gattsuru
4mo ago
I read this three times and I am still not quite sure what you are trying to say here.
You asked me, to quote you, "What, specifically, would you like me to have done about the attempted Trump assassination?"
I gave you a list, of :
- The week of July 13th 2023, write a significant post in the Butler shooting thread here, criticizing the progressive mainstreaming of eliminationist and violent rhetoric.
- This week, resting your argument on whether something happened, instead of covering your ass with whether you remembered something happening.
- Or, if not that, at least not move the goalposts from "When that happens, the Blues are not going to want to tolerate it, and the Reds are not going to accept an abrupt demand for a return to order and decorum." and "Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism!" to "no one [here] thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged" (and now "I think political violence is bad all around and I think most sane (not-on-the-Internet) people agree.")
This is why I often find the barrage of accusations you throw at me disingenuous. This is why I often find the barrage of accusations you throw at me disingenuous. I do not claim history started yesterday or claim things "shouldn't matter."
No, you just complain every single time I highlight past events or failures of past predictions. That's why I didn't say you'd claimed history started yesterday or things "shouldn't matter" ; it's why I asked whether we're "supposed to pretend history started yesterday" or "why it shouldn't matter". What reason does it not count that the subreddit that promoted itself on the importance of appealing to anti-violence blue tribers both couldn't find more than a dozen such posters and can't spare comment on one of several political assassination attempts? Are you ever going to explain why "harping on a dead subreddit" is wrong, or even engage with the matter, or is this yet another dodge?
I disagree with @FCfromSCC that we are at a point where there is no longer a norm against political violence, that this norm was destroyed by Blues, or that Blues in general are pro-assassination. I believe him that he encounters Blues on the regular who say things like this. If you say you do, I will take your word for it. While I probably am in a much more Blue bubble than him, I don't encounter them that often but it does happen. I think political violence is bad all around and I think most sane (not-on-the-Internet) people agree.
And you're still not engaging with FcFromSSC's literal words, instead of throwing the goalposts out a third story window. "[A] precedent is being set here for the level of background violence "we" are supposed to tolerate, but that standard is being set largely by social institutions that are predominantly Blue and are sympathetic to Blue violence. At some point in the not-to-distant future, I think it is likely that it will be Reds committing the sporadic violence. When that happens, the Blues are not going to want to tolerate it, and the Reds are not going to accept an abrupt demand for a return to order and decorum."
Speaking of hard to parse, I don't know what "recent old" argument means; you could be talking about something I posted last week or something I posted back on reddit.
I am specifically trying to avoid linking to one of the many, many previous arguments that we've had, since you've complained about three-year-old and three-month-old ones. If you really want me to select the most prominent and relevant one, I can, but my point here is that this is a broader problem than just you dodging any deeper criticism than "it's fucked", sometimes.
I am sure you know I did not literally mean that zero Blues in the entire world have ever expressed sympathy with the would-be Trump assassin except on TikTok. So when I mention yes, I have encountered a few elsewhere, you act like this is a gotcha. Come on.
Which is why I didn't accuse you of literally meaning zero Blues in the entire world ever did that (contrast "like this was only a problem in one website that doesn't really count"). It's a gotcha that you constantly use this sort of phrasing to minimize bad behaviors by Blues, even if it would have been more serious engagement with the actual post to admit it happens but you challenge it.
I don't really think you want to go Kulak either, you just seem pretty sympathetic to the argument that Blues have it coming.
No. My claim -- and I think FCfromSSC's -- is that enough Blues have completely abandoned any serious attempt at establishing neutral, consistent rules of behavior that are enforced consistently against even their own that any appeal to such rules is completely laughable to Reds, but being a hypocrite isn't a capital crime. The problem is that deserve has nothing to do with it; Reds are, with reason, going to laugh at any Blue overtures toward past norms, and they're going to have absolutely no trust that any newly-created rules will hold more than immediate scenario in question.
It doesn't matter if the Blue in question genuinely was really principled in the past, or even if they personally have records of it -- although I'll point out again we don't here for anyone but ChrisPratt. It may well be very unfair, in those circumstances. It's still going to happen.
If Trace has failed to condemn the Trump assassination with sufficient vigor or you think he and Matt Yglesias and the SPLC only condemn rightist violence, fair enough, you can hold that against them, but I don't think it's remotely the same as actively advocating for violence.
Did I say "remotely the same"? No, I said they're both bad. For clarity, in words you might prefer, that "both advocating violence and refusing to condemn violence are bad".
This is why I keep nailing down your 'hyperbole' or rephrasings or turns of phrase; because we quite rapidly get into these debates where you try to swap my positions into something randomly and unbelievably -- literally that you "cannot believe you're serious" -- instead of what my literal words were, right above you, in your own blockquotes.
I don't think it's an indictment of society that a fairly milquetoast centrist like Trace has attracted a modest following and your feeling so seems to be purely based on your long-standing grudge.
