gattsuru
9mo ago
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail has some interesting, if spoileriffic counterexamples. For those who aren't interested in the game or spending a couple hundred hours to get to the endgame:
There is some mind (or more specifically memory) control, but ultimately it's a bit of a distraction: there are fundamental disagreements, and while they might have been solvable by looking for some third option, neither society was interested in it.
Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?
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.
gattsuru
14d 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
9mo ago
Yeah, the original FMA had some very memorable scenes early on, but it jumped the shark more than Hellsing's OVA did, and that one was supposed to include random nazis.
gattsuru
9mo ago
To be fair, there actually are some gay guys who kink on gloryholes-qua-non, where it's about the informality and casual nature rather than either the anonymity or grossness/degradation. (Though the resulting kink is still very casual-sex-with-longer-term-acquaintances). Braeburned's probably one of the better-known artists in the furry fandom really focusing on it, but there's a decent amount both inside and outside of the fandom.
But it still wouldn't be especially effective at reducing COVID transmission even in that 'ideal' case, for pretty obvious reasons, and it still has other issues re: both COVID and STD transmission.
gattsuru
2mo ago
When Dems lost 2024 they had a notable period of reflection where new ideas were more accepted.
The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age.
gattsuru
8mo ago
I'm gonna suggest that it's probably not a great idea to come up with long and seriously-considered lists of ways to upset civil society, especially those that could be planned and executed in less than a week.
Hasn't pardoned Reality Winner (which I did expect four years ago) or that IRS leaker (which would unpleasantly surprise me, yet, growth mindset), so there's still some downhill to go. But there's another couple hours left to slide down the slippery slope.
I'll also add to the extent that media coverage of 'normal' pardons is obfuscating things:
They are, unsurprisingly, also strong political advocates for the President's (aides') political positions, but they're also separately testing the limits of Scott Alexander's 'media doesn't lie' spiel.
I don't have high expectations for Reuters, but I would hope they were able to count.
gattsuru
1mo ago
I think a sex worker will ALMOST CERTAINLY have a body count greater than 5, so it'd be redundant to include.
Depends pretty heavily on how you're defining sex worker, but even the prostitution-with-numbers-filed-off escort services sometimes do have one- or two-off sugar daddy sorta behaviors, and that'd be at least a small red flag to me. I don't get why straight guys care about how many people who've seen a potential partner naked, but if you think it's a significant, there are 'sex workers' who have zero body count but tens or hundreds of thousands of watchers via camera.
gattsuru
5mo ago
There is another possible outcome. Can you see the one you are missing?
The trouble with making this argument is that at some point you have to actually make the argument, not just snark about it. I don't think you have, and I don't think you can, and I don't think the foremost advocates can or will.
gattsuru
8mo ago
... the language is "I want to flirt with your dad" and "I did your dad," both of which are like 5th-grade starter-pack level in the scale of "fucked your mom" jokes.
That, uh, says as much about what I'm willing to link (and what can be posted on youtube/twitch/yada) as much as it does about behaviors in certain social circles. I'll admit I haven't seen double-fisting specifically brought to offer, but neither does it stop at teabagging jokes.
While we're in this media sphere, another thing I've been genuinely curious about: what's the standard level of sexual violence theming in gay porn (of the sort actually made for gay men)?
I think aoiislove overstates the extent it shows up in all gay male sexuality, but it's definitely present, and pretty common. It's a little hard to calculate exactly, because there's a lot of stuff that's sexual violence to women and also has gay men lining up (sometimes literally) to receive. (and conversely, a few things that are more appalling to gay guys.)
