papasquat's recent activity
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Comment on Magical stones from the mall! in ~talk
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Comment on California’s new bill requires Department of Justice-approved 3D printers that report on themselves in ~hobbies
papasquat Link ParentYou can make reliable guns with 3d printed parts, but you can't print an entire gun that lasts more than a few rounds with a 3d printer yet. At least not without some extremely expensive, advanced...You can make reliable guns with 3d printed parts, but you can't print an entire gun that lasts more than a few rounds with a 3d printer yet. At least not without some extremely expensive, advanced metal sintering printers that are way outside the range of non professionals.
Building a decent gun out of mostly 3d printed parts is still way harder and more expensive than just buying an 80% lower kit as well.
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Comment on California’s new bill requires Department of Justice-approved 3D printers that report on themselves in ~hobbies
papasquat Link ParentThis kind of reminds me of something that went on a few years with my hobby, FPV Drones. A few years ago, the FAA passed a regulation where drones above a certain size (250g, extremely light; most...This kind of reminds me of something that went on a few years with my hobby, FPV Drones. A few years ago, the FAA passed a regulation where drones above a certain size (250g, extremely light; most FPV freestyle drones are around 700g) needed to have a remote ID module. This module hooks into your flight controller's telemetry and constantly announces the drone's position, altitude, speed, the position of the operator, and an ID number that could be read to find who the operator is. These things are broadcast cleartext and can be picked up by phones over wifi.
There's a big fine if you don't fly with the module, but the module adds weight, is expensive, and most crucially, announces your presence to people who have no idea about UAV laws, safety, and what you are and are not allowed to do with a drone, but they just don't like the idea of drones so that information gets used to harass you.
Predictably, virtually no one in the hobby uses them. The FAA is spread far too thin to enforce this regulation on hundreds of thousands of people that mostly aren't causing any problems. Local police don't even know about that regulation, and regulating airspace is out of their jurisdiction anyway. If you buy a prebuilt drone from a big company like DJI, they have them built in, but a lot of the hobby is building your own drones, and no one ever includes a remoteID module in their parts list.
I doubt this will ever change, unless something dramatic like terrorist attacks with FPV drones ever become common.
I see this proposed legislation being the exact same thing if it passes. If I buy a Bambu printer and then jailbreak its nanny gun reporting software, who is going to know that? If I build a printer and don't include the gun reporting module, how would anyone know? Are the police going to go door-to-door searching for illegal 3d printers? Probably not. This is just another law without even an inkling of a realistic enforcement mechanism that gets passed so that a legislator can pat himself on the back. It goes into the endless corpus of state law that no one pays attention to or cares about until it gets used to make some political point one day, but realistically it's just a waste of everyone's time.
I personally think there should be a bar that needs to be passed for legislation; if it's not realistically enforceable, it shouldn't be constitutional. Otherwise it just gets used to selectively persecute people you don't like.
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Comment on California’s new bill requires Department of Justice-approved 3D printers that report on themselves in ~hobbies
papasquat Link ParentI mean... it depends on the barrel. In their most basic form, they really are just a tube with a hole through a middle. You can happily fire shotgun shells out of most 3/4" ID metal pipe, and a...I mean... it depends on the barrel. In their most basic form, they really are just a tube with a hole through a middle. You can happily fire shotgun shells out of most 3/4" ID metal pipe, and a lot of them won't even explode, and it will definitely kill someone looking through the other end. Firearms aren't fundamentally that complicated.
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Comment on California’s new bill requires Department of Justice-approved 3D printers that report on themselves in ~hobbies
papasquat Link ParentThe thing is, this does absolutely nothing to stop ghost guns. 3d printed guns are still wildly impractical. They're weak, they're unreliable, and they break after a few shots. The most practical...The thing is, this does absolutely nothing to stop ghost guns. 3d printed guns are still wildly impractical. They're weak, they're unreliable, and they break after a few shots. The most practical and reliable ghost guns are those produced from 80% lowers. They require extremely minimal tools and skill to assemble, and there are some states that regulate them, but lots of states where they don't, and they're extremely easy to get on the internet.
The fundamental problem is that guns really are not very complex. They're tubes that have a mechanism to hold a round in place while the primer is struck. You can build one out of a pipe, an end cap, a rubber band, and a nail. We're not talking about regulating nuclear weapons here.
There's literally nothing the government can do that can effectively stop sufficiently motivated people from building unregistered firearms in their garages. Screwing over everyone else who has no interest in doing that sort of thing makes absolutely no sense, and until there's widespread violence as the result of 3d printers, which we haven't even seen a shred of, the whole thing is a pointless, silly idea.
Especially when you consider that this is the fucking united states we're talking about. Virtually any adult in the country can drive 10 minutes to their nearest Walmart, and walk out 10 minutes later with their choice of firearm and ammunition for a hell of a lot cheaper and with way less effort than all but the most barebones 3d printers. Why are we worried about 3d printing?
