gattsuru
1yr ago
openDogv3 is a really impressive project, but it's also optimized for low-cost and weight. There are a lot of better options out there than 8308s and a 3d-printed gearbox at the enthusiast or hobbyist level; they just blow out the rest of your budget out of the water and dramatically increase cost-of-entry.
That said, while the gap isn't as huge as you're suggesting, it's still pretty big. More efficient artificial approaches usually work by optimizing for entirely different purposes or environments.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think it's less interesting for the economic impact -- in addition to there just not being that many full-time furry porn artists, most of their commissioners are likely to want things more specific or outside of the realm of current ML generators, and there's a lot of social stuff going on that can't really been done by a python script -- and more because it's an interesting case that should allow exploration that isn't easy to do elsewhere. In order:
-
Furries are identifiable by other furries, but avoid a lot of the privacy and identify concerns relevant for most living people with large numbers of photos available, and while technically as much protected by copyright as Mario are a lot less likely to result in a takedown request.
-
On-topic training data is limited, and of sporadic quality, and unlikely to be used by professional environments. There's a lot of pre-tagged data on the various furry boorus! But it's probably on the order of 3-5m images, quite a lot of which won't meet the requirements used for LAION et all, and covering a pretty wide variety of topics, and a lot of reasons for ML researchers to not want to touch it. In retrospect, 'can AI realize your text string is a request to photoshop a wildlife shot onto a human's body' is pretty trivially obvious, but I don't think it was such a given three years ago.
-
On-topic enthusiast data is wildly available: randos can and already have started going everything from exploring the limits of textual_inversion to fine-tuning the algorithm on personally-curated data sets. So we'll get a lot of that.
-
There are a lot of symbols with few or marginal referents. There might be a fuschia otter in the training set, somewhere, or ghibli-style foxes and rabbits, but it's probably pretty rare in the training data. There's a scale here from dragons to griffons to hippogryphs to khajit or tabaxi to avali, not in that the subjects are fictional, but that a specific generated image is less and less likely to be pulled from a large class of input images and instead reflect interaction at a trait level (to whatever extent these are different things) or something more complex. (As an example: StableDiffusion gives robot-like outputs for protogen, despite very clearly having no idea what they are. Which isn't surprising that 'proto' and 'gen' have those connotations, but it's not clear people three years ago would have assumed ML could find them out.) At the very least, this points toward a upper bound for the minimum number of examples for a class; at most, it may explore important areas about how much a neural net can intuit. While I don't expect image generation solutions to these problems to generalize, that they exist is reason to think they at least can exist for other realms.
-
Outputs need be specific. This is partly just an extrapolation of composition problem that Scott was betting on, but there's also matters that are elevated from the connotations in ways that powerful AI will need to be able to do to handle a number of real-world situations, and most current ML can't.
-
Outputs are not human-specialized, in the way that even minor face abnormalities are able to trigger people, but they are still obvious where defects occur. StableDiffusion can't reliably do human faces, or even rabbit or weasel faces, but that it can do tigers most of the time, and foxes and wolves often, and this kinda says something interesting about what we expect and what ML (and even non-ML applications) may be able to easily do moving forward.
-
Inputs need be complex. Most current AI generators struggle with this, both because it's a generally hard problem and because a lot of the techniques they've used to handle other issues make this harder. I don't think the ability for a hypothetical 2025 version of StableDiffusion to handle this will be especially destructive on its own, but it will mean a pretty significant transformation that will impact a wide variety of other fields, and be very obvious here.
Yes, on both. I think non-binary/whatever AFAB people tend to be a little more newsogenic, and there's a lot of cultural stuff around AMABs getting anywhere near fem-adjacent without explicitly becoming not-men, but it does happen, and there's a some people that statistically show up as AMAB trans (because measures v metrics when a lot of them are dosing hormones anyway) and/but self-identify as non-binary.
Either as a result or a coincidence, a lot of the AMAB enby 'celebrities' tend to be comedians, youtube personalities, so on. Eddie Izzard is probably one of the ones better-known before they came out. Among furries, there's a decent number, with SonicFox being one of the better-known. In my personal sphere, the person running the Minecraft server I've been writing custom forks for is non-binary AMAB. It's hard to be absolutely certain in the Minecraft modding sphere, but I think there's a couple mod-writers that are AMAB and gender-fluid or in the 'not sure what's going on' Vazkii sector.
I do think it's genuinely less common, but that's mostly a gut feeling and I'll admit I still don't know (and may not be able to know) what the identity actually means.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think there's a lot of selection bias on both sides of this matter: if you aren't in Blue Tribe communities you're mostly going to see the highest-heat-over-light nutpicking show up, and conversely I don't think the Fez guy transitioned.
I won't pretend the Quilt Minecraft discord isn't full of drama, but it's no worse than Fabric or Forge. You don't have to be a little nuts for dedicated games development, but it helps, and once you've got a box full of off-kilter people, some of them are going to end up being unproductively nutty.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The lack of preemption over more restrictive state laws is probably closer to constitutionally correct than had it been included, but the lack of even an attempt to defang or prohibit restrictions before this time frame, or restrictions related to travel for abortion, make that unlikely to be successful.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit available for improvements; even simple drill-press and 6061 aluminum could do a lot. But the toolchains for those processes are much more complicated and the processes themselves much messier, so it's not really in consideration. And, conversely, there's a lot of potential spaces for... more improvizational materials, where people are willing to design around them.
