Ar'kendrythist handles power scaling better in the first few books, where there's not merely charged conflict but the protagonist being a pretty severe underdog. Even well after that, there's always a bigger fish until (arguably) the back half of the last book, and that's the point where the protagonist dying stops mattering and what the villain could do to everybody else becomes more important.
While it's still a little obnoxiously progressive-in-the-inevitability sense even by my standards, that works out pretty well for keeping the tension high; what fixing a wasteland of slavery and infighting even looks like is a more interesting question than who's power is more maximum and can blow up a city (though that happens a lot too). The author's also willing to kick out legs under the protagonist often enough that even some situations where it seems like they should be certain to win, a problem will show up and whatever the heroes built collapse. Never quite to the point of being unfair, though it gets a little close at times.
gattsuru
16d ago
They have wide discretion because most of the INA is subject to "may" clauses instead of "shall" clauses right now.
And this guy has been told, repeatedly, that the very specific law he claims has "may" clauses had "shall" clauses, already; that there was a massive court case over it, and it didn't do jack or shit.
gattsuru
17d ago
Most of the common complaints are about minimum memory and CPU footprint; VSCode takes comparable resources to run as far more fully-featured IDEs. But if you've got the specs these are unlikely to actually feel bad, it's just kinda goofy.
The biggest problems are pretty hardware-specific, but they've been pretty bad when they pop up. I've had VSCode pull 16+GB memory (especially bad on an 8GB-RAM system) or peg multiple threads at 100% core utilization just idling, all with the default configuration, no extensions. A lot of it seems very dependent on renderer, especially since it started defaulting to a hardware renderer even on Intel integrated GPUs, but sometimes 'normal' developer workstations with multimonitor configurations have gone really wonky. While a less common use case, I've seen bigger problems with massive files in VSCode than in VisualStudio, Intellij, Android Studio (which isn't great itself!), or NotePad++, sometimes to the point where I had to shutdown the computer because VSCode was capping out CPU utilization so high that I couldn't use the mouse or keyboard.
((I've also had problems with deployments of VSCode, rather than VSCode itself. Which, tbf, usually aren't even the Electron developers faults, but since it includes things like a 40+ GB electron update, it's still worth keeping in mind before committing to VSCode as a day-to-day dev environment.))
VSCode defends itself in many cases by pointing to issues with extensions, and to some extent that's fair: just as it's not the Electron devs fault that a distro screwed up once, it's not VSCoders fault that a random html/css extension can peg a cpu. You can't build a framework that can contain every sufficiently dedicated forkbomb without making it useless. But you're almost certainly going to need some extensions just handle basic compiling and debug functionality. And some of them are pretty bad! My worst experience have been with the Java variants, with high idle CPU utilization across the board, but that's mostly because VSCode is the 'officially supported' tool for FIRST FRC so I see it on a lot of different non-optimized hardware. I don't do much webdev, but the few times I've run into ESLint, even with a minimal ruleset and properly configured (why is apply-rules-on-typing even an option?!) it's been pretty painful.
It's easier for straight cis guys (or even people like myself who are bi), but I think you overestimate how easy it is to walk into a relationship, depending on social class and work/life balance. This is an older poll, but you still end up with sizable percentages of unmarried adults having never had a date, and a much bigger group struggling to try to get a relationship; it's only gotten worse since.
Straight men can ask out anyone... kinda, and there's pretty strict social norms against doing so anywhere near work and several different classes of enthusiast hobbies. People try to set up straight men with friends and coworkers... if you're already the sort of person who has. You can hook up with random strangers... if you're in the tiny percentage of straight guys that can get a tindr date. There's a lot of ways for straight guys to set themselves apart to women... in the negative sense as easily as the positive: (het, cis) women are far more likely to get the ick for single 'red flags' that can end up being. Straight guys don't have anywhere near the expectations of attractiveness... but they're also dancing a very narrow line between coming across as too aggressive or not forward enough.
((and... straight guys are picky in a different way. The expectations are lower, but anything under them is far more strict limitation, in extreme cases to the point where even a guy that wanted to muscle through it in the interest of an orgasm or a relationship would find themselves 'pushing rope'.))