You're the one that highlighted his "modest following" on Twitter, but besides that, try reading that whole sentence, not just the part you like. "I think it's actually a pretty serious indictment of society in general that they are getting anywhere near the coverage that they are, while anyone that really cares at best gets shoved into some third-rate Red Tribe rag." I would really like deradicalizing and deescalating efforts to exist! I would like them to be recognized, and popular, and available and appealing to both sides of the political aisle. In a world where they did... well, I'd still be disappointed, but I can live with disappointment.
But the Litany of Tarsi wins.
We don't have those things. I'll point out that you could counter this whole argument by highlighting a mere handful of such groups -- that "Do you have some better example?" wasn't sarcastic -- and you haven't, and I don't think you can. We just have people deluding others and maybe themselves.
I specifically said I don't remember, because I was pretty sure you'd post a link to something a banned troll said once.
Yep. I'd have linked two or more of I didn't have a class of students starting in ten minutes. The difference between didn't happen and don't remember it happening is kinda the point.
(And color me unsurprised your mad hate for Trace has you still harping on a nearly dead subreddit years later.)
Yes, I'm rather titchy about the people who dressed themselves as paragons of Respect, Truth, and Peace, then instead grew up to throw around words like "moronic", are quite proud of 'pranking' into the epistemic waters or promoting Matt Yglesias, and not only can't find any reason to comment on attempted political assassinations or a guy getting beaten to death for political protest, but didn't wrangle up anyone who'd have a burning need to do so.
Do you have some better example? Going to explain why it shouldn't matter? Or are we just supposed to pretend history started yesterday?
Two years ago I told ChrisPratt that it's a problem that "Yet there's no TracingWoodgrains the news network; I don't think there's even a TracingWoodgrains the famous news caster." If it turns out that there's not actually a TracingWoodgrains the Redditor, on this topic, what am I supposed to be pointing at instead?
I don't know if this is a dig at me or at the Schism or Blues in general.
Blues in general. If it were just you doing it, I'd throw another reference to a recent post of yours. If it were just some people doing it, this wouldn't be a problem. Even if it were just the people here doing it, it wouldn't be a problem.
What, specifically, would you like me to have done about the attempted Trump assassination?
In the narrow sense, not try to hide a falsifiable and meaningful claim (did anyone here do X) behind a unfalsifiable and meaningless one (do you personally remember anyone here doing X). In the shallow one, it'd have been embarrassing for me if I'd had opened that link to the Butler shooting thread, and there was a big Amadan post talking about how this contextualized and heightened their concerns about political radicalization on the left, and I'd have liked to be embarrassed. I guess ChrisPratt tried? In the I'm-going-to-be-repetitive-and-obnoxious sense because dodging this matters here like every other time before, I'd have liked you to not moved the goalposts from FCFromSSC's "sure things happened in the past" to your own "no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged."
If I tell you that indeed, I have gotten into fights (and been blocked/defriended) for arguing with lefties about how fucked up it is to cheer on political violence directed against people we don't like, I assume you will not believe me because I'm not giving you links so you can enlarge your dossier on me. *
I'm sorry that you had that sort of encounter, and I give my sympathies and empathy if you lost friends over it.
I do, yes, think it would be stronger if you had something you could actually show, or a reference here contemporaneous to it happening instead of suddenly revealing under challenge, or if you didn't duck from 'it doesn't happen in real life' to 'a small number' where 'most' of your friends didn't agree, but again if it were just you I'd just be throwing a reference to a recent old argument.
More critically, I think it would have been stronger to start with that, than to start with "TikTok screamers" like this was only a problem in one website that doesn't really count.
You and FC are claiming Blues basically don't care about political violence until it touches them, and then they'll cry real loud about it. I think every tribe cares a lot more about their own side being hurt and the degree to which they object to violence done to the other side depends on how opposed they are on principle to political violence and suppressing other people's rights.
No, I think that one tribe makes very very loud noises about how they are opposed on principle to political violence and suppressing other people's rights, all the time. They just don't act on that principle.
On the extreme side, the SLPC isn't shutting up about subtle threats motivating violence; they're just spending time focused on "male supremacy". (bonus points: did you know their podcast Apathy Isn't An Option? Betcha it doesn't have anything on this topic in a week!). Nina Jankowicz didn't crawl under a rock to surface in seven years time; she's quite happily promoting her brand and will never, ever, ever mention Tom Fletcher.
But if those are the nutjobs, where are the sane, reasonable ones? ChrisPratt tried after the Butler County attempt, but he's an army of one: most of the time people had literally nothing to say. What person terrified by the ultimatium thrown at Harvard yesterday ever spoke against Harvard-affiliated orgs doxxing Red Tribers? I'm not demanding that we find one individual that has such an opinion on all broad topics, or even that we find anyone willing to answer every single offense ever, but I'm feeling a lot closer to Diogenes than Lot, right now.
The popularity of Trace on X gives me some hope, the popularity of Kulak gives me less. I suppose for you those values are reversed.
... I am going to be very, very polite here, because my first reaction to this bit involved profanity. I am not a KulakRevolt fan. I have never been a KulakRevolt fan. I have specifically highlighted him -- well before he went completely off the deep end and got braincored by Twitter! -- as an example of the sort of problem that actually contains what you and yours falsely accuse FCfromSSC or I of.
