gattsuru
53m ago
We don't know they're fine with it; we just know that they think it's the best strategic choice. Which is probably true, since they don't have a friendly administration on the other side of the lawsuit.
But there's another bit I'll highlight. The time from April 20, 2021 to February 27, 2023. Can you guess whether the college staff was fired for her speech longer, or shorter, than Kelly?
gattsuru
58m ago
Nope.
But there's a lot of places it was tolerated, and not only did their management have no concerns about lawfare, more importantly, literally zero have shown up in the news having been hit by or having to resist that lawfare. There's no sequel to ARFCOM; there's no even a sequel to 'Discord Channel Shut Down for making fun of George Floyd'.
This isn't perfect information, just like there are limits to our ability to extrapolate from the lack of Brendan-Eich-facepunching aimed at modern day interleft-battles. It's still information.
gattsuru
1hr ago
Clearly whatever the result is, Hogge is fine with it and did not wish to pursue further.
Hogge's the lawyer, giving lawyer-speak for 'I can't even say I won'. Kelly got his job back, so he's not complaining and definitely not doing it somewhere where the department could get him fired for doing it, but there's no evidence he's come out of things with a million or even a hundred thousand bucks.
In the US, it absolutely does.
Party presentation rule, anyone?
It does a lot against warrants.
I would be fascinated to see you explain what procedural protections are present in an ex parte warrant hearing in front of magistrate judges, where police and prosecutors don't even have a duty to present exculpatory evidence. The standard of probable cause means that even a warrant focusing on arguably protected speech is fair game for that 'arguably' result in a search warrant to be evaluated post-ante at trial, and that's before we get to the continuing effort by lower courts to water down Brandenburg.
gattsuru
1hr ago
Amadan has specifically and repeatedly noted concerns about a possible warrant to Zorba as a major motivating factor. Whether it's "particularly likely" enough for you to let it count, it's clearly enough for an actual person who actually hosting a website to care -- but only for one political allegiance.
gattsuru
12hr ago
Welcome to the difference between public sector jobs and private sector jobs.
In case you missed the reference
Because their speech is protected from the government under the 1st amendment. They did not make a True Threat.
That stops a conviction (maybe). It does less than nothing against a warrant. Moderators here have been Very Concerned about warrants for speech that would easily avoid Brandenberg.
gattsuru
13hr ago
There's been a minor news story recently after a teacher got well over a million bucks in settlement money, and there's a strong argument she shouldn't have gotten fired originally... and then you think about everyone who got fired and didn't get anywhere near the compensation or an order of magnitude under that, didn't get their jobs back, and didn't get the fawning political coverage, for something far less charged than saying the target of a political assassination (and his family!) deserved it.
But what really gets me is the dog that doesn't bark. Nicholas Decker's "When Must We Kill Them" (answer: when he wanted the substack revenue) wasn't accompanied by an involuntary commitment and a warrant; PopeHat's complaining about a Bluesky ban rather than the solitary confinement and involuntary medication after he called for people to kill Musk. Trace is back from his internship and has a lot to say, and can't quite get his dander up about the forum he built because TheMotte didn't respect the humanity of spree criminals and arsonists can't reflect on the humanity of a guy who talked. There's no serious investigation of all those Tesla arsons, nor are we getting lawsuits by people fired for supporting the Tesla arsons. Damore isn't independently wealthy; he got judges informing people the law required his speech be infringed. William Kelly probably got his job back, and if he got anything else it was a rounding error, for 25 USD in Rittenhouse donations.
We know what happens when people do things that progressive leadership oppose. It's not a surprise when it didn't happen here.
gattsuru
14hr ago
What's the last update you heard in the news about Goode or Pretti? Or is the slop diagnosis something that's only goes on direction, or only means something one direction?
gattsuru
22hr ago
Dugan was sentenced to a 5000 USD fine. Her attorneys claim to plan an appeal.
gattsuru
1d ago
It's always plausible for the military to be lying, but helicopters are genuinely dangerous even in noncombat scenarios, and four days of search would be a pretty expensive cover story. There were also three survivors, which... isn't incompatible with hostile military action and isn't anywhere near the size of the general coordination you'd need to keep the story secret, but sounds closer to 'mechanical problem' than 'rocket fire' from a gutcheck.
gattsuru
1d ago
The nuclear warfare option is something from his time on Kik. The platform has a bad reputation for underage users, and while I'd understand the argument that what's been shown so far is much worse than waving his dingaling at a 17-year-old, there's both political and philosophical reasons the latter might be more of a showstopper.
