gattsuru
1d ago
I didn't claim Vaxry is blameless or looks good, or even that his faults were merely insufficient empathy. From my first post:
And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks.
But there's a bit of a problem.
There's a paradox of tolerance issue here, banning is not the only way to exclude bright people from your community. You can also do it just by being an asshole to them. Some people are brilliant assets that turn dumb if you start overtly politically attacking them. Some people need to be able to express the "nasty" things they believe to be true to think properly. This is a fundamental competing access needs issue that you can't just gloss over by never banning anyone.
As a nitpick, Popper's Paradox of Tolerance wasn't using 'tolerance' to mean 'things that progressives like today', but the simple possibility of open debate and discussion.
But more critically, few if any people who try to bring this more expansive non-Popperian version forward do so in any even-handed way. Vaxry's Discord isn't part of freedesktop.org. Vaxry is not accused of behaving poorly in FreeDesktop.org spaces, and I've not been able to find any evidence of such, whether because he's autistic enough to follow their rules in their spaces, or just from lack of opportunity.
You may say that there's a competing access need, but the modern-day variant turns into an insistence that the competition is over. If Vaxry and his cohort can't "express the 'nasty' things they believe to be true to think properly" in a Discord and github issue specific to their project, they can't be 'acerbic' anywhere -- and that's very clearly the target that the FreeDesktop.org held. In that view, the choice is between 'banning' people in the sense that they feel excluded and turned around because of things they found by digging at depth into it, and just directly actually-banning people. The first group will always be able to expand their ranks and justify greater interdiction.
And, to be blunt, the direct-bans get no small amount of people knowing that they'll be excluded by assholes, anyway. It's just that the banhammer-wielders are sort of asshole that the people in charge like.
gattsuru
3d ago
Most projects don't really have enough people for complex structures. I keep pointing to MinecraftForge, and while the commit log is even less good of a record than normal because some parts were ported from other version control, it gives a good idea of how much Zif's Law applies even for these structures. To the extent they end up with multiple maintainers at all, it's much more often to solve the 'hit by a truck' problem than any serious planning.
There's been a few efforts to come up with more robust structures, but I'm skeptical that they're trying to solve the right problem, nevermind actually having a solution. Given that the FOSS ones I can name are QuiltMC and Rust, this is... not the most encouraging endorsement (and Quilt specifically had a big snafu over their original keyholder).
Linus Torvald has lieutenants, and in practice who you draw matters a lot, but in theory and at the edge case he's got veto power over everything and anything that catches his attention. Python has a five-person lead council since van Rossum retired in 2018, but the only way to cycle the leadership is to wait. Occasionally you'll see corp-adjacent groups try to have reviewers selected from other parts of the same project or even from a set who just do reviews, but then the people reviewing the PRs aren't really tied to the code it's changing.
The bigger problem's that the overwhelming majority of FOSS contributors don't stay in any place for that long, especially when it's not their own project, and those that do tend to be a little obsessed.
gattsuru
3d ago
For the most part. I'm not sure whether Vaxry overestimated his 'power' -- from the e-mail chain, he pretty clearly saw the RedHat dev's starting e-mail as absolutely showing the FreeDesktop team was ready and willing to ban his ass, knew they could and would, and he seemed more concerned that FreeDesktop was going to try to take over as much of the Hypr space as possible. And while he worked on FreeDesktop's git, it wasn't his community, or really even a community given how much of a kludge any communication around the FreeDesktop-specific areas tended to be.
FreeDesktop could always fork Hypr, and Vaxry could (and since, has) forked wlroots, and FreeDesktop was already using a lot of his tools; that's what FOSS means, to a large extent.
The problem's more that this fractures an (admittedly small) portion of the FOSS community: even if we don't get the whole 'bad person touched this thing' reaction, there's definitely people on the "start looking at how they want to see their world curated" chain. A lot of things like 'many eyes make all bugs shallow' or 'working with the best ideas on the planet' start falling apart once you start banning people from your Issues and PR pages.
gattsuru
3d ago
Is Free Desktop important?
FreeDesktop is the space (literally a GitLab instance, may heaven have mercy on their souls) where people build the tools that almost all Linux desktop environments run on, including X11 (the user interface drawing framework that underlies every conventional desktop from GNOME to KDE to Cinnamon to ChromeOS) and Wayland (which is what Linux is starting to move toward as a replacement). So it's about as relevant as Linux On The Desktop is, for better or worse.
What's hyprland?
Hyprland is technically 'just' the window compositor (lies-to-children version: stitches applications together into a function desktop 'screen'), but it's more generally used as a name for the desktop environment produced by mixing it and other pieces together, like GNOME or KDE would be. This is a quick video showing just how it looks, and this some of the different behaviors. Essentially, it's designed for rapid but space-optimized window control, whether by mouse or keyboard, and management of many virtual desktops easily.
Hyprdots is a more fully-featured mix of it and those other pieces.
It doesn't have a huge userbase, even by not-Chromebook Linux standards, but it's easily the most popular Wayland-specific desktop environment. The Discord has a 10k members, for what little that's worth, and most users probably only bother with the discord if something breaks and they can't fix it.
Is Vaxry important?
Vaxry is the founder and lead developer for hypr, along with having done some work for wl-roots, which is a library many projects use to simplify common Wayland requirements. He's not the only person working on hyprland, but the commit comparison looks like this, and the other hypr stuff is even more lopsided.
This ban won't prevent him from writing further hyprland work, but it will block him from writing any pull requests or even issues for Wayland or wl-roots, and the broader response will make hypr-like conventions or projects harder to adopt, even when correct.
A Linux Cancellation
Vaxry, the creator and maintainer of hyprland, has been banned from FreeDesktop.Org and its member projects.
