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gattsuru


				

				

				
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gattsuru


				
				
				

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

					

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User ID: 94

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The Haaretz list includes literally zero infants (or children under the age of 4). It includes one child of four years old, two five-year-olds, two six-year-olds, an eight-year-old, one 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, four 12-year-olds, two 13-year-olds, two 14-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, and four 17-year-olds.

There is a filter between civilian, police, soldier, and rescue services. There's a few people listed as civilians with a military rank (one Captain, three Master Sgt., a Cpl., two Sergeant Maj.), and one person marked without a rank but as a Lone Soldier (IDF member without family in the area). Looking through external sources, some of these look to be retired or off-duty, but I can't tell for the remainder.

Of the 1131 names (as of 11/5), 400 have no age listed. Most of those are probably not young children. Most.

There's some possible discussion to be had with someone who wants to engage seriously with the matter, and some deeper analysis available. I just don't see the point doing so with someone that's not taking photographic evidence.

Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly, why do you believe that?

I think there are actually a pretty sizable number of reasons to suspect that dead children will be identified slower (they won't be in many photo databases, are less likely to have parents or siblings in other cities, may not be fully set up within any database given Kibbitz politics, and in extreme cases bones are easier to damage and dental records are less useful or present), and once identified that they are less likely to have their names released (there are broad norms not just in Israel against sharing the identities of deceased minors without parental permission, in many).

Meanwhile, there are absolutely zero under-3-year-olds (and only one 4-year-old), while there is photographic evidence that I am decidedly not going to link to of multiple dead <1-year-olds.

There are more complex and esoteric issues, but these are the ones that should have been pretty obvious to anyone looking at the data with even a passing familiarity with the situation. Meanwhile, groups such as the lqgist twitter account you link don't bother even to spell out that half of the dataset is missing entirely or missing names.

The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.

Someone with any degree of insight might ponder if it would be the slightest bit strange for that number to not have gone up across three weeks, even as the count of casualties on Oct 7 nearly doubled. Might think just the slightest about if there's something of relevance there

Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.

And there's the punchline.

That is why I'm not going into any more serious analysis of the casualty counts, or comparing to other sources than haaretz. You don't care, and now you've said you don't care. The argument is nothing more than a soldier.

There are discussions I could present on the broader topic you want to make your point -- how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts? What responsibility does Israel have for insufficiently vetting strikes to minimize civilian harm, and Hamas for collocating military caches with civilian infrastructure or refuges? How many, if any, casualties can or should we accept for a valid military objective, and where and who does 'valid' military objectives come from? Where is the breakdown for civilian combatant casualties, and where does the line between combatant self-defense, police or pseudo-military, and terrorism fall? (How do you measure non-combat civilian casualties, which Israel has probably caused more of?)

But there's not really much point if you're not engaging with the most wildly concrete components with any degree of even-handed analysis. And you, specifically, have been following this long enough and in enough detail that I know a lot of the reasons you should be skeptical aren't a surprise.

For comments, after you've submitted a comment, click the "..." button to the right of "Delete", and then click "Mark 18+".

For posts, there's a selectable box under the main text box, between "Notify Followers" and "Draft". I believe Posts can similarly be marked 18+ after-publication from the "..." menu.

Yeah, it's more explicit on her site. The taboo survey had many fewer responses (around 1300 to the around 30,000 of the kink survey as of Aug 2023) and looks like it was collected more heavily from Aella's readership until later in the process (where she started to sell through Positly). She assumes that a lot of the taboo stuff will converge quickly with fewer data points because it's such a social thing, and that's probably not wrong, and keeping the surveys separate probably does help avoid lower kinks scores because of people feeling shamed about kinks.

But neither is this isolated - just the previous week I saw you call out someone for being the lone poster to defend Ibram Kendi's book.

I don't think that's an accurate summary of this post, which as far as I can remember is the last time I've discussed Kendi.

((To be explicit: I don't think that gemmaem position was shameful, nor do I think she's the only one to promote Kendi before his disgrace.))

Thanks, updated.

YouGov -- which I'll admit I trust slightly less far than I can throw the entire Amazon center they run out of -- did a survey on October 9th holding that only half of the populace knew Hamas intentionally struck civilian centers, and only 32% of 18-29-year-olds did. Even adjusting for these numbers being garbage, they run into the problem where a shocking number of people throughout academia will try to make the same argument explicitly, despite video fucking evidence transmitted by the terrorists.

