gattsuru
22hr ago
Australia depends very heavily on bulk road transportation to very long distance deliveries, while not having a surfeit of truckers or the interstate infrastructure present in the US. Their solution is “road trains”, consisting of a semi truck, but instead of having one trailer, usually having three to five.
This on its own is just goofy-looking. But road trains also have additional speed limits often slower than normal vehicles (tbf, a good idea), and a lot of the roads they travel have two lanes, one traveling each direction. That would still be fine.
It is culturally normal to pass in those circumstances, so long as not in a no-passing zone. Even when the roads are pretty sandy on the edges. So you have a delta of 5-10kph, a set of trailers that can be 50m long, and you’re going to be potentially playing chicken with incoming traffic for over a minute while the trailers beside you are jerking around.
((And then you also have to worry about the truck driver spotting a kangaroo or a cow on the road in front of him.))
I have no objection to other people using automatic headlights; the mechanism is pretty fail safe. Don’t like them for my own use, but that’s a taste thing.
gattsuru
1d ago
- Yes.
- Yes.
- Not in the US, in good weather, at daytime. Expect 10-15% over to be acceptable. Rain, snow, or true nighttime off an interstate, speed limits are more strict to their posted number. Other countries can be more aggressive; Australia going 1 kph over too often can cost you your license (though in turn, their norms for road trains are near-suicidal by US standards).
- On the interstate and state roads, yes. Residential roads, I'd consider it rude to get into the left lane for a left turn more than a couple miles ahead of time, but it'd still not be a norm violation and in heavier traffic might be a good idea.
- At lower speeds, it's just impolite. Higher speeds (50+ mph), I'd consider it a norm violation unless they've been really stupid (eg matching speed, ignoring or not seeing turn signal for several hundred meters).
- No.
- a. How long after sunrise or before complete sunset do you need to turn on headlights, and what amount of rain should you? b. What sort of load, if any, in an open truck bed, before you need at least one ratchet strap?
gattsuru
1d ago
With AI image generation, there are so many levels of randomness and frustrated choice that it's hard to imagine how a user could work for years to achieve progressively greater mastery. Don't most commercial models actively work to disrupt direct user control, e.g. by adding a system prompt you can't see and running even the words of your prompt through intermediate hidden LLM revisions before they even get to the image generator?
Commercial models are usually pretty limited in your control, but local models can be surprisingly deep in terms of technical skill.
There aren't many people working in the space yet, but there's a lot you can do. Inpainting allows controlled redrawing of selected areas, LoRAs (and, previously, Dreambooth) can be used to encode characters or things or styles or perspectives, Image Segmentation can control layout, ControlNet can be used to manipulate pose or composition, so on. Currently, first-frame-last-frame-packing video generation are pretty focused on something very akin to putting together a 'storyboard', and the most plausibly consistent that storyboard is drastically changes how consistent the output image can be. Local AIgen workflows can look very different from talking to a midjourney bot.
Some of these technical skills even have a little overlap: knowing things like the names of different paint or painting techniques, or how camera lenses work, or what poses people can actually do, or why composition matters, feed back into even prompting and heavily feeds into these more technical uses.
The big difference is that (with the arguable exception of storyboarding) these are technical skills; they'll show you how well you achieve what you're trying to do, without necessarily changing whether what you want to do looks good. Conventional artists always had a little bit of that -- drawing a circle or line to improve hand coordination doesn't inherently teach where to use those primitives -- but AIgen does not really have a good way to develop the skill of taste beyond personal preference.
Technically, my first car I owned was a "fancy German car", and even a Mercedes Benz... that was older than I was when I bought it, less than a month's wages as a part-time dishwasher, and about as unreliable as that combination sounds. Probably more a fault on the previous owner than the German Engineering, but even after a full fuel line purge and a new fuel filter, had to clean out the carburetor on a biweekly basis.
Since then it's been the typical Camry-or-nearest-neighbor that I'll buy heavily used, and then drive until the engine grenades itself (thank you Saturn timing chains) or the next oil change isn't economical.
I'm not a car person. It's nice to have something where the muffler isn't falling off, and I don't mind doing the elbow work for maintenance, but if the car's in decent shape I'll take a salvage title Hyundai or a Lesbian-Brand Hatchback as happily as a Tesla or a Big Fuckoff Truck.
gattsuru
1d ago
Anyone want to bet whether that gets extended by or on the 11th?
gattsuru
1d ago
Excluding for now the possibility of a Dem trifecta, there's a lot of problems with the text of the INA. For a simple example... Under the conventional reads no; non-citizens must "immediately preceding the date of filing his application for naturalization has resided continuously, after being lawfully admitted for permanent residence, within the United States for at least five years", with a limited number of exceptions not relevant for most cases.
