gattsuru
10d ago
Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
That's nice and all, but there's quite a lot of us, and certainly more than enough to keep a number of content providers afloat. (Sometimes in surprising ways: the original writer of the Burned Furs manifesto has made a small part-time career in monsterfucker porn.) Fek is at 9k USD a month still, and while I actually appreciate the mechanical stuff he did with Spellbound (cw: technically has one girl, but gaaaaaaay) enough that I kinda want to see it cloned in a not-porn game, given the repeated hiatuses after burnout if anyone was going to get reasonably-motivated chargebacks, he'd be the first hit.
gattsuru
17d ago
Is Free Desktop important?
FreeDesktop is the space (literally a GitLab instance, may heaven have mercy on their souls) where people build the tools that almost all Linux desktop environments run on, including X11 (the user interface drawing framework that underlies every conventional desktop from GNOME to KDE to Cinnamon to ChromeOS) and Wayland (which is what Linux is starting to move toward as a replacement). So it's about as relevant as Linux On The Desktop is, for better or worse.
What's hyprland?
Hyprland is technically 'just' the window compositor (lies-to-children version: stitches applications together into a function desktop 'screen'), but it's more generally used as a name for the desktop environment produced by mixing it and other pieces together, like GNOME or KDE would be. This is a quick video showing just how it looks, and this some of the different behaviors. Essentially, it's designed for rapid but space-optimized window control, whether by mouse or keyboard, and management of many virtual desktops easily.
Hyprdots is a more fully-featured mix of it and those other pieces.
It doesn't have a huge userbase, even by not-Chromebook Linux standards, but it's easily the most popular Wayland-specific desktop environment. The Discord has a 10k members, for what little that's worth, and most users probably only bother with the discord if something breaks and they can't fix it.
Is Vaxry important?
Vaxry is the founder and lead developer for hypr, along with having done some work for wl-roots, which is a library many projects use to simplify common Wayland requirements. He's not the only person working on hyprland, but the commit comparison looks like this, and the other hypr stuff is even more lopsided.
This ban won't prevent him from writing further hyprland work, but it will block him from writing any pull requests or even issues for Wayland or wl-roots, and the broader response will make hypr-like conventions or projects harder to adopt, even when correct.
Against A Purely HyperDunbarist View
World’s for FIRST is in a week.
For those unfamiliar with the organization, For Increasingly Retrobuilt Silly Term For Inspiration in Science and Technology runs a series of competitions for youth robotics, starting from a scattering of Lego Mindstorm-based FLL competitions for elementary and middle schoolers, to the mid-range 20-40 pound robots of FTC that play in alliances of 2v2 across a ping-pong-table-sized space, and for high schoolers FRC running 120-pound robots in 3v3 alliances around the space of a basketball court. Worlds will have thousands of teams, spread across multiple subcompetitions. (For a short time pre-pandemic, there were two Worlds, with all the confusion that entailed.)
If you’re interested, a lot of Worlds competition will streamed. And a lot of both off-season and next-season competitions and teams are always looking for volunteers.
The organization’s goal... well, let’s quote the mission statement:
FIRST exists to prepare the young people of today for the world of tomorrow. To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders. The mission of FIRST is to provide life-changing robotics programs that give young people the skills, confidence, and resilience to build a better world.
There’s a bunch of the more normal culture war problems to point around. How goes the replacement of the prestigious Chairman’s Award with Ignite Impact? If not, complain at least that it’s a missed opportunity on the level of POCI/POCI for replacing a bad naming with a worse one? How do you end up with events playing the PRC’s theme song before the US national anthem?
There's even internal culture war stuff, which may not make a ton of sense to outsiders. Does the move away from commercial automotive motors to built-to-FIRST and especially-brushless motors privilege teams with more cash, or compromise safety or fair play? Should regional competitions, which may be the only official field plays small teams get, also accept international competitors? Should mentors white glove themselves, should they only do so during official competition events, or should the possibility of the Mentor Coach be abolished?
But the biggest question in my mind is how we got here.
Worlds competition is an outstanding and massive event, with an estimated 50k-person attendance at a ten-million-plus square foot convention center. And it’s a bit of a football game: there’s a lot of cheering and applause, and a little bit of technical work. There will be a number of tiny conferences, many of which will focus on organizational operations like running off-season events. People network. That’s not limited to Worlds itself, though the dichotomy is more apparent there: there might be one or two teams per regional competition that have a custom circuit board on their robot, but I'd bet cash that the average regional bats under 1.0 for number of teams with custom polyurethane or silicone parts.
Indeed, that football game is a large part of how teams get to Worlds. The competitions operates as a distributed tournament, where players who win certain awards may elect to continue to the next event in a hierarchy. The exact process and what exact awards count as continuing awards are pretty complex and vary by location (especially post-COVID), but as at the FRC level, the advancing awards prioritize two of the three teams that won a local competition's final, and then the team that has done the most recruitment and sponsoring of FTC or FLL teams over the last three (previously five) years, and then the team that has done the most for the current year. (Followed by the most competent Rookies, sometimes, and then a whole funnel system rolling through more esoteric awards.) In addition to the inherent randomness of alliance field play, there's a rather telling note: the 'what have you done for FIRST today' award, if won at the Worlds level, guarantees an optional invite to every future Worlds competition. By contrast, teaching or developing esoteric skills or core infrastructure is an awkward fit for any award, usually shoved into the Judge's Award, which with 3.5 USD won't buy you a good cup of coffee at Worlds.
