gattsuru
1d ago
Normalizing to miles or equivalent trips helps reduce the range and can put them around motorcycle risk, but helicopters as a full class remain a good bit more dangerous than cars. To be fair, that’s heavily driven by training flight and Robinson incidents, so fair-weather flight operations under Part 135 are a lot less concerning, but it’s still a risk-taking behavior.
gattsuru
1d ago
That would have its own issues even if it happened, but counterexamples like Chicago exists, and examples in favor of the theory like California have had their own responses turning them into disproofs.
gattsuru
1d ago
Unless you're going to give more detail, "personally antagonist" feels like it's trying to carry more weight than it supports. I do not believe moderators would, or for that matter should have been lighter on the banhammer had the responses to Darwin been formatted as subtweets talking about 'some liberals here'.
Darwin's efforts that direction were always a tool to prevent his claims from being falsified and to cast as broad of a net as possible, not some serious effort to avoid antagonizing individuals when he said "conspiracy theory levels of denial and outgroup alienation".
gattsuru
2d ago
Does this analysis apply from 'white' to 'whitey'?
I can imagine a steelman where this shows hypocrisy on their side, and the progressive tendency to treat only the slurs aimed at their team is pretty damned frustrating, but I don't think splitting the convention reals, here.
gattsuru
4d ago
The Darwin Question gets brought up over and over, but no one has ever offered concrete policies we should change, just "calibrate your tolerance" or "be quicker to ban people on vibes."
To be very explicit, please formalize a concrete policy on what "being antagonistic" means, that is deeper than vibes. Because for darwin specifically, it did look like some people got banned or modhatted, and others not, sometimes in the same thread and for merely pointing Darwin's accusations back at him.
I can offer options -- Viking's old "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." retains a lot of utility -- but I know mine isn't what you want.
gattsuru
5d ago
Google scrapes your e-mail and almost certainly will disclose it under some situations, but there are additional concerns with any AI access -- Anthropic doesn't (and might not be able to) have the same level of privacy protections, self-hosted AI have their own vulnerabilities, and it's a lot easier for an agent to pick up malware or bad instructions than Google or even Outlook/Thunderbird/whatever.
I've fiddled with LLM-based spam filtering, so there's definitely a point where it might be worth it, but I used GBNF and left pretty much every tool disabled up to and including memory. There might well be a day where permission systems for AI systems are good enough I'd trust them to accept unfiltered input and have command line access at the same time, but we're not at that day now.
gattsuru
5d ago
I have submitted a (much more polite) request for clarification and correction to the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine editorial. When (or if) that's ever published, I have a draft on the Forensic Science Medicine and Pathology paper.
On the downside, the chief editor has cited the Hargarten editorial already, and paraphrased it incorrectly, no less. I've had to dox and face reveal myself (those poor bastards) as part of the process.
On the upside, the WestJEM editorial team actually responded to my e-mail eventually, and I've even gotten access to some nonpublic drafts of papers from other related ballistics trials.
On the other downside, the Forensic Science paper has been cited repeatedly in the Viramontes case, including in an amici brief submitted by one of the lead writers of the Forensic Science Medicine and Pathology paper. And it's terrible.
Not only does it repeat many of the mistakes from the original paper, it's sloppy about them. Some of those mistakes include a couple I've been holding back in reserve -- do you know what happens to bone rapidly submerged in a giant block of 132 degree Celsius oil and have you ever made soup stock? do you know that if you trace (after three hops) the LaSueur's citations about 9mm indirect bone fractures, you instead an example of a handgun causing a fracture and the same rifle only being able to rarely cause a fracture at a seventh the distance as the LaSueur trial?
And now I know things that are not public information.
It's fascinating that the public version of the Cranfield data does not mention, not even once, what grade of ballistics gel simulacra it used. The amici claim that it used a "similar" gel. That's fascinating because 10% and 20% gel have drastically different properties, and ClearBallistics sells both. There's an interesting sentence of "The synthetic gel was pre-calibrated by the manufacturer using the standard .177 caliber steel.", which leaves the question of "steel what", and looks almost exactly like what you'd get if the calibration description and depth were cut off by someone trying to scrub details.
