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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   2582 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 20, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Reading stuff on the internet, I was suddenly hit with a realization that Tom Cruise is over 60 now (looking ridiculously good for the age, btw). Which got me thinking - almost all the movie stars I am familiar with are officially old now. I am mostly into action movies (though not only, I like comedies and even occasional romcom) and it used to be that if the movie has, say, Bruce Willis, or Schwarzenegger, or Harrison Ford, yes, Tom Cruise, you get the idea - I'd at least pay attention to it. It may still be bad, but I'll at least bother to check (otherwise I'd have to hear some good hype from some respected sources to even pay attention, there's just too much junk around otherwise). So, my question is - are there any stars under 40 now that are worth paying attention to? Who are they? Obviously, it's very subjective criteria, a matter of taste, but I'd like to hear some opinions.

Tom Cruise is always getting older

He knows he'll never be that young again

And every time he looks over his shoulder

He sees a thousand younger leading men

And he knows someday he'll have to play an old retarded grandpa

while someone younger plays his sexy son

Too early to tell but I loved Anyone but you as a back to basics from com and suspect Glen Powell is a decent (and attractive) actor.

The collapse of the monoculture means that, with very few exceptions, no new "stars" (in the sense of celebrities who are household names to a broad cross-section of the population) have been minted since the smartphone era began in earnest. Jeff Maurer noticed that all of the celebrities featured in this year's Super Bowl ads were all people who were already famous twenty years ago. I sincerely cannot think of a movie star who got their big break since 2014 (when smartphones achieved saturation) who could legitimately be considered a household name.

With the caveat that i don't think that movie stars really exist in the same way anymore, I think Robert Pattinson is a cut above most prominent actors his age, is decent at choosing prjoects and is consistently starring in commercial and critical successes.

There doesn't seem to be. I think recently RLM talked about how Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was officially a Hollywood sellout, and if he's in a movie you should run the other way. I remember when Top Gun: Maverick came out, people talked about how Tom Cruise is the last movie star. The last actor who's name alone can draw people to a picture.

Don't be sad it's over, be glad for all the good movie we already got.

You can be a total sellout and still be a good actor, though; doing this just means that the onus still falls back on your potential audience to look for other indicators of quality (reviews, non-sellout costars/directors/writers) rather than just trusting that you wouldn't be in anything that wasn't good. "The Rock" has been in a bunch of uninspiring stuff but that doesn't mean (assuming you have kids) you should run from Moana.

Consider Michael Caine for a better example. Two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, four nominations for Best Actor, cast member in several fantastic movies, and yet perhaps his best line was the one he ad-libbed to a question about his appearance in Jaws: The Revenge (IMDB 3.0/10):

"I haven’t seen the completed film, although from all accounts it’s terrible. I have seen the house it paid for, though, and that is terrific."

I'm not sad, if needed, I could spend 50 years rewatching old movies. I was just wondering - could I be missing something? The Rock is 52 by now, not sure if it's "old" but definitely not "young" anymore.

Henry Cavil is 41. But he has also shown his colors as a die hard nerd and loyalist to original material. I think it has gotten him kicked out of / mutually left roles that have strayed to far. His participation in a project is kind of like a stamp of approval for me.

Yeah, Cavill leaving The Witcher was kind of a bummer. I'm not sure whether I'll keep watching.

I don't understand how anyone who knew the Witcher from other media could enjoy the TV show. Cavill leaving was the right choice.

I read the books (some of them) and I don't see anything bad in Cavill. Of course it's different - TV and book are different media. But I think for the series he is fine.

Oh I guess it was easy to misunderstand. No, Cavill was great! The rest, not so much. Cavill will not staying in that shitshow was correct.

Ugh I know. What a tragedy

The show itself was the tragedy. Cavill was right to stand on principle.

Has anyone here used LLMs to generate useful code in a way that's actually saved you time, on net? Or if you're not particularly technical, given you the means to write code that you wouldn't have easily been able to figure out on your own? I've been playing around with o1-mini and it's impressive, enough so that I'm almost starting to get concerned re: job security and all the copium I see on tech Twitter is not quite as convincing as it used to be.

Here's a concrete example: I needed to scrape livestreams in real time and save them. This site isn't supported by any standard tools (yt-dlp, streamlink, etc). Not exactly rocket science, but I primarily dabble in C/C++/Rust and have a bit of an aversion to web technologies generally. This particular site does some wacky stuff with wasm (some kind of hand rolled DRM attempt) and after about 30 minutes of faffing around I gave up on trying to reverse engineer their API. Grabbing m3u8s from my browser's network inspector didn't work and even replaying requests with curl was serving me 403s; they're doing something trickier than I'm used to. I had some vague ideas about how to achieve what I wanted but figured I'd give ChatGPT a chance to weigh in. I outlined what I considered: maybe a Chrome extension that could capture the .ts streams in real time, or failing that, maybe something with Selenium (which I've never used), or possibly even just capturing raw packets with Wireshark or something similar.

o1-mini wrote me a whole Chrome extension in its first response, manifest et al, and provided detailed instructions on how to install it. This solution was flawed, using Chrome's webRequest API to monitor and filter for .ts files and then send a download request when it detects one. This would actually work well for most sites, but not this one, because of the aforementioned authorization shenanigans. To be fair to ChatGPT, I didn't mention anything about the authorization requirements. I asked if it was possible, with a Chrome extension, to intercept incoming network responses and just dump them to a file or something similar: it responded in the negative; apparently that functionality isn't exposed.

Fair enough! I asked for another solution. It suggested 3 options and wrote a nice wall of text with pros and cons for each one. "Use a custom proxy server," "Selenium + Browser DevTools protocol," and "Wireshark or tcpdump". I hadn't considered the first option, but it's obvious in retrospect. So I asked about it and it walked me through setting up mitmproxy (including the custom cert) and writing a Python addon for it to filter .ts files and dump them all to a folder as they come in. All of the code was perfect on the first try. Seriously, the entire process took me about 15 minutes, about as long as I've spent writing up this post about it. I ran mitmproxy -s scrapets.py and pointed my Firefox proxy settings to localhost. Then it just worked.

Now, why do I find this impressive? The solution was ultimately not that technical, the problem was not particularly difficult, and I could have muddled my way to a similar answer with some Googling and maybe 2-3 hours. Yet it feels significant. I remember spending countless hours as a teen ricing my Gentoo distro, scouring wikis and mailing lists and fiddling with configs and reading docs. It seems like we're headed to a point where if you can just clearly state your problem in English and maybe answer a few clarifying questions you'll get an instant solution, and if it's too complex, you can just continue recursively asking for more detailed explanations until you understand it fully. Now it's likely o1's knowledge is ocean wide and puddle deep, but even this is such an improvement over GPT-3 and GPT-4, the slope of the line is starting to get a little scary. When Terence Tao describes o1 as "roughly on par... with a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student,", well, I'm not that partial to Yudkowsky but I don't see any future where (at the very least!) programming isn't completely different 10 years from now.

Whatever is coming, the kids growing up with access to ChatGPT are going to be cracked beyond belief.

I have had success doing exactly what you described. Small projects and scripting that would previously take 4 hours now take 30 minutes. For a collection of small problems that's compounded.

