gattsuru
11mo ago
While I am and have been generally skeptical for the strong version of the 2020 vote fraud argument:
There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media.
McCrae Dowless was.
gattsuru
11mo ago
For a more concrete example of a step in that path:
I concur in the Court’s judgment and join its opinion in full. I write separately (and I’ll confess this is a little unusual) simply to pull back the curtain on the process by which I thought through one of the issues in this case—and using my own experience here as backdrop, to make a modest proposal regarding courts’ interpretations of the words and phrases used in legal instruments.
Here’s the proposal, which I suspect many will reflexively condemn as heresy, but which I promise to unpack if given the chance: Those, like me, who believe that “ordinary meaning” is the foundational rule for the evaluation of legal texts should consider—consider—whether and how AI-powered large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude might—might—inform the interpretive analysis.
There, having thought the unthinkable, I’ve said the unsayable.
It's controversial, even the judge's own analysis, and a far way from being the sole or primary controlling factor in most cases, but it demonstrates the sort of Deep Problems that can arise when problems (eg the adversarial potential) are overlooked.
gattsuru
1yr ago
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's definitely showing up pretty often in those adjacent spheres like covers, advertising, and illustrations, especially among the level of self-published writer that previously would have gone with pretty minimalist art, or where artist availability was never great, or where business models made it appealing. Places like RoyalRoad it's getting increasingly difficult to tell, and some of the episodic work will start with aigen and move to commissioned art later that it gets tricky to highlight specific examples.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Ooof. That's unfortunate. Wouldn't be the first time for them to have glorified reseller stuff, but that level of issue in pretty mainstream hardware is a real big downer.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Grainger and Fasternal have some overlap with McMaster-Carr, though there are some areas that their stock focuses are different that can be relevant.
Some mechanics would argue Snap-on as a tool-specific version, though I'm... not really skilled enough with any Snap-on tools I've used to recognize the differences well.
DigiKey and Mouser (and to a lesser extent Jameco and Arrow) would be the centralized spots for electronics components, where if you needed one chip even if it's been out of production for five years and absolutely positively can't accept a clone or a fake, they'll work for you, and it's still a major marketing argument. That said, while they still have pretty good catalogues and stocks, the combination of 'market' sellers and occasional parts contamination mean you have to do more filtering now than pre-COVID. For small orders, they can actually make sense to work with, since calling up Molex or STM directly and trying to order five can end up pretty similar in cost, and other shops just won't talk with you for less than 1k parts, but as you start trying to go to mass production getting a real connection to the underlying business for major parts becomes more important.
For network/IT, fs.com will cover most stuff, and make your wallet wince at the same time. Their network switches aren't awfully overpriced for next-day delivery where your office might struggle with the local Best Buy crap, but fiber equipment is not cheap and if you need it tomorrow it'll be really not cheap. The cameras are actually good for the price priced that I'm a little skeptical of their claimed NDAA compliance, though.
For user electronics cables, monoprice is the best I'm aware of. They've had a few supply chain fuckups, but especially as power-over-usb goes to higher and higher wattages, they're gonna be increasingly important.
For odd electronics adapters, big choice is StarTech. They're not the only people with USB-serial adapters (second place: TrendNet TU-S9s) I'll trust in safety-of-life situations, where a lot of amazon-grade or even Microcenter-grade ones will work kinda until they need to be reset, but StarTech's like this for everything they make, and they make weird stuff. That said, you do have to be careful, because they will retire products with few users, and then you're really up shit creek without a paddle -- I know the underlying (I think Silex?) driver issue that caused this to die off, but I know of three separate businesses that had to scramble because of it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Current McMaster-Carr will sometimes let you get away with better shipping costs (<10 USD for envelope-weight packages), although the prices for the products themselves are still extremely high compared to the typical vendor (expect 3x on common-use parts, and up to 20x for weird stuff). But they'll have it in stock, and it'll be on your doorstop tomorrow, short of a literal disaster.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I would strongly encourage you to define what 'official figure' means, before making that bet. An 'excess deaths' measurement like used after Maria will give drastically higher results than those marked as storm-related by a coroner.
