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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2675 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 5, 2026

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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It is 9/11 for the white knights and feminists of /r/tennis as the blonde-haired blue-eyed, Russian-German, (false?) domestic abuse accusation survivor Alexander Zverev wins the French Open to claim his maiden slam in a roller coaster of a five set match: 6-1, 4-6, 6-4, 6-7, 6-1.

The would-be favorite Alcaraz did not play due to injury and the two other contenders, Sinner and unc Djokovic, were upset in the early rounds.

Hasn't he been accused by more than one woman and shown a pattern of violent behavior toward umpires?

Regardless, I'm generally an art-from-artist separator, so I don't have much interest in the details of players on anything not directly tennis related. On that front, I've never seen a player whose playstyle sucks the joy of watching tennis from me quite like Zverev. He is terrible at everything I enjoy watching (mixing spins and angles, intelligent use of slices, net play, variation on serves) and incredible at the most uninteresting elements (pounding the 1st serve, and ground botting). Medvedev is similar in many ways, but his odd ball trajectory and overall weirdness present an interesting challenge for opponents. Sinner doesn't have the most interesting game, but at least his stroke and movement mechanics are unique and beautiful in and of themselves. Zverev really brings nothing to the table when it comes to entertainment. Not since the days of young Nadal running around every backhand to repetitively fling max topspin at the weaker wing of his opponent have I felt so little interest in a player (and Nadal at least at superhuman speed/topspin and got more interesting later on).

I feel like I’m having a stroke just reading this. Can’t imagine what it sounds like aloud.

Does anyone else watch The Rock and feel some grief that Connery didn’t keep making Bond films up into the 1990s?

I appreciate the fan theory that Connery's character in The Rock is fully intended to be "what if Connery Bond, but captured by the US for 30 years?".

I don't feel the same amount of grief, though, since the series is hit or miss- for each Bond that actually got 4-5 movies, 2-3 of them are good, and the others are a bit more forgettable.

I think the casting decisions made for each Bond were on their own pretty good. I can't actually picture Connery in Moonraker or Man with the Golden Gun, for instance; Brosnan belongs in the Brosnan movies, and so on. This applies especially to the Craig movies; he's just not the man the others are, so it wouldn't make sense for any of the others to portray him (except Dalton, I guess, since the cutting edge being 'a more vulnerable Bond' popped up in the 80s too).

The total and utter crap that were the Craig era movies after casino royale (which I think is the best bond movie post Connery), showed that the Casino turned out that way by accident. Afterwards was - we found what works and now it is time to excise it with great precision.

I think Quantum of Solace can be blamed on the writer's strike. Skyfall wasn't bad. The Christoph Waltz movies were ruined by spending too much time caught up in the canon of Bond, much like Tom Cruise climbed up his own ass in the last couple of Mission films trying to weld it into a coherent arc that no one asked for.

Which I think is just a general industry trend now.

I really like Quantum. It’s Bond as pure Miami Vice cologne-ad vibes film.

Can someone explain why an American strike could so affect a British franchise produced by a British company, filmed in Europe and Mexico, directed by a Swiss-German director and where two thirds of the writers were Brits?

God is a Yankee?

But yes, @Thoroughlygranted has the right of it: The writers were part of the WGA regardless of their nationality and so there was no one around to write the script.

Big movies tend to be unionized. I remember it was a big issue with From Dusk Till Dawn - covered in Full Tilt Boogie if you really care - where they faced strikes and shut downs for making a movie for $15 million (which I guess passed whatever indie cutoff they were willing to tolerate)

Craig/the production could have tried to find some anonymous scab but do you want them writing for Bond? And even people who aren't in that guild are in another one, so it'd be pretty awkward for them.

The writers were probably still WGA members, and even if not, Hollywood is enough of a union industry that publicly crossing the picket line would do a lot of damage to your career

Haus of Decline is one of the funniest webcomics I've found in years.

Well, it's happened. The pressures of our workload have driven a push to use AI to help with some of the bitchwork of coding. There is going to be a push to use AI to generate unit tests.

The toolchain involves OpenCode, so I figured I'd install it locally to get familiar with it before I start burning GPU time at work. Also, for reasons, we aren't allowed to use the GPUs. So last night I installed Ollama, OpenCode and the gemma4:e4b model on my humble RTX 4070 Super with 12 GB of VRAM. I tried to have it do the simplest of tasks. Create a Hello World project in dotnet10, and write a single unit test to verify it's output.

The first thing that happened was it created a new project. New projects actually begin with hello world output already. It then added a second hello world output. This poisoned the well, as now the AI was horribly confused about why there were two hello world lines. It never fully recovered. The project was generated without it's int main format which I prefer, so I tried to have it restructure the project to use that. After several missteps because it couldn't get over the fact that there were duplicate hello world statements, it finally figured it out.

Next came the unit tests. It created a unit test project, but then didn't actually populate the tests or link the projects. Then it wanted to refactor hello world, and pull in all sorts of abstraction frameworks, so it could test the output without redirecting stdout. I told it forget all that and redirect stdout. It had already done half the refactoring in a state that could not compile, and then never undid it, and then the whole project was totally broken and it couldn't figure out how to fix it.

I remind you, this was a "Hello world" and a single unit test. I told the AI it fucked everything up, it asked what it could do to fix it, and I told it that it could shutdown. It did. I think.

I know a lot of people reading this are AI evangelist. Where did I go wrong? What the fuck do people see in this shit?

What the fuck do people see in this shit?

They see alot of people select some generic useless model inappropriate to their usecase, fail, then condemn "AI" for their own ignorance.

It's all so tiresome.

Your work is doing things in the most retarded way possible if they're forcing you to use local CPU inference only. I'm not one of the AI boosters around here but I do use models from the big US labs a fair bit at work. I can see the local models becoming more capable and even quite useful for local tasks, but there's no way I'm getting one to vomit up a project from nothing and expecting miracles. I have had asked for audits of old code and had it found bugs that I missed (as well as a lot of noise).

As far as I can tell, llama.cpp is a lot better than ollama. While it's much less of a turn-key experience, many models never seem to make it across to ollama, and its inference is slower in my experience. It also seems to be slower at picking up newer developments, like multi-token prediction:

By pairing a heavy target model (e.g., Gemma 4 31B) with a lightweight drafter (the MTP model), we can utilize idle compute to “predict” several future tokens at once with the drafter in less time than it takes for the target model to process just one token. The target model then verifies all of these suggested tokens in parallel.