No. I think both the guy promoting rando violence, and the guy who says he hates rando violence enough to split apart communities for (banned!) comments, but only really can write about it when it's against his side are both bad, and I think it's actually a pretty serious indictment of society in general that they are getting anywhere near the coverage that they are, while anyone that really cares at best gets shoved into some third-rate Red Tribe rag.
gattsuru
4mo ago
I'm going to start off by saying that I am glad you wrote that, and I am glad that it got a QC. I'm glad that Impassionata got banned then, and last week, and whenever theschism mods get tired of it and finally banned Imp permanently I'll be glad -- and I don't often favor bans.
But I'm going to point out that it specifically in response to claims of 'right-wing' 'fascist' violence supposedly incited by Red Tribers, in 2023 long after BLM had ebbed; it does not name Red Tribers that were hit (excepting arguably a rhetorical flourish about police stations), but neighbors and friends.
((It's also an example that predates two of the three assassination attempts I'm commenting on, and doesn't mention the third.))
Contra expectations, I don't keep an encyclopedic assembly of every poster on every ratadj forum, and the good reddit search is down. Maybe I've missed something you've said elsewhere; maybe you weren't active at the right times; maybe you just didn't have a great opportunity. But understand why this is more an example of FCfromSSC's point than a counter.
gattsuru
4mo ago
That's fair. Do you have an example of a community that is a) left-leaning, b) claims to be fundamentally opposed to political violence in all forms, and c) exists?
gattsuru
4mo ago
Ah, if you've got a familiar mentor, it's less serious a problem. I'd still recommend putting your root directory and home directory on different partitions (in a laptop) or even drives (on a desktop), but almost all serious issues are pretty solvable with a familiar expert.
gattsuru
4mo ago
On one hand, anyone is a broad term. But they probably don't count.
More seriously, The Schism had less commentary on all three assassination attempts combined, between Trump and Kavanaugh, in an entire year, than it spent debating whether Trump was fascist in a single week before the 2024 election. (answer: of course, it's just a matter of how fascist). Tesla arsons, Paul Kessler, new phone who dis?
That's the subreddit that came into existence because people here didn't downvote a post FCfromSSC ate a ban over hard enough about advocacy of violence. Maybe direct advocacy is not universal among Blue Tribers (though I'll point again to Ken White or my tumblr feed and its regular DenyDefendDepose fandom), and maybe it's not here (modulo whenever Impassionata makes their next alt), but they don't care enough to comment on it; does anyone think there's a Blue Tribe locale that's going to be any stronger?
But the existence of guillotine tumblr is besides the point: conflating universal advocacy with the limited loud disavowal is still comes across as a dramatic move of the goalposts.
The problem's going to come about the next time that Blue Tribers want Red Tribers to care about this sorta violence aimed at Blues, and everyone involved promises that they've got examples somewhere, just left them in their other pants. The Blue Tribers might well have genuinely opposed it at a deep level, personally. Just, you know, not enough to do anything, or even hear about it.
This isn't some purely theoretical example, nor one specific to political violence. But it's particularly severe, here.
gattsuru
4mo ago
I have a big breakdown here for both disto recs and general tips and tricks, and I'll stand by it. I'm running an arch hypr variant, and it's a good learning experience and looks great, but it's not really ideal as a daily driver or for people that are not techies -- Linux Mint, Ubuntu, or even Elementary/Zorin will probably be better experiences your first time around.
It's very hard to break things irreparably with Linux, but it's unfortunately easier-than-Windows to get your machine into a state where a fresh install will be easier than cleaning things up. Manjaro is okay, but I will caution that if you aren't into tech (commandline) debugging it will quite happily let you get into goofy states. Even moreso than in Windows world, having a good backup setup is very important.
If you're planning to dual-boot, I strongly recommend increasing the size of your EFI partition to 200MB-500MB. It's not often an issue, but it's a lot less painful to handle before you've got your whole computer setup.
For gifts for parents, depends a lot on the people.
gattsuru
4mo ago
For cutting the strips, I just use an old set of kitchen shears, or even (no-longer-wanted-for-) fabric scissors works. I've yet to see any helping hands that weren't obnoxious and prone to falling apart, so you're going to get about the same quality (and sometimes the same manufacturer) from Harbor Freight, Aliexpress, or Microcenter. Building jigs and using vices can sometimes be more productive, but it's hard to justify for a handful of soldering jobs.
At the risk of adding to the waiting game, I'd consider some heat shrink: 3/4 or 5/8th heat shrink gives a surprising amount of strain relief. If you really want to protect the pads and solder, cutting some heat shrink and filling it with hot glue (or epoxy) before taking a hot air gun or butane torch to it usually leaves them more secure than the wire itself, especially at 18 gauge.
And, yeah, unfortunately, the difference between good silicone wire (or even thermostat wire) and 'hobbyist'-grade 'why is the copper this magnetic' junk is annoying, nevermind what happens if you buy discount and find yourself with steel or aluminum wire.