Hm.
In terms of total throughput and market velocity, there's not a lot of good formal metrics, and a combination of small events (eg, the owner of FurAffinity recently passed away), normal cyclical behavior (the start of college/end of grant season tends to slow the markets down a bit), and weird stuff (a bunch of Brazilian artists were on Twitter and have fled, SF tech sector is being more aware of their finances) make the few informal ones I do have insight on kinda unreliable. My gut feeling's that total commissions are not hugely far from historic trends either up or down, but I don't know that I'd notice a 25% change.
At the very least, I have to scroll pretty far down the list of furry artists I know before any are struggling to fill commission slots, and their prices haven't had to go down much if at all. Mainstream (fan)artists look similar at first glance, but I'll admit I've got a much more shallow reference pool there. Neither furry nor anime conventions have been struggling to get visitors or sellers; weirdest thing there has mostly been a (perceived?) increase in group booth buys and (in anime spaces) reseller booths.
Online direct sales have had a few payment processor crisises, mostly over fees. Nothing too noteworthy. I don’t have good metrics on Patreon-style subscription or Kickstarter-style funding, outside of new rules on outre content, so no real clue how businesses focused there have gone.
There's a lot of talk about a slump in mainstream 'gallery' art, and that is something artists in my circles are at least tense about. That said, I don't really interact with even the more consumerist side of that market, and I don't think the market pressures there are the same as in any space I do maneuver (even KendricTonn-style stuff, cw: artistic human nudes, sells a different way, though his experience going from galleria artist to social media artist is increasingly common). And I do think there's been a small slump among 'creative filler' sort of stuff, like in-ttrpg illustrations or logo and photography work, either in favor of aigen or in favor of minimalism.
Aigen remains controversial. Most furry-specific reputable sites (FurAffinity, Weasyl, SoFurry) ban it; those that allow it tend to be general-purpose or allow even more controversial stuff, most conventions ban it or require labeling, and some segments of the conventional market are working toward blacklists. Mainstream sites permit it more, but haven't found a good solution to the spam problem: DeviantArt and ArtStation aren't as slop as Facebook, but it's still got a lot of stuff that seems more scam than interesting. Pinterest has gone absolutely tango uniform with it, which I'd normally find entertainingly deserved if there weren't occasional honest folk on the site before hand. Community-focused spaces built for AI have handled it better, but in turn it's mostly prompters trading tips there, with (relatively) no one to scam.
Tumblr-style fandom of everything, or at least the part of it I see, is in a bit of a lull. The last big memeable character stuff was Delicious in Dungeon, and while it remains pretty popular, it's also been a while. Not the first major period with no big characters taking the site by storm, but usually end of summer has a couple. Not sure if it's a result of fewer universal bits of culture, or just the big movie drops being unpleasant (eg The Boy and the Heron) or more often sucking. Still a lot of original-like fan art, and fan-other-media. Princess : The Hopeful Crystal Edition has got a few Rule Zero issues in a mixed game, but an extremely strong thematic approach and clever in a few decent ways. The lead writer's an absolute putz, but Eat God is looking pretty fun.
I've heard second-hand that some of the East Coast Ren Faire art environments have been very feast-or-famine, even compared to their normal standards, with a lot of reseller or laser cutter-grade stuff on one hand and fewer artists getting run dry of stock, but no clue how significant, or even if it's more the normal flow as the season crosses.
Not sure if that covers what you're looking for, and I'll admit I've got pretty low confidence for most of this.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Elian Gonzalez has entered the chat. Progressive emphasis on immigration uber allies has long had a lot of exceptions for political utility.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's also an issue, post-Clinch River, where even if you can handle operating regulations changing, the feds can pull a license for any reason or no reason, and it doesn't count as a taking.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It all looks like, "make the NRC better," with no statement anywhere I've seen about increasing or reducing nuclear power anywhere.
