. On the upside, if you don't particularly care about a woman's appearance, you get to select for personality, and there's a lot of diamonds in the rough.
Ultimately, it's still a polyamorous relationship in the literal sense, if one where there third never gets dicked. It's also putting a massive amount of trust in a third party that you can't love and might grow to love you or need something more from someone, and to be blunt, while having little or no leverage over them. Optimistically, I know a few people who took this path and didn't divorce until after the kids graduated, and one who did and didn't divorce at all. You get a good idea of how much lust and love keeps most married couples from driving each other nuts once you see someone taking this approach. Even if that doesn't happens, it's a secret that has to last decades, and that's a lot of pressure, and I can't speak as to how the kids took it. I also don't know how prevalent fujoshi are in India, nevermind how he'd find one he likes well enough to spend decades with.
Being a unicorn isn't that bad, if you've got the right mindset. Chances are pretty good this makes biological children harder (barring finding a bi guy who likes the idea paternity roulette, tbf a surprisingly common kink) even if the couple in question wants kids, but if they do, you get to be the friendly uncle who's always around while skipping a lot of the bad parts of parenting like having to figure out discipline. There's jealousy in not being someone's one-and-only, but if you absolutely have to make a compromise on that, it can be both easier (they're not direct competition!) or harder (they can do something I can't, they're going to steal him!) where the one exception is a different gender. It's easier to be closeted, like this -- you'd be surprised how many older folk assume you're pining over the wife! -- but it's also even harder to come out.
There are risks, here, even with the compromises: being pumped-(and-pumped-and-pumped)-and-dumped does happen to gay unicorns as with straight women unicorns, like the fujoshi there's a risk of jealousy from the other partner and now it's fucking-polyamory, and this can get into weird legal situations even inside the United States or UK. I wouldn't even bring this up while he's with his current boyfriend, but if he's staying with him even as said boyfriend starts talking more and more as they start settling down, it's worth spelling out that this is a choice, even if he thinks he's not making any choice yet. And it is a survivable one, if not a perfect one.
Long-distance relationships can be both easier and harder than you'd expect. Having a partner that only exists through a VOIP call 300+ days a year sucks when you need a human touch, don't get me wrong, and I know more than one LDR that got really rough when the two long-time lovebirds found that they were only sexually compatible at a keyboard. You have a lot more space to select from, though, and a lot more people trying this stuff care about longer-term relationships to begin with. It's also easier to stay closeted (at least in meatspace), and a lot more compatible with a number of home obligations. On the gripping hand, though, this can turn into a massive psychological pressure such it feels like immigration to the LDR's homeland or emigration of the LDR Will Fix Everything, and that's both not true and can lead to bad decision-making with regret.
Also doesn't help with the biological child focus.
If anyone has practical advice rather than reassurance/validation, I'd be glad to have it. I'm not looking for confirmation that I'm a good person for loving my brother without conditions, which I do not consider an achievement. I want to know if there's something useful I can actually do.
Be a good sounding board. Especially if he doesn't have many meatspace gay friends separate from his boyfriend, it's very easy for a guy to go quite literally nuts as they stew over hard decisions without any external grounding (or falling down the /r/relationships or LLM rabbit hole for said external grounding, which will quite happily work toward driving you even more nuts). It's a really bad situation to be in, and I'm not exaggerating or hyperbolizing when I talk about this like going crazy. Having someone you can be out to, even if they can't empathize fully with a specific problem, as long as they're going to be honest and serious and open-minded about a choice, helps a ton at not getting unmoored or badly fixated.
And that's going to be uncomfortable at times! I'm bi, and I still absolutely know more of my brother's preferences than I ever wanted to know. The watersports joke is not the worst of all possible worlds. It's still better than having family who can't tell if they're obsessing over someone.
gattsuru
8d ago
I have some very bad or very good news for you about the entire kink of orientation play.
gattsuru
8d ago
It's less that you haven't proven it, and more that it feels like people started with the conclusion and then tried to look for any data supporting it. It's not just that this evidence sometimes has other alternative explanations (hell, some of the alternative explanations are a little sketchy themselves!); it's that there's no real 'okay, what falsify this' or even a 'okay, what would explain the same data with fewer epicycles'.