Background and Dramatis Personae
The Linux pipeline to an actual desktop is complicated and made of a bunch of moving parts, buried under the actual GUI itself, following the dual Linux philosophies of having everything do one task well(ish), and filling technical discussion with as many three-letter acronyms as possible. A historically important one is the X Window System, also known as X11 or xorg, but is both long in the tooth, covers an unusually wide area of ground for a Linux component, and is incredibly janky. While incredibly important for normal desktop users, the system has a long and bizarre history, with long periods of strife or minimal development: the current FreeDesktop space is technically just an independent github competitor for Linux desktop-specific development, but in practice there's a lot of RedHat Linux people in high places, in no small part because RHEL is the biggest way to be a linux dev and actually make money from it.
In recent years, many X11 developers have moved over to create a new version that better separates responsibility between the display protocol and everything else, along with covering a number of places that X11 just made bad mistakes in 1990 has been stuck with since, and this has turned into Wayland (and some related libraries like wl-roots), developed on the FreeDesktop.org gitlab. It's not quite ready for prime-time, especially for tasks like gaming with a nVidia card, but it's getting pretty close, and there are already some capabilities (eg, multiple displays with different refresh rates) that are a single text-file mod away in Wayland and you'd have an inconsistent time with in X11.
While some existing desktop environments, such as KDE, have worked to directly port over from X11 to Wayland, many Linux devs have taken the opportunity to try Weird and New things, instead, either because the need to develop several components previously internal to X11 seems like the best opportunity for such novel task, or because they're Linux devs. One branch consists of tiling window managers: while not new to Linux (or even Windows, they've taken some increasing popularity in the Wayland environment. Two of the most popular current ones are Hyprland and Sway. Though I'll caveat that popular here means you can find people using it: there's reason it's hard to find packages for them outside, and even harder to find prebuilt distros with it enabled. (Manjaro has a Sway community iso, in case you want to make three bad decisions at once.) Both are independently developed from FreeDesktop, though dependent on the Freedesktop-built wl-roots library.
Hyprland was founded by the psuedoanon Vaxry. I've described it in other contexts as catgirl thighhigh, and even the official github glamour shots are very clearly within that ethos, with many of the community themes being even more so. You could force it to look Professional, but the defaults provide a bizarre combination of mouseless window management, varied and sometimes obnoxious keyboard combinations, a fully text-based and live-updated config system, strong support for transparency and multiple desktops virtual or otherwise, and highly performant and kinda goofy animations (and fucking default-on rounded window corners, wtf). You don't have to own a Blahaj to like the theme, but there's a cluster of personality types that it seems to appeal toward, and the other half of them involve the sorta person that can leave leekspin on repeat for five hours on a second monitor and find it keeps getting funnier every single time they see it. Sway is intended as a drop-in-replacement for the much-older (x11) i3, and [a little more professional/grognardy in its base form, for better (hypr considered a license switch in a PR without having consulted a lawyer first) and worse (manual tiling).
Like a lot of Linux desktop environments (begun, the why-is-gnome-pronounced-that-way wars have), they Don't Like Each Other. Hyprland gives Sway special thanks "For showing how 2 do stuff the overkill way", Sway's original author has written multiple blogposts over the last six months with names like "Hyprland is a toxic community". This mostly didn't matter for Freedesktop.Org, though, since it's the sorta linux space where things like an official irc server would be a little too newfangled and a little out-of-scope.
And They Kept Using Discord
Which means most of the drama happens in weakly-affiliated channels. Hyprland has a Discord server, and while its membership is a mix of Blahaj and leekspinners, its ethos is very much toward the latter. In addition to mainstay stuff like a server ruleset that might as well be summarized as "don't make me come over there", right under announcements channel is the #days-since-vaxry-was-an-idiot, and not far under that is the official list of all accepted fanart of hyprchan, the hyprland mascot. (I didn't say the leekspin side was never trans, anymore than the blahaj side solely trans.) But while the server and Vaxry were willing to tolerate and use what could charitably be called 4chan humor and more accurately be called rude and bad jokes, they do keep to the rule poc||gtfo.
In early March, a Red Hat employee operating under the auspices of FreeDesktop contacted Vaxry about things he, and moderators of his Discord, had done. And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks. However, toward the end, that employee spelled out that that "... if more bad and more recent behavior ends up coming to our attention - it can be damaging to freedesktop's reputation as well, and we would have to consider steps to protect our community's reputation". Vaxry took this as a threat, and this escalated, first with the Red Hat employee highlighting that "The code of conduct team absolutely has the right to remove you from Freedesktop.org and ban you from the gitlab instance", and then when, when Vaxry said "further emails from the freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team will now be ignored unless You, as a team, decide to change Your attitude wrt. the issue at hand", the freedesktop Code of Conduct team pulling that trigger, Vaxry put various comments on his blog, yada yada.
Bang-Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head.
Both Vaxry and the unnamed RedHat employee come across as prats in the e-mail chain. It's very easy to read that chain as RedHat wanting on paper an official "It won't happen again" commitment and show of contrition, especially as hypr has become a bigger part of the wayland world (there's no serious census, but hypr's userbase seems the biggest among novel Wayland compositors; hyprcursor is genuinely a major improvement over the fucked-up xcursor, and has no serious competitors). It's also very easy to see this e-mail exchange as somewhere between requiring hypr spaces to act fully under RedHat corporate norms, and more cynically hanging up a Sword of Damocles for later -- even assuming arguendo that Vaxry's behavior retroactively justified the threat in the first e-mail, it made it very clear it was a threat.
((And for various reasons it's a little concerning to have two desktop environment developers that aren't quite clear on how capitalization works.))
There's a certain irony in the stolid and more formal Sway being the Blue-Tribe-themed one, and the purple-and-pink-and-blue-everywhere unprofessional hypr-active world being the not-Blue-Tribe-themed one, but there's another sense where it's not a huge surprise.
