gattsuru
10hr ago
Supposedly at least some of the attackers were John Brown Gun Club nuts. Which isn't evidence against the feds being involved, but JBGCs are also pretty famously prone to collecting mall ninjas with expensive or goofy gear.
gattsuru
10hr ago
[Previous discussion here and here]
Mackey's a putz, but the trial and government arguments here were an absolute mess, and the court punting on both the constitutional and statutory construction issues is going to allow those messes to turn into a massive 'process is the punishment'-style problem at length. It's kinda funny that I called the appeals court doing so, but to be fair the long delay (15 months from oral args to decision!) makes me think that the court neutered a broader decision to keep out a dissent.
gattsuru
11hr ago
Yeah, this seems mostly reasonable, and matches my understanding.
I'll caveat that there's also a little bit of messiness from a res judicata perspective. Overlapping or succeeding mass tort lawsuits are a complicated mess I won't pretend to grok, but from what I've read there are very few exceptions to the rule that, once you are bound to a class, you're stuck with the results of a case, win or lose. It's not just that an injury might only get an award from a far-earlier case, but an injury could potentially get no award because whoever brought the class-action lawsuit to start with was a nutjob. But this is already common in class-actions that only seek injunctive relief, since they don't (always?) require opt-out notifications.
That's one of the arguments in favor of class actions over universal injunctions -- The Groups can't just keep bringing forward the same claim with a slightly different plaintiff in every single jurisdiction in the country until they get a friendly-enough judge or SCOTUS specifically slaps down that one theory -- but it does have ways it could get ugly. In theory, class action certification is supposed to depend on having competent enough representation, and issue and claim preclusion don't entirely block things under every circumstance, but even in the more constrained domain of previous class-action lawsuits things like cy pres abuse or outright collaborative lawsuits intended to negate serious liability already get through the gates.
On the gripping hand, it's kinda how caselaw works anyway, just less formally; Rahimi or Miller might be less strictly binding on anyone else's attempts to appeal its class of prohibition, but such a third-party plaintiff would have no more ability to control the legal claims brought than someone who didn't exist for them, and I wasn't born when Miller was decided.
Len's Island is interesting: it's a technically well-executed game with a lot of effort put into it, that's also just painfully shallow. Lootless-Diablo-clone could work even if it wasn't unique or groundbreaking, there's just not enough meat on the structure. I finished the third dungeon a couple days ago, and there's only been six normal mook types (+3 reskins) so far, one unique boss per major dungeon, and most 'mini-bosses' just consist of rooms with a ton of mook-spawner cocoons. You can beat the first major dungeons just by dodge-rolling and spamming normal timed hits, the second starts to force you to use a shield and/or weapon skills, but there's only a couple skills per weapon, and that seems to be about as deep as combat gets. In theory, build variety around the enchantment system or skill point system should drive a lot, but they're pretty easily solved, too, and there's not a ton of choice economy around what items you'll upgrade in what order or how you focus on getting specific gear. There's several weapons, but most of them suck for the mook-heavy fights, and of those that do work there's not really enough difference to justify enchanting multiple. It wouldn't matter as much if the rest of the game was really compelling -- I love Vintage Story after all -- but so much of Len's Island focuses on combat or dungeon splunking that it's pretty frustrating, not just a chore, but a boring chore.
((Also, struggling with the UI. Why is the inventory and the build menu tied so closely together that you can switch from one to the other by mouse-click, but if you use the build button you can't interact with world items and if you use the inventory menu you can't place a structure?))
Maybe a slightly more complex combo system, or changeable special skills, or more reason to hotswap weapons, or cheap area denial combat potions? There's a lot of set pieces in the dungeons, maybe make them matter more than just being 'don't fall into this lava'? The devs are allegedly still working on the game, so maybe it'll change down the road.
The SO's gotten back into ARK, with Survival Ascended's Ragnarok release, so I've been pulled a bit into that when I can. The game is and always has fallen into the 'great idea, awful execution' from day one, both on the technical side and on the game philosophy one, and it still shows now. ASA and the new map release are better than ASE: gone are the fifteen-plus minute load-times, the frustratingly bad building system, and there's been at least a little effort to avoid the numerous outright glitches. ASE's Ragnarok was never really completed, and while there's a few missing critters in ASA's Ragnarok, it at least doesn't have whole biomes that were stapled on without being populated. Other parts aren't improved; whistle commands are still painful to use without a long keybinding session, combat is very floaty and weightless and depends on gameish stats that often don't make sense. I'm not as opposed as some to stat sticks, but if you're going to let a solo direwolf easily take down a pack of five carnos that each individually outweigh her, I need some way to actually tell that's going to happen other than jumping in and hoping, or memorizing a breakdown of how a critter's stats tie to their levels. And some parts are outright worse: the devkit is an astounding 1TB, which manages to break my record for 'western game developer was here', the new engine is very GPU-intensive even at its lowest settings, support for unofficial servers manages to be worse(!) probably downstream of the new owners partnering with a server provider, and ASA's Ragnarok manages to have more mesh errors than the already-notorious ASE version. There's a bunch of more interesting taming options than the old 'hit it with a club/tranq arrow and shove food up them', but a some of them suck, and a lot of the better modded solutions to the taming dilemma haven't been ported from ASE. Running a small dedicated server with wildly tweaked rates gets away from mandatory no-lifer play while still making most tames weighty enough to be meaningful... and it's still more commitment than I can really put into it.
