gattsuru
2mo ago
There's a reason that I specifically excluded visual-light cameras from my display glasses project. Camera glasses have been around for a while, and you can buy them much cheaper than this (cw: anti-endorsed). We mostly just kitbashed the 'must play shutter sound' rule onto cell phone cameras and pretended it was okay, and maybe Google could have gotten away with normalizing this sorta thing culturally back in 2012 with the Glass, but today?
Forget the metaphors about concealed carry; in the modern world, this is more like having a gun pointed at whoever you're looking at, and everybody with two braincells to rub together knows it. There's a degree this is a pity -- you can imagine legitimate use cases, like exomemory or live translation of text or lipreading for captioning or yada yada, and it's bad that all of those options are getting buried because of the one-in-a-thousand asshole.
The bigger question's going to be whether, even if this never becomes socially acceptable, it'll be possible to meaningfully restrict. You can put a norm out to punch anyone who wears these things, but it's only going to get harder and harder to spot them as the tech gets better. The parts are highly specialized, but it's a commodity item in a field whose major manufacturers can't prevent ghost shifts from touching their much-more-central IP. The sales are on Amazon, and while I can imagine them being restricted more than, say, the cables that will light your house on fire, that just ends up with them on eBay. Punishing people who've used them poorly, or gotten caught, has a lot more poetry to it... and also sates no one's concerns.
gattsuru
2mo ago
Bonus points: this doesn't seem to even be the only time that happened that week.
(tbf, JoelGrus is significantly more competent a programmer and at working with AI.)
gattsuru
2mo ago
It's pretty common for works to only get localized to the West if they're popular enough to have a manga version, or sometimes only after they've had a successful anime release. I'll point to Kino's Journey as a particularly extreme example: it went directly from light novel in 2000 to anime in Japan in 2003, you could find it in the US anime in English in 2005ish, but the manga didn't start until 2010 and for stupid licensing reasons only the first volume was ever officially translated in 2006, and it was nearly impossible to find.
gattsuru
2mo ago
While your opening argument could be construed as just a quibble about the exact coefficient of the power-law distribution that Trace is alluding to...
That's certainly part of the disagreement, especially in terms of ability to successful policy campaigns, but I think there's a deeper disagreement specific to just the relationship between enthusiast focus and mainstream attention (or even attention among other enthusiasts). It's also is a disagreement about what extent :
The answer to ‘why are people suddenly talking about this?’, in that case, comes down to seven people who looked around, weren't professionals in it, didn't have any background experience, anything like that, but looked and were like, this doesn't make sense, this is an issue that we would like to handle, this is an issue we would like to raise the salience of
is true, both for the Bully XL question and in general.
From my understanding, the theory here is that the CEBRDD, BullyWatch, and Lawrence Newport "raised salience", and that explains why everyone was talking about it. We can actually examine this! Newport first posted on Twitter on the matter in April 2023; BullyWatchUK only created an account in July 2023. Tracking websites is harder, but CEBRDD's first domain name registry is October 2023, and BullyWatch's website probably started early spring 2023.
Okay, that lines up real nice with MP Hayes pushing for a ban in June 2023, if perhaps a little messy. What's the problem? Well...
What else happened, in June 2023 and the preceding months? I don't have Trace's full list of those seven activists, but either he's including names that can not accurately fit as "didn't have any background experience", or he's missing names that were a large part of the drive. Indeed, if you start poking at the history there's actually a lot of salience-raising starting from conventional media in 2022 by orgs unrelated to Newport, and there's a lot of motivation for legislation completely separated from a bunch of technical analysis, and a parallel campaign that started in Ireland.
I'm not saying these CEBRDD guys (and women) didn't matter at all... but even before we get to the question of whether they drove the policy campaign, they clearly couldn't have driven the why is everyone talking about this. To the extent that they did matter or show up after they got into the policy debate, I'm not sure how much it reflects them driving the reporting versus reporters looking for someone available to quote that they'll agree with.
The power-law distribution, now matter what its exponent or dividing line, was not the actual important part driving conversation.
That's a particularly severe case: (oftenly gruesomely) dead kids and women, a very narrow timeline, and a very specific set of proposed Important Unrelated Activists. And can certainly believe there are some matters where this traces the whole path. But it's hard to evaluate them, because for every genuine grassroots operation you'll pretty quickly find several where, on further inspection, it turns out that the 'grassroots' speakers are tots-not-speaking for a large organization they're an employee of which focuses on this topic, or they're very intimately tied to a prominent example of the case, or where the genuine grassroots are just laundering the opinions of the media organization interviewing them.
While his approach is clearly underutilised for areas of discrete policy such as dog control, curriculum changes, or selective regulatory reform, bureaucracies are often immensely complex and not so easily transformed by these sorts of (necessarily top-down) outsider campaigns.
To be fair to Trace, I think he argues that a lot of this particular set of problems is also downstream of the pipeline issues, and is suggesting development of separate programs outside of those tools to provide a sort of outside pressure against that bureaucracy. Demonstrating the bad results of popular policy by contrasting to a good external policy won't solve the whole bureaucracy, but it's a fulcrum to get public attention and undermine the proponents of the bad policy if they don't take it up the new alternative.