Ostensibly, this shouldn't matter much. Yes, hyprland and wayland and wl-roots are still buggy messes. But to the extent hyprland might be more vulnerable now to Wayland or wl-roots bugs, if Vaxry can't supply PRs or even bug reports to wl-roots, it'll drive the fixes to hypr, to the broader Wayland ecosystems' detriment. There are other people using hypr that could still report it up (and Vaxry has already forked wl-roots). In practice, any dev taking hypr-like conventions, especially newer devs, can and should be a little cautious in freedesktop environments, and there's already been a slow siddle away from hypr among the influencer set. There's been calls in some package managers to pull the project after some early posts from DeVault, which to be fair have been mostly rejected; we'll see if that changes. Which still doesn't matter.
But there's a tendency among a Certain Set to talk about how cancel culture has peaked, or how it doesn't impact 'normal' people, or how it's just a fiction, and I think it's worth mentioning the examples that don't show up in google news or conventional culture war channels.
The DJI device feels a lot like an upscaled version of the Lego MindStorms kit. It's okay as an entry-level tool for everything, and that's what makes it appealing for new learners, but you can't really get in deep or into expertise for any component. If you're programming, you're either running Python or Scratch, and even with an adult instructor it's not a great environment for learning Python. You can take it apart and reassemble it, but you're really limited in what you can physically build with it; you can rearrange DJI-provided sensors, but it's hard to even use other PWM devices, nevermind something really weird like a random I2C or SPI sensor.
The mecanum drive is a major selling point, and five or ten years ago getting decent mecanum wheels was nightmarish enough FRC or FTC teams would 3d-print them (pro tip: don't), though now a small robot set can be found under 80 USD. They do definitely make path coding easier to get right, at least for open-space play.
You could definitely build something better for a similar or slightly higher price, so a lot depends on what you're trying to do and introduce: for a student new to robotics, it's one of the cooler-looking options to dip your toes; to a student with experience it's a bit of a (very pricey) toy that gets frustrating if you try to do anything deeper. Probably the strongest selling point comes about if you really want to focus on video/image processing, and you just want a platform to do it on.
I can't speak much for the competitions and camps. As far as I know, the youth sports never went out of east Asia, the university league is 'international' but requires all competitors to be attached to a college (and the pieces look vastly un-challenging for college students), and the camps are inaccessible. Which is a pity, because I like the idea of something between BattleBots-one-robot-leaves and FIRST-it's-about-working-together-for-a-high-score philosophies.
gattsuru
6d ago
Oof. I guess I'll need to work on making my summary of the recent hyprland cancellation a bit more readable.
Thanks for saying so. I've been trying to highlight more esoteric stuff, but it necessarily involves dropping a pile of context at the start of a post, and it's hard to tell the right balancing point between succinct-but-incomplete and complete-but-infodumpy.
gattsuru
6d ago
Cynically, "celebrate" in the mission statement probably means 'get scholarships and burnish college resumes': FIRST doesn't pull in a lot for either, but it really clearly wants to have the cash of a sports team scholarship and the reputation of an Eagle Scout.
Less cynically, a lot of school environments teach tech, not just poorly, but also as a chore, even when it could or should have been fun. You don't and shouldn't celebrate or applaud things just for being present, but from physics labs to chemistry to programming to the complete destruction of the shop class, we've lost a lot of the framework for 'projects' as things that can be completed or have real win/lose states. For all my complaints, FIRST, even at its goofiest FLL versions, avoids that problem.
gattsuru
6d ago
In discussing Dunbar's number, it's not uncommon to see people divide matters into sub- and super-Dunbar counts (eg from 2013), and this can be useful in some contexts, but it also munges together a million-person org that's constantly growing (or trying to constantly grow) and a 200-person-org that's doing minimal recruiting.
Hyperdunbar approaches do not merely require an organization to exceed Dunbar's number, but that the organization constantly be striving for growth, unconstrained and reaching for infinity or the nearest limit. They do not merely have the problem that superDunbar groups do of wildly changed social dynamics, but the constant churn makes even many of the social technologies built for superdunbar organizations break.
Apologies for coining a word for what may well be have an obvious term.
gattsuru
6d ago
Apologies, this post was a little more stream of consciousness than I'd intended. My thesis is more that :
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Every organization, even an organization of one person, must select relative priorities of growth against other targets. For businesses, marketing and investment versus product development; for artists, growing your audience against growing your skills; for streamers focusing on following the algorithm versus following your interests. For FIRST, that's a part of that's the division between creating and expanding teams versus developing skills for those teams, but the pattern exists much more broadly.
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Organizations that make that decision don't do so (only) because they've forgotten their original goal, or because they've been taken over by people who don't care about that goal, but because scale does genuinely have (distributed) benefit.
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But that strategy has costs. Effective Altruists often focused on the degenerate cases, where outreach becomes almost all of what the organization does, or where outreach has hit decreasing returns while the organization is unwilling to admit that. But there are more honest problems, such as where this emphasis on outreach disconnects your metrics from your measures, or where successful growth can Baumol you as relative productivity varies with scale for individual parts of the organization.
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More critically, it is fundamentally risky approach at the level of individual people, while obfuscating the outcome of that gamble. If a consistent and always-applicable recruitment paradigm existed, you would already have joined, as would every adult in the county/country/planet; if you could keep in mind the outcome of your recruitment efforts, it wouldn't exceed your Dunbar number. Not everyone approached can be a recruit, not all recruits persist (or are even desirable), so on: even successful orgs notorious for their outreach can spend hundreds of manhours to get four or five mid-duration recruits. Organizations can eventually make this work out by playing the odds across a large enough number of people, but individual actors within the organization can not. Hyperdunbar non-outreach/recruitment efforts can similarly be risky and hide their outcomes: it's very easy to give a talk before a thousand people, and very hard to know what portion of the audience was listening the next day.
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Because of their public-facing nature, difficulty of measurement, influence of the internet and media coverage (and, cynically, hyperdunbar organization efforts to dazzle or baffle their membership), these approaches are what are most visible when looking into most fields from outside, such that they seem like the only viable option.
