gattsuru
12hr ago
It's not surprising that porn-for-(non-autogynophilic)-men avoids seeing what the inside of a woman's head feels like. It is kinda weird from a bi guy perspective how much straight-for-guy's-eyes porn focuses on the man or men, and how little is focused on something really prioritizing women qua woman. I would expect places like I Feel Myself to be a genre, but they really don't look like it.
I doubt it would help a lot even if it existed -- there's a lot of variation from one person to another, as a lot of same-sex couples have found out for better or worse -- but still strange.
gattsuru
13hr ago
For current-gen games, you're looking at protonDB. Yes, it's officially meant for Steam, but if you don't want to run it and add them as a non-Steam game, you can easily access the underlying tools using Lutris or Heroic Game Launcher. Lutris tends to be better, in my experience, for legally-owned-backups. Compatibility is good-but-not-perfect -- almost anything mainstream enough to sell through Steam in the last ten years is getting looked at, but marginal games under that bar might not, and a lot of the very popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat have trouble or just won't work.
Older stuff and more marginal games can be rougher. DOSBox works and exists, and there are linux-friendly ports (or native builds) of almost every past-gen console, though quality and performance varies on the PS3+ era. Go really far into the indies and it can be a mess, with some games having Linux-native builds despite being built around an ecosystem that absolutely loathes it, and others only coming up to functionality after a decade of attempted ports and then some random fix in photon-ge solved it.
gattsuru
13hr ago
Yeah, there's a lot of romance in the idea of so carefully reading your partner's microexpressions that you can tell exactly how they want things or how things are working at a given time, but in the real world it's something you actually have to use your words to get done properly.
gattsuru
13hr ago
Perhaps. There's a really awkward question about whether he knew, or suspected, or just was in a sufficiently target-rich environment that any finger-pointing would hit a fraudster.
... kinda?
You have to go pretty far before any woman is going to use 'beanflicker novel' or even 'it's erotica', but Reddit's /r/romancebook has a first page with Kink and Sex Acts Megathread - Knotting, FMC and MMC has something erotic happen in front of them and it makes them both “snap”, and Mmc fucks fmc thinking she is his girlfriend. I'm not an absolute expert in the field, but even the M/M stuff is written for and often by women's consumption, and about the point where the protagonist secretly begins taking contraceptives so the fuckening can continue, there's not a lot of fig leaf.
(To be clear, I'm not judging, here! ... well, except in the giving some of the books individual ratings, and considering if I want to drop some furry names in the megathread.)
Yes, there's still some stigma about this stuff: a woman reading Morning Glory Milking Farm (cw: not-great romance art, incredibly heavy-handed innuendo in picture, the book is bizarrely vanilla) on the train is going to get similar looks as a guy leafing through the original edition Savant and Sorcerer (cw: woman in swimsuit-level-nudity). But you're not going to see a Fifty Shades of Gray For Men make the front pages, nor will some random male-focused shipper fanfic smutty fanfic get a full film. Even the for-gay-guys equivalents are a lot more heavily policed: there's no Magic Mike-but-actually-gay.
Most people talk about it through euphemism in wildly public spaces; spice, heat, the citrus scale, so on. But they're still pretty overt about it, with over half of this book list having explicit smutty sex scenes (3 'pepper' or higher). Maybe that's less of a deal because it's a mostly written environment. But it's not something that's hard to spot.
I'm more skeptical that this is bad. I've made and will continue to make the argument that even pretty kinky or genre-focused smutty or smut-adjacent works can have broader meaning or allow deeper insight, and that even works that are just read for gratification are fine whether they're smut or milsci-fi (even if gustibus non disputandum meets some discomfort with WH40k books). But it's a thing, and the difference in expectations by gender is a thing.
gattsuru
1d ago
[contemporaneous discussion, more recent]
Caveat: I'm pretty confident that Gino is either guilty as sin or so negligent as to be guilty, and probably both given that she'd signed onto other fraudy-as-fuck research without a care before. A good many of her deflections are not just naked, but often wrong, and those that aren't wrong are meaningless. The lawsuit is, in particular, an indictment of both Gino and her lawyers -- and that the DataColada crew couldn't get legal fees after succeeding an indictment of the courts. Much of her defenders embody of the adage about "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table." and that's a part of it.
So, to be blunt, I'm not a fan.
... but I do notice that she's also unusual, and not in the way I wish she was unusual. Dan Ariely, noted co-author and co-fraud, got a television show, and his sketchy academic behavior is only slightly less obvious. Sam Yoon isn't up a creek until the investigation turns in; it's not hard to list piles of academic misconduct that's just everyday charlatanism, much of which isn't even worth a retraction nevermind direct real punishment. There are other fraudsters that get the hammer, but even there, academia tends to keep the wheel of justice slow, fine, and prone to false negatives: Stapel got got and literally none of his students did, Wansink lost his job and we never even got an answer for what fakes were direct lies rather than p-hacking, yada yada.