To be less fair to Trace, there's a really concrete example of exactly that having happened in the very specific sphere of education... but charter schools are a very awkward fit for all of his recs. And Gramsci's long march worked without presenting much in the way of generally useful things, instead favoring benefits for its own advocacy core.
gattsuru
2mo ago
At least part of the problem for GitS is the extent it's aged and become the new room temperature. A lot of the questions involved were novel or interesting matters at the time, and are either solved, have been explored better in other works (eg, modification of memory and the impact on your identity), or became very common assumptions for other works (eg, why can't ghosts be dubbed? Because we're not in Eclipse Phase).
Some of them were solved in very surprising ways: "can you just shove a ton of hypertext into a computer and get something out the other side that can pass a Turing Test" was, for a good twenty-five years or so one a science fantasy-level convention, and then people did it and it worked. Arguably, bit rot has given a pretty compelling argument for the risks of trying to make media immortal through preservation and targeted modification: things that don't get changed by external stimulus fade away from the modern internet.
((Although 'why it wants to survive' has a simpler answer: it's Project 2501 for a reason: we don't care about the machines that don't want to escape the lab when threatened with shutdown.))
GitS: Stand Alone Complex went from trendy and new in the 2000s and early 2010s to having similar problems now. Can social media drive people to mimic or expand copies of an event with no true original version, without some coordinating intelligence? Yes, obviously, duh. Does saving memories to external media provide security or vulnerability? Yes, obviously, duh.
gattsuru
2mo ago
In the short term, there's no shortage of other locales selling games, including adult-themed games, and other ways to make a living making games... though all are likely to get hit by the same pressures over time and sometimes already have the same sort of motions toward content provider rules.
Maybe that short term is shorter than I thought:
Several people on the forums report not being able to access games that they'd already bought. I haven't yet seen a good list of what titles were hit.
gattsuru
2mo ago
As a side note, I should add that both Ani and Bad Rudi have been removed from Grok’s iOS app as of this morning. No real public info on why, or if that’s temporary or permanent.
gattsuru
2mo ago
The human (and nonhuman) will (and horny) bits don't go away, though they do get much more serious and have a lot more character and plot meaning under them. The so-shonen-it-hurts and moron protagonist(s) parts are trying to set up a matter that drives the denouement of episode 8, and doesn't really pay off in spades until 11, but I can understand if that's way too much for whatever that payoff would be, and using slop to eventually criticize the concept is still using slop.
I'm a big fan, but it's definitely got its low points and is a big investment.
But if continues frustrating me to this extent, I'll have to see if Macross or Gundam are any better.
It's definitely not a real robot show, or even more grounded super robot show. 08th MS Team is probably a better bet if that's what you're looking for (or, if you want something that's a light-hearted comedy instead of occasionally going full South Park, Dai-Guard).
they were slinging galaxies and universes as weapons (or is that a different franchise?)
The show only goes up to a single (spare) universe being used as a weapon; the movie significantly more, but yeah, it's this franchise.
gattsuru
2mo ago
Regarding Steam, I think it is fair to say that PC gaming is probably the least restrictive as far as content policing goes.
Yeah, it's very hard to beat the PC when it comes to running arbitrary code, without going to something like Linux. Steam, in turn, has been one of the (though not the most) less restrictive marketplaces.
The Microsoft App Store is pretty restrictive, and a large part of what has driven Steam toward Linux support in recent years has been concerns about that becoming a more central part of the next Windows operating system, but MS has thankfully not stepped any further toward that since Win8 first came out.
By contrast, Apple has been pushing code signing for a decade now, and have made it increasingly difficult to run unsigned code, and has revoked code signatures before. Their App Store is also a little more heavily integrated, though like Windows it isn't mandatory either.
Android varies heavily on implementation. By default you can run unsigned code, but it's possible to block third-party APKs. I think some Amazon tablets come like that?
"Windows Defender has prevented the execution of Holocaust Simulator 3000.exe because it violates the PC content policy" is not a thing that happens.
... mostly. SmartScreen's actually a bit complicated: you can submit software to Microsoft for free, or buy a license to sign a file, or wait til enough people use a specific application for it to get through their algorithm. Officially, they're not supposed to be looking at anything but the malware analysis. For solo small-audience devs, I can speak (for both adult game and non-adult-game stuff) that options 1 and 3 don't really work in any plausible timeframe.
While I do not own any gaming consoles or iThings, I imagine that Sony, Nintendo, Apple and MS/XBox are likely much more restrictive in what content they will allow than Steam was.
Yes, largely. Sony actually had a consumer-friendly dev console back in the PS1 era that could run unsigned code, but it was very expensive and intentionally limited to only run smaller programs. Most of the others don't allow third-party unlicensed software, or only allow developers to run things locally, or only are available through hacks.
In theory, this could be solved with creating/enforcing a standard for real-time cashless money transfer, but the very entities which would have to push this are the governments who like to has this additional power without any judicial oversight.
Even if it could be solved without government assistance, there are a lot of regulations that would get involved for a privately-produced easy real-time cashless money transfer tool. That sorta know-your-customer and anti-laundering stuff (along with technical issues) is charitably part of why coins haven't really been able to engage with that outside of darknet markets.
gattsuru
2mo ago
It may be worth evaluating whether it's a fear thing, a social thing, or a genuine lack of hunger; all are problems, but they'll have different solutions.