For running local models, there are quite a few things to think about:

  • Which model to use: at the moment, the strongest locally-runnable coding model seems to be Qwen3.6.
  • How big of a model to use: smaller models are stupider. If it doesn't fit in VRAM, inference speed generally tanks too low to be useful. Qwen3.6 comes in two sizes: 27B (27 billion parameters) and 35B-A3B (35 billion parameters, but only 3B parameters are active for each token). The 27B model will be smarter because it activates more parameters per token but 35B-A3B model will be a lot faster. For your GPU, I'd try Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, not least because as a "mixture of experts" model, some of those experts can be kept on CPU.
  • What quantization of that model to use: this is where someone crunches the model down to make it take up less space at the cost of making it dumber. More accurate quantizations will also have slower inference. It seems like Q4_K_XL is usually a "sweet spot" most people go for, and here's someone claiming 80 tokens/sec with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Q4_K_XL on a 12GB card: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1t82zxv/80_toksec_and_128k_context_on_12gb_vram_with/ . Ignore the stuff about the MTP PR; that's since been merged to master.

Then there's actually getting it running and doing something useful. For that I'll defer to the above guide on how to launch llama-server for this model on a 12GB card. You'll then have to point OpenCode at your local server and see if it goes any better for you. No promises, my sense is that local stuff is on the edge of being "quite decent" and it's worth having a finger in the local model pie so when it does get genuinely good. I don't ever want to be locked into paying for subscription compute.

Thanks for having an actionable and helpful reply. I'll give these things a try.

Don't get me wrong, the people who say these local models are "almost-Claude-tier" are still too starry-eyed. The model I recommended you - Qwen3.6-A3B-Q4_K_XL - told me earlier that both the Linux kernel and Busybox used the autotools. It will confabulate as badly as a previous-gen frontier model but if you drop it in an established project where it can read stuff written by people with a clue, it can often be guided into doing useful things like push through refactors and updates where the compiler and tests can keep it on track.

I know a lot of people reading this are AI evangelist. Where did I go wrong?

You are using an 8B model and expecting it to do anything useful, is your problem. For reference, the strongest open source coding models are GLM-5.1 with 754B params, kimi-k2.6 with 1.1T params, MiMo-V2.5-Pro with 1T params, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 862B params. And those models are a year or two behind the strongest proprietary model, Claude Opus 4.7.

12 GB of VRAM is enough to run a text-to-image model like Stable Diffusion XL or Pony and make bespoke porn. But if you want to run an LLM for coding, it's completely useless.

Well, it's happened. The pressures of our household have driven a push to use a fire to help with some of the bitchwork of cooking. There is going to be a push to use fire to cook our meat.

The method involves using fire to heat up a vessel that will contain meat. So I figured I'd get this set up in the backyard so I could be familiar with it. Also, for reasons, we aren't going to be allowed to use metal. so last night I dug a pit, put wood in it and got my humble plastic bowl. I tried to cook the simplest meal, some steak and berries.

The first thing that happened as I put the steak in the plastic bowl and placed it directly in the burning fire is that the bowl started to melt almost immediately. This poisoned the meat. No matter how I moved the bowl within the fire the melting only got worse and I burned my hands painfully in the process. Next I tried to throw the berries into the blaze and was rewarded only with foul smelling smoke.

I know a lot of people reading this are AI evangelist. Where did I go wrong? What the fuck do people see in this shit?

You used tools no one would ever have advised you to use, in a way no one would ever advise you to use them in. There isn't like one or two things that you could tweak to fix this performance. open up a free chat gpt chat and just ask it what you should do to to get started.

I wouldn't expect to get much from a local model unless you're basically an expert in how to set up these things with world-class hardware. If you really want to see what it can do, pony up the $20 for a subscription to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Cursor, whoever. AFAIK, they're all easy to cancel after that one month. On a personal device if you need to and corporate is being all uptight about what's done on work devices.

I still don't trust it to write large amounts of code that isn't just boilerplate or make any architectural decisions, but it's quite good at tracking down problems and fixing bugs on its own. I've been using it a significant amount on a Python project I've taken on at work - I don't really know Python all that well, and it's a big help with some of the trickier parts. Using OpenCode with our corporate account for Claude Opus 4.6 in Agent mode, it seems to work well to set up a unit test that exercises a problem and tell it to run that test and fix the issue in the proper place. When I run into some bug or confusing point that I can't make much sense of, and I expect that solving it myself would involve hours of web searching and poring over library docs, it usually is able to solve it in under a minute. And the fix and reason why it works is explained and usually only a couple of lines of code, so it's easy to verify that it's correct and not doing any other crazy stuff.

You definitely do IMO need to treat it like a over-enthusiastic junior and carefully review everything it does to ensure it makes sense.

I wouldn't expect to get much from a local model

I'm not. It's hard to imagine how I could expect less. I repeat. I told it to write "Hello world!" and a single unit test to verify output. There, quite literally, isn't anything less I could ask of it.

In my experience, you really need to hold the AI's hand to get it to do anything remotely complicated. It's awful at designing things, and will constantly make incorrect assumptions. Last week I had it tell me that some map was wrong because it was keyed off of type information, and so if two types have the same layout there will be a collision. Not only is that not true in C++, I can't think of any language that does that.

That being said, it can be useful when doing things that can be automatically checked. I've had decent success getting it to write mock implementations for tests after denying it the ability to change the actual source code, or to change which libraries the test links. It'll still try to do both of those things, but will eventually give up and write the actual mock. It's also okay at writing the test case outlines, albeit with as few assertions as possible. It's probably still faster for me to add them afterwards than write the whole test by hand.

I know a lot of people reading this are AI evangelist. Where did I go wrong? What the fuck do people see in this shit?

You used a "4B" model which is about an order of magnitude below the level where I find AI starts to be useful for more than just single line autocomplete. But most of the evangelists aren't using 30-40B class local models, either, they're using frontier models which are scaled another order of magnitude, and usually closer to two. Capabilities obviously aren't linear with model size and one can get surprising results from small models at times, but "small" here usually doesn't mean "fits on your phone".

I have no idea what the market is for shitty, small models. Well, in Gemma's case I think it might be for on-device inference to save Google compute costs, and "fits on your phone" is a core constraint and market demand never really factored into it.

Your results are worse than mine, but I'm in a similar boat. The results that the boosters are seeing are not what I am seeing in my professional life.

I can approximate what the boosters are seeing in personal projects, if I keep the scope small, and I use python, and the project doesn't involve much state management, and I write a spec that is roughly the same size as the codebase that would exist if I were to write it by hand.

