Reasonable Men
The New Jersey Attorney General has filed a complaint:
The Attorney General brings this action to hold Defendant Jordan Vinroe accountable for his years-long and unlawful efforts to sell New Jersey residents kits, parts, and other products to create unserialized, untraceable firearms—commonly known as “Ghost Guns.” This action against Vinroe is for his personal, intentional, and unlawful conduct.
The interesting thing isn't that New Jersey is suing some random gun or parts manufacturer: compared to Platkin v Defense Distributed, someone who actually sold actual physical components and has shipped something into the state is comparatively restrained.
The interesting bit is that, by the law's plain text, nothing Vinroe did was illegal. A large part of the actual case rests on him being a public nuisance, not having reasonable controls that he couldn't implement, giving good-faith advice on complying with New Jersey's registration and permit system, and then the complaint spends a lot of time arguing he was violating criminal laws he didn't and couldn't break.
Vinroe sold 80% receivers, but only where and when it was lawful: he stopped the sales the day the ATF regulation went in effect, and paused them when Pennsylvania tried to ban them by executive order. He even wrote a declaration in support of Vanderstock, the poor schmuck, highlighting how much this decision impacted his business. Not only did federal and state law permit him to make these sales without doing a background check, even though he had an FFL 07, he could not legally do a background check on buyers of non-firearms had he wanted to. To be fair, he was clearly also philosophically opposed to it. Vinroe is bombastic about Second Amendment advocacy - he bought a gun show specifically because the previous owner buckled under public pressure on 80% receivers - but he was reasonable about it, and as fastidious about compliance with federal and Pennsylvania law as you'd expect for someone who signed up to allow warrantless inspections from the ATF.
The state's argument is that he advertised to lawful customers, encouraged them to comply with the law, and that's not only not enough, but evidence of ill intent, and his liability for the criminal acts of others, regardless of whether those criminal actors bought their products from him.
Nor is it unlawful for him to sell to New Jersey residents.
The complaint highlights that he didn't check driver's license for state of residence, but it focuses on a statute that requires he "prevent the sale or distribution of a gun-related product to a straw purchaser, a firearm trafficker, a person prohibited from possessing a firearm under State or federal law, or a person who the gun industry member has reasonable cause to believe is at substantial risk" and complies with all provisions of State and federal law and does not otherwise promote the unlawful sale, manufacture, distribution, importing, marketing, possession, or use of a gun-related product". Some of these tests, like the prohibited person one, could only be achieved with that NICS check he can't legally use; the rest he was doing and are entirely independent of state of residence.
Reasonable Buyers
In fact, in 2022, it wasn't even clear it was unlawful for New Jersey residents to buy the kits from him and take them home. New Jersey helpfully describes the legislative history in the complaint, pages 27-28, but to summarize, New Jersey declared it illegal to :
- Purchasing firearm parts to manufacture a firearm without a serial number.[...] a person who, with the purpose to manufacture or otherwise assemble a firearm [...], purchases or otherwise obtains separately or as part of a kit a firearm frame or firearm receiver which is not imprinted with a serial number registered with a federally licensed manufacturer or any combination of parts from which a firearm without a serial number may be readily manufactured or otherwise assembled, but which does not have the capacity to function as a firearm unless manufactured or otherwise assembled is guilty of a crime of the third degree.
- Transporting a manufactured firearm without a serial number. In addition to any other criminal penalties provided under law, a person who transports, ships, sells, or disposes of a firearm manufactured or otherwise assembled using a firearm frame or firearm receiver as defined in subsection k. of this section which is not imprinted with a serial number registered with a federally licensed manufacturer[...] is guilty of a crime of the second degree.
That is, it's illegal to purchase a "firearm frame or receiver" as defined by New Jersey law to include 80% receivers, and it's illegal to transport, ship, sell, or dispose of a manufactured unserialized firearm, but there's not actually a law against bare possession. Arguably it'd even be lawful to manufacture and possess in the home, though the transport/dispose rule would make that very ill-advised. I'm not sure why. This is New Jersey, they will quite happily consider banning bare possession of unregistered body armor, but it's also New Jersey politicians, so maybe they just know so little about guns that they didn't realize there was a difference between 80% and 100%. And, traditionally, a state's law only applies to acts within that state.
And it's actually reasonable for some buyers to want to comply in this way: a New Jersey resident that wants to own a handgun legally could use a 'ghost gun' kit, never assemble or manufacture it in New Jersey out of a good-faith attempt to comply with the law, manufacture it in Pennsylvania and store it in a Pennsylvania locker once assembled. Because federal law prohibits the sale of a serialized handgun to a New Jersey resident out-of-state in almost every circumstance, and New Jersey is willing to restrict permits to purchase in-state based on bare speech or 'quality of character', they can't buy a normal handgun despite being perfectly law-abiding citizens, and this was a theoretically-legal alternative. Or they could buy one and stick it in a lockbox, under the (woefully optimistic) hope that New Jersey's laws about manufacture might change some day. Or they could buy one to resell later, or to only manufacture after they move out.