I haven't used it for greenfield projects but I suspect scaffolding my database schema is going to be similarly faster, along with shared utilities for problems and great unit tests.

I am not an IC anymore but it would have taken me from a 3x dev to 5x, and I'm constantly hammering my guys to use it.

Yes, welcome to the future. I use LLMs all the time. They excel at building prototypes, little tools, and self contained functions. It can't one shot complex projects (neither can I ) but you can still handhold it and prompt and split the complex project into smaller modules that it can reason about.

So far I have not found a good way of getting it to fix bugs in existing codebases, but I do wonder if that's just a UI issue rather than an intelligence issue, since there's no easy way for me to let it track the data flow between several files.

The more context you add, the better. This is a mistake people make. It can't read your mind and often people just don't give it enough information.

Programming will absolutely be different in 10 years time, but so will a lot of the rest of world.

I use LLM regularly to generate code. It's mostly useful when I'm dealing with repetitive code - like, copy this code block, but change a little thing in it 10 times, or produce a code that looks like this code, but with a little twist changed - basically, smart enhanced copypaste. LLM is decently good at this - sometimes you have to fix a couple of things, but can easily turn a 5-minute task into a 5-second task if you're reasonable lucky. I am working with Java, which traditionally has a lot of boilerplate code - and LLM is very helpful in speeding up producing such code. It also helps with doing standard things like "here I have this collection of values, I need to apply this mapping function to it, then filter it this way, then rearrange them in this way and then store them in this way" - I can write it all myself, but it'll require me at least one trip to the docs to remember the exact name and syntax of certain method, and LLM can deliver all that in seconds without switching context. Which is amazingly helpful when you're "in the zone" and don't want to ruin your flow.

It has also been useful for generating quick one-time tools - like transforming data in certain format in certain place (say, database) into certain other place using certain API. Basically the sort of thing you did with your proxy thing. I can write most of such tools easily, probably in 10-15 minutes, but instead if I feed description to the LLM, it can deliver the same in seconds, and again, I wouldn't even have to look up the docs. So, nothing I can't do myself, easily, but these tasks are boring and LLM can do it quickly without me having to do mental context switch. Not a groundbreaking capability, but a very nice convenience for me.

One has to be careful with it, because sometimes it has a penchant for hallucinating things that don't really exist but it thinks it may be helpful if they did. A good IDE though usually helps to fix that, but sometimes, if the actual task is not easily achievable, you can be lost in the labyrinth of LLM hallucinations and just waste your time.

I have not been successful in making LLM to produce something substantial and even moderately complex from scratch. That's where the fact that this thing doesn't really understand anything shows.

All in all, as a professional software developer, this is an amazing tool that provides me with a lot of convenience, but so far any talk of it replacing any of the professional engineers is a complete bunk. I can not say what will happen in 10 years (or even in 3 years) but that's what I am seeing now.

So I've been playing a lot of Master of Orion. I simply adored Master of Orion 2, and the pages of Computer Gaming World considered it the apex of 4X games until Galactic Civilizations 2 came out in 2004, where they begrudgingly admitted GalCiv2 was at least as good as Master of Orion 2, maybe.

Going back to the first one, I'm struck by it's simplicity. No more building individual improvements on planets, it's all more abstract with sliders for different production. Tech makes these cheaper, more efficient, etc. Combat is just the one two punch of fleet battle, and then sending in the shock troops. And that's just as easy as hitting the "TRANS" button to send population, the same way you'd shuffle it between your own colonies. No need to build specialized troop transports or anything. I kind of love it. It has a simple, but good enough, system of setting rally points for ships you build. And if you ever get tired of slowly conquering planets and then getting them up to speed and productive, you can just glass them from orbit instead. Easy peasy, no special tech required. You get nuclear bombs from the start, and it seems like all sorts of different weapon tech can bombard planets.

I find the end game to be a breeze, unlike almost any other 4X game I've played that devolve into micro management hell. I remember encountering people who always sword Master of Orion 1 was better than 2, and I think I can see why. In a world where 4X has grown into grand strategy, MoO1 is downright casual, and it's fucking fantastic for it.

Yeah. Its a rare case where the first in the series really nailed it, to the point where there was almost nowhere left to go and they had to change things up. The first really captures the feeling of "expand, expand, EXPAND," and being the dictator of a vast galactic empire. Other games add more details, but they make it feel you're more small scale, micromanaging things. Plus, the simplicity means that the AI is actually a decent opponent.

Been meaning to try writing about this, but it always comes out as old man yelling at clouds.

When I was a kid there was a ton of autistic joy in civ micromanagement, building recycling tanks in every city, telling which pop to work which forest tile to minimize overlap with other cities, you know the stuff.
My enjoyment of that has really soured as I've gotten older and peeked behind the curtain of optimization and gameplay loops to see what pointless busywork it all was.

Like early civ games gave you all these tools to play with, and every late-game turn ten year old you would spend hours clicking through dozens of bases to build them the new nanotech hospital you just researched.
But playing "optimally" actually meant not building any of that stuff, and tiling the map with an ICS grid of size 3 cities running free market economies for per-tile bonuses.
So optimal play is tedious and unexciting, and my casual play was just a baby hitting shiny buttons on a busyboard.

Dwarf fortress is an even better example because it throws the player into a mass of absurdly complex systems that often don't even work.
Players larp at optimizing and copy-paste received wisdom over and over on reddit: "hammers are good against undead because blah blah." When someone does real testing and reveals that blunt weapons are bugged and useless it doesn't stop the bad advice, because those people were only engaging the game mechanics like a kid playing alone with action figures and giving them cool +5 maces of smiting.

Multiplayer games don't get away with this because you're trying to out-think a person; there's still an evolving meta in StarCraft Brood War 26 years after it came out. But most of these complicated single player games now look to me like (at best) a tool to play with your imagination under someone else's constraints, or (at worst) cookie clickers with a lot of makeup on.

That's why I've stopped playing them to make time for other hobbies. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a cloud outside that doesn't know its place.

Yeah, I'm not quite that cynical about slightly more complex 4x games. I do still love everything Civilization up through 4. But I can see where you are coming from. But to me, it's not a waste to treat a 4x game like a story telling device. Sub optimal play is fine. Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun. I'm reminded of the starvation strategy in the board game Stone Age. Or the Halifax Hammer in A Few Acres of Snow, although I'm skeptical how game ruining that strategy actually was as the story behind it, so near as I've seen, is interesting.

It's been probably 20 years since I played MoO3, but I remember the game just sort of ran itself. It was difficult to tell what impact anything you did had on anything, so much was automated, indirect and abstracted. I've been watching Tex play Ultimate Admiral Dreadnaughts, because I love to listen to him sperg about history while he plays. But it seems to be a game of similar qualities. He acts like he knows what he's doing, and these arbitrary decisions he makes in budget allocations and ship design are yielding concrete results. I can scarcely tell by watching it.

I think it's also why I avoid a lot of grand strategy games. Especially the grand strategy games with dozens of different DLC. I remember looking into Endless Space 2, because I enjoyed the first one, and it was like land mines which DLC were good and which break the game with bullshit. And how does a game like that even work after 20 expansion packs worth of modifications? Fucking what? Back in my day, a solid strategy game got a single expansion pack to round out it's short comings, if it even had any.

Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun.

