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@sonyasupposedly "The unwavering blade cares not whom it serves nor who it cuts."
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gattsuru
15.7K posts
@MorosKostas And there are federal felonies, and the possibility of out-of-state felonies. There’s no way they’d accept it but as fed system + state system, and there’s no buy into that without a serious rework of the many abuses of the fed system already present.
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The proposal seems critical of NICS, saying states are better at this as they more directly have the relevant records.
But states can also abuse background checks. Anytime you buy a gun in California, you pay around $37 for the state's background check. And $5 a pop when you buy ammo (or $19, if you have moved from wherever your last gun was registered).
States should be mandated to have free background checks, or at least extremely cheap ones. And no ammo background checks at all.
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Alright, let's take a look at these proposals. A couple people I respect contributed to this, so I'll take it seriously.
It probably won't be going anywhere now, because whatever small hopes it may have had likely died when Virginia Dems pushed their AWB and other punitive bills. And I note that no one on the gun control side of "Bridging the Divide" spoke out against what Virginia is doing. So it seems that for the gun control participants of the group, this project is just about getting red states to adopt some gun control, while not trying to slow down or stop far more draconian laws in blue states.
In short, the pro-2A side has no reason to believe the gun control side will ever operate in good faith, especially after this latest affront in Virginia.
But I'll still judge the proposed ideas and deals on their own merit.
Anything I say on my personal twitter is only my opinion, not necessarily SAF's. (That's always the case, but it's worth repeating when I'm about to talk policy proposals)
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@MorosKostas I’ll make the dumb counter argument: I’d rather someone with a 100% chance of using his (or her) gun violently, if that violence is self-defense.
If this outreach can’t recognize that principle, missing tha forest and the trees.
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Hard to disagree with that principle.
The problem, of course, is that antigunners tend to have a VERY different opinion on what "interfering minimally" means.
California argues, for example, that an ammunition background check that costs $5 each time you buy ammo, and erroneously denies 10% of people who use it, is a minimal burden.
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@AviWoolf There’s been a change in both prevalence and prominence: that’s clear everywhere from polls on LGBT id to Ren Faire ticket sales for the former, and seeing norms about hiring in the latter.
But the combo is as much changing what you see, as much as makeup of it
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@AviWoolf The conflation of signifiers and signified makes it a messy analysis. You could run into out and obvious gay guys working greasy spoon diners in Red State Midwest in 2003; the furry fandom’s been a mix of service sector and tech white collar since the 90s, if not longer.
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Cf. The sexual revolution as a whole.
Wokal Distance@wokal_distance
Every trend starts among high status elites, and flows down the status hierarchy until it ends up in walmart bargain bins. Which means "Queer" is about to run through middle America the way Crack cocaine ran through Black neighborhoods in the 1970's.
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@Jonathan_Blow @gak_pdx @slatestarcodex Huh. I'll be the dumbass that says thanks for pointing that out. I'd tried to read into it and completely missed that side of things.
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For the 0.0000 people who actually care, here's the relatively recent book (published 2012) where Baumol lays this out.
amazon.com/dp/B009B5STCG
It is kind of a shitty book, as the first couple chapters are the real content, then it's bulked out with badly-edited reprints of papers, but, the first couple chapters are all you need.
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One of my favorite things on the internet was @slatestarcodex writing about Cost Disease; basically, how the costs to do anything have basically tripled, completely disconnected from labor costs, material inputs, or inflation. No economists have an explanation for why costs have gone up so much, it seems like some dark force is acting on the US economy so that - while the Europeans can build lavish infrastructure, the US is stuck at 5-6x costs to build literally everything... and this underpins our fundamental debates about everything.
The Interstate Bridge is an excellent example. Back when this was killed the 2nd or 3rd time (I forgot which), the *studies* performed to explore the new bridge cost ~$200 Million. I did the back of the napkin math and those studies cost 3x, inflation adjusted, what the original entire bridge cost to build.
I think the dark force economists cannot detect is a combination of things, primarily though? Grift. You need to pay off the environmentalists, you need to pay off the labor unions, you need to pay off local interest groups. Those are the grifts that use social concerns as a cover...
But the real grift is the Professional Managerial Class. All the various technical entities involved in the production of anything are 3 people who know anything about the subject encased in small to large organizations where 80% of the headcount has nothing to do with the task at hand. It is a baked-in, structural grift that underpins almost the entirety of the American economy. Vast swaths of the white collar economy are basically riding the coattails of a small - eroding - segment of SMEs who do actual work.
Tren Griffin@trengriffin
The cost to replace the Interstate Bridge between Washington and Oregon increased ~ 140% from a 2022 estimate of $6 billion to a new "target" of $14.4 billion. How much of this cost is not related to actual construction and is instead fees of consultants and lawyers?
