#shieldfoss

[jenlog]

your hat will soon be coming back into season

we're so back

[jenlog]

trick or treat :3

some normal money

[crustacean-on-main]

In principle I should make a proper long form post here but I have severe Fried Attention Span syndrome and nobody has been wrong on the internet, so:

1. In industrialized economies with low fertility rates class is already functionally hereditary. The reason for this is that there’s a lot of families that did well during the 30 odd years of breakneck economic expansion coinciding with the rise of China, and that that economic expansion has now stopped, so that material expectations of the current generation are anchored on parental wealth, both as a function of career paths and, like, material prerequisites for marriage. Kvetching about boomers makes the most sense if your own boomer parents failed to do anything with this opportunity and you have only yourself to rely on in a much more diminished set of circumstances.

2. The political superstructure for all this is really what you would expect: there are too many people in the power structure to form a truly isolated oligarchy, so the only scalable barrier to entry is education, and the only scalable loyalty enforcement mechanism is ideology.

3. There’s a type of Complaining About Women that is largely based on the triple insult to the (middle-class) male self-esteem that the resultant political economy can present: if you didn’t make it, then you were simultaneously rejected, economically outcompeted and ideologically censured by the women you think of as being in your class. In other words, really it’s frustration with the rigidity of the system mischanneled into sexism because from that perspective the sharp edges tend to look female.

4. The irony is that the resulting demands would be counter-productive for these guys if implemented. The enduring legacy of the ‘68 revolution is that there are plenty of women who are willing to shack up with a man who is objectively a questionable choice because of vibes and you’re out here demanding her dad have the power to subpoena your bank accounts before approving her marriage. Really?

5. “But I’m also ugly” “skill issue”

[mellowdarkness]

Who need they jobussy filled⁉️⁉️

[jeremys-blogs]

We're in the Mirror Universe now, friends 😅

[samueldays]

@shieldfoss OP has blocked me so I can't reblog directly, but I wanted to reply to your post:

I am currently in a land where the indigenous way of building is (checks notes) world class civil engineering. Or did Gordon mean non-White indigenous should have different ways of building than white indigenous people?

I don't know about Gordon specifically, but a lot of people of Gordon's general class have a particular definition where "indigenous people" means something like "ethnic underclass of native dependents who were conquered by and remain subjugated by some other people".

By this definition, you Danes are merely "native" or "autochthonous", but not "indigenous" because you are free and rule your own land, you have no indigenous way of building, and the only indigenous people in Europe are the Sami and/or the Basques.

I think this definition of "indigenous" is dumb, misleading, and borderline dishonest when not spelled out, but it's out there.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2025-05-05

Getting into the situation

Listening: Bandcamp Friday!

Perennial '65, I cannot thank @kelp-of-discontent for getting me into Perennial enough. I love big loud yelling lyrics and classic rock instruments.

Vestiges of Verumex Visidrome from Gnome, who I really hope I get to see sometime. Thudding, steady progressive rock. It just keeps going

Scatterling Empire from Acid Magus, a ZA band who put down heavy psychedelic metal. For the Lizzard Wizard lovers in your life.

Watching: Night of the Lepus at Bad Movie Night. It turns out that no matter how good you are at miniatures you cannot make rabbits look that scary.

Sinners, literally like an hour ago, with accompanying Q&A with a reviewer. It's great when a movie is two movies that's three movies. This is a story about power and eternity. This is a story about some pretty by the book vampires doing some very off-book things. This is a movie that werewolfbaited me goddammit am I the only one who thought Pearline was going to be a werewolf.

The Big Music Scene is obviously killer but I also adore the undercurrent of power that runs through any moment the vampires get involved in. Look at all this strength! It could be yours, if you just give up everything else..

Reading: Red Mars! Mostly reading this on lunch at work. I love stories about people in close quarters. Some of my most memorable teenage experiences are from Nerd Camp, a public/private pre-university skills development thing I landed up in that had you spending a couple weeks living and working with a hundred other students in your group and like a thousand across the entire program in a non-stop educational drill scenario and that combination of focus and forced familiarity is something I find really compelling.

Playing: Skin Deep, the new Blendo game. If you haven't played a Blendo game you won't know what it means for a game to be Extremely Blendo. There's a reliable but clunky UI, there's a richly decorated environment realized with like four megabytes of memory, there's cats.