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Comment on I built a space simulation that runs in the browser and it feels good enough to share it now in ~space
papasquat LinkSweet! I don't know a ton about astronomy, but the one issue I noticed is that the moon doesn't appear to be tidally locked to Earth. Maybe it's rotating in the wrong direction?Sweet! I don't know a ton about astronomy, but the one issue I noticed is that the moon doesn't appear to be tidally locked to Earth. Maybe it's rotating in the wrong direction?
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Comment on Swedish heavy metal band Avatar cancel London concert mid-performance after the stage at Exhibition White City became electrified, shocking two crew members in ~music
papasquat Link ParentBizarre! Aren't guitar strings electrically isolated from the actual electrical components in the guitar?The guitarist could feel something through the strings too
Bizarre! Aren't guitar strings electrically isolated from the actual electrical components in the guitar?
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Comment on Fix your hearts or die: The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism in ~life
papasquat Link ParentI think a lot of people in this thread are zeroing in on your usage of that statistic and painting you with a slightly unfair brush because of it. Its an extremely commonly used white supremacist...why is it that so many people are willing to accept the exact same kind of distortion when the narrative blames men instead of black people?
I think a lot of people in this thread are zeroing in on your usage of that statistic and painting you with a slightly unfair brush because of it. Its an extremely commonly used white supremacist talking point, to the extent that citing it virtually always paints someone as a white supremacist, but I understand the point you were trying to make, so I'll take a stab at explaining the difference in how those two statistics are taken. I won't comment on whether either is true or not, so for the sake of argument I'll pretend they both are.
First, black people in the US, as a whole, on average, are disadvantaged to this day. They have lower overall wages, higher rates of poverty, higher obesity rates, shorter lifespans, lower rates of literacy and so on than the general population. This stems from either modern racism, or the echos of historical racism that propogated until the modern day. You can't divorce crime statistics from those facts.
Men are not disadvantaged all in all. There is no pervasive discrimination against men in modern society.
Two, historically, black people were imported to and enslaved in the US. That one fact influenced everything about US race relations. It influence black culture, it influences white culture, it has far reaching implications 200 years later in incomes, development patterns, living situations, and crime.
Men have never experienced shared trauma like that that would explain negative outcomes today.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, black people are white people are almost identical, biologically. Overall, similar brain sizes, body sizes and configuration, hormone levels, and so on. The only real differences are superficial.
Men and women are not biologically identical. Their bodies are quite different. Their brains are different. One isn't better than the other, but the idea that men are more inherently prone to violence is wayyyyyyyy better supported in science than the idea that black people are.
You can't really compare the two statistics then and call someone a hypocrite because they think one is racist but the other one isn't sexist. They're completely different axes of comparison, so one is more problematic than the other.
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Comment on Opinion piece: I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day. in ~life.women
papasquat Link ParentI'm sure it was a topic of conversation, but it just didn't come up that much. Like, I've never really thought to ask anyone I was with, and I've never been asked by men or women. If I found out...I'm sure it was a topic of conversation, but it just didn't come up that much. Like, I've never really thought to ask anyone I was with, and I've never been asked by men or women.
If I found out that some girl I was interested in slept with 200 guys or something ridiculous in highschool, I'd have concerns and so would most people, but it's just not something that really came up that much. It seems like the main thing that young people talk about now though.
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Comment on Opinion piece: I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day. in ~life.women
papasquat Link ParentI'll add that misogyny and sexism doesn't even just affect women. The prescriptivist idea that gender x is like this and gender y is like this negatively affects both men and women, and is...I'll add that misogyny and sexism doesn't even just affect women. The prescriptivist idea that gender x is like this and gender y is like this negatively affects both men and women, and is propogated by both men and woman as well.
When a boy wants to act in a play but doesn't because "that's gay", it's a big tragedy, just like when a girl doesn't pursue engineering because it's "for men".
Showing men good examples of men who are secure with themselves and can do the things they want to do regardless of prescribed gender norms can go a long way.
At the end of the day the thing that's missing is empathy. Boys aren't thinking about what it's like to be a girl and have your every move judged through a lens of "slut" versus "virgin".
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Comment on Opinion piece: I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day. in ~life.women
papasquat LinkI have a lot of disorganized thoughts about this, but it kind of touches on something that's I've noticed about the modern internet that's really disturbed me. When I was growing up in the late...I have a lot of disorganized thoughts about this, but it kind of touches on something that's I've noticed about the modern internet that's really disturbed me.
When I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was obviously some of this, but things felt a lot more progressive to me back then.
My friends and I were aware of some girls being labeled as sluts or whatever, but none of us cared at all about "body counts". That wasn't even a term. I never even thought to ask any girl how many guys she slept with.
Our moms were mostly feminists, and it was just taken as an assumption that women liked sex just like guys did, and judging them for it made no sense. It wasn't perfect, and there were still obviously guys that cared about that stuff, but to me it felt like sort of a fringe, backwards opinion.
Similarly, online, most people seemed to mostly be on the same page. There were places back then filled with violent misogyny like 4chan, and on games, people would be sexist or racist, but it feels different now.
The internet after smart phones became proliferated seemed to just get way more conservative. It was shocking to me the first time I heard the opinion that ideally, women should stay home and not get jobs being parroted by men and women alike. It made no sense to me, why would a man want a woman that he has to fully support financially?