Like, does popular gay porn do "dumb twink rammed until he CAN'T WALK STRAIGHT" or "Ten portly bears PUNISH this bratty man's BLEEDING ASSHOLE while he begs" style videos at the same rate as straight porn
Can't walk straight, definitely, along with a lot of similar stuff ('guts rearranged' is popular right now, 'wrecks hole' been along since before I knew I was bi, sometimes just 'dominates' or even just outright 'bullies'). Ten portly bears definitely, and while it's a little hard as a direct comparison because there's a lot of gay guys for whom that sounds like a great start to a Friday night, there's enough where it's not supposed to be attractive or appealing directly that is pretty comparable. Bleeding is a bit unusual: there's commercial restrictions for mainstream credit card sites that are more intended for actual knives-and-beatings BDSM edgeplay, but mainstream merchants still avoid it. The closest common gay male porn term would probably be some variant of 'gape'.
and are there similar levels of theming about men getting choked and hit,
Yeah. Not my thing, but slapping, choking (with hands or dick), hitting, spitting, markings, comically oversized sex toys, (usually fake) 'insufficient lube', that sort of rough sex has enough of a following you have to put some effort on mainstream sites to avoid it.
... getting stuck in tight places and begging for help, having guys cum on their face and chest...
These ones are hard to compare directly. The latter in particular is extremely common ('painting', straight-up bukkake), but it's... probably not something most people think about as sexual violence?
I'll point to Braeburned's Room 609 (llama guy puts himself in a hole in a door, gets eiffel tower'd by his roommate and whoever his roommate taps on an app to take the other side) comic as an example of the problem: it's easy to frame what's effectively a gay-male-variant of the 'free use' fantasy that in its het form is very much built around ignoring women's consent and physical integrity... but Braeburned and quite a large portion of the fans of the series are preferentially bottoms, and even in his other comics that have a guy getting a surprise train run on them (eg Gay For Play, where the main character gets roped into a football team prank that ends up... where you'd expect) can credibly make it seem consenting because it's pretty clear the author would love it. That's a furry example, but there are non-furry and conventional-porn ones, just harder to track down names and personalities involved.
That's not to say clearly eroticized sexual violence using these themes is unusual -- I'll point to NakedSav's "Marked Prey" as one that's very much presented from an mdom rather than msub perspective, and the msub side is about as degrading as the author's willing to go. It definitely shows up as a thing in certain types of gay-for-pay or masc4masc genre 'normal' porn. But it may not be useful as a metric, compared to other traits in the work.
Stuck in tight places is kinda a goofy 'plot', even by porn plot standards, and thus pretty rare, but it definitely shows up, including the begging (or at least pretense of it for a couple seconds). There's a mostly-gay-specific thing about (ruiadri just posted a great one today!) about making a sub paint themselves, but I dunno what the comparable het thing would be outside of pegging/pretty heavy femdom.
gattsuru
9mo ago
Yeah, as before I'll caveat that this alpha top stuff, while a common kink, is far from a universal one. Even for people who do appreciate it, it's not always something you're gonna be feeling up for. Things like frotting, mutual masturbation, or some forms of oral don't really have top/bottom in the same sense, and there's a lot of times where providing oral to someone is fun because it's fun, not because you're submitting to them, especially with that whole oversensitivity deal you can kinda play with.
There is a lot of mechanical vulnerability to bottoming, even to women (arguably, because strapons give less feedback, more vulnerability), but being physically vulnerable isn't the same as being emotionally vulnerable, and it doesn't have to be tied into this framework of submitting to someone Better than you.
That said, I think there is a risk of romanticizing the unknown. There can be a lot of asymmetry in a lot of gay relationships: while there's less difference in sex drive on average, there's a lot more mechanical preparation to bottoming; where there's a lot fewer of the big gendered differences in expectations or interests, a lot of things that look gendered in het relationships are cultural or upraising in gay ones.
gattsuru
9mo ago
It'd be funny if it were just the they/them Marx fandom furries -- hell, it wouldn't even be the most defamatory thing from DogPatch Press, somehow. But I think that the problems the furry fandom fight with are just particularly prominent, because the most arguable border cases and the central version of the prohibited content are visible without the FBI getting involved or having to read three hundred pages of crappy Harry Potter AU fanfic for context, and the resulting internal discourse has given some of the witchiest and witch-hunterist people a lot of ammo to work with.
There's been similar problems throughout the various writing spheres, Archive Of Our Own gets regular attacks over it, it's one of the main Tumblr Discourse platter options. And the New Right has its own versions. I think there's a broader matter where it's become the new room temperature.
gattsuru
10mo ago
My model for DeSantis is that he was preparing into March or April of 2024 at least competitive, and hoping to consolidate the other non-Trump candidates as they started to drop out. His initial model had been MAGA-y but-competent, intending to pivot to slamming Trump once some big enough scandal hit to kinda force that, preferably something that let him emphasis the competent bit without having to step too specifically against conservative or MAGA positions.