In fact, I would argue that perfectly optimized play is almost always the enemy of fun. Given the opportunity, gamers frequently choose to optimize the fun right out of a game.

Absolutely! I've been playing the Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection that just came out and the game there most were waiting for was Marvel vs Capcom 2 (MvC2)

The main selling point of MvC2 was its gigantic roster (like 50 characters). Competitive play over the like 24 years the game existed identified that there are like 5 actually viable characters. That meta is stronger than in other fighting games, there is only one competitive player known to be able to beat it and yeah, he's been playing 24 years so no one's catching up to him. Other than him, forget about situations like happened at EVO this year for SF3 Third Strike: forget about a cheeky Hugo or Elena making it far into the finals.

The community had to create the norms to resolve it. Picking a meta team when your opponent signaled he was not going to play a meta team makes you an asshole in the eyes of the community. People have to purposefully play suboptimally and run low tier teams otherwise the competitive meta sucked all the fun out of MvC2.

The ratio system has helped keep MvC2 interesting. You have to resort to banning characters or super arts in 3S to mix things up.

That's really interesting. Good on the MvC2 community for not letting the fun die from the game!

Sub optimal play is fine. Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun.

If I'm not in an actual competitive environment, but rather am goofing off with friends or doing a good ol' comp stomp, or when I literally just want to enjoy myself and not sweat my ass off, then I try to optimize for FUN.

FUN IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE GOAL, if pride or money or some other incentive isn't on the line. Not sure why you'd be 'optimizing' your play without accounting for the "Am I having fun" variable!

So yeah, once a game has become so well understood that 'optimal' builds, strats, items, and such are everywhere, it loses almost all appeal to me because it squeezes out the room for experimentation and the 'game' is now just about following a set strategy with as little deviation as possible. I'd argue that when it is reduced to a contest of who can execute the proper script more accurately/quickly, it ceases to be very game-like, where the challenge comes from the unpredictable elements.

I blame it to a large degree on ELO making skill levels more legible.. Now if you're NOT using the optimal strats, but instead playing around, everyone can see your ranking and make judgments about you.

I don't know if we have a similarly objective framework for identifying how much 'fun' a person is having in a game.

One of my great joys playing old school games was TRYING to force the game into weird edge cases or find a completely unique path to victory by trying less popular strategies and using the mechanics in otherwise sub-optimal ways that could still combine in such a way as to lead to a good outcome. Or setting little sub-goals or handicaps for myself so I have to actually get creative rather than just follow the optimal strats that I've memorized.

I think good game design should make it possible to use largely ignored mechanics or combine weak items in such a way that, with a certain amount of risk, you can 'surprise' a more skilled opponent who was following an established strategy but literally never encountered the scenario you've created and thus either adapts quickly or loses.

Of course said player will immediately adopt that strategy if it replicates, and soon it just becomes the meta. And that takes the fun away again.

And if I'm not having fun first and foremost, unless something else is on the line, I'm just not going to spend time on it.

I think simplicity in strategy games is vastly under rated. Game devs always want to add more, and gamers are always excited by being promised more. But in practice, even a very simple game like chess has enormous amounts of emergent complexity and new strategies being discovered. A well balanced game with straightforward but engaging skill tests is better than an unbalanced super complicated game. Because when something's complicated but unbalanced, you can often pick out one overpowered strategy that actually makes a game where you choose between dozens of options easier than one where you pick between 3 options.

Its interesting because we're entering a period where you can use a computer to determine with certainty the optimal moves in a given scenario. Stockfish does this for chess, but I'd wager that you could take any given computer game and machine learning could produce an engine which can beat 99% of human players at said game given the same input/output signals.

So if you want to give your players a crutch in game, just simplify the mechanics down to "let the computer suggest three mostly optimal moves, and let the player select from among them." Leave the actual mechanics of the game under the hood and invisible to the player, let the AI figure out how those mechanics play out, and then give the player the 'choice' that will actually move the state of play along.

In this scenario, the player who takes time to learn the mechanics and fiddle around under the hood and decides they will make decisions without the AI advisor is almost certainly at a disadvantage, there's no way they can discover a better move that the AI missed.

But is the player who is at least trying to develop mastery of the game having more fun?

MAYBE!

What do you think of Masters of Orion 3?

What do you think of FreeOrion, that has been version 0.4.x or 0.5 for the last two decades?

FWIW, I played a whole lot of MoO3 back when it came out. It was obviously unfinished and hat a host of issues, but I very much appreciated what it tried to do; i.e., offering a higher-level experience with greater scope and perhaps a little more realism. Of course it failed, but the idea of it had merit to me.

Classic MoO and its myriad copycats I continue to bounce off of.

Moo3 bored me to tears when it came out. I don't know if it ever got "fixed". Galactic Civilizations 2 became my goto 4x after that, then Endless Space. After that 4x just got weird imho. Just endless dlc platforms. I can't stand it.

Posted a few weeks ago about trying to figure out Crusader Kings III. Some 50 hours later, I'm pretty entertained. My first "real" campaign was as the de Bessas in Northeast France, became King after a few generations but got too bogged down by factions and decided to give another character a try. Played as a duke (doux) in the Byzantine Empire, conquered a few Kingdoms (Despots), but massively underestimated how big the de jure Byzantine empire was. Then tried out a count in Skane, a duchy in Denmark, in 867. Realized tribal plays very differently, depends a lot on prestige which is hard to come by. Starting as a count, it can take a while to build up an army that can raid effectively depending on how well your leige does setting up alliances for himself. Remains to be seen how this plays out, but might just start as a Duke in Scandinavia instead.

Fun game, but I'm still shocked how many people have 2000+ hours in it. The core gameplay loop seems like it could get repetitive very fast. Make babies, marry them off for alliances (thanks @orthoxerox for the tip), fabricate claim on county, invade, make higher and higher tier titles, rinse, repeat. Is the appeal to the diehard fans just how many various ways there are to roleplay? Far more than any of the Civilization games at least.

I have dabbled in the total conversion mods. A Game of Thrones is almost too bespoke to believe, has ever a game complimented a novel series so perfectly? With the Tours and Tournaments DLC you can even host your own Red Wedding. Now there's a bookmark that triggers a civil war after Viserys I dies (the Dance of the Dragons). After The End is very original, set in a post-apocalyptic New World in 2666 where people practice religions vaguely associated with their geographic regions. Nevadans worship UFOs, the people of Svalbard pray to their seed vault, rust belt Americans worship the 19th century industrialists. That said, these mostly seem to just give you different ways to roleplay. The core gameplay loop is the same.

I've heard CK2 is better but I've tried it and just find the graphics and UI hideous and outdated.

I can still see myself getting 100+ hours of enjoyment out of CK3 though so feel free to recommend specific starts, mods encouraged.

Most of the people with thousands of hours in CK3 stopped playing it like a traditional strategy game a long time ago. I like to use the gameplay as a scaffolding around which I build a grand narrative that exists mostly in my own head. I'll start with an obscure count and raise his dynasty to greatness, then manufacture a succession crisis and civil war. I'll lean hard into characters' traits and make horrible decisions, then revel in the ensuing drama. CK3 is basically an ongoing creative writing prompt for me (oh no! The promising young king I had planned to conquer France with died unexpectedly to smallpox, along with all his children! Now the throne is held by his fat, cowardly brother, but the dead king's older sister is married to the most powerful duke in the realm and has ambitions of her own....).

