gattsuru
11mo ago
I'll give the Dodo Bird Verdict (and the SSC link) a nod. Psychiatrist patients may well want something that is "surprisingly unexpected but also ring true", and shrinks themselves certainly wish they could provide it, but for the most part people just talk to each other, often about fairly trite ways. Sometimes 'just people talking' can provide an outside perspective, or present information not available to the client, or just act as a rubber ducky, but more of the structure may be even more trite than that.
gattsuru
11mo ago
To run it at a conversational speed, you need a GPU with 40GB of VRAM, so you're probably looking at dropping $4,500 minimum on just the GPU, and maybe closer to $15,000 -- not exactly available to the masses. Maybe in 4 years. Moore's law is still kicking on the GPU side.
I'm curious what the availability of standalone AI processors might do. You can get, today, a Jetson NGX Orin with 64GB VRAM on a development board around 2K USD. That's not as fast as an nVidia A100 (I think ~30% of the speed for Int8 perf? supposed to be comparable to a V100) and data transfer rates can be obnoxious since everything has to get shoved through an ARM processor, but for non-video applications, it's really hard to beat the price point or the thermal envelope while still having enough VRAM for the big models.
((At least unless nVidia's consumer modules end up surprising everyone, but I expect they're more likely to boost to 24GB/32GB for the mid- and high-end cards for this generation, rather than 32GB/48GB or higher.))
That doesn't make them a good investment today, since 2k worth of standard GPU will also let you do everything else GPUs are used for, but if a killer app comes about there's a lot of ways for people to run at smaller-scales in home environments.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Furries have a stereotype as being, by-and-large, bi and large. While that's not true strictly true, as around 25% are strictly gay or strictly straight, the stereotype isn't exactly unfounded.
There's nothing preventing a furry from being straight, and indeed no small number of well-known artists are (I'll point to meesh and ruaidri as particularly well-known, but eddiew is another good artist that draws gay, but found out experimentally that it wasn't working for him). The standard explanation is that there's literally no alternatives, but if you actually poke at the demographic info, you find that there's actually a lot more women in the fandom than the stereotype, and even if not parity, closer to gender-parity than spaces like the ratsphere or electronics engineering, and they're more het than the fandom at large. And furries do date outside of the fandom (albeit still much more gay than the general world). Yet this large portion of bi people aren't just theoretically or socially bi, or even just bi-for-roleplay purposes. Nor does it seem solely a matter of selection bias pulling in gayer people: there's a pretty sizable number of people who identify as straight, get into the fandom, and then having the "Oh No He's Hot!" moments (cw: tasteful shirtless male).
((There's a few other fandoms I've seen with similar trends, albeit usually to less extremes. FFXIV's fandom isn't that gay in the strict sense, but it's pretty gay in the .))
And this doesn't just change the culture for the gay and bisexual people. All of the three straight artists above have done significant M/M work, often including their own characters, and Meesh in particular is pretty famous for a long-form coming-out-style comic. And there's a good few others I could name in a similar boat. Normal culture doesn't have as much a norm around drawing yourself as the middle strut in an Eiffel Tower, and less of a norm around money talking, so obviously this directly isn't something that's going to generalize; you're not going to see the world turn into an Anthrocon room party as soon as the scale hits 40% bi. And having more older straight people around will provide some inductance to slow some massive changes that do happen.
But I think there will be some pretty large changes, often faster than people would expect, probably reflecting things people can't even name, if this generalizes and if the general trend continues. Population dynamics are the most obvious and severe, and while I think there are some counterpressures, since a lot of people in same-sex relationships do want kids of their own enough to find a surrogate or lay back and think of England, it's another potential worry on top of already collapsing birth rates. Outside of that, there's just a massive potential for changes in a lot of norms, both in single-sex and mixed-sex environments.
More broadly... a common perspective is that the growth of a lot of this stuff is social status-tied, rather than some deeper or more meaningful cause: at 'best', that a lot of this new generation of LGBs are effectively Kinsey 1s, and more often Kinsey 0s who just aren't grossed out and want the recognition, and at worst have pushed themselves into situations they don't actually enjoy because of social pressures. See here for a motte-sphere example, but there's a lot of if you look at social cons, even pretty squishy ones.