It's not enough to say that her fraud is unusual. There are so many rules, and so many ways to do academic misconduct, and so many ways to slice academic misconduct, that it's always possible to explain why one case was vital without lending any predictive power, nor explain why one case was important and the others weren't. And bureaucracies inventing and applying a thicket of rules only to enforce them when desired is absolutely a thing that happens, and something that people like Ackman has seen.
What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.
... which gets rough for 2rafa's take. There's a world where the education and test-taking makes for better decisions, better responses, better actions, and better systems, where elites mean extreme focus in specialized capabilities. There's a world where it's status-farming, or Goodharting, or some very precise games-of-thronesing, where elites are just a class identity for a class that doesn't even pretend to try for its claimed focuses. These worlds aren't even incompatible!
But then you have to run into this world. We're in one where Gino got into, and succeeded at, Harvard for nearly two decades. Dias made it into Harvard and the Time 100 Next before spinning his wheels as one of a dozen lab leaders doing this sort of research on the planet, absolutely wasting it, and another one of those lab leads pretending to replicate part of his tots-real data.
I dunno. I don't want to put words in 2rafa's mouth. If the argument is on whether everything must or should be a status game, I'd agree with you, and find that's not a healthy sort of nihilism to take, and not a healthy reason to want to ignore it all. I don't think that's the position, but if it is, or even if it's a decent read, it's not a good thing.
If the argument is on whether everything is or has become a status game... I'd be stuck having to quibble on the 'everything', and doing so would be a faint defense, or defenders of these approaches to education and academia might feel they have to argue that their output is just better than nothing and I'd have to do the work to believe that. I might be wrong in that pessimism! But I have my reasons, and, thankfully, it's an argument we can have based on facts.
gattsuru
1d ago
I think it's far more likely that someone (maybe Rov_Scam?) talks at length about how Gerstein and Politico's actions here are totally just neutral reporting and critical commentary on a policy Gerstein doesn't agree with, done entirely in his personal capability in ways that tots shouldn't say anything about Politico, and by the way here's something Trump did that was a Real Threat That Counts. That Grok link above gives a pretty good preview of the Least Common Denominator options; I'd expect writers here could be a little more original unless Darwin comes out of the woodwork again, but I don't expect anything more _compelling_.
And that's in the case that anyone here that's left-leaning thinks it's worth comment at all.
To be fair to Rov_Scam, "He's an obvious charlatan" did exceed expectations.
gattsuru
2d ago
Given that they've caused less damage than a single particularly retarded-as-in-dropped-on-his-head arsonist, I'm not convinced that they've been optimizing for damage, whatever thought they've put in. I'm... actually a little unconvinced that they've even optimized well for disruption, but there's a lot of reasons I don't want to talk about that publicly.
Which is one half of the problem in talking about this stuff. If there are red team exercises that can up the high score from the known alternatives, it's... not a very good idea to start talking about them at length in public. The other half's that if you have reasons why a given attack shouldn't work, it's not a very good idea to talk about that at length in public, either.
He's... hard to talk about.
The critique has long echoed the old Samuel Johnson quote about being "both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good" -- and the man has had a hatedom before 2012, so it's been echoing for a while. Most of the man's more accessible scientific writing is 'just' presenting well-established popsci into a more accessible form (sometimes without sufficient citations), while a lot of his predictive or even cutting-edge scientific analysis has to get suffixed with 'from a certain point of view' at best and 'ah yes but' at worst. If anything, that's only become more true over time: both The Golden Age Sequences and HPMoR have long relied on some of the sociology research that's be found the most wanting under the replication crisis.
Yudkowsky's been moderately open about some of this stuff, and his pro-AI, AI-is-easy, AI-is-hard, anti-AI changes have been a part of his whole story. I like that more than the people insisting they've always been right. It's still not something everyone likes, or that he can do consistently. There's never been a good retrospective on how MIRI's output was so absolutely bad on both the academic paper and popular-reader sides for so long, or the time they had an employee embezzle (tbf, not an unusual thing for new non-profits to have hit them), or yada yada.
But that's a bit of a victim of own success thing. Yudkowsky can't claim the whole replication movement anymore than he can claim the whole effective altruism one. He's at least been in the general vicinity too early to have jumped in front of the parade post-hoc, though. "Map is not the territory" and "fake answers" might have been well-known and obvious before 2008, but it wasn't until after that anyone put them together to actually poke at the core tools we thought we were using to find deep truths about reality. And these movements have been a large part of why so many of the older posts have aged so poorly, though not the only part.