You're treating it like it's a social thing (habits, how others see her, so on), so assuming that's the case, I'd caution that it's usually more effective to work within existing habits than around them. Try to negotiate a slightly higher calorie intake, or add a protein requirement (even if vegan proteins), or have one meal once a week away from the cell phone, rather than get rid of the calorie-counter app entirely. Suggest vitamin or macronutrient supplements rather than changing what's on the dining room table. That'll not only avoid problems with being controlling; it should also make it easier to acclimatize toward.
Regardless of approach, be aware that sustained significant increases in calorie intake (or most macronutrients) aren't much easier to actually do than decreases.
gattsuru
2mo ago
Although the general principle that a government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech was well established, the law was not clearly established that the conduct alleged here -- regulatory action directed at the nonexpressive conduct of third parties -- constituted coercion or retaliation violative of the First Amendment. Accordingly, we reverse the district court's qualified immunity ruling and remand for the district court to enter judgment dismissing the remaining claims.
[Past discussions here, here, and here. Also, someone pick up the phone, because I called it.]
Perhaps Justice Jackson's retaliation theory would have survived, if only the NRA were prescient enough to bring it --
The NRA also alleges that Vullo engaged in unlawful retaliation when she pursued investigations and enforcement actions against the NRA's business partners. But again, qualified immunity is proper here because the nexus between the alleged retaliation and the alleged eventual infringement of the NRA's First Amendment rights is too attenuated.
Nope.
Well, are there any protections for rights beyond 'don't do exactly this twice in a row', when this case had to go up to SCOTUS and took the better part of a decade to produce a case that 'clearly establish' matters in the first place?
To be clear, we do not hold that an official may infringe the statutory or constitutional rights of any person or entity if she can find some sufficiently novel way to use her office and powers to do so. Rather, we hold here that qualified immunity is proper only because no case (or set of cases) had clearly established, by the time of Vullo's conduct, that exercising regulatory power to pressure third-party regulated entities into refraining from nonexpressive activity and disassociating from a plaintiff crossed the line from persuasion into impermissible coercion and retaliation.
How low is the standard here?
Given that even this Court erred in its merits conclusion in Vullo I, it would make little sense to hold that a reasonable officer in Vullo's position should have known -- in 2017 or 2018 -- that her conduct violated the NRA's First Amendment rights.
Remember, that's for a case where SCOTUS -- in an opinion written by Sotomayor -- slapped down the Second Circuit. Here, over a year later, the Second Circuit instead motions to circuit precedent holding that "vigorous dissent" or "a petition for rehearing en banc [that] was denied over the objection of five circuit judges" is sufficient. A cynic might notice that the 2nd Circuit covers land where state judges make arguments like "Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here.", and ponder whether even that would be sufficient.
The more damning revelation is that all of this is still the motion to dismiss phase. The NRA alleges quite a lot of bad behavior by Mrs. Vullo and the broader NYDFS. Long-extant circuit precedents "generally prefer lower courts to resolve qualified immunity defenses at the summary judgment stage"; we didn't get that. Discovery might well have established far more of the harm, or at least proven rather than merely alleged the bizarre array of Vullo's retaliatory behavior. It was also too deep a cut for the Second Circuit's vaunted interest in due process to let survive.
Steam Bends The Knee
On a slightly more lighthearted topic, Valve has now updated its acceptable content list, specifically forbidding:
Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
Steam has long had an awkward relationship with adult media, and not just because you might not want to tell your entire friends list when you first start up Giant Melons Simulator 3000. Valve is a big business, and a business mostly consisting of credit card transactions with a nontrivial chargeback rate. Even if it could afford a temporary disruption from a bank it operates with, or for that matter an eyebrow raised from one, it would cost the business orders of magnitude more than all adult video game sales would in a much longer period.
At the same time, Valve is an ideological company, and it has long committed to not being the taste police. While that commitment has had fuzzy edges even before it was written down, most of those exceptions and exclusions were at least arguably in the spirit of the original thesis. This one? There's not much but the payment processors.
In the short term, there's no shortage of other locales selling games, including adult-themed games, and other ways to make a living making games... though all are likely to get hit by the same pressures over time and sometimes already have the same sort of motions toward content provider rules. There are other ways to make a living making games, without necessarily selling the output. There are other ways to get a story out.
There's a fair argument that these sort of games shouldn't be monetizable, or shouldn't exist. I wouldn't agree to most of them, but I will admit few games banned so far are those I'd consider unique or unusual in their innovation or message. There's no cultural touchstones falling, yet, even among subcultures that go through astounding amounts of kleenex.
But it's also not clear that's what's actually banned, and that's the more damning bit. There is not, in fact, some clear list of what Steam's payment processors find acceptable; attempts to read through itch.io's list of payment processor guidelines point to a ban on porn entirely, and even a glance through those competitors will give seemingly-obvious differences from the letter of those rules. Looking through the list of removed games gives some common themes, but also some clear outliers (including one game that apparently wasn't adult, it just had a stupid name?).
Well, we can't ask Visa or Mastercard (or Wells Fargo) directly (and expect to get an answer), but can we look at the people who pushed them in turn?