DeBoer sucking at 'Palestinian' apologia is about as much a surprise.

That tells you all you need to know.

I spelled out that the Fed numbers I was providing did not include inflation at the end of the post above. (I'm also not sure, but I'm 99% confident the SP500 isn't adjusted for inflation either. Yes to be clear, stocks are still going to end up having larger absolute growth.)

The exact look of the chart varies a lot depending on what inflation and housing price index you use, and some of them will show drops around the 2008 and 1979 (sometimes 1989), but even those will be less volatile than the stock market, unsurprisingly, and that's what I'm pointing toward.

Which is simultaneously obvious and kinda weird! Housing prices are not obviously goods like an opera or string quartet that should be this subject to the Baumol effect, and while land values (and regulatory overhead) are part of the difference in value, you can at least imagine some counterfactual world where a flood of cheap housing brought the average house price lower even if some individual local markets still skyrocketed as they have in our world.

My claim is less that housing prices have been the Single Best Return On Investment, and more that they're just very consistently rising.

Separately, I don't think the St Louis Fed's residential property price index is really an apples-to-apples comparison to stock investments or what I'm motioning around, but their documentation on what data means exactly is pretty painful. This measure is probably closer, but because it's an average of sale values rather than of all values some of the drop in 2008 is probably about decreasing velocity at the top of the market, and it does hide some of the inflation-related 'real' value drops.

Zoophilia is not that common a paraphilia, practicing zoophilia even less, removed from contexts like degradation or zoosadism yet rarer still, and female non-degradation-focused zoophiles even more uncommon.

((I don't recommend using Bad Dragon as a metric, since regardless of Varka's issues the median Bad Dragon sale or advertisement revolves around the fantasy of a sapient and often bipedal partner, but a) the median customer has or had a dick, and b) an overwhelmingly male ratio applies to self-reports among actual-bestialists, too.))

It's just more visible, in the sense that someone getting arrested and/or publicly shamed for animal abuse (whether in any remotely less-violent way, or as the degradation or animal-sadism sense that very few incels would want) shows up in the news for incels to talk about, where "woman with kink for ugly/submissive/pathetic men" doesn't in any visible or identifiable way. But the later is more common than you'd think; if more generally spaced among written fiction than visual pornography.

And, of course, the broader "average-looking beta provider" is far better off, even before considering all of the ethical and pragmatic problems with actual animal abuse.

((Peter Singer's impact on the Wider EA Community isn't the worst thing that hit the tumblr ratsphere, but that I know this stuff is definitely not a benefit.))

And a guardedly-optimistic summary from Derek Lowe.

Not sure what's going on at that level. Most people seem convinced that the South Korean lab must be sending out samples for testing, or at least talking in person with MIT-level experts, but outside of saying that it's planned I've not seen much. The sorta people who have big XRD toolkits don't tend to spend too much time speculating on twitter, though.

I'd expect a lot of that chessboard depends on how heavily you're committed to the bit. If it just needs to look right from the top but you want the grain patterns to look intact, that's a great place to rent some time on a cnc to make an inlay or even just use a bunch of veneer or burl and a sharp exacto knife. Would still require a lot of chisel or marking knife work to get those precise corner angles, but it'd save you a ton of material and a lot of really finicky jigsaw work or sanding.

Your cite is from this discussion, discussing philosophy during 1983 by doctors, written in 1996 from interviews in 1992-1995. The same piece also describes out, from the exact same time period (though a different doctor):

Moss: I drew that line with a thick felt tip, and I thought: My house is inside the line. So what's going to happen? Are they going to put barbed wire around this line? Are they going to have a cordon sanitaire? See, at this point, we didn't know how infectious the disease was. And one thing that starts happening in 1983 is major infectious disease paranoia: Are we all going to get it? Is everybody going to get it?

Now, if it was as infectious as hepatitis B, then 5 to 10 percent of the medical staff would have died of AIDS, because that's the infection rate of hepatitis B. We didn't know it was only transmitted sexually and by blood. It could have been multiply transmitted. Everybody could have gotten it. For all we knew, the entire population of San Francisco could have been infected, or could have been threatened.

Now, if that had been true, then they would have put that fence around the Castro. They would have razed a six-block area around it, and left the gays inside it.

Hughes: In the late twentieth century, they would have done that?