Some of that's the tension between the 'born this way' framework and rapidly increasing self-identification (including changes in identification), but a bigger thing these people point at is the number of bisexuals who end up in heterosexual relationships. A different Gallup poll puts around bisexuals as six times more likely to end up in a het long-term relationship than a same-sex one, and while there are some process problems with that poll, it's definitely an existence proof of something. And you can find individual evidence of even the most extreme variants of the claim.
But a different explanation's that, until very recently, if you were Kinsey 2-3 (or 4-5!) and looking for a romantic partner, you had the choice:
-
go to very highly gay spaces (gay bars, gay clubs, so on) where most people were gay or the accepted romantic (or, uh, other) overtures were gay.
-
not, and trying to identify someone else's sexuality before making an overture.
-
not, and just go for whatever's most likely to work out.
And in practice, unless you went to the far of the first category, even if you tried all three approaches, you'd probably still end up with a majority of prospective partners being different sex. There's more to romantic compatibility than a simple odds game, but it's not a small driver, either. This seldom made it impossible or even required especially heroic acts to find a same-sex partner, but it's basically Beware Trivial Inconveniences writ large, especially since a lot of those inconveniences weren't that trivial (eg, moving to The Big City) or could be undesirable for other reasons (eg, being a teetotaller at a lot of gay bars is pretty unpleasant; gay-straight alliances tend to be a very specific sort of thing).
In a perfectly-spherical cow world, assuming 2% bisexual and 3% gay, you need to encounter 40 people to have one same-gender person who'd even consider your entire sex, already outside of the scale of a small club or a small business (as compared to 1-in-4.5ish for opposite-sex, note both gay and straight numbers are further modified by age, marital status, yada yada). But as those numbers change and it becomes easier to go looking (or to date for a specific gender from a very large supply, or not for a specific gender, qua online dating), the results twist rapidly. At 18% bisexual and 2% gay, it's 1-in-10. At 30% bisexual and 5% gay, 1-in-6, and the risk of hitting on a gay opposite-gender person has more than doubled.
And for most people, that simple division isn't quite the right math. For a variety of reasons, you're likely to spend more time around people of the same sex, and there are a number of cultural norms specific to each sex that have historically made inter-gender dating more complicated and especially complicated to start.
((LGBT identification isn't the only thing driving this; there have also been drastically changing norms about dating in the workplace or at some hobby locations, if not consistently enforced, as has the movement to online dating and finding dating partners through online communities have had a pretty big impact, too. A lot of norms about appropriate behavior to opposite-sex casual acquaintances have an impact, too, and continue to increase limits.))
gattsuru
11mo ago
I don't think the framing of 'treasure' or 'keys' in The Rules For Rulers is entirely correct, but it's useful to keep in mind at least metaphorically.
gattsuru
11mo ago
/4. Someone in the Air Force or Army was involved, and wanted to make an incredibly mean joke at Navy expense.
Somewhat more steelmanned, there is actually a surprising number of MTF (until very recently, retired-)military personnel, just as there were a number of DADT-era gay military personnel. The Standard Narrative is that some number of internally-gender-nonconfirming people end compensating for it and looking for the Manliest Manly Man thing to do, and for a lot of folk at the lower income levels Joining The Military was one of those things. ((The non-standard version I favor is more than MTF people tend to be a lot more aware of the importance of benefits even before they 'crack the egg', and military benefits are pretty damned good if you can stand dealing with the paperwork.))
But the more plausible explanation for the Navy's recruitment isn't that they expect to (or even want to) get a bunch of trans employees; it's that they see younger generations as being extremely pro-LGBT even if the potential recruits are cis (or otherwise not-definitionally-trans), and they believe a stereotype of military environments as conservative on sexuality-stuff will discourage otherwise marginal potential recruits.
((The really cynical explanation is that this what they were ordered to do, by people who don't particularly care about military recruitment numbers but do care about recruiters that they can't kick off college campuses yet, and as bad as the modern military has gotten, it's still full of people who follow lawful orders even when stupid.))
gattsuru
11mo ago
That's the first time I've heard of that theory, but I'm not really making proposals about what Is, but rather what a well-intentioned bureaucrat could reasonably be acting on.
