A Linux Cancellation
Vaxry, the creator and maintainer of hyprland, has been banned from FreeDesktop.Org and its member projects.
Background and Dramatis Personae
The Linux pipeline to an actual desktop is complicated and made of a bunch of moving parts, buried under the actual GUI itself, following the dual Linux philosophies of having everything do one task well(ish), and filling technical discussion with as many three-letter acronyms as possible. A historically important one is the X Window System, also known as X11 or xorg, but is both long in the tooth, covers an unusually wide area of ground for a Linux component, and is incredibly janky. While incredibly important for normal desktop users, the system has a long and bizarre history, with long periods of strife or minimal development: the current FreeDesktop space is technically just an independent github competitor for Linux desktop-specific development, but in practice there's a lot of RedHat Linux people in high places, in no small part because RHEL is the biggest way to be a linux dev and actually make money from it.
In recent years, many X11 developers have moved over to create a new version that better separates responsibility between the display protocol and everything else, along with covering a number of places that X11 just made bad mistakes in 1990 has been stuck with since, and this has turned into Wayland (and some related libraries like wl-roots), developed on the FreeDesktop.org gitlab. It's not quite ready for prime-time, especially for tasks like gaming with a nVidia card, but it's getting pretty close, and there are already some capabilities (eg, multiple displays with different refresh rates) that are a single text-file mod away in Wayland and you'd have an inconsistent time with in X11.
While some existing desktop environments, such as KDE, have worked to directly port over from X11 to Wayland, many Linux devs have taken the opportunity to try Weird and New things, instead, either because the need to develop several components previously internal to X11 seems like the best opportunity for such novel task, or because they're Linux devs. One branch consists of tiling window managers: while not new to Linux (or even Windows, they've taken some increasing popularity in the Wayland environment. Two of the most popular current ones are Hyprland and Sway. Though I'll caveat that popular here means you can find people using it: there's reason it's hard to find packages for them outside, and even harder to find prebuilt distros with it enabled. (Manjaro has a Sway community iso, in case you want to make three bad decisions at once.) Both are independently developed from FreeDesktop, though dependent on the Freedesktop-built wl-roots library.
Hyprland was founded by the psuedoanon Vaxry. I've described it in other contexts as catgirl thighhigh, and even the official github glamour shots are very clearly within that ethos, with many of the community themes being even more so. You could force it to look Professional, but the defaults provide a bizarre combination of mouseless window management, varied and sometimes obnoxious keyboard combinations, a fully text-based and live-updated config system, strong support for transparency and multiple desktops virtual or otherwise, and highly performant and kinda goofy animations (and fucking default-on rounded window corners, wtf). You don't have to own a Blahaj to like the theme, but there's a cluster of personality types that it seems to appeal toward, and the other half of them involve the sorta person that can leave leekspin on repeat for five hours on a second monitor and find it keeps getting funnier every single time they see it. Sway is intended as a drop-in-replacement for the much-older (x11) i3, and [a little more professional/grognardy in its base form, for better (hypr considered a license switch in a PR without having consulted a lawyer first) and worse (manual tiling).
Like a lot of Linux desktop environments (begun, the why-is-gnome-pronounced-that-way wars have), they Don't Like Each Other. Hyprland gives Sway special thanks "For showing how 2 do stuff the overkill way", Sway's original author has written multiple blogposts over the last six months with names like "Hyprland is a toxic community". This mostly didn't matter for Freedesktop.Org, though, since it's the sorta linux space where things like an official irc server would be a little too newfangled and a little out-of-scope.
And They Kept Using Discord
Which means most of the drama happens in weakly-affiliated channels. Hyprland has a Discord server, and while its membership is a mix of Blahaj and leekspinners, its ethos is very much toward the latter. In addition to mainstay stuff like a server ruleset that might as well be summarized as "don't make me come over there", right under announcements channel is the #days-since-vaxry-was-an-idiot, and not far under that is the official list of all accepted fanart of hyprchan, the hyprland mascot. (I didn't say the leekspin side was never trans, anymore than the blahaj side solely trans.) But while the server and Vaxry were willing to tolerate and use what could charitably be called 4chan humor and more accurately be called rude and bad jokes, they do keep to the rule poc||gtfo.
In early March, a Red Hat employee operating under the auspices of FreeDesktop contacted Vaxry about things he, and moderators of his Discord, had done. And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks. However, toward the end, that employee spelled out that that "... if more bad and more recent behavior ends up coming to our attention - it can be damaging to freedesktop's reputation as well, and we would have to consider steps to protect our community's reputation". Vaxry took this as a threat, and this escalated, first with the Red Hat employee highlighting that "The code of conduct team absolutely has the right to remove you from Freedesktop.org and ban you from the gitlab instance", and then when, when Vaxry said "further emails from the freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team will now be ignored unless You, as a team, decide to change Your attitude wrt. the issue at hand", the freedesktop Code of Conduct team pulling that trigger, Vaxry put various comments on his blog, yada yada.
Bang-Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head.
Both Vaxry and the unnamed RedHat employee come across as prats in the e-mail chain. It's very easy to read that chain as RedHat wanting on paper an official "It won't happen again" commitment and show of contrition, especially as hypr has become a bigger part of the wayland world (there's no serious census, but hypr's userbase seems the biggest among novel Wayland compositors; hyprcursor is genuinely a major improvement over the fucked-up xcursor, and has no serious competitors). It's also very easy to see this e-mail exchange as somewhere between requiring hypr spaces to act fully under RedHat corporate norms, and more cynically hanging up a Sword of Damocles for later -- even assuming arguendo that Vaxry's behavior retroactively justified the threat in the first e-mail, it made it very clear it was a threat.