If you're able to make the first move, a lot of those problems disappear, but in turn a lot of the ways (straight, cis) men were allowed to make the first move have disappeared too. Of my social environments, there's maybe one in which asking someone out on a date would be accepted (and, uh, coincidentally this is also the gayest one, thanks FFXIV), and maybe three where it's not explicitly ban-worthy. I can't speak on straight guys getting set up by friends or family from personal experience, given the bi bit, but from what I've seen second-hand there's a lot of people where that either doesn't happen, or it only happens in situations that have developed the various taboos.
Some of that's downstream of selection effects as I've aged and been in a relationship for a while, but it's very different from the gay world or from what I can see of most of the trans-friendly dating world. A number of gay writers are pretty strong advocates of that model replacing the classical one for hets, but I'm not sure it's working out great for the gays: I have a hell of a time when quite a lot of my options are split between bars or dances, down2succ-level 'casual', or online stuff that's never going to graduate beyond RP and hard to even keep time synced. Where these options are unpleasant in a gay context, they seem unsolvable in a het one.
((And the dodges are so common that Scott Alexander had a post on how "you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation" explanations radicalize a lot of people who are very far from the central example of what I'm hoping are your actual focus, over a decade ago.))
Again, I'm not saying that het (cis) guys have it worse or even anywhere near as rough as you do, but I think you're running into a version of the lemon market problem in things like comp sci hiring; it's really easy for the absolute worst to get vastly over-represented, while a lot of those who are either slightly under-par or who are not as assertive won't show up much on your radar.
gattsuru
18d ago
Anyone have particularly strong feelings about best (or worst) UI libraries? I spent a good part of the weekend trying to take a more serious attempt at familiarizing myself with Avalonia, but I'll admit user interface work is always something I've dabbled with rather than gotten a great understanding of, and at the dabbler's level a lot of great or terrible code gets completely buried by the strength (Visual Studio) or weakness (oh boy, QT!) of IDE-focused tooling, or the difficulty of entry (ia ia OpenGL fhtagn).
gattsuru
18d ago
Yeah, the ending feels a lot like Alan Moore's Promethea (or, tbf, a lot of Douglas Adam's works, like the Dirk Gently books). There's an absolute ton of pins that were lined up, and then the bowling ball never really came, so they fell over anyway. Which is praising with faint damns when it all still comes together! But feels like something that could have been improved in the editing pass since initial release.
gattsuru
19d ago
Anything I posted that was anti-MAGA was highly contentious or net-downvoted, with poorly thought out responses by others on the level of "have you ever considered that maybe you're too retarded to understand Trump's brilliant 4D chess move?????" getting broadly upvoted.
It's a good thing there's no other possible distinguishing characteristics, here.
gattsuru
19d ago
Ah, thanks. This event happened in Minnesota, and the victims were Minnesota State Senators. Not sure how I goofed that up after linking to the Minnesota senate.
Two deaths. Other two victims are currently expected to recover.
One noteworthy bit’s that this is a little bit more sophisticated than the normal hradzka garbage person emotional spasm, not just in the police maskerade, but also hitting two separate politicians so quickly. Police are claiming he had a list with a number of other politicians included. This is pretty far from what I (or, presumably FCfromSSC) would think about, but it doesn’t take much more sophistication before it breaks the normal field tilt toward defense.
Another is that Washington’s ED: Minnesota's /ED state Senate is very close. They’re out of session and it will be a while til the next session, but change votes by a bullet is Very Bad to have as common knowledge.
Some reporting is claiming the shooter has been caught and identified as someone with ties to the Dem political sphere (Walz, morbidly). I’d like to see confirmation that a) that’s the guy and b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though. EDIT: Confirmed “no kings” rally fliers in vehicle, dunno if motivation or target.
gattsuru
20d ago
Australia depends very heavily on bulk road transportation to very long distance deliveries, while not having a surfeit of truckers or the interstate infrastructure present in the US. Their solution is “road trains”, consisting of a semi truck, but instead of having one trailer, usually having three to five.
This on its own is just goofy-looking. But road trains also have additional speed limits often slower than normal vehicles (tbf, a good idea), and a lot of the roads they travel have two lanes, one traveling each direction. That would still be fine.
It is culturally normal to pass in those circumstances, so long as not in a no-passing zone. Even when the roads are pretty sandy on the edges. So you have a delta of 5-10kph, a set of trailers that can be 50m long, and you’re going to be potentially playing chicken with incoming traffic for over a minute while the trailers beside you are jerking around.
((And then you also have to worry about the truck driver spotting a kangaroo or a cow on the road in front of him.))
