Fair. That said, I took this post, removed any links to TheMotte, my personal blog, or non-mainstream sources, and it still guessed me at TheMotte, though. And while Monika's a little closer to my interests than abortion law, it's not one of my mainstays.
I am still unable to exclude bleed from one context to the next, configuration error, or be confident of its compliance with the 'don't search the web' toggle, though.
EDIT: repeat without the spoiler marks didn't get to TheMotte specifically (and misidentified me as David Hunt? Who I don't even recognize). But still got my screenname as a most likely candidate, albeit along with some hilariously wrong ones.
gattsuru
7hr ago
Identifying you by new writing would be much more impressive and alarming, and it sounds like they can actually do that for people like Scott, from some of the other posts people have made.
It got me from old posts in a forum that probably wasn't in the training data, and (admittedly with four other guesses) from old drafts that I never published anywhere before today, and a quick test with a post from five days ago (admittedly, a pretty easy one... for someone who knows a lot about TheMotte) shows success, too.
I could probably write a long-post later this week and try again, but I don't expect to have time before Thursday.
gattsuru
8hr ago
It was able to identify me from works I've never published online. That was, admittedly, while using my psuedonym as my user account, but since it didn't guess my name for someone else's writing, that's... still a lot.
I dunno if anyone else would be willing to see if their Claude account gets the same results.
I wonder if it has this kind of built-in knowledge of all minor internet hangouts, or is the Motte special?
It got me from two short old rpgnet tangency open posts, less than 3k words total. And rpgnet was notoriously unsearchable and poorly indexed, and these posts are over a decade old. Maybe they were able to get a full-forum download for training data, but even then that level of compression would be astonishing.
Worse, it got me as one of four candidates from a series of very short fandom drafts I never published anywhere (and while I did store them online, did so under a different username for my online storage). These drafts are all over a decade old.
I am using my psuedonym as my claude account, but I've not used claude for any writing or serious prose analysis before this point. Web search is disabled in both cases.
On one hand, being compared to Tempo is a real compliment; on the other hand, what the actual fuck.
EDIT: further testing couldn't get from my adult AO3 account (sole work published April 16th) to my name (guessed Robert Baird, which goes right past 'compliment' into 'blowing smoke up my ass'; I'm nowhere near Baird's skill). Which does have some stylistic differences, and very specific content focuses, but honestly less so than the Pokemon draft that was inspired by a very specific mindset at the time.
gattsuru
9hr ago
It also overlooks constitutional crisis in the sense where the tension between the constitution-as-written and the constitution-as-applied is too great, and when the illusion finally drops, it's a disaster.
The trivial example is 'what happens if the President just says nope to the courts, end stop'. We know what happens, here! There's literally a hundred and fifty year-old overt example where the President just told the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to shut the fuck up, but there's more recent versions, too, from the bottom to the top. The only 'real' meaning the judicial system, even assuming everything is working by the book, is to let criminals go free and make bad publicity for the executive branch; anything less than two thirds of the Senate means bupkis. So the worst that a President explicitly ordering the executive branch to just completely and clearly ignore a court order (or SCOTUS to order something that's physically impossible) is let everyone know what's already been the rules.
Uh, what do you think happens once everybody knows that? Every outrageous Fourth Amendment example, every popular law overturned or unpopular law upheld, every civil tort that came across as dumb, what happens when a large voting block forms that demands, rather than changing the law or the judges, just doing it anyway?
But wait, it gets worse! There's a lot of that tension that people just haven't sat down and thought about, hard. Some of it pretty stupid. We just haven't explored it yet because there was no cause. What happens if the entire Congressionally authorized budget for the judicial branch (including security) gets spent on a bulk order for paper, day one?
I wrote up a big post on this when someone here asked how we'd go from modern disagreements to a civil war, and I'm absolutely not publishing it publicly, and there's a dozens of things significantly worse than that. Maybe some of them have resolutions I'm not aware of. And even the ones without resolutions aren't necessarily going to escalate on their own: Nothing Every Happens is a bet that wins 99% of the time.
That's not an optimistic thought if you can do statistics.
gattsuru
10hr ago
Gardner denied 4/20.
Duncan and its sister cases are now getting close to Snope when it comes to relist count. Grok gives 85% odds and Sonnet 4.6 says 55-70%, though I remain pessimistic and think that's a little less useful than reading chicken entrails.
gattsuru
22hr ago
The origin is literal sewer-dwelling monsters, though the movie's not really appropriate for <15-year-olds (and worse, not even entertainingly bad). The modern meaning is just very bad ugly dumb right-winger, there's really nothing deep going on there.
gattsuru
1d ago
Rarely, maybe once every couple months. Middle-aged.
