There's some technical parts to how LLMs specifically work that make it a lot harder to police hallucination than to improve produce a compelling argument, for the same reason that they're bad at multiplication and great at symbolic reference work. A lot of LLMs can already use WestLaw and do a pretty good job of summarizing it... at the cost of it trying to cite a state law I specifically didn't ask about.
It's possible that hallucination will be absolutely impossible to completely solve, but either way I expect these machines to become better at presenting compelling arguments faster than I expect them to be good researchers, with all the good and ill that implies. Do lawyers value honesty more than persuasion?
I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing.
One would think! And yet.
gattsuru
2d ago
gattsuru
2d ago
It's an impact, but it's likely to end up a bigger impact in the sense that this is the first time a federal gun law has been actually rolled back instead of merely sunsetted or outdated.
A 200 USD tax isn't trivial for a gun accessory, especially an expendable one, and having zero tax might allow some manufacturers to start building out entry-level silencers so the cost-of-first-hit isn't 100+ USD on top of the tax. But while that's part of why the NFA was annoying, it's not the biggest or even a primary part. And I'm not even sure we'll see much drop in MSRPs. From the sellers side, they still count as 'firearms' for FFL purposes, you'll still need an SOT, there's still going to be a ton of legal risk, and there's still a hell of a lot of overhead. From the buyer's side you aren't any less afraid of 'oil traps' or accidental 'transfers' or the ATF giving you a free colonoscopy.
((Yes, theoretically zeroing out the tax should also make enforcement of the whole registration schema impossible, but we know how that goes.))
Meanwhile, the parliamentary stuff is pretty obnoxious. I expect a dem appointee to be biased, but Byrd Ruling modifications of a law that has been defended in courts as a tax literally dozens of times is appalling.
gattsuru
3d ago
The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.
Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.
Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.
gattsuru
3d ago
while something like this gets AAQC'd.
I would be very, very, very interested to see you explain exactly what in that post you believe is objectionable, "hostile", or "delusional".
gattsuru
3d ago
My typical rule-of-thumb is 1/4 lb per adult per meal if you have a lot of sides, 3/4 lb per adult if meat's most of the food. Lot of it's going to depend on how long the guests are staying (one meal or two) and how picky you'd expect them to be if you run out of one protein. Probably going to end up with a decent amount of leftovers unless they're staying for both lunch and dinner. That said, almost all of these will store well in a fridge for 4-6 days, and they'll mix in well with pasta (everything but the chicken) or rice (everything) dishes pretty easily, so as long as you've got fridge space I dunno that I'd be that worried about leftovers.
I don't grill often, but there's a lot of great kabob recipes that just can't be done in an oven or air frier. Might take one variation on that.
Can't say anything on the alcohol side; I can barely drink beer or wine, and while I can drink hard liquor I've never developed enough of a taste to distinguish more than rough categories.
I'm not convinced darwin2500 needed a permaban, but if you want a long-form discussion of why he was a bad poster, I wrote one here (and against some of his AAQCs here). And it's not like that was some all-encompassing list; many of his worst behaviors were well after that summary, and I didn't even include all the bad behaviors before that summary (open question: can Darwin2500 use CTRL+F?). _Viking's "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." kinda sums it up.
There's (unfortunately) a number of posters that you could pick out for each of darwin's individual ticks except from the right here (well, most of them), but there are very few, if any, that manage to combine all or even a sizable section of them all on their own.
gattsuru
3d ago
I'm... hesitant to go with any of the easy answers. The Bulwarkist side of no-longer-Republicans-if-they-ever-were exists, but it's tiny. The Republican minority outreach should expect to see incoming demographics who don't like The Gays, but the difference just isn't that big. Measurement problems are endemic to modern polls, but there's a lot of reasons to suspect that they'd result in these polls going more toward the demographics most gay-friendly (younger, more urban, more online). And while it's possible for some number of people to be rounding 'gay marriage' and 'trans stuff' together, either out of confusion or treating the movement as a whole, there's too big of a difference in poll numbers on gay marriage and trans stuff for that to shake out right either.
I think there's some genuine disagreements on policy that have become a lot more apparent in the last three or four years. MacIntyre likes to Darkly Hint in ways that wouldn't be accepted (or even necessarily understood) by a lot of Red Tribers, but matters like surrogacy, limits of workplace conduct, interactions with media, the bake-the-cake movement, these are things I see from not-especially-online people in the real world.
I'd like to think that there are workable compromise positions, but they depend on actually understanding and respecting the other side, and I thought the same about trans stuff.
gattsuru
3d ago
And FFXIV : Endwalker (cw: level 90 spoilers).
gattsuru
3d ago
To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.
I'm not disagreeing with the factual findings. Literally in the post you're replying to, I said:
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition.
Indeed, the question raised by the petitioner during appeal was specifically "the trial court improperly relied on his current physical condition, age, and stated reasons for seeking expungement". While I don't think that's meritless -- I raised some statutory interpretation questions, again literally in the post that you're replying to -- I do fully recognize that there's absolutely zero chance of them being successful. Likewise, I recognize that because of the commitment's age bringing any serious challenges to would be difficult even were New Jersey and its federal circuit any less biased against gun rights, and because of the petitioner's age and the speed of New Jersey courts, any Second Amendment-related or due process legal challenges would be doomed.