Reasonable Jurists
Which obviously couldn't stand by the time the courts got to it:
In our view, Paragraph k requires the State prove defendant: (1) purchased a ghost gun kit; (2) acted with purpose to manufacture or assemble a firearm; and (3) was not registered or licensed to manufacture or assemble a firearm in this state. The conduct stated in the first element, the ghost gun purchase, is distinct from the conduct stated in the second element, the actor's state of mind. Contrary to defendant's argument, nothing about the language of the statute requires the ghost gun purchase occur in New Jersey or that the first and second elements of Paragraph k constitute a single element.
Oliver, the defendant in that case, was prosecuted under the theory that the intent to manufacture happened in New Jersey, even if the purchase happened outside of New Jersey, and the manufacture never happened. The appeals court held that worked fine in 2025. Didn't even need to treat it like an attempted manufacture or attempted possession of an assembled gun. Partly because Oliver is an incredibly unsophisticated defendant who had already served his full sentence by the time of the appeal's oral arguments, partly because it's a New Jersey appeals court, what did you expect to happen?
This has some hilarious ramifications under its own logic: it's a published state appeals court opinion declaring that a state law prohibiting actions that's legal in other states, of actions only happening in other states, can still apply criminal punishment, and even an expansive read of its dicta only requires that the 'intent to manufacture' form in or involve the state of New Jersey in some way for a jurisdictional hook. I don't think the NJAG's office is going to start trying to prosecute people who permanently flee the state so they can possess an unserialized gun again, or who never enter the state but buy a kit with the stated intent of assembling it in New Jersey sometime in the future, but I probably shouldn't give him ideas, either.
Reasonable Consequences
But back to Vinroe, the other unsophisticated defendant.
He's obviously doomed.
In front of a fair court, there'd be a lot to discuss about accomplice liability in New Jersey requiring purposeful intent to promote or facilitate the offense, which many of the causes of action rely on. All of those legitimate, legal, or reasonably-perceived-as-legal uses of his products, even by New Jersey buyers, could matter in theory. But he's in New Jersey's Chancery system, it's incredibly deferential to the legislature in general and especially on firearms, it's a civil case so the burden of proof is low, and on appeal every factual question would be reviewed solely for clear error and every legal question will find the same state-favored lean. He still sells (and maybe ships) scopes in or near New Jersey under the business name Gideon Optics, so the injunctive relief about 'reasonable controls for gun-related products' isn't moot, even if it's against federal law for Vinroe to actually use the NICS system for anything but a gun, so the regulation is essentially a ban on sales into New Jersey written to exploit National Pork Producers. The actual legal protections against a state punishing actors for behavior that was legal where the act happened, like BMW v. Gore and State Farm v. Campbell, are very doctrinally narrow and mostly limit the state's attempts to pile on punitive damages even were they recognized. The court's logic about extraterritorial reach expands well beyond him, but Vinroe had e-mails and billboards in New Jersey, and even if they were advertising purely legal services to people perfectly allowed to buy them, that's enough to put him squarely under New Jersey's jurisdiction.
And the bulk of the financial liability would fall downstream of the public nuisance and negligence torts, which don't care about any of the above, and have been custom-written to evade the PLCAA, and which are entirely insulated from the narrowing principle in Smith & Wesson v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos (because there's a specific statute) and which SCOTUS has ignored in previous abuses like Soto v Bushmaster. Vinroe's settled before where his personal costs were an injunction to comply with the law, but the demands here would go far further. New Jersey's biggest desire is an injunction leaving a New Jersey cop looking over Vinroe's shoulder for the rest of his life ("injunctive relief as is necessary to prevent continuing harm") for all sales regardless of destination, but they probably also would be quite happy if he's beggared ("pay accrued and future costs that the State of New Jersey and any other person or entity incurs in abating the public nuisances", "monetary damages and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial, including interest thereon", "unjust enrichment and other restitution"). Because they're suing him in his personal capacity, and because they're plead as punitive damages with willful malice, they can't be discharged in personal bankruptcy, either.
The last big protection against these sort of crusading legal activism is the protection of his state of residence. Since Vinroe isn't a fugitive from justice, the legal obligation to extradite him much weaker; since public policy adds a ton of exceptions to the general full faith and credit clause, the legal obligation to actually enforce a judgment against Vinroe isn't strictly mandatory. There's other cases resting on these specific distinctions.
Back to Oliver again, though? He got pulled over by New York cops in cooperation with the Pennsylvania Attorney General, the same man that tried to ban 80% receivers by executive order, who is now Pennsylvania Governor.
So Vinroe has no hope, there. Pennsylvania isn't going to enact a Second Amendment shield law; they're more likely to start the enforcement before New Jersey asks. If Vinroe's planning ahead, he's put his finances into crypto and mattresses, and planning a move to Texas (if he trusts Paxton) or Missouri (if he's actually smart).
Reasonable Legal Tactics
Which leads to the other thread. Yes, court cases are generally painfully slow, but New Jersey's lawsuit against Vinroe here was filed this week, focusing on actions from 2022. There's a reason for that. They sued his companies, first, in 2023.