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But that framework is flawed; hyperdunbar efforts can and often do run face-first into a ditch.
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Even some efforts toted as wildly successful can fade off at shockingly low numbers. That's not to call them a failure for doing so, even if it's not always or often what the stated goals were. However, it shows a space where the tradeoffs necessary to try to scale to vast numbers weren't necessary.
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And a lot of good can be done outside of hyperdunbar efforts.
Against A Purely HyperDunbarist View
World’s for FIRST is in a week.
For those unfamiliar with the organization, For Increasingly Retrobuilt Silly Term For Inspiration in Science and Technology runs a series of competitions for youth robotics, starting from a scattering of Lego Mindstorm-based FLL competitions for elementary and middle schoolers, to the mid-range 20-40 pound robots of FTC that play in alliances of 2v2 across a ping-pong-table-sized space, and for high schoolers FRC running 120-pound robots in 3v3 alliances around the space of a basketball court. Worlds will have thousands of teams, spread across multiple subcompetitions. (For a short time pre-pandemic, there were two Worlds, with all the confusion that entailed.)
If you’re interested, a lot of Worlds competition will streamed. And a lot of both off-season and next-season competitions and teams are always looking for volunteers.
The organization’s goal... well, let’s quote the mission statement:
FIRST exists to prepare the young people of today for the world of tomorrow. To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders. The mission of FIRST is to provide life-changing robotics programs that give young people the skills, confidence, and resilience to build a better world.
There’s a bunch of the more normal culture war problems to point around. How goes the replacement of the prestigious Chairman’s Award with Ignite Impact? If not, complain at least that it’s a missed opportunity on the level of POCI/POCI for replacing a bad naming with a worse one? How do you end up with events playing the PRC’s theme song before the US national anthem?
There's even internal culture war stuff, which may not make a ton of sense to outsiders. Does the move away from commercial automotive motors to built-to-FIRST and especially-brushless motors privilege teams with more cash, or compromise safety or fair play? Should regional competitions, which may be the only official field plays small teams get, also accept international competitors? Should mentors white glove themselves, should they only do so during official competition events, or should the possibility of the Mentor Coach be abolished?
But the biggest question in my mind is how we got here.
Worlds competition is an outstanding and massive event, with an estimated 50k-person attendance at a ten-million-plus square foot convention center. And it’s a bit of a football game: there’s a lot of cheering and applause, and a little bit of technical work. There will be a number of tiny conferences, many of which will focus on organizational operations like running off-season events. People network. That’s not limited to Worlds itself, though the dichotomy is more apparent there: there might be one or two teams per regional competition that have a custom circuit board on their robot, but I'd bet cash that the average regional bats under 1.0 for number of teams with custom polyurethane or silicone parts.
Indeed, that football game is a large part of how teams get to Worlds. The competitions operates as a distributed tournament, where players who win certain awards may elect to continue to the next event in a hierarchy. The exact process and what exact awards count as continuing awards are pretty complex and vary by location (especially post-COVID), but as at the FRC level, the advancing awards prioritize two of the three teams that won a local competition's final, and then the team that has done the most recruitment and sponsoring of FTC or FLL teams over the last three (previously five) years, and then the team that has done the most for the current year. (Followed by the most competent Rookies, sometimes, and then a whole funnel system rolling through more esoteric awards.) In addition to the inherent randomness of alliance field play, there's a rather telling note: the 'what have you done for FIRST today' award, if won at the Worlds level, guarantees an optional invite to every future Worlds competition. By contrast, teaching or developing esoteric skills or core infrastructure is an awkward fit for any award, usually shoved into the Judge's Award, which with 3.5 USD won't buy you a good cup of coffee at Worlds.
There’s reasons it’s like this, and it’s not just the Iron Laws of Bureaucracy, or the sometimes-blurry lines between modern corporate infrastructure and mid-level-marketing. The organization hasn't been hollowed out by parasites and worn like a skinsuit (at least not in this context): it's the sort of goal that the founders and first generation would have and do consider a remarkable victory. I’m not making the Iscariot complaint, because it’s not true.
FIRST couldn’t exist in the form it does without these massive events and the political and public support they produce, not just because you wouldn’t hear about any smaller organization, but because the equipment and technology only works at sizable scale. Entire businesses have sprung up to provide increasingly specialized equipment, FIRST got National Instruments to build a robotics controller that resists aluminum glitter a little better, even the LEGO stuff has some custom support, and they can only do so because an ever-increasing number of teams exist to want it. SolidWorks, Altium, dozens of other companies donate atoms and/or bits on a yearly basis; the entire field system for FRC wouldn’t work without constant support and donation by industrial engineering companies. WPI might devote a couple post-grad students to maintaining a robotics library without tens of thousands of people using it, but I wouldn’t bet on it. States would not be explicitly funding FIRST (or its competitors) unless those programs can show up on television and have constituents that can show up at a state politician’s door.
Those demands drive not just how FIRST operates today, but what its interests are looking toward the future, not just in what it does, but what it won’t do. From a cynical eye, I wouldn’t say with certainty that FIRST would drop ten community teams for a school system buy-in, or twenty for a state program, but I wouldn’t want to be on the community team for any of those hard choices. There is no open-source motor controller or control board available for FIRST competition use, and there’s not a procedure available to present one, and there won’t be. There’s a lot of emphasis on sharing outreach tricks, and a little for sharing old code or 3d models, and a lot of limits to providing skills.
Because throughout this system, the most impactful thing you can do is always getting more people. It’s not Inspiring, it’s not Chairmanny Impactful, but that's what those awards are, with reason. Shut up and multiple: the math, in the end, is inevitable.
And I’m going to deny it.
