gattsuru
1yr ago
If you're still playing through, I'll be somewhat vague to avoid spoilers.
The stakes are low, and the time pressure lower. Most expansions have started with some rising threat well before the expansion dropped -- Heavensward most famously with the WoL being chased to Ishgard after being framed as a regicidal maniac while Ascians were behind the Ishgardian popehat, Stormblood with the giant Shinryu hamster ball and (for better or worse) Zenos, Shadowbringers everybody being kidnapped to the First and a threat of a whole Umbral Calamity, and Endwalker the Garlean Empire getting desperate enough to start summoning weird primals and throwing out those towers. Here, there's only really the Turiyolal succession, its worst-case scenario is a Bad Brother Winning mumble mumble, until nearly level 95.
Said brother's motivations aren't that interesting or deep. That's not new: one of the big fandom critiques of Zenos was the extent he seemed just bounce around being evil at his uncle's behest and out of Shonen Anime Antagonist-dom, and while there were character notes under that, they only really started to flower with more time post-suicide. In Dawntrail, Zoraal Ja's claimed motivations sound like a less charismatic and coherent version of the Senator Armstrong speech with a sprinkling of For Peace thrown in, and all we get from other characters about him is a talk about Ambition and loneliness. I don't think every villain needs to be or should be a misunderstood woobie, but he comes across as just jumbled. There's a way to read him that's coherent and I think it's the intended read, but a lot of people don't get that from the writing, and even with that read he feels more rabid dog than dire threat. ((We do get an idea for the actual final boss, and it's more interesting, but it comes really late.))
Wuk Lamat feels a bit much like Lyse v2, where she's the main character for this story and we're here to escort and/or cheerlead her. There's always a bit of this going on, since the WoL's almost-mute nature means you need a couple characters for the story cutscenes to work at all, but where previous expansions have had your retinue helping you, or at worst the Scions operating as a group with you as a vital part. Here,
The emotional notes aren't that strong. There's some really high bars to pass, here, by video game standards: .
The Role and new Job quests are also fairly uninspiring. The role quests are often funny, if sometimes in dark ways, but just don't really have the emotional weight for what they're going for. The role quests are more serious, but they're seldom that memorable. Nothing's so bad as the 3.x PLD quest line, but it's never really going above average. There's not even much in the way of good lore about the world; you mostly learn about This One Weird Artifact per. ((I'd actually say that the crafter role quests do a better job, writing-wise: while they're just text they feel more about doing the actual role in the actual place with the actual people, where especially the Sharlayan ones were more having random chores attached to a disconnected story. Uh, excepting FSH 7.0, which goes BLU.))
I don't agree with all the critiques -- in particular, I think the lower stakes is a good thing even if the pacing problems aren't -- but I can understand the complaints.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The simple-but-wrong answer is capacity; you can squeeze more flights in, and LAX gets busy. But that's not as true as you'd expect, for wake turbulence and flight separation reasons.
The more complex answer... LAX's terminal design is a mess, and a lot of runway incursion concerns were (and remain!) about other types of collision. Especially at the time, Tenerife was the Central Example of a fatal runway incident, and involved an aircraft taking off and colliding with another aircraft taxing to takeoff that had crossed the runway; the next most well-known in 1991 would have been Heartsfield's landing-landing impact.
Using the 'far' runways for LAX for arrivals and 'near' runways for departures (as is the current practice, though it's still not always applied) would reduce the risk of landing on someone trying to take off, but it also means increased risk of collision between and aircraft taking off and an aircraft taxing, because simply using the 'far' runways with LAX's layout requires crossing the near ones. Runway crossing during taxi was both a well-known risk at the time, and one that was believed to be harder to mitigate. So the thumb went on that side of the scale.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Eh... there's still a lot of weird cultures going on. The entire point of the Lay of Repast joke is specifically about how two Mamool Ja are willing to overlook the Mamook side of that tradition. The Lay of Gold is the only one that doesn't rely on historical stuff, instead the modern (Dawnservant-inspired) Pelu focus on trade. It's less obvious in Tural the city, and the big focus on Big Fat Tacos kinda does do the cultures-as-foods-and-funny-hats bit, but if you look around there's still different parts of the city more focused on Mamook, X'braal, Pelu, and Hhetsarro architectures.