((And for various reasons it's a little concerning to have two desktop environment developers that aren't quite clear on how capitalization works.))
There's a certain irony in the stolid and more formal Sway being the Blue-Tribe-themed one, and the purple-and-pink-and-blue-everywhere unprofessional hypr-active world being the not-Blue-Tribe-themed one, but there's another sense where it's not a huge surprise.
Ostensibly, this shouldn't matter much. Yes, hyprland and wayland and wl-roots are still buggy messes. But to the extent hyprland might be more vulnerable now to Wayland or wl-roots bugs, if Vaxry can't supply PRs or even bug reports to wl-roots, it'll drive the fixes to hypr, to the broader Wayland ecosystems' detriment. There are other people using hypr that could still report it up (and Vaxry has already forked wl-roots). In practice, any dev taking hypr-like conventions, especially newer devs, can and should be a little cautious in freedesktop environments, and there's already been a slow siddle away from hypr among the influencer set. There's been calls in some package managers to pull the project after some early posts from DeVault, which to be fair have been mostly rejected; we'll see if that changes. Which still doesn't matter.
But there's a tendency among a Certain Set to talk about how cancel culture has peaked, or how it doesn't impact 'normal' people, or how it's just a fiction, and I think it's worth mentioning the examples that don't show up in google news or conventional culture war channels.
gattsuru
24d ago
A Furry Cancellation
Mary E. Lowd, aka Ryffnah, has been removed from the Furry Writer's Guild, dropped by her publishers, and bounced as a Guest of Honour from the Oregon convention Furlandia, one week before the convention started. Not one of the biggest furry writers, or as skilled as someone like Tempo Kun, Robert Baird, Rukis Croax, or Kyell Gold. She has had had some success in out-of-fandom pieces in Baen, and her Otters In Space series was more normie-friendly than even other SFW writers (and even some normie anthromorphic authors). That must take some effort: what did she do?
Lowd has been open and explicit about her use of AI image gen, likely driven both by her husband's work in the field of AI research, and more seriously by the economics of the matter. To be fair, the FWG policy was officially published in January of last year, and unofficialy well-established for some time before; FurPlanet doesn't really do policy, but their stance has been just as open and explicit for nearly as long. There's some smoke-filledfree backroom management that Happens for furcons, and I expect Lowd will find more than one or two doors has closed, here.
Businesses have policies reflecting their principles or interests or both, so it's not a huge surprise it came to this.
The interesting bit's that the next-to-last editions of her works had conventionally- or conventionally-digitally produced art, some by pretty well-known artists like BlackTeagan. Emphasis on had: as common in the book industry, the cover art belonged to her publisher; it may well fall off the planet outside of private collections. The current replacements aren't great, though it's not clear if that reflects the artistic limitations of Lowd's tools or her time crunch. She previous sold her newest books at convention tables with nice stickers marking the ones with AI art, and that's going to be a lot less common moving forward.
And she's not alone.
Of the exceptions I gave a year ago, e621 has officially shoved any AI-gen to the e6ai subsite, and while Weasyl hasn't yet updated its policies, it has updated its practices. Outside of AIgen-specific accounts on twitter or servers on Discord, it can be hard to find the stuff. If you're a furry, you can avoid seeing AI art without even trying!... er... labelled AI art. Forget the awkward questions about how increasingly wide varieties of games integrate it into their graphics pipeline, or the not-so-clear division from more advance 'brush' tech to some uses of AI-gen: the people coming up with the policies don't know how the tech works. They may never know anything other than Lowd's oh-god-I-gotta-get-a-new-publisher-whatever-works pieces, even to recognize it.
Which is one potential end to the story, and to many stories, and a quiet one. Yet at the same time, it's an utterly frustrating ending: all of the worst fears of economic impact on lower-tier artists or of unlabelled AI spam overwhelming sincere creation, all the lost opportunities for conventional artists to focus more of their time on the parts of art they love or dedicated AI-genners to explore types of media that just wouldn't be practical for conventional artwork, all come true... and no one cares.
Against A Purely HyperDunbarist View
World’s for FIRST is in a week.
For those unfamiliar with the organization, For Increasingly Retrobuilt Silly Term For Inspiration in Science and Technology runs a series of competitions for youth robotics, starting from a scattering of Lego Mindstorm-based FLL competitions for elementary and middle schoolers, to the mid-range 20-40 pound robots of FTC that play in alliances of 2v2 across a ping-pong-table-sized space, and for high schoolers FRC running 120-pound robots in 3v3 alliances around the space of a basketball court. Worlds will have thousands of teams, spread across multiple subcompetitions. (For a short time pre-pandemic, there were two Worlds, with all the confusion that entailed.)
If you’re interested, a lot of Worlds competition will streamed. And a lot of both off-season and next-season competitions and teams are always looking for volunteers.
The organization’s goal... well, let’s quote the mission statement:
FIRST exists to prepare the young people of today for the world of tomorrow. To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders. The mission of FIRST is to provide life-changing robotics programs that give young people the skills, confidence, and resilience to build a better world.