There's a story that goes around in the FIRST sphere, where one of FIRST's founders bargained or tricked Coca-Cola into in exchange for developing some other more commercial technology. The exact form and valence tends to vary with who tells the story, whether to highlight the speaker's anti-capitalist frame, to gloss over some of the frustrations with the Coca-Cola Freestyle (tbf, usually more logistic and maintenance than with the pumps themselves), or to wave away the rough question of whether it paid off).
But that last point is a bit unfair: Solving Problems In Extreme Poverty is the sort of difficult and low-odds environment where high-variance options make sense to take, and you should expect a high-variance low-odds option to fail (or at least not succeed wildly) most of the time, and at least it wasn't as dumb an idea as the lifestraw. Maybe (probably!) enough of the steps that combine to keep FIRST running fall into the same category.
I'm hoping teaching kids isn't a low-odds environment. And ultimately, most volunteers and teams and sponsors signed up more for that than for the flashing lights and the fancy banners. But teaching, in matter involving true interaction, can not be done at the scales and directions that turn a roll of the dice from gambling to a variance strategy. It's difficult enough as a mentor to remember all the names the students and family for even a moderately-sized FRC or FTC team; few in a team that "support 128" teams (not linking directly: these are teenagers) can name every one or even a majority. These organizations have, by necessity, turned to maximize how many opportunities they present to their affiliates, without much attention to what that opportunity is. Few turn to the full argumentum ad absurdum where the recruitment exists solely to get more recruiters, but they’ve not left that problem space behind, either.
((There are other nitpicks: the same economies of scale that make these answers work eliminate many less-difficult problem whose presence is necessary to onboard and upskill new learners, the focus on bits over atoms breaks in similar ways that the outreach-vs-teaching one does.))
Dunbar proposed an upper limit to how large a social group the human mind readily handles. There's a lot of !!fun!! questions about how well this will replicate, or how accurate the exact number is, or what applicability it has for a given level of interaction: suffice it to assume some limit exists, that some necessary contact increments the counter at some level of teaching, and that it can't possibly be this high. At some point, you are no longer working with people; you're performing a presentation, and they're watching; or you're giving money and they're shaking a hand. At best, you're delegating.
These strategies exceed the limit, blasting past it or even starting beyond it. They are hyperdunbar, whether trying to get fifty thousand people into a convention center, or trying to sell ten thousand books, or 8k-10k subscribers. There are things that you can't do, or can't do without spending a ton of your own money, without taking these strategies! Whether FIRST getting NI's interest, writing or drawing, building or playing video games full-time, you either take this compromise or another one, and a lot of the others are worse.
But they're simultaneously the most visible strategies, by definition. I do not come to kill the Indigestion Impact Award; I come to raise the things that aren't in the awards. Even if FIRST could support a dozen teams that emphasized bringing new technologies forward in a one-on-one basis, and if your first exposure to the program selected from teams randomly, you'd be much more likely to hear from the hyperdunbarists -- hell, it could well be that way, and I've just missed the rest of them.
Yet they are not the only opportunity. You don't have to be grindmaxxing. One team, even in FIRST, can share skills simply for the purpose of sharing skills. It’s why I volunteer for the org. You can go into an artistic thing knowing you want a tiny audience, or to cover costs and if lucky your time, or as a hobby that's yours first. It shouldn't be necessary to say that outright, as even in hyperdunbar focuses, most fail down to that point. Yet even in spheres where Baumol's hits hardest, it can be a difficult assumption to break.
gattsuru
8d ago
Yeah, that's fair. There's definitely an unreasonable push toward a dichotomy of toy-or-career everything, not just in the writing or arts sphere, but everywhere from electrical engineering to machinework to plastic fab to web design. I'm trying to get a post together talking about that in the context of FIRST, but it's a serious problem and undermines a lot of social behavior across a lot of fields.
I do think it's a broader issue than no-FUD; the internet has pushed a lot of fields to a point where it's reasonable to see the most impactful option is outreach, shut-up-and-multiply style, and even if some people do turn away from the Omelas that making that choice, the people inviting you in will be the ones who bite that bullet.
((That said, a lot of people who do write as a supplementary wages in the furry fandom, and in many fields like TTRPGs, don't go through traditional publishing; FurPlanet is more of a print-on-demand and storefront faciliator, along with doing some ISDN bullshit. But even though they're really operating at 50-150 counts, you'd have to do some digging to realize that.))
There's some legal messiness about the standard of causation, but in an environment with any serious level of social trust, the Crumbley's would fall fast into the sphere where no one looks that closely at it, even had they just fallen down the stairs. Even gunnies whose literal jobs involve poking at the law agree with the moral question for this specific case. I'd be interested to know how consistently parents of teenagers who drive drunk are held criminally responsible, but I dunno that the data is really available in meaningful detail, and guns are different enough, and it'd still be a good arg in favor of tightening up the law then.
Part of that fall-through-cracks is because Michigan's statutes were pretty wonky: conviction for improper storage of firearm w/ a minor would have been far more clear-cut, but they didn't really clearly exist in 2021.
The court of appeals did, in fact try to spell this one out as good-for-this-ride-or-worse-only:
Finally, we share defendants’ concern about the potential for this decision to be applied in the future to parents whose situation viz-a-viz their child’s intentional conduct is not as closely tied together, and/or the warning signs and evidence were not as substantial as they are here. But those concerns are significantly diminished by several well-established principles. First, the principle that grossly negligent or intentional acts are generally superseding causes remains intact. We simply hold that with these unique facts, and in this procedural posture and applicable standard of review, this case falls outside the general rule regarding intentional acts because EC’s acts were reasonably foreseeable, and that is the ultimate test that must be applied.13 Second, our decision is based solely on the record evidence, and the actions and inactions taken by defendants despite the uniquely troubling facts of which they were fully aware. And this point is important, as although the judiciary typically recognizes that a decision’s precedent is limited by the facts at issue, it is particularly true when the court expresses that limitation.