But on top of the question of whether that exists, the trouble is the old "Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across". Nothing from this point onward is more dangerous to a Senator than to a random loser; any further threat is just another layer of double-or-prison.
(maybe literally; the statute of limitations in Maine for rape is 20 years)
gattsuru
2d ago
The more plausible failure mode is just that SpaceX writes a report, the FAA looks at it, and then says "more", rinse and repeat. That's a really common failure mode for environmental law, but the FAA (generally through DAR/DER) is pretty well-known for it, too.
gattsuru
3d ago
It's a weird version of the story to tell themselves.
There's a version of post-rat that buy into woo because it's woo. There's a version of the normal rat that buys into woo because oh there's there's really fascinating and counterinuitive and probably-fake theory but it's a minor cost and there goes the Pascal's Wager; that's the popsci version of Roko's Basilisk. There's a version of the normal rat that buys into woo just because they miss the woo; arguably, the original HPMOR-era fascination with Kahnneman fits here.
But that's not what happened, here.
Leverage's people seem, at least from the summary here, to have purchased into the central example of a thing that their mainstay texts specifically highlight as not working. It's like a Christian worshiping a bronze bull, or a tech guy being happy about Microsoft's business practices.
Of course, SBF bought a concussionball endorsement for his 'EA'-themed organization, and that was also a central example of bad charity.
gattsuru
3d ago
At least in the United States, the specific rule is :
gattsuru
3d ago
I'd caution that while this might work as a fermi estimate, it's got some pretty rough assumptions on both sides.
Trivially, there's a lot of ways to like dick that won't require a PrEP prescription. You can get surveys with numbers showing up to 50% of gay men on PrEP, but there's a big asterisk when you look at the survey methodology and find it's mostly venue-based. That's useful from an epidemiological perspective, but it's about as hard as you could crank down on the selection bias effect without being seen as a joke.
The costs are the other side. Truvada's gone generic. It did cost a lot for a while, but now it's about 300-400 USD/year at retail pricing, and bulk agreements probably drop that further. The injectable PrEPs aren't generic, though, and non-generics are where the big numbers fall out from. I don't know how much of a breakdown exists on where the average consumer falls on that band.
gattsuru
3d ago
It's also just an awkward fit. There's been several cases where the 'downloadable content' was just an unlock code for part of the game that was physically on the disc but not available to players, with the Protean character from Mass Effect 3 being an early and high-profile example. And these days you run into the problem the other direction: ARK has been dumping a ton of downloadable content that's free-as-in-beer, but charging for parts of the gameplay instead. If you want to get your ass eaten by a pyromane, the free Ragnarok map has that coming as a default. If you want to actually tame the pyromane, though, you gotta shell out five bucks, and you won't get the notice until the tame fails, either.
I'm not that opposed to paid cosmetics, and from a pure gameplay perspective the current balance is roughly better for the consumer in general. Ragnarok is easily a 100+ hours play if you like ARK at all (admittedly, a big caveat), while the Pyromane is kinda a gimmick tame that's more annoying than useful. I think the drakelings are worse, but they're still not that bad compared to the rest of the balance mess that is ARK. But it still feels like a really bad equilibrium that we fell into, rather than a good result we're happy with. At minimum, even the best-case situations like FFXIV have had friction between the paid cosmetic sphere and the modding community, and most cases drift from that promise pretty fast.
That's more fair. The more serious justification's that we've had a number of topics, both political and non-political, where a common rejoinder was that an individual small case was not meaningful in some way, the large case not representative, and the attempt to connect them after being 'called out' on it mere retrofitting. Where my examples clearly stand on their own, I'll write them individually, cfe 3d Printers or Legos or furry cancelation. I'm not sure that the fair booth example would be worth a standalone post even in the Bare Link Repository era.
I also specifically don't want to be the type of person that optimizes for interactions. I'm probably overcompensating on 'don't get braincored', but the failure mode is dire enough I'd rather risk that.