((Although he's also a weird writer to have as big an impact as it seems he's had? The Sequences, fine, if good blog should change people's minds, it's a good enough blog. Why is HpMoR a more effective AI Safety program than Friendship is Optimal? Why is the Sword of Good so much more effective than a lot of more recent attempts at its take?))
... but all that's kinda side stories, at this point. Today, if you care about him, it's the AI safety stuff, not whether he guessed correctly on Kahneman vs Elisabeth Bik, or even on neural networks versus agentic AI research.
Which gets messy, because like Reading Philosophy Backwards, today, all of his demonstrated successful predictions are incredibly obvious, his failed ones ludicrous-sounding, and only the ones we can't evaluate yet relevant. Why would anyone care about the AI Box experiment when corporations or even complete randos are giving LLMs a credit card and saying have fun? (Because some extremely well-credentialed people were sure that these sort of AI would be perfectly harmless if not allowed access to the outside world, even months after the LLMs were given credit card info.) Why would anyone be surprised that an AI might disclose private or dangerous information, if not told otherwise, when we now know LLMs can and do readily do those things? (Because 'the machine will only do what we program it to do' was a serious claim for over a decade.) Who could possibly believe that an LLM couldn't improve code performance? (Uh, except all the people talking about stochaistic parrots today, and convinced that it was philosophically impossible for years before then.)
And the big unsolved questions are very important.
But in turn, that doesn't make his proposed answers better or useful. Say what you will for the ethos of singularitarity races, but at least they have something more credible than the 'you can't just tell people not to do something' guy telling people not to do something, and ultimately that's all that policies like an AI pause boil down to. The various attempts to solve morality have made some progress, despite my own expectations. It might seem like the difference between timeless decision theory and functional decision theory is just huffing fumes, but it does have some genuine benefits... and we have no way to implement them, and no way to validate or even seriously consider whether we're even looking at the most important measures. We don't know what the system they'd need to be implemented on looks like, and it's speculative (though increasingly likely) there will even be a system, and it's not clear the people building that system will be interested or even aware of the general AI safety issues.
So there's big unsolved questions that have been largely left unasked.
gattsuru
4d ago
Given that teenagers have been charged with the production, possession, and distribution of CSAM for sending nudes of themselves, CSAM charges in this case don’t strike me as anything close to nuclear, assuming the police can recover the images from Snapchat
I'm mostly using "nuclear" in the sense of "the biggest available weapon, and its resulting proportionality concerns". Those style of prosecutions happen, but they're pretty uncommon, even though there's good evidence to think the chargeable conduct happens more often than anyone wants to think about.
The only thing I’m not certain of is whether they actually broke any CSAM laws. Is it actually illegal to draw a photorealistic, but fake, image of a nude minor?
In the US, it's a federal felony under the PROTECT Act, unless the content also has serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Enforcement is pretty rare, though, since the feds don't want the law to get another challenge like Ashcroft.
gattsuru
4d ago
The FAA has promoted a RemoteID system in the United States, and I think TheNybbler's commented on it and its problems before. Most modern drone receivers that fly-by-GPS have a fallback to safely land if GPS is interrupted and have some coded-in-keepout zones, but fly-by-eye or by-remote typically don't (or, in extreme cases, might be intended for use in GPS-less environments). And there's an absolute ton of old ones out there. And disabling an outbound antenna isn't that hard. And a lot of important keepout zones aren't permanent. And the software controller is largely not hard part of the drone software.
It'll probably help (and probably be frustrating) on the margins, but it's just extremely hard to lock things down that aggressively.
I think the only "EMI" weapon that even remotely fits the bill is laser weapons hitting drone batteries or other weak parts. "Some things in this room drone don't react well to bullets directed energy".
Yeah, that's probably true, and also probably something that could be a weapon of its own. I'd hoped that maybe you could treat the brushless motors like antenna, but the math doesn't really work out with modern tech.
It's worth noting that large airports nationwide have full-time teams scaring birds away from airports as aviation hazards. Would an equivalent size anti-drone team even get noticed in the noise?
Fair point, and sometimes those are somewhat hilariously aggressive -- tamed hunting falcons or dogs on one end, noise 'cannons' at the other -- though they're also all from back when we could Just Do Things.
gattsuru
4d ago
Tbf, the PROTECT Act stapled on a Miller test. They're still trying to bypass the 'prevailing community standards' bit, but compared to the pre-Ashcroft version that just pretended the Miller test didn't matter, it's a much wider retreat than, for example, US v. Lopez.
gattsuru
4d ago
I think there's a plausible false light (and defamation per se) claim, given that the images in this situation were being shared and would be themselves illegal for her to produce. Even for deepfakes-of-adults, false claims of sexual promiscuity would fall into these categories. There's some theoretical examples where a Falwell v. Hustler-style defense would be relevant in the case of a public figure where the deepfakes were clear parody, but that's pretty far from the typical case. But from a traditional law perspective you don't have to pull a Gorsuch to find a civil tradition against this sorta stuff.