Now, that's also a draft paper by someone that thinks a bullet can enter a block of ballistics gel at zero velocity and gain speed by the time it exits, or that the AR-15 can fire 40 gram bullets, among other errors, reported and packaged and signed off by lawyers that think three and six are the same number. I'd like to point out that it costs literally thousands of dollars to publish an amici brief, by the way, just in printing costs. But could just a coincidence.
Unfortunately, Cranfield is not subject to any meaningful disclosure requirements.
More readily available firearms
I'm talking about "availability" in terms of the teens getting access to firearms, and in particular handguns. In the 1950s fewer than 1 in 7 households had a handgun while by the 1990s almost half of households had one.
This is also wrong. The nice thing about pro-gun control statistics is that so many of them are so bad that you can track their source just because no one else simultaneously invented the same fake number, and this is one of those. The actual version of this is from Cook 1993, sourced at your favorite piracy group, and it claimed:
"The 1989 Gallup poll estimated that 47% of households possessed a gun. Remarkably, the fraction of American households owning a gun has remained at about one half for at least the last three decades. However, the fraction of households that own a handgun has increased substantially, from 13% in 1959 to 24% in 1978 and thereafter; thus, in recent years about half of the gun-owning households own a handgun. Most gun-owning-households have several guns, with an average of about four. Only one in seven gun-owning households is limited to handguns; in fact, two thirds of those who own a handgun also own a rifle or shotgun."
I'm not confident Cook's number reals - the only other cite referencing a Gallup 1959 poll on handgun ownership is Eskine, and it gives 16%, on top of the normal survey problems - but the dependence on gun-owning households make this a claim eating its own tail.
Meanwhile, the number of households with firearms decreased in that timeframe; Cook's 'about one half' is only true if you draw a line with a fat sharpie. 'Official' federal surveys gave numbers of all firearm ownership around 35% of households in the 1990s; there were books written about the whole theory that gun owners were becoming rarer but more dogmatic in that time frame. Note the conflict with the original claim, now fully abandoned without so much as a whoopsie-diddle.
again
gattsuru
6d ago
Even the simple problem of 'how does food get from the truck to the front side of a grocery store' involves some pretty varied people. I don't think it's fair to call it dumb, and the actual dumb coworkers can range from just a little slow to actively being a hazard to everyone else, but it's a job where you think with your muscles as much as your head. I've got an ex-coworker who was great at inventory management and billing, but went to throw boxes around because it was a job she just stop thinking about the second the shift ended. You take some income hits doing that, but she wanted kids, and the equation changes pretty dramatically.
gattsuru
6d ago
It gets pretty dark, even compared to New Vegas as inspiration. Littlepip isn't depressed and mopey, but gruesome torture, mass murder, loss of limbs, both individual and systematized rape, suicide in both the 'to avoid something worse' and 'deep depression' senses, race war, children being forced to fight each other to death, pacifism being tested and broken, so on. It's a surreal tone because it's intentionally contrasting the initially-bright setting and a messianic protagonist with what that actually means and does under stress, but it's definitely still a dark and increasingly dark one.
"GetThereItis" is a pretty big driver of incidents across the board:
Most of the fatalities tend to be in private aviation, but the pressures are probably higher for charter. I'd assume it's especially hard if you're a sports fan having to tell Kobe Bryant that visibility is shit today, but even without that, it's the sort of business where reputation for reliability is a major driver in future customers. You can afford to have a plane sit out a single flight or a single day for safety sake pretty easily, since fuel and per-hour maintenance is so much of your running costs. But you can't afford to be the guy who cancels at the last minute, because then you end up with planes that sit for weeks on end.
The other big issue is that smaller charter operations can run with much less experienced pilots in one or both seats. I don't buy the full Colgan Air philosophy, but there definitely have been incidents where a pilot whose background overwhelmingly favored fair-weather flights got thrust into environments where they couldn't make that rule apply, and had no ability to judge bad weather conditions from unsafe ones. And while bigger charter operations will push pilots toward education, smaller ones tend to have hobbyist or semi-pro pilots that don't keep up on it.
More options
Context Copy link