gattsuru
2yr ago
"Promote anything from a source on this allowlist" requires the person to have and maintain a list of accepted sources. That works for some small projects, but a very typical use case is just "I want to pass this e-mail around to anyone who needs it, even if I don't know them, and not have it get mixed into the 1k+ emails I get already".
gattsuru
2yr ago
Obama defended the practice when members of his administration got caught doing it but it seems very unconvincing with the existence of email filtering:
Filtering is very lackluster, especially if you're trying to provide it to high-publicity people who aren't very tech-aware and especially where you're not just filtering between "useful" and "spam" but between several different tiers of importance and some junk that an intern still needs to go through. I wish plus-addressing was the right solution, but 95%+ of users will eventually just strip it out and e-mail to the top level instead.
That said, there's a difference between firstname.lastname.projectname and sooners7. The first does anything conventional filtering can not reliably do; the only real benefit to the latter is to avoid grepping. Political appointees are free (and required!) to keep private e-mails off of their public accounts and are free to go full Publicus for their private discussions, but the opportunity for problems are severe.
It's not the worst FOIA-evasion I've seen recently, but it's definitely going to add more reason to suspect fuckery going around.
On the flip side, it's not like anything's going to happen because of it. Even if this action 'violated the law' for NARA or whatever, it's not exactly something that gets enforced; the SLF may get some cash back for the clear violation of FOIA's statutory required response timeline, but even if they do it could well be after the 2024 election at this rate. It probably won't get anyone working in the government in actual trouble rather than just bilking some tax money.
gattsuru
2yr ago
The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC?
-
A speaker is presented who has a shallow, simple political perspective, which they repeat often as a slogan, usually with the expectation that no one could reasonably disagree or even that a factual basis is relevant. The NPC meme here references the Welcome to Corneria problem in video game design. -
The speaker has a shallow political perspective which has been 'programmed' into them. This doesn't necessarily mean a sinister sort of way -- it can be a perspective that they already agreed with and the 'programming' is just a bunch of snappy slogans -- but it's usually meant to imply that the speaker at least hasn't really investigated the principles underlying that slogan. See here for a parody of the perspective. For a steelman, see the criticisms here of even counterculture speakers often reacting to whatever becomes the mainstream media focus de jour until it gets dropped for a new shiny. -
The speaker lacks agency or principles to want anything but whatever script is given to them. Cfe here for an explicit example, here or here for more typical usage.
gattsuru
2yr ago
There's a decent number who don't want to have penetrative anal sex, although it's a pretty small minority. I don't like considering frottage or intercrural not-sex, and even for people who do anal they're still fun and can be a whole encounter on their own, but some do take to them exclusively. Some of that can reflect health concerns more than preferences -- Crohn's and some related disorders don't play well with bottoming, and not just for the disgust stuff -- but some people just don't like it.
That said, prostate stimulation isn't for everybody, but it's really good if it works for you, and it's not implausible for the how of it working for some men is at least somewhat tied to same-sex attraction.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Femboys get a lot of outsized attention in public awareness, but statistically gay men tend to prefer masculinity, and anecdote suggests that this applies even beyond sex roles (eg, a lot of tops still want a masculine bottom or verse). I think this contradiction arises because a lot of gay men want to themselves been seen as (weakly) feminine more than the general sex role disparity, but that's just a hunch.
On the flip side, even tomboyish women that intentionally bulk up on muscles are pretty fey compared even moderately in-shape men. Often much stronger! But even the bodybuilders are a lot
Beyond that, it's not just (or even mostly) visual appearance. Breasts tend to be a turn-off for gay men, to be fair. But there's differences in texture of skin, of how people sound, and of smell and even warmth. Men are almost always going to be more physically active, even when bottoming, and they're often more vocal. It's... not a small difference.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Oral, frottage, intercrural, some fun combinations with sex toys that I don't know have names, there's a lot of options short of penetration. Even for couples that do anal, these play a pretty important role.
As for how prevalent completely avoiding anal is, it depends pretty heavily on how you survey it. I've seen numbers as high as ~30% claimed, but that usually ends up reflecting a survey question like 'recent sexual encounter' or 'in the last x months' that's probably better understood as whether they have regular interest. I'd expect the real number is probably a lot lower: 10% or even 5% seem more realistic.