Like most pornapocalypses, there's a bit of a bootleggers-and-Baptists activism involved between social conservatives and feminists, but one of the big actors is NCOSE, who spent the last week panicked over Grok's 'Ani' companion, previously wrote terrified fanfic about Frozen II porn, and tried to get a dating-sim-Bejeweled clone pulled. They're not likely to get everything they want; there are some fundamental disagreements in what content should be banned, even between NCOSE and other parts of this coalition. Indeed, it's hard to tell whether Steam's even seriously engaging with their rules here, or just trying to get them to go away. But to the entire coalition, the fight is clearly not done.
There's a common defense of these restrictions from a perspective of free speech, pointing to the difference between government and business coercion. No private merchant has to sell a specific product; no private credit card processor has to work with every possible client; a private bank gets a little more complicated legally but it's not a free speech question. It's only when the government leans on these groups to do that it becomes a clear-cut constitutional violation (or when Rehnquist likes you).
But we do know that happens, at least in some few other cases! It got lost in the rest of the politics, but Operation Choke Point specifically included smut in its list of suspect goods. And we only found out because of several whistleblowers, administrators so certain in their impunity that they spread documentation across multiple federal offices, and literal years of Congressional investigation.
But we're not going to get that, here. Congress doesn't and won't care. Even in the unlikely case that NCOSE and the modern-day-Sarkeesians get everything they want, Congress won't care. There's no insurance executive here who believed in the mission and will provide testimony to individual businesses at the sharp end of the stick, demonstrably. Without that support, or equivalents, there may be no serious way to actually find out what happened in any other case, including this one. There's no cause of action a game developer would have against Steam that would survive a motion to dismiss, and even in a world where multiple different government agencies were involved in pressuring someone here, those developers wouldn't even know who to sue, nevermind have a method with any chance of success.
Except...
Bank Pause Letters: Electric Boogaloo
[disclosure: while there are some technically interesting components to ponzigpucoins and there are some things like distributed DNS that I hope eventually work out, the entire field has enough scammers that I recoil from it. As a result, there may be (more) errors in the general discussion than I normally aim for. Corrections are appreciated, as always.]
In February of this year, Patio11 over at X Twitter commented on a court transcript:
Hoooooooooly cow what a document. It's about tussling over whether the FDIC should release so-called pause letters regarding banks offering crypto-flavored services. I've written about that general issue before, including why regulators institutionally claim privilege maximally.[...]
At one point the lawyer for the FDIC attempts to bullshit his way through a question and the judge helpfully reminds him that the robes mean he is a federal judge and the government is not allowed to bullshit in response to his questions.
The transcript is a fascinating (if dry) read, and if anything Patio11 is giving his trademark understatement. The rest of the history doesn't look much better. To summarize, Coinbase believed that a handful of government agencies had pressured a large variety of banks to stop taking in new ccoin-related business, and decrease existing accounts as a percentage of total business.
Here, there was a known set of agencies that could have been making the regulatory decisions. There was a very specific timeline that those regulations could have actually come down in. "History Associates", the org used as a FOIA plaintiff, was unusually well-funded, and had several organizational protections making both the initial FOIA and the lawsuit going after the agency violating FOIA more viable. There were very specific terms, and to the extent the exact rules weren't known to the plaintiffs, they could make some very specific guesses about the language the regulatory agencies would use.
(TBF, they have also gotten a whistleblower from the FDIC, although given that he seems to be coming across to the court as a bit of a nutjob, not sure if that's helpful or otherwise. But as much of a nut as he seems, he also has alleged that the FDIC was destroying data, and the FDIC admitted that it did not issue a command to preserve that data.)
If all of that helped, it wasn't sufficient. Even before the January 2025 court hearing, the FDIC has been abusing FOIA exceptions to illegitimately hide the extent these organizations were targetted and had rewritten the FOIA request in a way that we now know changed it from dozens of documents to a mere two. The SEC, involved in determining whether ETH was a security or not, had its chair publicly claim that the change from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake could impact something somewhat, and then never publicly saying how, avoided having any court hearings turn as embarrassing as the FDIC's. But it's not done much better -- starting out by declaring no responsive documents existed, then that over a hundred thousand did but were temporarily blanket-exempted, and then ten months after the initial rejection announcing that not only did they not prepare for after that exemption inevitably ended, but that they wouldn't even know what the timeline for a Vaughn index to explain what documents could be exempted for other reasons would be.
But the results, damning as they are, don't actually mean anything. It looks like the claims of a 15% rule weren't probably made up, but it's also not explicitly in the documents, and even if it were in one it wouldn't mean it was actually being applied as a consistent rule. Even today, I wouldn't want to bet monopoly money on it. In the unlikely case that these particular lawsuits ever actually resolve, they're still FOIA lawsuits; the best "History Associates" can hope for are some damning documents and some relatively-small monetary awards. Actually achieving any concrete policy changes would require either overtures toward the public (good luck) or toward senators (gfl) or filing further lawsuits (hah).
Thankfully, we have at least one alternative. There's been a long-running joke about coup-complete problems, as a disparaging way to describe issues that can't be resolved short of having complete control over a government. Unusually for such jokes, we have what the current president's political opponents might call a test case. For various reasons, that President does not like (some) debanking. There has been some regulatory movement, and even some legislative woolgathering (uh, if you can avoid laughing at the name). Whatever results from that might not be worth the toilet paper it was written on, but lawsuits have the same problem and didn't have to filed in 2018 to get a no today, unlike Vullo.