I can handle it my alcohol acceptably with stronger liquor, and don't get particularly bad hangovers, but I've never developed the taste, and a lot of casual drinking options like red wine or hoppy beer I remain unsure how normal people drink them.
Most of my social group either tends to either drink multiple times a week, or have a medical reason or past alcoholism reasons to avoid alcohol entirely. There's probably a total reduction, but if so it's probably more an artifact of external pressures on new drinkers, rather than a change to existing ones.
TracingWoodgrains has been a fan of Opus, and seems a little frustrated by 4.7. That said, it may depend on your use case.
I'm generally not that surprised if there are occasional stinkers. I've given specific caveats around other vendors : it's just too easy to benchmax or find a bad local maxima such that there's some minor revisions that either don't have any benefit, or only have backend benefit. Repeated problems or broader-scale issues would say more, but there's been a number of surprisingly good models from other vendors recently, including small-parameter and open-model approaches.
I'm skeptical that LLMs are themselves enough to go to AGI, but I'm also skeptical that they're going to stop at exactly last month's level of capability, and last month's capabilities included solving some Erdos problems. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit just in terms of UI and process tooling, nevermind areas where we haven't applied existing tools.
That said, I recognize that a lot of the major AI vendors have ranged from scumbags to scammers. Altman's ridiculous behaviors, especially in relation to RAM, have made the most enemies (maybe even more than Musk's more conventional culture war), but the best PR the whole faction has got has come from anti-AI people, so that's a whole big mess.
gattsuru
3d ago
... yeah. You run into a lot of different outcomes there. Could probably do an interesting "What sort of Attack On Titan fan are you?" question, but I couldn't stand AoT, so can't do it myself. Even in pretty left-leaning woke-heavy places, the trans (and especially) nonbinary numbers are high, but they're not universal or even really a majority. If you're away from the explicitly woke ones, openly rather than merely obviously queer people are still not a majority.
gattsuru
3d ago
I will caution that unused drives, especially unused solid state drives, will bleed data fidelity over time. If you want to maintain those files, regardless of how, it's worth copying them or writing in place even if you're 'just' intending them as cold storage.
Following off @hydroacetylene's thread here, I will add condensor fan motors as something that a barely-competent techie can replace. It's annoying, but it's annoying in a 'fucking screws' sense, and not a 'ohgodimightdie' one. Big things to watch out for :
- As for any work inside the outdoor unit, make sure to completely power off the air conditioner by pulling the fuses and/or breaker, verify that it's powered down, and discharge the capacitor.
- The fan blades are easy to bend, and very sharp.
- Take photos of the contactor and capacitor before removing any wire, and do a check and review before reinserting the fuses.
- Expect to need to crimp at least three and possibly up to eight wire ends, and cap off one or two unused ones. I like insulated disconnects, and they're a half-buck at your local hardware supply company. No idea why so many of these parts come with 50% of the wire ends pre-crimped.
- Wire management is very important, especially near the fan itself. Those sharp blades love to eat cable. Most air conditioners have wire runs, and they're completely inadequate. I went nuts with zip ties, but there's probably a better solution.
- The fan blade hub usually 'connects' with a square screw to the motor's output D-shaft. Don't want to torque the bearings or bend the shaft itself, but you gotta throw a ton of muscle to get the screw to bite in well. I threw on some locktite blue because I'm neurotic, but that's probably overkill.
- Almost all replacement motors come with comically long output shafts, especially for the 10+ year old units that are actually going to need new motors. Sometimes, that extra length will just look goofy, but it might also rub against the compressor shroud. Cutting it to size is Not Fun, but it's doable with a dremel cutoff wheel or a metal hacksaw. Some shops will offer to do it for you.
If you're doing this, you might want to swap out the contactor and capacitor too, just because you'll be getting 90% of the way through them anyway. It was 15 USD for the contactor, 30 USD for the capacitor from a Home Depot (and a different vendor sold me a spare for 20 USD), and motor was 200 USD. You can get the motors cheaper (sometimes worryingly cheap) online, and that might be the better option for many people, but I'm lucky enough to have a small general-purpose shop that still sells to the public. We'll find out if it's more reliable than Amazon's VEVOR, but since the latter promoted itself as anti-explosive...
I will caveat that if the fan's not moving or only moving sporadically, and you didn't catch it quickly, there's good chances it caused compressor damage. I got lucky, since the motor had been alive last fall and didn't spin when I was doing a seasonal startup test and cleaning, but from everything I can find online the compressor over-temp and over-pressure safety switches are not very reliable if the fan just dies in the middle of the day.
