gattsuru
4mo ago
... and... separately, I made a bunch of predictions, here and here.
I didn't get all of them correct -- Rittenhouse hasn't faced federal prosecution (yet), and Dominick Black ended up with a suspended sentence for the Kenosha gun stuff and only ended up in jail for unrelated reasons (cocaine motorcycle chase was not on my bingo card). Demokovich was overturned, if on limited grounds, and Gustafson is in a weird place that I didn't even know was possible when I wrote it.
Others, it hasn't been long enough to check: the NRA's New York DFS lawsuit isn't likely to be resolved for months at best, and we don't know that the next Republican President is one who's had tactical leaks against him yet.
But I don't look back at that and think "well, we're on a lot better a trajectory now" or "well, I need to toss a ton of disclaimers and caveats for each of these". In many cases, the extent these attacks have reduced conservative access to the public sphere has remained constant or accelerated. Given the news from today, if anything, I am feeling a little like I was insufficiently pessimistic.
gattsuru
5mo ago
August 2014 is a weird starting point, even from the progressive view. That post-dates Atheism +, Racefail, Zimmerman, It Gets Better, the first and second Scott Walker John Doe investigations, so on. In particular, discussing the modern social justice movement without the Affordable Care Act -- both its effects, and also the discussions it depended on to get public legitimacy -- is missing a lot.
gattsuru
4mo ago
Given the references to the schisming, probably talking about this event and this comment, referencing this post, which was about those good-faith objections.
That said, yakultbingedrinker's comment (that were also highlighted as "evil sentiment and a precursor to atrocities", and received more emphasis) were about self-defense; Tyre_Inflator may have confused you and him.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm also trying to leave an opening for people to tell me I'm misunderstanding the problem, that this is the vision being articulated by so-and-so and I've just never encountered it, or that I'm typical-minding half the country who don't respond to the same incentives I do.
Would you take any such argument seriously? Because it's kinda hard to treat 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' from the guy who's gone whole-hog on "Do you want to drive over to my apartment and put a bullet in my head, or set off a bomb at my workplace?" as someone who would.
((Even for this specific case. It's not like libertarians and the Gray Tribe haven't had long arguments over the scope of 'dangerous' or dangerous public information!))
It's not like it's hard to find! There's a (not unreasonable!) reputation for libertarians specifically being seen as the exact class of people being skewered by the "world if X got their way" meme, where small or inconsequential policy changes are supposed to lead to tremendous unrelated benefits, but it's not like this is a thing limited to Reason. Even on the specific matter of the gender culture wars, it's not like the positive vision from social conservatives is something that requires a microscope to find, as much as I disagree with it.
Rather, I'm trying to make an argument along these lines although no doubt much less skillfully.
I'll note that this, likewise, doesn't look like an unusually Positive Vision -- indeed, even if Scott hides it, I'd argue it's more 'turn back the clock' than a lot of mainstream conservative ones! -- so much as a vision you don't disagree with. Which is part of why stamping out whether you actually want what you're asking for, rather than Policies You'd Like, is important as a first step.
((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
There was some [previous discussion], more culture war focused, on AI art and specifically AI pornography. 17 days ago, furry-specialized models were "currently a WIP and will be available soon".
The Yiffy specialized model has reached Epoch18 last night, following hot on the tail (hur hur) of Epoch13 on September 25th and Epoch15 a couple days later. While it's not quite up to my test case yet (or I'm not a good enough promptomancer to get it there), it's made a huge amount of progress toward it. And while I can't speak for Primaprimaprima's test of "a single high-quality AI image of two people having sex", there's absolutely the opportunity to generate images of two furries having sex, now. While it does PoV shots more easily, people have already found a few prompts that pretty consistently get common positions or even some kinks like exhibitionism going.
((Separately, we have separate Doe Biden and Buck Breaking jokes from Trace Woodgrains. Not sure if Trace was using Yiffy, or the less-porn-trained Furry model.))
Some somewhat surprising revelations:
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Furry models seem to be doing better about anatomy like hands than conventional StableDiffusion. Which is kinda funny when someone wants paws, but potentially useful. Still not great, though, and probably only because the source images have such a restrained number of poses.
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It's actually somewhat useful to train and tag for things you don't want. The Automatic1111 WebUI has the option of negative prompting. For adult content use, that can be useful for avoiding orientations or genders or other content you're not interested in. But that also useful if you don't want adult content at all; not only can you find the opposite of dicks, you can find the opposite of "bad anatomy". Which isn't necessarily going to make an output good, but it does point to some interesting options.
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Albeit at the cost that you've probably trained for things that you don't like. Both the Furry and Yiffy checkpoints were trained against datasets filtered both on quality (albeit by simple upvotes), but also by content, for a variety of very good reasons.
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Hit rates are either not great or outstanding, depending on what perspective you're looking at. Some more simple 'pinup' style prompts have gotten 30%+ as what their creators consider 'acceptable', but more complicated prompts can be ~10%, or even never produce good results at the first pass.
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Furries have, perhaps understandably, focused on the use of furry artists for style prompting, but you can get somewhat surprising results looking at things in unexpected ways. Furry porn by DaVinci ends up looking pretty cool! I've had better luck getting SFW noodly cartoon people from prompts involving braeburned (cw: gay) and zachary911 (cw: gaaaaaay) than prompts involving Rick Griffin, who's pretty much the king of that field. A number of non-furry artstation artists (eg Greg Rutkowski, Michael & Inessa Garmash, Ruan Jia, Pino Daeni) can augment the style of prompt that's already got furry artists included.
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Prompt and name collision seem to be an issue. Perhaps moreso in the furry fandom than elsewhere, but I do think it's going to point to some general issues with the tokenizer. I'm not sure if this is an issue from the scale of the data, or if it's one of many wider problems in the CLIP tokenizer.
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This isn't very advanced. There's some fantastic work happening in the field, but the Automatic1111 webui also is missing unit tests and breaks functionality every other commit. The Yiffy model was trained on the word 'explict', because typos. It's not unusual to develop a prompt's settings by dartboard.
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It's still very involved. At the extreme end, there's people who have entire workflows of inpainting and outpainting to correct defects like hands and eyes, follow by resolution enhancements, followed by resolution enhancements. But even well before that, it's tricky to dial in the right denoising settings. But with the exception of that last photoshop touchup phase, it's far from clear that these could not, themselves, be automated, and even that much of that automation would be new technology rather than slapping together existing bits. Indeed, automating the underlying 'does this image look /right/' step was a major part of the filtering of the LAOIN dataset used to train StableDiffusion to begin with.
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It's also a surprisingly small training dataset. Yiffy trained starting on 150k images, moving to 200k for later epochs. A different model was separately trained on latex, rubber, and 'goo' with 100k images and, while I've not experimented with it or part of its audience, seems to be fairly successful. Many of the very useful tagged styles have less than 500 pieces in the training data: this (cw: topless fox guy in a loincloth, probably nsfw, but nothing 'showing') compares the relative effects of artists with 1400 (ruaidri), 230 (snowskau), and 47 (garnetto) works in the training data. That doesn't necessarily say something about training size floors, and it's possible that the terms are coming from previous training from the original LAION data, but it does suggest ceilings.
A Linux Cancellation
Vaxry, the creator and maintainer of hyprland, has been banned from FreeDesktop.Org and its member projects.