Ck3's gameplay loop is kinda immersion breaking once figured out. You start seeing the same events over and over.

Two solutions

  1. Roleplay as your character. Instead of minmaxxing you're stats ask instead how your character would respond. Take joy in long plots to murder every single one of your rivals family before kidnapping him and making him die of old age in the oubliette.
  2. Set weird or interesting goals for yourself. Form the kingdom of Jerusalem and then eventually Outremer. As Norse go to India. Creating a tall Brittania with the goal not of expansion but instead of crusade to spread your dynasty everywhere. Form New England. Play a hyper tall Wales.

Of cultural note relevant to this forum specifically. CK2's After the End mod actually had a bunch of rat references. Yudkowsky founds the empire of California, founds a religion whose focus is to emphasize different teachers but no singular authoritative source, and you start with the rare artifact "Meditations on Moloch"

The CK3 mod did away with all of this and I believe the cultural uniqueness of AtE is worse for it.

One of my favorite self-imposed challenges in CK II was to roleplay a Norse lord who got banished to Northern Africa, and whose sole goal was to restore his lineage to the throne of Norway.

Its nearly impossible to make decent progress with your starting character, and so you end up marrying other Northern African lords and the hybrid kids that result are not exactly likely to make a convincing case to the Norwegians that they are actually related.

I've never actually pulled this one off because the layers of machinations that are required to get yourself in position to actually invade the North lead to all kinds of distracting shenanigans.

This is a great Harry Potter themed parody of Empire State of Mind. Cadence is perfect, every line rhymes and is a reference to the series. Think my favorite is "Two girls ask about my scar, told 'em I was born with it/ Took 'em to my dorm for a Triwizard Tournament" or "Decked out cauldron, they wonder how I paid for it/ Drive-by on Gringotts leave a goblin on the pavement".

At a wedding, normally pretty fun for me, but the music ... Ugh.

It's too old. Perfect music for someone born in 1985 but I was born in 1990, and the actual wedding participants were born in 1995.

DJs are important.

What did they play? The White Stripes and The Hives and Evanescence?

No it was generally 90's rap songs.

That sounds awful, and I say this as someone who was born in 85.

Vanilla Ice is one of the artists that stuck out in my mind, because I couldn't believe it was being played as anything other than joke.

Wedding was otherwise good, and bride seemed happy, so no real complaints. Just selfishly wish the music was better for my dance floor moves.

bride seemed happy

what about the groom?

Ya him too, but he barely matters.

That is why you make mosh pits. They are eternal.

I thought about posting this last night in response to the question about the new NFL kickoff rules, but since that thread is a bit stale I'm posting it here today. First, the new kickoff rules are dumb. There are more returns, but it seems like all these returns end up at the 30 yard line anyway, so there's no point in not kicking it out of the end zone. If we want to "fix" kickoffs, here's my proposal: At the beginning of the 1st and 3rd quarters, the receiving team simply takes the ball at their own 25. Onside kicks are rare enough in these situations that little is lost by eliminating them. We move touchbacks back to the 20 where they belong. After a touchdown the scoring team kicks from their own 40, practically guaranteeing a touchback. After a field goal, though, they have to kick from their own 25, pretty much guaranteeing a return and pretty good field position to the returning team. The obvious positive consequences are fewer field goals and more 4th down conversion attempts. But the real benefit is less obvious: More situations for mentally overwhelmed coaches to fuck things up in comedic fashion.

Consider the following situation: The Steelers are trailing the Chargers by 4 points on Sunday with 7 minutes remaining in the game. After a third down pass that ends up short of the sticks after the receiver inexplicably runs backwards after catching the ball, the Steelers are 4th and 3 at the Chargers 22 yard line? If the Steelers kick the field goal, they're still down a point and give LA excellent field position to finish off the game. If they score a touchdown, they have the lead and LA will almost certainly have to start the ensuing comeback drive from their own 20.

So what does Mike Tomlin do in this situation? First he wastes a timeout unsuccessfully challenging the spot of the ball. Then he wastes another timeout so he can think about the decision. Then he kicks the field goal anyway, because of course Mike Tomlin was going to kick the field goal. Then the Chargers start the ensuing drive at their own 40, but the Steelers defense forces a 3 and out. The Steelers then take over deep in their own territory and begin to quickly march down the field, only for time to expire before they can get into field goal range because they were out of timeouts (they wasted their other timeout to avoid a delay of game penalty on first down early in the third quarter). Then I get to listen to yinzer heads explode on talk radio the next day because they totally would have scored a touchdown if they had had Justin Fields run a keeper / given the ball to Jaylen Warren / run some other dumb play that probably wouldn't have worked. At no point would the poor clock management come up.

I love the Steelers, but I must admit that the inevitable meltdowns make losing almost as good as winning.

So what does Mike Tomlin do in this situation? First he wastes a timeout unsuccessfully challenging the spot of the ball. Then he wastes another timeout so he can think about the decision. Then he kicks the field goal anyway, because of course Mike Tomlin was going to kick the field goal.

Hahaha 😝

But surely even Tomlin wouldn’t use his last two timeouts at the same time with 7 minutes left and one score down…

[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]

A little over a year after the landmark UAP hearings with David Grusch that took place in the US House of Representatives, both chambers of Congress are gearing up to have additional new UAP hearings within the coming months. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's office confirmed that the Senate Armed Services Committee is planning on having a public hearing after the November elections which will focus on the progress in UAP analysis made by AARO, the official "UFO office" in the Pentagon. Rep. Nancy Mace further confirmed that the House will have its own public hearing on November 13th.

Would be nice if they had something concrete planned. Maybe we'll finally see that stunning photo that Matt Gaetz mentioned last year? Or at least some new witnesses coming forward.

I'm teaching a class on LLMs right now, and the students are working on a project to use LLMs to answer questions about the current election. (They're using a RAG based system to pull in news articles to answer the questions, and they're next assignment is going to be to get the system to respond in the style of Harris/Trump.)

Anyways, to evaluate the students' work, I needed to create a dataset of US election facts. I call it the Hairy Trumpet dataset (github link), and I'm surprised I haven't heard this pun on the candidates' names anywhere else yet. I especially like the pun because hairy trumpet is also the name of a weird fungus, which seems fitting for a dataset on politics.

Can you share the course content with me?

Github repo with course content: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/cmc-csci181-languages

All the lectures recorded and put on youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSNWQVdrBwoa4KNaiKr-ayUdROZdSZ_1E

(unfortunately the audio didn't capture on the first video)

Thanks. Seems like a neat course, I'll keep an eye on it to see what's coming.

Whoah, haven't seen you post in a while. Or maybe I wasn't paying attention.

edit: Wasn't trying to sound like an ass, was genuinely thinking you haven't posted in a while.

I haven't posted in a while. In fact I haven't visited in a while. That's not the mottes fault it's the internets fault, there's just much more important things like work and vacations happening in the real world.

I'm starting another office job which requires a reasonable amount of typing, so instead of using the work supplied keyboard which makes me want to throw it out the window, I'm interested in what input devices everyone uses. I find my YouTube and internet searches aren't definitive, and I really don't want to spend a grotesque amount of time and money on finding the right keyboard. My current criteria are:

  • I prefer linear over tactile or clicky. I hate clicky the most.