... so what's, exactly, the definition of "being lawfully admitted for permanent residence"? Barring some exceptions not relevant here, "the status of having been lawfully accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States as an immigrant in accordance with the immigration laws, such status not having changed". Historically that's been understood to require an LPR (aka green card).
But would a Dem President be un_able_ to change that? All the processes are executive branch, even the judges. Would anyone have standing to even bring a case challenging such a change? Would SCOTUS be willing to claw back the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of people?
And that's one of the less plausible ones.
gattsuru
2d ago
There's some videos here and here (cw: deadly plane crash).
Too grainy to completely exclude takeoff misconfiguration (esp on a sleek design like the 787), but at least no obvious structural failure, and I'd be surprised if takeoff misconfiguration could get that high in those weather conditions with that passenger load. NTSB's going to do some tests for fuel contamination, pilot error, maintenance faults, so on, but at the risk of speculating too early a lot of what I'm seeing points to either dual mechanical failure of the engines or electrical failure of the whole aircraft, especially the reported RAT deployment is real. Given everything else a lot of people are predisposed to think software or major design failure, but it's hard to think of a software bug or hardware flaw that would hide for over a decade and then hit both engines simultaneously. Maybe flying into a flock of birds a la Sully, but without the river and miracle?
gattsuru
2d ago
There's a lot of surprising survivals in takeoff and landing crashes: Northwest 255 is a pretty (in)famous takeoff misconfiguration that managed to kill more people than were on the flight and had one survivor.
gattsuru
2d ago
There's a handful of well-known examples in western languages, too, and probably a bunch more that are too informal to really be written down.
gattsuru
2d ago
A Framingham man who is accused of shooting another man during a pro-Israeli rally last September in Newton was placed on pretrial probation on Wednesday, June 4. Charges against Scott Hayes, 48, will be dismissed if he completes all pretrial probation conditions. The pretrial probation period runs through Sept. 13. The resolution of the case took place during a hearing Wednesday in Newton District Court.
One interesting bit I hadn't seen until reviewing one of his probation requirements, to search for a new job:
The disabled Iraq War veteran was contracted to provide natural gas leak detection, leak surveys, and inspections for a company that contracts with National Grid, one of the largest utility provider companies in Massachusetts. National Grid refused to allow Hayes to work on their account after the incident. As a result, his company informed him on Sunday — a month after the attack — that there was no work available, and advised Hayes to file for unemployment.
I've not been able to find out what happened with Gannon, the guy who struck Hayes. He was eventually charged with assault and battery, but the MA court lookup system sucks, so I can't tell if I'm not getting results with his name because I'm using the system wrong, or because they're not there. There's been no media coverage of a trial or plea agreement.
There's a lot less 'adult' games out there than you might expect, even for a pretty shallow level of curation and taste.
F95 doesn't have literally every porn game (or even every recent porn game; Fek's Spellbound (cw:m/m) has a surprisingly interesting central mechanic and afaict no f95 thread), and its filtering tools aren't the best, but the widest tag search gives a little over 2k items for 'cheating'. I don't have a good grasp on netorare/netorase/netosi, but the whole category of cheating is probably not really what erwgv3g34's after, and a lot of games will get marked for a kink for having one or two scenes even mentioning it rather than any real serious focus. I'd be surprised if there's more than a couple hundred, and as much as the ones erwgv links are Bog Standard In Progress VNs, even moderately good writing or design would probably put them at the top 10% of the pack.
There's a lot of furry games (F95 gives about 1200), and we tend to be pretty omnivorous when it comes to material. But a lot of those are either tech demos, like most VR games or very-early-prototypes, or games with maybe a couple story paths or a handful of animations, like VNs or platformers. There are some games that are complex enough to be worth visiting a few different times, most of which I've either bought or donated for. But if you wanted a list (and, uh, were pretty open-minded), I'd still probably given dozens, not hundreds. Even of the one-shots, a pretty sizable portion are not great, even by the standards of LLMs or AIgen. You can run out pretty quick without being some supergooner.
That's most severe for adult media and for kink, because there's a lot of kinks that range from personal nonstarters even in tiny doses (eg, I personally don't like hyper period, no offense to those that do) to possibly illegal in many countries (ignoring the obvious examples, people have gotten pretty seriously legal concerns over producing a cartoony CBT game). Many of the better games for my interests are text-only, because the nature of what they are means producing more than a handful of paperdoll-style images is agonizing work even with a lot of artists willing to work for near-peanuts!