Do you know about Ebola virus and Marburg virus? There are viruses that kill everybody. Now, suppose it [the infectious agent] is airborne, and you can get it by walking through the Castro. Now, how do you think people would have taken that?

Hughes: Well, there was a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Oleske on the casual household transmission of AIDS, which apparently caused a real ruckus.

Moss: Well, there were many ruckuses. There's a two-year period in 1983 and '84 when nobody knows what's happening, and the concern level has risen very high. And that's when this fear of stigmatization is going on. It makes everybody very paranoid indeed, because who knows who's getting it, and who knows what the political consequence will be? What if it really is like pneumatic plague, where you breathe on people and they get it? Or TB [tuberculosis]? We didn't know whether that was the case. Nobody knew that. And it was a reasonable speculation that it could be at least as infectious as hepatitis B, and that would have been really bad.

So paranoia was very high, and I'm drawing this line [around the Castro], and I'm having paranoid fantasies about what might happen as a result of this line. Pat Norman had the same reaction. She gets scapegoated for this, but lots of people were having the same reaction: Wait a minute. I don't want to hear this. I'm just going to quietly leave town now, before you publish it.

The interview references Oleske, but another certain famous asshole had outsized influence.

But I think it is also responsible partly for degree of dissatisfaction. How many people in a social context where transition wasn’t an option, would have been happier not transitioning than people not transitioning in a social context where it is an option?

It's hard to long for the solely-imagined, but there were a lot of people longing for the solely-imagined into the mid-90s and early-00s, and I only start there because that's where I first ran into it. That's actually driven a lot of art and transhumanist trans stuff, because magical or magic-science explanations for gender swapping predate Ranma 1/2 or Heinlein by decades. And while having it only be the realm of magic makes it more unreachable, it also hides a lot of the costs and tradeoffs: Ranma 1/2 fans could envision transition where the only serious ramifications were some social impacts, your rival hitting on you, and maybe some lost muscle strength, without questions like what surgical or even hormonal intervention might involve.

To be fair, there's been a number of "but they really did <insert minor sin here>", usually related to drugs, alcohol, or fleeing from the police. There were some conservatives and even social conservatives that handled the Arbery shooting with grace or at least recognizing uncertainty, but at the very least there were some pretty dedicated bad trolls pretending to be socons.

I'm skeptical that this particular case has the necessary ambiguity or secondary valence to this those points, though.

While big tech puts a lot of effort into defeating bots, it does cost money for dev time and is a maintenance burden, so they only do in areas it's worth preventing bots, e.g. account creation and posting of content. Most top 100 websites can be trivially scraped at within-10x-of-human-activity intensities, because they already have tens of millions of users doing that, so preventing read-only bots at that scale doesn't meaningfully affect load.

That's fascinating to hear.

I imagine fast full-text search or embedding-based search would work fine here. I'm pretty sure there are open-source tools for both 'save every text you look at and search it' that are janky, as well as startups working on making a good UI for it.

Full-text search has a lot of applicable tooling, if you aren't just willing to learn grep (which, tbf...). Embeddings... there's a lot of image archivers that can (try to) identify and tag people (eg nextcloud here), and general objects it's probably possible to replace them with yolo models, but I haven't found much that's a great way to actually find stuff. And other spaces like automated transcription's always a little tricky.

Also, eevee was doing "See, I actually have a 64-bit kernel, but a 32-bit userspace", which ... it'd take a ton of effort to seamlessly support every quirky configuration people can come up with, so most devs don't, which is correctly prioritized imo. Again, with the database, they didn't use the supported configuration of 'give it root' and did some permission thing.

That's somewhat fair, although more so for the mixed-bit size than for giving root to random software (and even for the mixed-bit-size problem, it's a little discouraging that "we don't support 32-bit" or "here's this vital extension" isn't in the documentation). And I can certainly understand and empathize the problems with end-users wanting support across ridiculous breadths of deployment environment: I've submitted code to fix one-off problems that likely only applied to small circumstances like mine, and I can understand when they were accepted or rejected.

But I don't think eevee's issues were, and my issues are generally not, about one piece of software having a problem in one environment. A sizable portion of eevee's problems were less about the specialized failure modes, and more that even the canonical install paths aren't really complete (or are Docker, or more recently flatpak has started showing up for no goddamn reason). At the time of writing, Discourse did not say install Docker or else. It had a pretty long installation guide! But it did not (even at the time of eevee's writing; it was deleted the day after that post) actually cover things like 'what are actually the dependencies', rather than the minimum number of apt-get calls to get it to build on the author's machine.