My argument is that these are bad; that they defy broad rights and due process and justice, and yet can't be meaningfully challenged and won't be meaningfully recognized. We've had this distinction before.
T.B. in this case might have failed a test for expungement in a fair system, but he didn't get a fair system. Instead he got one where his rights could be taken away in an ex parte hearing with no due process or representation and standard, and to retrieve those rights he could present only limited information against an explicitly adversarial judge who could moor any denial in anything the judge wanted under any standard of evidence and using any information or no information at all. Indeed, he didn't even get a system interested in pretending to be fair, where the judge can make some handwave toward what T.B. would have to do in order to comply with the law.
There's a trivial sense where they're bad in ways that undermine all of the defenses that you entered this discussion with. But there's a more general one where it's no defense at all to say that the bad procedures are established by statute, and that the biased judges are just part of a biased system, and that there's just going to be people who fall between the awkward interactions of laws that don't mesh together, and that people simultaneously should know that any constitutional or due process arguments would actively doom whatever trivial chance their 'conventional' petition might have and that outside observers can't point to the blatant disregard for constitutional rights or due process.
There are imaginable universes where we are, as a society, so attached to legal formalism that all of these things weigh against constitutional rights, and the constitutional rights lose. There are imaginable universes where all those frictions and safety risks weigh against constitutional rights, and the same happens.
The courts can, have, and did in the last week jump over themselves to protect the rights of a murderer to 'prove' that he might have only planned and assisted with the murder of an innocent woman. The courts can, have, and did jump over themselves to defend an illegal immigrant who beat his wife and allegedly participated in human trafficking from getting deported, with everyone on the Left and their dogs and you specifically talking up the importance of due process.
We aren't in those universes. You know we're not in those universes. That this disagreement is only imaginable for matters that happen to line up with your political goals leaves any argument presented under them as below contempt.
gattsuru
4d ago
It's possible, but I'm skeptical -- AI isn't as bad as people say, but I don't think it's quite there yet, and more critically there's a massive space for additional programmer output -- and a lot of this stuff is happening at the same time that Microsoft is demanding vast increases in cheaper workers.
gattsuru
6d 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
6d 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
7d ago
Apologies, KJA's pretty much my central example of Extruded Book Product; the comparison's not a compliment to either of them.
gattsuru
7d ago
Tchaikovsky's not quite a Zahn or Pratchett-level writer, but he's pretty worthwhile; will definitely second if any of his books grasp you. I dunno that I'd say better than Sanderson -- Children of Time had more interesting characters and core ideas, but the plot and especially denouement was a muddled mush in a way that even the more trite Sanderson stuff (or even some 'better' Kevin J Anderson stuff!) never hits. But definitely at least on the same or similar tiers.
Creative sex toys, generally dildos designed or themed around fantasy monsters. Some front page examples now include Kragg the Rock Dragon and Reggie the Mothman, along with the more typical werewolf or saytr or minotaur.
Bad Dragon itself is a specific company that pioneered in the field (and has kinda become the Kleenex of sex toys, double entendre not intended) and runs heavily on the furry theme, but there’s a small industry out there. Because of some worker disputes and BD focusing more on male customers, I’d expect most female novelty-seekers to work with a variety of other companies (or chase the zillions of Etsy shops focusing on the field) as well. See The Wandering Bard, or PhoenixFlame Creations, Primal Hardwere, Weredog,co,uk, or Paladin Pleasure for other examples in the business.
Uh, somewhere private, and only if you don’t mind getting blasted with every imaginable fantasy dick (and a handful of vulvas/tongues/butts). All of these are hugely NSFW.
gattsuru
8d 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.
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
8d ago
They have to get rid of "content harmful to minors". That's theoretically less expansive in many ways, but in practice it's far broader than all but the softest-core definition of porn.
gattsuru
8d ago
It’s a convention from role playing communities indicating either out-or-character comments or side discussions not attached to the main thrust of the current discussion.
gattsuru
8d ago
Yeah, the 'homeless person' concern is not the main objection, and I don't think anyone here's going to care what Texas' policies about low-cost IDs are.
That said, I think there are serious privacy and chilling effect concerns regarding this specific implementation and how it interacts with normal website management. The Texas law applies to any website run by a commercial entity (with a tiny number of exceptions), where more than 1/3rd of its content is 'harmful to minors', must do this verification or face sizable fines (up to 10k USD/day, plus 250k USD if a minor sees any banned content). Any web host operating in the United States that serves both adult and non-adult content, or even repeats content from its users, needs to do some pretty serious evaluations.
This wouldn't be too rough if the burden from age verification was tiny -- you take the precautionary principle to the max or divide the website and/or commercial entity -- but that doesn't seem to be the case. The plaintiffs here had a bit of a nut for a lawyer, but his claims that age verification could cost 40k USD for 100k users were plausible enough for a skeptical Texas court to accept it. That's steep but workable for a conventional commercial porn site; HB 1181 does not operate based on being a commercial site selling porn, but on being a commercial entity serving partially adult material. Even if he's off by a 'mere' couple orders of magnitude, there's a lot of websites and services where that's going to bring the risk-reward underwater, or outspend what sort of losses that a hobbyist is willing to lose out on.
gattsuru
8d 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
8d 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.
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 moredependent on Cetaganda than either of the other two stories .
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?
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