But it's not like it's specific to porn games.
A year or so ago Rayon brought a big conversation about Palworld. And it's never been that clear how much (if at all) AI was used in producing the game. But it's a genre with a mere handful of serious competitors, and even the most 'successful' ones are often much worse. Over a year later, Nintendo has brought a pretty deadly legal threat against Palworld; they don't have a game that can actually compete with Palworld's not-exactly-great implementation yet. Maybe Legends ZA will break the pattern in October, but the last Legends game was pretty much just a joke. ARK I remains notoriously unplayable for the vast majority of people, it has a 'remaster' that manages to be buggier, and ARK II is in ETA:soon mode and has been for three years now. Kenshi or Grounded, if you have a wide enough definition? There's a couple attempts in Roblox for dragon manager games, I guess? But that's an insult to gatcha.
Base-building survival game with critters seems like it'd be inundated with clones; it's not exactly the goats-on-fire of SFW gaming genres. And that's not really happened. AIgen isn't there, yet. Maybe those limitations are why nobody's been able to step into the space, and maybe it'll never get there. Or maybe AIgen will act as an attacter for the sorta people who make very shallow games. (after all, most AIgen on f95 is glorified VN)
gattsuru
3d ago
I'll caveat that tumblr has picked a 'third way' -- if you can't depend on finding the flaws in the machines or smashing the machines, you can start looking at and promoting artists with their art. Yes, an AIgenner could theoretically 'put their steps in', having a long history of progressing art skills and process work for a given piece, maybe not even fraudulent at that, but it's not really what almost any will.
((With the advances we're seeing, I'd expect this to go the way of Amish furniture -- great technical skill and often unusual approaches to a work and usually better when available, but not always able to do those things.))
... though I'm not sure that will matter. People want to make principled stands over copyright or intellectual property, even if they're sometimes a little Janus-faced. But the Luddites cared about their work, and their pay, and not without reason; modern AIgen concerns much more heavily revolve around these matters than tracing II: trace harder. A thousand galleries and retweets and reblogs do not cash make; as an artist, Attention Is <Not> All You Need. A lot of mainstream artists historically depended, both for cash and for opportunity to develop their skills, on make-day work that is completely separate from other reputation and reliability trends pointed to direct sales to their audiences. You can't break the machines for this, you aren't involved in deciding to buy or not, and you can't judge the artist because they might never be named.
Tumblr and a lot of fandom spaces have moved to merch or patreon funding, and that's kinda worked on the edges for the most successful or the most second-job strivery. But I don't think it scales.
Most furry spaces have largely gotten pretty strict rules about aigen, sometimes aligned to the points you've highlighted and sometimes not, and the end result is pretty goofy.
E621, for example, prohibits AI excepting use for "backgrounds (treated like using a photo as a background, quality rules apply); for artwork that references, but does not directly use, AI generated content; and for audio in video posts such as WebM." The moderators will explain, when pinged, exactly how a particular piece falls, and from my understanding are pretty clear and direct about things. I don't know of any sfw examples, but leeto's 4930019 (cw:M/M and M/F) is an example where AI had been used to create pose references, but the final file had never been touched by any AIgen program, and moderators said it was at the very border but still acceptable (though this scared the artist off enough to move to conventional digital pose generators). The rules are workable!
But they end up in a situation where half of the pixels in a particular artpiece are AIgen and it's okay, including a lot of stuff that's setting the stage, and then another piece where AIgen was only used to add some shadow or shading and that's unacceptable. More critically, serious enforcement is dependent on self-reporting. Rick Griffin got a piece banned from FurAffinity (and, presumably, would not be allowed on e621) for some tree renders and shading that I don't think anyone would have noticed had he not spelled it out. Obvious errors in logic or consistency can sometimes point to AIgen when an artist doesn't disclose it (or show other faults that trigger other quality rules), and there's a certain look to some of the most common AIgen, but you can and I have put out hundreds of pieces in an hour with wildly different styles and pretty good image quality consistency.
((And, on the flip side, a bad actor can actively use AI for what AI proponents would still consider stealing. Img2img with someone else's art can have far less actual effort than direct reference or even hand-tracing on a lightbox, but can be different enough to bypass a lot of conventional phash checks or even eyeball tests for 'novelty' and 'uniqueness'. If a small-name account starts doing it, it's hard to catch and harder still to persuasively demonstrate.))