There’s reasons it’s like this, and it’s not just the Iron Laws of Bureaucracy, or the sometimes-blurry lines between modern corporate infrastructure and mid-level-marketing. The organization hasn't been hollowed out by parasites and worn like a skinsuit (at least not in this context): it's the sort of goal that the founders and first generation would have and do consider a remarkable victory. I’m not making the Iscariot complaint, because it’s not true.
FIRST couldn’t exist in the form it does without these massive events and the political and public support they produce, not just because you wouldn’t hear about any smaller organization, but because the equipment and technology only works at sizable scale. Entire businesses have sprung up to provide increasingly specialized equipment, FIRST got National Instruments to build a robotics controller that resists aluminum glitter a little better, even the LEGO stuff has some custom support, and they can only do so because an ever-increasing number of teams exist to want it. SolidWorks, Altium, dozens of other companies donate atoms and/or bits on a yearly basis; the entire field system for FRC wouldn’t work without constant support and donation by industrial engineering companies. WPI might devote a couple post-grad students to maintaining a robotics library without tens of thousands of people using it, but I wouldn’t bet on it. States would not be explicitly funding FIRST (or its competitors) unless those programs can show up on television and have constituents that can show up at a state politician’s door.
Those demands drive not just how FIRST operates today, but what its interests are looking toward the future, not just in what it does, but what it won’t do. From a cynical eye, I wouldn’t say with certainty that FIRST would drop ten community teams for a school system buy-in, or twenty for a state program, but I wouldn’t want to be on the community team for any of those hard choices. There is no open-source motor controller or control board available for FIRST competition use, and there’s not a procedure available to present one, and there won’t be. There’s a lot of emphasis on sharing outreach tricks, and a little for sharing old code or 3d models, and a lot of limits to providing skills.
Because throughout this system, the most impactful thing you can do is always getting more people. It’s not Inspiring, it’s not Chairmanny Impactful, but that's what those awards are, with reason. Shut up and multiple: the math, in the end, is inevitable.
And I’m going to deny it.
There's a story that goes around in the FIRST sphere, where one of FIRST's founders bargained or tricked Coca-Cola into in exchange for developing some other more commercial technology. The exact form and valence tends to vary with who tells the story, whether to highlight the speaker's anti-capitalist frame, to gloss over some of the frustrations with the Coca-Cola Freestyle (tbf, usually more logistic and maintenance than with the pumps themselves), or to wave away the rough question of whether it paid off).
But that last point is a bit unfair: Solving Problems In Extreme Poverty is the sort of difficult and low-odds environment where high-variance options make sense to take, and you should expect a high-variance low-odds option to fail (or at least not succeed wildly) most of the time, and at least it wasn't as dumb an idea as the lifestraw. Maybe (probably!) enough of the steps that combine to keep FIRST running fall into the same category.
I'm hoping teaching kids isn't a low-odds environment. And ultimately, most volunteers and teams and sponsors signed up more for that than for the flashing lights and the fancy banners. But teaching, in matter involving true interaction, can not be done at the scales and directions that turn a roll of the dice from gambling to a variance strategy. It's difficult enough as a mentor to remember all the names the students and family for even a moderately-sized FRC or FTC team; few in a team that "support 128" teams (not linking directly: these are teenagers) can name every one or even a majority. These organizations have, by necessity, turned to maximize how many opportunities they present to their affiliates, without much attention to what that opportunity is. Few turn to the full argumentum ad absurdum where the recruitment exists solely to get more recruiters, but they’ve not left that problem space behind, either.
((There are other nitpicks: the same economies of scale that make these answers work eliminate many less-difficult problem whose presence is necessary to onboard and upskill new learners, the focus on bits over atoms breaks in similar ways that the outreach-vs-teaching one does.))
Dunbar proposed an upper limit to how large a social group the human mind readily handles. There's a lot of !!fun!! questions about how well this will replicate, or how accurate the exact number is, or what applicability it has for a given level of interaction: suffice it to assume some limit exists, that some necessary contact increments the counter at some level of teaching, and that it can't possibly be this high. At some point, you are no longer working with people; you're performing a presentation, and they're watching; or you're giving money and they're shaking a hand. At best, you're delegating.
These strategies exceed the limit, blasting past it or even starting beyond it. They are hyperdunbar, whether trying to get fifty thousand people into a convention center, or trying to sell ten thousand books, or 8k-10k subscribers. There are things that you can't do, or can't do without spending a ton of your own money, without taking these strategies! Whether FIRST getting NI's interest, writing or drawing, building or playing video games full-time, you either take this compromise or another one, and a lot of the others are worse.
But they're simultaneously the most visible strategies, by definition. I do not come to kill the Indigestion Impact Award; I come to raise the things that aren't in the awards. Even if FIRST could support a dozen teams that emphasized bringing new technologies forward in a one-on-one basis, and if your first exposure to the program selected from teams randomly, you'd be much more likely to hear from the hyperdunbarists -- hell, it could well be that way, and I've just missed the rest of them.
Yet they are not the only opportunity. You don't have to be grindmaxxing. One team, even in FIRST, can share skills simply for the purpose of sharing skills. It’s why I volunteer for the org. You can go into an artistic thing knowing you want a tiny audience, or to cover costs and if lucky your time, or as a hobby that's yours first. It shouldn't be necessary to say that outright, as even in hyperdunbar focuses, most fail down to that point. Yet even in spheres where Baumol's hits hardest, it can be a difficult assumption to break.
gattsuru
10d ago
You would have to argue that regarding the obvious and clear special concerns of a student-led protest movement
Are you going to spell them out, or just make vague motions about the horror or someone taking video of a public protest, or of someone in a stupid hat smirking at them?