((There's been an effort to popularize the term "side" for this as a sex role, but a) I've not seen an academic surveys on the identity and b) it's a stupid name.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
My brother turned down the opportunity to fuck a guy he really wanted because the man's girlfriend wanted to watch, and reading between the lines, that was enough of a turnoff to make the entire process unworkable. That isn't universal, but neither is it unusual or even the most extreme variant. The number that'd turn down direct contact with a woman without another dick in the room is a lot higher.
Conversely, a surprising number of gay men have tried women, despite their best efforts: there was a fun statistic going around in the early 00s that was probably mostly selection effect but ended up with a worrying number of gay men having had their first age of heterosexual intercourse before the average straight man did. Some of that's really sketchy stuff -- Dan Savage's version is worse because he doesn't mention and may not realize it was statutory rape -- but more of it's just that a lot of gay socialization makes dealing with women somewhat easier and a little less 'threatening', along with pressures to appear straight making early relationships (including relationships without a stated interest in sex!) more appealing earlier.
Some of them identify as gay because they tried it and it didn't work: either 'pushing rope', not being able to reach climax even if they could get hard, or they had to lay back and think of England (or their favorite porn star dick). ((If you want a fictional example, look at Meesh's "Passing Love" pages 9-12, cw: het sex, and notice comments empathizing with it.))
But others were physically capable (sometimes with chemical assistance, sometimes not) and it just wasn't enjoyable. They might not turn down a hot woman who wanted sex, but it's not what they'd go with if they had a choice between a hot woman and a hot (or even mediocre) guy, and if the woman was offering for his sake rather than for her's, he might be better entertained with his own hands.
gattsuru
2yr ago
The other potential culprit is my geriatric 600w power supply, over 10 years old at this point, but why would it be thermally related?
Power supplies are thermal creatures; even high-end modern power supplies will typically lose ~10% of power to heat, and some of that load will actually increase as devices are getting thermally stressed (in addition to obvious power demand increases when ). Usually it's something related to the main switching MOSFET(s) on the high-voltage side from an internal control perspective (and the caps from a practical one), but I strongly discourage trying to repair your own PSU so the matter is kinda academic.
I won't say it's certainly the issue, but it's a very inexpensive one that's a lot more probable than most people expect.
gattsuru
2yr ago
People who routinely borrow 20k USD for a car usually have a better job or job prospects than the median people coming out of college, and especially better than the median debtor, since income is right up there with credit score for something required to qualify for such a auto loan that isn't for education loans. They also have an asset that can, in a majority of cases, be meaningfully repossessed, and while such repossessions are janky and unpleasant for everyone, they happen at scale in a way that discharges the loan without unspooling significant portions of the United States economy.
College loans guaranteed by the government, at least on paper, make up a value equivalent around 6% of GDP, which isn't quite the right comparison but it's as useful of one as I can provide. It's plausible that this just goes on forever with a bunch of barely-serviced loans, but another fun stat is that people with active loans make up around 13% of the population. And they're kinda the historical go-to example for people who vote, and the last three Democratic Presidential primaries have been full of people fighting with each other to see who can pander the most while dangling 20k USD bills in front of this particular audience; the current sitting President has tried to push a blatantly illegal policies to do so, that was specifically 10k-20k USD per person.
There are other issues on top of this -- proposals that don't change the system mean that this exact same problem will come about again in another decade or two, the problem's particularly galling because university administration where a lot of this money is getting funneled is filled with awful and awfully anti-Red-Tribe people, just as this failure mode was obvious back in the ACA debate era the next step where this debt forgiveness/nullification breaks down will be funny when Red Tribers are joking about nationalizing the university endowments and significantly less so when the actual policy response has considered ten years of its worst enemy's public plans. But it's Bad Enough.
gattsuru
2yr ago
... Both of those examples are in the United Kingdom, and the DID was merged into the Foreign Office without many firings. The CSD reforms did cashier out 140k people from the civil service before breaking the department into new groups, and some functions were privatized, so I'll give you that one, but it was also almost forty years ago and lead to massive efforts to specifically try to prevent that exact sort of thing from ever happening again.
In theory, the UK doesn't really have a 'higher pleading' in the way the United States has the Constitution, so there's nothing explicitly preventing a future PM from changing the law and stripping a new department out. But in practice the last attempt for a significantly less robust rollback ended Poorly. Which isn't strong evidence -- there's a lot of failure in the Johnson government! And yet.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Griffin was convicted of trespassing, was also already considered a useless putz by the broader New Mexico GOP, and appeals floundered because the man's lawyers didn't bother filing the full appeal.
I'm not sure that system was taken seriously, so much as used as an excuse to get rid of a meddlesome priest.