Even where the monoculture answer 'works', like Koana's solution to the Lay of Reeds, it's noteworthy that it doesn't work better: it heals fewer plots of reeds than the ritual magic, and likely has little beneficial effect on the wildlife. In Shaaloani zone, the monoculture sheriff is reasonable but completely fleeced; the local Old Ways of dueling saves the day. And groups like the Yok Huy are both fractured in tolerating Turalyi dominance at all, and even those that 'tolerate' it barely interact with others.
There's definitely a problem, but the game struggling with treating each zone as real cultures and simultaneously bottle episodes that can be solved in at most a dungeon or trial has been a thing since ARR -- the only people you can't persuade that way are literally brainwashed by primals, beast tribe or Ishgardian alike -- and lampshaded as early as Stormblood. The cultures here are a little less interestingly weird than those of the Au Ra tribes, but the Au Ra were far outliers: contrast the Doma, Ishgard, Bozja, so on.
The harder part is that it's openly judgemental about traditions: both the 'sacred brothers' tradition and Koana's abandonment are explicitly written as bad, in contrast to Yok Huy remembrances or the Hhetsarro tribe's interactions with their beasts of burden. That's not completely unprecedented (ie, Ala Mhigan militarism and kings, Limosan piracy).
But I don't know that they're woke in that sense. The sacred brothers deal in particular is not especially woke-flavored ('interracial marriages are bad for the kids?')
gattsuru
1yr ago
Eh... writing-wise, it's really hard to beat Stormblood for jank or ARR for bloat. Dawntrail's got some of the notes pretty dumb, but I think more of the problem's that its trying to put too many plates in the air, more than gone woke -- even Wuk Lamat's weird story arc is just LyseV2 more than Trans Superstar, and the 'we defeat our enemies when we make them our friends' line with the Turiyolal is a continuation of Minfilla's story with the Beast Tribes.
And both Endwalker and Shadowbringer were also just really outstanding for MMO writing, in ways that would be difficult to repeat. Alexandria couldn't and shouldn't have been Ancients v2 Electric Boogaloo.
((Though them no longer being Beast Tribes is as much woke as it is the paradox of non-Beastman 'Beast' Tribes.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Battle of Athens, and to a lesser extent Bundy Standoff.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's definitely some of that going on, and HP certainly seemed primed to buy those optimistic numbers and then some. At one point HP internally valued Autonomy at a 40bn+ USD.
But allegedly the behavior here was Worse than hilarious optimism. From the Hussain (Autonomy CFO) trial appeal:
They used several improper techniques to pad revenue: back-dating contracts; "selling" software to resellers when it never actually expected to be paid back; and re-selling hardware at a loss while representing to auditors, market analysts, and ultimately HP that it never sold hardware separately from software. Autonomy, in other words, was "buying its own revenue."...
In addition to deceiving its auditors, Autonomy also had to square its books with the actual cash on hand. Sometimes, it would collect money on these deals from the ultimate end user instead of the reseller. Sometimes, it would buy worthless software from the reseller to give it the money to pay Autonomy. And sometimes it would simply write off the amounts owed. These write-offs occurred in the "dark period" between Aug. 18 and Oct. 3, 2011—the date when HP announced it would acquire Autonomy, and the date the deal actually closed, respectively.
And there's a really big list of individual screwy behaviors (the Vatican gets involved! Twice!). While a lot of them were 'just' recognizing revenue earlier in sketchy ways, others look like pretty overt efforts to manufacture revenue or 'revenue' while hiding costs. I have absolutely no idea about the legality of this sort of accounting foolery in a public company normally, nor in the context of a sale/audit. Hell, I don't even enough about accounting to know if they're as clearly sketchy as they look at first glance -- as much as 'just write it all off' is rightfully a meme, there are a lot of ways to legally mess with numbers or have a 'pure software' company that's selling hardware at a loss for large portions of its revenue.