Background and Dramatis Personae
The Linux pipeline to an actual desktop is complicated and made of a bunch of moving parts, buried under the actual GUI itself, following the dual Linux philosophies of having everything do one task well(ish), and filling technical discussion with as many three-letter acronyms as possible. A historically important one is the X Window System, also known as X11 or xorg, but is both long in the tooth, covers an unusually wide area of ground for a Linux component, and is incredibly janky. While incredibly important for normal desktop users, the system has a long and bizarre history, with long periods of strife or minimal development: the current FreeDesktop space is technically just an independent github competitor for Linux desktop-specific development, but in practice there's a lot of RedHat Linux people in high places, in no small part because RHEL is the biggest way to be a linux dev and actually make money from it.
In recent years, many X11 developers have moved over to create a new version that better separates responsibility between the display protocol and everything else, along with covering a number of places that X11 just made bad mistakes in 1990 has been stuck with since, and this has turned into Wayland (and some related libraries like wl-roots), developed on the FreeDesktop.org gitlab. It's not quite ready for prime-time, especially for tasks like gaming with a nVidia card, but it's getting pretty close, and there are already some capabilities (eg, multiple displays with different refresh rates) that are a single text-file mod away in Wayland and you'd have an inconsistent time with in X11.
While some existing desktop environments, such as KDE, have worked to directly port over from X11 to Wayland, many Linux devs have taken the opportunity to try Weird and New things, instead, either because the need to develop several components previously internal to X11 seems like the best opportunity for such novel task, or because they're Linux devs. One branch consists of tiling window managers: while not new to Linux (or even Windows, they've taken some increasing popularity in the Wayland environment. Two of the most popular current ones are Hyprland and Sway. Though I'll caveat that popular here means you can find people using it: there's reason it's hard to find packages for them outside, and even harder to find prebuilt distros with it enabled. (Manjaro has a Sway community iso, in case you want to make three bad decisions at once.) Both are independently developed from FreeDesktop, though dependent on the Freedesktop-built wl-roots library.
Hyprland was founded by the psuedoanon Vaxry. I've described it in other contexts as catgirl thighhigh, and even the official github glamour shots are very clearly within that ethos, with many of the community themes being even more so. You could force it to look Professional, but the defaults provide a bizarre combination of mouseless window management, varied and sometimes obnoxious keyboard combinations, a fully text-based and live-updated config system, strong support for transparency and multiple desktops virtual or otherwise, and highly performant and kinda goofy animations (and fucking default-on rounded window corners, wtf). You don't have to own a Blahaj to like the theme, but there's a cluster of personality types that it seems to appeal toward, and the other half of them involve the sorta person that can leave leekspin on repeat for five hours on a second monitor and find it keeps getting funnier every single time they see it. Sway is intended as a drop-in-replacement for the much-older (x11) i3, and [a little more professional/grognardy in its base form, for better (hypr considered a license switch in a PR without having consulted a lawyer first) and worse (manual tiling).
Like a lot of Linux desktop environments (begun, the why-is-gnome-pronounced-that-way wars have), they Don't Like Each Other. Hyprland gives Sway special thanks "For showing how 2 do stuff the overkill way", Sway's original author has written multiple blogposts over the last six months with names like "Hyprland is a toxic community". This mostly didn't matter for Freedesktop.Org, though, since it's the sorta linux space where things like an official irc server would be a little too newfangled and a little out-of-scope.
And They Kept Using Discord
Which means most of the drama happens in weakly-affiliated channels. Hyprland has a Discord server, and while its membership is a mix of Blahaj and leekspinners, its ethos is very much toward the latter. In addition to mainstay stuff like a server ruleset that might as well be summarized as "don't make me come over there", right under announcements channel is the #days-since-vaxry-was-an-idiot, and not far under that is the official list of all accepted fanart of hyprchan, the hyprland mascot. (I didn't say the leekspin side was never trans, anymore than the blahaj side solely trans.) But while the server and Vaxry were willing to tolerate and use what could charitably be called 4chan humor and more accurately be called rude and bad jokes, they do keep to the rule poc||gtfo.
In early March, a Red Hat employee operating under the auspices of FreeDesktop contacted Vaxry about things he, and moderators of his Discord, had done. And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks. However, toward the end, that employee spelled out that that "... if more bad and more recent behavior ends up coming to our attention - it can be damaging to freedesktop's reputation as well, and we would have to consider steps to protect our community's reputation". Vaxry took this as a threat, and this escalated, first with the Red Hat employee highlighting that "The code of conduct team absolutely has the right to remove you from Freedesktop.org and ban you from the gitlab instance", and then when, when Vaxry said "further emails from the freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team will now be ignored unless You, as a team, decide to change Your attitude wrt. the issue at hand", the freedesktop Code of Conduct team pulling that trigger, Vaxry put various comments on his blog, yada yada.
Bang-Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head.
Both Vaxry and the unnamed RedHat employee come across as prats in the e-mail chain. It's very easy to read that chain as RedHat wanting on paper an official "It won't happen again" commitment and show of contrition, especially as hypr has become a bigger part of the wayland world (there's no serious census, but hypr's userbase seems the biggest among novel Wayland compositors; hyprcursor is genuinely a major improvement over the fucked-up xcursor, and has no serious competitors). It's also very easy to see this e-mail exchange as somewhere between requiring hypr spaces to act fully under RedHat corporate norms, and more cynically hanging up a Sword of Damocles for later -- even assuming arguendo that Vaxry's behavior retroactively justified the threat in the first e-mail, it made it very clear it was a threat.
((And for various reasons it's a little concerning to have two desktop environment developers that aren't quite clear on how capitalization works.))
There's a certain irony in the stolid and more formal Sway being the Blue-Tribe-themed one, and the purple-and-pink-and-blue-everywhere unprofessional hypr-active world being the not-Blue-Tribe-themed one, but there's another sense where it's not a huge surprise.
Ostensibly, this shouldn't matter much. Yes, hyprland and wayland and wl-roots are still buggy messes. But to the extent hyprland might be more vulnerable now to Wayland or wl-roots bugs, if Vaxry can't supply PRs or even bug reports to wl-roots, it'll drive the fixes to hypr, to the broader Wayland ecosystems' detriment. There are other people using hypr that could still report it up (and Vaxry has already forked wl-roots). In practice, any dev taking hypr-like conventions, especially newer devs, can and should be a little cautious in freedesktop environments, and there's already been a slow siddle away from hypr among the influencer set. There's been calls in some package managers to pull the project after some early posts from DeVault, which to be fair have been mostly rejected; we'll see if that changes. Which still doesn't matter.
But there's a tendency among a Certain Set to talk about how cancel culture has peaked, or how it doesn't impact 'normal' people, or how it's just a fiction, and I think it's worth mentioning the examples that don't show up in google news or conventional culture war channels.
gattsuru
1mo ago
A Furry Cancellation
Mary E. Lowd, aka Ryffnah, has been removed from the Furry Writer's Guild, dropped by her publishers, and bounced as a Guest of Honour from the Oregon convention Furlandia, one week before the convention started. Not one of the biggest furry writers, or as skilled as someone like Tempo Kun, Robert Baird, Rukis Croax, or Kyell Gold. She has had had some success in out-of-fandom pieces in Baen, and her Otters In Space series was more normie-friendly than even other SFW writers (and even some normie anthromorphic authors). That must take some effort: what did she do?
