gattsuru
17d ago
In this case, the law requires age verification for a web site run by a commercial entity where one third of the content on the site is 'harmful to minors', or the Texas AG can bring 10k USD/day charges even if no minor has visited the website. There's a lot of speech you do have a right to that can fall under that bar.
Maybe it's close enough to the right policy as to be worth that burden, but it needs to at least be considered in the context of what it's actually promoting, not just what the sticker on the front says.
gattsuru
1d ago
That's fair. I'm one of the weirdos that likes fishing minigames, but still has seen times where it goes too far. And the multiplayer for Len's works well enough that I could see it as a fun family thing.
gattsuru
19d ago
The first trouble is that, even assuming these things are all true, this conditions the availability of a constitutional right on knowing exactly how to frame a matter for the tastes of whatever judge or judges he was unlucky enough to pick months or years before seeing the court room, having the funds to hire lawyers (and since the guy isn't pro se, instead being represented by this guy, having the funds and knowledge to hire 'competent' lawyers), having the capabilities to act well as an effective witness at trial, and come off nicely-enough presented while sitting in court for a New Jersey judge to like him, (and don't know about a community services organization offering low-cost outpatient services). Few of these matters could be verified without a time machine; none are in the public record to even make sure that the judges are properly summarizing it.
The second trouble is that, especially when coming from someone that says "that seem onerous but that's the point" when it comes to this class of regulation, there's a lot of 'oh, my personal experience makes this seem a whole lot more reasonable' depends on things that the rest of us can't know.
The third's that assuming enough round up to true requires a lot of faith in the New Jersey appellate courts, and there's reason to believe judicial bias here older than most people writing on this site in general, and for at least one of the two judges here.
The deep problem is that these don't apply to the all or even a majority of the cases you're supposedly focused on, and could easily apply to the harmless. The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook. That's not only non-theoretical, it's a decade-old.
One take is that Mamdani's able to massage a lot of traditionally idpol issues as anti-Trumpist or under legalisms, and thus been able to avoid explicit proposals by having the whole thrust of his lunchbucket politics also imply them.
((eg, "affordable housing" doesn't mean housing people can afford; it means a ton of Section 8.))
Another, more cynical one, is Darwin's old "it was never about being gay". Idpol doesn't care, specifically, about gay rights, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, or even about winning their votes. It cares about the cause of the day, with no more honest motivation than it being the cause of the day. And Mamdani's tongue-bathing Hamas anti-Zionism is the cause of the day among the upper-class demographics he needed to win the primary.
Edit: I was tempted to use hating the Joos above, but couldn’t find a good summary to support it. Not a problem anymore! /EDIT
There's some silver lining on that cloud, in the sense that the Idpol cause of the day can swap out on a minute's notice. But it's not gonna.
gattsuru
27d ago
Medicare estimates a national average compensation rate around 7.5k USD at hospital facilities (you may have to click the down arrow for "more cost information"). Most insurance companies (have to, ACA) cover it for gender care, but how that works out with deductibles is a treatise on its own.
I'm ... skeptical about the Milgram theory in general, and for this behavior in specific, but even presuming that they're correct and generally believing the Beware Trivial Inconveniences theory, I'd be really worried if a plane ticket and a couple weeks in an Extended Stay Express were enough of a trivial inconvenience, especially compared to everything else involved.
gattsuru
7d ago
His distinction:
But the power to decline to enforce a statute just isn’t the same thing as the dispensing power; the former does nothing to alter the potential liability that those who violate the statute might face; the latter at least purports to render them formally immune.
Seems both threadbare and tremendously wrong, though. The various and length delays to the ACA's individual and employer mandate were not only retrospective, nor accompanied by anyone panicking that they could face future liability had the government changed its mind afterward. The DACA authorizations left specific people immune to civil litigation even well after a different President was elected specifically on the matter of changing the rule, and courts stayed those changes!
gattsuru
17d ago
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
In theory, the term's pretty clearly picked to mimic federal obscenity-to-minors jurisprudence from Ginsburg, which... is a clusterfuck, but supposedly trades socially redeeming values against what extent the material is 'patently offensive to prevailing standards of what is appropriate'. In practice, I'd expect the Texas AG's going to act more based on what he thinks he can get away with and who makes particularly good news headlines.
I do not think that viewing PIV sex on video after searching for it is intrinsically harmful. The stuff which is harmful is all the stuff where porn differs from what one would recommend as sex acts for beginners.