JFK Jr. wasn’t actually licensed to fly that plane
The US doesn't really have licenses or endorsements for individual small aircraft (or even have that specialized training, with one singular exception, and Jr. had a complex aircraft endorsement, which is the big thing for the Saratoga (albeit for reasons not relevant here: retractable landing gear). The problem was that the man had no Instrument Flight Rules certificate, very little instrument flight experience, and flew in extremely marginal conditions over an area with very poor visual reference, taking off at the very end of civil twilight, with little moonlight, while flying east.
This was arguably legal, and remains so today, but in the same sense that throwing a football while skiing was. Doing so with multiple passengers was unforgivable, especially for a route that could have been covered by car in about five hours, plus or minus the ferry. From contemporaneous AOPA coverage of the incident:
The instructor stated that Kennedy had the ability to fly the airplane without a visible horizon but was not ready for an instrument evaluation as of July 1, 1999, and needed additional training. The CFI observed that he would not have felt comfortable with Kennedy conducting night flight operations on that route and in those weather conditions. On the day of the accident, the CFI offered to accompany them that night but Kennedy replied that "he wanted to do it alone."
This wasn't the 1970s, where spatial disorientation training was solely the providence and concern of fighter pilots, nor was it some unpredictable black swan event. Those do exist, in general aviation; losing a vacuum pump in marginal VMC is Not Fun, and it's literally run with a drive coupling that looks like a McDonald's toy and is a single point of failure. I don't like to speak ill of the dead, and I think 'stupidity' is missing a bit of the more serious failure mode, but it's a very frustrating incident.
I will caveat that on the other side nickel meme re: political assassinations.
I read Robert Caro’s series on LBJ, and a major part of the story is how much LBJ hated the Kennedys, and especially RFK. And Caro hates LBJ, and worships RFK. And reading Caro, I rolled my eyes a lot, at one point he talks about how RFK despised LBJ because LBJ was a liar and RFK had “an essential devotion to truth” or something like that.
It's also kinda hilarious given the overlap in behavior, from modern eyes. We consider massive infidelity today on the same spectrum as LBJ flopping Little Johnson out to prove a point (and LBJ had so many affairs that his wife focused more on where they were serious), but contemporaneously?
I could write just-so stories about how pre-antibiotics and pre- (or given the Catholics, non-) contraceptive spheres made sex a lot less attractive for the women these men were married to, regardless of 'normal' sex drive. Or that the aftermath of WWII's impact on gender relations busted things so broadly that an underclass of unattached women (but a lot of these affairs were with married women! sometimes, as with Monroe, married to other Kennedys!). Or that mistresses (and misters?) and such were long-standing cultural expectations for a long period in certain classes and that the real offense were the emotional stuff -- you do still get a decent amount of this in certain spheres, or cfe the early airforce not-quite-polyamory swinging.
((Maybe we're just getting representation bias, and the horniest motherfuckers in the last hundred years are the only ones whose sexuality gets these sort of writeups.))
But I dunno that any of them are 'real' answers. The tempting bit is to look at Caro instead, not just in finding the contrast from infidelity and honestly different than you or I, but that what he consider 'essential devotion' isn't what you or I would. The contrast isn't LBJ; it's Moses.
Where did he find the time? Given, he was so hot, with so much social proof, that the seduction itself doesn’t seem to have been difficult, but still: keeping them all reasonably happy, keeping track of who they were, finding time to fuck them all? Where did he find the time?
I wonder where they found or find the balls. Money can cover a lot of problems, as can power; affairs that are to mistresses what escorts are to prostitution doesn't completely remove the time complexity, but it drops it down to an 0(3-5).
But much of this was pre-Viagra (approved 1998). No matter how willing the spirit might get, or how much abstention from jorking it might back things up, there's a certain point where the flesh is weak and spongy. Instead:
It was a hectic month for Kennedy, who traveled to Toronto, Louisiana, and Washington, DC — and listed at least one woman’s name on 22 different dates, including 13 consecutive days.
I get that I've got a weird drive, but on the other extreme I know guys who literally optimize their lives and lifestyles for convention orgies, (often don't have to worry as much about refractory periods for it), and have far greater access to willing holes and/or poles willing to meet up for sex and nothing else. Not my thing, but I can definitely understand the Braeburned interest. And they (cw: extremely gay) aren't as heavily sexed as these guys. Like, what the literal fuck.
To be clear, I do applaud you for writing this. It takes some genuinely uncommon courage to admit to a mistake, and it speaks well of your character to do so. No one's immune to being mislead or making error, and I've personally made worse (and dumber) mistakes, including in this forum.
So to the extent I'm making commentary, this is to comment on the Mescales News et all, with an emphasis on the et all. This isn't even the first time people have accused DOGE of killing people via tornado, falsely. Lest I be called out for nutpicking, today, a sitting federal senator accused Trump and DOGE of killing at least two sailors; accusations that DOGE cuts and the Shelton Snowlikes were the real cause of AA5342 or MedJets 056 were endemic even as it became clearer and clearer that it wasn't and couldn't have been. Nor is this specific to Trump: Abbott murdered migrants [even if]https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/us/us-mexico-border-drowned-migrants) he needed a time machine to do it, and that's just the one that's been discussed here.