Well, Meinecke did not engage with any counter-protesters and had his own location where he was protesting.
You want to try that, again?
Protestors surrounded Meinecke after about an hour. One protestor seized Meinecke’s Bible. Meinecke retrieved another Bible from his bag and continued reading aloud. Another protestor grabbed hold of—and ripped pages from—the new Bible. The altercation soon escalated. As protestors, some of whom Seattle police characterized in their written reports as Antifa, encroached, Meinecke took hold of an orange-and-white traffic sawhorse. Five protestors, some clad in all black and wearing body armor, picked up Meinecke and the sawhorse, moved him across the street, and dropped him on the pavement. One law enforcement officer who observed this interaction reported that “‘Antifa’ members . . . began to fight/assault” Meinecke.
Undeterred, Meinecke walked back to his original location by the federal building and resumed reading and held up a sign. While people gathered on the street, however, some approached Meinecke, knocked him down, and took one of his shoes.
gattsuru
10d ago
Ten years ago a brand-new processor would have been the Haswell- or Broadwell-era, and while you could get machines that could hold 32GB RAM, the H81 chipset only supported up to 16GB, going to 32GB would not have been standard, and it'd probably cost you upwards of 250 USD in RAM alone.
But more centrally, VSCode's linter and intellisense implementation is perfectly fine for mid-sized projects without a boatload of dependencies in certain languages. Get outside of those bounds, and its RAM usage can skyrocket. Python tends to get it hard (as does Java, tbf) because of popular libraries with massive and somewhat circular dependency graphs, but I've seen large C++ projects go absolutely tango uniform, with upwards of 10GB.
Yes, it is usually an extension problem, but given that you'll end up needing to install a few extensions for almost every language you work with just to get them compiling (nevermind debugging!), and that it's often even Microsoft-provided extensions (both vscode-cpptools and vscode-python have bitten me, personally) , that doesn't actually help a lot. Yes, you can solve it by finding the extension and disabling it, and sometimes there's even alternative extensions for the same task that do work.
The normal case isn't much worse, and sometimes is better, than alternatives like IntelliJ/PyCharm. But the worst cases are atrocious, and they're not just things hitting some rando on a github issue with some weird outlier use case.
Options:
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Google's mainstay is Gemini (previously Bard) is free(ish) for now, if you have a Google account. Open it, start writing. Not private.
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Anthropic pushes Claude. You can try Haiku and Sonnet, the lighter- and mid-weight models free, but Opus was more restricted last I checked. Tends to be one of the stronger fiction writers, for better or worse.
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Chat-GPT3.5 is available for free at here, 4.0 is a paid feature at the same sight. The paid version is good for imagegen -- I think it's what a lot of Trace's current stuff is using. Flexible, if a bit prudish.
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Llama is Facebook's big model, free. Llama 2 is also available for download and direct run, though it's a little outdated at this point.
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LMSys Arena lets you pit models against each other, including a wide variety of above. Again, not private. Very likely to shutter with little notice.
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Run a model locally, generally through the use of a toolkit like OobaBooga webui. This runs fastest with a decent-ish graphics card, in which case you want to download the .SAFETENSORS version, but you can also use a CPU implementation for (slow) generation by downloading GGUF versions for some models. Mistral 8x7B seems to be the best-recommended here for general purpose if you can manage the hefty 10+GB VRAM minimum, followed by SOLAR for 6GB+ and Goliath for 40+GB cards, but there's a lot of variety if you have specific goals. They aren't as good as the big corporate models, but you can get variants that aren't lobotomized, tune for specific goals, and there's no risk of someone turning it off.
Most online models have a free or trial version, which usually will be a little dumber, limited to shorter context (think memory), or be based on older data, or some combination of the above. Paid models may charge a monthly fee (eg, ChatGPT Plus gives access to DallE and ChatGPT4 for 20 USD / month), or they may charge based on tokens (eg, ChatGPT API has a per 1 million input and output token price rate, varying based on model). Tokens are kinda like syllables for the LLM, between a letter to a whole word or rarely a couple words, which are how the LLM breaks apart sentences into numbers. See here for more technical details -- token pricing is usually cheaper unless you're a really heavy user, but it can be unintuitive.
For use:
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Most models (excluding some local options) assume a conversational model: ask the program questions, and it will try to give (lengthy) answers. They will generally follow your tone to some extent, so if you want a dry technical explanation, use precise and dry technical terms; if you want colloquial English, be more casual. OobaBooga lets you switch models between different 'modes', with Instruct having that Q/A form, and Default being more blank, but most online models can be set or talked into behaving that way.
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Be aware that many models, especially earlier models, struggle with numbers, especially numbers with many significant figures. They are all still prone to hallucination, though the extent varies with model.
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Long conversations, within the context length of the model, will impact future text; remember that creating a new chat will break from previous context, and this can be important when changing topics.
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They're really sensitive to how you ask a question, sometimes in unintuitive ways.
gattsuru
17d ago
For the most part. I'm not sure whether Vaxry overestimated his 'power' -- from the e-mail chain, he pretty clearly saw the RedHat dev's starting e-mail as absolutely showing the FreeDesktop team was ready and willing to ban his ass, knew they could and would, and he seemed more concerned that FreeDesktop was going to try to take over as much of the Hypr space as possible. And while he worked on FreeDesktop's git, it wasn't his community, or really even a community given how much of a kludge any communication around the FreeDesktop-specific areas tended to be.
FreeDesktop could always fork Hypr, and Vaxry could (and since, has) forked wlroots, and FreeDesktop was already using a lot of his tools; that's what FOSS means, to a large extent.