Yeah, that's a lot of the more frustrating bit around this stuff. For all that Sam Brinton turned out to be a creep and a kleptomaniac, even beforehand there was a pretty damning problem where Brinton was just another seat-filler anywhere it mattered.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Being able to do partial replacement of fuel rods without shutting down a reactor is critical for bulk weapons-grade fuel enrichment, both to avoid the long cooldown processes from waiting for xenon poisoning to burn off, and because of increasingly bad plutonium isotope ratios caused by continued neutron flux exposure after a critical phase. RBMKs can do that, in ways that most other commonly-used reactor designs can't (while still having enough water pressure to generate industrially useful power, unlike the fully air-cooled Windscale and air-cooled-in-all-but-the-technical-sense X-10). See the Canadian CANDU reactor for a high-pressure variant of enrichment reactor.
While the RBMK wasn't finalized until after the USSR had started scaling back plutonium production, it's very plausible that the administration wanted to keep it as an option, especially as a 'deniable' option. That said, hot-fuel cycling does also have industrial and civil benefits, most directly in being able to provide slightly better uptime even with traditional fuel life cycles. And while some of the necessary compromises (most overtly the minimal secondary containment vessel aka building roof) probably made the disaster worse, most of them didn't make it happen to start with.
On the flip side, it was also much cheaper, and further corners were cut beyond the necessary minima for the design. Chernobyl's best known for the lackluster control rod design, but the extremely high void coefficient was entirely a cost-cutting measure and played a bigger role in the disaster starting. The physical containment being a simple generic building was unavoidable given the requirement for a big refueling crane, but it didn't need to be a glorified warehouse roof. The sketchy SCADA system was a matter of construction and development speed. So on.
If I had to bet, I'd say the costs (and speed of construction) were a bigger driver, but may not have been the only one.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Big reactors are gonna take decade+ time periods to get built no matter what the President says. There's definitely spaces on the margins to have impact -- President Obama's NRC Chair was hilariously bad, in particularly two-faced ways given the early Obama admin's pretense of creating nuclear jobs, and more subtly a number of pinch points in later construction are downstream of the US just not having the sort of large manufacturing capabilities outside of SpaceX. But the way the NRC works as an organization is built to make building big plants hard and slow, and like Ted Cruz or Rick Perry found facing the DOE, there's just not the political will. The EU is in a similar boat, maybe worse: the extent Germany has been taken over by complete anti-nuclear fever-dreams is hard to understate.
Actual small modular reactors... maybe. Even if the paperwork side can't be stripped down that much, the greater simplicity and lowered energy density should make them much faster to actually construct and to deploy. I'm not optimistic about the NRC recognizing pre-fab nuclear plants in my lifetime, but even getting it down to the level of something like an experimental kit aircraft would be a massive win. They won't be anywhere as efficient or showy as the big plants, but the distributed baseload capabilities actually have a lot of secondary benefits.
The tradeoff is that SMRs are a clusterfuck: a lot of the high-profile variants depend on new or novel technologies that may not survive first contact with the enemy, and a lot of the more boring technologies aren't getting enough of a time advantage to really focus resources on them.
I'm not an uncomplicated nuclear booster -- there are some genuine limitations to the technologies, and the early days of the US nuclear power world were Not Great Bob -- but it's been a culture war item for a long time, and it's tough to figure out why it broke down like it did. The Standard explanation for the United States is a combination of environmentalism, anti-war philosophy, and Soviet funding anchored it down among the Left, but these come across a little too pat: you don't see just the Soviet-suckers or hardcore environmentalists doing it, and people willing to buck them on other matters come crawling back to the roost when it comes to nuclear power. Instead, anti-nuclear power activists are bizarrely well-connected in specific ways that others from the same sketchy background aren't; we don't have people who fired rockets at pizza shops getting mid-level political appointments.