But even if HP was willing to make up whatever numbers would make that deal flow, Autonomy was willing to at least bend over backwards to give numbers making the company look like a better buy.
Unfortunately, it's not very easy to tell the difference between those two ends from the public record. There's a lot of lawfare about specific testimony, but that... doesn't really mean much, and from a quick glance it doesn't look like any big decisions happened over technicalities from a judge's perspective.
Their CFO, Sushovan Hussain, was convicted of a ton of counts of wire fraud, so it's pretty clear that someone was making something up. It doesn't cover near the full 8bn USD gap, but it's at least sizable enough to explain some sort of otherwise-unreasonable conclusion. Lynch-Chamberlain's defense was that Hussain had handled the money and documents in question, and that neither Chamberlain nor Lynch were (proven to be) aware he was lying, or to the extent Chamberlain futzed some numbers that they were not done to induce HP's deal. The lawfirm for Lynch highlighted the weakness of a major witness for the government, but I'll caveat that this is a very lawyer take on things.
Whether it's scuzzy is a bit easier: yes, absolutely. The indictment looks a lot worse for Lynch than Chamberlain, and not all allegations in an indictment are true -- one charge got tossed as unsupported by the evidence, which takes some fucking up -- but most look like they'd be prone to problems more of the sort "did HP depend on this" or "what this done for potential buyers" rather than "did this show good compliance with financial best-practices". At best, Lynch as CEO and Chamberlain as VP of Finance managed to miss tens of millions of dollars in not-quite-honest claims by their CFO; more likely, they at least futzed with the truth, if not necessarily to the point of it being covered by a law.
Did the car and driver just disappear into the ether (suspicious) or is there a legal docket somewhere in Cambridge where some old lady is gonna be tried for grossly negligent driving resulting in grave injury
Maybe the latter, but apparently 49-year-old?:
Cambridgeshire Police did not name Mr Chamberlain, but were appealing for witnesses after a collision between a pedestrian and a car had taken place in Newmarket Road in Stretham.
Officers said a blue Vauxhall Corsa was travelling between Stretham and Wicken on the A1123 when the collision took place at about 10.10am on Saturday. They added a man in his 50s had been taken to hospital with serious injuries. The driver of the car, a 49-year-old woman from Haddenham, remained at the scene and was assisting officers with their inquiries.
I don't follow Python internals as much as I should (except to complain about dependency hells), given how spread out the language is.
From some quick searches, I'd guess you're talking about this official statement (w/ this article actually giving him as the banned coder), with pro-Tim and anti-Tim (maybe?) sample takes?
My gut-check, given this at the center of it all, it looks like it's the pretty standard Code of Conduct spiral, where once a Code of Conduct gets implemented, it becomes increasingly vital to use it early, often, and with steadily lowering bars. Peters is the first guy retired enough and not-autistic enough to pull aggro, but there's people seeing the writing on the wall, sometimes getting aggro at themselves.
But I don't know the community well enough to give more than a gutcheck.
gattsuru
1yr ago
For background, despite the name, Autonomy was a pretty generic business middleware-ish corporation, mostly based around database search. AFAIK, no significant AI focus. HP bought, as Tophattingson says, for 11bn USD in 2011, and it was pretty much scrap by late 2012, eventually getting sold to OpenText (with some handoffs on the way) in 2016.
Matt Levine had some good contemporaneous reporting, though I'll caveat that he's prone to thinking everything's a scam, if in a scam-heavy field. Regardless of whether it was a scam to start with, several billion dollars in losses would pretty easily get enough negative attention to get a few people homicidal, though ten years is a long time to wait for justice if you're willing to just hit someone with a lorry.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I mean, to be fair, no taxes on tips acknowledges a de facto reality: who reports their tips in their tax returns?
The structure of the tip credit is designed to strongly encourage employers to force tipped-as-in-lower-minimum-wage workers to mark down at least (untipped) minimum wage in tips -- otherwise, the employer has to cover the gap out of their pocket -- and there are some other tax (and SSI) benefits to accurately reporting the typical tipped income.