Lowd has been open and explicit about her use of AI image gen, likely driven both by her husband's work in the field of AI research, and more seriously by the economics of the matter. To be fair, the FWG policy was officially published in January of last year, and unofficialy well-established for some time before; FurPlanet doesn't really do policy, but their stance has been just as open and explicit for nearly as long. There's some smoke-filledfree backroom management that Happens for furcons, and I expect Lowd will find more than one or two doors has closed, here.
Businesses have policies reflecting their principles or interests or both, so it's not a huge surprise it came to this.
The interesting bit's that the next-to-last editions of her works had conventionally- or conventionally-digitally produced art, some by pretty well-known artists like BlackTeagan. Emphasis on had: as common in the book industry, the cover art belonged to her publisher; it may well fall off the planet outside of private collections. The current replacements aren't great, though it's not clear if that reflects the artistic limitations of Lowd's tools or her time crunch. She previous sold her newest books at convention tables with nice stickers marking the ones with AI art, and that's going to be a lot less common moving forward.
And she's not alone.
Of the exceptions I gave a year ago, e621 has officially shoved any AI-gen to the e6ai subsite, and while Weasyl hasn't yet updated its policies, it has updated its practices. Outside of AIgen-specific accounts on twitter or servers on Discord, it can be hard to find the stuff. If you're a furry, you can avoid seeing AI art without even trying!... er... labelled AI art. Forget the awkward questions about how increasingly wide varieties of games integrate it into their graphics pipeline, or the not-so-clear division from more advance 'brush' tech to some uses of AI-gen: the people coming up with the policies don't know how the tech works. They may never know anything other than Lowd's oh-god-I-gotta-get-a-new-publisher-whatever-works pieces, even to recognize it.
Which is one potential end to the story, and to many stories, and a quiet one. Yet at the same time, it's an utterly frustrating ending: all of the worst fears of economic impact on lower-tier artists or of unlabelled AI spam overwhelming sincere creation, all the lost opportunities for conventional artists to focus more of their time on the parts of art they love or dedicated AI-genners to explore types of media that just wouldn't be practical for conventional artwork, all come true... and no one cares.
gattsuru
4mo ago
I just reread all those posts of mine you linked to. I can see how you might disagree with some of the things I said. I can see how I might have worded some things better, or might even walk back a line or two if I were re-editing myself now. I cannot see where you get (what I perceive to be) an accusation that I am lying or arguing in bad faith or ignoring your counteraguments. For the most part, I stand by what I said and have not changed my opinions.
Because none of these things would break from the standards you demand, now!
Time, after time, after time, after time, you propose horribles or parades of horribles of things that are Worse that are your evidence that conservatives need sit down and take it, not just in response to civil war rhetoric but even to matters as simple as turnabout being fair play.
And then I provide examples that those parades of horribles are happening, or being attempted, or in rare cases have been room temperature for a decade or been applied to me personally. In some cases, you explicitly say that "mostly, it's not happening" and a "gish gallop", even after I provide explicit evidence, without even the slightest effort to point to a single one that I'm actually wrong on. Other times, you just ipse dixit, or simply duck out because my claims "doesn't impress", none of the examples I bring were persuasive enough for you to even bother responding to.
And now it turns out it doesn't matter! It wouldn't change the conversation even if conservatives were being literally marched into concentration camps -- which, to be extremely explicit so you don't deflect down that rabbit hole again, I'm not claiming is the current state. If A(3) or A(4) are what we're trying to talk about, we've had concentration camps before! Why the hell were you asking me about shit like voicing conservative opinions in public or struggle sessions? You, in this thread, brought up "(Or even, say, the level of a fringe political or religious minority in previous eras in US history.)" as what you were arguing against, and by definition even if I could have demonstrated this to your requirements, it'd still not have been novel at all!
Well, okay, maybe the conversation topic just drifted in the last handful of posts. You've said our real disagreement was about whether the severity and novelty of the gish gallops examples I provided weren't serious enough to justify defection. That's something we could discuss seriously, and I spent a thousand words doing it: why evaluations of novelty are vulnerable to giving you whatever answer you came in wanting, and why defection is both necessary and laudable before the more extreme degrees of marginalization and exclusion from the public sphere hit.
Did your response here engage with any of that, either? You literally can't see how you're ignoring my counterarguments or arguing in bad faith, with all that?
[cw: probably an invasive meme, although not a particularly harmful one. Also, caveat: I don't think Bailey or Blanchard's model is particularly useful as an approach for the typical trans woman, even and in part because there are actual 'cis'-by-conventional-standards autogynophiles.]
There's a variety and range on these matters: actors taking method acting to extremes either falsely (no one cares about Leto) to more serious issues (Bowie didn't seem to handle his stage persona well at all), and multiples (don't ask) can range from wanting integration to actively being appalled by the concept. It's enough of an issue that there's a lot of psychological screening that goes on for serious undercover investigation roles. TvTropes (cw: tvtropes) has a pretty good list of some real-life examples at the bottom of this page, mostly focused on actors.
((Though not everyone seems vulnerable: Norah Vincent's later suicide is probably unrelated to her time living as a man, but even when she liked the social aspects she never really seemed to change self-identity.))
Fictional tulpa or tulpa-likes that take over their creator is a popular target of media, but actual people who've made one and complain about it tend to be more frustrated just that they can't get it to shut up (and arguably some impact on performance in some testing scenarios?) rather than it becoming the new 'real' personality.
((Furries and some non-furries that spend too much time in VR have reported weird results. Some therianthropes claimed to get similar fake-tactile feedback with sufficient meditation in a pre-VR environment, but it's... hard to find good documentation now. And impacts on personality from an avatar are pretty well-documented well outside of VR, although insert necessary caveats about social science research, even if I've been more impressed by Nick Yee than most social scientists.))
Outside of the more out-there therians and actors, though, this can be hard to notice from the outside, and harder still to distinguish from normal personality changes from simply being in these environments. It's weird if you wanted to have your last name legally changed to match your wrestling stage name or fursona, but unless you also get in a shootout with cops or pick a name the courts don't like, it's probably not going to make the news.
And if it's not changing your name or gender (or phenotype), it might even be part of the intent going in! There's a lot of people who go into VR with the intent of getting more used to meatspace interactions, and it's hard to tell the difference between being more social because you've gotten the practice, and being more social because that's what your avatar would do. If gatt the nardodragon likes pranks more than I do, or gry the Hrothgar is just generally cheerful, it might even be hard for me internally to notice if I’m more them one day. Even if I present mannerisms that are solely artifacts of those game's designers or animators, there’s mirror neuron reasons it could happen just as a matter of course rather than some deep identity matters.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Tuning is relatively cheap, but initial training is (currently) expensive. The furry StableDiffusion tweaks probably cost 50-400 USD depending on vendor and management, but the initial StableDiffusion model they're based on reflects ~300k USD at official prices (although probably got at least some bulk discounting).
Some of that'll go down as GPU prices decrease and newer equipment becomes available, but there are some costs for bandwidth and energy that are slower to change. This might go from 'old condo' to 'new car', but it's not likely to go to 'vacation' or 'a couple weeks' savings' for a few years, maybe even the better part of a decade, without dramatic changes to the underlying code.
For data, it varies more. LAOIN's a lot of bandwidth, curation, and drive space, but it's... actually not that incredible for a single (if slightly nuts) person. Other data sources, probably less so, either due to scale (eg video), to availability (eg privacy), or to more esoteric causes (AI music is a legal clusterfuck).
Against A Purely HyperDunbarist View
World’s for FIRST is in a week.