Scale is part of the problem, but you don't need that much scale. The FIRST FRC environment has a ton of devices being sold on scales of hundreds or low thousands that involve a lot of custom metal parts, and while they're not always good, they're definitely extant and productive. Part of that reflects the tax- and labor-advantaged nature of a situations where most customers and some sellers are non-profits or subsidiaries of non-profits, but that's ultimately a political choice: there's no that must favor FRC or Vex but not more productive matters.
The deeper issues... I think the big one is that there's simultaneously a big desire to build everything from 'scratch', but also to see some level of devices as indivisible, at least for this class of project. LEGO could make (arguably, does make, through Mindstorms) an injection-molded-polymer Spot knockoff, but the sort of people who want to build a LEGO kit aren't trying to put together a Spot variant. Even a lot of the Pi-and-cheap-servo posebots are largely marketed under the theory that they're an introduction to everything you'd need to learn for the project.
Some of this is just inevitable Pareto Principle stuff, but I think a lot of it's downstream of the death of manufacturing. The emphasis and ease-of-access to bits makes it so easy to considering scaling and production as someone else's problem, because, for no small part, it has been. I think the extreme time constraints and very limited purchaser base have done more to keep the FIRST ecosystem around as long as it has.
What projects do you have in mind?
There's a few interesting takes on custom motors like the DizzyMotors, but almost all have a step one that involves taking apart a larger, expensive motor. Moteus is getting closer, but it's still (AFAIK) still in a prototype level, and it's very far from anything especially hitting the limits of the medium.
The Supreme Court has responded to a stay request in Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance. The cases revolves around New York's Yeshiva University, a long-standing and very Orthodox Jewish university, which is facing civil suit under New York City's Human Rights Act, for refusing to recognize an internal LGBT alliance. After a summary judgement stage, the judge found in favor of Yu Pride Alliance, and ordered an injunction against Yeshiva to immediately recognize the Alliance and provide all support given to other clubs. Yeshiva appealed to the case to New York's confusingly-named Appellate Division, and requested a stay during appeal. This was denied, without explanation on August 23rd. Yeshiva then requested leave to appeal that denial of stay from both the Appellate Division and the even-more-confusing separate Court of Appeals; this was denied, again without explanation, on August 26th. Yeshiva filed an emergency appeal to SCOTUS on August 29th, arguing that with its time for club applications running from August 26th to September 12th, the likely timeline for state appeals -- October or November before trial, likely past the end of the school year for a decision -- make for irreparable harm.
While Justice Sotomayor issued a short administrative stay from the 9th to the 13th, SCOTUS ultimately punted, holding that Yeshiva could request an expedited appeal from the state, or try again after completion of all state-level appeals, if rejected. Of course, by that point, Yeshiva's then-established-and-recognized Pride Alliance will have a lot of extra weight on arguments regarding future stays. As YU Pride Alliance explicitly declares it purpose is to change hearts and minds, it is difficult to see that period not reflecting any compelled speech.
There are a number of more subtle issues.
Some of these are just obnoxious. There's a rather impressive silence from those who worried about the Texas Bounty Hunters bringing lawsuits with statutes putting every thumb possible on the scales, obviously. SlightlyLessHairyApe has suggested in the past (in supposedly less favorable circumstances!) that "Martinez is the decision in most danger of backsliding"; this refusal isn't any stronger evidence CLS v. Martinez is here to stay than the Texas Bounty Hunters legal cases evidence that Roe wasn't... but faint damns. The state judge ordering the stay is or was a member of the Lesbian and Gay Law Association for Greater New York, which is not the sort of thing that requires or even counsels recusal, anymore than a judge being an observant Jew might, but at least the sort of thing that would raise elevated interest in making the impartial read of the law as clear as possible.
((There's also some boring debates about the definition of 'irony'.))
One more usefully interesting matter reflects the text of the court's decision. The state law actually does contain an exemption for some religious educational organizations, specifically those "religious corporations incorporated under the education law"; Yeshiva is, however, incorporated as an "educational" corporation under the education law, likely in no small part so it can issue secular degrees:
The court finds that Yeshiva's educational function, evidenced by its ability to now confer many secular multi-disciplinary degrees, thus becamse Yeshiva's primary purpose. Even if Yeshiva still "prompted the study of Talmud", that does not necessarily make Yeshiva a religious corporation as that term was intended by the City Council when it enacted Section 8-102.
Those of you following other conversations here this week might have noticed that a city -- conveniently the same city! -- is in the middle of investigating whether Hasidic grade schools are providing sufficient education. Which wouldn't necessarily be covered by the current text of Administrative Code 8-102, which only mandates that organizations with over 400 members and taking in money be considered not-private unless proven otherwise. But the remaining exceptions are not just statutory but affected by a morass of regulatory and administrative decisions. And the statute has changed rapidly in the past: while Yeshiva changed its incorporation to the education law in 1967, an exception present at the time for "colleges and universities" was stripped by a 1991 City Council decision
A month ago I'd have called Hasidic fears of the corruptive nature of secular education paranoid. I still don't think NYC would, any time soon. I'm a good deal more limited in what foundation I can argue that. Hope that won't have negative ramifications!
Another is a continuing willingness by the courts to ignore what are, charitably, misleading filings. In this case, the YU Pride Alliance Opposition filing says, among other claims, that :
YU has also acknowledged it must comply with the Human Rights Law without raising First Amendment concerns on numerous occasions. For example, YU “concede[d] that it is subject to the City Human Rights Law” to the New York Court of Appeals in 2001. Levin v. Yeshiva Univ., 96 N.Y.2d 484, 491 (2001). It raised no First Amendment challenge to the application of the Human Rights Law in that case.