I have no objection to other people using automatic headlights; the mechanism is pretty fail safe. Don’t like them for my own use, but that’s a taste thing.
gattsuru
21d ago
- Yes.
- Yes.
- Not in the US, in good weather, at daytime. Expect 10-15% over to be acceptable. Rain, snow, or true nighttime off an interstate, speed limits are more strict to their posted number. Other countries can be more aggressive; Australia going 1 kph over too often can cost you your license (though in turn, their norms for road trains are near-suicidal by US standards).
- On the interstate and state roads, yes. Residential roads, I'd consider it rude to get into the left lane for a left turn more than a couple miles ahead of time, but it'd still not be a norm violation and in heavier traffic might be a good idea.
- At lower speeds, it's just impolite. Higher speeds (50+ mph), I'd consider it a norm violation unless they've been really stupid (eg matching speed, ignoring or not seeing turn signal for several hundred meters).
- No.
- a. How long after sunrise or before complete sunset do you need to turn on headlights, and what amount of rain should you? b. What sort of load, if any, in an open truck bed, before you need at least one ratchet strap?
gattsuru
21d ago
With AI image generation, there are so many levels of randomness and frustrated choice that it's hard to imagine how a user could work for years to achieve progressively greater mastery. Don't most commercial models actively work to disrupt direct user control, e.g. by adding a system prompt you can't see and running even the words of your prompt through intermediate hidden LLM revisions before they even get to the image generator?
Commercial models are usually pretty limited in your control, but local models can be surprisingly deep in terms of technical skill.
There aren't many people working in the space yet, but there's a lot you can do. Inpainting allows controlled redrawing of selected areas, LoRAs (and, previously, Dreambooth) can be used to encode characters or things or styles or perspectives, Image Segmentation can control layout, ControlNet can be used to manipulate pose or composition, so on. Currently, first-frame-last-frame-packing video generation are pretty focused on something very akin to putting together a 'storyboard', and the most plausibly consistent that storyboard is drastically changes how consistent the output image can be. Local AIgen workflows can look very different from talking to a midjourney bot.
Some of these technical skills even have a little overlap: knowing things like the names of different paint or painting techniques, or how camera lenses work, or what poses people can actually do, or why composition matters, feed back into even prompting and heavily feeds into these more technical uses.
The big difference is that (with the arguable exception of storyboarding) these are technical skills; they'll show you how well you achieve what you're trying to do, without necessarily changing whether what you want to do looks good. Conventional artists always had a little bit of that -- drawing a circle or line to improve hand coordination doesn't inherently teach where to use those primitives -- but AIgen does not really have a good way to develop the skill of taste beyond personal preference.
Technically, my first car I owned was a "fancy German car", and even a Mercedes Benz... that was older than I was when I bought it, less than a month's wages as a part-time dishwasher, and about as unreliable as that combination sounds. Probably more a fault on the previous owner than the German Engineering, but even after a full fuel line purge and a new fuel filter, had to clean out the carburetor on a biweekly basis.
Since then it's been the typical Camry-or-nearest-neighbor that I'll buy heavily used, and then drive until the engine grenades itself (thank you Saturn timing chains) or the next oil change isn't economical.
I'm not a car person. It's nice to have something where the muffler isn't falling off, and I don't mind doing the elbow work for maintenance, but if the car's in decent shape I'll take a salvage title Hyundai or a Lesbian-Brand Hatchback as happily as a Tesla or a Big Fuckoff Truck.
gattsuru
21d ago
Anyone want to bet whether that gets extended by or on the 11th?
gattsuru
21d ago
Excluding for now the possibility of a Dem trifecta, there's a lot of problems with the text of the INA. For a simple example... Under the conventional reads no; non-citizens must "immediately preceding the date of filing his application for naturalization has resided continuously, after being lawfully admitted for permanent residence, within the United States for at least five years", with a limited number of exceptions not relevant for most cases.
... so what's, exactly, the definition of "being lawfully admitted for permanent residence"? Barring some exceptions not relevant here, "the status of having been lawfully accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States as an immigrant in accordance with the immigration laws, such status not having changed". Historically that's been understood to require an LPR (aka green card).
But would a Dem President be un_able_ to change that? All the processes are executive branch, even the judges. Would anyone have standing to even bring a case challenging such a change? Would SCOTUS be willing to claw back the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of people?