  • Full size is preferred. I use the num pad for work

  • Hall effect is a plus

  • Minimal out of box tinkering, even if it comes at some premium.

What keyboards are you using?

Kinesis Freestyle2 Blue. Decided to try it out on a whim and turned out a split keyboard is surprisingly convenient.

I'm surprised the number of responses that recommended split keyboards. Maybe I should look into those more closely.

When I started using a split keyboard, I realized that I pressed the "B" key with my right index finger. That took some adjusting. Kinesis Gaming Freestyle Edge.

I'll add my voice to the split keyboard users. In my case, I tried out the OG M$ ergonomic keyboard as an experiment because being left-handed, my index finger had a nasty habit of trying to type keys meant for my right index finger. All these years later, I just inadvertently killed my M$ Natural 4000 and am strongly considering picking up a used version to keep me going

Mech keyboards are a fucking rabbit hole and a stupid one at that. I have a 20USD Chinese piece of crap with fake blue switches and it's OK. And I also have a 150USD boutique keyboard, which is better but maybe 10% better at best.

Right now I am using some blue clicky mechanical chinesium made keyboard. It cost 15 euro. Not the best I have had but get's the job done. Trying to figure out how to obtain unicomp. I love buckle springs.

UHK with a keychron Q0 numpad on the side

Split keyboard. I think holding my hands close together like on a regular keyboard was hurting my upper back.

Kinesis freestyle 2

Numpads are overrated. I won a nickel in a bet with a coworker that I could type numbers faster without. I love my keyboard.io model 100 split ortholinear walnut thumbcluster keyboard

I used to work a job doing inventories where we used machines that were nothing but a keypad and a one-line LCD display. After banging on that for 8 hours a day I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who can enter numbers faster than me without one.

Something that bothers me about the whole mechanical keyboard market is that there really is no good way to test keyboard without spending the money. It's more than what I'm willing to spend by about $100, especially if I'm going to be leaving it in an office. I might bring my current keyboard into the office and keep the new keyboard at home.

Yeah, that's rough, and it's not like there's a store you can try it out at . I've had I want to say eight keyboards at about that price point purchased by employers...

I use Unicomp, but it's the mother of all clicky keyboards.

I bought and used one for months before my teammates staged an intervention.

I threatened to fight mine off with the keyboard itself.

I've never quite got the appeal of deep mechanical gaming keyboards for work. I prefer something my fingers will fly over, not sink into.

As such, I like the thin aluminum Apple ones, or similar in office. I still use a thick one for gaming though. Feels more secure in WSAD-position.

IME, the depth and travel allows your fingers to use more force and speed for longer compared to thin keyboards. The amount of typing I do on a regular basis means that the apple keyboard or a laptop keyboard means sore fingers at the end of the day.

For my personal use, I use the GMMK. Unfortunately Glorious caught the stupid and stopped selling full size keyboards, so you would have to get one secondhand. For work I use a Keychron K10, which is also pretty good. I prefer brown switches myself, but the GMMK is customizable and I believe the K10 is too.

Keychron Q6. Full sized, simple, easy to use, and customizable. I never customized it, but it is. One negative is that it's heavy, but I prefer it that way.

I'm leaning toward Keychron myself, but almost everything I heard says they still require modding after work to make them really good. Maybe their higher end models are better out of box experiences.

Depends on what you mean by "really good." I just used mine out of the box and it's better than the others I've used.

So, I went to Toronto in June of this year to meet my partner. It feels surreal for two reasons, one being that I never expected my life to become the plot of a bad romantic comedy, and the other being that it makes me the only member of my family to have ever been in North America. It was also an interesting dichotomy - I loved spending time with my SO, but detested the city. I couldn't stop noticing just how ugly and unmaintained the city is, and couldn't help wondering how it got this way. Disclaimer: I spent much of my time downtown.

It's a ridiculously Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia or any of its previous satellite states. Much of their architecture, including their public spaces, looks like it's trying to be a soulless pastiche of Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius; structures supposedly built for the public that actually looks like it hates the very people it's meant to serve. They are featureless blocks of concrete that evoke no joy, and in line with the modernist architectural ethos ornamentation is basically absent. Also, if there is any doubt about the unpopularity of modernist and postmodernist architecture alike, look at "America's Favourite Architecture", very few of the buildings people actually chose as their favourites are from the post-war period. The response from many architects was that the list didn't reflect the opinions of "architectural experts", which isn't insular and elitist at all. Good to see that people who build for the public actively couldn't care less about their aesthetic preferences, and in fact are incapable of predicting their preferences at all.

The starkest example of the shift in architectural trends is probably the current Toronto City Hall. The new City Hall is a featureless, barely geometric concrete block, framed by the treeless, austere Nathan Phillips Square - apparently supposed to be a public gathering space. Now compare it with Old City Hall, which is still there but no longer in use. I think most people would view Old City Hall as a much more appropriate building for its purpose, and find it more pleasing to look at. Another example of the modernist turn is exemplified in the Royal Ontario Museum, a building that looked like this in 1922. Then it had a (now-defunct) planetarium and terrace galleries attached to it in 1968 and 1984, then in 2007 oh my god what the fuck is that. There is not an iota of respect for any of their architectural traditions. Old buildings that are part of the city's intangible heritage just get "iterated upon" and superseded by horrific modernist/postmodern/deconstructivist blocks with no relation or connection to the previous style the building used to have.

The same pattern can be seen in public art. This infamous piece of public art, named Zones of Immersion, is displayed in the tube in Union Station, one of the TTC's major transportation hubs, and it succeeds marvellously at offering your average commuter the indescribable experience of being loaded on a train headed straight for Auschwitz. According to the artist, Stuart Reid, "This window into our contemporary isolation offers faces and body language, blurred and revealed poetic writings from my journal entries, and rhythms of colour that punctuate the ribboned expanse." I, too, would like to be reminded of the bleakness and misery of everyday life every time I try to go to work. This is a very clear example of an artist being distanced from the very people they are designing for, and pursuing clout in an increasingly small and incestuous sphere of "art fanatics" who have long disappeared up their own ass in the endless pursuit of social status. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone wasn't forced to look at it every day.

As if it wasn't bad enough that the city is by and large a mix of seedy strip malls and truly unpleasant brutalist blocks, on top of that there's the sheer lack of maintenance of any of these spaces. The train stations are some of the best examples of this - the poor state of the TTC is well known at this point among Canadians. These tubes are depressing spaces often badly disfigured by water damage, missing tiles and ceilings, and just in general seem to be falling apart at the seams. Here and here are some illustrations of normal scenes in the tube system. The same applies to many of the buildings, where their already unfriendly-looking concrete surfaces are further marred by water stains and damage, and nobody seems to have given it any care for decades. Other aspects of the city's design also worsen the experience, such as how when you walk around the city centre on hot days an awful stench will often waft out of the gutter grates (Yonge in particular smells like human faeces). Oh, and then there's the homelessness problem, which I won't get into here but really worsens the sense of dinginess and disrepair that the city already possesses. Downtown, there is at least one encampment every kilometre you walk.