It's clear that they don't really 'believe' it, to the extent someone who worked for Vox can be said to 'believe' anything, but I think that's besides the point. They don't believe the truth, either! That's not what their job is, and even if they're lying because their mouths are moving, you can't assume that anything bad is literally always wrong.
((Going back to the question of Being Wrong, I nearly started writing a bit on the Qatar AF1 donation, and while some of the initial reporting was wrong, not enough of it was for what I wrote to be worth posting.))
There's a bigger question of how we got here, to this. I'm tempted, as always, to point to Palin, where between actions and lawsuits the punchline was written years before Very Rarely Lies was -- Trump or DOGE might well try to sue here, but everyone and their dog (and insurance company) knows that they won't and can't win. Maybe I'm just drawing too big a contrast from previous variants, either on the right or left, where there was at least some motion around hyperbole or figure of speech or schizophrenia, maybe I just missed some of the more clear examples back then.
((Something something USS Maine?))
But this should matter! It's a problem for people like you or I that we have to dig twenty layers deep to find any discussion of Noem's quote that doesn't bury the actual lead -- that the Trump admin is considering whether FEMA's cause could be better served by state-operated grants, rather than just burning the entire concept of disaster response like an ostrich. It's not our fault if we can't tell a hundred percent of the time when facing off against an entire industry that has optimized itself to be persuasive.
But fault's got nothing to do with it.
gattsuru
4mo ago
Yeah, that's kinda the core of the problem, here.
There's a lot of arguments in favor of a muscular judiciary, and I've made a good number of them, but we don't have that. SCOTUS hears a tiny number of cases, a fraction of those they do hear either get punts or toothless GVRs, and the normal policy has been to fastidiously avoid interlocutory appeals and triple-check every case for sufficient jurisdiction and mootness, and even on those extremely rare events where they don't skip out completely we still get cases that don't want to make the law clear.
That's what makes this sorta thing gall. I don't think Trump has a particularly strong arg for the AEA stuff, and even if the birthright citizenship history is more complicated than most people think the stare decisis is pretty compelling. But I can name countless other issues, and every single time that the court punts on any situation where there is current and unrecoverable harm and the court hems and haws over the importance of procedural regularity, I'm going to point to this case. And I'm going to have a lot of opportunities to point to this case.
gattsuru
4mo ago
From a legal perspective, requirements to join HOAs are usually set up as contractual requirements on the land, as well as a requirement to pass that onto any further sales of the land. Some created themselves in extant neighborhoods by getting the then-current homeowners to buy in, but these days most are set up by the original land developer and transmit from the first sale on. Courts have invalidated this type of thing in very specific circumstances, but outside of that one context they generally don't like to break real property contract requirements.
That process is, imo, one of the stronger arguments that they can be whitewashed state action: in addition to the dependency on mode of enforcement that Shelley highlighted, land developers can get anything from nod-and-wink permitting favoritism to outright direct grants for setting up HOAs with policies that match whatever the local government wants done.
I'm Not A Fan of them -- there are some reasonable HOAs and some reasonable cause for them like shared facilities maintenance or setting explicit standards of behavior, and there are a tiny portion of actually-voluntary HOAs that don't have such contract requirements. But even the good ones can be pretty easily corrupted by a single neurotic, and a lot were never good to start with. In theory, frustrated homeowners could take over an HOA (or even dissolve it), but in practice the bylaws are set up to make this an incredibly difficult and ponderous thing.
gattsuru
4mo ago
Why consider?
It's a hard question. You're definitely looking at a lot more complexity and, unless you get into PCB manufacturing, a really trustworthy charger can get expensive. In turn, running low voltage inputs into a high multiplier boost converter is generally going to be low efficiency and high-noise. Depends very heavily on your comfort level.
I was a bit freaked out by LiPo watching videos of them burst into flames if they get ruptured. Maybe not something I want to attach to my helmet. But perhaps the issue is just as prevalent with 18650s?
18650s are just a form factor, but expect LiPo unless advertised otherwise. They're a little more resistant to puncture than pouch-style designs, but you're probably going to want a rigid cover regardless, both to protect against impacts, but also to avoid contamination.
Lithium-iron-phosphates are a lot safer and are available in 16850 format -- though they'll still discharge some heat and not-great fumes, even a direct puncture or complete short on a big battery pack won't cause a fire on its own -- but they're more expensive and finding a compatible charger is even more difficult. NiMH are cheaper and more widely available, but they have a much lower cell voltage and are pretty heavy for something to wear when biking.
The irony is my local library and (non-profit, communist) maker space all have 3d printers (multiple, even), but they're always broken.
Yeah, that's definitely a Thing. Especially the lower-end machines are always a battle to keep running.
As such I'm now currently trying to get pieces of acrylic, cutting them to size and seeing how sandwiching the ESP32 etc and wrapping the whole thing in a rubber gasket for light waterproofing works out.