Indeed, the current lawsuit is heavily copy-pasted from that original complaint, to the point of neglecting several updates to the very cases it cites. The current NJAG at least fixed the transcription errors where New Jersey falsely quoted Vinroe in the same page it linked to the video of the real quote, though even with the corrections, it's still describing Vinroe's discussion of legal demand incentivized by bad Californian law as if it were encouragement to exploit illegal demand. But the obligation to put reasonable effort into investigating claims before filing is more a guideline than a rule; it doesn't matter here. The state's legal theory might depend on Vinroe specifically cultivated unlawful uses of his products, but that's not going to get a state lawyer in trouble for making not-exactly-factual claims in a complaint.
That previous lawsuit, in all fairness, looked as if it were a prolonged tantrum by an unsophisticated defendant. NSSF has a parallel suit against a similar New York law, which they've had to refile because New York disclaimed enforcement for months and then immediately sued Glock after SCOTUS punted, and they're still not going to touch this guy. And to be fair, it very likely was a tantrum: Vinroe, a man who had prioritized minimizing paperwork and record-keeping to the extent allowed by law, spent two years trying to fight simple discovery at every step, only to dissolve the companies in Chapter 7 bankruptcy after sanctions hit.
Of course, if he hadn't fought like a spoiled toddler, he'd have been required to give the New Jersey Attorney General a complete list of every person who bought a ticket from his gun shows, whether or not they'd purchased anything. Being a brat worked, and nothing else would have. You can't appeal a discovery order; just sanctions for non-compliance (and then, not the form of sanctions Vinroe was hit by, and the only nondiscretionary appeal would be to NJ state appeals courts). In the unlikely situation that a more persuasive and compliant Vinroe could have talked the Chancery judge into restricting the use of the submitting records, the records would still have ended up in the hands of the NJAG's office or a private legal office paid by New Jersey, which has not historically been a very strong wall of separation, and that 'order' would have been nothing more than a pinky swear.
I'm not going to pretend Vinroe was motivated out of the goodness of his heart: on top of being an obstinate son-of-a-bitch, the reputational effects on his businesses are pretty obvious. But if that tantrum is the primary thing keeping hundreds of New Jersey citizens from getting pre-dawn raids for the bare possession of goods that they reasonably believed were lawful to purchase and possess, and a few of those citizens from getting their skulls ventilated, the professional law-abiding perspective starts looking a lot less ideal.
That's only going to matter so long as he keeps the records private, and this lawsuit is going straight back to asking for them. The only real privacy is having a boating accident with a laptop, or a burn pile with receipts, and those are undeniably spoliation of evidence, certain to be caught and resulting in every adverse inference against him.
Every Reason For His Conduct Save One
... so, what's that actually do? More monetary damages to the man who's going to be stuck eating cat food the rest of his life if judgement attaches? An adverse inference by a chancellor at a bench trial already predisposed toward the state, for a fact pattern the state already has an on-record conviction that proves the existence case that's the only thing it really needs? A faster push to an injunction to comply with a manufacturing regulation that SCOTUS has already given the thumbs-up, and that the man has been complying with for four years? A harsher injunction for scope sales the rest of the damages have made sure he doesn't want to sell Hoppes #9 to anyone in the state? Criminal charges for a man who has every reason to treat the whole state as predisposed to arrest him on sight already?
The ramifications are morbid enough from what it's encouraging Vinroe to do, or for the specific case of Vinroe's buyers, but they extrapolate well beyond that, pretty quickly.
New Jersey is infamously strict about firearms law and scienter: "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril" comes from a court case where a man was given a firearm after winning a police target match, never using it, and then being held liable regardless of whether he knew it broke a law enacted a few years later. Coincidentally, New Jersey has recently demanded over a dozen FFLs provide records related to every Glock sale in the state since 2016. California has reclassified older model Glocks as machine-gun-convertible devices, prohibiting new sales; New York has a sale-or-transfer ban; Maryland adds manufacturing one to the list. New Jersey has a bill up to reclassify previously-lawful handguns as assault weapons.
Did you know that a state's subpoena power is not constrained to its geographic boundaries?
So there's a strong incentive to start treating with unreasonable men.
Other Fun Cases
ANJRPC finally dropped, in about the most expansive way possible. Would make all of the above rant hilariously irrelevant if its logic was applied in breadth, but probably going to be cut down to dicta by lower courts, and maybe result in New Jersey throwing assault weapons a grandfather clause.
Knife Rights v Bonta is about what you'd expect after Teter, but come for the funny VanDyke dissent, stay to see how many BDSM double entendres he can fit in while daring his colleagues to complain about it as if he were saying "swinging dicks" again.
Hawaii's state appeals court is trying to show hands at SCOTUS. Funny in a much more morbid way, in the sense that it takes an otherwise credible and serious discussion involving a pretty awful crime and then a possibly-wrong conviction that resulted in a long prison sentence... and then spends 72-78 trying to yell about SCOTUS being racist on entirely unrelated matters.
gattsuru
20hr ago
It's a little weird, and it depends on what model you're using, what you're doing with it, and your set up. The general rule that if you have to go under Q4, you're probably better going off with a smaller model, but that's... very approximate.