The general vibe of the city is also information-overload in the worst way; an instance that sticks in my mind was when I was walking in the town centre and all at once the following was happening in a crowded square:

  1. Someone playing a flute in an absolutely fucking ridiculous way that somehow almost reminded me of Kazoo Kid.

  2. Someone trying to proselytise the glory of God to random passers-by.

  3. Somebody with burns trying to solicit money by sitting naked in the street showing the grisly scars all the way down his body.

There was probably more happening that my brain filtered out so as to preserve my sanity.

All of this could've been compensated for if there were many particularly interesting things to see, but the issue is that there just isn't very much that's worth stopping and looking at. The Royal Ontario Museum and perhaps the Distillery District are virtually the only things worth visiting, the Art Gallery of Ontario is only worth stopping by for the Group of Seven paintings (which are, to be fair, beautiful to see in person). The CN Tower and everything around it are unashamed tourist traps built and maintained largely for vanity purposes, without all too much to do there. The beach on Centre Island was hardly a beach at all, and seemed dirty enough that I didn't really want to step on the sand barefoot (though I am almost certainly spoiled with the best beaches in the world due to living in Australia). Outside of that, I can't remember anything else particularly memorable about the city.

In short, I didn't like Toronto. It was unpleasant enough that once I got out of the airport in Sydney, I walked into the train station at International and heaved a massive sigh of relief at how spacious, light, quiet and well-maintained it all seemed.

structures supposedly built for the public that actually looks like it hates the very people it's meant to serve.

Welcome to brutalism. Making nice things is boring and passé, proper architects hate your guts and let you know it.

Soviet brutalist architecture can be very apt: consider in particular the Kyiv Crematorium (halfway down the list).

Sure, but "brutalism is apt for buildings that are meant to be morbid" is hardly an argument in favour of its application everywhere a la Chandigarh (in Toronto, that kind of architecture is a staple of everyday life). I also think the Kyiv Crematorium is quite ugly, and I wouldn't build a crematorium like that, but different strokes, I guess. The only one I like in there at all is the museum in Tashkent, and that's because it uses some ornamentation and maintains some level of continuity with earlier architectural traditions, but ornament is anathema to many modernists.

Endorsed -- be aware that everyone in Canada (other than people from Toronto, who will smugly inform you that 'it's a World Class City') has felt the same way since roughly 1965:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-4x54lnkCMw

Toronto is a Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia

Heavy disagree, honestly. Lived in Moscow and Toronto. Toronto is possibly nothing like Russia

The best description of Toronto I've heard is that its a city that "thinks its the equal of New York, but in reality is less then half of a Chicago". I would have judged this an unfair critique until I met a bunch of people from Toronto, all of whom thought that I should have been impressed by their status as denizens of the aforementioned metro area (in fairness, New Yorkers and Londoners do this too, and are just as mad when I do not ask for their recommendations for the most up to date and hip spots in town, but in theory there are places in NYC and LON that i would want to visit, Toronto has no such saving grace). I guess I don't connect with people who are boosters for their home city, and that seems to be a large percentage of Torontians.

I went to Toronto in June of this year to meet my partner

makes me the only member of my family to have ever been in North America

🤨🤨🤨

Toronto is very sprawled and mediocre, despite people who live there never being willing to admit it, it's just a large Midwestern city no different than Cleveland or Indianapolis. However while I can't make any insight into whether the art community is shrinking or growing, the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist. Consider how bland and boring most public art is:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/city-of-calgary-public-art-1.6757072

https://globalnews.ca/news/8787114/the-ring-art-place-ville-marie-esplanade/

the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist.

That's probably what I hate the most in the modern art criticism. Nothing against you personally, but this is so unsatisfactory and lazy. I mean I get all the things about "everything can be art" and pop-art and readymade and stuff. But when a seagull pooping on my shoulder is art (it certainly makes me feel emotions!), I think this makes the whole thing meaningless. Maybe that's the goal, but I know it is not meaningless. I have been to the museums. I know how art can make me feel, and I know it is something. Something that "ha-ha, made you look!" is not. These two aren't just part of the same worlds, and maybe I can't explain with proper jargon why exactly, but I know it.

🤨🤨🤨

It's long distance, and "member of my family" here just means people related by blood.

However while I can't make any insight into whether the art community is shrinking or growing, the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist.

They certainly succeeded at making a piece of art that evokes emotions, but that's just not my criteria for what constitutes good art since (as someone who dabbles in arts myself, primarily literature and music) I think it's trivially easy to do so - especially if you consider "intense hatred of and anger at the artist" a valid emotion. Part of the problem is that the art in Union Station looks like it was taken straight from an unfinished sketch. Skill is an integral part of it for me - an important part of being an artist is constantly questioning what you bring to the world others couldn't already offer themselves, and if your art lacks technique and is easily replicated, you genuinely don't offer much. In order for any art to be considered good at all, there also needs to be a way for it to be bad, there needs to be a non-trivial set of failure-criteria that a sizeable amount of people would not be able to satisfy. A lot of modern artists, even celebrated ones (e.g. Rothko) don't have that.

Furthermore, there are works that fit an art gallery that don't work in a public space people have to frequent every day. I don't know about you, but I don't think Francisco Goya's Black Paintings should be displayed in a public square, and that was constructed with infinitely more talent than whatever was in Union Station. I would honestly rather have an inoffensive, bland piece of public art than something that makes me feel depressed or annoyed every time I encounter it.

The architecture thing is a dead horse, but at the same time, they can't keep getting away with it. The worst thing I've seen recently is Vienna's modern art museum which they plopped into the middle of a nice 18th century baroque complex (pay no attention to the building with the cock and balls on the roof).

What a perfect illustration. Just an ugly box next to perfectly nice buildings would be an injury, but they had to add an insult to it by adorning it with a massive penis. So everybody knows what they meant by it.

We must be glad that the cock is on the roof where you can't see it.

Would you want to live in this cute, perfectly-code-compliant neighborhood?

(Yes, I was too lazy to add radii to the driveway corners. Sue me.)

It looks like it was designed in a DOOM map editor. That’s not actually a downside.

Too much wasted space while the houses are tiny. The road between the houses is bigger than the houses themselves, and double-wide driveways are hideous.

I would do the following:

  • slim down the road as much as possible (one-way, pedestrians have priority, no setbacks etc)
  • somehow classify on-street parking as off-street parking, then each lot will have three parking spaces
  • if that's not possible, turn setbacks into driveways (6m/20ft deep setbacks)
  • make the houses as wide as the fire safety code allows and as shallow as necessary, aiming at 33sqm/330sqft per occupant

Example implementation

Note that parallel-parking spaces are 8 ft * 22 ft rather than 9 ft * 20 ft, so the lots have been changed from 60 ft * 100 ft (6000 ft^2) to 66 ft * 91 ft (6006 ft^2). Also, the installation of underground utilities presumably will require a lot of easements somewhere.

Yeah, this looks nicer. I would make the parking spaces 7x21ft, but I guess pickups are just that big.

Now you just need to change the floor plans so that you can enter the houses from the front again.

At my current stage of life, no. But it does look better than the various slum efficiency and sub-basement units I lived in when I was younger.