There’s a bunch of the more normal culture war problems to point around. How goes the replacement of the prestigious Chairman’s Award with Ignite Impact? If not, complain at least that it’s a missed opportunity on the level of POCI/POCI for replacing a bad naming with a worse one? How do you end up with events playing the PRC’s theme song before the US national anthem?
There's even internal culture war stuff, which may not make a ton of sense to outsiders. Does the move away from commercial automotive motors to built-to-FIRST and especially-brushless motors privilege teams with more cash, or compromise safety or fair play? Should regional competitions, which may be the only official field plays small teams get, also accept international competitors? Should mentors white glove themselves, should they only do so during official competition events, or should the possibility of the Mentor Coach be abolished?
But the biggest question in my mind is how we got here.
Worlds competition is an outstanding and massive event, with an estimated 50k-person attendance at a ten-million-plus square foot convention center. And it’s a bit of a football game: there’s a lot of cheering and applause, and a little bit of technical work. There will be a number of tiny conferences, many of which will focus on organizational operations like running off-season events. People network. That’s not limited to Worlds itself, though the dichotomy is more apparent there: there might be one or two teams per regional competition that have a custom circuit board on their robot, but I'd bet cash that the average regional bats under 1.0 for number of teams with custom polyurethane or silicone parts.
Indeed, that football game is a large part of how teams get to Worlds. The competitions operates as a distributed tournament, where players who win certain awards may elect to continue to the next event in a hierarchy. The exact process and what exact awards count as continuing awards are pretty complex and vary by location (especially post-COVID), but as at the FRC level, the advancing awards prioritize two of the three teams that won a local competition's final, and then the team that has done the most recruitment and sponsoring of FTC or FLL teams over the last three (previously five) years, and then the team that has done the most for the current year. (Followed by the most competent Rookies, sometimes, and then a whole funnel system rolling through more esoteric awards.) In addition to the inherent randomness of alliance field play, there's a rather telling note: the 'what have you done for FIRST today' award, if won at the Worlds level, guarantees an optional invite to every future Worlds competition. By contrast, teaching or developing esoteric skills or core infrastructure is an awkward fit for any award, usually shoved into the Judge's Award, which with 3.5 USD won't buy you a good cup of coffee at Worlds.
There’s reasons it’s like this, and it’s not just the Iron Laws of Bureaucracy, or the sometimes-blurry lines between modern corporate infrastructure and mid-level-marketing. The organization hasn't been hollowed out by parasites and worn like a skinsuit (at least not in this context): it's the sort of goal that the founders and first generation would have and do consider a remarkable victory. I’m not making the Iscariot complaint, because it’s not true.
FIRST couldn’t exist in the form it does without these massive events and the political and public support they produce, not just because you wouldn’t hear about any smaller organization, but because the equipment and technology only works at sizable scale. Entire businesses have sprung up to provide increasingly specialized equipment, FIRST got National Instruments to build a robotics controller that resists aluminum glitter a little better, even the LEGO stuff has some custom support, and they can only do so because an ever-increasing number of teams exist to want it. SolidWorks, Altium, dozens of other companies donate atoms and/or bits on a yearly basis; the entire field system for FRC wouldn’t work without constant support and donation by industrial engineering companies. WPI might devote a couple post-grad students to maintaining a robotics library without tens of thousands of people using it, but I wouldn’t bet on it. States would not be explicitly funding FIRST (or its competitors) unless those programs can show up on television and have constituents that can show up at a state politician’s door.
Those demands drive not just how FIRST operates today, but what its interests are looking toward the future, not just in what it does, but what it won’t do. From a cynical eye, I wouldn’t say with certainty that FIRST would drop ten community teams for a school system buy-in, or twenty for a state program, but I wouldn’t want to be on the community team for any of those hard choices. There is no open-source motor controller or control board available for FIRST competition use, and there’s not a procedure available to present one, and there won’t be. There’s a lot of emphasis on sharing outreach tricks, and a little for sharing old code or 3d models, and a lot of limits to providing skills.
Because throughout this system, the most impactful thing you can do is always getting more people. It’s not Inspiring, it’s not Chairmanny Impactful, but that's what those awards are, with reason. Shut up and multiple: the math, in the end, is inevitable.
And I’m going to deny it.
There's a story that goes around in the FIRST sphere, where one of FIRST's founders bargained or tricked Coca-Cola into in exchange for developing some other more commercial technology. The exact form and valence tends to vary with who tells the story, whether to highlight the speaker's anti-capitalist frame, to gloss over some of the frustrations with the Coca-Cola Freestyle (tbf, usually more logistic and maintenance than with the pumps themselves), or to wave away the rough question of whether it paid off).
But that last point is a bit unfair: Solving Problems In Extreme Poverty is the sort of difficult and low-odds environment where high-variance options make sense to take, and you should expect a high-variance low-odds option to fail (or at least not succeed wildly) most of the time, and at least it wasn't as dumb an idea as the lifestraw. Maybe (probably!) enough of the steps that combine to keep FIRST running fall into the same category.
I'm hoping teaching kids isn't a low-odds environment. And ultimately, most volunteers and teams and sponsors signed up more for that than for the flashing lights and the fancy banners. But teaching, in matter involving true interaction, can not be done at the scales and directions that turn a roll of the dice from gambling to a variance strategy. It's difficult enough as a mentor to remember all the names the students and family for even a moderately-sized FRC or FTC team; few in a team that "support 128" teams (not linking directly: these are teenagers) can name every one or even a majority. These organizations have, by necessity, turned to maximize how many opportunities they present to their affiliates, without much attention to what that opportunity is. Few turn to the full argumentum ad absurdum where the recruitment exists solely to get more recruiters, but they’ve not left that problem space behind, either.