That doesn't make the theory wrong, but it makes it hard to feel any level of confidence.
Have you ever seen a lesbian look like her?
Uh... yes, actually. There's even one at the FRC environment I support, albeit caucasian and taller. For all the Subaru Flannel stereotypes are founded in reality, there's a lot of people outside of the stereotypes still. I have known (cis!) femmes who glorify the Barbie Doll look, obvious implants and all. I'm way too androphillic to get it myself, but different strokes for different folks.
Maybe things are different in China -- meyerlemon's response here seems like it was viewed from a literal funhouse mirror to Western Perspectives. But I don't have good sources clearly saying that it is different this way, either.
gattsuru
8d ago
I've run GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.6 on a desktop computer that set me back around 1.5k USD, including everything down to the power supply and case, just using an nVidia 3090 24GB and 224GB RAM. You get a significant performance penalty going with GPU+RAM compared to a pure GPU run, but it's nowhere near as bad as pure-CPU or CPU+SSD speeds. Not fast enough for synchronous work like a Codex replacement, by a long shot; for something you can set-and-forget a series of prompts to run overnight, it's fine and can churn out 10k-ish words at around 150w power consumption. For GLM 4.6 specifically you do end up needing one of the more heavily-trimmed quants, but you can run it down to 32GB VRAM + 128 GB RAM without cutting too hard on context.
((I will caveat that the heavily-trimmed quants give weird failure modes. I'd naively expected quantization to result in typos, logic problems, or looping, and sometimes that happens, but you also get bizarre focuses on certain names, places, or plot points not present in more-precise variants.))
That said, it cost me 1.5k USD at September 2025 prices, and even then I was making compromises on RAM to keep to budget (hence the bizarre RAM total). Wouldn't recommend it at current prices, since a rough estimate hits around 3.5k-3.8k. Putting more emphasis on VRAM might make more sense... which is a bizarre thing to say.
There's a lot of cases where a faster, lower-parameter model is a better choice, even with this setup. For synchronous work, smaller or MoE-focused models are night-and-day in terms of being able to just throw tokens at a problem. Even for async work, sometimes GLM-4.5-Air's (110B to GLM-4.6's 357B) going to save enough time and energy that it's close enough, and something like Cydonia (24B) can handle longer contexts surprisingly well if you prompt carefully. Hell, I've got a few models I've requantized down so I can run shorter prompts at the higher fidelity with all layers on GPU, and then drop down to a 'dumber' variant for long-context operations that would exceed VRAM.
gattsuru
9d ago
I'd... argue otherwise.
It's especially bad here, where the alleged source was almost certainly a malicious or self-serving motivation behind the lurid claims, but a probable cause affidavit is just that: it's not a claim something must be wrong, but that someone could be wrong. Like a grand jury indictment, the standards for a search warrant are hilariously low, and the people signing it off and executing it have very close to cart blanche. Not everyone being searched will have evidence of a crime, and not everyone being investigated will be guilty, necessarily.
Which makes it a problem when these things are world-upending, without any valid need. There may well be a scenario that requires a six-person team with assault rifles. As with countless other examples such as Malinowski and going all the way back to Ken Ballew, it's very hard to understand what is benefit derived from those tactics here, which look to be optimizing for shock-and-awe at the cost of not just inconvenience to the suspect, but danger to the community and even alleged victims.
That's a criticism that sometimes is delivered with perfect hindsight or expecting clairvoyant police and judges, but I think it applies here even when considering the least convenient world. In an alternate universe where Foreman had been guilty and had dangerous control over kidnapped women, and had been at the residence at the time of the raid, this raid could have easily resulted in the kidnapped women turned into hostages or 'made incapable of testimony' at the first kick at the door.
This is a consideration police do take, before serving even far more strongly evidenced search or arrest warrants.
It's just really easy for them to not, when they're morons. My personal favorite example is the FBI leaking to press the location and time of the search of a suspected mad bomber, presumably not for the purpose of maximizing casualties if he went Molotov, but there's a long and storied set of examples. Some of that's bad-but-at-least-foreseeable motivations -- arrest warrants in particular tend to get served at home despite it being well-known to be dangerous as shit, because SCOTUS hasn't slapped down searches-while-executing-arrest nearly aggressively enough. A lot of it's just how things have always been done.