Is there a particular reason for all the side yard space and front drives? Is it supposed to be generally preferable to row homes or town houses? I would rather have slightly more personal square footage and a small back garden, than a side yard and code minimum sized bedroom. You could have a back alleyway, shared front parking diagonally in the center of a long cul-de-sac, or even resident street parking (parallel or diagonal), if parking is necessary.

Another option that would have similar density, but more interior square footage, for a development would be a n-over-one or "stumpy." It's not cute, but real-estate developers in North America clearly think they offer the best net balance for medium density right now.

I also thought that they were below-code size, but I see now the minimum size requirements were removed from the International Residential Code in 2015. I had no idea. Also did not realize they added appendix AQ, specifically with respect to "tiny homes." I guess that's a win for density.

Is there a particular reason for all the side yard space and front drives?

Under the International Zoning Code:

  • The densest single-family residential zone has lots of at least 60 ft * 90 ft and 6000 ft^2. The lots in this image are 60 ft * 100 ft.

  • At least two 9 ft * 20 ft off-street parking stalls must be provided for each dwelling unit. I've made the driveways double-width for the larger houses, to accommodate multigenerational households.

Is it supposed to be generally preferable to row homes or town houses?

I didn't consider anything but single-family houses in this particular flight of fancy.

The sheer gall of the authors calling their American building/zoning codes international will never cease to inflame me.

Its very common for American companies to push their standards worldwide regardless of suitability for local conditions (eg local countries using the metric system for a start). I don't think it's from superiority, just out of ignorance. Many Americans are woefully uneducated about the world outside of America. (clearly doesn't apply so much to the 'very online', such as our American posters here.)

Actually, the International Codes indeed do see some use outside the US.

I prefer attached garages.

A garage is a needless luxury, just like a closet and a pantry.

(In response to deleted comment "Where's the garage???" by @sarker)

Ooh. Yeah, we have hail around here. People would riot without their garages.

Are you a desperately poor 3rd worlder or something? Where does this opinion come from? And where do you store your food if not the pantry?

The comment was intentionally phrased in an inflammatory manner for laughs (since this is the Friday Fun Thread). Seriously, though, as a reasonably-well-off person living in the US, I personally have little need of garages, closets, and pantries.

  • I have no pantry. All my room-temperature food is in the kitchen cabinets.

  • I have a closet, but I hardly use it. Rather, I keep all my regularly-used clothes in a large plastic basket or haphazardly around my bedroom. And a wardrobe can serve the purpose of a closet anyway.

  • I have no garage. I can see how it might be useful for working on a car, but I personally just go to a mechanic.

I deleted it because I figured the big black blocks are garages and driveways, but I guess I was mistaken.

The big black blocks are driveways without garages.

Garages are kino. You can park your car there, have a gym, or a woodshop, or a metal shop, etc etc.

A basement can serve most of the same purposes.

Not all areas have need for basements: if you're not digging to get below the frost line (warmer climates), soil is shallow, or the water table is near the surface (the entire Gulf coast), a basement is really expensive to build as an option, and they aren't very common choices. I'll keep my garage.

G-d preserve me from schlepping heavy equipment to a basement.

Volokh: Security Clearance Denied for Watching Furry Porn Depicting Animated 16-Year-Olds

Bierly confessed that some of the furries in the videos he watched were depicted as minors as young as age 16. The SOR advised that Bierly's history of "engaging in criminal sexual behavior by viewing and masturbating to pornographic images of minors" and intent to continue doing so constituted a "security concern". For his part, Bierly objects to characterizing the videos as child pornography because they featured animated characters rather than actual 16-year-old people.

Bierly's constitutional claims are as follows:

  • Count I claims that viewing animated furry pornography is protected speech under the First Amendment, and that DCSA's suspension of his security clearance therefore infringes this right.

  • Count II argues that DCSA's suspension of his security clearance abridges Bierly's First Amendment freedom to associate with others who share his political, religious and cultural beliefs.

  • Count III contends that SEAD 4, which allows the DCSA to withhold clearance based on sexual behavior that "demonstrates a lack of judgment or discretion or may subject the individual to undue influence of coercion, exploitation, or duress", is unconstitutionally overbroad under the First Amendment.

  • Count IV challenges the same language in SEAD 4 as unconstitutionally vague.

  • Count V is a substantive due process claim, arguing that the viewing of legal pornographic material is a protected liberty interest that the DCSA has wrongfully abridged.

  • Count VI is a Fifth Amendment Equal Protection argument, alleging that the defendants have unequally and arbitrarily applied SEAD 4 against Bierly, and that this uneven application fails strict scrutiny.

The court avoided the substantive constitutional questions, in part because federal precedent provides that "the grant of security clearance to a particular employee is committed by law to the appropriate agency of the Executive branch" and therefore "employment actions based on denial of security clearance are not subject to judicial review", especially when it comes to requests for injunctions seeking the grant of a clearance (to oversimplify in some measure).

The court also rejected Bierly's separate statutory claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, Freedom of Information Act, and Privacy Act. Note that Bierly's Complaint states that, "Mr. Bierly admitted to watching 16 year old Furry pornography when he was 15 years old, and the polygrapher used that age for all subsequent Furry pornography that Mr. Bierly admitted to watching," though that wouldn't affect, I think, the court's analysis.

when he was 15 years old

That kind of changes the whole picture. It's beyond idiotic to hold a grown man, years later, for shit he did on the internet when being a horny teenager. Ever more idiotic, they apparently allowed him to work for 2.5 years, presumably accessing all that top secret information, and then suddenly they started digging into his behavior as 15 years old? So many levels of pure dumb.

At least from the complaint, Bierly's work history only included :

Mr. Bierly worked as an intern with the U.S. Cybercommand for a summer internship from June 15, 2020 through July 17, 2020. During the summer internship with JWAC, Mr. Bierly worked from May 24, 2021 through August 13, 2021. Lastly, On November 18, 2022, after working in his position with the Air Force from August 15, 2022, Mr. Bierly was issued a Statement of Reasons (SOR) from DCSA notifying him of the DCSA’s intent to revoke Mr. Bierly’s eligibility for access to classified information.

Most of the time during his probationary period he worked at a university tech support field, according to his LinkedIn, and for the internships or three months at the job there's a lot of restrictions about what new hires get. There's a fair argument that the DoD needs to figure out how to handle the broader class of stuff at a more reasonable rate -- taking three+ years to onboard new people is a problem! -- but this sorta one-hand-can't-find-the-other is why those prolonged probationary periods exist.

On the other side, in the SOR letter the investigator claims to have understood this to include continued and recent viewing of porn involving 16-year-old characters as recently as a month before the polygraph (page 147 here, cw: more details about a dude jerking it than I wanted to know). Bierly's complaint alleges that the polygraphers inserted that age as an assumption for everything but his admission while 15-years-old, though, and his more recent viewings had been focused on 18+ characters.

There are even some technical reasons with how e621's tag and blacklist system worked at the time where that confusion might be reasonable! Or the investigators could have gotten a face full of prohibited content when checking the normie keywords Bierly provided, had to soak their computers in bleach, and either not believed or wanted to take it out on him.

some of the furries in the videos he watched were depicted as minors as young as age 16

How old were they in dog years?

(Asking for a friend...)

EDIT: This could be cougar porn

Oof. That's a mess.