Raw parameter count alone doesn't make for a smarter model, especially across families or generations. PALM was a 540B model, for example, and it'll make mistakes that modern models in the 100B range won't. With more recent models, raw parameter count matters less for reasoning ability, but smaller models will have far more and larger gaps in knowledge. As an example, Gemma4-12B has no idea what the Burned Furs controversy was and assumed it was about someone having heatstroke, Gemma4-26B-A4B talked about a real-but-different event from 2016, and GLM-4.5-Air knew the actual thing and had a summary equivalent to the actual furry wikis histories.
Mixture-of-expert models can be thought of as having a bunch of specialized sub-models and a coordination engine, so they're usually dumber than their headline number for general purposes, but smarter than their A#B parameter number would suggest for specialized purposes.
Quantization generally doesn't make the model dumb, so much as it makes it wrong. Hallucinations, weird word choices, different languages or character sets, or 'obvious' errors tend to pop up. I've heard Q2 described as a model being drunk, and it's not wrong. This varies a lot depending on model and use, though.
Be aware that there's the separate concept of KV cache quantization. That's a runtime memory toggle, not part of the model. Most models run KV_Q8 perfectly and KV_Q4 reasonably, but Gemma and some reasoning-heavy models are a little more 'correct' at KV_Q16 and goes outright wrong at KV_Q4.
gattsuru
1d ago
A follow-up lawsuit received a different and more knife-unfriendly panel, upheld the law under the most expansive facial test possible, and was just denied en banc.
gattsuru
2d ago
I'll give a caveat that the really simple version, literally "within a few years of homosexuality becoming more accepted in the US", doesn't line up the timeline right. The progression from HIV to AIDS to fatality takes the better part of a decade, the initial infection spike predated the normalization of homosexuality, the initial infections were probably WWII-era transportation results (and that difference explains a lot about the limited benefits of a Cuba-like quarantine), and to make it work you'd have to have the tail end of the Reagan era as the break of the taboo against homosexuality, to the surprise of Bowers v. Hardwick.
There's a stronger version that focuses less on the stigmatization and more the actions, especially in a more mobile world. But then the stigmatization didn't work, and arguably concentrated the fuckpile into three or four major cities where enforcement of the stigma become impossible and the disease could run far more rampant.
And there's a steelman about injuries and disease more generally, although that turns the confusing bit from "effective antivirals" to "consistent access to clean running water, antibiotics, good diet, and cheap lube".
gattsuru
2d ago
I'm honestly fine with a heavy hand for some of the larger and more popular tags, and the smaller ones aren't as important.
Fair solution.
that said how does it take that long to change one word? Shouldn't that just be a mildly fancy SQL query?
You'd think, but there's a lot of uses where the slang term is the actual word and it shouldn't be changed (generally forms of outercourse), where it's used for an entirely different reason (there are four characters and three artists with the word in their name, mostly as cat references), and an absolute nightmare of spaces where sometimes it'd mean vagina exclusively and sometimes it means vulva exclusively.
Which is funny for a sex booru debating whether the vibrator is going in or going on for each of 4k posts, but might be more tedious when dealing with 100 indie games that may or may not have been mods at some point.
gattsuru
2d ago
Gemma4 is quantization sensitive enough that 31B-Q5 is probably the best bet, closely followed by Gemma4 26BA4B around Q4-Q6 where you want (much) higher speed and simpler questions. That said, Gemma4 is great for writing, mediocre for coding, and lackluster for complex spatial reference.
Qwen 3.x is really good for local coding, especially 3.6 35B-A3B and 3.6 27B. Depending on context length, you'll want either Q6 or Q5, make sure to get the MTP variant setup where available. If you just want to code, these two models honestly cover 99.9% of anything you'd be able to do locally with any practical single-GPU machine.
Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B (Q4-Q5) is a little weird and it's not as good for code generation as Qwen, but it does handle really big contexts for analysis better. It's a bit annoying to set up properly, though.
Llama.cpp can run GGUFs of models in mixed-inference mode, where some layers operate on the GPU and some run in system RAM. This can be slightly slower for MoE models (anything with AXB as a suffix), or much slower for dense models, but it lets you run stuff that'd otherwise be impossible. I've got GLM-4.5-Air running on a single nVidia 3090 and 128 GB system RAM at Q8... admittedly, at <5 tokens/sec. Still can be useful for things like draft review if you let it run overnight.
((If you're really desperate, you can even offload to NVME, but this is a very bad idea for drive wear reasons.))
The general rule-of-thumb is that even if you're willing to accept slow inference, quants under Q2 are usually useless and under Q3 are marginal at best, so this doesn't mean it's worth the bandwidth and drive space to go with something like GLM-5.2 at Q1 just because the parameter count is high. But there are some useful options, still. For your setup, some that might be worth evaluating:
- GLM-4.5-Air (355B A12B). Was the big standard for writing for quite some time, and while it suffers from quantization, it's still pretty useful.