And the first big scandal that hit in that time frame was the Bragg Indictment.
gattsuru
11mo ago
gattsuru
30d ago
A Framingham man who is accused of shooting another man during a pro-Israeli rally last September in Newton was placed on pretrial probation on Wednesday, June 4. Charges against Scott Hayes, 48, will be dismissed if he completes all pretrial probation conditions. The pretrial probation period runs through Sept. 13. The resolution of the case took place during a hearing Wednesday in Newton District Court.
One interesting bit I hadn't seen until reviewing one of his probation requirements, to search for a new job:
The disabled Iraq War veteran was contracted to provide natural gas leak detection, leak surveys, and inspections for a company that contracts with National Grid, one of the largest utility provider companies in Massachusetts. National Grid refused to allow Hayes to work on their account after the incident. As a result, his company informed him on Sunday — a month after the attack — that there was no work available, and advised Hayes to file for unemployment.
I've not been able to find out what happened with Gannon, the guy who struck Hayes. He was eventually charged with assault and battery, but the MA court lookup system sucks, so I can't tell if I'm not getting results with his name because I'm using the system wrong, or because they're not there. There's been no media coverage of a trial or plea agreement.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Fair. My impression is that LASD has a lot of the same issues, but I'll admit I've got less current evidence on that.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Why consider?
It's a hard question. You're definitely looking at a lot more complexity and, unless you get into PCB manufacturing, a really trustworthy charger can get expensive. In turn, running low voltage inputs into a high multiplier boost converter is generally going to be low efficiency and high-noise. Depends very heavily on your comfort level.
I was a bit freaked out by LiPo watching videos of them burst into flames if they get ruptured. Maybe not something I want to attach to my helmet. But perhaps the issue is just as prevalent with 18650s?
18650s are just a form factor, but expect LiPo unless advertised otherwise. They're a little more resistant to puncture than pouch-style designs, but you're probably going to want a rigid cover regardless, both to protect against impacts, but also to avoid contamination.
Lithium-iron-phosphates are a lot safer and are available in 16850 format -- though they'll still discharge some heat and not-great fumes, even a direct puncture or complete short on a big battery pack won't cause a fire on its own -- but they're more expensive and finding a compatible charger is even more difficult. NiMH are cheaper and more widely available, but they have a much lower cell voltage and are pretty heavy for something to wear when biking.
The irony is my local library and (non-profit, communist) maker space all have 3d printers (multiple, even), but they're always broken.
Yeah, that's definitely a Thing. Especially the lower-end machines are always a battle to keep running.
As such I'm now currently trying to get pieces of acrylic, cutting them to size and seeing how sandwiching the ESP32 etc and wrapping the whole thing in a rubber gasket for light waterproofing works out.
That's definitely an option. I would consider switching to polycarbonate for the final version -- it's a little more obnoxious to cut with a saw (and can't be safely cut in any way involving heat/laser) and scratches easily, but you can bend it cold and it's extremely impact-resistant where even acrylic can shatter with jagged edges. But acrylic's fine for testing.
If you need a really weird shape or very thin gaskets, I'd also point to various automotive gasket makers. They're generally only useful where you have two surfaces being tightly screwed together and won't last for too long if you're repeatedly removing and reattaching things, but especially for rapid prototyping they're a lot faster and easier to work with, and surprisingly cheap (and actually can be purchased in Ace/Menards/Autoshops, even some WalMarts).
gattsuru
2mo ago
It's noisy, but more critically, it's also a signal that's very sensitive to other stuff. I'm not very optimistic about Ames, for example, but despite not being a disparate impact suit itself, I'm hard-pressed to think of any conclusion but a punt on the underlying circuit split that leaves the rate of disparate impact suits unchanged. There's some cy pres stuff that could have an even bigger impact on settlements in general.