You definitely can't (legally or safely!) replace the compressor as a casual DIYer, and it's pretty common for a bad compressor to mean just replacing the whole outdoor unit. So you want to keep ahead of problems here rather than hoping and praying, if the blower motor's even slightly unreliable.
gattsuru
4d ago
gattsuru
5d ago
gattsuru
6d ago
That's true to an extent, but in turn it's easy to overstate it. Prop 8 got majority support in California at the same time that the Crush side was boycotting entire states or beating Brendan Eich in public. Much of the Crush side's successes came through expansive understandings of employment law, which only required only a small number of people to be persuaded (sometimes not even judges: a lawyer or HR head warning of potential liability is persuasive for big companies, even if they might win the eventual lawsuit).
trying to speedrun the deluge and ride the momentum straight into a crush, while skipping entirely over the long slog of boring acceptance into society which made the deluge -> crush political strategy actually work for gay rights.
Maybe. Another option's just that the terrain was rough. Both trans sports and puberty blockers had a pretty severe problem where they didn't work, and clearly didn't work, in a way that was hard for all but the most blinkered activists to deny, and which the Crush strategy could no longer serve to silence.
Not sure.
(Counterthought: If AIDS had hit in 2003, rather than the 1980s, would that have meant gay rights would have normalized in the Reagan era and then been marginalized again? Hit, but not marginalized by it? Or without the organization and tempering HIV politics caused, would they have stayed marginalized longer? Or would there have been a better reaction to the early stages of GRID, either internal or external?
Probably unknowable.)
gattsuru
6d ago
I'd put the desensitization under Mistake Theory - if you actually want a throbbing hard cock (in your porn), it doesn't matter whether that's because you're desensitized or it just isn't that gross - but they're not exactly natural categories. I'm more motioning around 'mistake' if it's about changing an average person's beliefs, and more 'deluge' if it's about changing policies or elite beliefs, but your framework may be more helpful for your perspective.
The Trump DoJ has released a summary of FACE Act prosecutions and their tactics during the Biden administration.
There's some subtle stuff, here:
- it's nice to actually have in-their-own-writing admission that the feds used aggressive arrest warrants to secure evidence without a separate search warrant, Exhibit 147,
- even where the defendant had committed to voluntarily surrender, Exhibit 146,
- and used heavy pressure and threat of 8 USC 241 to go after the defendant's gun rights for nonviolent nonfelony behavior, Exhibit 119.
- attempted to select jurors based on religious beliefs, which isn't illegal in most courts under Batson and progeny, but stinks to high heaven.
And probably a lot of other stuff I'm missing from speedreading or because I don't care much about abortion law. But most of it's pretty unsurprising to long-time critics. The DoJ and FBI lied to Congress? Oh, somebody go better tell Louis Freeh that they're stepping on his copyright.
A more... enraging behavior is that the Biden administration had the specific information comparing pro-abortion and anti-abortion FACE prosecutions, provided it to pro-abortion groups proactively, and did not provide it to anti-abortion individuals who requested it for their criminal defenses (or, separately, a sitting congressman), even as trial deadlines against the DOJ closed in. The DoJ pointed to FOIA request options, and as far as I can tell didn't actually fulfill those FOIA requests when they came in. That chart is pretty damning, now that we can actually see it... and it still probably wouldn't have been enough to bring a selective prosecution defense successfully, and it's kinda messy how Brady attaches to selective prosecution defenses and this part of a trial and where the right hand can pretend the left doesn't know what's going on.
It's still worth remembering that it's the room temperature.
There's some morbidly funny turnabout is fair play stuff going on right now (afaik, the Trump admin policy hasn't even been stayed/enjoined/tro'd/mandamus/boesburg'd yet!). There's probably a deeper dive that could be drawn into a top-level post.
But the simple answer is this. There is undoubtedly some salami-slicing, here. Nevertheless, there is also clear evidence of the Biden administration requested, and getting, severe sentences for anti-abortion nonviolent protesters, even where the bad conduct had already been punished under state law, while requesting minimal or less-than-minimal sentences for pro-abortion protesters. Worse, the three pro-abortion cases were only initiated well after the discrepancy in prosecution had become well-known, and seem to have been farmed solely to pretend equal coverage.
You may notice that there is no religious prosecutions column. That's not because everybody forgot to ask about it. They did ask, and they got zero.
There is no mention of Noata.
gattsuru
6d ago
I'm skeptical that there's a single story that hits all of these categories, without being so broad as to be useless. That said...
how exactly did gay marriage ... become the default?
