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gattsuru


				

				

				
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gattsuru


				
				
				

				
13 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:16:04 UTC

					

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User ID: 94

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Anyone want to bet whether that gets extended by or on the 11th?

Two more weeks, or until the order of the Fifth Circuit.

Excluding for now the possibility of a Dem trifecta, there's a lot of problems with the text of the INA. For a simple example... Under the conventional reads no; non-citizens must "immediately preceding the date of filing his application for naturalization has resided continuously, after being lawfully admitted for permanent residence, within the United States for at least five years", with a limited number of exceptions not relevant for most cases.

... so what's, exactly, the definition of "being lawfully admitted for permanent residence"? Barring some exceptions not relevant here, "the status of having been lawfully accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States as an immigrant in accordance with the immigration laws, such status not having changed". Historically that's been understood to require an LPR (aka green card).

But would a Dem President be un_able_ to change that? All the processes are executive branch, even the judges. Would anyone have standing to even bring a case challenging such a change? Would SCOTUS be willing to claw back the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of people?

And that's one of the less plausible ones.

Thanks for fighting with that.

There's some videos here and here (cw: deadly plane crash).

Too grainy to completely exclude takeoff misconfiguration (esp on a sleek design like the 787), but at least no obvious structural failure, and I'd be surprised if takeoff misconfiguration could get that high in those weather conditions with that passenger load. NTSB's going to do some tests for fuel contamination, pilot error, maintenance faults, so on, but at the risk of speculating too early a lot of what I'm seeing points to either dual mechanical failure of the engines or electrical failure of the whole aircraft, especially the reported RAT deployment is real. Given everything else a lot of people are predisposed to think software or major design failure, but it's hard to think of a software bug or hardware flaw that would hide for over a decade and then hit both engines simultaneously. Maybe flying into a flock of birds a la Sully, but without the river and miracle?

There's a lot of surprising survivals in takeoff and landing crashes: Northwest 255 is a pretty (in)famous takeoff misconfiguration that managed to kill more people than were on the flight and had one survivor.

There's a handful of well-known examples in western languages, too, and probably a bunch more that are too informal to really be written down.

Metrowest Daily:

A Framingham man who is accused of shooting another man during a pro-Israeli rally last September in Newton was placed on pretrial probation on Wednesday, June 4. Charges against Scott Hayes, 48, will be dismissed if he completes all pretrial probation conditions. The pretrial probation period runs through Sept. 13. The resolution of the case took place during a hearing Wednesday in Newton District Court.

One interesting bit I hadn't seen until reviewing one of his probation requirements, to search for a new job:

The disabled Iraq War veteran was contracted to provide natural gas leak detection, leak surveys, and inspections for a company that contracts with National Grid, one of the largest utility provider companies in Massachusetts. National Grid refused to allow Hayes to work on their account after the incident. As a result, his company informed him on Sunday — a month after the attack — that there was no work available, and advised Hayes to file for unemployment.

I've not been able to find out what happened with Gannon, the guy who struck Hayes. He was eventually charged with assault and battery, but the MA court lookup system sucks, so I can't tell if I'm not getting results with his name because I'm using the system wrong, or because they're not there. There's been no media coverage of a trial or plea agreement.

I'll caveat that tumblr has picked a 'third way' -- if you can't depend on finding the flaws in the machines or smashing the machines, you can start looking at and promoting artists with their art. Yes, an AIgenner could theoretically 'put their steps in', having a long history of progressing art skills and process work for a given piece, maybe not even fraudulent at that, but it's not really what almost any will.

((With the advances we're seeing, I'd expect this to go the way of Amish furniture -- great technical skill and often unusual approaches to a work and usually better when available, but not always able to do those things.))

... though I'm not sure that will matter. People want to make principled stands over copyright or intellectual property, even if they're sometimes a little Janus-faced. But the Luddites cared about their work, and their pay, and not without reason; modern AIgen concerns much more heavily revolve around these matters than tracing II: trace harder. A thousand galleries and retweets and reblogs do not cash make; as an artist, Attention Is <Not> All You Need. A lot of mainstream artists historically depended, both for cash and for opportunity to develop their skills, on make-day work that is completely separate from other reputation and reliability trends pointed to direct sales to their audiences. You can't break the machines for this, you aren't involved in deciding to buy or not, and you can't judge the artist because they might never be named.