Beyond that, a lot of my position is about the policy, itself. The paper matters, both as something that discourages behaviors well before a court case happens, and in acting as cover for a wide variety of other behaviors that would be legally questionable. Maybe that's not something that we can bet on -- a Dem admin blanket-reversing every Trump EO is possible and wouldn't necessarily mean a reversion to 2024 disparate impact rules -- but it seems more relevant.
gattsuru
2mo ago
You already knew it would work before asking chatgpt, and knew what you wanted to do. How much value add did asking it actually provide? Did any of the problems that it predicted actually happen?
The specific series of events here was that I'd had some rough familiarity with ECM in general from the ctrlPew world, saw this video, tried to isolate the rough theory, and was curious whether it was possible to expand to cutting through thin metal with fine detail, asked the LLM those questions, sanity checked the numbers for any massive math or chemistry errors, then asked a chemist I knew regarding safety concerns. I had never tried it before, nor have I found any documentation of this specific approach beyond etching layouts that warned about leaving the process so long that inserts fell out (and shorted). After I ran it, I found a few other similar attempts, albeit still not entirely overlapping.
There were a few things it provided that I didn't think of or read from what I could find. Some of those would have been obvious to a human with machining background -- flow rate of fluid at higher cutting speeds are a common thing with air-blast or coolant flooding in traditional CNC, and the theory behind the pump assist here is related to that -- but others were not. I did not know a Faraday's Law could be applied to this case, and specifically having 'material removal rate' rather than any synonym helped me track it down to confirm rather than get a half-dozen links about inductance.
Conversely, you're right that there are things it definitely neglected to say. Getting any paint or adhesive to stick to nearly any common type of aluminum without a lot of prep and elbow grease is a massive issue that both is a common fault in other environments like aviation or building work, and also ignored by a lot of novices; the transfer paper for getting fine detail vinyl from backing to workpiece was a pain in the dick.
I think you already fucked up. masks are more of a thing for electro etching. Not really the correct concept for ECM, but slopgpt doesn't point it out.
ECM isn't really the right tool at all for this job; it's just a tool I had relatively available, and mask vs paint vs tools specialized for the work piece is part of that. Yes, a process like [PCM](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bR9EN3kUlfg] would near-certainly have better and faster results, especially at scale, but I don't exactly want to be messing with high-pressure ferric chloride, either. The question is whether minimizing surface area and using readily-produced masks could work at all in environments where creating a form or to-purpose tool was not practical (in this case, very bad detail work), for any function at all, rather than whether it was the right way to go about it. That's why it was a process with very little documentation available, and worth asking either an theory-focused expert or doing this sort of search.
There's a fair criticism along it failing to XY problem me, but in this case I was genuinely interested in the method as much as the end result.
What's unique about it? How is it different from "normal?" What specialize electrolytes? Is it really widely available? Is chatgpt assuming you can just sprinkle some table salt in the water? Does it reduce operational costs? Is electrolyte a major operational cost? How much does it cost?
Commercial ECM dielectric tends to be pretty pricey anywhere I could find willing to ship to a residential area, and worse, only available in fairly large quantities that vastly exceed my use case. It makes sense for commercial ECM machinery, since it can be filtered and reused and you need volume but don't replace it much, but a lot of what the literature points at it performing better at wasn't practical for small-scale operations without specialized tools. I haven't been able to find what typical costs for conventional ECM were, but for my use case it would have vastly exceeding the rest of the costs by an order of magnitude (which was a Harbor Freight pump, paint and vinyl, a few drop shipment blanks, and an old power supply that had been on the bench for a while), and probably cost more than getting it made by a local CNC mill company. Mixing my own to replicate commercial electrolytic might have been possible at a reasonable cost (literature suggests sodium hydroxide and sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate with a bunch of additives?), but in turn would probably have gotten me put on a list.
Table salt worked, though I did measure by mass, mixed for a long period under mild heat, and passed through a coffee paper filter to exclude large granules, and the LLM did not mention that. Dunno if it was necessary. I've also seen ethanol or polyethylene glycol recommended as additives (presumably by humans).
says that 4000 series aluminum is prone to cracking during welding, not during machining.