This kind of tracks with the handful of AI enthusiasts I know in real life, too. The first category is professional programmers. When I ask what problems they solve with it, they tell me they're using AI to write an AI agent orchestration framework to better run their AI. When I ask what they'll use that tool to do, I'm told to shut up, because AI is the future and you can't be left behind. The second category is non programmers who ask Claude to process a CSV file, and this blows their dick clean off. The idea that you can process a CSV file and you don't even need Excel to do it is a mind-altering experience for them. The fact that Claude is doing a tool call that runs ten lines of python is irrelevant. This is the future. They'll keep rebuilding that same deterministic python script from an elaborate prompt every single month, because holy mother of cyber-jesus, this saves them half an hour in Excel every month.

Everyone else I know is either possessed of a terrifying antipathy, or can't muster up anything more enthusiastic than "it's ok, I guess".

On an unrelated note - do you know why .net projects like to keep their unit tests in a segregated project? Most other languages that I've used have a convention where the unit tests are in a separate folder in the same project.

On an unrelated note - do you know why .net projects like to keep their unit tests in a segregated project? Most other languages that I've used have a convention where the unit tests are in a separate folder in the same project.

I donno, why do most other languages comingle their production code with their unit tests? I can't speak for any official reason, but I know managing large dotnet solutions, testing projects need to be flagged with true in it's project file or some shit like that. Otherwise test runners don't find it. They usually also have a bunch of nuget packages pulled in, like xunit or MSTest that your production project won't need. They'll probably have some resources embedded in them to facilitate testing which you almost certainly do not want shipped in production.

Man, I was checking the dependencies xunit3's nuget pulls in now. Shit looks like a maven package.

Finished The Rose of Versailles on Netflix

Well, that's not something you see every day; a musical anime film! For a moment, I felt like I was back in the 90s, watching Anastasia and The Prince of Egypt. Some of the songs are pretty good; "Anger and Pain" (which plays as the French Revolution starts) is outstanding, as is "Never Surrender" (which plays during the duel with Alain).

The movie is very pretty, specially compared to the original series. This is to be expected; the animation of a 1979 TV show cannot possibly compete with the animation of a 2025 theatrical film. The colors are vibrant, with red and blue uniforms popping out of the screen. The skirmish at Tuileries and the storming of the Bastille are particularly stunning.

Unfortunately, writing is the weak link in the movie. The script has a serious problem with "show, don't tell"; characters tell each other they are in love rather than being shown falling in love, or talk about hungry relatives that are never seen onscreen.

The film's pacing is ridiculous, moving so fast that it makes the speed of light look like a stoned turtle. It seemed like every time I blinked, the narrative skipped forward three years. I am not sure I would have been able to follow the plot had I not already been familiar with the story.

Entire subplots are reduced to three seconds of screen time during musical numbers, such as Madame du Barry and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, or excised entirely, such as the Black Knight or Saint-Just moonlighting as a masked vigilante noble killer (that last one was probably for the best; what the fuck, original series?). Everything is pared down to the core story of Lady Oscar and Marie Antoinette, but even then these characters are missing some serious development.

To some extent, this is understandable. The Rose of Versailles is an epic story, taking place over 33 years and 40 episodes; compressing it into a 2 hour movie is an impossible task. But then, they should not have attempted it. This should have been a trilogy.

The film feels like a highlight reel of the show's best moments, or perhaps a recap episode. Actually, someone on Reddit called it an advertisement for the manga, and perhaps that was its true purpose.

Overall, I'd recommend watching the 1979 anime instead, at least at first. It's free on YouTube!

The movie is very pretty, specially compared to the original series. This is to be expected; the animation of a 1979 TV show cannot possibly compete with the animation of a 2025 theatrical film. The colors are vibrant, with red and blue uniforms popping out of the screen.

I haven't watched the Netflix adaptation but I just watched the trailer and the OP sequence for it and I have to disagree. I am a huge fan of 70s anime (shoujo especially) and think the art style in the original version is a million times more attractive and effective than the art style of the new version. The 70s artists communicate so much in their sparseness and simplicity. The new version overloads you with a maximalist scrapbook aesthetic that looks very like, illustrator vector frutiger metro but sort of adapted to the 2020s. I mean the techniques of reproduction (the camera work or whatever process is used to convert the illustrations to a final image) has obviously "technically improved" but the charm and soul of the original is missing. It is similar to how AI generation or smartphone cameras continue to improve in clarity and definition but degrade in terms of soul and art and the sort of in between imprecision of the act of creation. The color grading also seems to lack cohesion in the new version compared to the original anime. And really I don't mean to disrespect the artists working today and it's good that they have careers at all but the taste to me is just a world apart from the taste of the 70s illustrators and animators.

Astral Codex Ten 2026 Book Review Contest submissions thread

How do y'all rate an essay that is a good read, but not really a review?

I rate it purely based on how entertaining/interesting it was.

I wish that website allowed filtering by finalists/winners of past competitions.

My top 10:

Honorable mentions:

I used to really love World War Z, but upon returning to it last year, I think it really has not aged well, especially after the last 20 years. In hindsight it seems obvious that certain characters/storylines were included to push Max's political hobby horses. A couple I found especially jarring were the cripple neighborhood watch member, the billionaire pharmaceutical CEO hiding out in the arctic, and the ending. However, it's still charming in its own way. It's almost quaint in how it handles its politics. Were the book written today, I have no doubt that there would be at least a couple of chapters devoted to the usual culture war topics.

To me it's a fun read. The core story is still compelling, but it really shows its age. Part of me thinks that maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't have memories of it being such a great book. I honestly wish I could read it for the first time again today so I didn't have my judgement clouded by my previous expectations. Maybe if I was reading it for the first time today, it wouldn't show its age as much. Overall I'd still recommend it, but nowhere near as heartily as I would have in 2010.

World War Z was a book which really stuck with me. I read it in my early teens and went into it looking for the archetypical zombie thriller and I was completely blindsided by the breadth of storytelling. Brooks' choice to tell the story from ordinary people, discussing their lived experiences made each vignette much more real to me. I can honestly say that by the time I was halfway through I was thinking about how hard it would be to block the staircase with sofa. Brooks has dropped in a ton of personal moralizing to the story, pretty obvious in certain parts during my most recent re-read, but as a teen I was too enraptured by the story and too young to pick up on most of. For those interested in more WWZ content there is a super long althist rewrite from a very leftist perspective in this thread. It's even more heavyhanded than the original book and laughable at times but a fun (and occasionally enraging) read. I haven't found another book like WWZ with that approach to storytelling and grounded approach to zombies. Please let me know if you know of any others like it!

World War Z was released on the upswing of Peak Zombie, and now we're well into the downslop. I loved zombie apocalypse content around high school in 2010 or so, but by the time The Walking Dead was big and the World War Z movie came out, it was just so beaten to death and cliche that I was sick of it all.