But fair. And there's a good example coming out of Louisiana that might serve as a test case, if I have time to write it up later this week.
If you think something's a Gish Gallop, show at least one claim that the "gish gallop" made that is false. If you think you can show a post is bad, respond to the post. If you're making a top-level post to complain about another poster's behavior, ping them.
If you think a post has no through-line, at least try think harder about it than a 12B quantized LLM (Gemma4-12B). I actually ran this test before posting (caveat: deleted original chat, this is remade now) so as to make sure I was being sufficiently clear.
If you have good examples of the same process starting from lies from the right, I'd be interested in examples, but everything I could find was either fairly distant history (Iraq War), very arguable (exactly how true the 'defund the police' mechanism was versus not continuing increases), or just stupid (peace in middle east).
gattsuru
5d ago
I would not call that photo strong evidence. If you want to convince me that the coating is failing in many places due to vandalism, a photo of a person kneeling next to the pool with a backpack and what may very charitably be a knife is not going to cut it.
Hm.
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect,
The alternatives are, yes, quite plausible. I am not, pointedly, claiming that Trump's position must be clearly correct, or even reflect a good model of the problem. I'm definitely not going to propose that he's competent at anything.
I am, however, noticing that quite a lot of news coverage is insistent that there's no evidence in this case, and quick to imply that there's no plausible world in the general case, where people would damage public property just to spite Trump.
gattsuru
6d ago
Some of the weirdness is downstream of the contest parameters; I'd put some effort toward a short story using a recursive writing approach, but by the time it was remotely good prose, it wasn't clear it complied with the rules. Had similar issues with Phailyoor's challenge.
Some of it is definitely a toolset problem. The models themselves overwhelmingly aim toward <1k word 'chunks', and community efforts to bypass that like WriteLonger are very much band-aids. It's relatively easy to throw together a scaffold of scenes that interlace together, but you still get mini-climaxes at the end of each prompt and that gets grating fast. Claude tries to do something under the hood to hide the problem, as do some agentic setups, but they seem to do so by just gluing segments together. Whether you do that automatically or manually, it still results in unpleasant crescendos because the model thinks the scene or segment ends in places the tension is supposed to be rising. Some prompt scaffolds to give better control over pacing only squeeze that further together.
Like conventional art, there's a big problem where even most writers don't know the technical terms for what they're trying to do, and unlike conventional art with diffusers, writing in the Style of X doesn't work very well, and anything else takes a ton of input tokens. I've had some limited success by giving a handwritten example as input and then transferring the characters and background with them, but it's still not good, and it doesn't scale to longer works.
Context remains an issue. It's amazing that models can get into the 1-million-range, but few do well there. That's more of an issue with long-form writing -- this story isn't very good, sometimes in painful ways because it's close to it, but the prose quality goes from merely purple to outright blah by 30k tokens -- but it does still mean you can't just throw a hundred thousand words of setting and style bible into most models and get anything useful out.
Weirdly, the models are great at editing, both broad strokes and catching narrow typos, including for smaller models and sometimes even for genres that should be really hard for a token predictor to understand. The outcomes aren't always in the form I like, but it's usually nothing awful, or even as bad as the original prose. But you can't just cycle the same text through an LLM with a prompt of "do it better": on top of the token costs, it tends to just get set in cycles around a small subset of problems.
I keep hoping it'd be possible to get something better out of a more complicated script-based approach rather than a solely agentic one, but results have been mixed, and you end up with a thirty-page deep list of checkboxes for the models to review over and over.
gattsuru
6d ago
That's a fascinating strategic analysis about Shapiro, but your three prongs miss the one he actually took: he pretended neutrality, caused problems, and then lied about what the problems were. If he had been genuinely neutral or refused to participate entirely, he still could have gotten the loving tongue-bath from TNR and the leftists. He just would have had to admit what he did, and show responsibility.
He didn't. That means something, especially if he's pretending to be the adult in the room.
I'm less sure on the liner material. That's a plausible model, but it's dependent on the application here being 'normal', and there's a lot of ways it just isn't because of scale. The metal plates in particular are a spot that the normal analysis wouldn't cover because they didn't need to exist, and would survive normal stresses, but would vulnerable to sabotage. Polyurea really isn't that scratch- or cut- resistant on its own, and the reason things like bubbling matter so much is because it does propagate from weak points, especially while the underlying primer is still curing.