That's definitely an option. I would consider switching to polycarbonate for the final version -- it's a little more obnoxious to cut with a saw (and can't be safely cut in any way involving heat/laser) and scratches easily, but you can bend it cold and it's extremely impact-resistant where even acrylic can shatter with jagged edges. But acrylic's fine for testing.
If you need a really weird shape or very thin gaskets, I'd also point to various automotive gasket makers. They're generally only useful where you have two surfaces being tightly screwed together and won't last for too long if you're repeatedly removing and reattaching things, but especially for rapid prototyping they're a lot faster and easier to work with, and surprisingly cheap (and actually can be purchased in Ace/Menards/Autoshops, even some WalMarts).
gattsuru
4mo ago
FDM's a great learning experience for software-side people that aren't great at self-driven efforts to learn about physical-side work -- everything from chemistry to mechanical tuning to maintenance scheduling to belt or stepper drive behaviors matter.
For actual usability, it's a mix. A lot of what's available out there are aesthetic toys at best and, frankly, more often cheap useless crap. If you've got a good use case, there are things that they excel at, but many times even they can turn into a temptation rather than an actual benefit (oh boy, a 3d-printed corner bracket!... why didn't I just get a metal one from Home Depot?). Still, for rapid(ish) prototyping, for specialty shapes, and for weird art projects.
Resin printers are more set-and-forget, since outside of support placement and cleaning there's not much to tweak with them. Better for figurines, though there are some chemistry-adjacent stuff where they have unique advantages.
On the power side, I'd at least consider 3S LiPo battery pack, running the LEDs from that voltage, and just using one buck converter for ESP32 (which can be a tiny 5 watt one). That's only a nominal "12v", and really a 10ish-12.6 range, so you'll want to double-check the datasheet for your specific LEDs, but it's well within spec for the WS2815s. You can get 3S 18650 chargers cheap (eg here, not endorsed), though premade packs are so widely available (and tend to have much better low-current protection) that it's hard to justify building your own packs unless you need 5+ amp.
While series is generally pretty safe, never use LiPo in parallel until you have a very good familiarity with the technology and necessary safety precautions. Further instruction on that matter not available here.
On the circuit design work, yeah, part control is a Problem. As you get more experience you'll start to collect a bunch of standard parts and design with them around whatever your target is, and only need to order a handful of specialized things, but on the path there you'll end up with literally thousands of bags of stupid little components that are worth fractions of a penny and you'll never use again. And even once you have your 'jellybean' parts together, you'll always need something specific to a given project, or find that your old parts aren't available anymore, yada yada. Breaking projects into modules can help, but then you're juggling them, too.
There are some "MakerSpace Starter Kits" (and a much broader number of order lists) for component-level parts, but as you go from components to prebuilt boards they tend to get a more 'cheap plastic toy rather than tool' problems. There used to be some good lists of common sensor boards for educational uses that I'd cribbed from, but SnapCircuits and Cubelets et all have kinda cut the bottom out from that market; nowadays, you're probably better off just spending a birthday at a Microcenter or on Adafruit.
For 3d printers, yes, for FDM the entry-level ones (eg Ender3s) tend to be glorified junk that will need maintenance within days, if not hours, and owning them is an exercise in modification and repair. This can be a great educational experience, but it's also a lot of ship of thesus for a tool. You can pay a bit more and get a professional- or educator- grade one that can go hundreds of hours without as much work or a lot more and get an industrial-grade one that gets thousands of hours before serious repairs (eg, GenFabCo), but unless you want to Be The 3d Printing Guy, it's hard to justify the cost of either.
For small parts, resin printers are another option. They're still fiddly, because support material is even less of a solved problem, but they don't so much have maintenance schedules so much as they just have parts you replace, and even the absolute cheapo ones (eg Elego) tend to work just as a 'replace screen and bulb every few hundred hours' sorta thing. They don't scale well beyond about six-eight inch size parts, though, and they're very much not things to be used without proper ventilation.
If you're only needing a handful and had little or no interest in 3d printing, seriously consider various fabrication services, or local marker spaces (or some libraries), rather than buying a full 3d printer.
Laser cutters are ... iffy as a value proposition; they're extremely limited in both what they can cut or etch (some woods, acrylic, anodized coatings), and also how (both depth and angle). The big value proposition to a comparable CNC is ease of use and operating costs, but this is a very rough tradeoff. I'm very hesitant to recommend them for any structural component, just because anything capable of cutting deep enough into transparent plastic to make a useful part is going to be ludicrously expensive.
For flexible, light-weight, shaped transparent pieces with little 3d complexity, my go-to has been vacuum-forming. Big ones get surprisingly complicated fast, but for anything under a couple feet square you can get away with stuff you probably have in your house, and the big trouble becomes sourcing the right types of plastic.