- Solar-Open-102B A12B, probably Q4-Q5. Kinda general-purpose, nothing outstanding, but it's unusual for its size point and fits your specs pretty well.
- Mistral 3.5 Medium 128B, probably Q3-Q4. More meant as a strong reasoning code model, unfortunately not a great one, but it's the best Euro model and for language support that sometimes helps.
- MiniMax 2.7 (229B) at Q3 (or variants like IQ3_S). Not a huge fan of it, but has a following.
- DeepSeek V4-Flash (284B A13B) at Q3 or Q2.
- Qwen 3.6-27B at Q8 can be worth having around, despite the RAM offload. Most of the time the difference from Q5 isn't massive, but I have seen logic and parsing differences.
- GPT-OSS (120B, effectively A5.1B). This one's weird because of the native quants, but some people really like it and some people find it very meh.
gattsuru
2d ago
I'll caution that mixing different sizes of memory and generations of card means you're really going to want to stick with llama.cpp over vLLM, and be limited in hardware dtype support. For casual home use, that's fine, but there's a lot of talk about FP8, FP4, NVFP4, that just won't be worth it for you.
gattsuru
2d ago
Yeah, that's likely to impact the visibility, especially if you're solely looking at news coverage. RAIIN's numbers are survey-based and victim-oriented, which probably overcorrects, but it's still an oranges-to-grapefruit comparison.
gattsuru
2d ago
Some of the 'every couple of months' numbers come about because the same cases are re-reported at each stage of the legal process. The Preston Davey case has been front page news everywhere from the initial allegations to procedural crap to the convictions (legitimately! that's a cw: worst thing imaginable), and I wouldn't be surprised or upset when the killers eventual 'fell down a staircase' ends up news, too.
That said, the denominator for gay surrogacy are low enough that it's still concerning with small N. Fermi estimate, I'd give less than 80k children of surrogacy or adoption living with gay male parents, and probably well under 40k. The "safer biological father" metric is still compared to the 'get the heavy flamethrower' numbers for stepfathers, but while I'd give moderately high confidence we don't have 400 rapes of surrogate- or adopted-children by gay men in the last fifteen years, I can't say the same for 40. So whether they're riskier is going to depend on what you think the base rate for monsters is.
For the broader question, there's a lot of studies, but they're pretty useless for anything short of piranha-level problems. Tiny numbers, massively self-selected on top of the normal selection pressures for surrogates, and a lot of evidence of p-hacking for what's reported versus what isn't. And, because gay surrogacy was incredibly rare before 2010, you're measuring for effect in middle schoolers, using very crappy tools. Still, when the massive problems are "gay dad having to buy tampons for his daughter is even worse than divorced dad", you're at least not seeing some massive BPD or autism effect.
gattsuru
2d ago
Yeah, I'll second this. The gay guys letter saying that they 'wish' for an abortion when they thought the medical defect was likely to be serious (which I'd find that really objectionable) was ill-advised, and the surrogate's home birth decision was ill-advised, and neither of these seem to really matter for the actual lawsuit/arbitration, which is mostly about compensation for additional costs and fees. Which is its own very stupid mess and everyone involved needs to grow up, but it's not very specific to surrogacy in ways that the home birth or 'do you abort under X conditions' questions are.
gattsuru
3d ago
This means that anyone going to "/r/pot" ends up in whatever community we currently have blessed with the name "/r/pot", but a copypasted link gets that specific community even if it has since been renamed.
Copypaste seems survivable, but I'd be a little cautious about what that does if people manually type a link to a community. Admittedly, might not be a common enough use case to matter.
One thing I'm currently unsure of is how to tell when it needs actual attention; obviously any subreddit as big as /r/politics is going to have people constantly spamming "this subreddit is violating its own rules" reports.
Yeah. And a lot of the metrics that would be naively useful, like whether there's a bunch of splintering or a quickly growing competitor subreddit, are bad to make actual measures because Goodhart.
I'm actually not too concerned about custom templating, you can do sufficiently bad stuff with CSS that a real bad actor will find a way to be a nuisance anyway.
Fair point. I'm mostly thinking about the incompetent actor that needs ten hours of your tech support's time while you get a reputation for 'breaking' a sub for them putting a period in the wrong place. But that's what reset/load default buttons are for.
I'm actually not familiar enough to Tumblr to know what's going on here. What did happen?
For fandom reasons, Tumblr's pretty notorious for weird, overlapping, and very unintuitive tags, and despite that, those tags can take off aggressively. Sometimes this works out well, especially when it's got some coordination: #undertail has 'stuck' several years after Toby Fox proposed it, if anyone wants to see Asgore dad bod and some skeletons bumping uglies. Just as importantly, if they don't, they have to make a significant typo to get from #undertale to that one. But more often, you end up with (overlapping) acronyms, barely related content using snowclones, or bizarre memes (general news updates get tagged with SPN shipping names).
And then you get trolls that will spam every high-profile matter with unrelated content, either to screw up tag following, trying to push their own visibility, or to start fights.