While it (and even the publicity) might not completely kill this guy's career, it definitely chops a lot of potential off it. There's some civilian uses for the sorta skills the software parts of that career field do, and some cybersecurity shops won't really care, but quite a lot of them either depend on background checks or lower levels of clearance that are gonna red flag this. Even if he didn't plan on staying in the DoD, having a security clearance before leaving can be worth a lot of salary.

(LinkedIn points to a higher education nonprofit, which... works, I guess, though depending on exactly where it falls in 'higher ed' would raise different concerns if he really were a threat. Dunno if it's more or less of a Google Problem than having your real name tied to the other sort of 1000-year-old dragon.)

And while not the most central case of where these definitions break down, and squicks me a bit (especially "intent to continue doing so" as he stops being a teenager, though not being able to read the complaint leaves me some concern for how accurately that's being repeated), it's still the sort of thing that also gets played at Cannes or put into a school library when there's a sufficient bow slapped on top. Law is filled with these sorta graduations, but if you wanted a similar level of 'officially banned, unofficially tolerated or sometimes feted' the first place to come to mind would be marijuana legalization, which... hasn't worked out great.

It's not clear whether it's illegal in the strict formalist sense. Ashcroft v Free Speech is usually what people point to as suggesting that obviously fictional works can't be generally prohibited, but that opinion allowed such speech to be restricted under the rules around obscenity, and Congress did do that. While that definition is vague (imo badly so) and counterproductive (imo badly so), modern technical advances have made Rehnquist's dissent much more persuasive at the same time that SCOTUS's makeup is more skeptical of the ACLU takes. From a legal realist perspective? It's a clusterfuck to determine if any one piece has 'redeeming value' (though a majority of furry porn is straight-up porn that would directly fail by honest tests, and others by close-enough checks), whether it offends community sensibilities, whether the ways it does offend community sensibilities are actually the sort the courts unofficially overlook because it's a proxy for 'animus', what the age of characters even are (is this goat the probably-older-than-universe-but-woefully-immature Asriel from Undertale, the unknown-aged-but-probably-late-high-schoolish Ralsei from Deltarune, an aged-down version of either, an aged up version of either, or an Original Character Donut Steel?), yada yada. Prosecutors generally don't want to deal with it, but they have on rare occasions with especially clear cases.

On the other hand, this isn't criminal prosecution: especially this level of higher-tier security clearance. There's a reason you can tell who's been through that level of interview from those who've just heard about it by the extent they flinch at certain questions. For all the official guidelines are about really overt behavior showing sympathy to foreign governments, illegal behaviors, or blackmailable targets, the practical guidelines are looking for broader understandings of strong impulse control and good judgement, pretty vaguely defined. If playing War Thunder is an unacceptable security risk -- and I think it's pretty persuasive that it is -- it's not like this is that unreasonable.

On the gripping hand, the extent the underlying laws and definitions are a mess and largely unconfrontable is gonna keep making the paradoxes more present, both here and in cases with more serious consequences. I get that critics of the law are (understandably!) looking for cases with perfectly sympathetic defendants and especially clear legal processes, both for normal legal tactics and because a decent number of the 'it's ephibophilia' people end up taking off the mask, but in practice there's been thirty years of establishing a pretty harsh new social norm.

((On the other gripping hand, it's quite possible we'll seriously confront those central cases where the definitions completely break down and decide that's because we do need to crank up enforcement of stricter social and legal norms. Totally fictional porn by people who are just working through their own missed opportunities in their youth still have the Kabier problem, and there's a lot more evidence in favor of even sometimes-above-age-of-consent sexualization being either risky or prone to abuse.))

It's not clear whether it's illegal in the strict formalist sense.

It probably isn't, but as you observed, you can be denied a security clearance for behavior that is not illegal. For example, smoking weed in a state where it's legal (granted, that is still federally illegal), or having too many foreign contacts, or having financial problems or a gambling habit.

It used to be, of course, that homosexuality was grounds for denying a security clearance. The reasoning was that it "made you vulnerable to extortion," but even an out and proud homosexual would be judged unsuitable. Homosexuality is now a protected class, but being a furry hentai aficionado is not (yet).

So yeah, looking at underage hentai, even if they are 1000-year-old vampires, is probably legal but still likely gonna get you flagged as "deviant with lack of impulse control and judgement" by a background investigator. (I too have questions about "intent to continue doing so" - who actually tells the humorless polygrapher who's about to torpedo your career, "Yes, I totally intend to keep doing this"? But then I have watched a lot of police bodycam and predcatcher YouTube, and the things people will admit to on camera is amazing, so...)

I think some or all of the underage content would be covered and illegal under federal obscenity law, if in the same marijuana sense. There probably is a Stanley v. Georgia right to receive non-obscene furry porn, though I wouldn't want to wager that much on any one piece as passing that test and I wouldn't be absolutely confident in Stanley surviving modern review.

I too have questions about "intent to continue doing so" - who actually tells the humorless polygrapher who's about to torpedo your career, "Yes, I totally intend to keep doing this"?

I tracked down the full complaint and security background paperwork (attachment 2, relevant page 147) on the FOIA project. 'Intent to continue' seems attached only to the supercategory of 'these types of images', even by the government's telling. Especially if Bierly didn't realize how deep shit he was in, not completely disavowing future consumption of above-age furry porn and/or insufficiently distinguishing between it is... plausible. And it's kinda clearance investigator's jobs to not let people they're investigat_ing_ realize the shit is neck-high.

((Hell, there are some internal parts of how tags/blacklisting worked at e621 at the time where that might have augmented that confusion even had Bierly been very aggressive about blocking underage content, though I expect no one wants to hear about those details.))

But short of his account getting linked to his real name, and maybe not even then, we're probably never gonna know with more certainty than just what he wants us to think the story is.

On the other hand, this isn't criminal prosecution: especially this level of higher-tier security clearance. There's a reason you can tell who's been through that level of interview from those who've just heard about it by the extent they flinch at certain questions. For all the official guidelines are about really overt behavior showing sympathy to foreign governments, illegal behaviors, or blackmailable targets, the practical guidelines are looking for broader understandings of strong impulse control and good judgement, pretty vaguely defined. If playing War Thunder is an unacceptable security risk -- and I think it's pretty persuasive that it is -- it's not like this is that unreasonable.

It does seem like the space between "can't get security clearance" and "criminal prosecution" should be fairly large.

Yeah, and it's not necessarily a completely overlapping set of circles -- there's a lot more security clearance red flags in totally-legal levels of financial mismanagement than in getting in an ill-advised fistfight. A clearance isn't an official designation that you're a good person, or even a completely trustworthy one, so much as trying to hedge off certain security risks. As I said, I'm not sure the clearance determination here is wrong.

But the heuristics are wonky, here. I'm sure mine aren't representative, but it's hard to name ones that are compatible with what we do.

Really, I'm not entirely sure why this is an issue. Security clearance depends on a low blackmail attack surface, so as Puritanism [about what books one reads, in this case] in the population increases or becomes more powerful as a social force, things that wouldn't be an issue in more liberal times start to become viable blackmail avenues.

And yes, that means society is leaving talent on the ground; on the other hand, defending people who hate you is stupid and if their fake moral standards get them killed because of it, then so be it. Maybe the survivors will smarten up.