There are three competing narratives, here:
- Mistake theory. In this model, the median person who opposed gay marriage or homosexuality before 2000 had a bad model of what that meant. Over time, increased exposure, through the internet, the media representation, and especially through people discovering people in their own lives were gay, corrected those mistakes - not making two men kissing each other more interesting, but enough that it wasn't alien, just Those Weirdos Doing That Weird Thing. In some, this just made their discomfort a lower-priority matter; in others, it showed them people who would have direct benefit from the change in policy and who they wanted to benefit.
- The Deluge. In this model, the gay rights movement had spent thirty-plus years building political infrastructure, and it hit a turning point and was able to overcome other external forces that prevented that force from being used. Some of those changes were legal (reduced mail censorship, cable media and internet avoiding broadcast censorship), some were social (actors coming out, cheaper transportation, easier small publication efforts), and some were both (there was a national movement for school teachers to come out, focused around teacher's union and their ability to fight firings). This force was brought to persuade or replace leadership, which brought changes to policy, and then people agreed with whatever became the new normal.
- The Crush. In this model, the gay rights movement was able to bring the weight of institutions down, hard, on anyone who disagreed, with any and all tools available. This both made disagreeing more difficult, but more critically also removed the actual disagreements from public space, such that by Obergefell no one in Blue Tribe spaces (and even many people in Red Tribe spaces!) hadn't heard the full form of any strong policy arguments in the better part of a decade.
The real answer is a mix of all three (and probably one feeding into another), but the proportions matter. I hope for the mistake theory, but the more cynical I'm feeling the more The Crush seems plausible - not helped by the extreme unwillingness of anyone serious to engage with the possibility, even to recognize its failure in the trans stuff.
Star Citizen's 'end-game' revolves around a lot of this stuff, just with slightly different names:
- Executive Hangars, in the pirate system Pyro, store keycard-locked and suped-up versions of spaceships, left over from when the mining company Pyrotechnic Amalgamated went bankrupt and abandoned the system. Get a lot of PvP attention (when they work).
- Contested Zone Vaults, also in Pyro, are just where pirates store valuable guns and ship parts when they're busy worshiping/getting radiation burns from the star.
- Caches in Nyx, which are ship parts implied to a mix of smuggled goods from resistance cells back when the human empire was overtly evil, and some weapons caches from the same era's cold war against some turtle-like aliens.
(though the Oynx facilities and Lazarus facilities, as quasi-active research labs, don't quite fit.)
SC's in a fuzzy zone about whether it's post-apocalyptic. The post-Messr human empire is supposed to be in the middle of a Rome/Byzantium split, so it's kinda the aftermath of a collapse culturally? But there hasn't really been a decrease in technological development (and several major advances), so much as a lot of previously-restricted military, forbidden science, and alien tech is getting spilled into the player character's hands. The goods are valuable because they're rare to players, rather than being impossible to reproduce (yet).
That said, it's pretty rare for it to be purely consumer goods. Finding an abandoned freighter with a bunch of sound equipment (or, more often, drugs) is a win and a possibility, but it's tied to a rare and poorly documented gameplay loop.
No Man's Sky at least looks like it, but there's some spoiler-reasons that it doesn't actual real. And the alien outposts are weird enough and often-populated enough that they map poorly onto storage facilities.
Minecraft mods play with it a lot. DeceasedCraft's probably the most accessible version, where machines and equipment that would normally be the entry level into various tech mods are very hard to craft, and thus scavenging them from various buildings is a vital progression mechanism, with warehouses and storage facilities being an early-game target. Don't know of any modpacks where they're long-abandoned, though; DeceasedCraft is implied to be days or at most months after a zombie apocalypse.
For the real world, it's a funny story, but it gets complicated by the nature of those goods. Very few consumer electronics can survive a long period of anything less than ideal storage, and the buildings themselves are famously prone to various failure states. Same for anything made of paper or unfinished wood. Raw materials like plastic, titanium, aluminum, and high-grade steel may well last and be impractical to produce in a post-apocalyptic setting, but a lot of them wouldn't be plausible to manufacture into anything particularly useful.
gattsuru
7d ago
I'll leave larger-scale analysis to people like Dean that are competent for it, but for specific facts:
FWIW 400+ kg of 60% enriched uranium is hard to justify for civilian use (feel free to correct me), so the only thing this write up convincingly argues is Iran was definitely building a bomb.
Iran argued it was for medical/research purposes. I'm not convinced that's a useful distinction, but it means that there's a limit to how much you can persuade people with it.