Tumblr's user tagging system has been kinda reused as a way to out-of-thread comment, and it's tied to (thankfully only original) posts rather than to subreddit or forum equivalents, so some of those issues (eg, threads getting tagged 'lmoa' or 'yes') aren't as likely to show up in a sanely designed site. But they're illustrative.
I can also think of, uh, a site with a number in it that has a phenomenally thorough crowdsourced tagging system.
Yeah, the boorus have definitely made it work. That said, they've also typically had to do so with a very heavy hand and a lot of cruft: you probably don't have to worry about a four hundred line analysis to translate "pussy" to "vagina" (a literal two-year on-going process at e621, still incomplete), but I'd still plan early around a situation where a big fandom coalesced around thirty or so completely unrelated tags, some of which overlap with other intended uses of those same tags.
One is to just not worry about it. Reddit still has porn. Deal with it. I feel like porn is less of a problem for communities than it is for community managers without a spine, and I don't plan to be that person... Another is to have a "everything except the porn" URL, and then an "everything including the porn" URL, using the "everything except the porn" URL pretty much everywhere we can.
That's fair. I'd long-hoped that the old compromise of 'I won't make you see it, you don't make me see you whine' could last, and despite its difficulties, there's reason to hope it was rejected rather than really failed.
I guess I'm more motioning around the non-porn variants being a problem that will arise, if not one as immediately likely to result in legal threat.
gattsuru
3d ago
I'd be willing to throw some hours at this, though I'll recognize my area of focus is neither webdev nor the massively parallel http serve optimizations you'd need to have this scale.
Would they work?
My biggest immediate concern is the face value of "What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable?" That's a hard problem, and one with a lot of bad solutions. Reddit (and tumblr, and a lot of other social media) overloads the value of 'name'. It's both an identifier for access purposes, a community label, and a navigation and search aid.
So... let's pretend we have /r/trees (id: 101) and /r/pot (id: 102), which are humorously mixed up so that 101 refers to marijuana, and 102 is the horticulture of apple trees. The joke finally got old, and everyone agrees (note: this will never happen) that they need to be fixed so that /r/pot is attached to ID 101, and /r/trees is ID 102. What does that mean, from a technical level?
Is the new link themotte.org/r/101/this-is-a-pot-thread, and all that changes is what themotte.org/r/pot redirects toward? Because humans don't remember even small numbers well, and if the IDs are alphanumeric or GUID, they'll hate it. Or is it themotte.org/r/pot/this-is-a-pot-thread, and any previous links are updated automatically (that seems a database nightmare, and impossible for off-site links)? Or is the ID part of the thread identifier, and the submotte id only a navigation aid?
Who arbitrates when /r/politics has been taken over by your outgroup, can they fund the inevitable lawsuit or forced arbitration, and what's that look like to normal users?
Would people put up with it?
I think there's ways to sell it, but I think it matters heavily what you're selling. People like reddit, tumblr, twitter, yada, because it's hilariously easy to go from a community member to running your own minisite, and the pressure to do so first means that anyone on the fence either jumps or ends up drawn to an aggregator. Even though setting up a XenoForum site is just a couple hours of work, the
Part of your alpha is the direct website functionality and the aggregator work, but it also needs to be the services you're offering, which is one of the spots that Reddit/Tumblr/whatever have historically been the worst at. People get committed when they buy in, even small costs, and there's a lot of genuine services that are pretty valuable to users and that traditional social media has avoided.
But those services are their own fracture point: DNS means you can get ARFCOM'd, private messaging or live chat adds a lot of COPA concerns, custom templating rather than rawdogging CSS means support costs. So tradeoffs, there. And there's a very serious temptation to go full Discord and start upselling useless crap, at which point your customers hate you.
What am I missing?
Uh, some non-obvious problems:
Categorization. I'll take ARK as an example: you have /r/playark at the 'official' subreddit, /r/ark as the community subreddit, /r/survivetogether as the 'official' server listing, /r/playarkservers for community server listings, a handful of other subreddits for specific ports, yada, and that's just the stuff that's on reddit. And while ARK is particularly poorly thought out (badum tish), that's not really unique. /r/ffxiv has about thirty related subreddits, and maybe a dozen or so subreddits that are still about FFXIV that the /r/ffxiv moderators either don't want to highlight or actively loathe. This both pollutes the namespace, and it also means finding a list of everything ARK-related or FFXIV-related is extremely difficult, rather than a single existing page.
There's a couple solutions here. The namespace solution is the obvious coder one: r.games.ffxiv.<community> and r.games.ark.<community>, throw a page that lists them with some sort capability (and maybe allow management of that page by moderators for the recognized community), done. (uh, until you think about Prey 2017 vs Prey 2006). And then you think about literally anything other than video games, where the categorization gets weird fast. This is how usenet worked, but it's also why usenet ended up with things like alt.horror.werewolves having a bunch of furries and therians.
The other is tag-based. Still have the collision problem, but the bigger issue's whether you allow user tagging -- see tumblr's search for how that goes -- or have to do some work to manage it.