((Yet. Growth mindset.))
I think there's a lot of it's an accidents of history thing -- particularly successful anti-nuclear weapons activists pivoting through non-proliferation concerns into general anti-nuke power, Carter getting scared out of his gourd, the early atomic energy groups being particularly untrustworthy and caught in it. But that doesn't really help much.
The obvious counterexample to Lee is Forrest, who pretty happily ducked into the dishonourable behaviors: a slave trader who wanted to expand new markets in human bodies and treated slaves cruelly even by the standards of his time, at least oversaw and possibly participated in slaughter of individually-surrendered soldiers, signed on as an early member of the KKK and was a major leader in the early days, so on. Even in his everyday businesses he was a bit of a grifter, as minor a fault as that is compared to everything else.
The most charitable things one could say is that he somehow wasn't the worst, with some other southerners being even more reprehensible (along with Henry Wirz, I'll highlight Samuel Ferguson earned their express tickets to hell, within a year the KKK repelled even Forrest); his combination of strong tactical skill and minimal strategic emphasis cost the Confederacy no few lasting victories; among his compatriots he initiated squabbles and infighting that nearly got him killed; and when Lee surrendered Forrest eventually stopped.
And, uh, I guess the statue fits.
Lee was noteworthy not just for accepting surrender, but that he waged war with an interest in protecting 'enemy' civilians, not just in not killing them, but ordering (albeit with imperfect compliance) against the pillage and looting that had been common in that era. After the war ended, he returned to facing disagreement by fully above-board political means within the constraints of the surrender he gave. These behaviors were not only uncommon among Confederates, but not universal in the Union: Sherman and Sheridan are best-known for destroying civil infrastructure and private homes as a military tactic, but even post-war you have people like Burbridge who liked collective punishment and weren't particularly choosy about making sure 'fellow guerillas' actually were guilty.
There's certainly still warts, here -- Lee never countermanded the Confederate policies against 'traitors', regardless of race, which included kidnappings and simple murder; his personal philosophical opposition to slavery often fell second to his own economic and social interests; he was still the sort of racist common to his time. And it's definitely still a tragedy, where the man could have made better decisions earlier, or persuaded his commanders of better ways had he the skill to share the certainty he already held, and didn't. I'm a bigger fan of Longstreet, for example, and he gets far too short a shift in both the mainstream and southern-friendly versions.
((The extent Lost Causers defend Forrest or only mention him by his limited post-civil war racial reconciliation efforts is... usually one of the stronger examples against that school; I have no idea where Dunning proper falls on the spectrum for him.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Photoshop has some of the strongest AI tools for digital artists, but there are GIMP plugins for some capabilities that are pretty robust, too if you don't want to get trapped in the Adobe hell.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, the original FMA had some very memorable scenes early on, but it jumped the shark more than Hellsing's OVA did, and that one was supposed to include random nazis.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Not a medic, but a lot depends on what the problem is, and that's likely to be driven by how hard you want it to be to solve.
- Endocrine disorders are the most common problem, usually sex hormone or thyroid related. Both can be diagnosed by interview and confirmed by blood test, but they can sometimes be treated (though not always effectively!), so if future certain infertility is a plot point you probably don't want to go with this.
- Structural problems like damage or scarring to the fallopian tubes or uterus. These are usually detected via a mix of patient history and sono(saline)gram, with harder-to-diagnose cases going to an MRI (when available) or x-ray (when not). CT are sometimes used where other tests give unclear results and MRIs aren't available, but they're disfavored as the contrast agents don't really like going in that area, or don't like coming out afterward, and the radiation exposure is significant.