The problem's more that this fractures an (admittedly small) portion of the FOSS community: even if we don't get the whole 'bad person touched this thing' reaction, there's definitely people on the "start looking at how they want to see their world curated" chain. A lot of things like 'many eyes make all bugs shallow' or 'working with the best ideas on the planet' start falling apart once you start banning people from your Issues and PR pages.
Yeah, seconding both prongs, here: a) IDEs are important and b) Python IDEs near-universally suck. If you're in the Java sphere before, PyCharm is kinda the Intellij-for-Python, for better and worse, and there's a large faction that loves VSCode for eating all of their RAM handling multi-language projects reasonably, but for the love of god don't try to build class-ful python in IDLE.
((I'll generally advocate PyCharm for new programmers, as annoying some of the Intellijisms can be, but if you're more acclimatized to and have already set up Eclipse it's definitely not worth swapping.))
gattsuru
20d ago
Apologies, this post was a little more stream of consciousness than I'd intended. My thesis is more that :
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Every organization, even an organization of one person, must select relative priorities of growth against other targets. For businesses, marketing and investment versus product development; for artists, growing your audience against growing your skills; for streamers focusing on following the algorithm versus following your interests. For FIRST, that's a part of that's the division between creating and expanding teams versus developing skills for those teams, but the pattern exists much more broadly.
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Organizations that make that decision don't do so (only) because they've forgotten their original goal, or because they've been taken over by people who don't care about that goal, but because scale does genuinely have (distributed) benefit.
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But that strategy has costs. Effective Altruists often focused on the degenerate cases, where outreach becomes almost all of what the organization does, or where outreach has hit decreasing returns while the organization is unwilling to admit that. But there are more honest problems, such as where this emphasis on outreach disconnects your metrics from your measures, or where successful growth can Baumol you as relative productivity varies with scale for individual parts of the organization.
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More critically, it is fundamentally risky approach at the level of individual people, while obfuscating the outcome of that gamble. If a consistent and always-applicable recruitment paradigm existed, you would already have joined, as would every adult in the county/country/planet; if you could keep in mind the outcome of your recruitment efforts, it wouldn't exceed your Dunbar number. Not everyone approached can be a recruit, not all recruits persist (or are even desirable), so on: even successful orgs notorious for their outreach can spend hundreds of manhours to get four or five mid-duration recruits. Organizations can eventually make this work out by playing the odds across a large enough number of people, but individual actors within the organization can not. Hyperdunbar non-outreach/recruitment efforts can similarly be risky and hide their outcomes: it's very easy to give a talk before a thousand people, and very hard to know what portion of the audience was listening the next day.
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Because of their public-facing nature, difficulty of measurement, influence of the internet and media coverage (and, cynically, hyperdunbar organization efforts to dazzle or baffle their membership), these approaches are what are most visible when looking into most fields from outside, such that they seem like the only viable option.
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But that framework is flawed; hyperdunbar efforts can and often do run face-first into a ditch.
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Even some efforts toted as wildly successful can fade off at shockingly low numbers. That's not to call them a failure for doing so, even if it's not always or often what the stated goals were. However, it shows a space where the tradeoffs necessary to try to scale to vast numbers weren't necessary.
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And a lot of good can be done outside of hyperdunbar efforts.
gattsuru
25d ago
A Furry Cancellation
Mary E. Lowd, aka Ryffnah, has been removed from the Furry Writer's Guild, dropped by her publishers, and bounced as a Guest of Honour from the Oregon convention Furlandia, one week before the convention started. Not one of the biggest furry writers, or as skilled as someone like Tempo Kun, Robert Baird, Rukis Croax, or Kyell Gold. She has had had some success in out-of-fandom pieces in Baen, and her Otters In Space series was more normie-friendly than even other SFW writers (and even some normie anthromorphic authors). That must take some effort: what did she do?
Lowd has been open and explicit about her use of AI image gen, likely driven both by her husband's work in the field of AI research, and more seriously by the economics of the matter. To be fair, the FWG policy was officially published in January of last year, and unofficialy well-established for some time before; FurPlanet doesn't really do policy, but their stance has been just as open and explicit for nearly as long. There's some smoke-filledfree backroom management that Happens for furcons, and I expect Lowd will find more than one or two doors has closed, here.
Businesses have policies reflecting their principles or interests or both, so it's not a huge surprise it came to this.
The interesting bit's that the next-to-last editions of her works had conventionally- or conventionally-digitally produced art, some by pretty well-known artists like BlackTeagan. Emphasis on had: as common in the book industry, the cover art belonged to her publisher; it may well fall off the planet outside of private collections. The current replacements aren't great, though it's not clear if that reflects the artistic limitations of Lowd's tools or her time crunch. She previous sold her newest books at convention tables with nice stickers marking the ones with AI art, and that's going to be a lot less common moving forward.
And she's not alone.
Of the exceptions I gave a year ago, e621 has officially shoved any AI-gen to the e6ai subsite, and while Weasyl hasn't yet updated its policies, it has updated its practices. Outside of AIgen-specific accounts on twitter or servers on Discord, it can be hard to find the stuff. If you're a furry, you can avoid seeing AI art without even trying!... er... labelled AI art. Forget the awkward questions about how increasingly wide varieties of games integrate it into their graphics pipeline, or the not-so-clear division from more advance 'brush' tech to some uses of AI-gen: the people coming up with the policies don't know how the tech works. They may never know anything other than Lowd's oh-god-I-gotta-get-a-new-publisher-whatever-works pieces, even to recognize it.