Tumblr and a lot of fandom spaces have moved to merch or patreon funding, and that's kinda worked on the edges for the most successful or the most second-job strivery. But I don't think it scales.

There's three major stories I'm aware of:

The Red Tribe story starts in 1986, where President Reagan promoted and passed a major immigration bill with two central components. On one hand, almost all existing immigrants, regardless of their status, would be given an amnesty and treated as if they had legally immigrated for purposes such as deportation and naturalization. In turn, we were supposed to get a massive enforcement apparatus discouraging further illegal immigration. But like all Wimpyisms, we found that the stuff that took place today happened reliably, and the prong that was supposed to happen in the future faded away; the various rules to cut off the employment of illegal immigrants were left unenforced, and various court cases would make deportation harder even in the rare case anyone was caught.

((Note that there is no honest Blue Tribe analysis of the impact of these policies: compare the wikipedia's "allowing for the legalization of nearly 60,000 undocumented immigrants from 1986 to 1989 alone" with the actual source).

This was, on its own, frustrating. But it did not escalate immediately. What really brought the tension to the forefront was the 2013 Gang of Eight bill. While a lot of broad stroke discussions of the proposal (championed by Rubio) heavily promoted an increased enforcement mandate, the combination of interactions with the then-controversial ACA and widespread loss of trust in claims made about the ACA made it far more critical. And then the language actual came out, and one of the biggest enforcement mechanisms was a entry/exit database that had been required by statute for over a decade-and-a-half already. This time they'd really do it because the amnesty would only be provisional until (some of) these enforcement actions happened... because ten years of provisional status would be a lot more politically costly to act against. And that goal leaked.

So a lot of conservatives absolutely lost their shit, Rubio was a joke for months. A lot of mainstream conservatives swore, at length, that they would not even consider any bill that did not prioritize enforcement first. Meanwhile, the mainstream democratic party saw any bill without a broad amnesty component as actively useless.

... which was itself, in turn, an escalation. After seeing the conservative response, President Obama, and pushed DACA and DAPA, along with a number of other various non-prosecution policies. While not all of these would manage to go into action (albeit some were only blocked officially), the blue tribe calling conservatives the Party of No weren't exactly wrong! And the next ten years would primarily focused around lawfare; because neither side could pass legislation the other would even consider, various executive actions were the only real option, and because this required no negotiation except for what had to pass SCOTUS scrutiny, these policies could be much wider or single-sided than any plausible statute. Conservatives pointed to increasingly fraught possibilities of downstream political consequences (JarJarJedi has listed most of the mainstream examples, but for a particularly fun one most people who can think about don't say outloud: under the INA, people who have immigrated legally are eligible for naturalization after five years. guess how 'immigrated legally' is defined, or the legal consequences of a grant of citizenship that can't be stripped). Eventually this culminated in US v. Texas under Biden, where it turned out to be impossible to compel any enforcement policy at all from a President that didn't want to follow it.

The Blue Tribe story starts a few years later, as the IRCA1986's entry date amnesty thing passed, and it turned out that there were millions (sometimes estimated as ten million!) people who either entered the US too late for its use, did not register in time, or who were not eligible for other reasons. Run all the above with the opposite valiance, and you've got ten or tens of millions of people, a large portion who immigrated as children, are forced into a gray-at-best legal environment over what the Blue Tribe sees as a glorified paperwork offense, and Republicans who demand that we make a lot of additional paperwork offenses and hefty punishments for them before even considering confronting The Real Problem.

((In both the Blue Tribe and Red Tribe tellings, there's also various selection pressures: pro-immigration Republicans and restrictionist-Democrats were either compelled to change their minds or pushed out of the party/national politics.))

The Gray Tribe story starts much later, and thinks the legal and legislative connections are a little besides the point. They explain why things aren't happening, but they don't explain why the rioting is happening. For that, we instead look to a large and increasing group of who have long framed immigration enforcement of any type as fundamentally illegitimate, and any attempts to do so as fundamentally driven by animus and a sign of unadulterated evil. That put the normal paeans to informed compromise off the table.