As an aside, I believe that is what is preventing GRRM from ever finishing The Winds of Winter, he probably had ideas for how to really play with and subvert tropes around zombies in fantasy/horror...and then a hundred other major zombie properties came out between when he started the series and when he got to TWOW, and a thousand more have come out while he's working on TWOW. My personal theory: Jon Snow is meant to assume the role of the Night King to lead the Others and the Zombies away from the human lands to the South, this has been theorycrafted well in advance. The problem for GRRM is that this is also the ending to the Arthas raid in World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King, so it's no longer cool and creative and subverting tropes in the genre, it's merely regurgitating another story. The irony being that both the Scourge's first appearance in Warcraft III and the ending of WotLK were probably inspired by GRRM and ASOIAF. GRRM's subversiveness has been torpedoed by his own success before he could finish his work.

Pretty good theory, makes sense on why GRRM has writer's block. He will probably pass of natural causes before he finishes ASOIAF unfortunately, being obese and physically inactive.

It's a literary debate grenade I throw out every few months when someone brings up Game of Thrones, how GRRM set out consciously with the goal of critiquing or debating or surpassing Tolkien, and ultimately failed because he was unable to write an ending.

My theory was always that he was going in the opposite direction, and going to do a "White Walkers win" ending to shit on Tolkien's optimism and faith. "AKSHUALLY, people don't just come together after a hatefully bitter civil war. They just die."

And that's a thing you can do when you're writing a "Top 100 most popular current fantasy series", where the grim ending is what makes a splash, but now that Game of Thrones broke containment and is world-renowned to normies, he doesn't have the balls to eat the backlash.

Anyone out there is going to have one tell of a time in attempting to surpass Tolkien. The mythology of Middle Earth went well beyond what most people found in LOTR alone, and it wasn’t simply the range but the depth of fantasy he went into.

I don't think it's really possible.

My wife is reading LOTR for the first time right now, and asked me how much of modern fantasy Tolkien invented. And I said that it's not so much that he invented a lot of things, almost everything in LOTR had some precedent either in prior sword and sandals fantasy universes or in myths both ancient and modern. ((Among other things, I think Tolkien scholars make a concerted effort to connect Numenor primarily to Plato's Atlantis and skip over the various Aryanist fantasies around Atlantis and Lemuria you see more clearly in R.E. Howard's stories.))

But Tolkien is fantasy's Most Recent Common Ancestor on essentially all questions. He settled a lot of different versions of what Elves, Orcs, Goblins, Dwarves were. Before Tolkien they could be a lot of things, after Tolkien they're mainly just the one thing, or if you change it you are in conscious conversation with Tolkien's tradition in changing it.

You just can't get that kind of juice today. The only thing comparable in influence is D&D, which will never get the same credibility.

Oh, yes it makes sense he would attempt to equal or surprass Tolkien, GRRM wrote about how he thought he could never equal Tolkien in the preface to his short story collection as a young writer.

I like some of his short stories, A Song for Lya is one of my favorites. It has an interesting ending! I bet he wants to land an ending to ASOIAF which is just as good.

Just imagine that the Studs Turkl interviewer is actually the most fair and decent man at NPR.

I love the Storm of Steel review (I'm biased).

I love how the Kakistocracy review starts off with the classic girl-writing move of "you wouldn't believe how gross this guy I dated was! He slept on a stained mattress in his mother's basement, and oh wow you wouldn't believe what he made me do on it - what a loser!"

Been awhile since I read Earth Abides but I’ve always enjoyed post-apocalyptic explorations. I read Lucifer’s Hammer a few years ago. Maybe I should do Earth Abides again.

I love this one https://acxreviews.robennals.org/reviews/weve-had-a-hundred-years-of-psychotherapy-and-the-worlds-getting-worse?year=2026

I thought that one was interesting, but incomplete. I wanted him to go on and think it through in more depth.

It's great there's a proper website now, with estimated reading lengths and same page ratings.

Enjoyed reading about Tom Sachs and his redemption arc apparently in his NYT portfolio here

Tom Sachs was ambling through his art studio in Manhattan’s Chinatown this spring when he pointed out a low-slung, octagonal seat. It was a hard-edge variation on the kind of cushioned ottoman that appears in many of New York’s high-end boutiques. “We call it the cuck chair,” said Sachs, 59, barely suppressing a titter. “It’s a place to sit in the shop with your iPhone while your spouse is being pleasured by the staff.”

I guess if it’s a Sachs cuck chair maybe you do just sit on it.

“My main concern is that other people’s feelings are more important than some idea that I have,” he said, explaining that these days, he is less focused on dominion over his team and surroundings.

Also interesting to note that he seems to be saying the “right things” but that could just be my cynicism about the whole “canceled” (but not really) celebrity comes out of the woodworks.

Even so, I enjoy his design work and may have even tried his knolling and cleaning technique to calm the mind at times.

/images/17806760937795756.webp

New Timeline just dropped. Hunter Biden joined Twitter two weeks ago and amassed a lot of followers. He is kind of funny.

Is he the front runner for POTUS in 2028 election?

I think I might vote for him.

He needs to be harder on immigrants to get my vote. Just because I would never trust a Dem to not get run over by the NGOs and let in unlimited migrants.

I don’t think America ever wants to elect another Romney. We want entertained so go pick the most absurd populists you can find.

Edit will give links and takes:

https://x.com/hunterbiden/status/2062880174254010399?s=46

https://x.com/signulll/status/2062602162857779536?s=46 https://x.com/shagbark_hick/status/2062709558246584513?s=46

I find him a lot more relatable than anyone in Trump's orbit, that's for sure. Guessing he'd immediately relapse if he went anywhere near a tough job though

Come to think of it, I'm surprised politicians and other figures aren't caught doing crack with black prostitutes in DC constantly. They're away from their homes and families, stressed, and surrounded by poor black people.

He just did a long as hell Soft White Underbelly video too. (yes the channel which usually interviews prostitutes and child abuse victims and whatever). I watched the whole thing. He's kind of flat and creepy like a lot of recovered drug addicts. I'm surprised he's a democrat. His paintings are bad enough that they trigger a Harrison Bergeron response in my brain.

A lot of maga have like that cousin who’s a heroin addict. Relatable to many people.

His following probably stems from those who understood him as the First Crackhead. Now that Rob Ford has passed away, he’s the next best candidate to zero in on.

I've been more than a little surprised that no-one here in This Fine Establishment has done a post noting the parallels between Ford and Trump, but of course, it's always possible that it was already done and I just wasn't around for it at the time.

One of the things you had to give Rob Ford was that he was truly a man of the people.

Doh, I thought you were talking about Rob Ford!

Funny how phones do that, I’m sure he had a brother too.

Haha, of course, that makes much more sense in retrospect than the idea that you were talking about Tom Ford the fashion guy!