For those unfamiliar with the organization, For Increasingly Retrobuilt Silly Term For Inspiration in Science and Technology runs a series of competitions for youth robotics, starting from a scattering of Lego Mindstorm-based FLL competitions for elementary and middle schoolers, to the mid-range 20-40 pound robots of FTC that play in alliances of 2v2 across a ping-pong-table-sized space, and for high schoolers FRC running 120-pound robots in 3v3 alliances around the space of a basketball court. Worlds will have thousands of teams, spread across multiple subcompetitions. (For a short time pre-pandemic, there were two Worlds, with all the confusion that entailed.)
If you’re interested, a lot of Worlds competition will streamed. And a lot of both off-season and next-season competitions and teams are always looking for volunteers.
The organization’s goal... well, let’s quote the mission statement:
FIRST exists to prepare the young people of today for the world of tomorrow. To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders. The mission of FIRST is to provide life-changing robotics programs that give young people the skills, confidence, and resilience to build a better world.
There’s a bunch of the more normal culture war problems to point around. How goes the replacement of the prestigious Chairman’s Award with Ignite Impact? If not, complain at least that it’s a missed opportunity on the level of POCI/POCI for replacing a bad naming with a worse one? How do you end up with events playing the PRC’s theme song before the US national anthem?
There's even internal culture war stuff, which may not make a ton of sense to outsiders. Does the move away from commercial automotive motors to built-to-FIRST and especially-brushless motors privilege teams with more cash, or compromise safety or fair play? Should regional competitions, which may be the only official field plays small teams get, also accept international competitors? Should mentors white glove themselves, should they only do so during official competition events, or should the possibility of the Mentor Coach be abolished?
But the biggest question in my mind is how we got here.
Worlds competition is an outstanding and massive event, with an estimated 50k-person attendance at a ten-million-plus square foot convention center. And it’s a bit of a football game: there’s a lot of cheering and applause, and a little bit of technical work. There will be a number of tiny conferences, many of which will focus on organizational operations like running off-season events. People network. That’s not limited to Worlds itself, though the dichotomy is more apparent there: there might be one or two teams per regional competition that have a custom circuit board on their robot, but I'd bet cash that the average regional bats under 1.0 for number of teams with custom polyurethane or silicone parts.
Indeed, that football game is a large part of how teams get to Worlds. The competitions operates as a distributed tournament, where players who win certain awards may elect to continue to the next event in a hierarchy. The exact process and what exact awards count as continuing awards are pretty complex and vary by location (especially post-COVID), but as at the FRC level, the advancing awards prioritize two of the three teams that won a local competition's final, and then the team that has done the most recruitment and sponsoring of FTC or FLL teams over the last three (previously five) years, and then the team that has done the most for the current year. (Followed by the most competent Rookies, sometimes, and then a whole funnel system rolling through more esoteric awards.) In addition to the inherent randomness of alliance field play, there's a rather telling note: the 'what have you done for FIRST today' award, if won at the Worlds level, guarantees an optional invite to every future Worlds competition. By contrast, teaching or developing esoteric skills or core infrastructure is an awkward fit for any award, usually shoved into the Judge's Award, which with 3.5 USD won't buy you a good cup of coffee at Worlds.
There’s reasons it’s like this, and it’s not just the Iron Laws of Bureaucracy, or the sometimes-blurry lines between modern corporate infrastructure and mid-level-marketing. The organization hasn't been hollowed out by parasites and worn like a skinsuit (at least not in this context): it's the sort of goal that the founders and first generation would have and do consider a remarkable victory. I’m not making the Iscariot complaint, because it’s not true.
FIRST couldn’t exist in the form it does without these massive events and the political and public support they produce, not just because you wouldn’t hear about any smaller organization, but because the equipment and technology only works at sizable scale. Entire businesses have sprung up to provide increasingly specialized equipment, FIRST got National Instruments to build a robotics controller that resists aluminum glitter a little better, even the LEGO stuff has some custom support, and they can only do so because an ever-increasing number of teams exist to want it. SolidWorks, Altium, dozens of other companies donate atoms and/or bits on a yearly basis; the entire field system for FRC wouldn’t work without constant support and donation by industrial engineering companies. WPI might devote a couple post-grad students to maintaining a robotics library without tens of thousands of people using it, but I wouldn’t bet on it. States would not be explicitly funding FIRST (or its competitors) unless those programs can show up on television and have constituents that can show up at a state politician’s door.
Those demands drive not just how FIRST operates today, but what its interests are looking toward the future, not just in what it does, but what it won’t do. From a cynical eye, I wouldn’t say with certainty that FIRST would drop ten community teams for a school system buy-in, or twenty for a state program, but I wouldn’t want to be on the community team for any of those hard choices. There is no open-source motor controller or control board available for FIRST competition use, and there’s not a procedure available to present one, and there won’t be. There’s a lot of emphasis on sharing outreach tricks, and a little for sharing old code or 3d models, and a lot of limits to providing skills.
Because throughout this system, the most impactful thing you can do is always getting more people. It’s not Inspiring, it’s not Chairmanny Impactful, but that's what those awards are, with reason. Shut up and multiple: the math, in the end, is inevitable.
And I’m going to deny it.
There's a story that goes around in the FIRST sphere, where one of FIRST's founders bargained or tricked Coca-Cola into in exchange for developing some other more commercial technology. The exact form and valence tends to vary with who tells the story, whether to highlight the speaker's anti-capitalist frame, to gloss over some of the frustrations with the Coca-Cola Freestyle (tbf, usually more logistic and maintenance than with the pumps themselves), or to wave away the rough question of whether it paid off).
But that last point is a bit unfair: Solving Problems In Extreme Poverty is the sort of difficult and low-odds environment where high-variance options make sense to take, and you should expect a high-variance low-odds option to fail (or at least not succeed wildly) most of the time, and at least it wasn't as dumb an idea as the lifestraw. Maybe (probably!) enough of the steps that combine to keep FIRST running fall into the same category.
I'm hoping teaching kids isn't a low-odds environment. And ultimately, most volunteers and teams and sponsors signed up more for that than for the flashing lights and the fancy banners. But teaching, in matter involving true interaction, can not be done at the scales and directions that turn a roll of the dice from gambling to a variance strategy. It's difficult enough as a mentor to remember all the names the students and family for even a moderately-sized FRC or FTC team; few in a team that "support 128" teams (not linking directly: these are teenagers) can name every one or even a majority. These organizations have, by necessity, turned to maximize how many opportunities they present to their affiliates, without much attention to what that opportunity is. Few turn to the full argumentum ad absurdum where the recruitment exists solely to get more recruiters, but they’ve not left that problem space behind, either.
((There are other nitpicks: the same economies of scale that make these answers work eliminate many less-difficult problem whose presence is necessary to onboard and upskill new learners, the focus on bits over atoms breaks in similar ways that the outreach-vs-teaching one does.))
Dunbar proposed an upper limit to how large a social group the human mind readily handles. There's a lot of !!fun!! questions about how well this will replicate, or how accurate the exact number is, or what applicability it has for a given level of interaction: suffice it to assume some limit exists, that some necessary contact increments the counter at some level of teaching, and that it can't possibly be this high. At some point, you are no longer working with people; you're performing a presentation, and they're watching; or you're giving money and they're shaking a hand. At best, you're delegating.