I don't think for a significant number of them being able to perform in drag (or being able to be entertained by drag performers) was a significant factor in deciding whether to join the military. Am I wrong?
Probably not, but as costly signals go, this is a personally-inexpensive one that looks pricey.
((Which also applies to the military-broad costs. VA and MEPS and recruiting don't exactly share priorities, famously.))
I'm sure it's the case on Oberlin campus. Is that actually the case in places where the Navy recruits come from?
That's a fun and complicated question! If your datum class is "younger people", it's easy to get one answer; if it's "poor people", another; if you try searching for self-identified patriots, a third.
I'm not claiming it's true, just that it's plausible and not so stunningly incompetent as to hit category 1.
For my own drafts and areas of interest:
I have a draft trying to connect ice cream studies, outer-space rocks, chicken eggs, the original-generation Johns Hopkins IRB snafu, the Hirsch-Diaz feud, and copper++. The extent that modern scientific communication isn't doing great as letting people Know Things, either as a matter of political policy or as one of personal decision-making, is important, and hard to point to individual examples and not seem like cherry-picking.hereWaiting on a conclusion to Nordean, after Ymeskhout's Excel Chart Of Prosecutorial Misconduct piece. (I'm still giving better-than-even-odds of conviction for at least some of the charges, but wouldn't put much money on it. I wasn't expecting the jury to take this long.)here- The Death and Reconstruction of Short Fiction, as an answer to one of Gwern's open questions, with some short form on the death part here.
- Separating grift, hobby, and hobbyist business, in the youtube era, from the furry fandom to woodworking.
- The incredible fragility of open-source environments (no, not that, though it is terrifying, too, this).
- Mediated group hallucinated reality (or schizophrenic reality). Basically, what exists at the intersection of this and the sort of thing jonst0kes is protesting against here and this and this touch.
- "A range with Cooper's Four Rules on the wall is fine. A range requiring every person to sign a paper with Cooper's Four Rules is a single bad story. A range with Cooper's Four Rules stapled to every flat surface is a reason to turn around and find a different range."
- The rash of ATC close-calls.[couldn't write it well enough. This touches on a small part of the problem, and Trace got better coverage on another part than I could write, discussion here.]
- "They're paving over the wrinkles so you can't think!", ; FLCL and the modern day.
For things that I can't write, but wish someone with familiarity or sufficient nerdness would:
- Does it make sense to take gwern's url archiving to its radical conclusion and start automatically saving-to-disk webvideo and random forums and every version of every executable I ever download? Would you get away with it for long before Google slammed you (I don't think youtube-dl is detectable?)? The tools for automatic categorization and identification exist (among others), but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it?
- What the fuck is wrong with web tooling, aka updating Eevee's excellent rant (or maybe crossreferencing Zorba's Unity rant to a broader field? Not sure if that's related or just smells similar, given this seems to point the exact opposite direction).
- The economics for small-scale production, and what's going on. A little on the logistics side -- how and why is Etsy pulling 6% of sales fees and eBay 13% compared to PayPal's (already high) 3% -- but more seriously what's going on for the producers. I've got competing models where there's either a) a small industry of people creating cool bespoke stuff for a small but livable be-your-own-boss, b) an ecosystem where the only people actually making a real income are selling shovels and a tiny number of superstars, while most are second-'income'-less-than-min-wage a la writing, or c) both. This might seem trite, but the whole patrons of the arts has been one of the few plausible answers to automating all the things away... but a lot of the plausibility depends on actual existence proofs.
- How much do and should we trust a lot of User Design stuff as reflecting what is measured, rather than what it studied? For web stuff, people are supposed to be hugely responsive to tiny changes in web page latency or to small user interface changes, but in addition to my general skepticism of nudges, so much residential internet or screen size is (and during the study time especially was) high-variance enough it seems like these should have been swamped by noise. Are people really as price-conscious as Amazon thinks, or is this downstream of other design decisions Amazon (and other dropshifters) have made?
- Things that suck.
- Cable (standardization orgs) that suck. Is there some Chesterton's Fence thing, here, or do these people just not know how to count?
- Is there a (non-violent) solution to the problem of scam spamming, especially of the elderly, even if only a partial mitigation? Is anyone doing anything on the forefront of this field? Book fraud?