But you can also just kinda have counterintuitive and inconsistent results, and just that's how things are. I'm not even sure some arbitrary rules would be bad -- an art gallery that allowed some limited number of upload per account per day (and restricted alts) using AIgen could avoid a lot of the spam and quality control problems that places which haven't banned the stuff often run into. The rules and points being made up is pretty common.
gattsuru
4d ago
There's three major stories I'm aware of:
The Red Tribe story starts in 1986, where President Reagan promoted and passed a major immigration bill with two central components. On one hand, almost all existing immigrants, regardless of their status, would be given an amnesty and treated as if they had legally immigrated for purposes such as deportation and naturalization. In turn, we were supposed to get a massive enforcement apparatus discouraging further illegal immigration. But like all Wimpyisms, we found that the stuff that took place today happened reliably, and the prong that was supposed to happen in the future faded away; the various rules to cut off the employment of illegal immigrants were left unenforced, and various court cases would make deportation harder even in the rare case anyone was caught.
((Note that there is no honest Blue Tribe analysis of the impact of these policies: compare the wikipedia's "allowing for the legalization of nearly 60,000 undocumented immigrants from 1986 to 1989 alone" with the actual source).
This was, on its own, frustrating. But it did not escalate immediately. What really brought the tension to the forefront was the 2013 Gang of Eight bill. While a lot of broad stroke discussions of the proposal (championed by Rubio) heavily promoted an increased enforcement mandate, the combination of interactions with the then-controversial ACA and widespread loss of trust in claims made about the ACA made it far more critical. And then the language actual came out, and one of the biggest enforcement mechanisms was a entry/exit database that had been required by statute for over a decade-and-a-half already. This time they'd really do it because the amnesty would only be provisional until (some of) these enforcement actions happened... because ten years of provisional status would be a lot more politically costly to act against. And that goal leaked.
So a lot of conservatives absolutely lost their shit, Rubio was a joke for months. A lot of mainstream conservatives swore, at length, that they would not even consider any bill that did not prioritize enforcement first. Meanwhile, the mainstream democratic party saw any bill without a broad amnesty component as actively useless.
... which was itself, in turn, an escalation. After seeing the conservative response, President Obama, and pushed DACA and DAPA, along with a number of other various non-prosecution policies. While not all of these would manage to go into action (albeit some were only blocked officially), the blue tribe calling conservatives the Party of No weren't exactly wrong! And the next ten years would primarily focused around lawfare; because neither side could pass legislation the other would even consider, various executive actions were the only real option, and because this required no negotiation except for what had to pass SCOTUS scrutiny, these policies could be much wider or single-sided than any plausible statute. Conservatives pointed to increasingly fraught possibilities of downstream political consequences (JarJarJedi has listed most of the mainstream examples, but for a particularly fun one most people who can think about don't say outloud: under the INA, people who have immigrated legally are eligible for naturalization after five years. guess how 'immigrated legally' is defined, or the legal consequences of a grant of citizenship that can't be stripped). Eventually this culminated in US v. Texas under Biden, where it turned out to be impossible to compel any enforcement policy at all from a President that didn't want to follow it.
The Blue Tribe story starts a few years later, as the IRCA1986's entry date amnesty thing passed, and it turned out that there were millions (sometimes estimated as ten million!) people who either entered the US too late for its use, did not register in time, or who were not eligible for other reasons. Run all the above with the opposite valiance, and you've got ten or tens of millions of people, a large portion who immigrated as children, are forced into a gray-at-best legal environment over what the Blue Tribe sees as a glorified paperwork offense, and Republicans who demand that we make a lot of additional paperwork offenses and hefty punishments for them before even considering confronting The Real Problem.
((In both the Blue Tribe and Red Tribe tellings, there's also various selection pressures: pro-immigration Republicans and restrictionist-Democrats were either compelled to change their minds or pushed out of the party/national politics.))
The Gray Tribe story starts much later, and thinks the legal and legislative connections are a little besides the point. They explain why things aren't happening, but they don't explain why the rioting is happening. For that, we instead look to a large and increasing group of who have long framed immigration enforcement of any type as fundamentally illegitimate, and any attempts to do so as fundamentally driven by animus and a sign of unadulterated evil. That put the normal paeans to informed compromise off the table.