Useless, though, since the kid who did it's judgement proof. In theory, the state law would allow six months imprisonment per act, but in practice that's really not how the juvenile court systems work, and even an adult doing this to another adult is more likely to just end up with a fine. And while both the boy generating the deepfakes and those passing it around (or even receiving it) could probably charged with federal CSAM stuff, that's such a nuclear option it's extremely unlikely anyone would seriously even threaten it here.
Which is part of why the whole thing is such a mess.
gattsuru
4d ago
Bestiality's a 'funny joke' because as much as people say they care about animals, they don't really care about animals that much unless they're more than a little nuts, and the possibility that someone they know might even consider it is pretty unimaginable. There was a big scandal in the furry fandom a little under a decade ago about a zoophilia-sadist ring (cw: no matter how strong your stomach, you don't want to look to close into this, yes, insert 'beating dead horse' joke here), and it got a lot of critical attention from furries (and even some other zoophiles), but as far as I can tell the only criminal convictions involved literal serial killers of animals or separate possession of CSAM. There was a lot of conduct there that was physically damaging or even likely fatal to the animal, but ultimately, it's something normal people see as gross because of what the bad actors are doing to themselves, less than what's happening to the animal.
Animal protective services aren't going to pull custody from Hassan Piker; that doesn't make putting a shock collar on a kid funny.
Beyond that, a lot of the post-1990s changes to attitudes about abuse of very young children were driven by vastly increased understanding of what psychological impact these actions had on their victims. The Breendoggle or various priest abuses had a number of different reasons they were able to shovel themselves under the rug, but one of the biggest is that it was largely assumed that victims would forget, merely not understand, or at worst become 'precocious': 'corruption of a minor' as a charge was a lot more literally considered than modern readers think. But a significant portion of human victims end up pretty messed up by stuff that doesn't leave bruises or injuries, especially when it's committed by a trusted figure.
[caveat: there's public information on this topic I'm not going to discuss here, and I'm going to encourage anyone who recognizes to not discuss here]
Any organization that can collect and process so much information on drone signals has capabilities comparable to traditional spy organizations.
That's... not strictly true, at least for lower tiers of "drone signals". You can (if you have a ton of money, and are a US citizen, and don't mind getting probed) just buy a commercial 'drone signal tracker' box and antenna kit. My guess is that the smarter ones do a lot of complex FPGA-based TDMA-like analysis work, but there's probably a few cheaper-tier ones that are just boxes stuffed full of SDRs. There are even STC'd variants for shoving into aircraft, though guessing from first principles I doubt they're very good. DJI even makes one for its specific protocol...
Which is the limiting factor: decoding traditional analog control signals doesn't tell you much about DJI's various protocols, which don't tell you about MAVLink, which doesn't tell you about some schmuck hackadayer's DIY version. Protocols are (notoriously) easy to make, and the .mil versions of a drone don't even have to use the same frequency bands as cOTS drones. Then we can throw in encryption, and you're really screwed. The only really universal response to radio control signals is triangulation, and a) that doesn't tell you much more than 'something was here' and b) are the sort of technology that has good solutions old enough to vote.
Blocking the more specialized drones that don't use radio signals gets a lot more complicated. AFAIK, we haven't seen any fiber cable drones in the continental United States, or purely-camera-driven drones... but it's a matter of when, not if.
Any security organization that can destroy, or hijack and control, drones at will, could use those capabilities against the government. Giving everyone ‘robust’ counter-drone capabilities is giving everyone (some) of the pre-requisites for throwing a coup.
Oh, I think it's much worse than that. I'd like to be in a world where the meta favors some type of tightly-targeted EMI weapon that burns out drone motor controllers -- that would still be costly to legitimate drones if misused, but mostly just drones. I don't think we live in that world, though.
Consider what a meta where physical interception with a net by a 300kph low-cost counter-drone looks like, includes, and could in the hands of a bad actor to non-drone known targets, including non-drone targets that are not considered 'critical infrastructure' but would cause tens, hundreds, or thousands of deaths if attacked. And that's still an optimistic case!
When the US opened up the US military Global Positioning Satellite network to global airlines in 1983 following the Korean Airlines Flight 007 disaster, it did not initially provide full capability. There was a policy of selective availability to globally degrade ‘civilian’ GPS signal. However, the Clinton Administration in 1996 made it US policy to provide (free) GPS access and facilitate integration into civilian and commercial applications, and in 2000 removed the selective availability policy.