((There are other nitpicks: the same economies of scale that make these answers work eliminate many less-difficult problem whose presence is necessary to onboard and upskill new learners, the focus on bits over atoms breaks in similar ways that the outreach-vs-teaching one does.))
Dunbar proposed an upper limit to how large a social group the human mind readily handles. There's a lot of !!fun!! questions about how well this will replicate, or how accurate the exact number is, or what applicability it has for a given level of interaction: suffice it to assume some limit exists, that some necessary contact increments the counter at some level of teaching, and that it can't possibly be this high. At some point, you are no longer working with people; you're performing a presentation, and they're watching; or you're giving money and they're shaking a hand. At best, you're delegating.
These strategies exceed the limit, blasting past it or even starting beyond it. They are hyperdunbar, whether trying to get fifty thousand people into a convention center, or trying to sell ten thousand books, or 8k-10k subscribers. There are things that you can't do, or can't do without spending a ton of your own money, without taking these strategies! Whether FIRST getting NI's interest, writing or drawing, building or playing video games full-time, you either take this compromise or another one, and a lot of the others are worse.
But they're simultaneously the most visible strategies, by definition. I do not come to kill the Indigestion Impact Award; I come to raise the things that aren't in the awards. Even if FIRST could support a dozen teams that emphasized bringing new technologies forward in a one-on-one basis, and if your first exposure to the program selected from teams randomly, you'd be much more likely to hear from the hyperdunbarists -- hell, it could well be that way, and I've just missed the rest of them.
Yet they are not the only opportunity. You don't have to be grindmaxxing. One team, even in FIRST, can share skills simply for the purpose of sharing skills. It’s why I volunteer for the org. You can go into an artistic thing knowing you want a tiny audience, or to cover costs and if lucky your time, or as a hobby that's yours first. It shouldn't be necessary to say that outright, as even in hyperdunbar focuses, most fail down to that point. Yet even in spheres where Baumol's hits hardest, it can be a difficult assumption to break.
gattsuru
21hr ago
I'm not sure whether it's better to respond with a furry fandom joke, a Baldur's Gate joke, or with a Vintage Story joke.
gattsuru
9d ago
That seems a near-universal recipe to surrender any and every public to whatever jackass is willing to occupy it first, and then insist that they feel unsafe because The Wrong Person walked close to them or took pictures of their public protest. Dissolving 'starting a confrontation' at all makes the fundamental flaws of this framework, if anything, more apparent.
gattsuru
9d ago
That’s a moderate argument in favor of unsanctioned protest, if somewhat marred by one of its (first!) prongs turning into whether people like the protest goals or not.
But I don’t need an argument in favor of unsanctioned protest: my metrics there are far simpler. My problem here is not the presence of a protest, but your advocacy of a norm where whatever protest group that takes a public forum first gets to exclude people who disagree with their message.
There might be some edge cases where that’s an unfortunate compromise we have to take, but under vague concerns about ‘confrontation’ are little more than carte blanche
gattsuru
23d ago
But also, I don’t see how it could be bad?
There's a thing in the Mormon church where they send teenagers to evangelize randos. It seems a little weird at first glance: everybody knows that they're not going to get any bites. But getting new recruits isn't the point -- the point is to absolutely demonstrate how bad non-Mormons can act.
That's probably not intended (either here, or in the Mormon church). Yet I wonder what, precisely, the proposer expects to have happen were he to ship cornfed rural folk (or even the Unnecessariat writer) to San Francisco, or vice versa.
gattsuru
7d ago
There's a lot of hilarious edge cases that proposal invokes -- could a gay man defend his partner's honour by claiming he just sucked at topping, missed the button every time? Was too short, just let the tip in? The Texas law in question prohibited stimulation with a sex toy (by a same-sex partner), but I've never seen evidence it was enforced; are we just giving up on that here? What happens with a penis sheathe? Strap-on over chastity cage (50+ images on e621)?
gattsuru
9d ago
Ten years ago a brand-new processor would have been the Haswell- or Broadwell-era, and while you could get machines that could hold 32GB RAM, the H81 chipset only supported up to 16GB, going to 32GB would not have been standard, and it'd probably cost you upwards of 250 USD in RAM alone.
But more centrally, VSCode's linter and intellisense implementation is perfectly fine for mid-sized projects without a boatload of dependencies in certain languages. Get outside of those bounds, and its RAM usage can skyrocket. Python tends to get it hard (as does Java, tbf) because of popular libraries with massive and somewhat circular dependency graphs, but I've seen large C++ projects go absolutely tango uniform, with upwards of 10GB.
Yes, it is usually an extension problem, but given that you'll end up needing to install a few extensions for almost every language you work with just to get them compiling (nevermind debugging!), and that it's often even Microsoft-provided extensions (both vscode-cpptools and vscode-python have bitten me, personally) , that doesn't actually help a lot. Yes, you can solve it by finding the extension and disabling it, and sometimes there's even alternative extensions for the same task that do work.