((Conversely, I'm incredibly skeptical that someone's going to get published arguing the same in any other political direction.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
Ah, that's fair. The big problem is usually less than authentication side, and more fighting with finding the right Java version. Go too early and you don't have TLS 1.2+ support, go too late and it'll do a version check during Java install and be a pain in the ass (or worse, depend on SSE instructions you may no longer have). But people have done it!
Newer Minecraft versions (1.17+) require more recent versions of Java that have stricter version checks; there are some workarounds but they're incredibly inelegant. But I don't think that's what you're trying to do.
That's kinda part of the problem. OregonLive's coverage is probably the more conventional Detached Professional Reportage in tone, but uh... you do notice convenient choices of words and focus, if you start looking. Like, just on simple questions of fact:
Hacker, a Portland-based activist who told jurors he often attended protests to observe police, film and photograph, described an incident in 2019 at a 24 Hour Fitness center in Portland. Hacker spotted Ngo and poured water on him while standing near a stairwell above Ngo. He confronted Ngo over what he said was distasteful and irresponsible media coverage of a recent protest that left an acquaintance seriously injured by a known white supremacist. Ngo pulled out his cell phone to record the interaction with Hacker, against gym policy, and Hacker smacked the phone out of Ngo’s hand.
Gym staff eventually intervened and revoked Hacker’s membership.
This isn't quite as overt as the simple lie (and I will call it a lie) from Ngo's book that ymeskhout highlights here, but's damning with pretty faint praise. This does not accurately describe I have absolutely no trust that the OregonLive reporting presented all reasonable evidence of Ngo's claim that Hacker or Richter were involved in the assault, nor any antics in the court itself.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Contemporary 2011 versions of Minecraft I'm unsure about.
There's a pretty sizable community of Golden Age Minecraft players, and while it varies when that age actually falls depending on who you talk to (Rotarycraft and Thaumcraft fans usually say r1.7!), most of the reddit community tends to emphasize b1.7.3 (June 2011) or r1.2.5 (April 2012) are two of the most common ones. AtLauncher does recent stuff and legacy versions pretty well, but there are also legacy-specific installers. Zontargs was pretty heavily into it, if he's still floating around.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I didn't see that on the video, though I had it on fast forward so I might have missed it. What is the time stamp for that?
6:09 is where the judge lists potential alternate intents, with an approximate transcript of :
"Maybe he returned the property only because he didn't want to lose a 24-hour fitness measurement."
"Maybe it was just because [garbled] I don't even know why I have this phone, I just pulled it away, I'm gonna give it back."
gattsuru
2yr ago
At least by the web record search, the specific torts were "Assault, Battery, Emotional Distress", and as far as I can find allegations that they were directly involved in the attack, but there's not much more (freely accessible) information available.
gattsuru
2yr ago
... There's video of Hacker shouting that he will break Ngo's phone, along with two gym employees testifying that Hacker had Ngo's phone in his possession while trying to leave the gym and only returned it to Ngo after being stopped by those gym employees. The judge explicitly considering and justifying his judgement by considering whether Hacker went into a short-lived fugue and then having no idea why he had the phone... sounds a bit more than the typical level of consideration.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I can't find the full complaint, but this is an early summary judgement analysis that has more details than a lot of mainstream coverage. (but it's a shitty scan, so gfl)
At least from a quick look, Europe also claims that many of her coworkers were similarly tardy and faced no serious reprimand, ie that the focus on tardiness was pretextual. It's not clear how obviously true that claim was, but Equinox having trouble finding relevant records couldn't help.
He also described a black employee as 'autistic', but again it's unclear why Ms. Europe alleges this was racially motivated.
The summary judgement decision summarizes this as :
Maltman was involved in an incident with another Equinox trainer, McGeary, in which Maltman made comments that McGeary felt were inappropriate. Maltman allegedly told McGeary that she looked like another woman, commented on McGeary's leggings, and asked McGeary if she was autistic. The plaintiff contends that there were sexual and racial connotations to Maltman's comments to McGeary because the comments implied that McGeary must be related to another brown-skinned woman with curly hair and that Maltman commented not only on McGeary's leggings but also how her body looked in the leggings.
