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
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
6hr ago
They will absolutely wreck you in Vintage Story, to the point where they're more feared than most of the not!zombie enemies. Only the Bells, as mob-summoners, are really worse; even the T3 and T4 drifters can do comparable damage, but they're much slower, where your best hope when being chased by a brown bear before getting iron or steel armor involves trying to pit trap or outswim them.
Thems Fighting Herds has Huggles, who acts as the final boss for each arcade mode run, and is frankly unfairly hard. There's a bonus mode version you can play as that's even more overpowered, though it's intended for the rest of a multiplayer fight to team up against whoever gets to play the bear.
The Elder Scrolls have pretty consistently had bears as some of the most dangerous enemies, to the point where they could out-match some lesser dragons in Skyrim.
I've had Tribal runs in Rimworld wrecked by an early-game bear manhunter, though I dunno if that was vanilla or a mod. The Long Dark has some dangerous bears, though once you've got a good rifle setup and prep they're kinda loot pinatas.
I guess maybe Five Nights at Freddies, for a loose enough definition?
But yeah, they're definitely often treated as far less threatening or dangerous than they should be, even in some survival-themed games.
gattsuru
6d ago
For the first type of edge cases, the same thing as sucking at marksmanship or having an insufficient weapon to penetrate the target.
Charging someone with attempting sodomy, if we're taking the metaphor that direction, kinda just makes it funnier.
For the second type, are you arguing that piv sex in condom is not piv sex?
Dunno. There are sheathes that are like condoms in being full-enclosed (still not rated or tested as contraceptives, though I'd expect that regulatory reasons drive that more than practical ones), but most of them range from an eight-inch to more than a quarter-inch of silicone all around. Their point is to alter texture, appearance, and/or girth/length, but especially since some are dual-use as dildos or even intended for women or trans men to wear, the line between stimulating the prostate with a sex toy and stimulating it with the top's dick isn't very clear.
At least to my intuitions, a condom is very much the same underlying sex act, but there's a point where a gal wearing the same sex toy can hit the same button that makes it a lot harder to call the penis doing the stimulation. But my intuitions aren't anywhere near yours.
gattsuru
9d ago
There's nothing like the partial class concept from C#, though I agree it would be really nice if there were.
You can kinda fake it by exploiting the heck of out inheritance, in a couple different ways, depending on what level of composition you're aiming to be able to do. If you want selective import of behaviors (and to avoid the diamond inheritance problem, mostly), you can do something like :
agentInfectionLogic,py:
wasInfected = False
countedInfections = 0
def incrementInfection(self):
self.world.totalInfections += 1
if self.wasInfected:
self.world.redundantInfections += 1
self.wasInfected = True
self.countedInfections += 1
def infectedCount(self):
return self.countedInfections
agentFileLogic,py:
def loadInfectionInfo(self):
temploadInfections = 20
for x in range(temploadInfections):
self.incrementInfection()
# do an actual file load here.
def saveInfectionInfo(self):
tempfile = self.infectedCount
# save an actual file here.
agent,py:
class Agent:
from agentInfectionLogic import infectedCount, incrementInfection, countedInfections, wasInfected
from agentFileLogic import saveInfectionInfo, loadInfectionInfo
def __init__(self, ownerWorld):
self.world = ownerWorld
And then calls like world.knownAgents[0].loadInfectionInfo() or world.infectRandomAgent() would work as normal, and you can even swap between different experimental forms by having from agentInfectionLogic import infectedCount, incrementInfection, countedInfections, wasInfected or from testAgentInfectionLogic import infectedCount, incrementInfection, countedInfections, wasInfected (or even a mix-and-match between the two).
Agent.py has to know about what's going on, but to everywhere else, anything imported into agent.py looks identical to as if it were coded into that file or class. Eventually this turns into a full module, where the __init__.py file holds the glue and then you have better names for your actual logic .pys, but when that makes sense depends a lot on the scale of your project.
gattsuru
11d ago
Maybe. There's a lot of people who came away from Loper v. Raimondo thinking that SCOTUS was pretty willing to toss the Chevron under the bus, but then Cargil had a place where the regulatory agency claims to have read the law wrong for twenty-plus years, disclaims Chevron, and most tea-leaf-readers are thinking it'll come out okay. It's just too useful to leave the actual law to the regulatory agencies.
But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
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
9d ago
I'd caution that :
- Python's support for the singleton pattern is kinda jank, due to lack of first-class support for private constructors or access modifiers.