There's some good arguments for this policy (and some against: do gay or trans versions of those get commissioned? should it recognize any kink at all, if in very 'correct' ways?). There's even been some, albeit mixed, efforts along those lines (one 'documentary' is very popular among het breeding fans, which... uh, Shinzo Abe meme, but probably not intended). You even get really awkward discussions about what the 'correct' age for this involves, and that's not a fun thing to even consider.
I dunno. I was a late bloomer. I don't think I have a good model for a lot of what'd be best, here, or even what a lot of potential harms would be. There's a lot of motions in both law and psychology about how any exposure to even 'normal' sex early on can cause harm, but then we're relying on a bunch of (mostly 1970s) psych research, and I would prefer not to.
But my suspicion is that the Texas move was never about protecting minors in the first place, it was about getting the filth off the Texan internet by pretending to care about minors seeing boobs and dicks.
I'd expect it's even less good than that: the end result's just going to make the stuff operated by American businesses less profitable and crush smaller actors, and scare straight websites that intermix adult and non-adult content.
gattsuru
12hr ago
It's been possible for a while to use AIgen to go from text to image to 3d model to animated rig to (extremely large) set of animations. Usually struggles a lot the further you get from standard human. Largely workable with most human intervention early in the chain, and would scale a lot better than using aigen (or something like posenet) in realtime, not just in compute resources but required bandwidth.
Dunno if that's what they're doing here, but it's how I'd attack things from a naive perspective. Honestly kinda surprised that it hasn't already been done at scale, but it would have enough repetition -- and especially idle animations for the existing two 'companions' are very repetitive -- that it might be undesirable to a lot of self-driven devs or experimenters.
gattsuru
7d ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
gattsuru
9d ago
Louis McMaster Bujold is always a blast. Sometimes a little preachy in the later works, but great howdunnits. Miles, Mutants, and Microbes is a little weird of an anthology since "Labyrinth" touches on topic the topic but not as heavily on the plot points of the other two works, while Diplomatic Immunity is more
DI can stand alone or as a sequel to Falling Free, but it's an odd editing decision, even by Baen's standards.
You see that Vorkorsigan-like tones more often in fantasy -- Diana Wynne Jones is a little less high social drama but similar -- but it does seem pretty badly underserved in scifi. Maybe some of the Ciaphas Cain series, if you're into Warhammer?
gattsuru
15d ago
With eight people, all older than fifty and some over eighty, facing serious burns, it'll be a minor miracle if there are no fatalities.
gattsuru
15d ago
Hm. Don't remember that phrase. Maybe this or this touch on similar themes, but they don't have that word specifically. And while it's definitely the sort of discussion Balioc goes over a bit, the phrase itself feels more like raggedjackscarlet or the-grey-tribe... except they don't have it either.
Do you remember about how long ago it was linked? Pre-COVID? Pre-split-from-SSC?
siikr.tumblr.com can be better for searching if you know the tumblr's name than either google or tumblr's built-in-search, though it's still not good.
gattsuru
17d ago
"We won't enforce the 10k USD/day, promise , unless it gets too gay" is putting a lot of trust in Ken Paxton.
EDIT: I agree that he very probably won't go after the vast majority of such websites. I also think the only thing limiting him from picking up the weakest-looking inmate and slamming them into the wall is wanting to get some as-applied challenges settled first, and the one-in-one-hundred risk of that will make a lot of changes in behavior.
gattsuru
20d ago
I would recommend using, or picking up, a pair of decent work gloves. I've done four or five car door repairs, and every single time I've either cut up my hands or gloves. Even if it's miserably hot, they'll be worth making sure it's not your fingers.
gattsuru
21d ago
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition.
Even in older circles, there's been a small portion who've long experimented with small amounts of T to go superbutch; some of them have started liking 'sir' outside of the bedroom context, though the majority have largely stayed mum or paved over the matter.
I've also heard of, though never met, "FTM femboys," who as far as I can tell are women who transition to men who dress as women...
It's pretty rare, but yeah, you can run into that a bit. Pantheggon's probably the most comprehensible to straight(ish) non-furs (and contrast Accelo to see what a bi cis femboy looks like, with the caveat that there's some m/m and even the m/f stuff is about as gay as that can get), though I'm just making an educated guess about the artist's actual gender. Haven't run into it in real life, at least as the sorta thing that they've waved as a flag.
... which is again a bizarre way to arrive at basically heterosexuality. I realize that the femboy thing is distinct from femnininity proper -- try calling a trans woman a femboy and see how it goes -- but at some point the irony and the flip flopping just goes so far that I can't even entertain the logic.