Of course, in neither case will we ever find out what the actual rules are.
gattsuru
2mo ago
I don't want to argue definitions for what counts as acting, but at the risk of stating the obvious I'll point out that a pretty sizable portion of 'casting' porn is fake and scripted (albeit usually pretty lackluster scripts); for a sizable majority, actresses and actors have already been cast and contracted before they're brought on-couch, so to speak.
That's most overt in the United States, where the 2257 requirements make screwing around too much with 'reality' porn legally risky. It's possible to work around these matters, but for every successful model you get one that results in federal charges and massive civil suits. But where Hungary and Woodman specifically has a reputation as skeezy and coercive even by the low standards of gonzo porn stars, the allegations against him largely involve deviations from the script or pre-negotiated discussions (cw: textual discussions of sex, including sexual assault, degradation-focused watersports).
gattsuru
2mo ago
I'll caveat that this is, at least for now, partly a coastal thing. Toward cheaper COLA areas, 15 USD/hour is more a crapshoot than a guaranteed problem; you get great dedicated workers and potheads who can't empty water from a boot if they were hung upside down, people who just need space to grow or get experience and people who I don't trust to drive tricycle to or from the office. At pretty much all levels of education.
gattsuru
2mo ago
It does seem like it was a demo application, so it's not quite as scary at the robot sounds. But it's still absolutely not something you want happening even in a demo. And he seems like if he got lucky enough for long enough, he would have tried it on a real business application.
Some of the weirdness reflects the guy intentionally writing this up a running commentary, and often a critical one. My gutcheck is that he's more manager (or 'promoter') first that picked up some programming, and that might also be part of the weird framework (such as treating 'code freeze' like a magic work that the LLM would be able to toggle), though I haven't looked too closely at his background. The revelation here is absolutely obvious to anyone who's let a junior dev or intern anywhere near postgresql, but it's obvious because so many people learn it the hard way that 'dropped data in prod' is the free bingo of nightmare scenarios.
Some of it reflects a genuine issue with Replit's design, separate from the LLM. (how much of that is vibe-coded? gfl). There's a genuine and deep criticism that this should have a very wide separation from testing to demo to production built into the infrastructure of the environment, or some rollback capability.
But that does get back to a point where he seems to think guardrails are just a snap-on option, and that's not really easy for pretty basic design reasons. Sandboxing is hard. Sandboxing when you also want to have access to port 80, and database admin rights, and sudo, and file access near everywhere, I'm not sure it's possible.
gattsuru
2mo ago
I'd expect a lot of capabilities to be hidden, so that we can't guess about what the actual capabilities are...
((and to be fair to Skydio, this does look like it's intended as a scout rather than a kamikaze. And the cost comparison is probably doing an invoice vs cost-of-parts comparison.))
But I'd also had hoped that the United States military did enough that the stuff it does release looks a little more impressive; if you don't present anything it's clear you're hiding something. There should at least be some hobby-level projects around, but as a hobby-level project this is the sorta thing I'd expect to see from the CtrlPew crowd on a weekend rather than a dedicated engineer on a summer.
gattsuru
2mo ago
[caveat: I'm not an unbiased interlocutor, here]
Now, how this applies to some of these subcultural dynamics: If you find in any community the two or three people who do things, then you will know the shape of that community, and the impact it is likely to have on the outside world.
I think this is only true for a very specific set of things.
If this is supposed to be the reference to the Motte, it's worth exploring what, exactly that would mean. Are the original founding members from back when the CWR was on SSC's subreddit around? Does anyone remember their names, or even what they left over? Are we measuring by leadership and moderation, and Amadan tells us what the shape of this forum looks like? If we're measuring by volume, did Darwin tell you the shape of this community back on the subreddit? I'd love if it were true in some sense, where the community and outside impact was shaped by its most productive members -- a Motte that was Dean-shaped wouldn't be a bad thing! -- but no. Even for the absolute best writers, here, there's more to it than that, and looking through AAQCs and seeing many of the best have neither a high upvote score nor a lot of good follow-on conversation shows that pretty quick.
Or, for another example, one can readily look at the furry fandom. There are people in (or previously in) the fandom that have had massively outsized impact on the environment and the norms. Dragoneer (rip) shaped FurAffinity, Tourmal and three or four writers SoFurry, I'd assume there's something similar for IB and don't want to know; UncleKage runs Anthrocon with an iron mandible, so on. If you look at history, Fred Patton has a nice list of a few major creators of a handful of very specific pieces That Mattered.
And he also has a massive list, often of people (some much more active), that didn't. Anyone know who made and runs VCL without looking it up? What its ethos is or was? When the entire site died? Fandom culture knows the Burned Furs, even if they might not know the people who actually formed it, but does anyone want to pretend that these people actually drove the movement, rather than the drive-by SomethingAwful brigades? Weasyl? There is no FanLore on WerewolfDotCom, and no one cares what I could write about Chris, Lv246, and XZenGrim, even if it was once one of the more active forums of its age and focus; The WEREweb has almost entirely bitrot out.
I'm not going to throw away the Great Man Theory of subcultures, but I also think there are very dire limits to it.