The paragraph that is pulled from reads :
Section 8-107(5)(a)(1) of the Administrative Code of the City of New York makes it an unlawful discriminatory practice to refuse housing accommodations to any person because of that person's "actual or perceived race, creed, color, national origin, gender, age, disability,sexual orientation, marital status, or alienage or citizenship status * * * " (emphasis supplied). At the outset, we note that this provision applies to those who provide public or private housing accommodations, and so Yeshiva's status as a private institution does not exempt it from the enactment. While denying its violation, Yeshiva concedes that it is subject to the City Human Rights Law. Plaintiffs, as members of a protected class, allege a violation of the New York City Human Rights Law, section 8-107(17), which creates a cause of action for "an unlawful discriminatory practice based upon disparate impact."
That is, Yeshiva conceded that it was subject to a specific different prong of the Human Rights Law, which Yeshiva did not claim to have religious objections to despite a (admittedly-limited) religious exemption where:
"Nothing contained in this section shall be construed to bar any religious or denominational institution or organization or any organization operated for charitable or educational purposes, which is operated, supervised or controlled by or in connection with a religious organization, from limiting employment or sales or rentals of housing accommodations or admission to or giving preference to persons of the same religion or denomination or from making such selection as is calculated by such organization to promote the religious principles for which it is established or maintained."
This isn't quite as bad as a certain state (New York again!) excising important words from referenced statutes, and then doing it again, or the CDC's famous "absent an unexpected change". But where lawyers are obligated to make the best arguments for their clients, they are also obligated to be fully honest in court filings, not merely in not-lying, but in representing the whole truth. I doubt this section had serious impact (or, frankly, that all of the justices even read it), but an inability to respond to or recognize these sort of tendentious filings do not encourage faith in even-handed access to the courts.
There is a phrase -- sometimes attributed, coincidentally, to Rabbis, elsewhere to Gladstone or Francis Bacon -- that 'justice delayed is justice denied'. It's possible that this decision is overturned at the state level, for the sort of reasons I and Alito both were too pessimistic in the aftermath of Fulton. Of course, if not resolved at the state level, SCOTUS review of the stay is unlikely before the end of the school semester; of the case, likely into 2026 or 2027. It's not hard to come up with examples of the costs of punting at such length. This case can, in many ways, be seen as the aftermath of Fulton's punt.
It's not quite up there with Young v. Hawaii's decade-long wait. I doubt it will be. I expect a long-standing yeshiva will be stubborn at the end of a case, where other religious orgs struggle to revert changes. And probably a coincidence that this falls at the same time the federal gay marriage bill is struggling in the Senate, over conflicts related to
Separately (both for character limit reasons and because it's another less interesting matter), I'm going to point to the posts here and here.
Yes, Demkovich was overturned and dismissed, albeit while the dissent points out the 9th Circuit found otherwise, and the grounds for that dismissal do not apply to broader speech outside of religious organizations. Yes, more broadly, these are not my positions: I have actually joined Pride organizations, where no Orthodox Jewish group would be interested in my views on the Talmud. Yes, this is compelled speech rather than prohibited speech, although the law does cover both. Yes, this is not a Rhode Island RFRA or an HR.
But I'm skeptical a perspective on a legal environment that excludes this sort of problem is a relevant one, when it comes to the health of the republic.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't think this is a very strong argument. Trivially, a portion of covered tenants are effectively unservable, a larger portion of covered tenants are going to be judgement proof, most state eviction systems got absolutely wrecked by the moratorium in ways that prevent a lot of newly-started evictions from actually going through in anything close to a reasonable time frame and further delay them, and being incredibly charitable and assuming that the same people who told SCOTUS about behavior "absent an unexpected change" weren't planning around these things, they still are separately impacting those systems by other bad policies.
As far as I can tell, there have been no successful cases attempting to bring damages against the government -- indeed, the unlawfulness of the moratorium was used to dismiss a suit about the damages for a taking.
And that's for a court case that ultimately decided on statutory interpretation grounds, not takings clause or due process ones. Eg, a case where the courts would have been A-OK if Congress wrote a law.
This isn't quite parallel with the mafia don that theoretically will accept appeals from those under his 'protection', but gives his made men's decisions incredible latitude even in the face of repeated bad acts, and only occasionally has them injure the representatives of even victorious appellants. But it rhymes a lot more than you'd hope.
There was a case in Western PA last winter where a guy at a hunting camp was shot after erratically firing an AK-47 and forcing the other people at the camp to stay at gunpoint. The incident happened in December but the investigation dragged on until the middle of March before the DA announced that they couldn't overcome their burden of proof in a self-defense case. This was in a rural area that is generally pro-gun.
Would that be this case? It's a little interesting, but this summary seems to be skipping over a couple details, especially given that the out-of-state interest in the matter driven by reporting certain it was a hate crime, which was so severe and widespread that today, months after the conclusion of the investigation, the Venango DA's website still has a brightly-highlighted statement emphasizing that he's taking a "complete and thorough investigation".
If this is the case you're referencing, "couldn't overcome their burden of proof" does not seem an accurate summary where the DA explicitly called it justified self-defense.