The trouble's that there's not much social trust. The Crumbley's are going to prison for a decade because their kid had a hallucinations and intrusive thoughts that the parents blew off, and that's extremely bad. What if he'd just written a lot about depression, and they'd ignored that? If he'd had the same problems, but not gotten sent to the principal's office the same day? He was a 15-year-old they allowed to have effective control of a handgun, would that change if he was over 18? 21? 25? They didn't lock (or 'locked' with 0-0-0) firearms. If they used a cheap 20-USD trigger lock that doesn't actually work, would that have broken the chain of causation?
These are problems for any serious statute with where the caselaw involves a ton of phrases like 'reasonably foreseeable', but most serious statutes don't have a sizable lobby pushing for (and often getting!) laws enforcing blanket criminal consqeuences in related context. The parade-of-horribles where someone is criminally liable because 'obviously' the seller knew this guy shouldn't have a gun, he shot people is an implicit goal for the Brady Bunch. I'll give Rov_Scam props for stating outright "a number of requirements that seem onerous but that's the point", but that only makes Rov honest; it doesn't help with the general problem.
gattsuru
8d ago
I’ve never understood that though. These people basically have a very expensive hobby and generally need to be told that.
For the most part, that's true for writers: even outside of the furry fandom, it's hard to beat minimum wage -- MorlockP has had three pretty successful works, and also a lot of commentary about how bad writing can pay. There's some furry writers that manage to make it as at least supplementing their income better than a minimum wage job would, but they tend to also be mixing art in (eg Rick Griffin, Rukis Croax) or riding the commission train hard (eg Amethyst Mare, Joshiah).
For artists, that's less true. There's a surprising number of people who can pull in low six figures through furry commission work, and while that's the top 1%ish of artists, that's in no small part because most artists don't want to make it a full-time job or a job at all, preferring to augment their more stable W2 income (eg Accelo) or just keep demand reasonable. The fandom is just heavily driven by artists -- while organizers and administrators are the 'kings' of their respective websites or conventions, an overwhelming majority of interest and more importantly cash moving around is driven by visual art (and comics, and games, etc containing visual art). And artists have been pushing to ban AI art in many contexts, with some success, seeing it as a direct threat to their income.
Why do hobbyist writers care what artists think, outside of cases where they're one and the same? FurPlanet's FuzzWolf commented at length a few years ago about the importance of a good cover artist, not just for quality or visibility, but because they will be able and willing to put your name out there. It's a marketing and networking expense, and even it won't necessarily break even for hobbyist writers (though FurPlanet does order and pay for commissions itself, not just in Lowd's case, and presumably isn't doing so out of the goodness of their hearts), the hobbyist writer can often get artwork that they'd want otherwise. Furry writers are often, if not always, furries themselves, after all.
In many cases, artwork that they couldn't get otherwise: many bigger furry publishers have good enough relationships with well-known artists that they can jump a commission queue or get in contact with artists that don't do open commissions at all. Lowd almost certainly couldn't have gotten that BlackTeagan piece on her own for Nexus Nine, for a few different reasons; Gre7g Luterman's deal with Rick Griffin for Haven Celestia cover art is little different, but almost certainly a benefit on Luterman's side. And for obvious reasons it's one that isn't available to any writer who even hints at using AIgen.
If it is a hobby, why throw away a good part of the enjoyment to save a couple hundred bucks, when you're spending weeks or months?
gattsuru
9d ago
The... samurai and their military leadership? At least in Japan.
Meiji- and Edo-era peasants (and especially hinin, which were somewhere between Indian dahlit and American homeless) had extremely minimal rights, at the same time that the samurai class had an explicit right to strike those who offended their honour, a rule that was of significant relevance and controversy in an incident involving Westerners that Clavell references. (Tbf, especially 1600s-era social and economic stratification meant that people sympathetic to the peasants or, more often, merchants, were often writing the histories.)
But that didn't stop peasant uprisings from happening: Chichibu is similar in time to Tai-Pan and_Gai-Jin_, and Jōkyō the best-known early Edo period peasant uprising that would have fit for Sho-Gun.
gattsuru
9d ago
I'm not sure if there's a specific term in the LDS community that separates it from more general missionary work, but sending 18-25ish young adults in suits on bicycles to knock on doors away from home, typically for sections of two years. TraceWoodgrains wrote about it from the perspective of someone then-inside the community who did the work in Australia, but I've seen it referenced from online and offline ex- and current-LDS.
Yes, ostensibly missionary work gets convert baptists, and the official statistics are in 4+ per missionary-year. Which is pretty respectable, even if it's an astounding amount of manhours to get there. But these numbers come about by merging the numbers from all jurisdictions, and by mixing explicit missionary work knocking on doors with, talking with organically-developed friendships while on mission, missionary service (such as volunteer work for the destitute).
Add in retention to baptism -- and from a non-LDS perspective, that's the LDS baptism requirements are a really low bar -- where knock-on-door numbers are awful and the entire program sells itself on members talking to or encouraging investigators that they found through personal efforts, and it turns into a wash pretty quickly for a lot of jurisdictions.
I don't think there are good public numbers for baptism-per-missionary by mission or country, but at least if your missionary work was recent, I'd really guess you were probably well above-average for your mission region.
The cynical view on Rumspringa is more that it shoves younger Amish to see how weird "the English" are and how little we like it (akin to forcing someone caught sneaking a puff of a cigarette to smoke several in a row, knowing that the nicotine would be unpleasant in that dosage), rather than a hazing: a person on Rumspringa can often run into trouble, but they're not interrupting Troubles' soap operas.
gattsuru
9d ago
But also, I don’t see how it could be bad?
There's a thing in the Mormon church where they send teenagers to evangelize randos. It seems a little weird at first glance: everybody knows that they're not going to get any bites. But getting new recruits isn't the point -- the point is to absolutely demonstrate how bad non-Mormons can act.