The exact start date is fuzzy and depends heavily on who you ask and when. The growth of Punch A Nazi discourse in 2016 is an easy example, but you can also see people pointing to G20 protests or the tactics formalized in the gay marriage wars (I use 'animus' specifically). Everyone's least favorite web forum also 'must' have been the source.
gattsuru
4d ago
Probably from this or this poll, though I'll caveat that in both cases a) YouGov, b) not great wording, c) specifically about overturning Lawrence v. Texas, rather than reimplementing the laws (though in turn, some states never got rid of their pre-Lawrence statutes).
I don't think I've seen any polls about construction crane conversion therapy as a punishment, and it'd require overturning Kennedy v. Louisiana. Which, tbf, on much worse legal ground than the already-post-hoc Lawrence, but doesn't usually get polled much either.
gattsuru
4d ago
I don't mind most 'weeds', but dandelions are particularly prone to killing other nearby plants, and then spreading aggressively to any areas that don't have complete grass cover or deep mulch. I used to have some clover I was trying to cultivate in the lawn proper and a handful of local flowering plants in a nearby garden area, but the dandelions have pretty eagerly smothered them out, and sometimes doing the same to grass. If you have near neighbors, it's also kinda rude to give them your problem, too, and even if you're aggressive about mowing and weeding it's hard to get every dandelion before it gets to seed.
Most of my problem is downstream of having irregular hours and not having consistent opportunities to weed. If you can consistently stop seedlings early, they're pretty easy to pull away from any garden crops you want to keep and at least plausible to prevent almost all from getting to seed. If you don't have those constraints (and don't want the clean-uniform-lawn), they're a lot more tolerable.
gattsuru
4d ago
I've tried both 2,4-D and glysophate, using those powered wand things, and giving the base of each plant a two-second count. The dandelions definitely don't like it, but either I'm missing a lot of them or they're springing back after each application. To be fair, the previous homeowner had let it get bad to start with, and I'm not great with or consistent about lawnwork, so they've gotten a lot of opportunity to dig in.
((For how bad, I spent a day with some kneepads on and filled a 5-gallon bucket to the lid fourteen times, and didn't even get through all of a pretty small front lawn.))
It's making some progress, as has switching from a reel lawnmower to a powered one to better prevent them from getting to seed after spraying them, but it's been a lot worse than I'd expected even after bringing out the big guns.
gattsuru
5d ago
Fair. My impression is that LASD has a lot of the same issues, but I'll admit I've got less current evidence on that.
gattsuru
5d ago
I've tried turning off visibility of things like individual post scores, but that does just risk you changing to focus on notifications, instead. And given the extent twitter has driven people completely bonkers, that might be worse than the karma farming. There's always been worries about the masks we wear molding the face -- and even some theories about using that to improve ourselves -- but having the masks get molded in turn is Not Great Bob. And then what exactly it seems to be driving even the boring people toward is kinda disturbing.
You can do some efforts to de-algorithmify yourself, but that's only going to get the worst of it, and maybe not even that. And it's pretty incompatible with having a career or even a renumerative hobby online. Even some offline small business work is becoming increasingly hard to kick off without it. I'd like to advocate some level of in vino veritas, but a) I don't drink, and b) that doesn't seem to work great for those who pick it up. Trying to actively avoid collecting enough of a following maybe helps? But I dunno if that's just because I wouldn't notice the microscale examples of the trend, either.
The one bright spot is that Flanderization does, at least in part, reflect another trait specific to media, not people qua people. Ted Flanders didn't turn from slightly-religious neighbor into a fundie just because time's arrow flew, but also because the shows writers needed something new for each episode. "Simpsons Did It" is a problem for South Park, but it's also an issue for The Simpsons itself; even if most viewers won't recognize the psuedorerun, the show's staff and a lot of the commentariat will. If you have to get a column out for your tech column the weekend and three videos M/W/F, you start diving into this sorta A/B-to-death-testing because you don't have anything else, and the content doesn't have that much to start with.
For normal people, that doesn't quite work that way. Yes, history rhymes, and I'm probably one of the worst people on this site when it comes to bringing up ancient history from the long-ago days of two years ago. But anyone that hasn't let the mask embed into their skull can and probably will find something new because the world is filled with new stuff. Get a hobby, touch grass, fight the dandelion infestation on your front lawn again (fuuuuuuuuuuuck), talk about cooking.
I've mostly been focused on image generators. Between improvements to LoRA development processes along with Wan's image-to-video and first-frame-last-frame-to-video, there's been some pretty massive advances in the last six months or so. It's still hard to get consistency in animation, along with long generation times the reasons why why all those animation shots floating around tend to just be a couple seconds long, but that we're at the point where 'make this arbitrary subject into a turntable motion effect' is getting complaints about background consistency is not what I imagined just a couple years ago. They don't always work, but we're not talking 'success' in the sense 'that it can do it at all' anymore.