That's not just the fault of the Discourse designers. The problem's that development in general (nuGet and maven have encouraged the exact same bad habits!), but especially web development, no longer has and often does not expect anyone to have the ability to seriously inspect dependencies, even as dependency trees have expanded. If you are very careful, you might be able to get your application to list all of its immediate dependencies (no one did for Discourse, hence the sidekiq bit, so it's a little bit Discourse's fault), in terms of full application-level dependencies. But those will have their own dependencies (or extensions, or modules, or packages, yada yada), which you might be able to get a list of what's currently installed. And in increasing situations, you'd have to dance down another level from that.

Docker bypasses this by pulling from specific installation images in order and just not caring if something else gets pulled along by accident -- which, hey, I'd be fine with on small scales. But then it installs a copy for each container. Which does solve dependency hell, since there's now one dependency install per application... at the cost of making it increasingly easy to have dozens of (oft-outdated) versions of common dependencies.

This would be a little annoying if it were just a problem during install, but maintenance and updating tends to be where it goes really bad. I've had multiple GitLab instances -- even with the 'recommended' omnibus! -- where upgrading just exploded because one version somewhere was out of whack. NextCloud just had a (nontrivial!) bug related to php versioning support. Even with grav, which is supposed to about as simple as it gets, I've still seen it go tango uniform because of a dependency versioning problem the developer was unaware of.

3% extra for etsy seems reasonable? Maybe not reasonable in the sense of 'how the economy should be', but reasonable in the sense that they have to address regulatory complexity, develop their software, deal with payments issues, prevent fraud... patio11's writing might be related

Patio11's writing is fantastic, but Patio11 also works for Stripe, which offers (listed) sales cuts around ~3% total, and hasn't taken over the world. Part of that's because Stripe doesn't want to (or, rather, Stripe's banks don't want it to), but another part is that there's not a horde of startups breaking down Stripe's door to take Etsy's lunch and 'only' make a billion USD... nor to provide a valet service and to charge 20%.

I could definitely imagine a vendor that gave the average seller 3%ish worth (or even 10%+/30%+!) of sales in benefits. It's actually not that hard, and that's a pretty reasonable cut in some circumstances. Amazon itself has bizarrely tight economic tolerances -- which doesn't mean it's an efficient marketplace, but winks and nods that direction -- and much of its business-side income comes only from shaking down sellers advertising. It's weird that it's turned into the standard for online sales even as a lot of these groups are doing less and worse, while no competitors are coming up at the extreme low-end, nor that more reputable vendors charging a little more (or providing fewer sales-assist services) haven't come forward. Amazon-style drop-shipping comes across as from what seems like a narrow maxima for a fairly broad sphere, despite being incredibly janky, and I don't think the conventional explanation makes sense.

The punchline to this twitter thread is that the Menards replacement probably ranged from 10 bucks more to 60 bucks less, depending on what popular wheelbarrow eigenrobot was getting and what shipping he used. You can buy end mills on Aliexpress, Etsy, Amazon, and they'll be the exact same end mill from the exact same manufacturer, for radically different prices. Or if you end up having to do currency conversion, Paypal ends of breaking normal expectations there.

So you don't have a hugely price-conscious buyers, nor hugely convenience-based, nor is it obviously trickery (as bad as Amazon or Paypal dark arts get, they're not actually earned that much cash). Is it just being a first-mover? Internet-wide search gone fucky? Scale-and-size? Reputation (if so, how bad would Amazon or ali* have to get)? People just hate having multiple logins?

Design is tightly coupled to revenue, which means companies and the people in them will be properly incentivized to care about it.

Fair. I guess just post Pivot To Video I'm kinda nervous about highly-publicized 'studies' by a corporation with One Weird Trick and a lot of reasons that replication failures wouldn't 'count'.

Not sure what you mean exactly. I also hate javadocs...

I hate javadocs, too, but a) people write them, b) people update them, and c) external users can read them, even if most don't. But I'm more motioning about how they're a documentation technology, in a way that technologies-used-for-documenation (eg, wikis, technical writers) are not, even if they aren't particularly effective. It's weird that this isn't something more common or more widely exploited beyond bad puns about self-documenting code.

To run it at a conversational speed, you need a GPU with 40GB of VRAM, so you're probably looking at dropping $4,500 minimum on just the GPU, and maybe closer to $15,000 -- not exactly available to the masses. Maybe in 4 years. Moore's law is still kicking on the GPU side.