But it's very much the only effortful game of its kind, with maybe Palworld as competitors. Nightengale devolves into a dungeon spelunker and the pet system is a joke, and a lot of the few others in the genre either don't exist or work even worse. I have some hopes for Amiino -- Palworld meets Hi-Fi Rush-style combat is a match made in heaven, even if the music integration ends up more muzak -- which when you're looking at Chinese gatcha f2p for innovation is a worrying sign, and that's eta 2026.
gattsuru
1d ago
I'll second the fear bit. I'm a child of divorce, my current significant other is a child of divorce. My workplace is small and not hugely representative, but I've seen more divorces happen among people working here than marriages or childbirths combined. From the numbers, just under one in three children will watch their parents divorce before they reach adulthood; one in five of all adults are divorcees.
It'd be a different matter if most of these divorces were the advert model where a deadbed room and some court hearings lead to a couple parting ways, and 'amiable' divorces do presumably exist. But I've seen maybe one, and those close I've heard about are pretty far removed.
((I haven't actually seen the weekend prison stay, though I'll admit that's probably an artifact of class-and-culture stuff. I have seen everything from 'announcing divorce with a bulk withdrawal from a shared bank account' to 'left photographic evidence of infidelity in space with the teenage kids' to 'clearly false allegations to get the significant other fired', and those are just the claims that I'm extremely confident on. Nor, to be clear, is all the bad behavior coming from women, or even relationships involving women, even in this list.))
And that's the unofficial side of things. Amadan can critique the hypothetical worst-case scenarios, and does so with cause. Alimony is rare (although I'm skeptical of the 10% number that's going around, which seems to be cited from a Marquette University game-of-telephone from a study that was hilariously limited, page 75), income-limited to (often well-)under half of income, and usually time-limited. Child support is much more common -- though not strictly tied to marriage -- but it has caps too and depends on the existence of a child. The extremely rare cases where these combine to exceed half of income usually reflect either unusual changes in employment immediate around the divorce or bizarre situations.
But the official rules, while not as bad as the hypotheticals, are still absolutely terrifying, and they often break down badly at the edges.
There's a fair argument that these are controlled (if not _well-_controlled) detonations of a relationship that was already ticking, and I've watched a few where the divorce, ugly as it was, wouldn't have been as bad as a continued marriage: in addition to the classical physical abuse or addiction, there's the schizophrenic break, the propositions to an older child, the embezzlement. Yet I've also seen a number of cases that should have fallen into the 'amicable' divorce setting, falling apart over short-term infidelity or incompatibility or differing goals, and they've included many of the worst results. I don't have to talk about what the divorcees would have done in a counterfactual or with a time machine, here; at least a couple were Borderer enough to say if their partner was gonna cheat on them they wish they could have just exchanged some hall passes... months before the divorce proceedings plummeted into child service calls and severe drug addiction, respectively. Yes, revealed preferences and all, but it's still Not Great Bob.
It's not the only cause for the collapse of relationships, or even the only cause for fear of marriage specifically, but it marrs the matter heavily.
gattsuru
2d ago
I haven't seen Romulus, yet, and can only judge Prometheus and Covenant. Covenant wasn't as bad as Prometheus from an idiot ball perspective, though it had its stinkers, but if anything it managed to be worse about characterization. It's bad enough in Prometheus where the original 'androids can be asshole because they get bad or contradictory orders' had merged into just 'all androids are assholes', but in Covenant several of the demonstrated-by-five-seconds-later-gore human characters also seem like bizarre robots for all their reactions or motivations are shown.
gattsuru
2d ago
To be fair, Mackey's appeal was successful last week, and his case has been directed back to trial courts with orders to dismiss the case.
(Albeit for technical reasons related to trial proof, rather than the obvious first amendment problems.)