There's a criticism that t4m (or even t4t) transmen can end up 'just' straight with more steps, but I dunno if that really matches up to how it goes in reality, and not just in the sense that some transmen like to top. But I'm really not a fan of the whole 'escalating scale where nonconventional is better' thing, either.
I think some of the weirdness is downstream of seeing-as-a-state-dropdown-box problems, but a lot of it's that coherent names get overloaded quick. A lot of these people are what I'd consider central examples of nonbinary (ie, wanting to present as mixtures of male and female) or genderfluid (ie, wanting to present as male some times but female in other times), but because the terms also include a bunch of random junk you end up a dozen different people trying to come up with new terms that aren't, which get jumped on in turn and often have pretty stupid-sounding names. I keeping hoping that the versions with actual surface grip will have enough time and brownian motion to have a sort of brazil nut effect going on, but even with actual physics that's really dependent on pretty specific requirements, and it's more likely than not they won't be present here.
gattsuru
22d ago
Can you give an example of a potential EO rule to change this?
How well-grounded do you want?
I don't think we'd see a Democratic President put forward an EO holding all asylees, once granted asylum, to be treated as having "been lawfully admitted for permanent residence" at the time of their entry, rather than the time they were issued a green card, but that's for political reasons rather than fear of judicial review. A court case would inevitably point to such retroactive adjustments in other contexts (the Cuban Adjustment Act was a statute, and had a portion of "lawfully admitted" happening up to 30 months before registry), but the real power would just come from the courts, and especially SCOTUS, not being able or willing to retroactively strip citizenship from hundreds of thousands of people, no matter how improperly given. A unilateral executive modification of the immigration registry date falls under similar problems -- even if a 2029 Dem admin had unilaterally granted it a green card to someone under this law that couldn't possibly have legally been eligible (eg, having been born after 1986), it's not clear anyone would have standing to challenge it... and it's just as unclear what political results would fall from that.
These are still mechanically possible; both could lead to a large number of people being given American citizenship overnight.
For a more politically plausible path, take something more like a soon-as-possible policy of rubber stamping of asylum claims, followed by a late-in-administration full rule setting a rubber-stamping of asylee-to-green-card-to-naturalization process. The strict read of the relevant statutes has six years, but it's not clear that even a fair-handed judiciary would read it that way rather than five years. This wouldn't get people voting overnight, but it'd be able to naturalize them within a single President's administration. The APA tomfoolery we've seen with DACA applies here; it could well be done with one term if the following administration was forced by courts to keep the old policies running.
There's other options that are more politically possible, but I'm not comfortable discussing them publicly.
Also, hasn't SCOTUS been pretty open to claims of standing by states challenging Federal policy?
Not really. Massachusetts v. EPA's what everyone points to requiring courts give 'special solicitude' to state challenges of federal policy, but that's literally only been used for that one case at SCOTUS, with every following case leaving states high and dry.
gattsuru
25d ago
Even the best Final Fantasy are beautifully flawed -- anyone that thinks VII was perfect can shove it up Guard Scorpion's tail. XII's world always struck me as much more interesting than its plot, just as the combat itself seemed more interesting than the gambit system you end up spending more time working around (though I've long been a Tales of fan so I may be judging the gambit system a little too harshly).
Agreed that the remake is in an awkward place. Like X and XI, it's in that awkward early stage of 3d work that's just high enough quality that it can't cruise on retro feel or imagination, but still so low-res that it's painful to watch and not easily vastly improved with emulation and upscaling... while the remaster also screwed around with enough of the systems that it's not a clear upgrade from gameplay perspectives. I prefer job systems in general, since some of my favorite games in the series have been FFXIV and the original FFT (and arguably Legend of Mana, though handwaves), but it definitely moves away from the learn-and-automate feel of the original. I'd guess that it was set that way under the assumption you'd have played the original enough that it'd just be repetitive? But that's not really right, either.
That said, both the original and remaster seem like they've been big sources of Lessons Learned for other games in the series, so well worth knowing just for that (in contrast to something like FFType0).
Hope you enjoy the Switch 2.
gattsuru
28d ago
Most of the common complaints are about minimum memory and CPU footprint; VSCode takes comparable resources to run as far more fully-featured IDEs. But if you've got the specs these are unlikely to actually feel bad, it's just kinda goofy.