I keep hoping that this'll end up being a useful tool for artists -- someone with a real eye for the medium and a good sketching hand should be able to use this to crank out in days what would otherwise take weeks or even months of dedicated work, in the same way that two years ago plain StableDiffusion could save artists a ton of time with crosshatching or rosettes or shading -- but there's not enough people really messing in the field to say for sure. Even for those few working in this there's not a lot publicly visible with how many conventional galleries ban the stuff, and a lot who might be some of the most adept at it already have workflows that fill in many of these gaps for comic- or even animation-level work.
AI voicework has a lot of potential. I've toyed with it a little, though getting decent emotion through is still a bit beyond me. The workflows are still a little too finicky to use real-time, but eventually getting an Emet Selch together would be fun for the memes.
I've been trying to get a full workflow for image-to-3d-print and image-to-CNC together. 2D works are easy, if not especially entertaining, but it should be well within the existing tech to do a lot of creative stuff, here. Almost have Meshroom to a point where it'll work, but not there yet.
Haven't been able to get any of the offline ones to write reasonable fiction, and I don't particularly trust the online ones for anything more complicated. For conventional fiction, it takes a frustrating amount of prompting to get a work that's surprising enough to be interesting without swerving into M. Night Shamalayan territory; trying to get exofiction or a counterfactual story or anything complex with viewpoint tends to go batshit (and for smut, the line between interesting and disgusting is very thin and hard-to-encode just for my own use). But I haven't messed with it too much.
gattsuru
5d ago
I'll argue (and have long argued) that it's something upstream; the direction of causality is pointing from a common source. There's a pretty wide variety of spheres where millenial-focused media is absolutely bright-colored, especially where designs and decisions come from the grassroots.
There are a lot of things to complain about in Helluva Boss (cw: lots of profanity, some sexual 'humour') or Brand New Animal, but they're not grey or even My Little Pony-pastel. Look at MMORPGs and going from the most conventional subscription model like FFXIV to the most gatcha-like Genshin they've only gotten brighter over the last decade even as they've increasingly targeted the same demographics. The furry fandom overwhelmingly favors bright and high-constrast to the point where there's a term for hitting it too hard and the bar is high (cw: extremely bad bad color selection). Even the artists who do focus on the greys have a lot more soul than corporate metis. Go into Blue Tribe heavy spaces, and the corporate grey laptops are spangled with every sticker cause celebre available.
But if you're putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, you paint your house grey. Nonconfrontational uber alles, in the most literal sense.
There's an optimistic story where the growth of spaces to be maximally yourself have lead to a cleaner division between the personal and the public (well, optimistic until you poke at it), and a pessimistic story where we just banned everything and ignored the consequences.
But I think there's a more cynical one: everything adds up to normal, and this is the local maxima.
gattsuru
5d ago
Fair, and maybe a decade or two ago a different focus on the side of trans advocates would have avoided some controversial landmines had they made that decision then. But path dependence is a nightmare; at this point, even assuming that committed (left-?) civil-left-libertarians exist in enough numbers to be a meaningful political force, I don't think this battle of terminology makes the top-ten list, and maybe even not the top-twenty list, of most alienating things.
gattsuru
5d ago
Old Man's War is a better Scalzi work than most, but it makes it there by being a knockoff of the far-better execution of the same concept in Haldeman's The Forever War -- if you haven't read it, I far recommend it. I don't think Scalzi was intentionally ripping that earlier story off, but I'm also exceptionally skeptical that he was unaware of the earlier story or never read it.
Two deaths. Other two victims are currently expected to recover.
One noteworthy bit’s that this is a little bit more sophisticated than the normal hradzka garbage person emotional spasm, not just in the police maskerade, but also hitting two separate politicians so quickly. Police are claiming he had a list with a number of other politicians included. This is pretty far from what I (or, presumably FCfromSSC) would think about, but it doesn’t take much more sophistication before it breaks the normal field tilt toward defense.
Another is that Washington’s state Senate is very close. They’re out of session and it will be a while til the next session, but change votes by a bullet is Very Bad to have as common knowledge.
Some reporting is claiming the shooter has been caught and identified as someone with ties to the Dem political sphere (Walz, morbidly). I’d like to see confirmation that a) that’s the guy and b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though. EDIT: Confirmed “no kings” rally fliers in vehicle, dunno if motivation or target.
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