I'm curious what the availability of standalone AI processors might do. You can get, today, a Jetson NGX Orin with 64GB VRAM on a development board around 2K USD. That's not as fast as an nVidia A100 (I think ~30% of the speed for Int8 perf? supposed to be comparable to a V100) and data transfer rates can be obnoxious since everything has to get shoved through an ARM processor, but for non-video applications, it's really hard to beat the price point or the thermal envelope while still having enough VRAM for the big models.

((At least unless nVidia's consumer modules end up surprising everyone, but I expect they're more likely to boost to 24GB/32GB for the mid- and high-end cards for this generation, rather than 32GB/48GB or higher.))

That doesn't make them a good investment today, since 2k worth of standard GPU will also let you do everything else GPUs are used for, but if a killer app comes about there's a lot of ways for people to run at smaller-scales in home environments.

... to an extent, and indeed WoW already did so to a small extent once (Cataclysm rebuilt a lot of the early zones, albeit in most cases for the better). And there's certainly worse: Tabula Rasa got smashed by some back-office NCSoft smuckery (literally faking a resignation e-mail while the guy was in space), and attempts at a private server are... not great.

On the other hand, some leaks of City of Heroes lead to the game having a small but lively rogue server community.

On the gripping hand, "mega corporation that can alter or delete it by one click of some minimum wage employee" is a surprisingly wide net. Don't get me wrong -- I do much prefer the private server models of MineCraft or ARK, of ripping every eBook through Calibre rather than waiting for Amazon to revise or retract it, of running *nix for personal computers rather than letting Microsoft have all my data backed up on the Cloud, so on -- but I would caution doing this doesn't actually get you that much protection. If Microsoft decides to fuck over Minecraft's authentication model again, it doesn't get easier to legally play (including old versions!). Buying physical media doesn't mean it has what was written on the box. And going private for multiplayer just changes the threat model rather than eliminates it: my last big MineCraft server lasted about three months before player interest dropped too low to justify the maintainer keeping it alive; my last ARK one restarted just yesterday due to save file corruption and player interest in changing maps.

Yeah, of the two I've been more impressed by 1Password's model and record. If your use case makes online a requirement, it's probably better than self-hosted file transfer, if you trust 1Password.

Look at behaviors - e.g. the number of 30-40 yr old Japanese who are virgins and have never been in a relationship.

This is an interesting measure, and a growing one (at least where virginity = het virgin), but I don't think it gives the numbers you'd need -- the numbers only jumped six and four percent for women and men respectively from 1987 to 2015. I've not seen good information from the 2020 survey, but it doesn't look from google translate like a dramatic increase.

((And that six-and-four percent is from every cause, when there's a pretty wide number of separate social issues in Japan pretty strongly discouraging interaction between the sexes that's a far more plausible cause.))

Being skeptical because of samey still images now, when there's no reason to think NNs won't eventually be able to translate narratives into film or 3d environments is kind of weird.

Oh, I absolutely think it will translate to new spheres, and to some extent already is in the process of doing so. But at least for furries, film and 3d environments are not especially prevalent even today (and those that do exist often suck: there's a few dozen VR furry projects, each more forgettable than the last), and the overwhelming majority of that e621 scrape would have been mostly flat media, too. The bar for furry-interesting content is lower: the majority of interactions with the sexuality-side of the fandom are still images or short fiction already. But even if the quality can be more consistent and variety greater, it's not more interesting, and I think that problem will continue (and probably be augmented, due to less available and more samey material to train on) even as tools expand to different media forms.

This has historically been the failure mode for a lot of procedurally-generated or programatically-varied content in the fandom (and, to my knowledge, outside of it). You can pretty easily toggle species or background or orifice or clothing lingerie accessories (and there's a small industry of games like Lilith's Throne built around doing just that)... but there's a reason Lilith's Throne has a configuration system that borders on the obnoxious even to an overwhelmingly tech and nerdy playerbase, and even using it to the hilt can still run into some content you aren't really interested in. Yet it can as quickly become samey, not just in that there's a limit to the available human-written content that surrounds the procedurally-generated stuff, but even 'new' stuff repeats the same themes and the same phrases, as a rut of over-optimizing smut, and the more heavily you (have to) tune the configurations to your interest the faster that happens.