And, yes, more broadly, this seems like a central example of the_nybbler's "Anti-self-defense people have managed to rig the system so completely against self-defense that even someone who shoots someone dead for good reasons will be made to seriously regret it". This says a lot about a lot, but not about self-defense itself.
... some relevant context here:
-
Massachusetts isn't a statutory 'sanctuary state', but mostly because the courts decided to do that for the legislature. Most major cities are, or have effective rules equivalent to such, for what little it ever comes up.
-
Martha's Vineyard is a 45-minute ferry ride from Falmouth, and from there 2-3 hours bus ride from Boston.
-
It's also ridiculously rich and notorious for large and sudden parties: the perspective that it couldn't scale to shelter for 50 really doesn't pass the sniff test.
-
There has been over a decade-long and massive surge of undocumented immigrants into border states, almost none of which has particularly been focused on parts of the border which have had shelter capability. Federal ICE policies have, at the very least, minimized the ability, and drastically demoralized any interest in enforcement where it remains possible (cfe 'reins').
-
There's been big mess about releasing undocumented immigrants minors in a handful of cities to relatives, 'relatives', or sponsors, which is required in by law and existed under the Trump admin but has scaled up dramatically, with a lot of !!fun!! questions about consent that would normally scare people given ICE Airlines, and abuse of the policy has probably been tied to a recent high-profile homicide.
-
A lot of the scale-up of that problem is downstream of aggressively coached asylum claimants, who -- while generally not actually falling under the statutory examples for asylum -- began to be released on recognizance in far more cases in recent years. Which looks a lot like... this, just with different political goals, since in no few cases the admin just bussed the applicants to random cities (edit: which sometimes then bus them again to random suburbs), gave them provisional status, and then shrugged about things like shelter capacity, often to defang criticism about custody numbers. Which, as with other times in the past, people didn't seem to care about.
I'm not a fan of this show-boating from DeSantis, but I don't think "$12 million ‘immigrant relocation program’ Own The Libs/Desantis for President" is a very strong steelman.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I would recommend Minecraft, given what you've described here. The vanilla game has no serious management ecosystem (villagers are useless idiots you stick in boxes), but Minecolonies adds a very robust one that gives a pretty interesting progression loop. Combat can be involved at start, especially before you have armor or a sufficient area cleared to avoid skeletons finding you, but it pretty quickly reaches the point where most monsters are resources to be harvested rather than challenges to be scaled.
These games fit into a rare category. There's a lot of Civ Builders, ranging from classics like Dwarf Fortress to ZorbaTHut's own work in Rimworld, but they're usually treating the player as an eye in the sky rather than part of the world. There's a lot of Harvest Moon (well, Story of Seasons/Rune Factory-likes), but they're usually not about customizing or varying your world that much -- usually you're limited to changing farm plots and the inside of a house, and maybe a story progression marker. Animal Crossing doesn't even really get that. Games focusing on roving bands like Kenshi or Blade And Mount have even less world customization, even if they have the NPC management bit, and tend to be too high-strung on the combat side. Meanwhile, dedicated Base Builders like ARK, Factorio or Planet Explorers leave the world feeling and being very empty.
Some of that's because meaningful pathfinding AI is hard, and widespread 3d customizable worlds is Hard (so hard, in fact, Subnautica built and then stripped out the system), and mixing those things and then adding meaningful NPCs on top of that is even harder. But it also just feels like a really underexplored space.
And that's a pity, because it's a really fun space.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Undoubtedly illegal immigrants have plenty of disposable income and familiarity with the Massachusetts transit system.
I'm thinking that there may be at least one person on Martha's Vineyard who fits that category, especially for a ferry system that charges a buck a ticket.
And why is the Governor of Florida concerned with Texas, and using funds his legislature approved for the state of Florida to ship illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts?
There are a number of fun power of the purse legal or correct focus of government questions, but I'm rather skeptical that you'd have been soothed if the Florida legislature have phrased their funding expenditure slightly or if Texas had independently decided to pay for shipping undocumented immigrants to Florida as a pit stop.
Border crossings, or at least apprehensions as a stand-in for crossings, from 2010-2020 were lower than they had been for the previous 30 years.
Interestingly, the 2021 numbers broke the 2000 record, though NPR gives some estimation caveats. There's some fun questions about how comparable these numbers are -- NPR's waffling about gotaways applies as easily in the opposite direction, not just for this year but also for large parts of the lulls. But more interestingly, the surge had resulted in a large number of policy changes to discourage unlawful immigration, most notably the 1996 IIRIRA.
If by 'reins' you mean this story, it's not clear to me how the media mistaking reins for whips is related to federal ICE policy.
The media doing so, alone, doesn't particularly control. The President of the United States, in response to the media outrage, informed the country that " promise you, those people will pay. There is an investigation underway right now and there will be consequences," while the Vice President said "it evoked images of some of the worst moments of our history where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country, has been used against African Americans during times of slavery"... still doesn't exactly control, but it has a lot of impact on the day-to-day operations. Not because that particular sort of behavior was especially common, or even because horseback operations, but because Tall Poppy.
((The agents in question were found to not having been using the reins as whips, or striking the immigrants; they were punished under a slight stretch of other different use-of-force rules.))
And there's been a lot of stuff like that. Individually, you could maybe argue that each one is merely a skeptical and restraining eye. In combination, Border Patrol has been told to not try very hard, and they know it.
Your argument being that there should be a better federal support and/or shelter network to be certain that illegal immigrants can be humanely treated? Your terms are acceptable.