The exact start date is fuzzy and depends heavily on who you ask and when. The growth of Punch A Nazi discourse in 2016 is an easy example, but you can also see people pointing to G20 protests or the tactics formalized in the gay marriage wars (I use 'animus' specifically). Everyone's least favorite web forum also 'must' have been the source.

Probably from this or this poll, though I'll caveat that in both cases a) YouGov, b) not great wording, c) specifically about overturning Lawrence v. Texas, rather than reimplementing the laws (though in turn, some states never got rid of their pre-Lawrence statutes).

I don't think I've seen any polls about construction crane conversion therapy as a punishment, and it'd require overturning Kennedy v. Louisiana. Which, tbf, on much worse legal ground than the already-post-hoc Lawrence, but doesn't usually get polled much either.

I don't mind most 'weeds', but dandelions are particularly prone to killing other nearby plants, and then spreading aggressively to any areas that don't have complete grass cover or deep mulch. I used to have some clover I was trying to cultivate in the lawn proper and a handful of local flowering plants in a nearby garden area, but the dandelions have pretty eagerly smothered them out, and sometimes doing the same to grass. If you have near neighbors, it's also kinda rude to give them your problem, too, and even if you're aggressive about mowing and weeding it's hard to get every dandelion before it gets to seed.

Most of my problem is downstream of having irregular hours and not having consistent opportunities to weed. If you can consistently stop seedlings early, they're pretty easy to pull away from any garden crops you want to keep and at least plausible to prevent almost all from getting to seed. If you don't have those constraints (and don't want the clean-uniform-lawn), they're a lot more tolerable.

I've tried both 2,4-D and glysophate, using those powered wand things, and giving the base of each plant a two-second count. The dandelions definitely don't like it, but either I'm missing a lot of them or they're springing back after each application. To be fair, the previous homeowner had let it get bad to start with, and I'm not great with or consistent about lawnwork, so they've gotten a lot of opportunity to dig in.

((For how bad, I spent a day with some kneepads on and filled a 5-gallon bucket to the lid fourteen times, and didn't even get through all of a pretty small front lawn.))

It's making some progress, as has switching from a reel lawnmower to a powered one to better prevent them from getting to seed after spraying them, but it's been a lot worse than I'd expected even after bringing out the big guns.

Fair. My impression is that LASD has a lot of the same issues, but I'll admit I've got less current evidence on that.

I've tried turning off visibility of things like individual post scores, but that does just risk you changing to focus on notifications, instead. And given the extent twitter has driven people completely bonkers, that might be worse than the karma farming. There's always been worries about the masks we wear molding the face -- and even some theories about using that to improve ourselves -- but having the masks get molded in turn is Not Great Bob. And then what exactly it seems to be driving even the boring people toward is kinda disturbing.

You can do some efforts to de-algorithmify yourself, but that's only going to get the worst of it, and maybe not even that. And it's pretty incompatible with having a career or even a renumerative hobby online. Even some offline small business work is becoming increasingly hard to kick off without it. I'd like to advocate some level of in vino veritas, but a) I don't drink, and b) that doesn't seem to work great for those who pick it up. Trying to actively avoid collecting enough of a following maybe helps? But I dunno if that's just because I wouldn't notice the microscale examples of the trend, either.

The one bright spot is that Flanderization does, at least in part, reflect another trait specific to media, not people qua people. Ted Flanders didn't turn from slightly-religious neighbor into a fundie just because time's arrow flew, but also because the shows writers needed something new for each episode. "Simpsons Did It" is a problem for South Park, but it's also an issue for The Simpsons itself; even if most viewers won't recognize the psuedorerun, the show's staff and a lot of the commentariat will. If you have to get a column out for your tech column the weekend and three videos M/W/F, you start diving into this sorta A/B-to-death-testing because you don't have anything else, and the content doesn't have that much to start with.