These strategies exceed the limit, blasting past it or even starting beyond it. They are hyperdunbar, whether trying to get fifty thousand people into a convention center, or trying to sell ten thousand books, or 8k-10k subscribers. There are things that you can't do, or can't do without spending a ton of your own money, without taking these strategies! Whether FIRST getting NI's interest, writing or drawing, building or playing video games full-time, you either take this compromise or another one, and a lot of the others are worse.
But they're simultaneously the most visible strategies, by definition. I do not come to kill the Indigestion Impact Award; I come to raise the things that aren't in the awards. Even if FIRST could support a dozen teams that emphasized bringing new technologies forward in a one-on-one basis, and if your first exposure to the program selected from teams randomly, you'd be much more likely to hear from the hyperdunbarists -- hell, it could well be that way, and I've just missed the rest of them.
Yet they are not the only opportunity. You don't have to be grindmaxxing. One team, even in FIRST, can share skills simply for the purpose of sharing skills. It’s why I volunteer for the org. You can go into an artistic thing knowing you want a tiny audience, or to cover costs and if lucky your time, or as a hobby that's yours first. It shouldn't be necessary to say that outright, as even in hyperdunbar focuses, most fail down to that point. Yet even in spheres where Baumol's hits hardest, it can be a difficult assumption to break.
gattsuru
4mo ago
This is widely considered to have attracted the Eye of Sauron and prompted the current crackdown once Microsoft realized what was going on and put the squeeze on platforms hosting Khanon's reverse proxy builds, also instantly disabling most Azure keys "in circulation".
For API tokens specifically, there was also a big security-sphere report on insufficiently-secured keys in December that's probably gotten Microsoft breathing down HF's neck, even more than the individual tokens running about. Though it's probably a mix of all those causes and more.
I can even pretend to have a scientific interest here, because for all the degeneracy I'll dare to venture that the median /g/oon's practical experience and LLM wrangling skills are hilariously far ahead of corpos.
Yeah, there's some absolute hilarity going on, here, far short of Gwern-level prompt engineering. That said, at least in FurryDiffusion there's been a lot less interest in jailbreaks recently, less because it's gotten hard, and more because people have gotten the feeling that they're helping OpenAI/MS/whatever further lobotomize lock down the various models. And the extent some apis are getting locked down, even for SFW stuff, is getting ridiculous.
That said, the difference in capability between a 70b model running at 2quant/2.4quant GGUF and Claude isn't huge. That's not quite cheap to run, especially if you want more of the model in GPU, but it's still literally something you can slip into your backpack. The local world is a ways behind Falcon/ChatGPT4-turbo, but especially for people writing async (ahem), if/when comparable models leak or are developed, some people will be running them at home on a local space heater in days.
Still, with the seedy undercurrent getting more and more noticed, I thought I could post some notes from the underground, plus I'm curious to know the opinions of people (probably) less exposed to this stuff on
the latest coomer techpossible harms of generative AI in general.
It's also worth noticing how much incidental exposure people are getting, or going to get. Linus groupies are about as normie tech-savvey (ish) as it gets, and they've got people confusing disclosed AI for real influencers (or, uh, at least as 'real' as any influencer is).
We're in a universe where car dealerships will put the akashic record behind a chat window that can't manage to sell you a car right. Forget the expected stuff: you're gonna get some weird shit (cw: recursive thotting).
gattsuru
4mo ago
Maine on Thursday disqualified Donald Trump from the state ballot in next year’s U.S. presidential primary election, becoming the second state to bar the former president for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, concluded that Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, incited an insurrection when he spread false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and then urged his supporters to march on the Capitol to stop lawmakers from certifying the vote. "The U.S. Constitution does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government," Bellows wrote in a 34-page ruling.
The decision can be appealed to a state Superior Court, and Bellows suspended her ruling until the court rules on the matter.
The IDF is claiming that the hospital impact was from a PIJ rocket (Palestine Islamic Jihad?), with some video showing a failed rocket launch with the right time stamps (maybe not; see below) as one of many in the salvo. Doesn't make it the truth, especially since it's hard to see what hit where, but video evidence is still worth a bit.
Still finding the casualty count weird. We know what happens when a Scud hits a crowded and ill-armored building, and almost all of the arms involved here are sub-Scud payload-wise. I'd expect hospital patients to be more vulnerable than soldiers, but this much more? Maybe if something big on the ground cooked off.
gattsuru
9mo ago
The day when it's possible to turn a natal male or female into the other gender while being biologically indistinguishable on the metrics I care about, we have no room for disagreement at all.
That's potentially interesting, though there's a lot of feeling from the pro-trans side that this is a space where goalposts either get set to pretty unusual places or moved there pretty rapidly. Some of that's due to nutpicking -- one particular radfem mistaking her own silhouette for a transwoman's is nearly a year old now and still goes around the tumblr-sphere, and there's a general class of people who start grabbing the phrenologist tools -- but on the other hand at least part of the drive toward earlier transition reflects adult transitioners who had an unpleasant puberty but also had some side effects from it that were either difficult to change or incompletely changed. And a lot of trans people regularly celebrate whenever tech related to things like cloned organs or less invasive surgical interventions are proposed or developed.
On the flip side, it kinda raises a "what about now" question. Not in a 'dissolve the question' pure-philosophy sorta way, but were it an actual possible proposal would it be acceptable. Presuming no massive technological or engineering changes in the near future, would you have issues if we instead had them put X (malex?/womenx? would at least be less dumb than latinx) as gender ID, widely available transition-as-currently-developed, and otherwise only have trans-specific rules for places where those metrics you care about are directly exposed? Do you think the general populace of trans-skeptics would?
((In practice, I don't think the trans side or the trans-skeptic side has enough trust to make such a compromise, or even the group coherency to make a decision on the matter -- you're going to have different perspectives from the socon catholics, just as the average trans dude's going to have different ones from the high priests of transdom. It seems relevant to explore.))
I'm certainly not trans, for what that's worth.
Yeah, it's definitely far from a universal pattern among transhumanists, and not even all transhumanists with the associated philosophical and aesthetic characteristics have the pattern, and some small portion who otherwise have the pattern aren't trans or don't identify as trans (or gender-whatever).
Can anyone provide examples of someone who did a similar crime and compare what penalties they faced?
Most publicized cases tend to involve a lot more firearms and a lot more drugs, but cases do happen and can result in lengthy sentences. Some of those have further moron taxes than present for even Hunter Biden, but Hunter's not exactly off the moron tax list himself.
If anyone wants the statistics, this report says (on pg 24) that of the 7373 §2K2.1 convictions in the 2021 year, 5.3% (or 347) were for prohibited persons where the prohibition was due to unlawful drug use. Unfortunately, looking the other direction -- how many people who are prohibited persons related to drug usage get caught and sentenced -- is an unknown and probably unknowable thing.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Twitter had its staff going into classified briefings, and was (uh, charitably) acting to counter international security threats. I think this is pretty close to the "traditional exclusive prerogative of the state".
[I'm answering this a little out of order, as I think the more critical stuff was wedge into the center.]
If conservatives were being literally marched into concentration camps it would absolutely change the conversation, and I would say "Goddamn, gattsuru, you were right and I was wrong!" How are you concluding from anything I wrote that I would be unmoved by conservatives being marched into concentration camps?
I am neither describing concentration camps as a current or plausible near-future problem, to be very explicit. If they happen, I will be wrong, too. Beyond that:
... where do you put concentration camps on a scale of novelty? They literally happened, more than once, as particularly shameful periods in American history. One memorable and significant set in living memory. They certainly weren't anywhere near what you'd have to dive to the Literal Civil War, to use the term I applied for A(4).