- Ovary problems, such as cancers or cysts, can be trickier to detect, but they can cause infertility (such as by messing with hormone levels). The normal diagnostic pathway outside for people without fertility concerns typically involves complaints of abdominal pain, followed by blood tests and/or ultrasound, and finally a biopsy to confirm. But if someone's going in with fertility concerns, weird bloodwork, and abdominal pain it's plausible that they'd go to an MRI as a sort of broad-spectrum search, at least in the United States.
- Genetic disorders are usually going to involve blood tests and/or family history work, unless the disorder has clear enough symptoms to start from there.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, Sweeny Todding it up would have had a lot of potential.
It's kinda been an undertone for the Harley Quinn stuff, most overly by way of Marilyn Monroe with the Diamonds are A Girl's Best Friend scene in Birds of Prey. And while that series has its ups and downs -- most overtly, the writers keep writing checks for melee combat that the fight choreographers can't cash; more subtly, Quinn herself often dives from 'funny' to 'obnoxious' by an hour in -- the dichotomy between someone who treating life like a video game and the actually-gorey violence in something like Suicide Squad does work and make her disquieting even when on the side of the 'heroes'.
But apparently not what they were aiming for here.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'll add that 'full value of home and land' isn't the cap for a title insurance payout; depending on the contract, certain types of breach (most notoriously unpermitted work, but also certain liens that attach to properties) can exceed the value of some homes or business locations.
Asheville Regional's PPA is for the airport, I think Musk is more complaining about some NOTAM, which is far bigger a deal and covers a lot bigger area. There's nothing listed as a TFR right now, but there was this weirdness until earlier today. It's not marked as a TFR -- they start with some variant of no pilot may operate (unless), cfe this VIP one from Biden flying through a couple days ago -- but it requires everyone to communicate to and obey a specific emergency center channel that could tell people to fuck off or just be overwhelmed.
EDIT: I'll add that it's possible there was no management-level decisions for Buttigieg to be aware of, for the specific problems Musk was highlighting; radio calls and management are rough in the best of circumstances, and no one in this field is gonna be NY TRACON-tier.
... and that this is in many ways a much worse thing. Public officials dealing with an emergency can't treat complaints like they're political conspiracy theories, not because such foul play is unimaginable -- I can give examples! -- but because the alternative is imaginable. Disasters are by definition the breakdown of normal systems, with lives on the line dependent on our ability to respond to those gaps.
How is airspace usually regulated?
I am not a pilot, but a rough overview...
Normal operations fall under various types of airspace classifications: Class A (18000-60000 foot above sea level), Class B - D (funnels of airspace near various sizes of towered airports), Class E (between 1200 foot above ground level and 18000 foot above sea level, with some exceptions not relevant here, and above 60,000 foot above sea level), and Class G or unclassed airspace (generally under 1200 foot above ground level, with some exceptions).
Class A-D, you are under the direct control of a towered airport or other air traffic controller, rarely more than one. Class E means you can be under air traffic control for instrument flight rules, or you can operate in visual flight rules and you're allowed to fly whatever without radio traffic (though insurance companies will frown on this). Class E airspace over 10000 foot above sea level requires ADS-B out, and in practice it's pretty hard to operate without it, but people do still run below without ADS-B out.
Rules for drones are complicated, and a lot of the whole mess about Class G is the FAA trying to control where they can go and when.
Then you have various special airspaces, geographically (and sometimes temporally) specific stuff, with various constraints on entry. Restricted areas (and warning areas) have dangerous exercises going on at some times: you're pretty much never allowed in them when active unless you're working with the US military, and going in can get you in trouble with the feds in a way that results in pulling your pilot's license. Prohibited areas are like that, but they're always active, and you'll probably go to jail if you break one. MOAs are in the same realm, but it's not technically illegal to enter while flying visual flight rules, just a really bad idea.