For normal people, that doesn't quite work that way. Yes, history rhymes, and I'm probably one of the worst people on this site when it comes to bringing up ancient history from the long-ago days of two years ago. But anyone that hasn't let the mask embed into their skull can and probably will find something new because the world is filled with new stuff. Get a hobby, touch grass, fight the dandelion infestation on your front lawn again (fuuuuuuuuuuuck), talk about cooking.

I've mostly been focused on image generators. Between improvements to LoRA development processes along with Wan's image-to-video and first-frame-last-frame-to-video, there's been some pretty massive advances in the last six months or so. It's still hard to get consistency in animation, along with long generation times the reasons why why all those animation shots floating around tend to just be a couple seconds long, but that we're at the point where 'make this arbitrary subject into a turntable motion effect' is getting complaints about background consistency is not what I imagined just a couple years ago. They don't always work, but we're not talking 'success' in the sense 'that it can do it at all' anymore.

I keep hoping that this'll end up being a useful tool for artists -- someone with a real eye for the medium and a good sketching hand should be able to use this to crank out in days what would otherwise take weeks or even months of dedicated work, in the same way that two years ago plain StableDiffusion could save artists a ton of time with crosshatching or rosettes or shading -- but there's not enough people really messing in the field to say for sure. Even for those few working in this there's not a lot publicly visible with how many conventional galleries ban the stuff, and a lot who might be some of the most adept at it already have workflows that fill in many of these gaps for comic- or even animation-level work.

AI voicework has a lot of potential. I've toyed with it a little, though getting decent emotion through is still a bit beyond me. The workflows are still a little too finicky to use real-time, but eventually getting an Emet Selch together would be fun for the memes.

I've been trying to get a full workflow for image-to-3d-print and image-to-CNC together. 2D works are easy, if not especially entertaining, but it should be well within the existing tech to do a lot of creative stuff, here. Almost have Meshroom to a point where it'll work, but not there yet.

Haven't been able to get any of the offline ones to write reasonable fiction, and I don't particularly trust the online ones for anything more complicated. For conventional fiction, it takes a frustrating amount of prompting to get a work that's surprising enough to be interesting without swerving into M. Night Shamalayan territory; trying to get exofiction or a counterfactual story or anything complex with viewpoint tends to go batshit (and for smut, the line between interesting and disgusting is very thin and hard-to-encode just for my own use). But I haven't messed with it too much.

I'll argue (and have long argued) that it's something upstream; the direction of causality is pointing from a common source. There's a pretty wide variety of spheres where millenial-focused media is absolutely bright-colored, especially where designs and decisions come from the grassroots.

There are a lot of things to complain about in Helluva Boss (cw: lots of profanity, some sexual 'humour') or Brand New Animal, but they're not grey or even My Little Pony-pastel. Look at MMORPGs and going from the most conventional subscription model like FFXIV to the most gatcha-like Genshin they've only gotten brighter over the last decade even as they've increasingly targeted the same demographics. The furry fandom overwhelmingly favors bright and high-constrast to the point where there's a term for hitting it too hard and the bar is high (cw: extremely bad bad color selection). Even the artists who do focus on the greys have a lot more soul than corporate metis. Go into Blue Tribe heavy spaces, and the corporate grey laptops are spangled with every sticker cause celebre available.

But if you're putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, you paint your house grey. Nonconfrontational uber alles, in the most literal sense.

There's an optimistic story where the growth of spaces to be maximally yourself have lead to a cleaner division between the personal and the public (well, optimistic until you poke at it), and a pessimistic story where we just banned everything and ignored the consequences.

But I think there's a more cynical one: everything adds up to normal, and this is the local maxima.

Fair, and maybe a decade or two ago a different focus on the side of trans advocates would have avoided some controversial landmines had they made that decision then. But path dependence is a nightmare; at this point, even assuming that committed (left-?) civil-left-libertarians exist in enough numbers to be a meaningful political force, I don't think this battle of terminology makes the top-ten list, and maybe even not the top-twenty list, of most alienating things.

Old Man's War is a better Scalzi work than most, but it makes it there by being a knockoff of the far-better execution of the same concept in Haldeman's The Forever War -- if you haven't read it, I far recommend it. I don't think Scalzi was intentionally ripping that earlier story off, but I'm also exceptionally skeptical that he was unaware of the earlier story or never read it.