It's got that 2008 Cracked.com writing style.

Which is great the first time you see it. After the dozenth the time, eh.

Ride-along question on this: Mottizens, do you think this is actually Hunter Biden, or is it a brilliant publicist? My money's on the latter - it's too perfectly Online, and it doesn't read at all like any of the Hunter Biden writing/messages we've seen. Also insanely good at hitting as many DNC youth outreach talking points as possible. Or maybe Hunter secretly got Extremely Online? He was seeing some dirtbag left egirl for a while.

There is no way this isn't a publicist ghost writing for him. Everything is just a little too on the nose, like George Takei used to be.

Maybe it is George Takei.

If he went for his father’s 1990’s politics I think he could have a good chance. The big issue his dad had was it felt like he was captured by the modern Democratic machine. My gut says if he runs he would be better off doing it as an independent as it would ease a lot of fears he will be controlled like dad. I think he could even pick off the MAGA vote. Trump does have an issue now that it feels like he’s controlled by Israel. And Hunter does feel American. So he could pick off a lot of Dems dissatisfied with the far left too. And maga does like a FU candidate which he fits.

Or maybe Hunter secretly got Extremely Online? He was seeing some dirtbag left egirl for a while.

I think the market for his totally-not-cover-for-bribes paintings is done, so he might have some time on his hands to be Extremely Online.

I thought he got hacked, and his hacker was trolling us. Though publicist is a good theory too but boring. However I think that people forget that Biden senior was a pretty charismatic person, definitely high on the list of politicians I'd get an Ice Cream cone with.

What's your score on the Cambridge Face Memory Test? https://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/psychologyexperiments/experiments/facememorytest/startup.php

I got just 56% and the difficulty spike between the first and the second parts was insane to me, I went from "I guess I'm not face blind" to "I better not be asked to pick one of the six perps out of a lineup" in a second.

I got 50%. Not too surprising. I often feel like I'm worse at recognizing faces than average, and that I often recognize people more by their body language and way of moving and voice than by face. I also occasionally get the impression that a person who is a random stranger is actually a person I know.

51%, which doesn't surprise me at all. I regularly get confused during TV shows and movies about that random guy who I thought was the same character until I saw the two of them in a room together.

Scored 82%. Kinda gave up at the last stage, got annoyed by the distortions.

I scored 64. This is such a crazy way to test face blindness. Once it got to the pixelated faces I did not recognize any of the faces. I have done other face blindness tests online in the past which have been a bit easier to me but I scored about the same in relation to the test's "average." I also know that I am significantly more face blind toward women than men: when I am meeting a bunch of new people in a new class, for example, it takes me a really long time to memorize the names of females especially. I do think I am relatively face blind though, recently I made the mistake of introducing myself to someone I had just met 5 minutes prior (granted it was in an overwhelming social situation where I'm usually anxious, but my friend and the person I did this to were both a bit annoyed with me.)

96%, and I'm actually surprised because in real life I hardly remember the faces of anyone I don't meet frequently (I actually often struggle to pick out prominent public figures by their looks, who I remember far more by their names and policies than I do their faces). In practice I store people as an abstract set of traits and positions in much the same way I do concepts.

In the vast majority of contexts the specific way somebody's face looks is probably the attribute of theirs I care the least about, and I suppose I just don't bother to commit it to long-term memory.

I'll finish it in the morning, felt like I have an unfair advantage - or maybe disadvantage - from having more exposure to British physiognomy. There's one guy who looks exactly like a hybrid of Nick Land and Lord Miles, which got me laughing too hard to keep going.

I was flying through 'til the end. Somehow ended up with a 93%.

I was sweating bullets by the end of the Norf FC Identification Quiz.

I got 76% which is remarkable because I feel like I have mild face blindness and was practically guessing for two thirds of the time.

90% for me. Honestly thought the last part in particular was incredibly difficult, I'm shocked 80% is the average given how hard it seems to be.

Decided to use nicknames for the faces to improve familiarity, got 90%.

79%. The last part was ridiculous.

79%. Got pretty hard there at the end.

I got 83%, but yeah the spike in difficulty for that last part was unreal. I swear some of those where just pixelated 3D shapes on some gradient where it was all the same face in increasing levels of gaussian noise. Reminds me of looking at diffusion model outputs.

My father has been claiming he's face blind for a year now, time to put this in the family chat and find out how much.

I meant the spike between the first and the second parts. Pick one out of three vs pick one out of six out of three.

Several of the faces have very clear distinct features that were hard to miss for me. The pudgy face was easy to remember, but slightly double chin face? Much harder depending on the angle. The 1st face looks like a co-worker's side profile. Cheekbones guy was very distinct by how sharp his face was. It was the guy with the fat(?)Fuzz(?) right besides his nose that I kept fucking up.

I got 83%, but yeah the spike in difficulty for that last part was unreal. I swear some of those where just pixelated 3D shapes on some gradient where it was all the same face in increasing levels of gaussian noise.

Same results, and I agree. Some of those by the end were just blobs with almost no identifying features.

Two fun stories from tech this past week:

Story 1

The rsync developer picked up vibecoding recently, which resulted in him publishing a busted release that started breaking people's backups, which caused a nuclear level of backlash. The rsync dev responded by posting this wall of text which insists that no, vibecoding is actually the future, chuds.

The most amusing part is this is not some cooked zoomer who picked up Claude last week and deluded himself into thinking he was now a real coder. This guy is the founding author of the project, and has been its primary maintainer for 30 years.

Story 2

Zcash is a cryptocurrency which advertises itself as a privacy coin. As all good cyberpunks do, Zcash has a centralised, legally-incorporated foundation elaborating their trademark policy as well as a wealth of resources about 1023s, bylaws, IRS compliance, and pretty much anything else that would brighten the day of a young cyberpunk.

But don't worry, it gets better when you dig into the details: "Privacy coins aren’t all the same — and Zcash takes a unique stance among them. Unlike [redacted], which enforces full anonymity by default, Zcash gives users a choice." A unique stance indeed! This stance has been pioneered elsewhere by Telegram, which famously features end-to-end encrypted chats that a user can opt into (and if they don't, well, the messages are unencrypted by default just like on every other platform, and Telegram and anyone capable of arm-twisting Telegram can read them). I'll note that as a frequent user of Telegram for over a decade myself, I have never once had someone initiate a secret chat with me, which just goes to show that all true cyberpunks love mass surveillance, and will choose it whenever they are given a choice. Like Telegram, most users of Zcash choose not to make their activity private. Of course, even if you opt into the shielded pool -- a respectable choice! -- make sure you do so carefully, because there are definitely not guns pre-pointed at your foot C++ style.