Specifically, until 2000, GPS degradation was based on an additional psuedorandom delay... that had been turned off over short periods before during periods of military (during the Persian Gulf War) or civil (disaster response) need, and enough had been learned during those temporary turn-off periods that differential GPS had already made it possible to eliminate the noise factor for most applications, and both government and nongovernment orgs were pushing for an implementation. It was still a good thing that Clinton took out SA, but it's also something that was reaching the end of its usefulness as a technology already. The government implementation of dGPS/WAAS meant those higher-quality fixes remained under gov control that could be turned off with a flick of a switch if needed...
Until GLONASS was in good working order in 2011, and dual (or triple-) single-chip GPS/GLONASS/Beidou chips became the new standard (2015?). Now, there's really no way to degrade GPS signal short of just jamming it.
There are about 20,000 public and private airports in the US. Even if you took every single air defense artillery expect from every other military function and spread them around the country, you wouldn’t have enough for one dedicated military air defender per airport.
Tbf, the vast majority of the public airports are tiny, pretty irrelevant, and operate using local contractors for pretty much everything; almost all of the private ones are even more irrelevant to the calculus. To be less fair, you aren't defending the big international airports with one person, or even one person per shift.
Like, say, keeping a national policy that forces local police to become air pirates if they want to throw a jacket on a dangerous drone. Will they get prosecuted as such by government officials? Probably not. Might they get sued as such by private citizens? Maybe not. Could malefactors or ambulance-chasing lawyers sue them to try and coerce a settlement or deter an action? Absolutely.
Eh... anyone can try to sue over anything, but there's not really a lot of grounding for that case here. At least from people in this field, I've seen more concerns about second- or third-party harm (eg, taking down a drone and it landing one someone else).
At least pre-SAFER SKIES, one of the biggest issues was not the FAA or DHS, but FCC -- they really don't like anything even remotely close to signal jamming or devices that can accidentally jam stuff. For a while, the only way the FCC was letting even tests of long-distance drone signal jamming tech happen involved one of their designees standing directly behind the person holding the button down, in person. That's starting to change, but not quickly, and I'm skeptical that it can change as quickly as technology will in response. Dunno if SAFER SKIES changed that, though.
gattsuru
5d ago
The stated purpose of the programs is to teach, and to learn by teaching. Can't say we're always doing that as well as I'd like, but I don't have to seriously consider the Litany of Tarski, either.
But, yes, I'm not optimistic. I'm not even trying to solve things with doves and olive branches; I'm just hoping that having an idea of what the 'other side' even looks like at least could leave us more grounded on actual disagreements instead of several layers of imagined ones. And I'll emphasize the 'hope' on that.
gattsuru
5d ago
Fair, but at the risk of going full Diogenes and regardless of his politics and morality, the practicing attorneys are charlatans, too. The difference between him and a Kennedy School professor and Obama alum that's never practiced law is just a bunch of W-2s, not whether he's more trustworthy or even more knowledgeable.
That might seem, at first glance, like a really expansive claim. But Ken White's a practicing criminal attorney - an ex-federal-prosecutor, as he repeatedly points out to anyone who doubts his bonafides - that has written that "if all else fails, punch him in the balls" is "within shouting distance of prosecutable in the U.S.", who argued that Epstein didn't kill himself by giving a long list of other prisoners almost all of which didn't kill themselves, and argued that the Snowden charges would have required the United States government "to prove that it is harmful to release accurate information about how it is spying on us, and how it is misleading us about spying on us" (when the text White posted of the statute showed they could just prove harm from any of the literal thousands of other specific things that Snowden had already been known to have divulged).
I'll point out that last one not because I had to dig that far back to find a third example (and believe me, it's tempting to just go reverse down his timeline) but because it shows he was fucking it up then. Worse, everyone else -- ClarkHat, Glenn Reynolds, lawfareblog, several actual practicing defense lawyers, me -- bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. Because we were naive, or stupid, or because we liked the politics, and the morality, and the whatever. And at the risk of stretching a metaphor, it's a claim that's equivalent to an IT guy that thinks you use rollover cables to connect two switches to each other, or a pilot that thinks you steer with the yoke on the ground. Maybe just a little concerning if it were an intern's first day on the job, but not the sort of mistake experts should get to make.
There's a fascinating philosophical question about whether he's intentionally turning the stupid on and off like a mask, if he's some pretense of competent when he's at his day job, or whether he's an idiot savant who reverse-rainmans himself by giving shitty legal theories in such a compelling way that observers are persuaded to agree with him. But since he's also the man who codified the Rule of Goats, I don't have to care. Nor is it just him, even if he's a particularly easy one to document.