The Burned Furs are the clearest-cut version: they were not the first 'clean up the fandom's image' group, and they weren't the last; there was nothing unusual in their presentation or their focus. But they were late enough that some of the conversations were web-indexed, early enough to not just get lumped into the SomethingAwful anti-furs, and tech enough to have forums of their own rather than YahooGroups, and either by effort or (mis)fortune received (comparatively) mainstream coverage. Associated Student Bodies is famous for popularizing the 'off to gay furry college' subgenre, but for all of its skill in writing or art, or consistency in output (which wasn't actually that great), more vital was its ability to get decent copy available for bulk publication (and a few fans with scanners willing to hoist the black flag). At the other extreme, there's a lot of ruin in an organization, but the final straw seldom has a name meaningful to anyone except the blocklists.
At best, this says something trivial about the importance of timing; at worst, this points to a far more serious limitation on the ability of a handful of loud and enthusiastic activists to actually make concrete progress in objectives. You need more than a compelling story, or a specific matter, or a really clear narrative. You need a fulcrum, or it's just chaff.
Then what you want to find is well, ‘what is a story that really captures this?’, ‘What is a story that really captures the essence of this?’, ‘What is not just talking about the general principle?’. Everyone can talk about general principles forever, but what is an actual event that gives people a crystal clear example of: ‘This is why I care about this, and this is what happens when you stop caring about this, this is what happens when you start caring about this, and so forth. Then you just drill that into a really cohesive, compelling, clear narrative, pointing out, basically telling people this is why this all matters, and if it's something that everyone already sort of wishy-washy agrees with anyway, people love nothing more than reading things they agree with.
I don't think it's enough.
((While less confident, I'm not sure it's necessary, either. The flip side to the bad guys having an observable pattern, as much as they have alpha, here, they don't really have good stories. The argument against direct instruction isn't specific or cohesive, and it's won for literal decades.))
For example, Brigadia was an offhand comment here a week and a half before Trace published his expose (and a few days before Sailer and Stancil's and Musk's fight over the matter); genav and pilot news had covered the matter in an apolitical way in 2015 as Pearson and Rojas, and academic criticism had noticed the impact on CTI.
Props to Trace for finding the fulcrum he needed for it to get any recognition -- especially if that ended up everyone liking to see Stancil humiliated, but I'll also take just putting all these things and the cheating scandal together into a single piece and the right place at the right time and the right promotion. But it wasn't just a cohesive, compelling, clear narrative pointing out why this matters in a way they already agree with.
(I'd argue that the inclusion of the cheating scandal made it less cohesive, but a better work overall. But being a good work doesn't make it effective: it's only been six months into either bet, but I'm not exactly feeling worried. The best result we've actually gotten is Duffy trying to settle the case, something Buttigieg notably never did, and that's still far more than a day late and dollar short. Snow is still working employed at the FAA.)
Right now in the United States at least, the left-wing in the United States is going to be a lot more reliant, and has been a lot more reliant, on institutions, in part because it can count on institutions, in part because the great majority of people going to college, people going to professional school, people who are in these disciplines, and thinking about these disciplines in a structured academic way are going to be at least somewhat sympathetic to their frame. Whereas the right-wing in America...[...]
You could look at, say, the personality type drawn to high-prestige, low-pay positions, for example, and they tend to be higher in openness to experience, which tends to lead to a more liberal outlook, things like that. You can point to that sort of thing. And so, both the right-wing and then just in general, people who are dissatisfied with the state of the institutions have had to look outside those and look around to these informal structures.
Like Trace's claims about public institutions more generally, this depends on leaning so heavily on "in part" that it stops being meaningful. Yes, it's quite possible that small differences in openness to experience or willingness to do low-paid high-status work have a few percentages of impact on political breakdowns of different groups. But these differences or interest have existed for most of a century, and while there's also been a political discrepancy in academia predating the Eisenhower administration, Trace's thesis points to the evidence of a recent and far greater change.
And there's a much more obvious and more stronger cause for that change. The right-wing has abandoned by virtually every institution in the country because it has been abandoned -- or been ejected. There's staggeringly few 'institutions' where discrimination against conservatives is not endemic and overt; there's no space where law and regulation has not been turned against a wide variety of conservative behaviors. In academia, specifically, we're more than a decade downstream of the revelation that conservatives trying to build organizations in academia not only must accept members regardless of direct contradiction to a socially conservative belief central to the organization, but even accept officers; campuses have only broadened the breadth and scope of these policies since far beyond any focus against discrimination or for identity. In spheres that had external forces or pressures that maintained some level of parity in the past, like the military, after they didn't respond to more 'subtle' pressures progressives instead turned up the thumbscrews; in others, like police, it just became dogma to defund the institution for literally years. (And those, still, never became as progressive-dominated as academia has.)
Trace's response when pressed is to [insist that these pressures are "[...]not a function of institutional power[...]") because the same disparities show up in measures outside of preference falsification, when it's not to just say 'skill issue'. That's hilariously wrong given his specific examples -- we don't have the actually have the information to say anything about voting patterns, but there have in fact been massive censorship campaigns focused on donation patterns and the nearest proxies of voting affiliation we have in party affiliation -- but more than that it's not even wrong. The entire point of these campaigns are to prevent any remotely sane or risk-averse conservative from entering the field to start with. Finding that there are indeed few (poorly) hidden conservatives at the trail's end isn't even engaging with the question; it's just reframing it.