But all of that is old news! Today, the price of Zcash wrt the dollar crashed nearly 60% on the news of a new critical vulnerability discovered by a random person deciding to point Claude at the code base (not the Mythos version; just the regular version accessible to anyone). The vulnerability allows unlimited coins to be printed in the shielded pool where nobody can see them. Some foolish conspiracy theorists have put forth the hypothesis that backdoor money-printing may, in fact, have been a feature, not a bug, but fortunately, top men are on the case to discredit such harebrained nonsense.

What's especially baffling about Zcash is that despite its impeccable reputation, Wikipedia notes its adoption among darknet cryptocurrency markets is less than 1%.

Essentially all of the Claude-authored rsync commits are for CI and the test suite, so it's more like AI failed to catch regressions introduced in response to a huge wave of (AI-generated) CVE reports than AI introducing those bugs itself.

This guy is the founding author of the project, and has been its primary maintainer for 30 years.

The vibe is that older retirement aged or approaching retirement aged people excessively love AI and are somehow blind to its faults.

It is a reversal of tech adoption in which the old are hyped and the young are hesitant.

I've noticed it too. Reminds me how my Grandma loved her Keurig. Me and my siblings were coming of coffee loving age in the era of specialty coffee and scoffed at the K-cups, while the lady who'd been toiling at making her own coffee for over 60 years, from before electric brewers or grinders where really a thing, through eras of war rationing, thought being able to just buy a Costco 60 pack and push a brew button was the greatest thing ever.

I think you get to a point where you have nothing left to prove and just value convivence over most other things. Enthusiasm for automation is directly proportional to how burnt out you are on doing it yourself.

The most amusing part is this is not some cooked zoomer who picked up Claude last week and deluded himself into thinking he was now a real coder. This guy is the founding author of the project, and has been its primary maintainer for 30 years.

This tracks. The most zealous AI boosters I've seen online and in real life are older guys who have reputations for having done really cool stuff in the past. Steve Yegge is another example.

Story 1

I don't have the time for this, but has anyone looked into the bugs introduced to see if they were bugs a human wouldn't have introduced or would have caught in code review? Or, failing that, if they should have been caught in testing? I wouldn't be surprised if the testing story on a project like this is not very good, and the fact that the author is flaunting his CS PhD makes me positively suspect it.

fortunately, top men are on the case to discredit such harebrained nonsense.

"Jews developed this so it's a honeypot" is indeed nonsense even if it really is a honeypot.

I’m getting Tornado Cash vibes by Zcash’s description. Although it wasn’t a currency itself (it was a ‘mixing’ service), its intended function still served the same purpose of making it harder to trace crypto transactions. Bad coding aside, the real use cases for these systems are effectively money laundering services and speculation. But I’m pretty sure in the darknet there are already adequate solutions people are running as schemes to facilitate payments between vendors and their customers.

I'd say your vibes are the exact opposite of what they should be, given that the Tornado cash devs were arrested by the government and the Zcash foundation is in McLean, Virginia (the spook capital of the world).

What do you see the use cases for crypto being?

Facebook and Instagram routinely show me reels by porn stars, and my AI-dar is strong enough that I usually notice when it's showing me AI-generated girls who don't actually exist. (No doubt there's a potential toupée fallacy here.) I assume these models are advertising their OnlyFans pages or similar, and that if one were to follow the link it would contain softcore photos and videos for a fee. I wouldn't know, as I've never clicked on one of these links.

Jerking off to softcore videos of photorealistic AI-gen women seems extremely lame to me, lamer than watching live-action porn featuring real women (which is already pretty lame). On the other hand, is watching photorealistic AI-gen porn lamer than watching hentai, animated furry porn, or similar? Technically, both hentai and photorealistic AI-gen porn are types of animated pornography, but at least the latter looks enough like a real person that you might not notice it on a cursory inspection. A guy might consume a lot of photorealistic AI-gen porn and still be attracted to real women who actually exist, whereas I fear for the habitual hentai user, eventually no 3-dimensional flesh-and-blood woman will ever appeal to him.

On the other hand, habitual hentai users might put the unambiguous fantasy of 2-dimensional hentai in a completely separate mental category to IRL sex and be able to derive enjoyment from both (just because you like burgers, doesn't mean you don't also like salmon); whereas photorealistic AI-gen porn looks just like real life except with every conceivable imperfection mercilessly rooted out. Someone who habitually consumes the latter might eventually find that the imperfections all flesh-and-blood women have* (to a greater or lesser extent) are impossible to overlook.

Obviously consuming either kind of porn to excess will mess with your head. But which do you think is worse?

*Men too, obviously, but I can't imagine many straight women have much interest in watching photorealistic AI-gen softcore porn of male characters.

I'm... skeptical of the strong form of this thesis.

There's a trivial version where yes, getting off every night means you're not going to get the early Spring 'holy shit I need to be in someone' rush, or where people in relationships have less sex if one or both watches a lot of porn, or it slightly impacts where 10/10 on a scale falls or what an ideal date night looks like. That's clearly true, but it's not very interesting, doesn't change depending on type (or, frankly, amount) of pornography, and doesn't result in people unable to fuck women.

If you're working on those concerns, I'd probably say the anime/hentai/furry side has more of an impact? AI-generated human-like people might be unnaturally perfect, but human neurology seems to map from unnatural perfection to normality fine. Reading into non-photorealistic-human shapes involves rewiring yourself to see those shapes as people. I'd expect that to have a bigger impact.

The strong form, where smut messes with your head so seriously you might not be able to be attracted to actual people, is a meaningful and different category. And there are examples of people who've ended up here. I'm most familiar with some of those people from the furry fandom -- either because they look at humans and don't get the frisson without a muzzle or tail, or because they've gotten wrapped up into kinks like vore or snuff that can't be executed in real life. But it can happen in other environments: the trans 'chaser' that couldn't form a relationship with one and won't leave the concept alone, the supermodel obsessive who will never meet a woman he'd score above a 3/10 and wouldn't date anyone who would give him a second glance, or the kinksters who've obviated the sex itself.

Yet actually looking into what happened or happens with specific examples throws a wrench into the theory. There's people who's FA pages are walls of overly-detailed mouths who still desperately want a boyfriend or girlfriend, or get one. Same for latex fetishism, or (for a women's example) obsession with guys in masks. Hell, even extreme denial kink tends to go that way, and there not getting fucked is the whole point. Charitably, that emotional and social connection just becomes too important too quickly. Less charitably, computers can't yet replace a warm hole or warm pole, nevermind the warm body and cuddling that comes with them.

imo, ai generated porn other people created feels very cringe, but ai generated adult imagery I have prompted myself is not cringe at all, to me. I am sure the ai generated adult imagery that I have prompted myself is cringe to other people.