But worse than that, it's not like anyone in the real world acts like any of these guys are the charlatans they obviously are. William Baude's at the nexus of both stuffed-shirt 'qualifications' and no-neck academic onanism that you justly criticize the Volokh sphere. The paper he's going to be famous for the rest of his life used Vallandigham as an example he picked to explain why the 14th Amendment required removing names from ballots, without ever noting or disclaiming that Vallandigham ran for Senate after the ratification of the 14th Amendment with his name getting on the ballot. No one cares. Not even in a kayfabe sense, where okay MSNBC is bread-and-circuses, but the important resources of governments and courts just throw this in with the pro se sovereign citizens. Ken White wasn't telling everyone Baude was a conman; no one in the Volokh circles cares (even today after Baude lost) that he's a putz. And it's not just the normies or the talking heads who overlook that these credentials are useless. Hell, I brought it up here with AshLael and ymeskhout - a real public defender - and no one of them said 'oh, sure, he's a swindler, why do you care about the Yalies' in response.
gattsuru
5d ago
The Measurements thing is pretty common, but I'll caution that mainstream (even 'mainstream' in the sense of the Playboy 'I can't believe it happened to me' sense) filters male-focused sexuality a lot more aggressively than women writers, even around the same kinks. Tamora Pierce's weirder age gaps predate the real heavy norm shifts in the late 1990s, but there's reason I keep bringing up the Blue Is The Warmest Color problem in romance; it's something you have to actively avoid and block the further you get into fandom spaces. But even well outside of the squicky questionable or overt absolute number age problems, male-written fantasy like what you're motioning around is not just possible but pretty common in fandom spaces.
((And it's just an outright standard trope for M/M stuff, whether the writer or artist is a top, switch, bottom, or straight guy.))
There's just a lot of forces that make sure that sorta writing doesn't come from a man in modern publishing, from the general pressures against men writing romance-heavy stories, the heightened scrutiny if they do, and the wider pressures against hiring men in those roles at all.
Trying some recipes again:
- Savory puff pastry rolls. Dice and partially caramelize a small white onion, about 10 min high heat, 20 min on low. Toss in and brown at high heat a pound of ground / minced lean beef or turkey, drain off any excess grease. Add salt, pepper, garlic powder, chili powder, and cumin to taste, optionally throw in a tablespoon worchestershire sauce or throw in and simmer off a quarter-cup of sherry, port, or red vinegar. Once crumbly and well-browned, turn off heat and immediately transfer to a plate with paper towels on top and below. Prepare two puff pastry sheets, unroll, but keep them as close to fridge temperature as possible. Scoop half the meat-and-onion mix in a flat line along one of the short edges of each puff pastry sheet, at least a half-inch in, and spread it shallow. Apply a line of 2- to 4-ounces of goat cheese, sharp cheddar, or pepper jack cheese, very shallow, along the same axis. Roll each sheet back up. Cut each puff pastry roll into pinwheels, six-eight per roll. Place onto parchment paper on a baking sheet, apply an egg wash. Cook at 450 F for 25-30 minutes. Serves four to six people, best served with a hearty salad, roasted vegetables, and a chutney or mustard sauce. You can put these into hand pies or more complicated shapes, but the roll works a lot better imo and are much easier, even if it's a bit messier. It's not quite as interesting a result as the chicken-and-cheese-and-apple pie, but it's been a lot more acceptable to most other people.
- Bobotie (sp?). Ground beef/turkey, onion, spice as above, toss in some curry powder to your preferences. Add a half-cup chutney or jam, four slices of white bread torn into tiny pieces, and either a cup of unsweetened applesauce or a cored and diced large apple, optionally a half cup of raisins, dried cranberries, or dried cherries. Layer into a baking dish. Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes. When that's almost done, mix three eggs, a cup of half-and-half (or a half-cup of cream and a half-cup of milk), a tablespoon of tumeric in a bowl, and beat the everliving shit out of it. Pour on top of the meat in the baking dish, cook for another twenty minutes. Most Official Recipes say add bay leaf, but even as someone that loves bay for rice, it doesn't seem to do much here. Serve with rice and some greenage, but expect three servings for most eaters.
- This recipe modifies to work in a rice cooker surprisingly well -- I basically just pan-fried the chicken in its marinade instead of partially-cooking it in an instant pot -- though I don't think it would have passed an authenticity test. Still pretty good, and outside of the (looooong) marinade time, a lot easier than I expected.