- Relatedly, is there anyone coming up with (non-violent) solutions to the failures of class-action (context) or conventional lawsuits as a way to discourage bad corporate behavior?
- The Three-Plate Method requires little more than three rocks, a decent dye, and a lot of patience; it has obvious applications from art to engineering to design, and is the core and fundamental of true standardization in parts... and was invented in the 1800s. Is there some obvious reason it wasn't invented so long ago we couldn't name the inventor (eg, prussian blue is magic)? Was it just reinvented and dropped over and over again? If neither, is it unique in how long it lay fallow or are there other similar spaces that could have been invented much earlier, and would have been useful, but weren't?
- I'd love to see what someone with actual taste in music could see this, or if it's just me.
- Are there any One Tricks for documentation? Not just in a code context; I hate javaDocs, but they do seem a genuine tool, and weird that they're such single examples.
- What about group drama mediation?
As an update, (since I've mentioned it here), all found guilty for most of the relevant charges, with a few bits still being deliberated.
I'm certainly excited to see how Miller tries to get out of this vise.
The government's response to the Jencks material problems is here, and to the later revelation the defense's witnesses including confidential human sources working for the government that were not disclosed by the government until after trial commenced here. I'm not seeing any written orders specific to these motions; it's possible they were resolved orally during the trial.
So, uh, 'not very hard' and 'successful anyway'.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Does this theory apply to other environments where steroid usage is rampant, or differentiate the military from them?
gattsuru
11mo ago
Concord better get ready for long hot summer of battles between red hat crowds trying to tear down the sign and black flag ones trying to defend it.
Do you want to bet on it? Because even if it does bubble up to common awareness, it seems the more likely result is the first time a bunch of red hats try to tip a sign (or try to deface it using a car, insert your own more vivid alternatives involving chain here), they get arrested, the entire country uses their misogyny as an example That Must Be Stopped, the moderate Republicans denounce them, the RINOs want them hung like meat, and the Trump/Loomer axis gets distracted with an internal sex scandal instead of even noticing.
The people dropping a statute of Christopher Columbus into the sea were doing what a significant part of t he city council wanted done, but couldn't. That's how this works; it's not a sword that cuts both ways.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Yeah, I'd second this. It's very easy to get away with property damage to a third party if the government wants the property damaged, but that this is at best mixed-benefit in the same way that a "needs killing" defense to murder has a pretty sordid history.
And it goes worse: Wallingford v Bonta has a lot of procedural hilarity, but in addition to the more generic (and caught-on-camera) threats aimed at the Wallingfords, Mrs. Nyugen also poured bleach on a tree on their property. The court issued a multi-year restraining order against the Wallingfords officially for pointing cameras past their own property line, but pragmatically for not submitting.
gattsuru
11mo ago
While big tech puts a lot of effort into defeating bots, it does cost money for dev time and is a maintenance burden, so they only do in areas it's worth preventing bots, e.g. account creation and posting of content. Most top 100 websites can be trivially scraped at within-10x-of-human-activity intensities, because they already have tens of millions of users doing that, so preventing read-only bots at that scale doesn't meaningfully affect load.
That's fascinating to hear.
I imagine fast full-text search or embedding-based search would work fine here. I'm pretty sure there are open-source tools for both 'save every text you look at and search it' that are janky, as well as startups working on making a good UI for it.
Full-text search has a lot of applicable tooling, if you aren't just willing to learn grep (which, tbf...). Embeddings... there's a lot of image archivers that can (try to) identify and tag people (eg nextcloud here), and general objects it's probably possible to replace them with yolo models, but I haven't found much that's a great way to actually find stuff. And other spaces like automated transcription's always a little tricky.
Also, eevee was doing "See, I actually have a 64-bit kernel, but a 32-bit userspace", which ... it'd take a ton of effort to seamlessly support every quirky configuration people can come up with, so most devs don't, which is correctly prioritized imo. Again, with the database, they didn't use the supported configuration of 'give it root' and did some permission thing.
That's somewhat fair, although more so for the mixed-bit size than for giving root to random software (and even for the mixed-bit-size problem, it's a little discouraging that "we don't support 32-bit" or "here's this vital extension" isn't in the documentation). And I can certainly understand and empathize the problems with end-users wanting support across ridiculous breadths of deployment environment: I've submitted code to fix one-off problems that likely only applied to small circumstances like mine, and I can understand when they were accepted or rejected.