The clunkiness of Blendo games is essential to their tactility. If you need to unjam a switch, you need the code for the jammer mounted on the wall. The code is a four-letter code, and you have to punch it in by keying it in on a T9 predictive style keypad with your crosshair and if you fuck it up it buzzes at you and alerts the pirates. If you pick up a gun the only way to know whether it's loaded or if there are bullets in the magazine is to hold it up and check it. When you are covered in trash from crawling through a trash chute you have to hurry around and find a sink to clean off.

Making: Microphone holder for my audio recorder, I was trying to take some field recordings and I wanted some solutions for hooking my mini cardioid onto my recorder. Still working on a good printed shock mount but I'm getting there I think.

A bunch of photography, went to one of the big graveyards. Still sorting through that, and also some of the stuff from the past few weeks. Put some new bugs up on inaturalist.

Tools and Equipment: Budget vibrating toothbrush, a thing I was sold on by @shieldfoss, I've seen these around. The cheap kind that take a AAA and have a conventional head. They're like $15 and I've seen them around but it really is a nice step up without the expense and bulk of the big electric toothbrushes. Gets your teeth squeaky clean and basically fits in a normal toothbrush holder.

[businesstiramisu]

@shieldfoss you have more patience than me

[barryogg]

@shieldfoss the joke is lack of the US-Mexican border, which I presume means annexation

[mitigatedchaos]

Have you heard about chaosprime?

I drafted a short post about the incident, since it's both relevant to the scene and provides information about how ethics in the scene are doing. However, I declined to post it, as the seriousness of the allegations was quite severe relative to my level of certainty about the allegations, and I didn't want to go digging to verify (especially as chaosprime has already deleted his Twitter account).

Twitter user chaosprime was associated with TPOT / the rationalist community on Twitter.

Apparently, there were allegations that he engaged in three instances of consensual at the time, but bad somehow, sex. (It was pretty vague.) Given members of the community's history with questionable accusations and norms of evidence from conflict with the feminist movement in the 2014 era, he could have weathered this.

However, during the arguments surrounding the accusations, some twitter users reportedly dug up his arrest and conviction history, showing that he was previously accused and convicted of sex crimes against multiple individuals, including a minor.

It appears that he agreed that he had been charged with all of those crimes, except for the specific dates.

Another user posted a screenshot of a tweet in which chaosprime apparently said that he 'didn't mean to brag,' but his sexual orientation was too taboo to discuss on Twitter.

At some point following this, he deleted his Twitter account.

TracingWoodgrains (tw: tracewoodgrains), probably better known from TheMotte, said,

I appreciate the thread and always appreciate pushes to humanize and show general compassion. I also think as a matter of policy someone who has a history of sex crimes should probably stay away from any sort of weird sex stuff from that point forward.

How do we assess whether someone has truly reformed, or whether they're the Type of Guy who still represents a risk? I think TracingWoodgrains' approach here is a good one.

(Chaosprime and I are of no relation. My Twitter account is q-----md------k, as shieldfoss can confirm.)

[regexkind]

i'm not shieldfoss. i'm someone who has mostly stopped using tumblr but still comes to check your blog. ready to guess again? <3

Oh! Hi Esther ❤️

[irradiate-space]

I read it in a screenshot thread on BlueSky

no i didnt get that from a video essay im a little more well read than that thanks. i got it from the abstract for a study i didnt read the rest of

[samueldays]

@shieldfoss and similar people, please help me spot perverse incentives and failure modes in something I'm thinking of as "post-conviction bail".

The basic idea: you (generic) can get any convict released from jail by putting up a sort of bail money in escrow, except it's a much larger sum than regular bail, because it has to be enough to compensate any future victims who are harmed by the released convict during what would otherwise have been jail time.

If the convict does not reoffend or only minorly reoffends during this time (compensation smaller than bail), you get the remaining money back afterwards. Possibly with interest+subsidy to encourage accurate identification of rehabilitation cases.

The intended incentive: figure out rehabilitation programs and reoffense rates. Put your money where your mouth is, identify the "he was about to turn his life around" cases that actually can be turned around at the cost of some escrow interest, while keeping Rashid Brimmage the Twenty-Time Convict in jail because if you release him then you lose your money when he inevitably commits his 21st assault. Make fanatic decarceration enthusiasts pay some of the cost they're inflicting on bystanders, while sensible rehabilitators get to show their work and good judgment.