Separation. Even if you don't host images/video, you're going to get content you don't want available to every user, and you're going to get content that goes together like peanut butter and some of reddit's now-banned infamous subreddits. Smut's the most obvious case, here, but it's also the 'easiest'... and it's pretty telling that Reddit's NSFW marker keeps getting reused for everything from spoilers to gore to trychtophobia to spiders to a million other things.
Search. Good fucking god, reddit, what the everliving fuck.
Federation and the Transitive Property. I'm... not sure if this is a general problem, or one specific to the Mastodon implementation, but there's historically been a tendency to threat some forms of content as fundamentally corrosive, and I don't expect that to decrease. Technical solutions haven't historically been sufficient, in general because of reputation effects, in some cases (the baraag saga) augmented by legal concerns.
gattsuru
4d ago
This seems a little prone to presentism. On top of the disclaimers you had to throw in, Lyndon B Johnson famously would wave his dick at reporters and got the FDA to pretends eggs were unhealthy just to paper over inflation. Nixon was Nixon. Ford started off the whole 'pardon the last guy' trend. Reagan had the exact same untrustworthy sack-of-shit empty-suit cargo cult leader stuff pointed at him, continuing well after he left office. Clinton interrupted national television to disclaim whether he, in fact, had sex with that woman, enough of a cult of personality that he got thrown into random cartoon intros, and a variety of hilarious corruption that at best gets the disclaimer 'not proven'. Dubya was Dubya. Obama's cult of personality has his defenders insist today that his worst scandal was a tan suit, after literal court settlements and his attorney general being held in contempt of congress (by a bipartisan vote). Biden Purged as or more aggressively.
I'll give you Carter, who was merely incompetent in his areas of expertise.
Trump's a culmination of the long-standing paean against democracy, but he's far from a novel or extreme one. The institutions hadn't rotted by coincidence.
gattsuru
4d ago
Part of the problem, as someone who also dislikes the man, is that there does genuinely seem to be a difference between those who dislike him on principles, and those who dislike him as a principle. Trump Derangement can be a cop-out, but there's far too many people who start with long lists of new superweapons they want to bring, a long list of supposedly unique grievances that justify their use, and then after the parallels or exact precursors to those grievances are shown to have been common or applauded, the need to launch the nukes remains. That's been true from Trump v. Anderson to the campaigns against the vulgarity of the office to grifting.
... which, uh, raises the obvious question. There's a pretty large number of other world leaders for whom each and every one of those criticisms applies, and a larger number of polities that have been either infected by or been the morass from which those leaders arose.
gattsuru
4d ago
I don't want to rest my position on that, specifically, since involuntary commitment and medication are rare (and a little unprincipled), while TheSchism or anti-arson or anti-discrimination laws were all supposed to be consistent and universalist by their own terms. But Nicholas Decker and Ken White's posts are within the bounds of stuff that has historically gotten a lot of negative attention, including warrants or arrests on their own, and when paired with other behavior or insufficient deference, escalated to commitments or medication.
Unfortunately, that sorta stuff usually doesn't get much attention (tbf, probably because it's not a great thing to publicize for either the nutjob's sake post-medication / calm down time, or for the general populace given contagion risks, in the cases it does turn out to be serious), so examples tend to be jank. So if you want a clear-cut example where it's clearly defensible speech, I'm not going to have one. All I've got are people about as crazy as Ken White.
gattsuru
4d ago
You're still turning a hypothetical into a clear conclusion that it "didn't seem to based meaningfully off of his speech", which is pretty clearly untrue given that he wouldn't have gotten a visit but for his speech.
And maybe that's still a strict scrutiny-passed tots-reasonable thing for police to do. Or at least close enough that everyone involved gets qualified immunity, and the courts never get around to deciding whether it's 'clearly established' one way or the other. But then we have Ken "violence against not just the government doing it and the private people joining the violence but the soft-target think-tank, media, and academic aparatus that empowered it becomes morally and philosophically justified" White, who already has a history of past mental health episodes, past gun advocacy, and who has promoted the belief that he's being personally targeted by the current administration.
No it's not the new standard for true threat, but it is a good showcase of why our currently existing standard is so high. People say edgy things all the time without doing violence.
I'm asking whether it's your standard of evidence. Because I can find a lot of people who were involuntarily committed and then, after release, didn't do anything violent; that's a far more common case than serious judicial review.
My point is that people say edgy things all the time without doing violence, and find either the feds or cops at their door with a fancy piece of paper signed by a judge. Not all the time! But again, Ken White isn't some random preteen being edgy on a Fortnite voice chat; trying to reason from the median case is pretty misleading.
And it's not just that he didn't get that noncon overnight stay with the fancy extra-long jacket sleeves, but that no one seems to be acting like they were even worried about it being a risk.
gattsuru
5d ago
but the content of his speech doesn't seem to have been a deciding key element as I highlighted above.
"Even if Mr. Raub's statements were protected speech and a contributing factor to Mr. Campbell's determination that Mr. Raub must be detained, it was not dispositive."
[Emphasis added.]
"didn't seem to based meaningfully off of his speech"
Hm.