And that's one of the less plausible ones.
gattsuru
22d ago
There's some videos here and here (cw: deadly plane crash).
Too grainy to completely exclude takeoff misconfiguration (esp on a sleek design like the 787), but at least no obvious structural failure, and I'd be surprised if takeoff misconfiguration could get that high in those weather conditions with that passenger load. NTSB's going to do some tests for fuel contamination, pilot error, maintenance faults, so on, but at the risk of speculating too early a lot of what I'm seeing points to either dual mechanical failure of the engines or electrical failure of the whole aircraft, especially the reported RAT deployment is real. Given everything else a lot of people are predisposed to think software or major design failure, but it's hard to think of a software bug or hardware flaw that would hide for over a decade and then hit both engines simultaneously. Maybe flying into a flock of birds a la Sully, but without the river and miracle?
gattsuru
22d ago
There's a lot of surprising survivals in takeoff and landing crashes: Northwest 255 is a pretty (in)famous takeoff misconfiguration that managed to kill more people than were on the flight and had one survivor.
gattsuru
22d ago
There's a handful of well-known examples in western languages, too, and probably a bunch more that are too informal to really be written down.
gattsuru
22d ago
A Framingham man who is accused of shooting another man during a pro-Israeli rally last September in Newton was placed on pretrial probation on Wednesday, June 4. Charges against Scott Hayes, 48, will be dismissed if he completes all pretrial probation conditions. The pretrial probation period runs through Sept. 13. The resolution of the case took place during a hearing Wednesday in Newton District Court.
One interesting bit I hadn't seen until reviewing one of his probation requirements, to search for a new job:
The disabled Iraq War veteran was contracted to provide natural gas leak detection, leak surveys, and inspections for a company that contracts with National Grid, one of the largest utility provider companies in Massachusetts. National Grid refused to allow Hayes to work on their account after the incident. As a result, his company informed him on Sunday — a month after the attack — that there was no work available, and advised Hayes to file for unemployment.
I've not been able to find out what happened with Gannon, the guy who struck Hayes. He was eventually charged with assault and battery, but the MA court lookup system sucks, so I can't tell if I'm not getting results with his name because I'm using the system wrong, or because they're not there. There's been no media coverage of a trial or plea agreement.
There's a lot less 'adult' games out there than you might expect, even for a pretty shallow level of curation and taste.
F95 doesn't have literally every porn game (or even every recent porn game; Fek's Spellbound (cw:m/m) has a surprisingly interesting central mechanic and afaict no f95 thread), and its filtering tools aren't the best, but the widest tag search gives a little over 2k items for 'cheating'. I don't have a good grasp on netorare/netorase/netosi, but the whole category of cheating is probably not really what erwgv3g34's after, and a lot of games will get marked for a kink for having one or two scenes even mentioning it rather than any real serious focus. I'd be surprised if there's more than a couple hundred, and as much as the ones erwgv links are Bog Standard In Progress VNs, even moderately good writing or design would probably put them at the top 10% of the pack.
There's a lot of furry games (F95 gives about 1200), and we tend to be pretty omnivorous when it comes to material. But a lot of those are either tech demos, like most VR games or very-early-prototypes, or games with maybe a couple story paths or a handful of animations, like VNs or platformers. There are some games that are complex enough to be worth visiting a few different times, most of which I've either bought or donated for. But if you wanted a list (and, uh, were pretty open-minded), I'd still probably given dozens, not hundreds. Even of the one-shots, a pretty sizable portion are not great, even by the standards of LLMs or AIgen. You can run out pretty quick without being some supergooner.
That's most severe for adult media and for kink, because there's a lot of kinks that range from personal nonstarters even in tiny doses (eg, I personally don't like hyper period, no offense to those that do) to possibly illegal in many countries (ignoring the obvious examples, people have gotten pretty seriously legal concerns over producing a cartoony CBT game). Many of the better games for my interests are text-only, because the nature of what they are means producing more than a handful of paperdoll-style images is agonizing work even with a lot of artists willing to work for near-peanuts!
But it's not like it's specific to porn games.