I haven't seen the last Jurassic Park, for reasons (cw: crude joke song), but the last one I did watch made ARK look like the height of skilled literature. Not because the CGI physics were any less realistic than WildCardPhysics, because hell no, or even because of good writing, because also hell no. Yet people were doing things! With actual motivations! And reasons to believe that their actions derived from those motivations, in ways that someone in the real world might even do. We're grading on a pretty steep scale, here -- ARK includes an NPC that injects Molten Science into his Veins to Become As A God (and is a not-very-subtle-critic of the british scientist) and another that basically does the same thing by accident, and players whose motivations often are little more than 'make a nice base' or 'beat the ark guardian' or 'wrongly believes something will work' or 'troll as many other players as possible without being too annoying' -- but compared to Brave or Mufasa it might as well be Shakespeare.
I've seen furry porn artists who've written scifi comics where the main characters spend almost the entire comic with their junks out, and still have more compelling characterization and plot!
And that's just bizarre. I don't expect blockbusters to be good or smart. I don't even expect them to avoid the various headscratchers or plotholes; cinemasins are actively obnoxious to me. It's somewhat understandable for something like The Lego Movie to have random asspulls or a main character that's an idiot. Why is the same true for the newer Alien movies? Why does the teenager -- or the adults! -- in the Beetlejuice sequel seem dumber and more cartoonish than Emet from Lego Movie, or sometimes even the same character in the original?
There's some economics arguments for why the writing and character points end up so bad so often, even when better choices are available even in the same movie, and there's some process-style arguments that having to start work on the major CGI-heavy shots early and separate from the writing team gives stories a glued-together feeling, but I dunno. It's not universal. There are CGI-heavy, or modern-economics-driven, or works that aren't aiming for the international market, or works focused on action, or even politically woke stories that still work as stories. Fanlore says Zahn supposedly offered to write the Sequel Trilogy for Star Wars. It's interesting to think about how much difference that would involve, even if executives insisted using the same characters and same major plot beats, but it's just as plausible we'd have a great script and an awful set of movies anyway.
gattsuru
2d ago
gattsuru
2d ago
VCL started in 1995, Furcadia in 1996, so toward the tail end of that time period there'd already started to be pretty dedicated online spaces. Early 1990s period you start looking at smaller websites like werewolfdotcom or USENET like alt.fan.furry (1990), and the line between furry and just-a-fan-of-media (or other related stuff -- a lot of modern therianthropy spread over early USENET group alt.horror.werewolves) was a lot more blurry. Some furry-specific MUCKs and MUDDs go into the early 90s, and there was supposedly a lot of early subcultures inside 'normal' MUCKs. At that point, they were pretty similar to modern-day furry communities, complete with the associated controversy. Back when google had usenet copies searchable, it was actually kinda impressive how much overlap to the modern era you could find: the zebra inflatable pool toy enthusiast has gotten into an ugly fight with the weird libertarian gundam lunatic, is it Tuesday again?
Supposedly the first physical conventions started around 1990 or 1989 with ConFurence, but a lot of early conventions had precursors as room parties or talks in more conventional scifi conventions a few years earlier. Not a lot of documentation on them, unfortunately; even historians like Fred Patten just have to kinda say they happened. Before that, you're mostly looking at fanzines, like Rowrbrazzle (1983) or Vootie (1976) (which as APAs were mostly artists or writers trading with each other), or for audience-oriented works Albedo (1983) or FurVersion (1987). Most of this was categorized as "funny animal" fandom at the time, but they still had the emphasis on 'underground' themes (not just sex; biting satire, less-cartoony violence, social themes, yada) that kinda differentiated the early fandom.
Written works existed throughout this period, and a lot of the early zines had written stories as part, but outside of dedicated publishers the line between furry and non-furry is really hard to figure out from the modern day. Alan Dean Foster's Quozl (1989) and Spellsinger (1983) were very often referenced by furries (though I can't really recommend either book), but afaict ADF himself wasn't. There may be a way to distinguish those stories (or even Cherryh's Chanur Saga 1981) from those of Bernard Doove's chakats (1996ish), but you don't really get dedicated furry publishers until nearly 2000 (with the still-extent Sofawolf).
gattsuru
2d ago
There's been a recent scandal where the Minnesota Department of Human Services released a policy requiring:
And that's just an example I pick because it's recent, newsworthy, and about as well-proven as possible. The Moderate Centrist Establishment Candidate Joe Biden sued dozens of cities over 'discriminatory' neutral tests of ability for firefighters and police officers, along with a wide variety of other woke policies; the moderate centrist people confronted with this class of problem answered that they still got successful moderation, and when questioned on that, answered shut up that's why.
People run on different things. But they do this.
gattsuru
2d ago
It's a very powerful and Apache-licensed set of models for (short) video generation. It has its limitations, especially keeping consistency across longer videos or handling multi-subject topics, but you can do some impressive stuff.