The biggest problems are pretty hardware-specific, but they've been pretty bad when they pop up. I've had VSCode pull 16+GB memory (especially bad on an 8GB-RAM system) or peg multiple threads at 100% core utilization just idling, all with the default configuration, no extensions. A lot of it seems very dependent on renderer, especially since it started defaulting to a hardware renderer even on Intel integrated GPUs, but sometimes 'normal' developer workstations with multimonitor configurations have gone really wonky. While a less common use case, I've seen bigger problems with massive files in VSCode than in VisualStudio, Intellij, Android Studio (which isn't great itself!), or NotePad++, sometimes to the point where I had to shutdown the computer because VSCode was capping out CPU utilization so high that I couldn't use the mouse or keyboard.
((I've also had problems with deployments of VSCode, rather than VSCode itself. Which, tbf, usually aren't even the Electron developers faults, but since it includes things like a 40+ GB electron update, it's still worth keeping in mind before committing to VSCode as a day-to-day dev environment.))
VSCode defends itself in many cases by pointing to issues with extensions, and to some extent that's fair: just as it's not the Electron devs fault that a distro screwed up once, it's not VSCoders fault that a random html/css extension can peg a cpu. You can't build a framework that can contain every sufficiently dedicated forkbomb without making it useless. But you're almost certainly going to need some extensions just handle basic compiling and debug functionality. And some of them are pretty bad! My worst experience have been with the Java variants, with high idle CPU utilization across the board, but that's mostly because VSCode is the 'officially supported' tool for FIRST FRC so I see it on a lot of different non-optimized hardware. I don't do much webdev, but the few times I've run into ESLint, even with a minimal ruleset and properly configured (why is apply-rules-on-typing even an option?!) it's been pretty painful.
gattsuru
29d ago
Anyone have particularly strong feelings about best (or worst) UI libraries? I spent a good part of the weekend trying to take a more serious attempt at familiarizing myself with Avalonia, but I'll admit user interface work is always something I've dabbled with rather than gotten a great understanding of, and at the dabbler's level a lot of great or terrible code gets completely buried by the strength (Visual Studio) or weakness (oh boy, QT!) of IDE-focused tooling, or the difficulty of entry (ia ia OpenGL fhtagn).
gattsuru
18d ago
Problem in this case is that it's possible that any DNA under the victim's fingernails match one of the Gutierrez's compatriots, and Gutierrez still entered the trailer and participated in the murder -- just without being scratched. Indeed, because one of his compatriots lived with the victim and had 'found' the victim's body, some of the samples should be reasonably expected to be not-Gutierrez's even if he was totally guilty as can be.
There's been fact-based determinations before focusing on guilt (even, rarely, ones that raised serious nontrivial questions of guilt: McCollum is pretty embarrassing to Scalia). I'm hard-pressed to see how that'd happen here.
gattsuru
21d ago
No.
The problem is that there are enforcement of laws that people disagree with, which have very overt parallels to matters where the other tribe received broad victories, which any reasonable reading of the text of the law would not permit, and where defendants either lose in court or never have a fair day to start with. It's a problem when the Constitution seems a scam, and where the BATNA looks like a direct improvement on the very measures that negotiated agreement is advertising itself on.
gattsuru
9hr ago
Technically, two furry versions, though you have to go into settings for Bad Rudi. Tbf, they're both obnoxiously monofocused and pretty lackluster when it comes to animations or gameification; Rudi on telling 'cool' stories, and Bad Rudi just trying to swear at you (cw: exactly what I said, loud sound).
But, yeah, it probably says a lot of strategic things.
gattsuru
10hr ago
I have two. I'm not a good writer, and a lot of my better writing I'm not really comfortable linking under this name, but I think they say something about what could be useful to good writers.
This is the all-audiences one: reviewing the review of the re-view. Not every recommendation here is good or even correct (Grok either can't or doesn't notice that I mention that the "Matryoshka doll" story is explicitly fictional and couldn't be known to be true in Mahaffey's version, and probably doesn't have access to the original book; it also handwaves errors in fatality numbers in an aircraft crash are actually pretty damning), but it does catch errors I didn't notice after multiple rereads ("opposites side") and that I definitely mirrored Mahaffey's approach far more heavily than I'd intended or even recognized, along with a few good style recommendations.
((Uh, and the recommendations about asides, nested parentheticals, and being a pedantic hater might be correct, but not exactly useful given that they're kinda my intentional tone.))