A year or so ago Rayon brought a big conversation about Palworld. And it's never been that clear how much (if at all) AI was used in producing the game. But it's a genre with a mere handful of serious competitors, and even the most 'successful' ones are often much worse. Over a year later, Nintendo has brought a pretty deadly legal threat against Palworld; they don't have a game that can actually compete with Palworld's not-exactly-great implementation yet. Maybe Legends ZA will break the pattern in October, but the last Legends game was pretty much just a joke. ARK I remains notoriously unplayable for the vast majority of people, it has a 'remaster' that manages to be buggier, and ARK II is in ETA:soon mode and has been for three years now. Kenshi or Grounded, if you have a wide enough definition? There's a couple attempts in Roblox for dragon manager games, I guess? But that's an insult to gatcha.
Base-building survival game with critters seems like it'd be inundated with clones; it's not exactly the goats-on-fire of SFW gaming genres. And that's not really happened. AIgen isn't there, yet. Maybe those limitations are why nobody's been able to step into the space, and maybe it'll never get there. Or maybe AIgen will act as an attacter for the sorta people who make very shallow games. (after all, most AIgen on f95 is glorified VN)
gattsuru
23d ago
I'll caveat that tumblr has picked a 'third way' -- if you can't depend on finding the flaws in the machines or smashing the machines, you can start looking at and promoting artists with their art. Yes, an AIgenner could theoretically 'put their steps in', having a long history of progressing art skills and process work for a given piece, maybe not even fraudulent at that, but it's not really what almost any will.
((With the advances we're seeing, I'd expect this to go the way of Amish furniture -- great technical skill and often unusual approaches to a work and usually better when available, but not always able to do those things.))
... though I'm not sure that will matter. People want to make principled stands over copyright or intellectual property, even if they're sometimes a little Janus-faced. But the Luddites cared about their work, and their pay, and not without reason; modern AIgen concerns much more heavily revolve around these matters than tracing II: trace harder. A thousand galleries and retweets and reblogs do not cash make; as an artist, Attention Is <Not> All You Need. A lot of mainstream artists historically depended, both for cash and for opportunity to develop their skills, on make-day work that is completely separate from other reputation and reliability trends pointed to direct sales to their audiences. You can't break the machines for this, you aren't involved in deciding to buy or not, and you can't judge the artist because they might never be named.
Tumblr and a lot of fandom spaces have moved to merch or patreon funding, and that's kinda worked on the edges for the most successful or the most second-job strivery. But I don't think it scales.
Most furry spaces have largely gotten pretty strict rules about aigen, sometimes aligned to the points you've highlighted and sometimes not, and the end result is pretty goofy.
E621, for example, prohibits AI excepting use for "backgrounds (treated like using a photo as a background, quality rules apply); for artwork that references, but does not directly use, AI generated content; and for audio in video posts such as WebM." The moderators will explain, when pinged, exactly how a particular piece falls, and from my understanding are pretty clear and direct about things. I don't know of any sfw examples, but leeto's 4930019 (cw:M/M and M/F) is an example where AI had been used to create pose references, but the final file had never been touched by any AIgen program, and moderators said it was at the very border but still acceptable (though this scared the artist off enough to move to conventional digital pose generators). The rules are workable!
But they end up in a situation where half of the pixels in a particular artpiece are AIgen and it's okay, including a lot of stuff that's setting the stage, and then another piece where AIgen was only used to add some shadow or shading and that's unacceptable. More critically, serious enforcement is dependent on self-reporting. Rick Griffin got a piece banned from FurAffinity (and, presumably, would not be allowed on e621) for some tree renders and shading that I don't think anyone would have noticed had he not spelled it out. Obvious errors in logic or consistency can sometimes point to AIgen when an artist doesn't disclose it (or show other faults that trigger other quality rules), and there's a certain look to some of the most common AIgen, but you can and I have put out hundreds of pieces in an hour with wildly different styles and pretty good image quality consistency.
((And, on the flip side, a bad actor can actively use AI for what AI proponents would still consider stealing. Img2img with someone else's art can have far less actual effort than direct reference or even hand-tracing on a lightbox, but can be different enough to bypass a lot of conventional phash checks or even eyeball tests for 'novelty' and 'uniqueness'. If a small-name account starts doing it, it's hard to catch and harder still to persuasively demonstrate.))
But you can also just kinda have counterintuitive and inconsistent results, and just that's how things are. I'm not even sure some arbitrary rules would be bad -- an art gallery that allowed some limited number of upload per account per day (and restricted alts) using AIgen could avoid a lot of the spam and quality control problems that places which haven't banned the stuff often run into. The rules and points being made up is pretty common.
This, although I'll caveat that I was kinda expecting more of a punt than this opinion ended up being.
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