No, my argument being that "treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points" has been a common practice, and there's been crickets, at length. I don't know the correct solution to this problem; there are reasons I could see federal support or shelter networks to help, but there are also plausible ways that they're likely to be impossible to scale up or even to make the general scale of the problem worse in ways where the ultimate cost to life or safety is greater. There are some interesting and difficult questions to ask on that matter!
I just know very few people were horrified about it happening, even for very large numbers, and even with far greater humanitarian impact.
Even if we tied it to border funding or some other carrot, I doubt Senate Republicans would care - Trump, at least, was offered border wall funding for protection for dreamers and wound up shutting down the government instead.
Which is interesting. Why didn't Trump accept that bill? Or, for that matter, why did the bill receive mostly Democratic support in Congress? The link just shrugs, perhaps Trump was incompetent. Which, to be fair, not exactly a bad null hypothesis!
But there was also a contemporaneous leak describing the White House's perspective. Maybe that leak was wrong! Maybe Trump somehow -- unusually -- managed to pull the vast majority of Republican politicians to his whims, and trick the Democratic Senators. But it's strange how the writer here can't even seem to imagine the possibility that a 'compromise' bill is actually not giving much to the other side, while demanding a lot.
The governor of Florida is paying to fly illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts to score political points. I'm too stupid to rationalize how that is in the best interest of the citizens of Florida, so I'll leave that to my betters.
Can you make any deep guesses about why DeSantis wants to do this, or why he -- and several other states, many of whom have been running similar operations -- believe that it makes effective political points? Was he born wicked, or was wickedness thrust upon him?
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's a solution, and not an unpopular one for games with a heavier RTS inspiration. There are tradeoffs -- having to 'program' the NPCs can get unwieldy if either job complexity or NPC count go too high, for one example, and you generally need to cap path complexity or duration -- but they're not entirely unsolvable ones, especially if NPCs have relatively simple 'complete' paths. It can be difficult as a fit thematically, though, unless your NPCs are intentionally robotic or very habitual, or if you have a lot of NPCs.
Minecolonies tries to compromise by considering workstations (or beds, etc) as automatic waypoints while leaving the option of manually-inserting additional user-defined ones, and then doing path-calculation between those nodes (with some range and other considerations). But this does have its own issues. There's still an absolute mess of special-cases that have to be considered even while expecting players to handle most severe breaks, and a number of annoying and subtle problems that can pop up.
((And there's still some bizarre cases that break it.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's the fact that the guy never made any direct threats.
"Spencer then became extremely angry that the others refused to follow his instructions to gather wood and started swearing at the Mercer man and pointing the AK-47 into his face, according to the report. Investigators wrote that Spencer also started demanding to know where the female in the group had gone, according to the report. The Mercer man said he tried to calm Spencer, but Spencer repeatedly demanded to know where the girl was and stated he would "shoot up the place if (he) needed to," according to the report."
I think that's kinda gonna count.
There's the fact that he was shot nine times in all parts of his body.
The autopsy report revealed that Spencer was struck nine times. There were two entry wounds to the front torso and upper right chest (exiting the back), one entry wound to the face (non-lethal, through the lower lip exiting side of neck), two closely-grouped entry wounds to the side under the right arm, two entry wounds to the back (superficial, grazing wounds), and two closely-grouped entry wounds in the buttocks.
The family's attorneys have found a forensic pathologist who disputed the self-defense claims, but that focused on which direction the shots went, with Wecht holding that most of the wounds on Spencer's back were entry wounds, and the state's forensics department saying they were exit wounds. There are professionalism arguments in favor of not magdumping. This shot list does not, on its own, raise serious questions about the self-defense claim. It is, charitably, a bit of a stretch to call the head, torso, and buttocks "all parts of his body".
If someone is shot dead the police have to investigate. If they were simply to take every self-defense claim at face value then we'd effectively have legalized murder, especially in gangland situations.
There's been people making similar arguments over the Rittenhouse, and the Gardner cases, and a good few others.
In one sense, it's true! Someone claiming "they were coming right for us!" alone isn't reason for the police to pack it up and go home! In one sense, yes, there's a reason self-defense experts like Masaad Ayoob recommend having a lawyer on retainer.
((I mean, not actually, descriptively true, but that's more because there's a number of police departments that are garbage.))
But for this specific case, day one had every witness at the scene says that the shot guy was threatening to shoot up the place and was trying to block their escape, his pockets are filled with their keys and one of their cell phones, and there's a bunch of recently-used shell cases matching the shot guy's gun, and tons of gunpowder residue up and down shot guy's arms. Nothing to contradict the self-defense claim comes up. And then on day two, the post-mortem tox report lights up like a Christmas tree in ways that support the suspect's claims, and completely unaffiliated witnesses from the camp owners -- who the suspect might not even have know were there -- give testimony about the shot pattern that matches. Still nothing to contradict the claim.
((And that's ignoring the stuff probably not admissible in court and shouldn't be considered by prosecutors but often is, like the rifle with an obliterated serial number and the already-active ATF investigation.))
Notably, unlike your hypothetical, no one was arrested or detained overnight. Now, this isn't the clearest-cut case of self-defense, since there was no video evidence. But I'm exceptionally skeptical that an honest and impartial prosecutor, not having the force of the state attorney general, the state police hate crimes side, national media coverage, international media coverage, so on, hits your parade of horribles.
And, what a coincidence! The same group is all, every single one, conveniently also opposed to civilian gun ownership and self-defense.