Given that to the best of my knowledge they haven't committed any violence despite the length of time that has gone by, it definitely suggests their statements did not indicate serious intent to harm ala a true threat.
Oh, is that the new standard? Or is it just the defense you're going to jump to before insisting that only the clearest and most unilateral court ruling counts for anyone else?
gattsuru
6d ago
Did you just respond to a post where I linked to an actual opinion by linking to a summary of that opinion, in direct-to-print format, which you yourself further misleadingly summarize (from "Even if Mr. Raub's statements were protected speech and a contributing factor to Mr. Campbell's determination that Mr. Raub must be detained, it was not dispositive." to your "didn't seem to based meaningfully off of his speech")? And all to counter an argument I didn't make, since I don't think any human reader would expect me to think Ken White or Nicholas Decker to be harmless or non-paranoid schizophrenic.
It's also not a 'first' example given that it's after Schoolcraft.
You're not doing a great job denying the "powered by a laptop-grade LLM" allegations.
The funny part is that I agree with Lukianoff on the Bushart case. If the central examples of pro-Kirk overstep had involved jail or police presence, I'd understand and empathize with the response.
But it's not, and not just in the sense that Bushart is the most extreme abuse.
Involuntary commitment to political opposition has the easy, uncontroversial, and high-profile example of Adrian Schoolcraft, though it didn't last 37 days, so I'll give Lukianoff points for stamina there.
Involuntary commitment for pure political speech is one of those places where most of the examples you're going to reject as unverified because it wasn't examined by the courts, but for a good example that was and where the courts later found "the petition [was] . . . devoid of any factual allegations", Brandon Raub. To be fair to Virginia, he was pretty nuts! To be less fair, my comparison is to Ken White.
Involuntary medication... the TopHattingson example is noncentral enough that I'm only going to give it so we don't have someone interject, but yes, I'll admit I'm riding heavily on the 'other contexts' bit, there. Lower courts abusing involuntary medication to the point of violating the law because someone is just really annoying happen.
So if you want a mea culpa, yes, I don't have a good, clear, court-reviewed example of involuntary medication motivated solely by conservative-tinged speech.
EDIT: for solitary confinement, I'll just quote that right-wing nutjob Elizabeth Warren. Solitary confinement might have been appropriate for most J6ers that were confined pre-trial, but the blanket policy was clearly motivated by their politics.
gattsuru
7d ago
Calls for government to do something.
No, noticing that the government did not do something that it happily did in other contexts.
Literally government.
Not only does California have a law requiring private businesses to recognize the free speech of their employees, and the NLRB require private businesses to recognize free speech rights about working conditions, the agency review held that federal anti-discrimination law instead required businesses be able to fire him.
Yes, to be clear, I'm not accusing the moderators here of a political bias on fedposting; I'm highlighting that we're worried about it, and zero of the left-fedposty sites are or had reason to be.
gattsuru
7d ago
I think it's a perfectly reasonable decision on Zorba's part. I even think it's a perfectly reasonable calculation on the part of progressive-leaning forum.
I'm critiquing the process, not the people reacting to the result.
Do you have an example?
A central one. As a more prospective one, see here.
(edit: improved context on first link to include where it was explicitly called fedposting)
gattsuru
7d ago
I'm saying that not-left-aligned organizations and groups have to be extremely cautious about tolerating fedposting because they have clear examples of lawfare and other destructive outside forces targeting them, often successfully. Left-aligned organizations don't fear that, and they have gotten away with fedposting without evidence of having to even resist any lawfare, and it cost them zero support among self-described 'normies'.
However, it's quite clear that saying that someone deserved to die is not fedposting.
The moderators here have included far less overt advocacy than "His killer committed a just act." as fedposting.
Not quite. It's a visual novel, but it's a lot more game-side of visual novels (failure modes, bad ends, some basic minigames, a meta bit where using out-of-game contexts matters). I won't pretend it's some great and mechanically deep game, but it's not the schlock that DQ was.
And in terms of story, it's favored among the tumblrite set because it's a metaphor for mental illness, but only one (short-lived ) character is specifically depressed. The rest are more psychotic, and the actual narrative for them is much more externally driven as to why they're going increasingly nuts. Will admit there's a very self-referential deconstructive bit, though it's less gooner or anti-gooner and more Undertale-like as a comment about video games in general.
If you want a plot synopsis, the Random Encounters song covers it in less than five minutes (and is very catchy).
I... didn't play every route (again, not a great game, I'm not in its target audience), but I don't remember seeing that quote, and it'd be a little weird in-context -- especially in the middle of the game, thesurviving girls are definitely not just the cute bits floating around dereferenced.
I'm also not sure those are official updates. DDLC had a big redraw thing (that got some controversy) in the COVID era, and some pretty slop ports, but I'm not seeing any talk on their reddit about anything new coming down or any new hires. I didn't think there was much left for them to do; the paid version already had some goofy 'explained too much about the setting' content thrown in as a 'secret'.
I agree that it's weird art, even by the modern standards (or even old Excel Saga standards).
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