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@BlakeDemarest12 @redtachyon It's kinda counterproductive when they've chosen languages that solely revolve around things that break underlying components of the LLM. There's nontrivial amounts of Brainfuck code, compared to some esolangs I've gotten LLMs to write; it's just unparsable by common tokenizers.
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@redtachyon I don’t think the benchmark is trying to discredit their capabilities, it’s trying to show that LLMs cannot transfer what they know across different mediums if there’s no training data, even with multi shot passes and humans in the loop
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Ok so let me get this straight.
SHOCKING: frontier LLMs suck at writing in esoteric languages. Things like... brainfuck and whitespace?
STOP THE PRESSES, STOP THE VCS, IT'S A BUBBLE
Brainfuckbench is cute, but this is hardly an indictment of the frontier models' capabilities.
Lossfunk@lossfunk
🚨 Shocking: Frontier LLMs score 85-95% on standard coding benchmarks. We gave them equivalent problems in languages they couldn't have memorized. They collapsed to 0-11%. Presenting EsoLang-Bench. Accepted to the Logical Reasoning and ICBINB workshops at ICLR 2026 🧵
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@redtachyon There's some utility in testing how well an LLM can integrate outside of its training data. HexCasting is a _weird_ language, and the extent (some) models can handle it says something against the broader form of the parrot complaint.
But HexCasting isn't actively hostile.
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Rand Paul presiding over Markwayne Mullin’s hearing like
GIF
Igor Bobic@igorbobic
!!! Rand Paul now rolling the tape of Mullin challenging a witness to a fight in the middle of a hearing
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@Elumin_8 @Heminator It kinda isn't, though.
There's no mention of BDSM or exhibitionism, which (tho still age-inappropriate!) are _way_ more common kinks. There's a big spiel about laws, but it spends a lot of ink dividing Ghana from Kenya and then just lumps 'some US states' in piles.
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@Heminator It also explains about erotically eating poo. So, its pretty comprehensive, I guess.
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“This Book is Gay” has a section telling kids how Grindr works. It’s literally dangerous to send kids to hook-up apps where they’re sure to be abused.
Libs of TikTok@libsoftiktok
BREAKING: Bondurant Community Library in Iowa CANCELS groomer event to give kids p**n books after MASSIVE backlash. This pastor put it perfectly: "It infuriates me, honestly, that a public institution funded by our taxes, pushing an agenda that mocks biblical truth, undermines parental authority, and is targeting CHILDREN."
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@AlexanderPayton The trouble's that this /definitely/ isn't that book, and it's even more definitely not appropriate for that age range.
In its defense, doesn't actually say how to download. But the fig leaf of 'this app is for 18+' is extremely thin.
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@AlexanderPayton Not a parent, but to steelman, the rise of catfishing and sextortion as an attack vector means parents of straight kids probably need to sit down and have a /really/ uncomfortable talk that's going into more detail than just 'don't do this thing or your life will be over', too.
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Please examine this issue objectively. Would anyone support telling kids how to download Tinder or straight hookup apps? Why then is it so “necessary” for left wing activists to have minors download Grindr? This is evil and it should be rejected across the board.
Mark Hemingway@Heminator
“This Book is Gay” has a section telling kids how Grindr works. It’s literally dangerous to send kids to hook-up apps where they’re sure to be abused.
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@Heminator To be fair, it does preface with a 'this thing is only for 18+'.
But Jesus Christ that is a fig leaf of a disclaimer. And hard to find a part of the book that isn't absolutely inappropriate for <14 year-olds, only parts that are less ridiculous.
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@rrbrussell @GaperClam @realAAAbbott @Empty_America Yeah, gruesome as that last bit can get.
But you need to know what you need to educate on, there's fifty other tools with similar (or worse! table saws!) problems, and while you're teaching /this/, the kids who are going to be useful get bored out of their gourd.
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@gattsuru @GaperClam @realAAAbbott @Empty_America Most of that is explaining the problem and maybe a fails video of the aftermath of doing it wrong.
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First thing we skills test for is "can you run a cordless drill".
98% of guys under 35 in fact cannot. They can't run a cordless drill properly, safely.
You aren't going to learn to be a plumber or electrician in 2 years because you don't even know enough to change a tire.
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@GaperClam @realAAAbbott @Empty_America - Drill escapes.
- No backstop, inadequate backstop, or a backstop of their own leg.
- Loose, large, and sharp workpieces without a vice, so any kick disembowels you.
- Trying to drill into steel without using a vice (did this one myself!)