I won't pretend that this means everybody complies even remotely accurately, and if you're on paper as a normal-minimum wage employee most of those incentives fall away, but it's very far from the free for all most expect
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's like the natural gas stove stuff. Ostensibly, it's for health and safety reasons related to insufficient ventilation; in practice, it's obviously motivated by decarbonization that expects the electric versions to be powered by clean renewable energy, which they'll never implement in sufficient scale or scope.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a tendency to overstate the matter -- while parts of the Ottoman Empire largely ignored male homosexual behavior, much of the post-Ottoman Empire turned religious bans on homosexual acts into civil law ones, either under local pressures or Western ones; there were complex social and sometimes legal norms against 'effeminacy' that weren't quite a ban on gay stuff but sometimes got used that way; a lot of this is graded on a pretty heavy curve given explicit and enforced bans in Western countries in the 1950-1960s -- but they definitely had a dedicated western European fandom even into 1972-1973.
((Uh, not always in good ways. A lot of the western gay tourist culture used 'boy' in the sense of 'adult twink', and a number didn't.))
The various civil wars were a good part of it, various migrations (both in response to Israel and to refugee flight) another part, increasing Islamist fear/demonization of 'Westernized' culture yet another, both in relationship to homosexuality and for treatment of women.
gattsuru
1yr ago
You're still looking at ~850 USD for a 3090 new today today, compared to around 600 USD for an nVidia 4070, plus the increased size and power/heat. Not a great deal if you need the VRAM, but it's not clear you do need it yet. I'd err in favor of futureproofing, but if you've got One Game You're Gonna Play for seriously for the next couple years, I could see the argument.
Though the various suffixes are more clearly dumb. 4070 TI Super Omega Super Saiyin Blue is at the same price point, nearly the same size, and similar power profiles, so looks like you're trading slightly better DRSS for less VRAM?
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm pretty skeptical.
There's definitely women with the general kink of being 'taken' (or assigned) by someone with near-ultimate power -- if you're a sub, there's a lot to like in a fantasy of being desired this sort of nonspecific way, where you're responsible for doing things but not making decisions, with clear and immediate and recoverable punishments for failure.
((Hell, there's guys with that kink, either in the 'oh do I want to be part of a harem servicing the guy/girl who will take up my control', or the rarer and more anatomically-implausible variants. For those interested in the former and not averse to m/m stuff, tatsuchan18's S4S series is a good, if sparkledoggy, glimpse for what subs are looking for.))
But it doesn't look anything like Handmaid's Tale, either the film or story version. Virtually no one in Handmaid's Tale is actually horny; 'legitimate' sex here is about power, most explicitly with the monthly 'duties'. The closest description to sexual enjoyment the books provide is one Wife who got more pleasure from holding her husband's handmaid down, and a brothel that ends up being much more for the one-pump-chumps than any serious desire or demand. The handmaids aren't even trophy wives. Rather than rules being consistent and the penalties being capricious(ly enjoyable), the rules are capricious while the penalties are permanent and ironclad.
It's horror porn. Atwood literally threw every misogynistic law or social norm that she had ever heard a rumor about into a jar, shook the jar a bunch, and wrote what came out. It's incoherent as such, even compared to a lot of the slave harem porn fantasies, but any intent for the work to be speculative fiction was stapled on at the end.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's not hard to come up with support for a minimal version -- every mechanic worth their salt has had some customer come in with a car where the brake pads have dissolved, the tires are bald, and the frame is about to fold in half, and the customer decides that they'll just drive it home. There's a libertarian argument that these problems solve themselves, and it's not wrong, but no few of these people end up taking out innocents with them. There's a pragmatic argument that the costs are huge and the benefits small, and it's probably right, but it's an ugly one to make.