The normal case isn't much worse, and sometimes is better, than alternatives like IntelliJ/PyCharm. But the worst cases are atrocious, and they're not just things hitting some rando on a github issue with some weird outlier use case.
gattsuru
14d ago
it took urban liberal Jewish/* lawyers to deploy it in practice?
I think urban liberal would have stood stronger on its own.
gattsuru
16d ago
Is Free Desktop important?
FreeDesktop is the space (literally a GitLab instance, may heaven have mercy on their souls) where people build the tools that almost all Linux desktop environments run on, including X11 (the user interface drawing framework that underlies every conventional desktop from GNOME to KDE to Cinnamon to ChromeOS) and Wayland (which is what Linux is starting to move toward as a replacement). So it's about as relevant as Linux On The Desktop is, for better or worse.
What's hyprland?
Hyprland is technically 'just' the window compositor (lies-to-children version: stitches applications together into a function desktop 'screen'), but it's more generally used as a name for the desktop environment produced by mixing it and other pieces together, like GNOME or KDE would be. This is a quick video showing just how it looks, and this some of the different behaviors. Essentially, it's designed for rapid but space-optimized window control, whether by mouse or keyboard, and management of many virtual desktops easily.
Hyprdots is a more fully-featured mix of it and those other pieces.
It doesn't have a huge userbase, even by not-Chromebook Linux standards, but it's easily the most popular Wayland-specific desktop environment. The Discord has a 10k members, for what little that's worth, and most users probably only bother with the discord if something breaks and they can't fix it.
Is Vaxry important?
Vaxry is the founder and lead developer for hypr, along with having done some work for wl-roots, which is a library many projects use to simplify common Wayland requirements. He's not the only person working on hyprland, but the commit comparison looks like this, and the other hypr stuff is even more lopsided.
This ban won't prevent him from writing further hyprland work, but it will block him from writing any pull requests or even issues for Wayland or wl-roots, and the broader response will make hypr-like conventions or projects harder to adopt, even when correct.
Options:
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Google's mainstay is Gemini (previously Bard) is free(ish) for now, if you have a Google account. Open it, start writing. Not private.
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Anthropic pushes Claude. You can try Haiku and Sonnet, the lighter- and mid-weight models free, but Opus was more restricted last I checked. Tends to be one of the stronger fiction writers, for better or worse.
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Chat-GPT3.5 is available for free at here, 4.0 is a paid feature at the same sight. The paid version is good for imagegen -- I think it's what a lot of Trace's current stuff is using. Flexible, if a bit prudish.
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Llama is Facebook's big model, free. Llama 2 is also available for download and direct run, though it's a little outdated at this point.
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LMSys Arena lets you pit models against each other, including a wide variety of above. Again, not private. Very likely to shutter with little notice.
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Run a model locally, generally through the use of a toolkit like OobaBooga webui. This runs fastest with a decent-ish graphics card, in which case you want to download the .SAFETENSORS version, but you can also use a CPU implementation for (slow) generation by downloading GGUF versions for some models. Mistral 8x7B seems to be the best-recommended here for general purpose if you can manage the hefty 10+GB VRAM minimum, followed by SOLAR for 6GB+ and Goliath for 40+GB cards, but there's a lot of variety if you have specific goals. They aren't as good as the big corporate models, but you can get variants that aren't lobotomized, tune for specific goals, and there's no risk of someone turning it off.
Most online models have a free or trial version, which usually will be a little dumber, limited to shorter context (think memory), or be based on older data, or some combination of the above. Paid models may charge a monthly fee (eg, ChatGPT Plus gives access to DallE and ChatGPT4 for 20 USD / month), or they may charge based on tokens (eg, ChatGPT API has a per 1 million input and output token price rate, varying based on model). Tokens are kinda like syllables for the LLM, between a letter to a whole word or rarely a couple words, which are how the LLM breaks apart sentences into numbers. See here for more technical details -- token pricing is usually cheaper unless you're a really heavy user, but it can be unintuitive.
For use:
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Most models (excluding some local options) assume a conversational model: ask the program questions, and it will try to give (lengthy) answers. They will generally follow your tone to some extent, so if you want a dry technical explanation, use precise and dry technical terms; if you want colloquial English, be more casual. OobaBooga lets you switch models between different 'modes', with Instruct having that Q/A form, and Default being more blank, but most online models can be set or talked into behaving that way.
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Be aware that many models, especially earlier models, struggle with numbers, especially numbers with many significant figures. They are all still prone to hallucination, though the extent varies with model.
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Long conversations, within the context length of the model, will impact future text; remember that creating a new chat will break from previous context, and this can be important when changing topics.
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They're really sensitive to how you ask a question, sometimes in unintuitive ways.
gattsuru
9d ago
This is already the norm for legally-sanctioned protests, though, right? As I mentioned in other replies, it is common for police to prevent counter protestors from intruding on the space of protestors and vice versa.
That's actually a fun question! The rules for how police can separate protestors and counterprotestors are complex. And this clearly flops many important prongs of that test.
The video looks like it is taken at a courtyard, one of a dozen around the University. They aren’t holding captive the main amphitheater at Columbia or something, where yeah there would be a concern regarding the reasonable use of university amenities.
This thread is south of this video, which was from Yale, about access to a building. And I buy people being blocked from just a few public fora about as much as I buy someone being a 'little bit pregnant'.
Ironically, you could even argue that the courtyard is seeing greater facility during this protest, given the population density from the looks of it.