That's probably not intended (either here, or in the Mormon church). Yet I wonder what, precisely, the proposer expects to have happen were he to ship cornfed rural folk (or even the Unnecessariat writer) to San Francisco, or vice versa.
Options:
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Google's mainstay is Gemini (previously Bard) is free(ish) for now, if you have a Google account. Open it, start writing. Not private.
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Anthropic pushes Claude. You can try Haiku and Sonnet, the lighter- and mid-weight models free, but Opus was more restricted last I checked. Tends to be one of the stronger fiction writers, for better or worse.
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Chat-GPT3.5 is available for free at here, 4.0 is a paid feature at the same sight. The paid version is good for imagegen -- I think it's what a lot of Trace's current stuff is using. Flexible, if a bit prudish.
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Llama is Facebook's big model, free. Llama 2 is also available for download and direct run, though it's a little outdated at this point.
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LMSys Arena lets you pit models against each other, including a wide variety of above. Again, not private. Very likely to shutter with little notice.
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Run a model locally, generally through the use of a toolkit like OobaBooga webui. This runs fastest with a decent-ish graphics card, in which case you want to download the .SAFETENSORS version, but you can also use a CPU implementation for (slow) generation by downloading GGUF versions for some models. Mistral 8x7B seems to be the best-recommended here for general purpose if you can manage the hefty 10+GB VRAM minimum, followed by SOLAR for 6GB+ and Goliath for 40+GB cards, but there's a lot of variety if you have specific goals. They aren't as good as the big corporate models, but you can get variants that aren't lobotomized, tune for specific goals, and there's no risk of someone turning it off.
Most online models have a free or trial version, which usually will be a little dumber, limited to shorter context (think memory), or be based on older data, or some combination of the above. Paid models may charge a monthly fee (eg, ChatGPT Plus gives access to DallE and ChatGPT4 for 20 USD / month), or they may charge based on tokens (eg, ChatGPT API has a per 1 million input and output token price rate, varying based on model). Tokens are kinda like syllables for the LLM, between a letter to a whole word or rarely a couple words, which are how the LLM breaks apart sentences into numbers. See here for more technical details -- token pricing is usually cheaper unless you're a really heavy user, but it can be unintuitive.
For use:
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Most models (excluding some local options) assume a conversational model: ask the program questions, and it will try to give (lengthy) answers. They will generally follow your tone to some extent, so if you want a dry technical explanation, use precise and dry technical terms; if you want colloquial English, be more casual. OobaBooga lets you switch models between different 'modes', with Instruct having that Q/A form, and Default being more blank, but most online models can be set or talked into behaving that way.
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Be aware that many models, especially earlier models, struggle with numbers, especially numbers with many significant figures. They are all still prone to hallucination, though the extent varies with model.
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Long conversations, within the context length of the model, will impact future text; remember that creating a new chat will break from previous context, and this can be important when changing topics.
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They're really sensitive to how you ask a question, sometimes in unintuitive ways.
gattsuru
11d ago
Sorry I'm a bit confused here, are you saying that this has already come to pass or are you offering this as a hypothetical?
I don't think it's already come to pass, or even that it'll be some clear demarcation between going to happen and has happened, but it seems the likely result of netrunnernobody's hypothetical, where :
the year is 2045. no one can tell the difference between machine-made art and the work of masters. the supposed painter has been with his wife for twenty years without learning she was male at birth.
their opposition still exist, but are as rare as people without smartphones.
We're clearly not there right now, but it's definitely plausible, and maybe the timeline is pessimistic on one end or the other. Yet to actually resolve the conflicts and culture wars, the fighters would have to accept everything they wished for at the cost of even mentioning quite a lot of what they really wanted.
People are still making money as professional artists and selling commissions online. AI has definitely impacted the market, but artists are still making money regardless. In fact the number of graphic design jobs on Upwork has increased since the release of DALL-E 2 and StableDiffusion.
I've seen that story bounce around a few times, but I'm not sure it's avoided the streetlamp effect. 'Jobs on Upwork' makes sense as a metric, but only because there's not much better visible data -- in addition to some number of these jobs revolving around, they're also long-been a saturated mix of a wide variety of roles, for which 'creating art' isn't all of it and might not even be a lot of it. More critically, even the more optimistic uses of AIgen would drop the price-per-job, either by reducing time investment or at least lifting some tedium, which could leave as many 'jobs' on the tables from Upwork's perspective, but far fewer artists able to live off them.
I don't think we're at the point where the average manager puts together something in Midjourney, then bills a rando freelancer a pittance to launder the corp's use fine-tune the piece, but if we were, it'd still look pretty good from Upwork's metrics.
Admittedly, I can't find better data, so I still have to recognize it.
The average non-specialist isn't going to mess around with running a local model, training custom LoRAs, using ControlNet and inpainting... it's still involved enough that it's reasonable to outsource the process to someone else.
Eh... outsourcing can remain, specialists can remain, and the market for artists can still fall apart. If a specialist exists that can output thirty times the speed that a conventional artist can, it might even pay better than the thirty people doing the same work previously combined... but it's going to mean thirty fewer artists in that field.
Edit: Uh, you might have been able to generate more discussion by waiting ~12 hours and posting this in the new week's thread?
Yeah, that's fair. I'm not sure this is really worth a ton of discussion, though, and not just for the reasons I didn't quote netrunnernobody's full hypothetical in the starting post.
Then again, the other post I'm ruminating on now is "Against Hyper-Dunbar Thinking", so maybe I'm just over-privileging the 'scream into the void' side of internet discussion.
gattsuru
11d ago
Seconding all of fishtwanger's recs.
Astro City is very much a comic fan's comic book, but it (and to a lesser extent, Common Grounds) are great not just by the low standards of superhero works, but more broadly as explorations of the human spirit. Nextwave takes things the other direction, and despite that is the only Warren Ellis work I can stand -- hilariously zany, completely shredding the ideas of superheroic human spirit, absolutely all the more enjoyable for it.