That's still not reason, alone, to keep doing it that way.
gattsuru
9d ago
People proposed this theory back back when Wu came up on the Old Reddit, along with the theory that she was an intentional CCP op. It's plausible, in the sense that it could happen, be hard to prove, and would have some explanatory power, but there's basically no attempts by those KFers to consider what would disprove it. I'm not going to say either has to be false, but I remain skeptical.
Most of the information I've seen suggests that formal use of 'hard' aversive stimuli (eg, electric shocks, physical impacts, harsh chemicals) fell out of favor by the mid 1980s. There's claims of it since, but they tend to revolve around extremely marginal cults and/or really sketchy political activist backstories. Even before it was marginalized in the social conservative sphere, it was considered (probably reasonably!) as likely to backfire, end up with asexual or otherwise less-sexually-functional-than-before outcomes, or trigger even weirder behaviors in the Nicholas Cummings side of the sphere.
(Although I was under the impression van den Aardweg himself was prone to flirting closer than most talk therapy-focused groups: there's always some fuzzy edges between exercise as process versus exercise and punishment, but the whole Failed Male and Failed Social Relationship framework seemed prone to leaping off that edge, in addition to just being hilariously wrong in a number of cases I know firsthand.)
Yeah, that's not unprecedented or unbelievable. I was trying to keep to the legal arguments above, but the factual side of this is an ungodly mess.
My impression is that there's a small portion of people (either bisexual or malleable for other reasons like their approach to sexuality or very pressing in the 'every hole is a goal' sense sex drives) for whom even the 'standard' form of Man Up works, or could probably even work themselves into a pretty wide variety of results in the Dodo Bird Verdict sense. There have been a few bihackers that were successful going the other direction, and happy with it, and I kinda do have to mention that there's a ton of guys who were perfectly straight and then spent some time in the furry fandom and discovered Oh No He's Hot.
But the flip side is that a lot don't, even within the small group who seek this out the hardest: a large portion who try are only able to shove down same-sex interests for short periods, or they're able to function with women but still crave men in ways that they're not really comfortable with. Likewise, you get bihackers that aren't grossed out by gay sex anymore, but wouldn't actually look out for the stuff, or might struggle to even top (or even top the 'most gay lite' guy available, cw: furry comic).
I'm not kidding when I say Cumming's 14% number seems really optimistic.
The flip side to that is that we've got a lot more tooling available, now. At the moderate level, there was a long-standing theory that gay guys just needed to have a couple good rounds of 'healthy' sex with a woman to Become A Man, and contra the invasive therapies and wireheading from erwgv3g34's older example, these days some gay guys can do it with a Little Blue Pill and a weekend in Vegas. It doesn't work -- a few still can't get it up or keep it up, and a much larger number can pump away and just don't really feel satiated at the end -- but it seems like it should be something that redefines how a lot of frameworks around everything here should go, and it really hasn't.
People having widespread changes to their sexuality as a result of hormonal supplementation is common, if not universal.
(At the more extreme, I'd expect rTMS to have some impact, and while I think experimenting like that is a terrible idea regardless of what you're trying to change your mind on, it's far from the most terrible idea to get massive support and grants. On the flip side, I can understand why both social conservatives and LGBT advocates think it's a really dumb weapon to invent and then leave around for someone else to mandate!)
On the flipside, with the possible exclusion of the Kaiser SF program, it's weird how messy "improved somewhat" is as a term of art. Does that mean they were still gay, just got perceived hypersexuality under control? Still gay, but could run on the masc4masc side of grindr? Still gay, but less conflicted about it? Could they now have sex with their wives, and if so did they enjoy it or see it as a chore? Or did they have reduced same-sex attraction, in the sense that they jorked it to gay porn instead of cheating on their significant other? Because some of these endpoints -- even and maybe especially if they are desirable for the patients in question -- seem like they could be confronted in ways that don't revolve around 'changing orientation' as the central result, rather than a rare side effect.
Even assuming as a given the whole progressive mainstream philosophy as true, there’s a lot of this stuff that could be relevant and interesting and important, completely divorced from sexual orientation change, and they’re not looking into it deeply either.
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