It was great, for the one side able to use it, isn't the most compelling argument for neutral access to public fora.
I can't find any records involving either person in the Pennsylvania court system, though given how crappy most court records are, that doesn't mean much.
The underlying complaint is here, and seems to be resting heavily on past adjudications by the State Board in 2010 (for Herr) and 2018 (for Wentworth). Like most state licensing laws, the definition of veterinary practice in Pennsylvania is very broad :
"Practice of veterinary medicine" includes, but is not limited to, the practice by any person who (i) diagnoses, treats, corrects, changes, relieves or prevents animal disease, deformity, injury or other physical, mental or dental conditions by any method or mode, including the prescription or administration of any drug, medicine, biologic, apparatus, application, anesthetic or other therapeutic or diagnostic substance or technique, (ii) performs a surgical operation, including cosmetic surgery, upon any animal, (iii) performs any manual procedure upon an animal for the diagnosis or treatment of sterility or infertility of animals, (iv) represents himself as engaged in the practice of veterinary medicine, (v) offers, undertakes, or holds himself out as being able to diagnose, treat, operate, vaccinate, or prescribe for any animal disease, pain, injury, deformity, or physical condition...
It's not obvious that ultrasounds (or possibly(?) selling bull semen?) are covered, and there's not a ton of great pragmatic arguments for it, but the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders. And for a wide variety of reasons this sorta thing is near-impossible to practically challenge even were courts willing to push back on it.
Given some of the coverage, though ("both men were advised by their former attorneys not to pay the fines or appear in court"), I'm not sure what happened was completely without any court behavior -- this may be referring to the 'court' of the board licensing group, which is more court in the kangaroo sense, but it also could be about enforcement summons for a conventional court. An actually fake arrest warrant wouldn't be unprecedented, but it's left me noticing I'm confused.
That said:
Rusty Herr was arrested the very next morning, April 11, at 6:30 a.m. at his home in Christiana.
gattsuru
22d ago
I’ve never understood that though. These people basically have a very expensive hobby and generally need to be told that.
For the most part, that's true for writers: even outside of the furry fandom, it's hard to beat minimum wage -- MorlockP has had three pretty successful works, and also a lot of commentary about how bad writing can pay. There's some furry writers that manage to make it as at least supplementing their income better than a minimum wage job would, but they tend to also be mixing art in (eg Rick Griffin, Rukis Croax) or riding the commission train hard (eg Amethyst Mare, Joshiah).
For artists, that's less true. There's a surprising number of people who can pull in low six figures through furry commission work, and while that's the top 1%ish of artists, that's in no small part because most artists don't want to make it a full-time job or a job at all, preferring to augment their more stable W2 income (eg Accelo) or just keep demand reasonable. The fandom is just heavily driven by artists -- while organizers and administrators are the 'kings' of their respective websites or conventions, an overwhelming majority of interest and more importantly cash moving around is driven by visual art (and comics, and games, etc containing visual art). And artists have been pushing to ban AI art in many contexts, with some success, seeing it as a direct threat to their income.
Why do hobbyist writers care what artists think, outside of cases where they're one and the same? FurPlanet's FuzzWolf commented at length a few years ago about the importance of a good cover artist, not just for quality or visibility, but because they will be able and willing to put your name out there. It's a marketing and networking expense, and even it won't necessarily break even for hobbyist writers (though FurPlanet does order and pay for commissions itself, not just in Lowd's case, and presumably isn't doing so out of the goodness of their hearts), the hobbyist writer can often get artwork that they'd want otherwise. Furry writers are often, if not always, furries themselves, after all.
In many cases, artwork that they couldn't get otherwise: many bigger furry publishers have good enough relationships with well-known artists that they can jump a commission queue or get in contact with artists that don't do open commissions at all. Lowd almost certainly couldn't have gotten that BlackTeagan piece on her own for Nexus Nine, for a few different reasons; Gre7g Luterman's deal with Rick Griffin for Haven Celestia cover art is little different, but almost certainly a benefit on Luterman's side. And for obvious reasons it's one that isn't available to any writer who even hints at using AIgen.
If it is a hobby, why throw away a good part of the enjoyment to save a couple hundred bucks, when you're spending weeks or months?
gattsuru
22d ago
I'm not sure if there's a specific term in the LDS community that separates it from more general missionary work, but sending 18-25ish young adults in suits on bicycles to knock on doors away from home, typically for sections of two years. TraceWoodgrains wrote about it from the perspective of someone then-inside the community who did the work in Australia, but I've seen it referenced from online and offline ex- and current-LDS.
Yes, ostensibly missionary work gets convert baptists, and the official statistics are in 4+ per missionary-year. Which is pretty respectable, even if it's an astounding amount of manhours to get there. But these numbers come about by merging the numbers from all jurisdictions, and by mixing explicit missionary work knocking on doors with, talking with organically-developed friendships while on mission, missionary service (such as volunteer work for the destitute).
Add in retention to baptism -- and from a non-LDS perspective, that's the LDS baptism requirements are a really low bar -- where knock-on-door numbers are awful and the entire program sells itself on members talking to or encouraging investigators that they found through personal efforts, and it turns into a wash pretty quickly for a lot of jurisdictions.
I don't think there are good public numbers for baptism-per-missionary by mission or country, but at least if your missionary work was recent, I'd really guess you were probably well above-average for your mission region.