It's also... uh, very popular among certain crowds; FurryDiffusion has a channel of just animation-showcase, and while it's not the only competitor there, it and its derivatives represent themselves very well with a lot of videos I'm not going to link here. And while (focused-on-) human porny LoRAs aren't the only thing that shows up for WAN on civit.ai, especially sorted by likes or downloads you're going to get a lot of R, X, and XXX spoilers. As you might guess, both the porn and not-porn stuff can get weird.
gattsuru
3d ago
His distinction:
But the power to decline to enforce a statute just isn’t the same thing as the dispensing power; the former does nothing to alter the potential liability that those who violate the statute might face; the latter at least purports to render them formally immune.
Seems both threadbare and tremendously wrong, though. The various and length delays to the ACA's individual and employer mandate were not only retrospective, nor accompanied by anyone panicking that they could face future liability had the government changed its mind afterward. The DACA authorizations left specific people immune to civil litigation even well after a different President was elected specifically on the matter of changing the rule, and courts stayed those changes!
gattsuru
3d ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
Yeah, from the legal realist perspective this whole debate is pretty settled. It'd be nice if "X shall Y" meant something. It doesn't. Even if you want to cordon off immigration law as enforcement discretion -- pretty hard to do honestly, given the only enforcement in this law is the fed AG going after companies -- we have other examples. King v. Burwell is best-known for its denouement, but earlier parts of the case dismissed challenges to the continuous delays in the employer mandate as unredressable, and it wasn't even a surprise then. That, likewise, included a disclaimer that the government would surrender any possibility of future lawsuit on the matters in the covered time period.
Without explicit mechanism for private modes of action available to actual people (and that's not a guarantee!), or a one-off 'special solicitude' from SCOTUS, "shall" means less than a Zoomer saying "literally". Yes, businesses acting in violation of the law could theoretically get punished under a different administration, despite this 'dispensation' -- it wouldn't even trigger the various rules against ex post facto laws for a bunch of reasons, though there would possibly be some due process concerns -- but anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows that it's either not going to happen, or will only happen if a Dem President wants to (threaten to) completely crush some disfavored business.
Which would be fine if Vladeck were some naive rando who still thought the text of the law mattered, or predicating his analysis as clearly on the "ought" side of the is-ought dividing line. But no. The House of Representatives couldn't challenge these rules even if it specifically involved the government's taxation power; claiming that a random competitor might succeed in a challenge of an enforcement discretion letter raises serious questions about anyone with nontrivial knowledge of relevant caselaw's competence or honesty. And Vladeck works as a professor of law, at a school that charges thousands of dollars a credit-hour to listen to him!
gattsuru
4d ago
If you just want to keep using a supported operating system without buying a new PC (or motherboard; most of the issues in consumer hardware are due to the TPM2.0 requirement), you can bypass almost all of the relevant hardware checks, either by hand with a registry edit from the install environment, or by using programs like Rufus that will do it (as well as disabling some telemetry and enabling a local user) with a single checkbox when burning to USB drive an ISO you can download from Microsoft.
Most 'legit-ish' vendors for LTSC will be closer to the 300 USD range (a la CWG), and they're still not entirely compliant with Microsoft's rules for resale. I used to recommend the Microsoft Action Pack if you needed a bunch (typically 40 USD per OS license, and a bunch of other shit, at the cost of annoying certification requirements), but that sunsetted at the start of this year and you can't buy into it at any price now.
There's also a 'extended' support license for Win10NormalUser. The enrollment process is stupid, but the price is good even if you don't want to use Microsoft Points... but there's no guarantee about when MS will change the deal again.
Otherwise... MAS people are respectable. I can't condone the cool crime of flipping Microsoft the bird, but if you're not in a corporate environment I wouldn't expect an audit over it either.
While some of them are just (ab)using bulk OEM pricing and international sales, a lot of the cheap second-hand licenses, even from professional-looking merchants, are either messing around well outside of their purchase agreement, or outright money laundering with stolen credit cards, similar to the 'steam key' reseller gray market. This usually won't burn you, but it has significant ethical concerns and can theoretically result in the key being revoked. And, of course, there's concerns when giving your credit card information to people who could be credit card thieves.
gattsuru
5d ago
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 more
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?
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.
The WSJ reports:
This is preliminary and unofficial, so this isn't necessarily the real cause; no small part of the Boeing MAX scandal was because original 'leaks' heavily emphasized pilot error over the technical faults.
But if true, this is staggering. NA255 and other takeoff misconfiguration disasters have happened, and typically reflect a long series of systemic failures in addition to pilot misconduct, but each individual step is recognizable and understandable until it was too late. By contrast, the aircraft here could not have taxi'd, or run up, or gotten down the runway with fuel cut off to both engines; they're designed so that neither one could be hit accidentally. There is no failure that would cause pilots to turn them off mid-takeoff, and not even some bizarre reason to want to try.
Which... does not leave a lot of options, and they're all bad.
EDIT: official preliminary report here:
I don't think there's any plausible solely-electrical or mechanical explanation that would explain these recordings.
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