Which is one potential end to the story, and to many stories, and a quiet one. Yet at the same time, it's an utterly frustrating ending: all of the worst fears of economic impact on lower-tier artists or of unlabelled AI spam overwhelming sincere creation, all the lost opportunities for conventional artists to focus more of their time on the parts of art they love or dedicated AI-genners to explore types of media that just wouldn't be practical for conventional artwork, all come true... and no one cares.
gattsuru
7d ago
For the first type of edge cases, the same thing as sucking at marksmanship or having an insufficient weapon to penetrate the target.
Charging someone with attempting sodomy, if we're taking the metaphor that direction, kinda just makes it funnier.
For the second type, are you arguing that piv sex in condom is not piv sex?
Dunno. There are sheathes that are like condoms in being full-enclosed (still not rated or tested as contraceptives, though I'd expect that regulatory reasons drive that more than practical ones), but most of them range from an eight-inch to more than a quarter-inch of silicone all around. Their point is to alter texture, appearance, and/or girth/length, but especially since some are dual-use as dildos or even intended for women or trans men to wear, the line between stimulating the prostate with a sex toy and stimulating it with the top's dick isn't very clear.
At least to my intuitions, a condom is very much the same underlying sex act, but there's a point where a gal wearing the same sex toy can hit the same button that makes it a lot harder to call the penis doing the stimulation. But my intuitions aren't anywhere near yours.
gattsuru
1mo ago
One thing I always like to point out: almanac.
In my opinion, I believe Malinowski was technically legally in the right despite the high volume of sales. There is no indication he was attempting to profit from selling to criminals/gangs etc. Many people collect firearms and enjoy buying and selling them as others would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on motorcycles or pokemon cards. There is no law in Arkansas against purchasing a handgun and deciding you don't like it for whatever reason and selling it to your neighbor the next day.
Legally in the right is kinda unrelated to those questions; the federal law isn't about selling to Bad People, but selling as a business or buying on 'behalf' of another person. See Abramski v. United States for a case where buying one gun for resale to another person (his uncle) who could legally buy or own the firearm had he bought the gun himself, and received five years of probation (technically, two such sentences running concurrently).
(The affidavit claims one of the guns was found in possession of a Norteno gang member, but search affidavits claim bullshit regularly, and it's not clear how many steps happened between Malinowski's sale and that point, since the Nortenos are mostly a California thing.)
Under current law, there's almost no chance that he'd have been able to avoid a lengthy federal sentence. There's not a statute written down saying you can't buy and resell in a day or a week as a private individual, but the law is whatever the ATF wants it to be, until and unless a court slaps them down. The line between private sales from a personal collection and acting as a business is vague and basically defined only in whatever sense the ATF wants it to mean, but there's been far more marginal cases convicted.
He might have been trying to start a legal confrontation, but I'm... somewhat skeptical for aviation reasons -- very few people who deal with the FAA regularly would start shit by going straight to 11, and those who do would have had a lawyer on retainer, heavily tied into paperwork somewhere, and ready to give a statement. As an alternative explanation, there was (and remains to a smaller extent) a lot of non-coastal people who use firearms as a store of value, and quite a lot of them aren't familiar with the law or the extent that it's been tightened recently.
Morally... more complicated. Whatever the original status of the GCA1968, the ATF and federal government have since joined together to make the FFL system as unavailable as possible to small businesses or hobbyist resellers, starting with the Clinton-era crackdown on kitchen-table FFLs (with a few exceptions). Abramski would have struggled to operate as an FFL had he wanted to, and the harassment aimed at small FFLs makes the moral arguments rough.
gattsuru
1mo ago
MR. FLETCHER: So there's a lot packed in there. I want to give you one very specific answer first and then step back out to the proper context. So specifically you mentioned demanding an answer right away and cursing them out. The only time that happens is in an email that's about the President's own Instagram account. It's not about moderating other people's content.
Here's the context Fletcher is trying to maneuver around. It's far from the most egregious stretch of the duty of candor to the court, but it's a pretty overt example of reframing the argument away to what he wants it to be, rather than what was asked, and it's not even honest at that.
I'm hoping that it will be a narrow ruling, with Roberts spearheading a tailoring doctrine that focuses on the putative lack of traceability and distinguishes between coercion as unacceptable, but strong encouragement being fine.
Maybe they'll try to split the baby between this case and Vullo, but like punting on Remington v Soto it just invites massive efforts. Even if coercion is officially banned, if the jawboning in this case isn't enough to be coercion, it'll be so impossible to actually prove traceability or coercion that the protection will be meaningless.
And the more morbid revelation is that it's probably pretty meaningless even if they do rule expansively. If Missouri wasn't funding this case, or if the bad actors has tried even slightly harder to keep the worst (discoverable) behavior to phone, it wouldn't be getting anywhere; Vullo only got as far as it did because whistleblowers (allegedly) provided specific details about tiny closed-door meetings. No one's going to do something similar against Gumroad. The courts aren't built for fishing expeditions, even if anyone can spot the fins with the naked eye and there's a constant Jaws theme in the background.
gattsuru
20d ago
In discussing Dunbar's number, it's not uncommon to see people divide matters into sub- and super-Dunbar counts (eg from 2013), and this can be useful in some contexts, but it also munges together a million-person org that's constantly growing (or trying to constantly grow) and a 200-person-org that's doing minimal recruiting.
Hyperdunbar approaches do not merely require an organization to exceed Dunbar's number, but that the organization constantly be striving for growth, unconstrained and reaching for infinity or the nearest limit. They do not merely have the problem that superDunbar groups do of wildly changed social dynamics, but the constant churn makes even many of the social technologies built for superdunbar organizations break.