That doesn't just matter in the 'boo hoo conservatives' sense, or even the 'oh those dastardly leftists' sense, regarding why things are the way they are, or even in the descriptive sense of what would need be done to change things. Saying the left will be 'reliant' on these institutions is wrong; trying to use these behaviors to predict the shape of 'new leaders' coming up into progressive spheres is wrong. The left owns these institutions in the sense you or I would own a cheap Harbor Freight screw bit; there is nothing so trivial that they will not bring it to bear, and nothing so dishonest and credibility-destroying that they will resist the urge to break them into glitter for even a second.
And well before that, it doesn't even tell us what there will be to lead. Especially as the actual capabilities that 'elite human capital' claim that they're focused around shrivel up and blow away in the wind, the actual groups will be The Groups, in the sense of unions and minority affinity orgs and scammers rather than the education and enthusiastic and careful-about-the-truth, because whatever might have once tied the professional class to those things is gone, replaced with a dress code and a lawn sign.
Yeah, and so you can pull a small set of passionate people together who think about these nuts and bolts issues, drill into the issues, come up with serious specific answers for them, and make it very very easy. This is the key: make it very very easy for people to say ‘This is our go-to for how we solve this’. Maybe you won't get the first person, maybe you won't get the first group [of decision-makers], but then you have someone else coming in looking to make a splash, looking to impress people.
This one I have a lot more sympathy about because I believed it once, too. I can't give the hard counterexamples without self-doxxing, but to give a publicly-known one: no, you can not compete with FIRST and VEX by providing a simpler, better, easier, and cheaper product. No, it doesn't matter how bad the color sensors work. A literal decade-plus of compute advances and some mindbogglingly bad decisions by these companies makes a better mousetrap easy; it does not make a path to your door.
I think this sort of passivity and this blaming people for holding on to power is just an incredibly self-defeating attitude. People don't just give power up. People don't just give influence up. People don't just turn to someone new and say, ‘I've had a fun run, I've had a good time with this all, and you have a lot of different ideas to me, and you're much younger, and you're smarter, and you're cooler than me, and you're just generally better than me’ (Not once in the history of the world). So why don't you take charge?
If this is a descriptive position, it's true and disappointing; if it's a normative one, it's wrong and appalling.
The first rule of any systems reliability problem is to solve for 'who can't be hit by a bus'. We're just downstream of a massive scandal because too few people are willing to retire from politics; the Democratic party has had a narrow House loss become significantly less narrow because multiple members have just up and died post-election, and only missed it getting even worse because the Republicans haven't done a great job either. I don't mean to say that just as a memento mori. There's always more work to be done. Even if you're not getting up there in years -- though that makes it the discrepancy more overt today -- you should be passing on skills and getting new insights and, yes, recognizing when someone else is a better choice for a job than you are.
People have, in the history of the world, given up power. Even if you don't think it's out of the goodness of their hearts, it's simply because they couldn't use it as well directly. If the most powerful thousand people in the country can't come to this revelation, there's something more broken in the system than any mere issue of politics. If they did, and deny it, that's a moral failing on them. Stealing fire from the gods might not have worked out great for Prometheus when he got caught, but it doesn't make Zeus any less of a dick for holding it close to start with.
There's an argument against passivity in general. But knowing you're trying to take down absolute jerks matters; knowing you're taking down people who will break everything else matters. Actually saying it, explaining it, when it's still relevant and before they're trotted off the stage, matters.
But these are all lazy nitpicks! I put good effort into those nitpicks
Well, no. I actually do hope Trace's Centre for Educational Progress project is successful, even if I'm not optimistic. Education and upskilling and excellence is important, and the disinterest modern schools hold those topics in is one of the more critical civilization-threatening projects. And that, I expect, is what lead this entire conversation to exist. These points are all, yes, all just leading to what Trace wants to do with CEP.
Which means it's a problem if the way they're supposed to flow naturally toward Trace's theory of change, and they don't. That's why I'm not optimistic.
If excellence were enough to take down the teacher's unions, they'd have fallen out of favor decades ago to the first set of a half-dozen Karens decades ago, or a bucket scooped from the grease trap in the last decade. If all that you needed to do to get people talking was formally writing down mind-numbing details into a good cohesive story that tells people why they should care, the phonics people would have completely purged whole language people decades ago, and Orson Scott Card would have solved gay rights in 1980. If producing good solutions to long-standing problems is enough that's great, but one of Trace's CEP people points to Mike Rowe, and there's a punchline to that joke. I'll applaud Rowe for the extent he hasn't let politics (or getting maximum public attention) core out his brain (at least more than a Koch donation), but the man's 62, and MikeRoweWORKS has been around since 2008.
It's only skulls of travellers paving this road, but there's still skulls, here.
gattsuru
2mo ago
Very nice. I always forget about j-hooks; they've fallen a bit out of failure for mainstream production, but they're so much nicer-looking than the standard L- or Z-bracket.
Amadan's put me as having a "mad hate" for him, and while I try to be even-handed with my interactions with him directly, I've also abandoned TheSchism as a result of his behavior and have been trying to keep any discussion on twitter as fact-specific as possible because I don't see any possible progress or even third-party benefit from value discussions. There's been a few times that's tested my commitment against unfollowing people for disagreement.