On the other hand, is watching photorealistic AI-gen porn lamer than watching hentai, animated furry porn, or similar?

Obviously the winning move is to watch AI-gen hentai.

All in all, another reason for deleting your social media. Backup your Facebook data if you’re worried about losing things and eradicate it from your life. I never experienced the detox some people claim to have had because I was never that drawn into it in the first place, but so much of it is a distraction and waste. Instagram is just the opposite of doomscrolling, and I see people outside of work who do nothing but consume one reel after, another despite having all these “great plans” in their lives that are permanently on hold and perpetually in the works because they can’t put down the cell phone to apply themselves where the work needs to be done.

As far as the content you’re describing, that’s ballooned over the years as a consequence of the real world drought a lot of young men have experienced as far as putting themselves out there and trying to make themselves an attractive prospect goes. Men don’t know how to make themselves attractive (often through no fault of their own, men aren’t shown any of this; yes; brush your teeth; wipe your ass; manage your finances; dress well; shave properly; don’t sound ghetto or hood when you speak; stand up straight; be respectful; vacuum the Cheeto crumbs off the bedroom floor; etc.) and women too often don’t know what men are good for them (give the nice guy a chance; stay in church; learn domestic skills; put on a smile; don’t drink or smoke; etc.).

There’s also a generational divide that I think shares a parallel with other examples. A few years ago, one of our managers at work decided to informally adopt a “peer” interview hiring approach, where new candidates who were under the microscope got to meet a random worker in the department to follow up and ask them questions related to their resume, while the manager observed in the office. As a fairly standout worker, I was one of the select people who did more than a couple of these. The youngest guy I did this for was a friend of a co-worker who was just coming onto the labor market. Kid comes in fully in his street clothes, answering questions with a nervous and unconfident tone (somewhat understandable but you want to speak with self-assuredness about your own abilities), and he also later failed a drug test from what I’d heard. I didn’t follow up with my co-worker about this kid, but it did leave me with an impression on my mind which was, “Who in the world is raising these kids?” It seems nobody ever really taught them what professionalism is, or how to be confident, or, I don’t know; not using drugs (it was weed, even though it’s legal in this state)? I think the same applies to how they approach relationships, but these kids are navigating an environment with a collapse in responsibility and no formal structure to any of it as far as standards and expectations go (and by that I’m not talking about selfish standards, I’m talking mature young adult standards that people used to have beaten into them).

no formal structure to any of it as far as standards and expectations go (and by that I’m not talking about selfish standards, I’m talking mature young adult standards that people used to have beaten into them)

My early 2000s history teacher had some point about how our generation no longer had a clear script to follow regarding relationships. And how that made dating and relationship forming harder for us. But he was optimistic that new norms would develop and future youths would find this easier.

Too bad he was wrong on that point.

I think a lot of the divide comes down to how we raise kids. The major difference between now and the past is that most parents are now so divorced from the idea that there should be any authority figures that they not only cannot raise their kids into adulthood properly, but often stand in the way of anyone who would demand a kid do anything they don’t want to. That often means that the child lacks the ability to act professionally or talk professionally. They don’t understand that going to a job interview is not the same as hanging out with the kid down the street.

Many of them often come from single parent households unfortunately.

We’re going to see an interesting social shift happen within a century’s time, if we haven’t begun this cycle already. Western welfare systems have been in free fall as a result of the social changes that have already taken place post-1960, along with globalization and technological progress; enabling corporations to extract more productivity out of people than individuals can easily earn back; as well as the difficulty of capturing the excess of the highest earners of the tax base (or just a complete intellectual loss of understanding how fiscal spending works, which coincidenced with the shift from Keynesian administrations to Neoliberal ones in the postwar period).

The cracks in the system are there and the modern world has made it such that this paradigm can’t be easily reformed (if it can be reformed at all). Collapse in the TFR means shrinking productivity, technology means capital flight is a few click away during tax season and antagonistic social relations between the genders means good luck to social stability in the future. There’s either going to be a Great Reconciliation where people just step to the right, and reality has forced them to acknowledge the necessary sacrifices to make life livable in hard times, or there’s going to be a great deal of oppression coming.

I think part of the problem is that modern technology and lifestyles have sort of enabled this. When you have entire generations of people who have only minimal contact with reality, they Don’t really believe in the necessity of teaching kids to survive in the world. When the default is “if he fails then there are all of these systems that mean he will do okay.” That could just be the assumption of the time when mom and dad were in school and there were enough “good enough” jobs for college graduates that a kid who flounders for a couple of years will be okay, so there’s no urgency in making sure that your kid is employable and can present himself well. For the lower class it’s much the same. Kids don’t need to worry about learning in school and learning a trade or going to college because welfare will feed them. And without hard edges, without having to worry about whether the children are being raised into sensible adults, they tend to go with the idea of letting kids do whatever they want.

Oppression is coming, I think. Only question is how to best position myself and my family to minimize harm to ourselves. Probably best to delete social media profiles which can be used as evidence of any political leanings one way or another.

The oppression is already here. Men and women aren't allowed to agree on the rules of engagement, you aren't permitted a place to raise your kid without paying ruinous costs in rent because building is illegal, the list goes on.

Just because it doesn't on its face look like what Boomers (or prior generations) told you oppression would look like, and just because you can still technically bear it, doesn't mean it isn't oppression.

Could very well be. Roko’s Basilisk could still be in effect via social media.

Jerking off to softcore videos of photorealistic AI-gen women seems extremely lame to me, lamer than watching live-action porn featuring real women (which is already pretty lame). On the other hand, is watching photorealistic AI-gen porn lamer than watching hentai, animated furry porn, or similar?

There's precedent.

Gabe: Wait. What are you doing?
Tycho: Putting my Lancer up here, with Frostmourne. I assumed this was where we were putting our epic weapons.
Gabe: No, no, na-no no. This is where we put rad things. Not bullshit, like your pretend gun.
Tycho: Frostmourne is a pretend sword.
Gabe: No, it's a real sword, based on a pretend sword.
Gabe: That is a fake gun, based on a pretend gun. It's fake twice.
Tycho: You teach me so much, Gabriel. You teach us all.

whereas photorealistic AI-gen porn looks just like real life except with every conceivable imperfection mercilessly rooted out.

Honestly, this was already the case before AI-gen porn, for some categories of it. The high-end, "classy", "art" porn from central/eastern europe already has models-style girls with few imperfections to begin with, with top quality Hollywood level make up, flattering lighting, poses and angles and post-processing erasing whatever was there. So I think unrealistically perfect was already a thing before AI-gen.

Obviously consuming either kind of porn to excess will mess with your head. But which do you think is worse?