But I don't think eevee's issues were, and my issues are generally not, about one piece of software having a problem in one environment. A sizable portion of eevee's problems were less about the specialized failure modes, and more that even the canonical install paths aren't really complete (or are Docker, or more recently flatpak has started showing up for no goddamn reason). At the time of writing, Discourse did not say install Docker or else. It had a pretty long installation guide! But it did not (even at the time of eevee's writing; it was deleted the day after that post) actually cover things like 'what are actually the dependencies', rather than the minimum number of apt-get calls to get it to build on the author's machine.
That's not just the fault of the Discourse designers. The problem's that development in general (nuGet and maven have encouraged the exact same bad habits!), but especially web development, no longer has and often does not expect anyone to have the ability to seriously inspect dependencies, even as dependency trees have expanded. If you are very careful, you might be able to get your application to list all of its immediate dependencies (no one did for Discourse, hence the sidekiq bit, so it's a little bit Discourse's fault), in terms of full application-level dependencies. But those will have their own dependencies (or extensions, or modules, or packages, yada yada), which you might be able to get a list of what's currently installed. And in increasing situations, you'd have to dance down another level from that.
Docker bypasses this by pulling from specific installation images in order and just not caring if something else gets pulled along by accident -- which, hey, I'd be fine with on small scales. But then it installs a copy for each container. Which does solve dependency hell, since there's now one dependency install per application... at the cost of making it increasingly easy to have dozens of (oft-outdated) versions of common dependencies.
This would be a little annoying if it were just a problem during install, but maintenance and updating tends to be where it goes really bad. I've had multiple GitLab instances -- even with the 'recommended' omnibus! -- where upgrading just exploded because one version somewhere was out of whack. NextCloud just had a (nontrivial!) bug related to php versioning support. Even with grav, which is supposed to about as simple as it gets, I've still seen it go tango uniform because of a dependency versioning problem the developer was unaware of.
3% extra for etsy seems reasonable? Maybe not reasonable in the sense of 'how the economy should be', but reasonable in the sense that they have to address regulatory complexity, develop their software, deal with payments issues, prevent fraud... patio11's writing might be related
Patio11's writing is fantastic, but Patio11 also works for Stripe, which offers (listed) sales cuts around ~3% total, and hasn't taken over the world. Part of that's because Stripe doesn't want to (or, rather, Stripe's banks don't want it to), but another part is that there's not a horde of startups breaking down Stripe's door to take Etsy's lunch and 'only' make a billion USD... nor to provide a valet service and to charge 20%.
I could definitely imagine a vendor that gave the average seller 3%ish worth (or even 10%+/30%+!) of sales in benefits. It's actually not that hard, and that's a pretty reasonable cut in some circumstances. Amazon itself has bizarrely tight economic tolerances -- which doesn't mean it's an efficient marketplace, but winks and nods that direction -- and much of its business-side income comes only from shaking down sellers advertising. It's weird that it's turned into the standard for online sales even as a lot of these groups are doing less and worse, while no competitors are coming up at the extreme low-end, nor that more reputable vendors charging a little more (or providing fewer sales-assist services) haven't come forward. Amazon-style drop-shipping comes across as from what seems like a narrow maxima for a fairly broad sphere, despite being incredibly janky, and I don't think the conventional explanation makes sense.
The punchline to this twitter thread is that the Menards replacement probably ranged from 10 bucks more to 60 bucks less, depending on what popular wheelbarrow eigenrobot was getting and what shipping he used. You can buy end mills on Aliexpress, Etsy, Amazon, and they'll be the exact same end mill from the exact same manufacturer, for radically different prices. Or if you end up having to do currency conversion, Paypal ends of breaking normal expectations there.
So you don't have a hugely price-conscious buyers, nor hugely convenience-based, nor is it obviously trickery (as bad as Amazon or Paypal dark arts get, they're not actually earned that much cash). Is it just being a first-mover? Internet-wide search gone fucky? Scale-and-size? Reputation (if so, how bad would Amazon or ali* have to get)? People just hate having multiple logins?
Design is tightly coupled to revenue, which means companies and the people in them will be properly incentivized to care about it.