I mean, it's the LAPD. You've got a choice between evil or incompetent, and it's probably better to select the healing power of "and".

... I don't think this is a good model. Even if you absolutely must frame it to sneer...

So, there's a joke that goes around in immigration contexts, where the CATO set think nationality is magic dirt, and national culture is food. And that's not a steelman, but it's not exactly an unfair criticism, either; there's a ton of long-built stuff just from one part of the US to another. If Alex Nowrasteh ended up in a SAW movie trap, you'd maybe get him to admit that cultural norms vary from one country to another rather than gnaw his own foot off, but I wouldn't bet on it. The idea that cultures tied to location of origin isn't just taboo, it's either unimaginable or a taboo behind a taboo. Nationality becomes what someone wants to do, in its most visible and immediate form.

What's that look like for gender, if a characteristic is only what the person wants to do? Well, what you were born with is a lot less actively chosen than what you carry in your pants, which is still a lot less actively chosen than what your call yourself. And that's clearly meaningless.

... but if you poke at it, that's not that incoherent. Yes, there are some obvious political compromise at the absolute edges (why is this butch a cis woman and this bitch trans male? why is that a femboy and that a transwoman?). But there's actually a lot of characteristics and terms we use like that: I use my current job title to describe my area of expertise, not the one I went to college over, and you'd probably be kinda weirded out if I used the field I started out with or what my family has historically done.

It's just not something you care about, and you see this as replacing a much more important term and concept. And it’s pretty reasonable to care more about what someone’s got in their pants than whether it’s wrapped in boxers or panties, and whether they want sir or ma’am even less. But that frame or most of the downstream characteristics are no more inaccessible to them than it is to you; the existence of "cis woman" as a term is a recognition of it.

Now, switching out 'trans woman' for 'lifestyle crossdresser' and 'trans man' for 'tomboy' isn't something the trans side is willing to offer for historical reasons even if soccons would accept it (and soccons wouldn't accept it, if they did). Perhaps even more critically, it won't solve the problems you or most soccons actually have, here. There are serious and difficult questions about how much we're willing to tradeoff opportunity costs for one group against another group's ability to reinvent themselves (am I talking about 'ban the box' or anti-college-diploma efforts?), of how welfare and entitlements need prioritize things that are actively undesirable to the wild majority of voters, of freedom of self-expression against social and regulatory norms, so on and so forth.

Everything before those questions is just disputing definitions.

Ah, you've read deeper into the incident than I have, then. Apologies.

CSB reports are pretty fun, if morbid reads, especially since they're a lot more willing to point fingers (contrast NTSB).

I will caution that they tend to put a pretty heavy thumb on the scales to favor as wide-ranging a possible conclusion as available from the evidence: even their own videos make it sound more like BP (or Amaco's) process engineering played a much bigger role than the page count would. The report notes that there were previous incidents involving the blowdown system, but most of these were from before the 2004 budget cuts, and some were from before the merger. Counterfactuals are hard, but with that bad a process design, and that level of normalization of deviance, I'm not sure better trained or less tired staff would have done much more than changed the body count for whatever inevitable incident happened.

I dunno if there was a single crystalizing incident for TTRPG fandom as a whole, or even for individual forums.

RPGnet has a date that the moderators themselves advertise as turning from "the wild west" to intersectionality uber allies (usually mid-2004/2005ish), but there wasn't some big incident motivating that, just a more formalized ruleset that wasn't even especially biased, outside Darren McLennan, Curt, and a few other moderators having unofficial exceptions.

Same for conventions: things like banning people over pepes and ok symbols are pretty far downstream of everything else at GenCon, just like the White Male Terrorist writeups were downstream of far broader definitions of harassment becoming standardized or the nuTSR thing was very much a reaction to progressive politics becoming cost-of-entry. There's a lot of stuff that was the topic de jour in the early days: D&D's Oriental Adventures controversy in early D&D 4 days (probably 2007-2009ish?), various convention kerfluffles, CthulhuTech controversies...

That said, I'd largely left the fandom except to keep up with Morancy by the worst of it, so I may just have missed some.