As a previously healthy consumer of porn (mostly reformed), sometimes you're in the mood for those perfectly shot videos, but also sometimes you're up for real amateur content, for fake amateur content, for 2000s early online productions, for 1990s italian hardcore flicks, for 70s classic films, for drawn content, for 3D CGI content, for softcore...

I think what is worse is being laser-focussed on a single thing and letting that shape your tastes. Checking many things out and being aroused by many of them is healthy.

Is watching cartoons lamer than watching kid movies?

Are you asking if it's lamer to watch cartoons or to watch live-action children's films?

Yes.

I guess it depends on the film.

That's my answer to your question about hentai vs porn.

So you think watching certain kinds of hentai is less lame than watching certain kinds of live-action porn?

Yeah?

Isn’t that a tautological truth given how awful most live-action porn is?

Is it?

More comments

I can't imagine many straight women have much interest in watching photorealistic AI-gen softcore porn of male characters.

Wait until they start integrating this into AI boyfriends, though.

What do you mean wait? Though given the unrealistic emotional standards such chatbots provide in "partners", I'm not sure it really makes much difference if there's an AI-generated image of "him" too.

Very interesting document from ICC (International Code Council): The EFSP (Essential Fire Safety Provisions)

Apparently, the goal is to provide an entry-level, stand-alone document that can be adopted in undeveloped countries without all the complexity of the full-fledged IBC (International Building Code) and IFC (International Fire Code). Editor's note:

During my career as a fire-safety consultant, I have had the opportunity to promote the adoption of modern fire codes outside the United States. On many occasions, when I engaged with authorities, I received comments indicating that these codes were too overwhelming. I remember a meeting with the mayor of the city of Asunción, in Paraguay, after a devastating fire in a supermarket in which 428 lost their lives. After I suggested to the mayor that his city should adopt NFPA 1 [an IFC competitor], he told me in no uncertain terms that, if he were to propose adopting such a voluminous code, his days as a democratically elected politician would be numbered.

Years later, I came to understand that the mayor was right, and I began exploring different approaches to making modern building codes more accessible in emerging nations with limited implementation capacity.

The EFSP appears to consist of abridged versions of the following items.

EFSPOriginal
Chapters 1–6IBC chapters 1–6
Chapters 7–10IBC/IFC chapters 7–10 (they are not identical, but do have a lot of overlap)
Appendix AIBC chapter 33
Appendices B–DIFC appendices B–D
Appendix EIFC chapter 32

In print, it amounts to 363 pages—a whopping 75-percent reduction from the combined 1444 pages of the IBC and the IFC. The price of a watermarked PDF is just 56 dollars, versus 322 dollars for IBC+IFC—an 86-percent reduction.

All three of these documents have official Spanish translations. ICC also has worked with governments that are neither Anglophone nor Hispanophone, such as Oman and Pakistan.

Fun fact: Incest between consenting adults is legal in New Jersey. In recent years, bills that would ban it have been submitted by politicians of both major parties (Democratic 2024–2027, Republican 2014–2021, Democratic 2014–2017), but have died in committee.

According to Wikipedia (1 2), incest between consenting adults is illegal in almost all the other states of the US, including Pennsylvania (example conviction) and New York (example conviction).

Interesting report from the United Nations Secretary-General on the UN's drive for multilingualism

Websites under the purview of the Department of Global Communications continued to demonstrate a high level of parity across official languages. As at 30 September 2025, 90 per cent of the 318 web properties on the un.org domain were available in the six official languages. User engagement data for 2024–2025 show that page views remained highest in English, followed by Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese and Arabic.

UN official languageProportion of page views on un.org (%)
English61.5
Spanish17.7
Russian7.6
French5.4
Chinese4.7
Arabic3.2

For several entities, multilingual web and social media activities were increasingly constrained by resource limitations. Funding cuts and staffing gaps led to the suspension or significant scaling-back of updates to non-English web pages, the accumulation of translation backlogs and greater reliance on prioritization of essential content. As a result, in those cases, if content was made available in more than one language, it was often the more stagnant content, and short-lived content was not being translated. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that the ad hoc and limited updating of its multilingual web content may have contributed to the decline recorded in readership and website traffic.

The 60 United Nations information centres played an instrumental role in conveying the Organization’s messages in multiple languages, including non-official languages to address the needs of local audiences. Information centres translated and disseminated over 4,500 informational materials in 45 languages, produced press releases and press statements in 27 languages, disseminated over 300 local op-eds in 15 languages and produced 150 podcasts in Arabic, English and Spanish. They also produced videos in 24 languages, which were widely shared on social media platforms, and organized 130 Model United Nations simulations in 17 languages, reaching approximately 40,000 students worldwide. Information centres maintained websites in 36 languages and social media accounts in 31 languages. [lengthy footnotes listing the languages omitted]

See also the Strategic Framework on Multilingualism.

Languages spoken confidentlyProportion of Secretariat staff (%)
19
239
3 or more52

The languages thing makes a lot of sense as most people if they have more than one language usually have at least one of them as English. Thus if there’s no official translation of UN content in your language, you’d default to English as the language of choice. Arabic and Chinese really don’t spread beyond their initial cultures and Spanish is largely confined to Spain and Latin America. Russian used to be bigger in Eastern Europe, but I don’t think it’s as popular there now.

According to Wikipedia (1 2), incest between consenting adults is illegal in almost all the other states of the US

Cersei and Jaime fans in shreds!

Is this the reason why incest is a no-no for Patreon and apparently many eroge-game hosting sites? Or so people on the internet tell me (people on the internet - clearly a bunch of pervs, all of them!).

As I understand it, there is nothing illegal in the US about depictions of illegal incest, and the payment-processing companies are just puritanical for complicated reasons. (The same apparently is not true in the UKGBNI.)

Seems like a very positive move to separate the “job creation” component of a lot of this regulation from the actually necessary part. Maybe eventually this will make its way back to us.

Not really. Most of what was eliminated has less to do with "job creation" and more to do with specific circumstances that only apply to certain industrial processes. For a made-up example, suppose lithium ion battery manufacturing has special considerations that mean that certain equipment needs an independent fire suppression system, some processes must be separated from others, and some materials need to be stored in special areas. Since most developing nations aren't going to have these kinds of facilities, there's no need to put them in a condensed version. But if you're going to have a comprehensive reference volume for municipalities with varying needs, then it makes sense to include these standards.

Most of what was eliminated has less to do with "job creation" and more to do with specific circumstances that only apply to certain industrial processes.

I think this applies to the deleted portions of the IFC (composed mostly of parts 4 (Special Occupancies and Occupations) and 5 (Hazardous Materials)), but not to the deleted portions of the IBC (generally applicable provisions).

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