Fair. I guess just post Pivot To Video I'm kinda nervous about highly-publicized 'studies' by a corporation with One Weird Trick and a lot of reasons that replication failures wouldn't 'count'.
Not sure what you mean exactly. I also hate javadocs...
I hate javadocs, too, but a) people write them, b) people update them, and c) external users can read them, even if most don't. But I'm more motioning about how they're a documentation technology, in a way that technologies-used-for-documenation (eg, wikis, technical writers) are not, even if they aren't particularly effective. It's weird that this isn't something more common or more widely exploited beyond bad puns about self-documenting code.
gattsuru
11mo ago
There was a pretty famous one in 2013 that received NRA support, but was shot down because Dems preferred a version that didn't bother with a fig-leaf of due process.
Which kinda points to the problem. It is quite possible both for the ATF to require ridiculous levels of paperwork and come down like a brick shithouse on FFLs that don't require clients to spell out Yes and No on every line, while also ignoring a vast realm of straw or otherwise unlawful purchases (plausibly including the son of a sitting president!). It is quite possible for there to be a lot of support for Universal Background Checks in general, and then actually-written background check proposals to be so badly drafted as to require restructuring hunter education classes.
More broadly, there's also an issue where this is all very obviously just another step toward the next big restriction. We don't have particularly good reason to believe the rules that actually do get enforced actually prevent mass or spree shootings, and a lot of times they get brought up even when they very clearly couldn't prevent them (eg, several bills named after an incident where the mass shooter stole a firearm involved background checks) ... but they are great at making it difficult to be into firearms, or to get new generations into firearms.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Australia is absolutely as rule-abiding a society as Japan; the rules are just different. Look at the treatment of speed limits for a trivial example.
In addition to the possibility of "Anonymous" or "No Name Given", or ToaKraka's random nutjob, a plausible explanation is that this is someone who's financially charged with producing these complaints. In Accessibility law, this is the realm of ADA testers and their lawyers: a very small group of people who promise that they're at least theoretically interested in going to a far larger space of public or semi-public accommodations and making sure that anyone with similar disabilities can access them (and not coincidentally make a lot of money), who individually have hundreds or low thousands of complaints or even lawsuits. The spread isn't quite as wide... but then again, the return is less direct, too. But you don't have to get money directly from a court case to make a career out of it.
I don't know that this is true. But I can look at the complaints from here and find a name that could hit the 20-complaints-a-day scenario without having to spend all day working on complaints, because he or she has people for that.
This isn't inherently wrong: the most abusive ADA testers tend to bubble up to the top simply because it's easier to find bullshit, but the fundamental of having actual harmed people asking for fixes rather than an army of ill-planned regulators isn't a bad one, even recognizing that most 'actual harmed people' won't have the energy or time to go through the full procedure. (Though I've got my complaints about the extent of both the ADA and modern Title IX/Title VI law).
And it may not be the case here.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Cathode_G! (cw: sfw as explosives can be on direct link, but the rest of his feed does have furry porn) Absolutely fascinating guy.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Cathode_G does also have a non-corrosive primer (as above, link has no nudity, but be prepared for furry porn elsewhere on his feed) recipe, though most disposable guns in a highly restricted regime will probably just stick with the corrosive but dead-simple matchhead.
Primers are also kinda like the lye in cathode_g's guncotton formula; they have too many industrial and home uses to effectively ban. Even China still has them in common use for construction. If you don't want to bother with chemistry or corrosive primers, there's literally millions of these things out there.
Brass cases are obnoxious, but I'm not convinced they're the right decision rather than the available one. SuckBoyTony's done some interesting things with manufacturing polymer cases, and there's a lot of design space ignoring cases entirely that's largely unexplored because it makes so little sense these days. If you're custom-casting and electroplating bullets in mass, you could start experimenting with wacky designs like the Daisy V/L, Activ-style shells, or gyrojets, or truly caseless ammo... but unless you have absolutely no access to spent brass, it's mostly just coming up with new ways and reasons for the ATF to shoot your dog.
gattsuru
11mo ago
From my understanding, it varies; some transwomen do stop or decrease estrogen usage as they age, while others maintain significant dosages. There's generally reason to be more concerned about heart and circulatory ramifications for those who've been on hormones for longer periods of time. WPATH has clear recommendations to favor transdermal estrogens for >45-year-olds, for one example.