The trouble's that even accepting that minimal version, it quickly turns from a 'is this car remotely safe' into a 'does someone who only buys new cars like how this one looks', or even a 'how do we get a guaranteed easy job for a handful of schmucks who can't be trusted with a wrench'? And even people who do recognize how bad the ugly versions of these programs get don't care that much about them, so it's a hard political problem.
gattsuru
1yr ago
gattsuru
1yr ago
Most image generators are a good deal more manageable : FLUX.1 dev is 24GB, but people have got it running on mobile GPUs with less than 4GB VRAM. It's slower -- a couple minutes per generation, as opposed to the <20 sec for running on a nvidia 3060 or equivalent -- but it's usable.
A good part of that is just that image generation models quantize better than LLMs, without become as 'dumb', so you can run down to fp8 (8-bit) with relatively little loss of information, and nf4 is good enough for a lot of uses even if notably different. But imagegen has also had a lot more software work done to do partial staging and some CPU offloading, in the casual sphere.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I am not an American, but I think one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries? Is that open information ? I guess it must be or how else can a party ask you to vote?
Whether you can vote in a primary without registering as a member of the party varies by state and even party, as does what hoops you have to jump through to get voter registration records (if getting it from the state).
gattsuru
1yr ago
Baltimore is unusually bad, even by US 'bad city' standards. While there are pronounced efforts to keep violence out of the Inner Harbor area and a few yuppie neighborhoods, it's very much a relatively narrow zone with a very thin buffer, and you can't really avoid going out of those areas if you're living there. Assaults and bike thefts on Johns Hopkins students were nearly endemic even pre-COVID, Monkey's reports on gunshots are if anything lower than my experience being there for a few months, and you could run into aggressive and grabby panhandlers just a couple blocks from the central police headquarters in the Inner Harbor area.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Archive link here. I'll caveat that "The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated or agreed with the president nor with the [commissioners]," or "On Tuesday the European Commission denied that Breton had approval from its president Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter." are much more limited phrases.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Virginia is a little weird for, until literally last month, allowing either car insurance or paying a one-time fee. Unlike most states, where you're often required to show proof of insurance or can have your license suspended without it, even legitimate dealers wouldn't and often couldn't check insurance status.
((A lot of the temp tags are just entirely fake, produced in Photoshop or MSPaint. Others are from 'licensed dealers' that sprout up, print a ton of tags, and close immediately after.))
Virginia also has much laxer vehicle safety inspections, mostly just an eyeball inspection on tires/brakes/mirrors/exhaust (though, to their credit, they're done annually); Maryland requires them only on transfer of a vehicle but can involve upwards of an hour on a vehicle lift, and no small number of marginal cars will flunk MD inspections consistently.
Both states have smog and emissions testing, though I don't think VA temp tags require it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
One of the bizarre bits of Baltimore is how close it is to DC; there are pretty regular departures from the localized incompetence and corruption (if only by infusing massive floods of cash) just so people from DC aren't inconvenienced. I'd be willing to bet that the Key Bridge falls into that pile, just because otherwise people going to Aberdeen have to deal with Baltimore roads.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It... depends. The big SCOTUS decision on the matter is Puckingham (cw: sexual assault of a child), where a near-blanket ban on social media or website use by convicted sex offenders who had served their sentence was not compatible with the First Amendment, and instead such bans must be narrowly tailored. While SCOTUS itself has not brought this to cover parolees as well, some circuit courts of appeals have. But those restrictions had to be extremely broad before the courts considered them unconstitutional; there is a general rule that parolees have highly restricted rights in general.
((Pretrial release, without a conviction, is even messier, not least of all because such matters are hard to contest before they are mooted.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Nakoula was a pretty generic grifter, but this happened right before President Obama's reelection. Having someone local to act on as an utmost priority meant that Benghazi was a Solved Problem in November 2012; it was only well after the election that anyone could start unraveling the loose threads.
Wouldn't be great for taxiing, but that's probably solvable, especially since LAX keeps getting additional taxi options.
Bigger issue's minimum separation distance: the FAA rules for wake turbulence are arcane, but the north runways are either on the hairy edge of being so close that they hit the delay requirements as a rule or well within them, and the south pair are only a little better. There are still rules for mixed operations on nearby parallel runways, but they're a lot less strict, and allow much higher capacity.
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