As soon as you agree that an investigation needs to be completed, and it's not going to be some half-assed investigation meant to corroborate the shooter's claim of self-defense, then the shooter needs to get an attorney.
Yes, tradeoffs exist. But the opening framework was not whether an investigation could occur, but that "this is the kind of use that makes me highly suspect of the actual utility of it." The scale of the tradeoffs matter. 1K USD and a bad night is not actually that bad compared to axe wounds and/or tens of thousands of dollars in property damage. There's a lot of things people will deal with for even a moderate reduction in the chance them and three of their friends of getting shot in the head by someone hopped up on shrooms, demanding that they sprawl out and call him a good, and confiscating their keys and cellphone.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Maybe so, but the people ranted about how soft Obama was on the border and how much better Republicans would do if we enacted their policies. Well, Trump got elected and not much changed; the trend towards increasing numbers of migrants potentially started in 2018 before being masked (heh) by COVID or not. I don't have a counterfactual world where Trump won reelection in 2020 to see what the numbers would be today, but I think there's a pretty good argument that even if we gave repubs everything they asked for (at least mainstream repubs, defined as a majority) the numbers would still be relatively high.
There's some fair and interesting debates about the effectiveness of conservative policies, or even how and when conservative policies are in the realm of the politically possible, but I don't think it's very useful to try to extrapolate from the 2016-2020 to what would happen if "we gave repubs everything they asked for". Trumpist policies -- regardless, or because of -- their (lack of) merits, did not spend a lot of time being actually applied. Most famously the DACA stuff, which not only was blocked at length, not only was eventually turned back at SCOTUS under iffy legal reasoning, but also just took until June 2020 just to finish the court cases that eventually told Trump to try again.
There are plausible arguments that this is bad policy, or that perhaps someone more competent could have turned in into bad policy instead of merely bad paper. There's plausible arguments that the proposals, even if 'not bad', would not actually reduce immigration if implemented. But it's a very weak argument about the effects of implemented policy.
((And, separately: the metric has been a measure, for a long time.))
Your contention here being that the current administration was under fire for the bad conditions at their border facilities, so they shrugged and started bussing all the people to random cities rather than where the people actually wanted to go? And your claim is that, in the article you cited, the relatives they are supposedly being bussed to do not exist and were fabricated?
No, my separate claims are that :
-
The federal government was releasing large batches of adult undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers at bus stops, usually without notifying the state government, and often with wide disregard for the capacities of local shelters.
-
The federal government has bussed or flown minor asylum-seekers to sponsors including relatives, as required by law.
-
The federal government has bussed or flown 'minor' 'asylum-seekers' to sponsors that 'include relatives', and then each of those prongs turn out to not be true.
I don't know for certain whether ICE gave them a big list of options to pick, just really hates that one bus stop in El Paso specifically, or if they give each immigrant or asylum-seeker a spin on an oversized wheel of fortune. Presumably someone actually wants to live in the Bronx, so it's possible that the immigrants getting bused there requested it specifically.
But I'm rather skeptical of a dividing line, here, when one side of this looks like the uncaring treatment of chattel being forced to be used for political purposes by an unarmed Florida government PR team, and the other side looks like the caring treatment of armed ICE agents.
So is your argument that Senate Republicans would, in fact, accept a compromise?
Senate specifically is a funny example! The Senate actually voted, 68-32, in favor of a pretty expansive and pretty progressive-favored slate, best-known as the Gang of Eight Bill. It struggled in the House through a lot of 2013, and Eric Cantor's loss in 2014 killed it in the House, especially since a lot of the conservative criticisms -- that the enforcement side would be neutered by Democratic efforts -- seemed a little prescient as DACA continued to grow.
The bill that you linked seems to be healthcare-related, not immigration, or else I'm just unfamiliar with the arcana of congress.
I linked to the vote for an amendment that the healthcare (and other random crap) bill: the text of specific to the amendment for that vote is available here. For (stupid) reasons, this is how Congress tends to do a lot of procedural stuff.
Doing what your constituents want isn't a bad thing, the real problem is when politicians of all stripes do things to hurt the outgroup and we cheer them for it.
That's true, but it's kinda useless without a deeper consideration. It's almost always possible to rationalize some deep reason why a bad policy that hurts the outgroup is acktually some great and necessary goal for the broader movement which "will protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor, cut down the burden of your taxes and provide you with more government benefits, lower prices and raise wages, give more freedom to the individual and strengthen the bonds of collective obligations", and also polish floors and server as a dessert topping.
There's a really obvious reason, here, and without being willing to touch it, this comes across as special pleading.
gattsuru
1yr ago
A lot of the reporting seems to be downstream of this sorta thing, which has an alleged photo of at least one alleged document, and a lawyer saying :
Matt Cameron, a Boston-based immigration attorney, explained that the benefits described in the brochure are resettlement benefits available to refugees who have been referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and authorized to live in the United States. These benefits are not available in Massachusetts to the migrants who boarded the flights, who are still in the process of seeking asylum.
The migrants who boarded the planes "absolutely do not have access to cash, housing, and other resettlement benefits which are provided through both federal funds and partnerships with faith-based [organizations]," Cameron said.
On the flip side, the underlying lawyer that they're talking about seems... obviously wrong, at least in a few details. The MA Refugee Settlement Program funds are, by statute, inclusive of:
Individuals paroled as refugees or asylees under § 212(d)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Which... afaik, includes pretty much every released asylum-seeker.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Seconding Bhopal: I have to remind myself that it's not common knowledge outside of industrial safety or PlainlyDifficult followers, despite being the largest industrial disaster of the century by at least one and possibly two orders of magnitude.