Moral complication: the general impression of 'buying' criminals out of jail, ugh. If the damages and compensation are large enough this is moving punishment around and converting a lot of punishments to fines, so it's not quite unpunished, but still.

Practical complication: it is very hard to estimate the amount of bail beforehand, and hard for an individual to put up the necessary amount that can run into the millions of dollars in escrow for years. Would probably need an insurance industry + actuaries backing it to be doable, but such things are isomorphic to a solved problem.

Exploit complication: deals poorly with rare one-off crimes that have low reoffense rates and pattern-match to "rehabilitated" but are actually "only wanted to murder exactly one specific guy and is unrepentant about that".

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2024-03-25

Can't tell if this is allergies or if I'm sick because spring is in the air

Listening: I have been listening to The Layover podcast, the behind the scenes podcast for Jet Lag The Game. I only got into Jet Lag pretty recently because I had Nebula anyway and saw it come up. Great show, both because the premise is great (carefully designed games incorporating travel on the scale of countries) and because they can actually edit this incredibly difficult pile of footage into something readable.

The Behind The Scenes is an interesting mix of talk about the on-the-ground situation of playing the game and the filmmaking that goes on after the fact, there's some cool insight into how and why they edit the way they do and it shows why it works so well.

I think you have to have Nebula to listen to the podcast? It does just spit out an RSS feed if you ask nicely though. Thank you podcasts.

Watching: Actually watched The Gay And Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo, the video series that launched like two dozen reaction images.

It's funny, it's a well put together indie comedy series. You've probably seen most of the really standout bits already even if you don't know it already but it is worth watching as a time capsule of web comedy, it's less than two hours long all told.

Reading: Started Glory In The Thunder by 0xabad1dea. I don't know what her real name is. I've had GITT in my ebooks library forever, 0xabad1dea is the main reason I got on twitter back in like 2016 (her and a couple other software blogs) and is why my Fediverse feed is still like a quarter security researchers by weight. She's probably one of the most well known static analysis researchers in the world.

Anyway Glory In The Thunder is a gaslamp-ish fantasy, although leaning very fantasy on the gaslamps. Very teenage characters which is whiplash but only because it's been a moment. Lots of very loud characters who announce themselves and their intentions, some fun seven dimensional politics going on, and a lot of jumping back and forth in the histories of the various gods who are constantly hanging around in the plot.

I think @shieldfoss has bugged me to read this before so you'll be glad to know that I am now.

I like this, I'm about halfway through. It's easy to keep track of despite having enough fantasy names to choke a horse, although I should really stop worrying about that, I've read the Shadowdance series you really have to try to beat that one. It's also a free book, you can get it at @gloryinthethunder.

Playing: Got a VR headset. Fidgeting with said headset. Figured out how to do wireless linked VR from Linux and Windows which is good, I should have all the kinks worked out, I'll have to see how I square the onboard capabilities of the Quest 2 with having a PC and fast WiFi.

Making: Finally run through enough smaller prints on the new hotend to feel confident running off the final endcap, so that's done. The parts of the 3D printed NAS case are complete, and I have started my first pass sanding which is going to take a while because PETG is very slippery. Once that's sanded I'll take it in to the shared workshop and run through some primer layers and some paint.

Tools and Equipment: Flat network cable is a godsend if you're running it in open air in a house. Absolutely useless for pulling through walls or running in conduit, and completely bereft of shielding, but having a flat cord that can press up against frames and sideboards really does make it all neater. I ran flat cat6 for all of this.

[regexkind]

sepia, rose, lavender, sapphire, rainbow (bet you can't guess who this is)

[ask meme]

If I guess correctly what's my prize? If I guess wrong what's my penalty? :3

I'm guessing @shieldfoss on the basis of the activity in my notes and my timeline, but if I'm wrong I won't apologize

[barryogg]

@shieldfoss

To be clear, I don't know what a folder is and I grew up on DOS and use Linux as my daily driver both at work and back home But I'm open to the idea that "I don't know what a folder is" might mean something different when I say it and when [zoomers] say it.

I'd bet good money that it absolutely means something different. Like I couldn't describe you the structure of an inode or a block from the top of my head, and yet