Then you have Special Air Traffic Rules and Special Flight Rules Areas. These are all unique one-offs with their own special constraints, which can be as minor as having to call someone ahead of time before flying certain altitudes or locations, or as serious as needing a police officer with a loaded gun pointed at your pilot while you fly (the DC SFRA is a mess). Busting these can and does result in a military response: I know a pilot who's gotten the nickname 'takedown' because the SATR contact actually lost his tail number, and he ended up pulled over by a Blackhack and sprawled onto the tarmac.
Lastly, you have Temporary Flight Restrictions. These are issued rules for temporary limits in an area. They're fairly common and can happen for ground events (every Presidential visit, and even major sports games will have its own NOTAM), or they can happen because of high disaster response. Some TFRs are blanket prohibitions (you are not flying at low altitude near the President), but others will simply require calling ahead, and others still will restrict flights to certain groups.
In this case, there are very clearly TFRs specific to several disaster areas,
What would happen if all restrictions were lifted?
All restrictions being lifted wouldn't happen. The FAA would spontaneously explode if you even considered touching most MOAs, Class A-C airspace is genuinely like that for a reason, and the SATRs are statutory. But most air space in the mountains are Class E and Class G. They're not outside of FAA control, but you can normally wildcat all you want in them.
There might be a slightly increased risk of midair collision, and those do happen, both drone-aircraft and aircraft-aircraft. Crowded areas with unprofessional pilots are especially dangerous, and there was a recent Oshkosh incident that's made it more prevalent in a lot of minds. On the gripping hand, a lot of the FAA's concern on drones, the FAA vastly overstates a lot of the risk for unintentional incidents. You just shouldn't be that low in a fixed-wing aircraft unless you're about to land, and helicopters aren't doing the sort of movement that makes a drone-on-fixed-wing aircraft collision so dangerous.
((And also shouldn't be flying that low, although many helicopter pilots are daredevils.))
Fixed-wing on fixed-wing, near misses are more common than I'd like. ADS-B gives more warning if it's equipped, but especially near busy airports you also get a ton of false positives (from aircraft on ground), and outside of ADS-B you're dependent on the human eyeball to spot a thirty-foot object that might be closing distance at >200 knots combined speed, while you're in a vehicle with giant blind spots (like 'everything above you' or 'everything below you', cfe Aeromexico 498). The claimed thirty near misses isn't as serious as it sounds -- Oshkosh doesn't even count them at this point -- but a mid-sized flight school would be very upset to see that many in a month and not happy to see that many in six months, and not ever near-miss is gonna be reported.
How hard is it to operate in the mountains (especially takeoff and landing)?
Fixed wing, pretty rough. The Appalachias aren't that high, so you don't have the oxygen problems that the west coast mountains do, but they're messy areas to fly in from an updraft and thermal perspective, and there's a lot of space where you don't really have any way to handle an in-flight emergency. That's not helped by the lack of serious airports around and the roughness of terrain -- if you're not at 10k ASL, for a lot of western North Carolina your emergency response is gonna be to kiss your ass goodbye.
Helicopters have it a little better, but they tradeoff easier landing against much lower sustain.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a funny thread not long ago you may have missed.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Uh... yeah, that seems like a handful.
It's easier than you'd think, it's just really annoying to make a big one. If you're doing small stuff (ie less than 1ftx1ft) you can just throw a bit of pegboard over a sealed (most tutorials will say glue or caulk, but camper mounting tape is amazing effective) wooden box with a hole in the side for a shop vac to plug in, and then just some aluminum angle iron into two squares for the buck. Find a used toaster oven, mark it not-for-food, and the hard part is finding decent PETG without having to ship it all in.
Scale up and you either end up drilling a ton of holes by hand or by CNC machine or buying some (often expensive) specialty boards, you need some sort of guide so the buck doesn't misalign, and it starts making more sense to build an 'oven' for uniform heating and that is miserable.
In addition to the various faithless elector attempts on 2016, I'll point to the 1960 Hawaii snafu, and where overturning the first set of validly-issued electors (... by unanimous consent as argued by one Presidential Candidate in his role as Vice President) was accepted.
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