The cynical view on Rumspringa is more that it shoves younger Amish to see how weird "the English" are and how little we like it (akin to forcing someone caught sneaking a puff of a cigarette to smoke several in a row, knowing that the nicotine would be unpleasant in that dosage), rather than a hazing: a person on Rumspringa can often run into trouble, but they're not interrupting Troubles' soap operas.
gattsuru
2d ago
That letter and five bucks won't buy you a cup of coffee, these days.
I'm very far from sure what Abbott intends for the Texas Education Agency to do/not do, but one important thing to remember is that, for states and federales, the law saying "shall" means absolutely squat without a directly connected enforcement mechanism and someone who can actually press the button on it. This letter might trigger ESEA compliance review stuff, since ESEA state plans have to comply with federal law in general (though it might not trigger until the next review?), but that ends up with a bunch of meetings before the feds can refuse to provide state funding. Title IX proper is supposed to depend on complaints filed regarding specific acts of discrimination (within 180 days of the act, not adjudicated by other bodies, yada), after which the DoE meets with, which (excluding criminal cases not relevant here) if refused can result in "initiate proceedings to suspend, terminate, or refuse to grant or continue Federal financial assistance to the recipient".
I expect Abbott's more relying on unrelated stays slowing any enforcement -- which seems a mediocre bet, since on one hand you've got the Fifth Circuit, but on the other it's this has been the writing on the wall since Bostock -- but barring that he's playing chicken.
(no, blue states have not denied federal forces the ability to operate, their examples of arguable nullification are more noncooperation than open defiance and resistance)
The line gets murky: refusing to honor an ICE detainer is probably noncooperation from a non-commandeering sense, but literally sneaking an illegal immigrant out the back door to help evade an ICE officer... well, there's a lot of metaphors where the Little People doing unfavored things would be sitting in jail.
I'm... not very good with Python, but my understanding, a toy example would be :
main,py:
import agent
import world
agentCount = 20
infectionCount = 25
world = world.World()
print("Starting...")
for i in range(agentCount):
world.addAgent(agent.Agent(world))
for i in range(infectionCount):
world.infectRandomAgent()
print("Total Infections :" + str(world.totalInfections))
print("Total Redundant Infections :" + str(world.redundantInfections))
for i in range(agentCount):
print("Agent #" + str(i) + " Infections:" + str(world.knownAgents[i].countedInfections))
world,py:
import random
class World:
knownAgents = list()
totalInfections = 0
redundantInfections = 0
def addAgent(self, newAgent):
self.knownAgents.append(newAgent)
def infectRandomAgent(self):
random.choice(self.knownAgents).incrementInfection()
agent,py:
class Agent:
wasInfected = False
countedInfections = 0
def __init__(self, ownerWorld):
self.world = ownerWorld
def incrementInfection(self):
self.world.totalInfections += 1
if self.wasInfected:
self.world.redundantInfections += 1
self.wasInfected = True;
self.countedInfections += 1
Note that if you're using raw python3.exe or a basic IDE like IDLE, all three files will need to be in the same folder, or you have to treat them like modules. Better IDEs like PyCharm will handle most of this for you, though I'd recommend experimenting before futzing with it a lot.
__init__ is a python builtin capability that's pretty equivalent to Java Constructors. The first argument for any class function will act as a reference to the instance of that class being called for that function, regardless of name -- do be careful getting a convention for that early and often, or it'll drive you up the walls. self is popular in pythonic circles, but I've seen a surprisingly large project that took the convention of this<className>, probably downstream of java or C# devs.
Only your main simulation file really should need to import the files that make up the actual objects. The class objects themselves don't need to know about each other, even if they're calling methods or fields specific to the other class, because that gets looked up during live runtime operations.
(edit: specifically, the class calling the constructor for an instance of an object needs to import that object. You could have, and it would probably be cleaner, to import Agent within world.py and not from within main.py, and do the agent constructor in the form :
def addAgent(self):
self.knownAgents.append(agent.Agent(self))
But I've been burned before in python environments where I ended up with my class imports spread throughout for hundred places and it being a nightmare to refactor or rename or handle versioning, so my preference for non-giant projects is to centralize imports, and for giant python projects you probably should be breaking it into modules.
gattsuru
16d ago
For the most part. I'm not sure whether Vaxry overestimated his 'power' -- from the e-mail chain, he pretty clearly saw the RedHat dev's starting e-mail as absolutely showing the FreeDesktop team was ready and willing to ban his ass, knew they could and would, and he seemed more concerned that FreeDesktop was going to try to take over as much of the Hypr space as possible. And while he worked on FreeDesktop's git, it wasn't his community, or really even a community given how much of a kludge any communication around the FreeDesktop-specific areas tended to be.
FreeDesktop could always fork Hypr, and Vaxry could (and since, has) forked wlroots, and FreeDesktop was already using a lot of his tools; that's what FOSS means, to a large extent.
The problem's more that this fractures an (admittedly small) portion of the FOSS community: even if we don't get the whole 'bad person touched this thing' reaction, there's definitely people on the "start looking at how they want to see their world curated" chain. A lot of things like 'many eyes make all bugs shallow' or 'working with the best ideas on the planet' start falling apart once you start banning people from your Issues and PR pages.
gattsuru
29d ago
This was perhaps the most sophisticated attack on an open source repo ever witnessed, waged against an extremely vulnerable target, and even then it didn't come even close to broad penetration before it was stopped.