Novel means new. Not mean worse, or a different color, or upside down: it means different from what has come before.
I'm not sure where this confusion is coming from, but looking for something that has already happened in the United States and been meaningful is precisely what A(3) and A(4) are trying to exclude, where A(1) is about whether the specific examples I've presented being true, and A(2) is the Chinese Cardiology option.
but I would summarize it as "I still think the evidence does not say we are as far along down the slippery slope as you think we are" - do you think that is a fair summary, or not? Is it that there are specific examples whose litigation you are unsatisfied about/you think I dodged, or that you think I should have been convinced by the volume of your examples and I am not?
Ok, that's not A at all, which was about whether "Things I'm citing are "specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies". It sounds more like something along one of B ("The things I'm citing real and meaningful, but not justification for retaliation"), or C ("These things real, and meaningful, and justification for retaliation, but not cause for escalation").
Is that closer? Or is there something on "meaningful" that you're trying to dig into?
We could debate the specifics of each one of those examples... but I would summarize it as "I still think the evidence does not say we are as far along down the slippery slope as you think we are" - do you think that is a fair summary, or not?
... I don't think this helps expand the problem. You've said countless times that our situation -- if not "greater free speech than has existed in almost any period of history " -- at least not bad enough to do some greater action over, beyond complain or persuade, and even for complaining you have little patience for people thinking they're oppressed.
That does not explain if the examples I bring up "mostly isn't happening", or if they're happening but they can't justify any retaliation, or if they're happening but can't justify any escalation. I did the whole Wittgenstein format question, trying to break this down, and instead I'm asking a second time.
Even this exact quote doesn't deliminate between whether you disagree with my evidence, or with my assessment of the tactical or strategic or moral sphere. And it's infuriating, because you keep bringing examples of specific acts as if they mattered, and it's really not clear that any but the most extreme, unlikely, and irrecoverable ones do. And I can't even tell if that's because there's something you don't like about the examples I bring of those specific acts, or because they don't matter to the extent they did happen.
Is it that there are specific examples whose litigation you are unsatisfied about/you think I dodged, or that you think I should have been convinced by the volume of your examples and I am not?
See above. I'm not going to, and can't, and don't want to, demand anything, but I can't see this being productive without at least trying to:
-
Pick one-to-three claims that I presented as a present-day encroachment of conservative civil rights and freedoms, and argue that it did not happen or mostly did not happen (in the sense it never occurred to start with, rather than in the sense it was overturned or punished in some form by the state).
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Give as low-severity an example of a thing as you can think of, that would justify retaliation, which you believe has not happened, which if I can show has happened would persuade you retaliation on that matter were acceptable.
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Give an example of a thing progressives have done, which is acceptable for conservatives to retaliate on, but not to escalate, and what that escalation would look like.
[edit: Yes, these do leave remaining options unavailable: you could, for example, disagree out of a general moral principle toward deescalation, with an exception for the absolute last-second of some extreme and irrevocable all-consuming abuse by a fascist government; or need some sort of statistically-validated incidence rate for discrimination or civil rights violation; or perhaps some certain classes of injury set aside for special pleading. There are some interesting conversations to be had under each aegis. Two or three years ago, I would even be interested in having that conversation with you. But you've made bets about things that don't make sense in any of those frameworks. If they're your real objection, state it and we'll at least have closure, but I'm not getting into those debates with you given the communication problems we've already had.]
I reread those links and do not see where I am arguing that "turnabout is fair play so conservatives need to sit down and take it."
The actual words I wrote were that "your evidence that conservatives need sit down and take it..." "in response to" "...matters as simple as turnabout being fair play."
"My heart does not bleed much when "liability" is being kicked off of Twitter" is literally the comment I linked to in those words you (mis)quoted, as was "I'm on your side if you want to push back against the anti-free speech, authoritarian ideology that is increasingly popular on the left. I am not on your side if that "push back" is defection and civil war." This was in response to a series of conversations not about civil war, or succession, or street warfare, or Minecraft LARP, but about some stupid speech restrictions (in Hungary!) or (a strawman of) "surely, we must burn THIS book?".
There are good arguments against making that particular choice! But instead of an argument against such an action, you simply jump to acting as though people were plotting "defection and civil war" rather than fairly trite regulations.
Now, this was before it was demonstrably proven that Twitter's moderation schema was often government employees naming individual posters to take down; it was merely blindingly obvious that these groups were at least reacting to government threats. Now, I don't particularly agree with FCFromSSC's position on free speech, and I at least try to be (if not always successfully) a true believer in free speech.
But come on. You're "on [my] side if you want to push back", somewhere... so long as that's limited to complaining about it, or trying to persuade people who don't care or actively want to punish conservative positions. Absolutely your prerogative to hold that position; I'd like to hold it as well. But instead of arguing why it is morally or pragmatically correct, instead you leap to people not being sent to a gulag.
Who was talking about gulags, when FCFromSSC in your exact quote was comparing a thousand-dollar fine against the social cost of his online identity being attached to his real one? Doesn't matter, it's the new standard!
((I mean, you do touch on the turnabout is fair play when progressives do it gimmick, with literally "you guys started it" sometimes, but it's rare enough that I try not to focus on it, and it wasn't among my links above.))
It doesn't help that we told you once to lay off the big collection of "links to every argument you've ever made" every time you argue with someone, because it's antagonistic and obnoxious, and to this day you claim that we told you you "aren't allowed to refute people with evidence."
And also asked me not to joust with old posts and ZorbaTHut said "I'm kinda not okay with digging through people's Reddit history using search tools to catch them in contradictions."
Fine. It's your shop, it's your rules. It's just this one class of evidence, and only when antagonistic, and it's only evidence of past claims, why would that matter?
(Apropos of nothing, did you know Darwin's back? Maybe he'll engage more seriously these days.)
I'll be more specific about what I'm not allowed to dig for in the future.
gattsuru
6mo ago
(The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s)
This is a list of names cleared for publication, not all killed.
gattsuru
6mo ago
Points for thinking about it, but I'm skeptical on both the political and pragmatic side.
Israel isn't a signatory to the Ottowa Treaty, but large deployments of landmines near a civilian area would be a long-lasting cause celebre even before some teenager became an example, and their use in the past at the West Bank / Golan Heights in much more conventional military contexts had previously been a matter of a lot of international fuckery. There are also just pretty high upper limits to the utility of landmines in an open environment where your sappers would be near-constantly observed. Electric fences are so simultaneously useless (defeated by gloves!) and politically controversial that they've been a goto slur for electronic monitoring.
A lot of the remainder of your suggests are just things already present, but harder, in ways that may not be possible. Israel hadn't closed all but one border crossing, but the number of crossings dropped dramatically from 2005-2011, culminating in the closure of the Karni crossing, while the remaining handful had been heavily fortified. Of the three major remaining ones, Rafah is in Egyptian territory and Kerem Shalom is politically necessary as part of relationships with Egypt. There's already some use of anti-vehicle ditches and other terrain.
10/7 seems like it depended on overwhelming observation, surveillance, and quick-response features so fast and so heavily that the IDF response took hours; I'm not seeing how 500m would have changed much of it.
And, yes, as 2fara points out, you need to block of not just the tactics from 10/7, but the whole class of any successful attack of this scale.