- While there's a lot of arguments in favor of the singleton pattern with an interaction controller for bigcorp work, in small businesses it can be a temptation with serious tradeoffs. Refactoring (whether to add an intermediate object between World and Agent, or if you end up needing multiple World objects such as for a fictional context) can be nightmarish in Python, even if all the interaction logic is properly contained. And it probably won't be properly contained: marketing and customers can end up demanding bizarre requirements on near-zero notice that can require information from multiple different singletons, and if you end up hiring (or taking interns!) as a small business rather than at the FAANG level, those people (and I was one of them once!) will often break around the interaction controller unless aggressively managed.
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.
The DJI device feels a lot like an upscaled version of the Lego MindStorms kit. It's okay as an entry-level tool for everything, and that's what makes it appealing for new learners, but you can't really get in deep or into expertise for any component. If you're programming, you're either running Python or Scratch, and even with an adult instructor it's not a great environment for learning Python. You can take it apart and reassemble it, but you're really limited in what you can physically build with it; you can rearrange DJI-provided sensors, but it's hard to even use other PWM devices, nevermind something really weird like a random I2C or SPI sensor.
The mecanum drive is a major selling point, and five or ten years ago getting decent mecanum wheels was nightmarish enough FRC or FTC teams would 3d-print them (pro tip: don't), though now a small robot set can be found under 80 USD. They do definitely make path coding easier to get right, at least for open-space play.
You could definitely build something better for a similar or slightly higher price, so a lot depends on what you're trying to do and introduce: for a student new to robotics, it's one of the cooler-looking options to dip your toes; to a student with experience it's a bit of a (very pricey) toy that gets frustrating if you try to do anything deeper. Probably the strongest selling point comes about if you really want to focus on video/image processing, and you just want a platform to do it on.
I can't speak much for the competitions and camps. As far as I know, the youth sports never went out of east Asia, the university league is 'international' but requires all competitors to be attached to a college (and the pieces look vastly un-challenging for college students), and the camps are inaccessible. Which is a pity, because I like the idea of something between BattleBots-one-robot-leaves and FIRST-it's-about-working-together-for-a-high-score philosophies.
gattsuru
21d ago
Yeah, that's fair. There's definitely an unreasonable push toward a dichotomy of toy-or-career everything, not just in the writing or arts sphere, but everywhere from electrical engineering to machinework to plastic fab to web design. I'm trying to get a post together talking about that in the context of FIRST, but it's a serious problem and undermines a lot of social behavior across a lot of fields.
I do think it's a broader issue than no-FUD; the internet has pushed a lot of fields to a point where it's reasonable to see the most impactful option is outreach, shut-up-and-multiply style, and even if some people do turn away from the Omelas that making that choice, the people inviting you in will be the ones who bite that bullet.
((That said, a lot of people who do write as a supplementary wages in the furry fandom, and in many fields like TTRPGs, don't go through traditional publishing; FurPlanet is more of a print-on-demand and storefront faciliator, along with doing some ISDN bullshit. But even though they're really operating at 50-150 counts, you'd have to do some digging to realize that.))
gattsuru
9d ago
Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.
I think this would be plausible for a wide-spectrum ban on porn, if still uncertain since these companies have little trouble working with businesses that have increased chargeback risks otherwise and just slamming on fees.
I don't think it's remotely plausible for the common levels of specificity involved, here. There may well be higher (or lower) rates of chargeback for incest porn, or hypnosis or forced TF kink, or dragon dongs with too much red dye, but I'm incredibly skeptical that a) card companies have the data to actually know that, b) that these rates are so much higher that they can't be resolved by fees, and c) that there's no more immediate and less-financially-direct motivation.
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
22d 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
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.
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 RAM handling 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.))
gattsuru
19d ago
Oof. I guess I'll need to work on making my summary of the recent hyprland cancellation a bit more readable.
Thanks for saying so. I've been trying to highlight more esoteric stuff, but it necessarily involves dropping a pile of context at the start of a post, and it's hard to tell the right balancing point between succinct-but-incomplete and complete-but-infodumpy.
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
1d ago
I would... not be so sure the administration can avoid it if Biden wanted. See the Kincaid v. Williams denial of cert (starts at page 39) from last year as an example of what's going to start coming down the pike in earnest: a very broad law with expansive reads of standing, on a matter extremely sympathetic to progressive-leaning and left-leaning judges, and where individual private actors can bring a private right of action with staggeringly high penalties, and a ton of opportunity to forum shop.