Apologies for coining a word for what may well be have an obvious term.
gattsuru
30d ago
Isn't that why we're all here on this site though?
How To Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 seems relevant.
The problem from that perspective isn't that guesswho's arguing; it's that he's awful at it. It's bad enough when posters provide weakmen of their enemies. No one's going to change minds by providing weakmen of the position they claim to be defending.
That being said, I don't think the law is as ambiguous as you're making it out to be.
I don't think his particular case is ambiguous: I agree that Malinowski was likely violating the law ("almost no chance that he'd have been able to avoid a lengthy federal sentence"). My moral problem is more a question of what compliance would look like.
(Abramski is more complicated: it's unquestioned that he was reselling the gun, but the law about buying and selling doesn't ban resale, only "engaging in the business", which he wasn't doing. Hence why he got hit with paperwork violations that aren't even parts of paperwork listed in the statute, but rather ATF regs.)
The exact requirements for a private FFL is a mess, but there's a lot of ways it can be ludicrously impractical. Becoming an FFL means the ATF can inspect your entire listed address with little or no notice at least once a year. While less often an issue in Little Rock than other jurisdictions, FFLs must comply with all local business regs just to receive a license; this can require massive investments or even where it doesn't just turn into a catch-22 or punitive FFL-specific fees. Moving is annoying and in recent years leaves you pretty much at the whims of the ATF's schedule. Some IOTs or jurisdictions can require enough additional security as to make casual sellers cost-negative. Gotta keep (and show you can keep) form 4473s for twenty years, every i dotted and t crossed. Even the sort of zoning stuff no one actually enforces has to be met and understood and complied with. Apartment or rental FFLs have to show that they'll be in compliance with all the boilerplate contract crap meant to keep people from running a leather tannery in basement.
Most critically, the ATF requires FFLs be engaged not just in resale, but in business. If you can't present a decent business plan during the interview, the ATF won't issue an FFL; if you're not making a decent number of sales, the ATF can pull an FFL. There's limited alternative sales (mostly consulting), but if you go with them you've got other problems. Officially, you only have to list two hours a week as your 'open hours' for inspection and business, but outside of FFL 03s (C&Rs), you're likely to get your IOT to tell you to try again until you've got at least one 'open' day (usually 5+ hours). That's likely wildly impractical for an airport manager, who must also be available at no notice to handle everything from a major air disaster to an fuel spill to a burst water pipe to a busted runway light.
((This isn't helped by overt abuse of FFLs by the ATF: there are some limited statutory protections about having too many inspections in too short a time period, searching material unrelated to the business, or taking pictures of FFL records during inspections absent evidence of wrongdoing, but these solely exist on paper. There's literally no recourse if the ATF flips the law the bird.))
That's the point; the whole set of regulations and harassment exists to discourage small or marginal FFLs, or people becoming an FFL for personal use (which is itself a felony!). That's the state of regulations right now, and there's no wiggle room from a view of the courts.
But from a moral one... I don't advocate noncompliance with such unreasonable laws. I'm hard-pressed to see it as morally wrong, though, rather than just a horribly bad idea.
I think part of the reason why the law remains vague is that gun control is such a toxic issue right now that any change of the law is difficult to accomplish. For the gun rights people any clarification short of a total repeal of the FFL requirement is going to be seen as an unreasonable imposition, and for the gun control people anything short of eliminating private sales entirely is going to be seen as a useless half-measure. So there's no political will to do this.
For gun rights people, there's a lot for whom the FFL system is, in many ways, the room temperature -- at most, you get some problems at extremes, but even among gunnies, there's just not the interest for its core. The problem's more that any of the even remotely plausible compromises look a lot like just one more bite at the cake.
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but I'd point that your particular proposal is all take and no give. Every private firearm sale must now have a paperwork and ID requirement, or involve an FFL, and a fairly low limit to private sales is now in place, and... what, we're supposed to be happy that we're 'absolutely sure' that four guns in two years wouldn't be against the law, at least until the feds change it again?
Add in that there's a wide gap between such minimal sales and the scope required for it to make business sense to jump through all the hoops for an FFL. For a fermi estimate, if we assume 300 USD profit per gun and 150 guns, Malinowski would have made less than 15k USD/year.
2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...
I can point exactly where I was, online, in 2009: the writing was already on the wall, and it went exactly where I expected it would.
There were better places online, if you looked for them -- this was still before some of the weirder specialty forums got chased out, and I have some fond memories of early therianthropy spheres -- but it was already a long way from the highlights of the early Eternal September era, or especially usenet era. The Scylla and Charbydis of SomethingAwful and corporate monoculture were well and present then.
gattsuru
10d ago
I'd caution that :
- Python's support for the singleton pattern is kinda jank, due to lack of first-class support for private constructors or access modifiers.
- While there's a lot of arguments in favor of the singleton pattern with an interaction controller for bigcorp work, in small businesses it can be a temptation with serious tradeoffs. Refactoring (whether to add an intermediate object between World and Agent, or if you end up needing multiple World objects such as for a fictional context) can be nightmarish in Python, even if all the interaction logic is properly contained. And it probably won't be properly contained: marketing and customers can end up demanding bizarre requirements on near-zero notice that can require information from multiple different singletons, and if you end up hiring (or taking interns!) as a small business rather than at the FAANG level, those people (and I was one of them once!) will often break around the interaction controller unless aggressively managed.