Against Large Language Models as an Archive
Much of the recent discussion regarding token-predicting AI such as LLMs has revolved around the intentional (and often-hilariously heavy-handed) political and social modification of these tools, their inputs, and their outputs, and there's a lot of interesting questions there. Separately, though, one space that appears under-examined is what, exactly, LLMs do when handling questions that aren't the hottest topics at the time the LLM was trained.
There's a lot of people who think, at some level, of LLMs as a .zip file++, where material is stuffed in somehow and the core meaning is pulled out from the text. Even fairly technical people sometimes fall to treating them like lossy compression, and there's already an active lawsuit caused in part by people expecting a ChatGPT to act as one. They do better when told to reparse existing information, but the people advocating that also promote LLMs as providing "pre-digested" Google answers. But in theory, these tools have been trained on a large portion of text from a massive variety of sources, and they can sometimes embed even tiny historical details.
Though you sometimes have to handle seers huffing fumes, the 12v universal akasha sometimes works. In reality, LLMs are token predictors, and they've been trained, and sometimes they just do that well instead. And sometimes it doesn't at all.
And I think that's going to augment forces that already turn memories to dust.
[Previous discussion here and, by another poster, here].
It's difficult to draw the borders around this limitation. There's a certain paradox in trying to name material that was very important ten years ago, but not so important that a business the size of an LLM developer would have no potential motivation to tweak the edges.
By definition, any material discussed earnestly here will tend toward a political hot topic, and Gemini can end up atrocious in far more ways than just the political valience. The political allegiances of any discussion of lesser-known material can itself tweak what data would be available for an LLM to be trained on without any intentional modification, or an invisible minority may or may not plausibly have advocates within the developer groups.
Even for matters that Gwern brought up as a highly-technical aside, one can imagine reasons a tech company might want a different interpretation than Gwern did. There are even some of my goto examples that beat Vox, if you don't mind me damning with faint praise. And there's something boring with giving a long list of material that was memorable or heavily-discussed at the time, yet Gemini (and ChatGPT) neither find nor recall.
((Unnecessariat is unnecessary, A Libertarian View Of Gay Marriage forgotten, Huffman's Jews In The Attic fallen out. Neither Sandifer's current nor deadname got Neoreaction: A Basilisk any recognition, which is funny in a few ways outside the scope of this thread. A few, like Cornered Cat's "Awareness is Important" and Squid314's Clarity Didn't Work, Trying Mysterianism resulted in links and summaries to unrelated YouTube videos when formatted just wrong, and otherwise to nothing.))
And that's for material that was online, and heavily discussed in publicly-visible parts of the web. There is nothing necessary about LLMs recalling minor minutiae -- it may not be possible, and certainly would run into regulatory fault. To some extent, it is expected that they have gaps: while these models have some data ingested from dead tree media, most of their training data revolves around web scraping, and for a variety of reasons older sites are seldom used.
But there are risks to integrating too heavily with even the best systems that have your interests in mind. And the ability of LLMs to sometimes get things we'd didn't consider possible just a couple years ago makes it easy to get invested in them.
gattsuru
1yr ago
This whole thread could be charitably just called wrong, but it's just kinda a mess of Chinese Cardiology, bad grammar, and pretty bad understandings.
It's not like there aren't problems in the furry fandom! But it's pretty much just word association, at that level.
gattsuru
3mo ago
You're not wrong in the general sense that each Tribe had cultural perspectives that are invisible to the other, and probably that the Blue Tribe's limitations there are smaller given the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Blue Tribe. ((That said, I'm not sure these gaps are as complete as people think: go to weird places and you'll find people who touch both spheres. It's just that the movers and shakers aren't.))
But your example seems weird:
One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.
This is absolutely something liberals and the Blue Tribe have as a perspective, and indeed even the most ivory-towered of them will fairly consistently blame conservatives for 'not grappling' with it in a genuine way rather than just shoving it out-of-sight. They just believe that the Correct solutions are near-completely opposite from the Red Tribe ones: favoring Therapy and voluntary treatment for the literal-schizophrenics and improved material support for the non-clinically insane. I think these things are wrong, but they're not really a gap in awareness, just evaluation of information.
Colgan Air 3407 was a 2009 aviation disaster, where regional commercial airliner on final descent to Buffalo New York stalled and crashed, killing all on-board and one person on the ground. For those interested in more precise details, the NTSB report is here, while MentourPilot has a video breakdown of the timeline and personnel here.
The majority of US airline disasters leave an impact on airline regulation and aviation in general, if sometimes not quite enough, or only after a delay. While far from the most deadly western air disaster of the the time, or even the worst western stall-related crash of that year, CA3407 had an unusual impact. Where older historical reports are filled with tragicomedic disasters and near-misses, the majority of recent accidents tend to rest on extremes, where either mechanical problems coincided with areas well outside of training focuses encountered pilots who made heroic efforts, or where pilots operated with long periods of outright disregard for safe operations, with perhaps a scatter of situations where bad practices mixed with mechanical error.
Instead, CA3407 fell due to a few seconds of phenomenally bad judgement by its captain encountering a spurious stall warning. Stalls are caused by insufficient lifting force on the wings, usually due to insufficient airspeed or high pitch (more rarely, extreme icing). Stalls and especially low-altitude stalls reflect fundamental aspects of flight, and pilots will do simulator (and sometimes real-world) drills both directly focusing on them, and on weather conditions that can induce them, such as microbursts. They're probably just up there with single-engine-out procedures for matters that a pilot should know by heart.
The normal behavior for a low-altitude stall is to give as much engine power as possible, with wings level to the horizon, until airspeed recovers. Instead the captain instead increased speed to a lower threshold and then pitched up well above the horizon -- a behavior that would have doomed a stalled aircraft had that warning been correct, and in normal landing profiles initiated an extreme stall. Worse yet, the time between the initial spurious warning and impact with the ground was less than half a minute; the aircraft was probably only recoverable in the first five to ten seconds, making takeover of effective command by the first officer impossible. While the first officer may not have been physically able to override the pilot's erroneous control behavior, if she had been willing to defy protocol and procedures, her response of lifting flaps was likely not harmful but neither procedurally correct nor helpful.
Like most incidents, there was no one single cause. The NTSB mentions pilot fatigue (and first officer illness), weather, flight manual inconsistency, and the combination of a first officer new to commercial flying with a pilot-in-command who had just moved to a new aircraft, among others. Training at the time would emphasize maintaining altitude during recovery, which made historic sense when terrain and obstruction information around airports was not always great and aircraft power profiles looked different, but was increasingly outdated around modern airports and unrealistic in modern aircraft.
But pilot capability was the big one. CA3407's pilot-flying and pilot-in-command had many hours experience, but also had a spotty training and especially checkride record. Checkrides can be considered the 'tests' for aviation certification, where the pilot flies along with an FAA-registered designated pilot examiner to undergo certain practical tests. The pilot in command here had four checkride disapprovals (effectively failures) across his career. While individual disapprovals at checkrides are not uncommon and do not necessarily indicate serious problems if corrected, these tests are neither convenient nor inexpensive to set up, and a pattern of first-attempt failures can, to quote the NTSB report:
"However, the captain’s established pattern of first-attempt failures might have indicated that he was slow to absorb information, develop skills, and gain mastery or that the training he received was not adequate. This pattern might also have indicated that the captain had difficulty performing required skills while under the stress conditions associated with a checkride."