((But then again, there's a lot of people who don't remember much about the Beruit explosion, and it rhymed with a couple other (distant) followers for big industrial accidents.))
Focusing too much on individual incidents can be tricky, though. Colgan Air 3407 has had a massive aviation impact and is part of the reason the commercial pilot shortage got so sharp so fast, but the reason it did and similar or larger incidents didn't. Is that because the action came about as a result of the multiple incidents all together? Or because the action had other, non-incident motivations? Does the distinction make sense in this case? If not, does it make sense in broader cases? Was Skyline Towers a warning for Willow Island, or were they two different aspects of a same underlying problem? Was Hyatt Regency uniquely dangerous, or just unusually obvious?
gattsuru
1yr ago
To be fair, there is a steelman where Kaepernick's problems at least were partially downstream of politician opposition, and that these problems would be very hard to catch. And while Kaepernick's far from the most severe or most overt case, it still had the President of the United States wink-and-nodding about how much political support for the next stadium 'gratitude' an team owner would get for firing him.
To be a little less fair, FIRE keeps finding people to interview who say "until Goodell mentions Kaepernick by name in apology, I feel like he has violated the spirit of the first amendment in an egregious way" without even trying to square that circle, or apply that same argument or broader respect for the "spirit" of the first amendment to nearly any other comparable case.
This rhymes a bit to me with the Just Impact criticism (previous discussion here). It's not that there's something wrong with a utilitarian calculus that suggests making this the centerpiece of their big ad campaign is a way to buy "credibility on the left as a hedge against getting painted as secret Republicans", to borrow from JTarrou, and hopefully FIRE's ad campaign isn't 200 million USD. If it doesn't compromise your underlying principles, that could improve your absolute impact, or even the specific aspects that your original campaigns promised to focus on.
On the flip side... there's already people betting on how long it lasts before we find out that those principles weren't as universal, or at least as universally-applicable as they seemed.
gattsuru
1yr ago
DACA is irrelevant in a conversation about how many illegal immigrants cross the southern border in a given year, short of some laughably tenuous argument about making a 'favorable environment.'
DACA -- a program that prohibits removal and supplies work permits for those covered -- has a "laughably tenuous" connection to how many undocumented immigrants cross the southern border?
He built the wall which was his signature campaign promise on immigration.
Trump threatened a government shutdown for 5 billion, got 1.6 billion with a ton of caveats, and then it and a bunch of other attempts got shot down in court (tbf, in the case of the emergency order, probably correctly).
ICE was kicking in the doors of illegal immigrants who hadn't committed crimes (aside from being in the country illegally) at a higher rate.
If you mean arresting and deporting immigrants without other convictions, with the kicking in doors figuratively, yes. (I'm not able to find statistics on ICE's actual no-knock arrests, and because ICE's warrants explicitly don't allow them to break into buildings, I don't know that they happen enough to be meaningful.)
He slashed the number of refugees accepted.
Fair, albeit this seems a real small deal from someone dismissing DACA, especially given the statutory limitations for the refugee program.
Your link itself says the children were being released to relatives or sponsors.
And then it carefully glosses over the adults. The El Paso bus stop ones don't even really bother with that fig leaf.
The fact that you're desperately trying to find some equivalence here to convince me that I'm being unfair in calling this out...bah. I'm done.
My point isn't to compare equivalence between these programs; my point is that no one cared about it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm personally not a fan of stylistic quotations, outside of pieces that are wholly and explicitly fictional. There's a lot of opportunity to mislead, even without intent to do so.
But if you absolutely must:
-
Use clearly fake names. In cryptography situations, Alice and Bob and Charlie and Dick have been used historically, but your context may have other preferred solutions. Writers sometimes go with Tom, especially when making puns.
-
The same piece must use a genuine quote, from a genuine person, which is relevant, and which uses the conventions for your dialect (eg, "This is an American real quote," said gattsuru, while 'This is a British real quote,' said gattsuru later.)
-
If in a piece for general-purpose consumption, or which you reasonably expect to be referenced in the longer-term, explicitly state that the conversation is hypothetical or a satire.
-
In AP/American environments, use single quotes (eg: 'This is a fake statement,' said Alice).
-
In UK/Britpack environments, use a non-standard character (eg: /This is a fake statement,/ said Bob.).
Unfortunately, there are few non-standard characters on the standard keyboard which do not have overloaded meanings, especially in Markdown contexts.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Do you have a source for that?
It's mentioned in the link (under the header "Long-distance relationships, debt and voting for Donald Trump top list of relationship deal breakers"), but a more specific Pew Poll is here, some previous discussion here.
There's certainly the possibility of these people having bunches of Surely exceptions, but I'm... pretty skeptical. I realize that my environment (furry, LGBT or adjacent) isn't going to be hugely representative, but I've also seen a lot of normie relationship blowups.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Whats interesting is that the streamer in question distinct "politics" from "human rights", she gives a pretty weak example with Roe V Wade. However i think the distinction between "politics" and "human rights" is shaky to begin with. No one really agrees on what human rights even are, per her roe example, gun control (constitutional arguably, but still) being another one, & there are still societies/people that arent accepting of LGBT although thats been on the decline over some decades. My guess is she is taking this to mean, "you probably shouldnt date a nazi", which is perfectly fine.