I'll see if I can find the underlying declaration: "must be related" could be anything from really explicit or completely imagined. But I expect that more rests on the question of retaliatory firing and insufficient introspection against Maltman, rather than the severity of the behaviors.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Yeah, unfortunately the trial records (and maybe the full text of the current Oregon UCJI?) are pretty heavily paywalled. It's not a negligence case, and very nearly the prototype for a situation where substantial-factor would normally be considered appropriate, but it's hard to find more specific data.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Severe injuries from a single-car accident while driving a GM C/K-model truck, leading to burns over most of his body.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Jury trials inherently limit justice to things that the median jury-selected resident of the locale in question consider criminal behavior. Your average Portlander probably does not consider beating up right-wing activists to be criminal. When some BLM activists tore down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, captured on video, they might have known they'd be acquitted by a jury in the left-wing city of Bristol.
Apropos of nothing, but John Hacker was previously found not guilty in a bench trial for criminal charges of robbery in a fact pattern that... I'm very hard-pressed to believe wasn't clearly guilty.
Which rather broadens the scope of the problem beyond that presented in your criticism, here. I've got an old post about the boxes of liberty, and it doesn't look much better when paralleled to Oregon state or Portland city politics.
Either The Post Millennial is providing a skewed version of events, or a defense attorney just defeated Andy Ngo's civil case against two of his attackers through blatant juror intimidation.
Probably both.
There's not much available through the public court records system in Portland, but this and this, while very overtly anti-Ngo, suggest that Ngo's trial theory depended a lot on attaching personal connection to direct injury that could be difficult in this sort of gang attack. The photos here suggest that Burrows was in (semi)-formal attire rather than actually wearing the shirt.
On the other hand, it's... very hard to have seen even those oregonlive summaries as anything but an attempt to win a civil suit by using the defendants as character witnesses against the plaintiff, in a 'but he deserved it' sense. And I'm not sure Ngo should have even had to prove directly bloody hands, especially in a civil trial; the various tests in the context of mob violence are a mess, but I'm pretty sure they're wider than but-for. That doesn't necessarily mean intimidation, given that we're still talking Portland -- Hacker previously escaped a criminal charge for theft robbery on a different occasion in a bench trial.
But that option's kinda worse.
I dunno. @FCfromSSC had a post on the broader tactical ramifications from this class of problem, from the context of the Stephen Ray Baca trial from New Mexico. And I don't think any of these are even local nadirs: the end result of the crushing of Christopher Green would have been comedically on-the-nose were Green's injuries more looney tunes and less severe brain damage.
gattsuru
2yr ago
1/Room temperature superconductor
I've been posting more detailed updates on this story here. I think we now have a credible and likely non-superconducting explanation for the behaviors seen in the original Korean papers and in (most) replications, though there are still some odd results and possibilities that don't completely eliminate the Lee-Kim proposal simply because it's not clear that Lee-Kim doesn't seem very sure what they've got.
It's interesting compared to most unidentified superconductor objects in that, rather than likely fraud (Dias and the LHN/SCH high-pressure superconductors), simple non-replication (a couple carbon nanotube experiments), or embarrassing error (what I'd considered the most plausible explanation a week ago), there seems to be a pretty wide conflux of genuinely weird stuff even in the non-superconducting explanation : dumb semiconductor isn't too much of a surprise, but amazingly strong diamagnetism with a mix of ferromagnetism and paramagnetism wasn't on many people's -- even strong skeptic's -- bingo cards.
[I've been in and out of the midwest over the last few months, so I've seen some of the coverage -- and lawn signs -- firsthand.]
I don't know how representative this particular example is but the 30-second spot avoids saying anything at all about abortion and instead argues that voting yes on Issue 1 would somehow...protect kids from trans drag queens in schools? The fuck? I guess they knew that "vote yes on Issue 1 to keep abortion restricted" wasn't going to be a winning message so this tangent was the only option.
I heard that one less often than the Farmers Growing Democracy version, but I don't think any of the Pro-Issue 1 coverage was willing to focus on the short-term abortion ramifications.
To steelman, though, there's a pretty widespread feeling among Red Tribe conservatives, where a lot of politically-charged matters have been started getting shoved through local direct democracy options, usually by a mix of obfuscating terminology and absolutely massive direct spending advocacy, kinda the flip side to the Prop 8 Discourse back in 2008.
This isn't a theoretical issue for Ohio, specifically: 2015 had a pair of conflicting constitutional amendment issues that were a confusing mess, followed by a 2018 constitutional initiative that was even more lopsided in terms of funding. These efforts hadn't succeeded yet, but they were getting increasingly close, for something that would have been very hard to reverse (and near-impossible to reverse quickly), despite often pretty stupid and badly-implemented targets.