I'm... not very good with Python, but my understanding, a toy example would be :
main,py:
import agent
import world
agentCount = 20
infectionCount = 25
world = world.World()
print("Starting...")
for i in range(agentCount):
world.addAgent(agent.Agent(world))
for i in range(infectionCount):
world.infectRandomAgent()
print("Total Infections :" + str(world.totalInfections))
print("Total Redundant Infections :" + str(world.redundantInfections))
for i in range(agentCount):
print("Agent #" + str(i) + " Infections:" + str(world.knownAgents[i].countedInfections))
world,py:
import random
class World:
knownAgents = list()
totalInfections = 0
redundantInfections = 0
def addAgent(self, newAgent):
self.knownAgents.append(newAgent)
def infectRandomAgent(self):
random.choice(self.knownAgents).incrementInfection()
agent,py:
class Agent:
wasInfected = False
countedInfections = 0
def __init__(self, ownerWorld):
self.world = ownerWorld
def incrementInfection(self):
self.world.totalInfections += 1
if self.wasInfected:
self.world.redundantInfections += 1
self.wasInfected = True;
self.countedInfections += 1
Note that if you're using raw python3.exe or a basic IDE like IDLE, all three files will need to be in the same folder, or you have to treat them like modules. Better IDEs like PyCharm will handle most of this for you, though I'd recommend experimenting before futzing with it a lot.
__init__ is a python builtin capability that's pretty equivalent to Java Constructors. The first argument for any class function will act as a reference to the instance of that class being called for that function, regardless of name -- do be careful getting a convention for that early and often, or it'll drive you up the walls. self is popular in pythonic circles, but I've seen a surprisingly large project that took the convention of this<className>, probably downstream of java or C# devs.
Only your main simulation file really should need to import the files that make up the actual objects. The class objects themselves don't need to know about each other, even if they're calling methods or fields specific to the other class, because that gets looked up during live runtime operations.
(edit: specifically, the class calling the constructor for an instance of an object needs to import that object. You could have, and it would probably be cleaner, to import Agent within world.py and not from within main.py, and do the agent constructor in the form :
def addAgent(self):
self.knownAgents.append(agent.Agent(self))
But I've been burned before in python environments where I ended up with my class imports spread throughout for hundred places and it being a nightmare to refactor or rename or handle versioning, so my preference for non-giant projects is to centralize imports, and for giant python projects you probably should be breaking it into modules.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Others I'd add:
-
Rationalist an adherent (or some style of critic) of the philosophy established on LessWrong, originally focused on trying to develop a more accurate model of what is true through understanding available information and avoiding the various pitfalls newly being recognized by 1990s-2005-era social psychology. Not... very typically that rational, and very much not philosophical rationalism.
-
Ratsphere, rationalist diaspora. A reader or commenter from LessWrong that started moving to other social media, typically in 2010-2014, or those adjacent to them, or adjacent to those adjacent to them. See here or here.
-
Postrat or post-rationalist, someone that rejects the rationalist movement's interest in what is true as impossible, and instead prioritizes what is useful to believe. Usually part of the (twitter) rationalist diaspora. See example here.
-
Tpot, usually lower-cased. 'That part of twitter', a mostly coastal techie group, some overlap with ratsphere. Largely an endonym. Example here.
-
Litany of Tarski, a poem saying to want to know and believe things that are true, usually with the connotation that the true thing is depressing or unpleasant. See here.
-
Conflict Theory and Mistake Theory, where Conflict Theory is the model that disagreements reflect two sides naturally opposed to each other who at best are negotiating over the division of spoils, while Mistake Theory is the model that each side disagrees about a question and could be persuaded. See example here or here. Quokka is largely a criticism of or self-identifier for mistake theorists and... I think we're at the point where there's not enough pure mistake theorists to have anything similar going the other way for conflict theorists.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Indeed, the district court cited testimony that the platforms rejected half of the FBI’s suggestions. Id. at 26,561; see App., infra, 107a, 191a.
It's amazing what happens if you follow citations within a single paper: 107a:
According to the Plaintiffs’ allegations detailed above, the FBI had a 50% success rate regarding social media’s suppression of alleged misinformation, and it did no investigation to determine whether the alleged disinformation was foreign or by U.S. citizens. The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling.
191a:
But, the FBI’s activities were not limited to purely foreign threats. In the build up to federal elections, the FBI set up “command” posts that would flag concerning content and relay developments to the platforms. In those operations, the officials also targeted domestically sourced “disinformation” like posts that stated incorrect poll hours or mail-in voting procedures. Apparently, the FBI’s flagging operations across-the-board led to posts being taken down 50% of the time.
Bizarrely, they don't cite the page where this actually first comes up, where instead:
65:
Chan testified the FBI had about a 50% success rate in having alleged election disinformation taken down or censored by social-media platforms.426
Cite 426 instead points to the FBI's agent's deposition, here, page 167. And it says instead that:
Q. But you received reports, I take it, from all over the country about disinformation about time, place and manner of voting, right?
A. That is -- we received them from multiple field offices, and I can't remember. But I remember many field offices, probably around ten to 12 field offices, relayed this type of information to us.
And because DOJ had informed us that this type of information was criminal in nature, that it did not matter where the -- who was the source of the information, but that it was criminal in nature and that it should be flagged to the social media companies. And then the respective field offices were expected to follow up with a legal process to get additional information on the origin and nature of these communications.
Q. So the Department of Justice advised you that it's criminal and there's no First Amendment right to post false information about time, place and manner of voting?
MR. SUR: Objection on the grounds of attorney-client privilege --
MR. SAUER: He just testified --
MR. SUR: -- and work product issues.