... so, I'm going to take an example that isn't dating:
This is, to skip the chase, a left-leaning site. It is not a tremendous surprise. I don't have access to the internal politics forum that I'm sure sparked this announcement. I'm unsure if they have, or ever will need to have, actual application of this rule -- the place was left-leaning enough a decade ago that the against-the-grain political posters were nicknamed zebras (for getting run down and eaten), and I doubt it's gotten more varied since. To the extent I look at all, it's because the Nobilis/Chuubo's stuff only really gets posted there.
But it's a useful example of a thread I've seen a lot. You criticize that "no one really agrees on what human rights even are", but that misses the point entirely: 'human rights', here, doesn't mean some legalistic or dictionary sense. It means matters so important that the writer is not willing to accept that their edge cases are up for discussion. It doesn't matter whether that's actually present as a descriptive sense: a lot of this class of 'human rights' are not actually protected at all, or may be not especially popular in the broader world (and, conversely, many things are not 'human rights' even if they're explicitly covered by the US Constitution and UN and large majorities in the speaker's country). It's a normative analysis for that specific context: these are axioms that can not and should not be debated in this situation. If the matter comes up, agreeing to disagree isn't acceptable.
The breadth of this application is not something universal, or probably even the majority of progressive spaces. Nor, for that matter, is it something that only shows up in progressive spaces (nor do you have to go into Deep Religious Evangelical SoCon ones to see right-wing variants: this twitter convo has three more open-minded rat-sphere-adjacent people talking, but the gut reaction is still pretty close to the same even if the expression is more amicable).
gattsuru
1yr ago
The only silver lining is that sooner or later, the harassment mob will probably run up against breaking an actual law in such a legible way as to fully suffer the consequences in court (I'm not a lawyer, but tortious interference probably fits the bill here).
One of the problems for everyone involved in this trash fire is that these sort of lawsuits are incredibly impractical. There is no federal small claims court, finding an actual bad actor to identify is a mess, and the wheels of justice grind slow and not particularly fine. CDA230 makes that worse because a lot of people the identifiable people can whitewash bad actions of third parties, but there's similar issues for print and paper that CDA230 doesn't cover.
No one's going to successfully bring a lawsuit, here, for the same reasons that the lawsuits aimed at KF were only going to drain coffers rather than actually bring down the site or even harm the actual bad actors rather than the guy hosting and encouraging them. No one's bringing state charges against SWATters on either side, or the people taking photos through rando's windows, and that's part of why this whole mess could get so amazingly bad.
Well, the way I see it, there is probably nothing that can be done unless fundamental internet services are regulated as common carriers.
This reflects a really bad understanding of common carrier rules. Shipping -- one of the classical common carriers -- has already banned firearms parts shipments; the USPS bans the shipment of handguns. For rails, Amtrak prohibits firearms in checked bags from 2001-2009, only accepting them again after congressional action.
Common carrier rules for the purposes of telecommunications are merely that :
If you heard the sound of a vast abyss of judicial interpretation with the words "unjust or unreasonable", you're not wrong. There are few reasonable definitions that couldn't fit KF!
I think it depends pretty heavily on what you're looking for. It's not too hard to get some moderately decent cheesecake or beefcake out of StableDiffusion1.4 even using prompts that don't aim for nudity or even a specifically gender. These aren't quite Hun-level, for a very (uh, mostly androphillic) good pin-up artist, but then again most furry artists aren't Hun-level. There are some problems here, but they're things like species or genital configurations that are probably outside of the training dataset or don't have a lot of variety in the training dataset. Which doesn't make that an easy problem -- it's quite possible the entire internet doesn't have sufficient training data for some things people want -- but it's at least an almost certainly solvable one.
Compositionality is harder, and relevant for more people. Scott's won a bet for some solutions for it, but a lot of people are going to be looking for something more than "two people having sex", or even "<color> <animal-person> screwing <color> <animal-person> in <orifice>". This is SFW (as much as a few Donald-Duck-esque animal-people can be), but I'm hard-pressed to summarize it in a short enough phrase for current engines to even tokenize it successfully into its attention span, and it's not like there's a shortage of (porn!) content from the same artist with similar or greater complexity.
And some stuff is really hard to write out for any non-human reader. Furfragged's probably an extreme case: the content isn't very complex to mimic (ie, mostly pretty vanilla, if exhibitionist, gay or straight sex), and the overarcing concept of 'orientation play' is a common enough kink that several big name gay sites focus on it (although straight4'pay' less so), but it's hard to actually develop a prompt that can even get the least-compositionality-dependent variants out. "Straight fox guy sucks a deer dude" is... not something that I'd expect to be coherent to AI. Well before that level of contradiction, even things like 'knot' and 'sheath' have a lot of space for confusion.
Beyond even that, it's not clear how the extant process will work for larger series pieces. There's a reason story-heavy pieces like those from Meesh, Nanoff, Braeburned, SigmaX, Ruiaidri, or Roanoak get a lot of attention, even if the story isn't anything exceptionally deep. It's not that tools like SD can't just write out a full comic or struggles with dialogue; just getting obviously samish-characters from several different perspectives is difficult, even with textual_inversion. And the attention limit remains a problem, and even if a solvable one is something that requires significant structural changes.
I think these programs will become useful tools for some artists in combination with their normal workflow, and some non-artists may use them for some simple pieces where these constraints don't show up, but there are some hard limitations that may not be as readily solved as just throwing more parameters or stronger language models in.
More options
Context Copy link