I'd also recommend considering Traditional Manufacturing -- just as there's a lot of people 3d printing what could be made with a handsaw in ten seconds, you may well be engineering something that could be sewn together in a good half-hour. If you want something flexible and comfortable for long-term wear, sewing is kinda the way to go. You'll still want some boxes for the batteries and protoboards to provide impact resistance, but it'll give a lot more space to consider multiple small project boxes or such, and those are a lot easier to source.
gattsuru
4mo ago
It's noisy, but more critically, it's also a signal that's very sensitive to other stuff. I'm not very optimistic about Ames, for example, but despite not being a disparate impact suit itself, I'm hard-pressed to think of any conclusion but a punt on the underlying circuit split that leaves the rate of disparate impact suits unchanged. There's some cy pres stuff that could have an even bigger impact on settlements in general.
Beyond that, a lot of my position is about the policy, itself. The paper matters, both as something that discourages behaviors well before a court case happens, and in acting as cover for a wide variety of other behaviors that would be legally questionable. Maybe that's not something that we can bet on -- a Dem admin blanket-reversing every Trump EO is possible and wouldn't necessarily mean a reversion to 2024 disparate impact rules -- but it seems more relevant.
gattsuru
5mo ago
VHB specifically, I've volunteered for FIRST FRC a lot, and it's one of the go-to adhesives in that realm (and most teams get free spools of it), so I've gotten a lot of hands-on experience.
WS2812s, I ran a few different STEM outreach projects using them. They're great as a way to teach and show for loops in physical space, but the constraints are very easy to run into, even with Adafruit's documentation.
Circuit assembly work in general has just been a hobby. I think it's a really important skillset, but also one that's very badly underserved by mainstream college training courses.
gattsuru
5mo ago
Isopropyl alcohol's worth a shot first, before trying to use primer. Beyond that, depends a lot on the plastic and coating; most bicycle helmets are ABS that I'd expect it would bind fine, perhaps benefiting from a bit of heat. Higher-end ones that are using carbonfiber, or scratch-resistant polycarbonate, I'd expect you'd want the primer.
The higher ends of gorilla tape can handle those cases if you don't want to deal with (or can't get, thank you California) the primers, but I haven't gotten any experience with how weatherproof it gets.
gattsuru
5mo ago
VHB is ridiculously strong when used on properly prepared surfaces; I've bent 1/8th inch aluminum plate trying to remove two stuck together with three 8-inch strips of the stuff without solvents. The trick is figuring out what 'properly prepared' means -- 90% of the time just dunking in simple green and rinsing with water works, but heavily polished or painted and almost all rubberized materials can benefit a lot from primer, and I'd expect helmets will fall into this domain.
Most other double-sided tape is either garbage (carpet tape) or won't last very long under exposure (basically every foam mounting tape).
Rivets are a great option in most situations you can make them fit, but alignment can be a pain without kliecos. I don't recommend staples. Epoxy is a mess, but it's really strong and there exist mixtures that will secure to most everything, at the cost of never coming off period. For obvious reasons I'd keep all three but especially the staples away from helmet pieces.
The other constraint to keep in mind is what you're sticking in place; it doesn't help to just have adhesive and the PCB strip well-secured and the LEDs flopping in the wind. Those sleeves have an advantage here, though even the floppy ones might have too large a minimum bend radius. Expect to mix-and-match.
gattsuru
5mo ago
Tbf, the official statement recognizes ChatGPT as generative AI, and just tries to distinguish its use for review or concatenation, as distinct from creating material, or specifically that "We have also not utilized an LLM in any other aspect of our program or convention."
Tbf to Amadan, the use of 'generative AI' as a description of use case rather than of design is a pretty common one from anti-AI artist and writers.
gattsuru
5mo ago
This gets complicated:
There is data out there, but it's pretty much trash quality. PornHub Insights (cw: no explicit images, but still a pornhub link) has some numbers, but they're filled with selection effect (who uses PH) after selection effect (who uses PH in non-incognito mode while pegging as a woman to google analytics?).
But there's clearly a sizable raw number, given the existence (and indeed prevalance) of fem-gaze-focused M/M in fandom and especially fanfiction spaces.
But a lot of women like the idea of gay or bi men, but don't actually want a bi guy in a relationship, either. I have absolutely met fujoshi that get the ick from guys who bottom, there's absolutely an expectation that bisexuals will be driven to cheat or are secretly gay and looking for a beard, concerns about disease or not-condoned infidelity, so on.
But that doesn't prevent them from liking it as an idea, or a comic, or whatever, and there's indeed a pretty wide variety of artists and especially writers that focus on that demographic.
And there are people for whom it's clearly a pretty strong kink.
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Vanilla survival. You're placed into a random location, under serious and often annoying constraints, such that Things Will Suck if you don't change them. That's not just the normal combat-progression stuff, although the difference between stone tools and enchanted diamond ones are pretty vast too. Traveling too far taking too long? Build a highway through hell or tame a horse or breed a mule, or get a hangglider ('elytra') and be able to cover in seconds what could previously take ten minutes. Creepers blow up your front door (again)? Build a guard post, or tame an ocelot to scare them off. Sick of running out of food? Build a scenic farm and start raising animals.
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Creatives. Yes, the graphics are dated and it's nothing like equivalent to a true modeling software, but you can build a lot with it. More importantly, if you're struggling to make something in Creative Mode, it's not likely to be because the controls are fighting you, unlike something like Blender.