What separates 'samey' pieces from novelty and interest is at least the potential for surprise. Now, it's porn. I don't want to overstate the artistic themes presented by the typical piece: someone invites a plumber, there's a joke about a lemon tree, money shot, yada yada. But there's a reason even tumblr adult gif fandom at its worst didn't turn into people just resplicing the same handful of images with slightly different subtitles. Tautologically, this could eventually be done through ML, but it's not clear how you'd do or define that, without going past the bounds of interested topics: either the consumer is taking a directorial role to some extent in the initial creation, or they get surprise cuckolding at best.

These won't be basic tools, but probably something customized and specialised.

For an example, the furry porn-specialized fine-tunes of StableDiffusion took about 200GB of porn and a few days on commercially-accessible (if high-end) gaming hardware now, which could be fairly said to be outside of the realm of the typical user. But that's now, with people making random guesses and erring on the side of caution (and trying to make overinclusive sets so other people can use them). Specific concepts have been taught or identified from less than 100 source images, sometimes incredibly bizarre ones. ((And, conversely, a furry-non-porn-specialized fine-tune could still output racy images, mostly due to the limits of the SD2.x safety checker.)) I think the likely threshold is going to end up closer to a few gigs than to a few hundred. To the extent that a typical small porn stash can't be used to train a model, that's mostly because people don't tag downloaded images.

I don't think you can prevent pretty widespread access short of banning the entire models, or heavily restricting access to model training.

That's fair, but I don't think it's still the core disagreement. Cfe: here to here, or here for some anti-ML perspectives.

I'm on the pro-side, on average, but I think presenting a legal argument to people who are making pragmatic ones isn't very productive. Opponents of ML-generated art or text are pretty explicitly not focused on the legal questions for any reason but thinking (imo, wrongly) that they can use them.

I don't think the position is right -- a lot of people care about fertility enough to torpedo in cis-cis relationships, a lot of people make romantic decisions on statistic matters as much as empirical reality, and there are 'non-physical' concerns that matter -- but :

The main objection here is that there are in fact zero transwomen who are indistinguishable from women with a womb.

I don't think this is right, either, or at least not arguing the same thing from their perspective as from yours.

Now, admittedly, I'm a bi furry, so my scales are probably not anywhere near the typical. And there's some blurry lines between "can easily be detected" and "indistinguishable". And the links from the actuallesbians post you're quoting is more highlighting trans woman the poster thought hot, more than thought especially undetectably trans. But I think there's a couple meaningful underlying threads that aren't in the obvious read:

  • The exact definition of 'indistinguishable' is not a bright line. There's probably some activist who'd make arguments about a XX transwoman, but even if such a person actually identified as trans rather than intersexed or something anyway, the more meaningful bit is that most people don't do random karotype checks of potential dating partners to avoid the one-in-fifty-thousand complete androgen insensitivity case.

  • There's a tendency to compare the most visible trans women to a platonic ideal of feminine beauty (and, to a lesser extent, trans men to masculine stereotypes). Even outside of the direct problem where out people are out by definition, and that a lot of the most visible trans women are not exactly central examples for a variety of reasons, a lot of actual women are pretty butch! This doesn't even have to be a Weird Gender Thing; 'she's just tall' or 'she's just butch' predates a lot of modern trans discourse. But there's a perception of all trans woman as 6-ft tall Adam's Apple-and-five-o'clock-shadowed pink dress wearers that's not really a good model.

  • The actual sex stuff isn't great, but it's also come a long way, in ways that aren't well-understood from outside. That's even truer in the lesbian field, where some of the limitations (not getting as wet, needing a lot of exercise to take a moderate-sized dick) are likely to be important. Even for trans guys, there's still a long way to go, but something like reelmagik (cw: if you google this, you will get pages of silicone dicks) aren't going to get the full feel of heat or the splatter, for obvious reasons, but they've got options that either wouldn't stand out or would only stand out in good ways in a crowded locker room.

  • (And, conversely, a lot of people who object to relationships with trans folk won't be pacified were we talking something like magical cloned replacement organs; cfe the discussion in the rest of this thread.)

I don't think I'm sanewashing the position. From original context:

It's valid to be not into penii. this is, possibly, the only context in which anyone is allowed to care about a trans woman's genitalia.

So there's at least some recognition that there's going to be practical differences.

That's not to condone the model, or to say that it's complete, but more that a lot of the disagreement is over definitions rather than point deer make horse problems.