Witnessed is a little important, here; I'm not as sure as TheGrugq that this isn't the first try at this, if only because no one's found (and reported) a historical example yet, but I'm still very far from confident it is the first. And it did get really close: I've got an Arch laptop that has one part of the payload.
Despite being obvious it bears laboring that it wouldn't have been possible for our Hero Without a Cape to uncover it if he wasn't able to access the sources.
That's... not entirely clear. Visible-source seems to have helped track down the whole story, as did the development discussions that happened in public (though what about e-mail/discord?), but the initial discovery seems like it was entirely separate from any source-diving, and a lot of the attack never had its source available until people began decompiling it.
The tendency to overreact may very well serve to make open source more anti-fragile. Absolutely everyone in this space is now thinking about how to make attacks like this more difficult at every step.
Yeah, that part is encouraging; I've definitely seen places (not just in code! aviation!) where people look at circumstances like this and consider it sign the were enough redundancy, rather than enough redundancy for this time. I think it's tempting to focus a little too much on the mechanical aspects, but that's more a streetlamp effect than an philosophical decision.
gattsuru
8d ago
If you're just trying to receive e-mails, Mail in a Box works pretty well 99% of the time. If you're largely just sending yourself notifications, with an account that's not used anywhere else of significance, it works 98%ish of the time. ((And even that's overkill; a basic postfix relay works.))
If you're trying to send e-mail, it can be messy, and worse unpredictably messy. Mailinabox tries to solve the absolute horror story that mail config turned into, and to be fair a lot of the tedious config-twisting stuff is no longer as frustrating as it once was. You can do it... for a while.
The issue is not that you might send enough e-mail to hit an automated spam filter yourself, or even the risk that you might misconfigure things in a way that a bad actor can abuse -- that's a concern with near-any server, and there's a lot of things like a SIP PBX where you just recognize and mitigate it. With e-mail, however, your domain and/or IP address can end up on sizable DNSBLs because some IP address half an octet away fucked up, or because some sysadmin in Europe had a stick up their ass that day. Surprisingly big-name people can misconfigure their own stuff, and break because you're not big enough to have been made an exception, and not even have reporting turned on: it's happened to me.
E-mail can be done fine for a toy project, or where you're measuring reliability by licking your finger and sticking it in the air rather than by count of nines. If you're going to move the system you use to handle your bank account's verification to it, or how you send bills to customers, you gotta be willing to put a lot of effort in and realize it may not work.
gattsuru
9d ago
32GB was possible on Sandy Bridge processors (technically 2011), but mid-range Westmere and Nehalim processors only supported 16GB(ish) for most of the consumer market, and even the high-end Bloomfield capped at 24GB. I'm not saying you didn't do it -- I've got a couple Xeon systems from that era floating around that could have -- but it was absolutely not a standard use case.
A more normal midrange system would be closer to 4GB, with 8GB as the splurge. You'd probably end up spending over 400 USD in RAM alone, plus needing to spec up your motherboard to support it (thanks, Intel for the fucky memory controller decision).
gattsuru
9d ago
You would have to argue that regarding the obvious and clear special concerns of a student-led protest movement
Are you going to spell them out, or just make vague motions about the horror or someone taking video of a public protest, or of someone in a stupid hat smirking at them?
Well, Meinecke did not engage with any counter-protesters and had his own location where he was protesting.
You want to try that, again?
Protestors surrounded Meinecke after about an hour. One protestor seized Meinecke’s Bible. Meinecke retrieved another Bible from his bag and continued reading aloud. Another protestor grabbed hold of—and ripped pages from—the new Bible. The altercation soon escalated. As protestors, some of whom Seattle police characterized in their written reports as Antifa, encroached, Meinecke took hold of an orange-and-white traffic sawhorse. Five protestors, some clad in all black and wearing body armor, picked up Meinecke and the sawhorse, moved him across the street, and dropped him on the pavement. One law enforcement officer who observed this interaction reported that “‘Antifa’ members . . . began to fight/assault” Meinecke.
Undeterred, Meinecke walked back to his original location by the federal building and resumed reading and held up a sign. While people gathered on the street, however, some approached Meinecke, knocked him down, and took one of his shoes.
gattsuru
9d ago
There's been a number of other things going on in this space, either from financial drivers or more straightforward legal ones. You've already gotten a post on gumroad, but itch.io has been doing a slow-march version where they don't block adult content sales as a category, just individual pieces of adult content, which has kept going apace.
I've not found good proof that there's something Operation Chokepoint-like going on, but with the timing and the variety in impacted content, it's increasingly hard to believe that this is all occurring randomly.
On the direct legal attacks, in the furry sphere, some places have complied with local bans (eg, e621 blocks North Carolina, while others have largely ignored them and hoped they don't get made examples. There's good reason that they're rather paranoid about having to keep name-identifying records, since people have blown zero-days on FurAffinity.
Yeah, seconding both prongs, here: a) IDEs are important and b) Python IDEs near-universally suck. If you're in the Java sphere before, PyCharm is kinda the Intellij-for-Python, for better and worse, and there's a large faction that loves VSCode for
eating all of their RAMhandling multi-language projects reasonably, but for the love of god don't try to build class-ful python in IDLE.((I'll generally advocate PyCharm for new programmers, as annoying some of the Intellijisms can be, but if you're more acclimatized to and have already set up Eclipse it's definitely not worth swapping.))
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