((It's also not very clear how well a lot of this is founded; natal women with hysterectomies had different outcomes than natal women without on hormone therapy, and orchidectomy has its own separate weird ramifications on total lifespan, and insert my normal rant about the state of medical science.))
gattsuru
11mo ago
Trump was personally pretty weak on firearms, and while some of that reflected the way the wind was blowing, to the extent it ever was a priority for the administration it was to make more problems for gunnies than to solve any.
At an intermediate level, the GAO did some housecleaning right before Trump got into office, specifically claiming the issue was caught and being resolved. Tots, cross their fingers.
At a deeper level, the ATF Doesn't Have Registries. They just have backups of recent NICS transactions that have been kept for arbitrary lengths of time, contrary to federal law, along with literally almost a billion scanned past transaction records that they extra-special-super-duper-promise that they will never hook up to an OCR. In many cases, the ATF have just designed systems such that the not!registry was an unavoidable result of the architecture that can not be reversed cheaply (or, for the scanned transaction records, at all, since the originals have been destroyed). Just as no one has actual standing to bring a claim about the various spending limits on the ATF, there's no way for an administration that lacks trust in the ATF to actually get it to stop doing things rather than call them something else.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Ten years ago, I'd make that argument, but the state of the art in disposable firearms hasn't been the Liberator as zip-gun-adjacent for the better part of the intervening period. The undercovered part of 3d2a analysis is that you don't just have zip-guns-but-worse and lovingly-crafting custom 1911s; there's a lot of capability to make hipoint-grade guns that fall in the middle. That space is largely underexplored in the United States (again, because you can buy a HiPoint, or because the ATF will shoot your dog, or both), but a good deal of it is potentially highly lethal, often in ways that would not be great to find out the hard way (further information not available here).
((But, yes, the OP's gun-free magic wand also needs to handle zip guns, in the same way it needs to handle people buying aluminum-grade CNCs for 1k and steel-grade ones for 8k. But the OP's not really engaging with the core point enough for this objection to really be relevant.))))
gattsuru
11mo ago
I’ll provide another hand for ‘gay guys referring to bottoms in both senses’, and I can provide a number of examples in the tumblr and furry spheres, albeit almost entirely NSFW (though notably e621 nixed both bussy and boy-pussy as tags).
I have seen it used in trans contexts, but it’s much more acceptable for trans men (and tbh, I find it less obnoxious there than for cis guys!) and various gender-weird contexts. It’s definitely something that would be at best controversial and more often close to fighting words for trans women, even not-hugely-lefty trans women. I think I’ve seen some conversation between two trans women use bussy without starting WWIII, but they were both already very close.
Yeah, seconding "Fandomcom"'s user experience being unusually atrocious. It's been driving me up the wall because I've been burning time on Sun Haven, and almost all of the data for it is either on fandomcom sites or video, to the point where I just gave up trying to check anything from mobile browser.
I know ARK at least has its wiki.gg equivalent, and FFXIV was always off-wikia to start with, but there's a lot of spaces that don't have anything close.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Midjourney (and most other AI-gens) still struggle with physics; even with a ton of in-painting and curation. Shadow, perspective and foreshortening, clothing seams, so on, all have often-hard-to-correct mismatches. This guy does some often heroic work to try to counter it, but most prompters (myself especially included!) can't even recognize a lot of the problems without special effort.
ControlNet and depth maps can kinda help (esp if you create a depth map from conventional 3d modeling or photography), but I don't think Midjourney supports that right now. And even when it works this narrows the possibility space down a ton.
A majority of that number is 'just' bisexual or adjacent people. I don't think that's meaningless -- at least for some fandom spaces, I've seen some pretty interesting results when a specific subcommunity starts to become >40%ish bisexual. But it does make it less relevant for trans stuff.
((And I'm not sure how much of the Gallup poll's trans stuff is trans-as-you-or-I-would-define it. I'm not finding the actual questions in a quick search, and there's a lot of nonbinary or genderfluid that rounds themselves closer to trans than to queer, largely for historical reasons, but does not raise most of the conventional medical concerns for trans stuff.))
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