Philosophically, there's a fun question about the difference between sending in the troops and charging 150k for each violation, but there's a point where the practical difference gets pretty small, and it happens pretty quick when the target's main assets will also be the tools necessary to not comply.
gattsuru
9d ago
Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
That's nice and all, but there's quite a lot of us, and certainly more than enough to keep a number of content providers afloat. (Sometimes in surprising ways: the original writer of the Burned Furs manifesto has made a small part-time career in monsterfucker porn.) Fek is at 9k USD a month still, and while I actually appreciate the mechanical stuff he did with Spellbound (cw: technically has one girl, but gaaaaaaay) enough that I kinda want to see it cloned in a not-porn game, given the repeated hiatuses after burnout if anyone was going to get reasonably-motivated chargebacks, he'd be the first hit.
gattsuru
14d ago
I didn't claim Vaxry is blameless or looks good, or even that his faults were merely insufficient empathy. From my first post:
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.
But there's a bit of a problem.
There's a paradox of tolerance issue here, banning is not the only way to exclude bright people from your community. You can also do it just by being an asshole to them. Some people are brilliant assets that turn dumb if you start overtly politically attacking them. Some people need to be able to express the "nasty" things they believe to be true to think properly. This is a fundamental competing access needs issue that you can't just gloss over by never banning anyone.
As a nitpick, Popper's Paradox of Tolerance wasn't using 'tolerance' to mean 'things that progressives like today', but the simple possibility of open debate and discussion.
But more critically, few if any people who try to bring this more expansive non-Popperian version forward do so in any even-handed way. Vaxry's Discord isn't part of freedesktop.org. Vaxry is not accused of behaving poorly in FreeDesktop.org spaces, and I've not been able to find any evidence of such, whether because he's autistic enough to follow their rules in their spaces, or just from lack of opportunity.
You may say that there's a competing access need, but the modern-day variant turns into an insistence that the competition is over. If Vaxry and his cohort can't "express the 'nasty' things they believe to be true to think properly" in a Discord and github issue specific to their project, they can't be 'acerbic' anywhere -- and that's very clearly the target that the FreeDesktop.org held. In that view, the choice is between 'banning' people in the sense that they feel excluded and turned around because of things they found by digging at depth into it, and just directly actually-banning people. The first group will always be able to expand their ranks and justify greater interdiction.
And, to be blunt, the direct-bans get no small amount of people knowing that they'll be excluded by assholes, anyway. It's just that the banhammer-wielders are sort of asshole that the people in charge like.
gattsuru
16d ago
Most projects don't really have enough people for complex structures. I keep pointing to MinecraftForge, and while the commit log is even less good of a record than normal because some parts were ported from other version control, it gives a good idea of how much Zif's Law applies even for these structures. To the extent they end up with multiple maintainers at all, it's much more often to solve the 'hit by a truck' problem than any serious planning.
There's been a few efforts to come up with more robust structures, but I'm skeptical that they're trying to solve the right problem, nevermind actually having a solution. Given that the FOSS ones I can name are QuiltMC and Rust, this is... not the most encouraging endorsement (and Quilt specifically had a big snafu over their original keyholder).
Linus Torvald has lieutenants, and in practice who you draw matters a lot, but in theory and at the edge case he's got veto power over everything and anything that catches his attention. Python has a five-person lead council since van Rossum retired in 2018, but the only way to cycle the leadership is to wait. Occasionally you'll see corp-adjacent groups try to have reviewers selected from other parts of the same project or even from a set who just do reviews, but then the people reviewing the PRs aren't really tied to the code it's changing.
The bigger problem's that the overwhelming majority of FOSS contributors don't stay in any place for that long, especially when it's not their own project, and those that do tend to be a little obsessed.
gattsuru
24d ago
Seconding all of fishtwanger's recs.
Astro City is very much a comic fan's comic book, but it (and to a lesser extent, Common Grounds) are great not just by the low standards of superhero works, but more broadly as explorations of the human spirit. Nextwave takes things the other direction, and despite that is the only Warren Ellis work I can stand -- hilariously zany, completely shredding the ideas of superheroic human spirit, absolutely all the more enjoyable for it.
If you like Moore, Promethea isn't perfect in a lot of ways, but it's generally underappreciated work.
Ursula Vernon's Digger is a weirder work, but fun.
For Eastern works, Kino's Journey is better-known for its anime (good) and light novel (outstanding), but the manga iterations are still pretty strong.
Against A Purely HyperDunbarist View
World’s for FIRST is in a week.
For those unfamiliar with the organization,
For Increasingly Retrobuilt Silly TermFor 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:
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
IgniteImpact? 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
ChairmannyImpactful, 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
IndigestionImpact 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.
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