[cw: nsfw text and themes below, though nothing worse than you could put on YouTube]
My other example is from a bi furry piece, albeit an except stripped of the actual bedroom activities. So that may make it unusable for examination. If not...
This isn't perfect. There's a good portion of it that's either blowing smoke up my skirt ('cheeky'), or only finding corrections that are trivial (duplicated words, comma errors) that I or a beta reader would probably have caught on a re-read, or that are amadan's extremely generic your first how to write advice (slow pacing). Some of the tone emphasis between flirty and platonic is arguable or even just, imo, plain wrong, as is one of the comma errors where it recommends a 'fix' that's already in the original text. Others are pretty clear good advice, such as on rising tension and characterization, but probably an artifact of my limited experience as a writer and .
(and, tbf, that this is a small excerpt).
By contrast, the problems with the wristband themes would be very hard to figure out with a beta reader: they're a moderately common convention in bi furry stuff, such that almost anyone who'd want to beta read would be so familiar with it as to take it as a given, but they're not so common that I should have assumed every reader or even every experienced reader would have gotten it.
But this is a subgenre-of-a-subgenre-of-a-subgenre piece. I could believe that grok has enough (mmf) furry smut in its input to avoid being absolutely one-shot! There's not really enough orientation play involving multiple male characters, furry or otherwise, for me to think the stochaistic parrots complaint applies, here. And this particular version of that subgenre focus is defined in no small part by a logical inconsistency. Even in the long-form, grok could 'recognize' it was being 'confused' that the character's self-identifications didn't match up with their behaviors, even if it came up with the 'wrong' response; that's about as good an evidence that you'd need to clarify what's going on as available from human reviewers.
and this is Grok's two-generation-old model.
I'm more on Team Gooner, which I'm sure will surprise absolutely no one, but this metaphor seems to occlude more than it illuminates. I've got some complaints about its accuracy, but assuming it for the sake of this discussion:
`1. Why is this 'drug' different from any other over-the-counter one, not just that people want to restrict children and teenagers from having access, or even that the state gets involved in restricting access, but that it's so vital that state restrictions can put sizable burdens on adults doing things entirely away from minors? Things like alcohol or cigarettes have the obvious physical ramifications that you're pretty clearly -- no one's getting cirrhosis of the dick, here. Am I missing some other parallel, or what distinguishes gooner materials from vidya or youtube or people who get way too into painting minatures or spend every weekend at a sportsball game?
`2. Why is this 'drug' so bad for minors such that we're willing to accept onerous restrictions on adults, and yet not something we need to hold against the adults themselves. There are restrictions like alcohol and cigarettes and the entire DEA. Maybe Texas won't end up being that bad, if only by the standard being set so low, or maybe we're just being cautious because it's so dangerous otherwise?
Or are restrictions going to keep going on from children and teenagers to everyone else? Because a lot of people, including the Texas politicians writing this bill, pretty clearly want to restrict it in general.
`4. Why is it so hard for advocates of these restrictions -- either on minors, or on everyone -- to actually focus on this 'drug'? No one was gooning from a single 1970s Playboy or a couple grainy standard definition videos; it's supposedly something specific to modern porn that's so much worse... and yet the Texas law here wouldn't just cover a 1970s Playboy, but even material softer-core or less overtly prurient than that. Even people here treat hobbyist weird content as at best as acceptable side effect.
`5. There's a model of addictive personalities as responding to spaces they can't get fulfilled otherwise, in the same way that mineral deficiencies can drive people to find weird or even inedible things delicious. In addictions with serious chemical dependency or withdrawal it's hilariously wrong, but gooning doesn't seem to have those things, and some gooners even challenge themselves to go long periods without (... usually in November, for acronym reasons).
That old TLP article has a punchline in the middle about how "Pornography is a scapegoat", and while TLP puts it on ego and narcissism because... uh, well, he's a coastal psychiatrist. There's a pretty mindboggling set of statistics about the sorta thing (not-Aella) people usually do before consensual sex, and everything from dating to marriage to mixed-sex casual meetups are all down the tubes.
Is this missing nutrient model wrong, here? If it's right, might it suggest to something else that's driving more of the changes in behavior people think is downstream of a couple hours on an unexciting hobby and a jacked right wrist? Because if there's something broken in relationship formation well before sex (or, uh, handies), removing that outlet might cause people to start putting a lot more effort into working around the break... or it might end up with a stampede of people going over a creaky bridge held in place by one rivet. And given how broken relationship formation is (especially for <18s and <25s), I'm not optimistic about that.
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