If you like Moore, Promethea isn't perfect in a lot of ways, but it's generally underappreciated work.
Ursula Vernon's Digger is a weirder work, but fun.
For Eastern works, Kino's Journey is better-known for its anime (good) and light novel (outstanding), but the manga iterations are still pretty strong.
gattsuru
11d ago
A Furry Cancellation
Mary E. Lowd, aka Ryffnah, has been removed from the Furry Writer's Guild, dropped by her publishers, and bounced as a Guest of Honour from the Oregon convention Furlandia, one week before the convention started. Not one of the biggest furry writers, or as skilled as someone like Tempo Kun, Robert Baird, Rukis Croax, or Kyell Gold. She has had had some success in out-of-fandom pieces in Baen, and her Otters In Space series was more normie-friendly than even other SFW writers (and even some normie anthromorphic authors). That must take some effort: what did she do?
Lowd has been open and explicit about her use of AI image gen, likely driven both by her husband's work in the field of AI research, and more seriously by the economics of the matter. To be fair, the FWG policy was officially published in January of last year, and unofficialy well-established for some time before; FurPlanet doesn't really do policy, but their stance has been just as open and explicit for nearly as long. There's some smoke-filledfree backroom management that Happens for furcons, and I expect Lowd will find more than one or two doors has closed, here.
Businesses have policies reflecting their principles or interests or both, so it's not a huge surprise it came to this.
The interesting bit's that the next-to-last editions of her works had conventionally- or conventionally-digitally produced art, some by pretty well-known artists like BlackTeagan. Emphasis on had: as common in the book industry, the cover art belonged to her publisher; it may well fall off the planet outside of private collections. The current replacements aren't great, though it's not clear if that reflects the artistic limitations of Lowd's tools or her time crunch. She previous sold her newest books at convention tables with nice stickers marking the ones with AI art, and that's going to be a lot less common moving forward.
And she's not alone.
Of the exceptions I gave a year ago, e621 has officially shoved any AI-gen to the e6ai subsite, and while Weasyl hasn't yet updated its policies, it has updated its practices. Outside of AIgen-specific accounts on twitter or servers on Discord, it can be hard to find the stuff. If you're a furry, you can avoid seeing AI art without even trying!... er... labelled AI art. Forget the awkward questions about how increasingly wide varieties of games integrate it into their graphics pipeline, or the not-so-clear division from more advance 'brush' tech to some uses of AI-gen: the people coming up with the policies don't know how the tech works. They may never know anything other than Lowd's oh-god-I-gotta-get-a-new-publisher-whatever-works pieces, even to recognize it.
Which is one potential end to the story, and to many stories, and a quiet one. Yet at the same time, it's an utterly frustrating ending: all of the worst fears of economic impact on lower-tier artists or of unlabelled AI spam overwhelming sincere creation, all the lost opportunities for conventional artists to focus more of their time on the parts of art they love or dedicated AI-genners to explore types of media that just wouldn't be practical for conventional artwork, all come true... and no one cares.
gattsuru
16d ago
This was perhaps the most sophisticated attack on an open source repo ever witnessed, waged against an extremely vulnerable target, and even then it didn't come even close to broad penetration before it was stopped.
Witnessed is a little important, here; I'm not as sure as TheGrugq that this isn't the first try at this, if only because no one's found (and reported) a historical example yet, but I'm still very far from confident it is the first. And it did get really close: I've got an Arch laptop that has one part of the payload.
Despite being obvious it bears laboring that it wouldn't have been possible for our Hero Without a Cape to uncover it if he wasn't able to access the sources.
That's... not entirely clear. Visible-source seems to have helped track down the whole story, as did the development discussions that happened in public (though what about e-mail/discord?), but the initial discovery seems like it was entirely separate from any source-diving, and a lot of the attack never had its source available until people began decompiling it.
The tendency to overreact may very well serve to make open source more anti-fragile. Absolutely everyone in this space is now thinking about how to make attacks like this more difficult at every step.
Yeah, that part is encouraging; I've definitely seen places (not just in code! aviation!) where people look at circumstances like this and consider it sign the were enough redundancy, rather than enough redundancy for this time. I think it's tempting to focus a little too much on the mechanical aspects, but that's more a streetlamp effect than an philosophical decision.
gattsuru
16d ago
Isn't that why we're all here on this site though?
How To Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 seems relevant.
The problem from that perspective isn't that guesswho's arguing; it's that he's awful at it. It's bad enough when posters provide weakmen of their enemies. No one's going to change minds by providing weakmen of the position they claim to be defending.
gattsuru
16d ago
Very much appreciate the additional takeaways.
Rolling out your own compression is much less evil: there is certainly some potential for arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, but not more than with handling any other file parsing.
Yeah, that's fair. There are some esoteric failure modes -- how do you handle large files, what level of recoverability do you want to handle, how do you avoid being the next zlib -- but for good-enough lossless compression you can get away with some surprisingly naive approaches, without the cryptography-specific failure mode where it can look where it's working fine but be vulnerable in ways you can't even imagine.
Data point: As some casual linux user, I recognize the xz file extension.
Huh, I stand corrected. I've seen it occasionally, but more often for Docker than anything else -- a lot of environments still use .gz almost everywhere.
On the plus side, the fact that the attackers stayed in userspace instead of having /usr/bin/sshd load some kernel model seems to indicate that a stealthy compromise of the kernel is hard? Yay for NSA's SELinux?
There is that on the plus side. I'm not hugely optimistic people would be as easily able to discover those sort of attacks, but then again, there's a lot more eyes on the kernel and a lot more emphasis on finding weird or unexpected behaviors in it.
I for one do not want to scream at them because I consider them to be a sock puppet of some unknown agency. I am kind of gleeful that some agency burned through this identity they put a lot of work into propping up.
Yeah, that's probably the more Correct response.
I think urban liberal would have stood stronger on its own.
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