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Completionism. Collect some amount of every block, get to every dimension and beat the Ender Dragon, have a fully functional (and safe) village, get all the achievements, yada yada.
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'Technical' minecraft play. You know those stories where someone get sucked into a world with bizarre rules and has to find ways to exploit them? Minecraft is one of those things, and even in the modern day a lot of it's still something to be discovered or shared for most kids, rather than Just Look At GameFAQs. In vanilla, this can range from iron or cactus farming to breaking bedrock to RS-latchs and sorting systems to self-driving mining machines. (I haven't seen the movie, but this is one of the reasons I don't think the thread-writer is really engaged with the game: the bucket nun-chunks thing from the trailers is absolutely the sort of things that minecraft players mentor each other with.)
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In modded minecraft, the above, but more so. Mods like Create or Botania have dozens of major puzzles built into their basic play, and hundreds or thousands if you're trying to go after specific uses. Or you can go the full GregTech-focused modpack if you want. Some of these might have only a few hundred active players, or you can make challenges that literally no one has ever tried. (HexCasting with dolphin memory? Using Spectrum and NeepMeat as your sole item transportation mods in a factory-focused pack like MI:Foundation? GFL.)
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Survival multiplayer, aka social play. These tend to be some of the most popular and funniest to watch, but a lot of people just enjoy goofing off (or dying horribly) with friends. HyPixel is the degenerate (ie, gotcha game) case, but the ideal case has a variety of people finding different things that they enjoy doing, and then having them work with each other on that.
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Guided challenges. Popularized by JadedCats Agrarian Skies in the 1.6 era, modded games can include questbooks or other breadcrumbs with specific challenges to complete, usually starting with basic survival and going onto things like automating production of million meals or building a single piece of the forbidden clay. Blightfall is probably the most whole-heartedly designed approach down to a fully customized world, but Create: Above and Beyond, the Material Energy series, SevTech, Manufactio, Crash Landing, and Cottage Witch are all great options for different types of play. (GregTech:NewHorizons is the magnum opus in a... different sense.)
gattsuru
5mo ago
Minecraft alpha first got mainstream attention in September 2010, so it'd more of a formative teenager experience for people born in the mid-to-late 1990s at earliest. There's older folk who got into it early, myself included, but in your age it'd be either competing with late college or early career stuff. And there's been regular resurgences -- 2013-2016 with real mainstreaming of both modded and multiplayer streamers for example -- so it's not really a single generational thing.
There’s a lot of people, including people who made their schtick about Violence Always Being Wrong, that have at least had to pointedly say that murder and slurs aren’t equivalent in the abstract, categorizing both as race war, while having nothing to say about this case specifically
No. And I already explained that: "I'm not demanding that we find one individual that has such an opinion on all broad topics, or even that we find anyone willing to answer every single offense ever, but I'm feeling a lot closer to Diogenes than Lot, right now."
I'd be surprised if you've literally never written up some paean about something, but do you genuinely not understand why zero out of three of the highest-profile examples coming up dry might point a direction? It's not like I'm pointing to nobodies like Baca or Dolloff or Gardner here, although if you'd commented on them I'd take that, too. Or you could point me to someone who has!
No, I say it's covering your ass because when someone tried to point out people who did, here, this didn't change the slightest bit of your position or have you bring forward some different more important fact; it had you complain that I wrote about it.
Yes! Precisely! I think you've presented a threadbare argument for your case, and when evidence came up against that threadbare argument, rather than provide new evidence for your case, you jumped new steps of what anyone disagreeing with you must be dependent on.
Because they're a subreddit that was formed around and because of supposed adherence to this principle, and its importance to appeal to Blues. Because they are not selected from Blues in some way that should make them atypically willing to overlook violent rhetoric. Because I keep asking you for examples of better Blue groups and organizations, and you haven't presented any. Because I've been looking for a near-decade for better Blues groups and organizations, and haven't found any.
((and, indeed, instead find Blues that spontaneously turn out to not; both "my father-in-law jokes or 'jokes' about throwing molotov cocktails at houses with Trump signs" and "the minecraft mod guy I worked with is really proud of punching Brendan Eich and wishes he did it more" are not hypotheticals.))
Yes, and I'm trying to get an answer out of why you think it's wrong, and if those reasons are supported.
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Did I miss something? Netstack said this was the first time Trace got modded, it was his last set of posts here, and I defended Trace in most of his last thread, where the facts demanded it. Was there something earlier? Or is this something from back on reddit?
I don't think playing to the crowd helps (and to some extent it breaks your brain), and I'd be very skeptical that people dive that far into debates between you and I to bother reading or upvoting them, or even noticing they exist.
I want to believe you, when you argue against a trend of further escalation. But what, exactly, do you think you're bringing to support this theory? If I drop a [bunch of polls](https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/new-survey-reveals-disturbing-trend-in-support-of-political-violence-president-trump-left-of-center-elon-musk-liberal (admittedly, not very robust), does that change your mind? I can show pictures of my tumblr feed, or my discord, or of forums I've once called home, and the only reason I can't show real-life is .
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