It probably depends on the specific material, but 4032 is pretty famously hard to machine, and it was the material I used here (no, I have no idea what thin plate 4032 was doing in a drop shipment). I'd tried high speed milling this stuff previously, but even with an 0-flute and tiny depth of cut it was extremely prone to gumming up the cutter in mere inches, and even when dialed in would split and crack at corners, especially sharp inside angles.
Voltage isn't the factor that matters when talking about excessive material removal.
I tried 12, 24, and 72 volt, and localized buildup was much worse at higher voltage. Voltage may not control removal, but it did seem to control how quickly material to remove popped up.
The silicon should be alloyed into the metal at a molecular level, not embedded as silicon grit or whatever.
I don't have the tools to analyze this one, but finish was Not Great Bob in 4032 or 4045, especially on large flat plates, and whatever it was that did precipitate was much harder and less prone to clearing without blasting the area with fluid than with 6061.
Totally false and retarded.
Yeah, that's one of the more serious errors; 4000-series might not be the most corrosion-resistant aluminum alloy, but the 5% or higher-silicon ones are pretty high up there.
Slopgpt just assumed this is a DIY process. What if we're talking about doing a commercial process with this setup?
I think that the correct answer would to question wtf we were doing. There are few, if any, arguments for running this approach at scale or commercially.
pH just appeared out of nowhere with no mention of it before at all.
At least some of the literature (eg here) suggests controlling pH and especially localized pH weirdness is a valuable thing for the normal ECM processes. Didn't seem to matter here, and it definitely isn't clear about why, so point.
Sounds wrong
The acrylic paint and acetone, or the vinyl pull? Unless it's had a couple weeks to cure acetone sloughed the paint right off. Vinyl was messier, with large surfaces of the cricut material falling off and tiny ones turning into a million flakes.
I don't believe acetone affects aluminum at all.
There are some alloys that you don't want to mix, with 2000-series being the worst, but yeah, 4000-series usually won't care. I did actually have problems with nail polish remover causing a gray mottled texture, but I think that was just contamination and it buffed out.
gattsuru
5mo ago
Rust does have normal C++-style unions, though they're a late and fairly controversial addition for the reasons you mention. I'll admit that I've used them occasionally in internal code (especially networking or protocol development, where hardware developers love throwing in 'this next four bytes could be an int or a float' in rev 1.0.1a after you've built your entire reader around structs), but I'd probably ask anyone who used them as an input in an API what they were smoking.
In higher-abstraction languages than C++, that sorta behavior either isn't available and/or forgo the performance and memory-specific benefits for dumb-programmer-safety. TypeScript unions or Java sealed interfaces are doing the same thing at the level of a definition -- it's a field you can put any of a limited number of options in! -- and you'd absolutely never use them for overlapping purposes. On the other hand, C#'s even more limited than Java on that use case, and I come across places it'd make sense to use pretty regularly, so maybe I'm just bitching.
That may be why a lot of their more type-theory focused stuff fell under a different name than the TypeScript-style union types.
I think the Rust enum overload is downstream of a lot of the behaviors you'll see in Java or Kotlin; I've encouraged FIRST students to use similar designs to hold different configuration values for easy toggling of modes or states. Not sure who first made enums that broke from the C(++) limit of one-value-per, but given the amount of C++ code I've seen where enums were used to map various flags intended for bitwise addition, probably a pretty early one.
I'd be interested to see court documents to understand exactly what "no additional elements of coercion" means. Depending on context that can mean anything from 'didn't drug or threaten her life' to 'was completely unconscious at the time of the incident', and usually law and judicial contexts care about where it's enough to count as aggravating convictions. The Times summary, for however much you trust it, looks closer to the former than I'd like, especially with the "They also drank Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur together and slept on a cardboard box under a hotel stairway when they couldn’t get a room".
His defenders argue that because he was not convicted of grooming, he didn't do that, but even in the highly unlikely situation he didn't groom her in the colloquial sense, it seems very likely he fit in the text of the statute, so it's hard to pull too much data out of it. I've got... less than favorable feelings about the 'it's-ephebophilia' side of libertarian thought, but depending on the behavior this could well have flunked even that.
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