MR. SAUER: That's waived. He just told him what -- he just described what DOJ said, and I'm asking for specificity.
MR. SUR: I am putting the objection on the record.
Q. BY MR. SAUER: You may answer.
A. That was my understanding.
Q. And did you, in fact, relay -- let me ask you this. You say manner of voting. Were some of these reports related to voting by mail, which was a hot topic back then?
A. From my recollection, some of them did include voting by mail. Specifically what I can remember is erroneous information about when mail-in ballots could be postmarked because it is different in different jurisdictions. So I would be relying on the local field office to know what were the election laws in their territory and to only flag information for us. Actually, let me provide additional context. DOJ public integrity attorneys were at the FBI's election command post and headquarters. So I believe that all of those were reviewed before they got sent to FBI San Francisco.
Q. So those reports would come to FBI San Francisco when you were the day commander at this command post, and then FBI San Francisco would relay them to the various social media platforms where the problematic posts had been made, right?
A. That is correct.
Q. And then the point there was to alert the social media platforms and see if they could be taken down, right?
A. It was to alert the social media companies to see if they violated their terms of service.
Q. And if they did, then they would be taken down?
A. If they did, they would follow their own policies, which may include taking down accounts.
Q. How about taking down posts as opposed to the entire account?
A. I think it depends on how they interpreted it and what the content was and what the account was.
Q. Do you know what the -- do you know whether some of those posts that you relayed to them were acted on by their content modulators?
MR. SUR: Objection; vague and ambiguous.
THE WITNESS: So from my recollection, we would receive some responses from the social media companies. I remember in some cases they would relay that they had taken down the posts. In other cases, they would say that this did not violate their terms of service.
Q. BY MR. SAUER: What sort of posts were flagged by you that they concluded did not violate their terms of service?
A. I can't remember off the top of my head.
Q. I mean, I take it they would all have a policy against just posting about the wrong time that the poles opened, right? Or the wrong date to mail your ballot?
A. That would be my assumption, but I do remember, but I can't remember the specifics as to why. But I do remember them saying that certain information we shared with them did not result in any actions on their part, but I can't remember the details of those. They were not frequent, but I do remember that they occurred.
Q. In most cases when you flagged something, it was taken down?
A. In most cases -- let me rephrase that. In some cases when we shared information they would provide a response to us that they had taken them down.
Q. Got you. Same as the -- go ahead.
A. I would not say it was 100 percent success rate. If I had to characterize it, I would say it was like a 50 percent success rate. But that's just from my recollection.
So an FBI agent at one particular office on one particular topic for one particular short period of time, if forced to characterize it, would say "it was like a 50% success rate" -- but only after saying that non-action was not-frequent.
gattsuru
15d ago
I didn't claim Vaxry is blameless or looks good, or even that his faults were merely insufficient empathy. From my first post:
And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks.
But there's a bit of a problem.
There's a paradox of tolerance issue here, banning is not the only way to exclude bright people from your community. You can also do it just by being an asshole to them. Some people are brilliant assets that turn dumb if you start overtly politically attacking them. Some people need to be able to express the "nasty" things they believe to be true to think properly. This is a fundamental competing access needs issue that you can't just gloss over by never banning anyone.
As a nitpick, Popper's Paradox of Tolerance wasn't using 'tolerance' to mean 'things that progressives like today', but the simple possibility of open debate and discussion.
But more critically, few if any people who try to bring this more expansive non-Popperian version forward do so in any even-handed way. Vaxry's Discord isn't part of freedesktop.org. Vaxry is not accused of behaving poorly in FreeDesktop.org spaces, and I've not been able to find any evidence of such, whether because he's autistic enough to follow their rules in their spaces, or just from lack of opportunity.
You may say that there's a competing access need, but the modern-day variant turns into an insistence that the competition is over. If Vaxry and his cohort can't "express the 'nasty' things they believe to be true to think properly" in a Discord and github issue specific to their project, they can't be 'acerbic' anywhere -- and that's very clearly the target that the FreeDesktop.org held. In that view, the choice is between 'banning' people in the sense that they feel excluded and turned around because of things they found by digging at depth into it, and just directly actually-banning people. The first group will always be able to expand their ranks and justify greater interdiction.
And, to be blunt, the direct-bans get no small amount of people knowing that they'll be excluded by assholes, anyway. It's just that the banhammer-wielders are sort of asshole that the people in charge like.
gattsuru
23d ago
But also, I don’t see how it could be bad?
There's a thing in the Mormon church where they send teenagers to evangelize randos. It seems a little weird at first glance: everybody knows that they're not going to get any bites. But getting new recruits isn't the point -- the point is to absolutely demonstrate how bad non-Mormons can act.
That's probably not intended (either here, or in the Mormon church). Yet I wonder what, precisely, the proposer expects to have happen were he to ship cornfed rural folk (or even the Unnecessariat writer) to San Francisco, or vice versa.
gattsuru
20d ago
Cynically, "celebrate" in the mission statement probably means 'get scholarships and burnish college resumes': FIRST doesn't pull in a lot for either, but it really clearly wants to have the cash of a sports team scholarship and the reputation of an Eagle Scout.
Less cynically, a lot of school environments teach tech, not just poorly, but also as a chore, even when it could or should have been fun. You don't and shouldn't celebrate or applaud things just for being present, but from physics labs to chemistry to programming to the complete destruction of the shop class, we've lost a lot of the framework for 'projects' as things that can be completed or have real win/lose states. For all my complaints, FIRST, even at its goofiest FLL versions, avoids that problem.
I think urban liberal would have stood stronger on its own.
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