((Though the FAA does not necessarily agree here; it holds that there is almost no correlation between checkride failure and later citations... which is a bit streetlamp-examination. But where CA3407's pilot would be in the bottom 5% of commercial pilots by simple count of checkride disapprovals, I absolutely agree that this isn't proof he was in the bottom 5% of commercial pilots by ability.))
This issue gained additional poignancy in public awareness due to the voice recorder conversations shortly before the crash, where the first officer discussed her unfamiliarity with icing conditions before being hired to Colgan, and the pilot mentioned his own employment history with the company.
Flight certification is heavily controlled by a new pilot's logged flight hours, with different licenses and certifications requiring certain thresholds or conditions of hours in a pilot's logbook. These hours aren't all literally flying, with some complex rules about what simulator hours can be logged in different grades of gear. Since an hour of flight can cost 100-300 USD/hour (and even BATD/AATD simulator time isn't free), including fuel and aircraft maintenance, optimizing hours someone else is paying for matters a lot.
Before 2009, one common route for new pilots involved self-funding their way through the private pilot's license and commercial license with instrument cert, which usually meant 150-300 hours, then zooming off to whatever regional airline needed first officers. While those first officers would not (and could not, legally) be pilots in command for the next 1200-1350 hours of flight, they would still get experience as pilots-flying and have time with various airline training and currency checks. Only then could they apply for an Airline Transport Pilot license, necessary to operate as a pilot in command. In theory, this would give a lot of experience in a variety of environments, most closer to 'real' pilot operations and some of which (like icing or flying near New York City) general aviation avoids like the plague, while still having the eyes and hands of an experienced pilot nearby to watch, and to catch any obvious faults.
After 2009, that was illegal. In response to CA3407, Congress passed the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010, which along with mandating a system for employers to more readily learn about applying pilot's past records (not finalized until 2021!), mandated that both the pilot and copilot of a commercial scheduled operating have an ATP. While a few exceptions were carved out (a new license, the ATP-r, was made available for pilots with a four-year pilot's degree, or two-year pilot's degree, or military flight training, at 1250 hours, 1000 hours, 750 hours, respectively), this rule remains today, and it has had no small effect on both the availability of airline pilots and their possible career paths. That's not as vast a change as it appears at first glance -- almost every airline had stricter hour minimums for hiring -- but it still significantly increased the number of hours a pilot would have to get on smaller aircraft first.
The argument is that many first officer roles would look to have a lot of varied flight experience, while not actually flying a plane most of those conditions. Pilots had to get a certain number of hands-on-stick landings to maintain currency, but a pilot-in-command would and often should take over landings and takeoff from a first officer in bad weather or awkward conditions. Especially in recent years, a lot of time would be flying the computer to set autopilot controls and monitor instruments mid-flight. To the extent small problems might show up, it would be very hard for documentation of those problems to show up if a pattern of. By contrast, flying a contract plane or as the flight instructor leaves you responsible for the safety of flight, and even recovery of a serious incident can and often is recorded.
And that argument is controversial. For CA3407 specifically, both pilots had significantly more than 1500 hours at the time of the crash, and while the pilot had earned most of his pre-Colgan hours at a flight school emphasizing bigger birds, the first officer had earned a lot of her hours as an instructor in a flight school. It's not clear that the theoretical argument applies, and there are some arguments against it. While not all arguments against are all well-founded (the rule is a little more complicated than allowing you to just log a thousand hours of tethered hot-air balloon time, even before considering that even overseas airlines would laugh you out of the office: pilots everywhere hate ballooners), some are more reasonable (flight instructors and flight schools will avoid many of the critical conditions and some aren't great about required incident reports, general aviation equipment in even newer aircraft is vastly different than even old airlines). While some groups like airline pilot unions have been strong advocates for the rule, there's reason MentourPilot and AOPA argues against it -- and there's more general-aviation pilots wanting in than airline pilots pissing out. Funding 1500 hours or a 4-year-degree in aviation is ludicrously expensive, and while some commercial operations remain legal for commercial-equipped pilots, the whole ecosystem is a mess, with a glut of flight instructors and contract pilots mixed with shaky demand for training and contract work. On the other side, when airline pilot demand is high, this has lead to flight 'clubs' or 'schools' that exist solely to burn hours and gas at the bare minimum of familiarity, or even airlines 'hiring' near-threshold pilots to build their last fifty or hundred hours in a rush. These markers are (and even pre-2010, were) disfavoured in airline hiring practices, but their increased prevalence makes them harder to filter out. The limited availability of pilots has even lead to consideration of tradeoffs against other forms of fitness, such as boosting the mandatory retirement age or decreasing flight medical rules. I'm generally against it, albeit not very strongly.
Ultimately, if this rule is a test of merit, it's a weak indicator, and selected more for convenience and politics than as the best option.
But enough about such culture war questions like pilot training requirements or FAA reporting guidelines. You know what nobody hates each other about yet? Race and (dis)ability!
Wait.
The FAA promotes diversity, and has for some time. Insert the joke about autistic people and transportation obsession here. The matter, however, got some increased traction after A Certain Someone on X Twitter highlighted a few sections of a Boeing DEI statement, and this quickly turned into discussion about what exactly that might mean, especially as diversity might include air crew entirely of one race for a flight (Canada, not US). And to be fair, there are no small number of nuts to pick who blame DEI for every fault, or popular idiots who think everything the FAA does involves their eyeballs, or who are using the matter as a poorly-camoflauged way to hate black people.
I am and long have been skeptical of the racial explanations for entire continents, and especially given the selection effects present for pilots, I am skeptical of any claim that African-American (or female, or gay, or whatever) pilots are categorically different in skill. Especially in the modern day, the Damoreish arguments don't apply: no one falls into commercial aviation, and everyone who tries to work in the field is fascinated by it to a large extent. What does it matter, here?
Because I have seen people say things like "The worst case for DEI is ending up with the lower end of the top 1% of candidates - where the difference between the best performer and the lower performer is measured in tenths". And there's some fair discussion whether the pilot of CA3407 was merely the lower performer, or so low he should not have been considered.
But that's not the option on the table. All the children in Lake Wobegon can be above-average compared to the country; not all of the country can be above-average compared to itself. Individual businesses or (possibly) entire fields could, perhaps, attract the 1% of subpopulations, and still remain at 1%-level capabilities: there are enough African-Americans in the United States that the top 0.1% could fulfill all pilot demand, even though I expect the majority have better things to do with their time and abilities. Piloting and the FAA are not the only places looking to fulfill DEI objectives. They are not the only one of ten commercial-pilot-sized places looking to fulfill DEI objections.
To be fair, there are other groups discrimination in hiring DEI hopes to help. We might just be downscoring half of qualified applicants in a crowded field, on matters completely and totally unrelated to their merit, rather than six out of seven.
There are ways to credibly challenge whether this is a problem. Perhaps training or experience matters more than innate ability; perhaps structure . Perhaps eventually everyone becomes a minority in some way; perhaps the position of modern equality has minorities as most equal.
But to suggest that the difference can't matter is to overlook literal piles of charred corpses. To complain that one extant metric is not optimally tied to merit while glossing over a new one that is disconnected from it does not strike as serious engagement.
One of the previous J6-related trials used these pretrial statements, which defined the matter as :
There's a fun philosophical question about how much Trump can be said to "know" anything, but the indictment's got a lot of people telling Trump he lost and didn't have a legal way to stay in office; it's at least enough to go to a jury on this specific question.
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