There are pragmatic reasons to suspect trans stuff is likely to become a relevant topic in the near future, and that Ohio would be a relevant target for a variety of logistical reasons attracting coastal soft power (and maybe federal government funding), in ways where the sword would not cut both ways.
And there's special concerns that the Ohio GOP might want to get this change done before a potential 2024 general election that could be a landslide because of hefty turnout on one side of the aisle and decreased enthusiasm on the other, such as if the GOP Presidential candidate is a complete schmuck.
((Of course, the Ohio GOP is also filled with morons, so this might be a position that they hadn't considered.))
But, as you say, this also was very clearly trying to work the refs for the fall ballot, so even if it might have been a good idea in general a lot of people were not exactly impressed by it in this context. Which does not work well for a state with a lot of borderers. And the combination of removing signature cure time and of requiring signatures from every county near-guaranteed that this was eventually going to even bite the GOP in the tail down the road.
But who actually thought the blatant gimmickry described above was actually going to work?
I think the steelman is that they thought it was a long shot, but that the quick turn around time would at least slow some of the conventional ways that out-of-state pressure applied. If so, it didn't work well: there was a very strong effort from teacher's unions and the conventional party affiliates, because "call phones and hand out signs" is pretty much their bread-and-butter. But the No on 1 campaign wasn't anywhere near as polished or coordinated in terms of advertising space as normal, didn't have time to start any serious cancellation efforts against supporters (yet), and didn't spend all that it raised, so to some extent it probably achieved part of the target goal.
On the other hand, they're pretty likely to bring that cash to the November election, so something something briar patch.
I think that's a bit of a fig leaf: the authors knew or should have known that the paper would be portrayed without full disclosure as to its limitations, including in its own abstract and in the UBC piece itself (which does only mentions that the study excluded "severe levels of substance use, alcohol use or mental health symptoms", but not that it excluded the long-term homeless). Neither mentions the further filtering to only the sheltered homeless, nor the loss to followups.
Summaries by nature can't include all details, but people writing studies know what will get left out, and should recognize when that's going to be highly dishonest.
((There are other problems: the use of two preregistered analysis that are the weakest for predictive power and least repeated in the news coverage ("subjective well-being and cognitive outcomes") followed by a mass of 'exploratory' analysis that are repeated heavily but also scream garden of forking paths, especially combined with the condition grouping and when the study power looks like this. In addition to the attrition before study criteria were applied, the cash group had vastly lower response rates (74% vs 95%) on the 1-month survey than the control group did, which probably didn't have a huge impact in the statistical analysis but doesn't seem to get mentioned in the main paper proper at all just in the appendix. I also don't have a good mental model for the impact of "In the main analyses, participants in the cash group were included in the final sample if they received the cash, while participants in the control group were only included if they completed at least one follow-up survey." but my gut check's that it's not a good sign combined with that extra 21% dropout rate for the 1-mo survey.))
Look at the other two portions of the study: the authors did a couple survey-style efforts specifically to form approaches to "frame the benefits of the cash transfer to make it more palatable to the public, with the goal of improving public support for a cash transfer policy". Which, in turn, again only mentions filtering for "severe level of substance use, alcohol use, or mental health challenges", without mentioning excluding the long-term homeless.
This is pretty standard! For a different sort of culture war issue, I'd point to this recent discussion about eating beef. There are, if you dig into it far enough, quite a lot of disclaimers about how this is really talking about 24-hour recall rather than any more holistic analysis of consumption, and inconveniently the study didn't actually ask about meat at all so instead the analysis was filtered through one database to make predictions for likely meat portion of self-reported food intake which still didn't say anything specific about beef so the authors further just cut everything that wasn't explicitly spelled out as one type of meat or another in half. It's all there, and unlike most bad actors in this space it's not even paywalled!
But ultimately, this study methodology still requires the author to look at (trash-quality) data claiming that X people consumed Y ounces of meat that the authors believed (for some reason?) was 50% beef, and that this was equivalent to X people consuming Y/2 ounces of beef individually. And while st_rev was responding to the NYPost, which one could quite plausibly expect to be unusually useless even by popsci standards, it's not like the popsci groups are doing any better.
These social scientists aren't morons, despite their best efforts. The people actively studying how best to frame the benefits of an intervention have to at least considered how they're going to describe the intervention. This doesn't even mean that the general thrust of these studies are wrong; they're all too underpowered to tell us that they're even lying, once you move the fig leaf. But that's pretty damning for the broader field of science.
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