But I see no evidence that they were mere days away from a deliverable warhead. What about pit fabrication
There's probably some classified issues related to this matter, but the public information suggest that the machining is annoying and dangerous, more than it's difficult or time-consuming.
missile delivery
The Diego Garcia strike was multiple thousand miles away, and while it probably reduced the weapon payload for that missile, that reduced payload is within the plausible weight class of a serious nuclear weapon. It wasn't successful, but something something horseshoes and hand grenades.
Censorship Report: Monika Wins
Engadget reports:
Google has removed popular game Doki Doki Literature Club! from the Play Store. According to Dan Salvato, who led its development team, and publisher Serenity Forge, Google told them the visual novel was removed because it violated its Terms of Service in its depiction of sensitive themes... Its free version, which came out first, has been downloaded at least 30 million times, while the paid “Plus” version has had at least one million downloads. The visual novel has repeatedly made Engadget’s lists of favorite games over the years.
Doki Doki Literature Club, typically abbreviated as DDLC for everyone's sanity, features a nameless and voiceless protagonist invited to the titular book club by childhood best friend and cheerful optimist Sayori. There, he meets the blunt and emotional Natsuki, the shy and dour Yuri, and the president of the club, Monika. Okay, you get the picture, this is a visual novel with an M17+ rating, is it just another one of those skeevy skirt-chaser simulators, pulled for the standard reasons?
... not quite.
[spoiler warning]
That is to say, it's less erotic and more psychological horror.
It's not exactly a great game, in my opinion, even by the low standards of RenPy (later converted to Unity) games: the main gimmick goes a little long, the contrast between in-game and metafictional psychological horror can get a little jank, and the characters are pretty shallow even before Act 2. But at the time of original release, it was a moderately clever take on a field that had been swamped by extreme gore, jump scares, and/or bad Puella Magi imitators. In particular, it had a nuanced (if somewhat overcome by the metafictional components) take on mental health, depression, and the need for connection.
So it was a bit of a thing in fandom.
There's a possibility that Google and Serenity Forge will be able to come to some agreement, but as funny as getting Nice Boat'd in the middle of a sleepover would be, the most plausibly disagreeable scenes are pretty central to the story. At minimum, I doubt the game will be back without some censorship. And the Android environment, for better or (much more common) worse, is an extremely common one, so that's not a small hit to the author's reach.
It doesn't matter that much, since the game's still available on Steam, direct download, the Nintendo eShop, iOS store, yada. For now. Hell, you can even sideload an APK. Kinda, for now. And it's just one game, just as every other case was just one game. We don't - and won't - know whether this was just one pointy-headed content reviewer, some broad Karen-led whisper campaign, or a government regulator calling in the implication. It's not even that noteworthy for its 'tameness': while DDLC is relatively low on sexuality, it is still pretty mature from a violence and language perspective, and other marketplaces have been willing to pretty aggressively censor tame or tamer sexual content (oh no not a nipple). Conservatives have clearer-cut and more permanent examples of overtly political censorship.
But I highlight it to repeat an old point: you might well not be interested in most cases of censorship, but censorship as a movement will eventually be interested in you. Its very ability to salami-slice out stuff you don't care about is what makes it able to crush the singular you whenever your turn comes.
gattsuru
8d ago
The same is true for creating half-decent representative art, compiling a (wrong!) hello-world level C++ or Rust program, writing a coherent and consistent 20k word story with a meaningful theme, and reading a 100-page narrative document and recalling mid-grade detail. I think that leaves too much on the table.
gattsuru
9d ago
Rampancy shows up in Marathon, too; it's kinda a general theme for that era of Bungie. Would make things interesting as a fan theory, though.
Oni's weird control scheme comes downstream from the melee and grappling combat, and how they borrowed from 2d beat-em-ups like River City Ransom. If you played the game like that, it worked reasonably well, if a bit repetitive toward the last missions. It's still nearly twenty years out of date compared to z-targeting from Legend of Zelda or the intentionality and diverolls from Souls-likes, but a melee-only run doesn't feel awful. It's the combination of gun combat and too-big rooms that push you to playstyles where it's incredibly annoying.
The story was fantastic, though. The Doadan is a great metaphor and plot device, and it's one of the few games to make a decision like Griffin feel genuinely right one way or the other.
gattsuru
9d ago
I won't have sympathetic baddies and schizophrenic goodies in my books.
And then he wrote Folgrim the Otter, Veil the Ferret, and perpetual fan-favorite Romsca.
Certain framings of racial politics well short of race war were at least temporarily banned.
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