- Running the drill in 'reverse' mode.
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@realAAAbbott @Empty_America I can understand them stripping screws, dropping the self tappers, putting holes in the wrong place, etc. But I can't imagine how anyone can unintentionally injure themself with a cordless drill.
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@simonsarris Kids of divorce have the obvious explanation, since parents aren't going to want to spend valuable time assembling furniture or doing car maintenance. But a lot of whole families just don't do those things, either, or don't do them in front of or with their kids.
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@simonsarris You see it surprisingly often in FIRST, especially when kids enter the program in FTC or FRC. Some amount of it seems a lack of interest - there's a bad tendency to divide software interests and hardware - but more just never had a relevant situation come up.
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This just sounds so impossible but I've heard 2 anecdotes from teachers that suggest the same thing. Kids who never ever picked up a drill or a screwdriver before graduating high school.
Andrew A.Abbott@realAAAbbott
First thing we skills test for is "can you run a cordless drill". 98% of guys under 35 in fact cannot. They can't run a cordless drill properly, safely. You aren't going to learn to be a plumber or electrician in 2 years because you don't even know enough to change a tire.
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@pegobry_en I'll make the pragmatic argument: speaking ill of the dead here just distracts from the problem that still matters, and that's the specific and wrong factual claims he championed.
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I know I said people shouldn’t do this, but in his case I’ll make an exception.
Rest in piss
Hunter📈🌈📊@StatisticUrban
His predictions weren't "premature." They were just wrong. They didn't happen, and they never will.
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@ElCid58617711 @MorosKostas Super en banc is theoretically possible, but it's never been done before. Doesn't prevent it from happening, though.
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@MorosKostas In the 9th circuit they can actually appeal to the entire panel right? Or would this be it?
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Just did my Rhode judge analysis post, so may as well do Yukutake too. I think this one is a total tossup. You could make the argument that this panel is better than Rhode's, actually. All comes down to where the two swing votes in Rhode are.
Owens I think is very gettable in this one. If so, then this is indeed the better panel than the Rhode one.
Likely or probably against us:
Murguia
Wardlaw
Nugyen
H.A. Thomas
Sanchez
Likely or probably for us:
R. Nelson
Bade
VanDyke
Bress
Forrest
Swing vote:
Owens
Rob Romano@2Aupdates
Yukutake v. Lopez (9th Circuit): The panel is Murguia, Wardlaw, Nguyen, Owens, R. Nelson, Bade, Bress, Forrest, VanDyke, Sanchez, H.A. Thomas ca9.uscourts.gov/calendar/month…
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@BrandonWarmke Hell, they could make an honest and serious defense of immigration! It might not be hugely persuasive, but it’s not /hard/.
Instead, you’d think the man would melt rather than admit his policies have costs
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A nice example of the CATO crowd being in way over their heads yet not having the slightest clue.
The Alex Nowrasteh@AlexNowrasteh
Joshi's work on the philosophy of immigration control boils down to this: "Immigration restrictions are great if all the facts were different. I also haven't read anything about this topic."
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We need to bring in tens of millions of real global theocrats to balance out the fake domestic theocrats is the sort of thing libertarians have to say when open borders itself becomes your religious dogma.
The Alex Nowrasteh@AlexNowrasteh
@BrandonWarmke I’m defending these guys. I want them to be able to say this stuff and freely believe it, which requires them not achieving power. Having foreigners balance them out domestically is a good strategy that has promoted good policy long term.
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@MorosKostas @Freakoutery It’s mostly the politics that get messy. Gun control advocates aren’t going to see it as a useful compromise, and gunnies know exactly how long statutory limits on fed data use last, given extant dealer records abuses and the use of NICS for ammo/antique guns.
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@MorosKostas @Freakoutery Pagunblog had a good post on the technical considerations at : pagunblog.com/2014/12/10/alt… . Though there’s been a lot of advances in zero knowledge proofs since then, it’s largely a solved technical problem.
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One thing I'd love to see happen, perhaps as a potential trade for carry reciprocity legislation, is my long-running idea of opening up NICS to private party use. Make it a phone app, and you provide a gun seller your unique code, which they enter into their phone and it tells them if you are clear or not. The actual gun(s) transferred are not recorded. Hell, whether or not *any* transfer even happened is not recorded.
I think this enables creative ideas too. Imagine an event for first-time shooters where they could try out firearms for the first time, with safety officers there to guide them through how to do so responsibly. It could be free of charge and help potential gun buyers finally get the confidence they need to take the plunge and join in exercising their Second Amendment rights.
A NICS app would be awesome for this, because it's a way to clear participants ahead of time to make sure everyone attending isn't some dangerous criminal.
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