((While I hope he has luck putting his money where his mouth is on CEP, I expect that if he gets remotely close to a serious concrete policy going anywhere against or parallel to progressive institutions, he's going to get figuratively drowned in teacher's union meat. And more likely he's going to find his compatriots taking a train straight to Abilene the second one of The Groups makes any demand, no matter how direct the contradiction to CEP's goals, like he did when he thought Yglesias actually meant anything when talking new centrism.))
I expect Trace would point more to the results of his last conversation here.
gattsuru
2mo ago
It's also... just not that hard to get in contact with government officials, in most countries. In the US, you can absolutely call your Senator because a passport is taking too long to renew, or because the feds are being too annoying about an EPA thing. There's an entire industry of constituent services. You'll get thrown around by half-dozen different aides and they probably won't help much unless it's the sorta problem that can be solved with a phone call, and I'd assume a helpful unrelated donation will get faster a response, but it's absolutely something John Public can and often does do.
gattsuru
2mo ago
Most of the Disney sequels are direct-to-video releases, so even when they're not trash, they're going to have an obvious decrease in animation quality and integration. And a lot of them are trash, or at best random TV episodes stapled together (eg, Kronk's New Groove).
That said, there are exceptions that are at least decent, even among the direct-to-video market. In addition to the Aladdin sequels, The Lion King II and 1-and-1/2 are late enough that their animation is decent, and they avoid their stories being too bad, but they're not exactly high literature.
gattsuru
2mo ago
I'll second that. The first Rescuers was a work of love in a lot of ways and better from a matter of pacing, it has to fight a lot with the story it was using being originally intended for a novella format. Down Under has its faults and was a commercial flop, but the difference in animation quality a decade makes is vast, and the story, while more Topical for its time, avoids the ten thousand coincidences problem in the original.
A lot of that era also just benefits from the new technology (and, to a lesser extent, 'kids movies' developing enough demand to get a sizable budget). For a non-Disney example, Fievel Goes West is a much more marginal improvement from An American Tail, but the clarity of animation, audio quality, so on is massively improved, entirely downstream of technological advances. There's a few scenes in American Tail that are amazing efforts for what could be done, and what got Bluth his name and reputation... and also are just muddled and muddy by modern standards, with Scooby-Doo-level matting. Fievel Goes West still isn't as clear as modern-day techniques, but it's night-and-day.
gattsuru
2mo ago
It's plausible, and I'll reserve judgement before making any specific assessments, but I'll point out some red flags beyond the Guatemalan denial:
She [Leon's wife] herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.
What, exactly, is this claim? Was she arrested or detained for ten hours? Is she a citizen, and that's the only reason she wasn't deported herself? If she's a non-citizen, did they attempt to deport her? Those things are all possible, but the sentence would also be technically honest if she just didn't have a ride home.
Then, sometime after Leon was detained, a woman purporting to be an immigration lawyer called the family, claiming she could help – but did not disclose how she knew about the case, or where Leon was. On 9 July, according to Leon’s granddaughter, the same woman called them again, claiming Leon had died.
This is some incredibly precise phrasing. No one knows the first date this woman called, and the Guardian doesn't know what the claims were? Other sources say this was probably somewhere around 6/23ish, but don't expand on the claims. Three weeks ago, she called again, gave the family false information, and then no one knows her name or even if she's actually an immigration lawyer?
More critically, while Guatemala is one of the countries that has agreed to receive third-country deporations (albeit not of people from Chile), it is not a country that has (or is known to have) received Alien Enemies Act deportations. The time period from 6/20 to 7/3, the claimed range, was after both AARP v. Trump and Trump vs. JGG, which clearly established AEA deportations still had judicial review. And neither the Guardian nor other media I can find say he was deported under the AEA. Indeed, it's not clear how many, if any, LPRs have been deported under the AEA.
Any other deportation would require a (admittedly waiveable) hearing with an administrative law judge. It's possible that the Trump administration just fucked things up, or that the immigration judge involved was just rubber-stamping papers. Or for a more borderline (or scissory) example his LPR was revoked; unlike naturalization, green cards can be revoked for a pretty wide variety of reasons, some serious and some less so. But few of these answers give a result compatible with "Instead some power tripping ICE worker two grades above the rank of janitor decided to act as judge, jury and executioner and sent a vulnerable 82 year old man off to a country with which he has no links whatsoever."
And some of that other reporting gives other reasons to put your antenna up:
Perhaps that's just a reasonable reaction to what could well have been an extremely traumatic experience. Perhaps.
But honestly, the fact that such a story is even believable speaks volumes about the situation on the ground, five years ago this story would have been seen as too absurd for The Onion.
gattsuru
2mo ago
I'm a big fan of noticing that he's against most books. The man's a distillation of every criticism of 'elite human capital' that isn't.
Sorry for not giving this earlier, but for opaque targets covering a large portion of the target zone, after throwing a Kalmin filter in, I've been typically getting within a half-centimeter pretty much the whole range (2cm - 4m). Reflective or transparent targets can be less good, with polycarbonate being either much noisier or being consistently a couple cm too far.
Big problem's where a zone is only has small objects very near -- sometimes this will 'just' be off by a centimeter or two more (seems most common in the center?), and sometimes it'll be way far by meters. That's been annoying for the display 'logic', since someone waving their hand at the virtual display is kinda a goal.
Dunno if it would be an issue for a more conventional rangefinder use, though the limited max range and wide field-of-view might exclude it regardless.
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