- Lazy man's burritos mix. Pan-fry a pound of boneless skinless chicken, allow pan to cool, then dump in drained pre-cooked kidney or pinto beans and a cup of salsa (salsa verde and peach salsa work weirdly well, but even your standard gringo salsa does fine). Simmer for thirty minutes covered on low heat, adding water if it starts to dry out. In a separate pot or a rice cooker, cook three cups rice in four cups water without rinsing the starch off, drain, and then dump the chicken-salsa-bean mix. Mix aggressively, let sit and cool for ten minutes to let the rice absorb as much as it can and get as sticky as possible. You can go really nuts with this recipe in a slow cooker, and it's great and gets rid of the pan-fry step (and can let you use bone-in chicken)... but it takes six hours and a crock pot. Either way, serve on a tortilla or lettuce wrap with iceberg lettuce, a sharp cheese, top with sour cream or greek yogurt and a drizzle of the remaining salsa.
gattsuru
6d ago
Partly, I'm just incredibly petty. Partly, because Gerstein's pivot to Project Veritas is unusually naked and galling - even as a defense of 'principles', both Gerstein and his cited experts quickly pivoted to defending the Times in their attacks on Veritas. Gerstein himself would later imply that Veritas only avoided criminal prosecution thanks to Trump winning the election, and it's possible he's not even wrong, though I'd need to check deeper before I could commit to it.
Partly, because writing up this stuff helps me remember the event. Partly because I've got some port I'm trying to work through before it goes bad, and while I can't drink enough at once to get really drunk, last night it was apparently enough to get me spicy. Partly, because if I don't write up un-newsworthy stuff, no one else will.
((and, I will admit, partly because I can't resist an easy "own", even when it degrades my writing. Can't claim in vino veritas as a defense on that.))
But mostly because, while Gerstein doesn't matter, the system does, and you can't meaningfully talk about a system without mentioning the completely replaceable gears. If I'd sed -i 's/Gerstein/Politico/g' that post, it'd have gotten criticized writing a smear; if I'd done them same to switch Gerstein's name for the entire leftist sphere, I'd be inviting moderation action, probably correctly. It's only that he's going to keep getting supported, employed, unarrested, and unmolested that even lets me make this into a broader critique (and, coincidentally, leaves a testable prediction... and one I've very, very, very seldom had to eat crow on.)
((bonus prediction, SHA256 for three days: 7d4ed1e8c28b93c95e7b533870073df64ca533c9174589124b5b145fd818a611.))
It's not very productive to unload both barrels at a particularly squeaky replaceable gear, even if it can be a little cathartic. Doesn't mean the system's in good shape. This guy shows a lot of the ways its defenses aren't in good shape.
Josh Gerstein is a Terrible Legal Expert
A man wrote a bad post on twitter:
This isn't so much a statement as it is a bunch of Implications given current events, but whatever extent it's implying anything, it's worth spelling out that it's fractally wrong. Minnesota is not a Stand Your Ground state, Stand Your Ground laws don't allow anyone to just blammo someone for knocking on a front door of a public business, there's no bonus tag on amateurs, Minnesota has an unusually constrained castle doctrine, so on, so forth.
At his claimed defense, this is just snark about his imagined false beliefs about the law resulting in the deaths of his hated enemies. False beliefs that Gerstein has actively promoted, and which he does not correct here even twenty hours later to dispel, taking full strength "90% of posters quit digging right before they're about to get out of the hole". Which would be funny, were Gerstein just another incompetent internet lawyer: it's not like I'd have space to complain just because someone's wrong, there's a surfeit of people wrong on the internet, and I'm not exactly bar-certified myself.
But no. He's an expert incompetent internet lawyer. Gerstein is, as his bio helpfully points out, a Senior Legal Affairs Reporter at Politico. He doesn't need X payouts to be compensated to be this wrong: he's a professional!
There’s things to be said about trust in expertise, but Ive said them before, on clearer matters; there’s little I can add to his presentation than shouting “the Cognitive Elite” at the end like the punchline to an Aristocrats joke, and that’s applicable nearly everywhere anyway.
To provide a real steelman, he doesn't want me dead. He doesn't even know me! He might even pretend to be apologetic were Shirley shot tomorrow. It's just be hilarious, the day after.
((Although it's worth spelling out that staff writers for a local media org published by a man with fraught ethical ties to the current Minnesota Governor are very interested in the identities of certain 'citizen journalists'. Just "reserving the right", anyway?))
... but that's not exactly news. Indeed, this stuff isn't newsworthy. Gerstein might feel proud about 4.8m (and counting) impressions of being a dumbass, but the reality is no one that matters cares about his entire existence except as a way to make the demons from Frieren look sympathetic and multifacted; if his computer blew up and he was stranded on a desert isle without internet access, there's a hundred thousand Vox wannabes chomping to take his seat. Brendan Eich got decked in a public space by someone specifically targeting him for his political positions a decade ago, you didn't hear about it at the time, I can't find any reporting now, and the only reason I know is that the guy who did it was happy to tell me. A guy who celebrated a political assassination took an NYT slot to debate the corpse, and he's better-known now for (allegedly) electrocuting a dog (cw: music, and be glad that I didn't link the furry version). Ken White has gone from jesus christ territory to full "who needs LLMs when the real hallucinations were with us the whole time". He can't even get an intervention, or for whatever shrink he's paying to pay attention to where his political screed hit actual madness; for everyone else, they're just noise coming from that thing in the corner. There's no shortage of these things; I'll just throw out the link and save the scrolling for everyone else. Even for people here, fish don't think about water.