But even if vandalism is possible as a major cause for the liner problems, it's compatible with also having poor application, and either option doesn't explain the algae blooms.
So... why is it so important to insist something with photographic evidence is not just implausible as a sole cause, but completely without evidence? Literally the next day someone got indicted for it!
gattsuru
7d ago
That's complicated.
About a third of normal USAID funding was just outright 'soft' stuff, as a program category: economic outreach, democracy, education, 'hearts and minds'. It wasn't necessarily used for bad purposes, but it could get assigned to outright random stuff, and no small part of it was outright democracy-as-liberal-favoritism. And it could be pretty overt, so this is where you get eg anti-Orbon funding passed through as fortifying 'free speech'. That said, while there were a lot of degrees of freedom with this funding, it wasn't infinite. That's why the claimed Ukraine plot supposedly involved trying to get a construction grant and then cycling the money around: they couldn't just write 'fuck Trump' on the grant application. On the other hand, oversight is incredibly weak, so 'ask for a giant construction grant and don't do anything with construction' is more plausible than it sounds at first glance. And some of the democracy, rights, and governance work is just 'regime change'.
Another two-thirds were at least ostensibly focused on central program targets: HIV care, TB medicine, nutrition, anti-malaria efforts, critical infrastructure, that sort of thing. Some of that's required by statute to go directly to medicine buys or palliative care, but it's mostly the stuff that USAID proponents wave as the goals of the program. So from those headline numbers, it's most legitimate charity on top than sketchy slush fund underneath.
((There's also a few years of Ukraine-specific funding; it's both far enough out of scope and unusual that it's even harder to break down.))
... but it's not clear how real the headline numbers are. There's a lot of HIV care funding that went to, as an example, LGBT de-stigmatization efforts. There's an epidemiological argument, since it's hard to get people to go to a testing clinic if they're going to be lynched afterward, but it's also conveniently the exact political target that a lot of the program leads wanted, regardless of how much of "don't get patients lynched" they actually needed and how much was setting up posters for a cause they supported.
And virtually every USAID program was metered and scored on gender equity. Even for core programs, it's hard to tell how many were using actual outcomes as a metric, and how many were like NASA, where it'd be nice to have a working spaceship or a functional bit of infrastructure, but the program is more focused on making sure spending got to the right people and anything else was a plus-up.
The uglier question is deaths. Most USAID slush fundy stuff was just inefficient, or, at worst, one of those matters where the negative ramifications were three or four steps removed: even if USAID funding to an anti-Orbon movement precedes a riot, it's not really responsible for the deaths. Giving an al-q affiliate five million bucks isn't direct, and you could theoretically imagine counterfactuals where it doesn't matter, but it's a lot closer.
The difficult one is whether a lot of USAID money made its way back to political causes directly. People are making a lot of hay out of DNC funding shortfalls and a stunning drop in support for left-wing politicians in many parts of The Global South, and that's some evidence, but it has enough alternative explanations that it still feels reaching to me.
gattsuru
7d ago
GCODE specifically describes the (sequential commands controlling) motions of the machine, and a natural language description of even a trivial print would be huge, but from a technical perspective it would work. STLs (or SLDPRTs/IPTs/whatever) would be more practical.
I'd... be very skeptical that a patent like that would be accepted, but not a patent expert, so who knows.
That said, it still runs into the EAR problem. The translation convertor should give a level of protection from being 'readily' convertible, but it's not like STLs themselves were genuinely ready-to-print functional code, and BIS thought they were close enough for government work. And if BIS didn't think the natural language description counted, you could just publish it directly.
It's not publicized often, but USAID spending getting redirected or misused toward literal terrorists happens a decent bit. It's not clear how big the scope of the problem is, because oversight is hard in the best of circumstances and the highest-risk areas are also the places with other forces making oversight much harder (UN involvement and corresponding stonewalling, partial evacuation of US non-essential personnel).
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'.
The moderators here have included far less overt advocacy than "His killer committed a just act." as fedposting.
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