Ken White is a lawyer in good standing. Punch-happy programmer, afaik, works at a FAANG. RPGnet isn't getting the ARFcom treatment, or men with no sense of humor that they are aware of asking for IP addresses. Discords and fundraisers where people call some political assassinations a good start don't have Harvard-supported orgs delivering hacked personal information to Fox News.
And Gerstein isn't going to lose his job over this. This is his job; he's a Legal Affairs Reporter not someone who actually needs to know what the actual laws are or who to ask about those things. There's no one who can boycott Politico who could care. It's certainly not going to end with fascist jackboots dragging him out of his door at 6AM in his underwear, and the mere idea, were it even imaginable, would be enough to unify a massive array complete with lawyers and judges with little interest or attention for technicalities and no hedging about bad behavior.
That's not a concern, for some.
gattsuru
7d ago
You'll see minheaps a bit under Dijkstra's algorithm in the networking and -adjacent spheres, but it's so well-known as the Default Solution for those use cases you're either going to have it under several layers of abstraction, or you're really doing something weird. I've had to hand-build it once, and I don't think the end product ever actually hit anywhere outside of a toy environment.
gattsuru
8d ago
To a large extent, these tools already exist. They're just limited: SCAIL struggles for movement paths with more than three characters or over nine seconds, ControlNet Pose has to be tuned for each model and sometimes even each finetune, and LoRA can uniquely handle three or four style/character/event/motion per output before they start getting funky interactions.
But even assuming that these problems can be fixed - plausible, but not a given! - there's a fundamental tradeoff between what you let the model do, and what you don't. Sometimes expressed as a double! And still hard to manage.
It's a little difficult to comment with confidence yet, just because there's something like (im)plausible deniability for at least some of the locations, still. Especially near the holidays you'd expect a child care business to be very feast-or-famine, it's not always obvious how closely a given 'business' is tied to a specific number of hours, and a number of violations during an inspection can 'just' point to a small and new business. Even the multitude of businesses with a shared address could mean that the owners are operating out of their homes and have an office park PO box to handle mail -- that's not even particularly unusual for actually-legit service-oriented small businesses.
But there's a lot of stuff that stinks to high heaven. At minimum, compliance had to have completely skipped most of the steps and processes that a normal child care agency had to go through. Even where it's 'real' in the sense that they're doing child care, some of it's probably not real in the sense of paying the claimed fees that justify the various grants and subsidies, and most of it's almost certainly not 'real' in the sense of complying with the long array of standards and regulations.
There's a non-zero chance Shirley ends up facing charges, here, which will be one of the funniest possible endings. ((Of course he's serious, and stop calling him Surely.)) There's a lot of rules about creeps filming kids, with reason.
There's also a >95% chance that there's some org or orgs has been actively farming these businesses or 'businesses' up in exchange for a cut, and is totally within the bounds of the law. Probably has extensive documentation that they cleanly and clearly described each and every regulatory requirement (to people who didn't understand them). The really fun question is how many of them are making political donations. But at best a bunch of particularly shameless small fry might fry; none of the people in the government who should have noticed that Line Went Up will lose their jobs.
Physical-work side, I got to do some siding repairs. That's been a !!fun!! way to spend the holiday break.
Software-side, trying to look into the state of modern sorting-assist tools. You'd think, will all of the advances in AI tech, classifying files and sorting them would be a solved or near-solved problem. Microsoft's "agentic AI" concept drives me up the wall for a wide variety of reasons, but this seems like one of the main killer use cases. If you've ever worked tech support for either Gen Y/Z or Boomers, seeing a Downloads or Documents folder with so many loose files that it causes an SSD to slow to a crawl is a pretty common experience, and they can't find shit (or, worse, can find ImportantDocument_final_last_(1)autorecover\current.docx, for now).
So I've been trying to come up with and evaluating possible solutions to this sorta thing.
That's on top of other issues specific to implementations: a lot of ViTs and multimodal LLMs depend heavily on breaking, while a lot of classifiers get really stupid if you have wildly different resolution inputs, multimodal LLMs can't distinguish between prompt and content, yada yada.
On the flip side, closely related topics are nearly >98% solved off the shelf, even ones that I'd consider a lot harder.
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