Over time, this just became the prevailing background opinion of the internet, which was just total whiplash for me, growing up in a pretty conservative place and always thinking of the internet as fairly progressive.
It's not just online now though. On reality TV shows, on dating shows, in movies, everything just seems... conservative. Women brag about having rich boyfriends and not working. Men talk about how pure and innocent women are.
It feels like over the course of 20 years, we've socially regressed 30.
It's overall just really tanked my opinion of western "culture". Being able to shout at the void and have an algorithm figure out the most engaging shouts have distilled online content into something that's simultaneously oversexualized but also over judgemental. It's like the absolute worst aspects of the human psyche are put on display for the world to see online and rewarded.
I don't even know how you fix it. It feels way too fundemental for the normal incentive tweaking via regulation or public awareness to resolve.
Like, how do you encourage people who are being complete assholes with no empathy or drive beside their base instincts to behave?
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Comment on The AI disruption has arrived, and it sure is fun (gifted link) in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentThe prospect of essentially becoming a mindless automation at work all day following the orders of an unthinking unfeeling AI boss is even more depressing than just being exterminated by the...The prospect of essentially becoming a mindless automation at work all day following the orders of an unthinking unfeeling AI boss is even more depressing than just being exterminated by the machine uprising, and infinitely more ironic.
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Comment on The AI disruption has arrived, and it sure is fun (gifted link) in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentI'll also add, even though most people don't care about these particular things, they care about the consequences. They just don't have the expertise and interest to connect the two. Like most...I'll also add, even though most people don't care about these particular things, they care about the consequences. They just don't have the expertise and interest to connect the two.
Like most people don't care about 2FA, but they do care about their bank account being hacked and losing their balance. Most people don't care about public transit and bike lanes and walkability, but they don't like sitting in traffic, having lung diseases, getting hit by cars.
All of those things are things that affect almost everyone, they just don't care about the root causes of them.
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Comment on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested and in custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office in UK in ~news
papasquat Link ParentPeople are very good at rationalizing the horrible things they do. No one sees themselves as the villain of their story, so they tell themselves stories to make themselves the good guy. In the...People are very good at rationalizing the horrible things they do. No one sees themselves as the villain of their story, so they tell themselves stories to make themselves the good guy.
In the case of these pieces of shit, it's usually something like "she's so into me" or "I'm giving her financial opportunities beyond her wildest dreams" or "this is way better than the alternative she'd face in <developing country I lured her from>" it doesn't matter that they're all obvious nonsense. They don't have to be convincing, they just have to be repeated to oneself over and over to soothe the psyche.
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Comment on I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took twenty minutes in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentIt gets ignored regularly every day. Every god damned day I have to spend time researching and refuting AI slop from people I work with. It's a never ending battle, because it's a lot quicker to...It gets ignored regularly every day. Every god damned day I have to spend time researching and refuting AI slop from people I work with.
It's a never ending battle, because it's a lot quicker to generate slop than it is to validate it, so if the trend continues, it will eventually be what I spend all of my time doing.
Somehow, people have internalized an idea that because it's a computer, it's never wrong. Like they have access to a crystal ball that knows everything, but no one else has figured out that it exists yet. It's become a little insulting, because the subtext is that I somehow haven't thought about using AI to answer this question we have. I've thought of it, obviously, and don't use it because it's mostly bad at answering complex questions accurately.
I don't need it for simple questions either, because I already know the answers to those.
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Comment on I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took twenty minutes in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentEvery site on the internet is cached by so many different services in so many places that an LLM scraping a site may not result in a 1:1 web request. In the case of Gemini, they already run a...Every site on the internet is cached by so many different services in so many places that an LLM scraping a site may not result in a 1:1 web request. In the case of Gemini, they already run a massive web crawler, so it would make sense to not make an additional web request each time AI prompted for it.
Aside from them I'd imagine all of the large AI companies run their own caching services for that purpose. At a certain scale it becomes more cost effective to cache the whole internet every day rather than paying for the extra bandwidth and other considerations that come from trillions of web requests per hour.
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Comment on I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took twenty minutes in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentThat probably has more to do with search engine crawling than the AI model. After all, the model is executing a web search exactly in the same way that a user would. So if you write an article and...That probably has more to do with search engine crawling than the AI model. After all, the model is executing a web search exactly in the same way that a user would. So if you write an article and you can't find that article with a very specific web search in the first few results, neither will an LLM. If you are able to find it in the first few results, so will an LLM.
The success of the attack depends on the success of traditional SEO techniques.
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Comment on Some of my family members aren't convinced that ICE isn't overstepping and that they are just deporting people that broke the law, can you help me share unbiased links that proves they are? in ~society
papasquat Link ParentYou will need to figure it out at some point soon though. It's kind of like if someone were to ask me why I don't start remodeling my house. Like I know that picking out the plans and starting the...You will need to figure it out at some point soon though. It's kind of like if someone were to ask me why I don't start remodeling my house.
Like I know that picking out the plans and starting the demo isn't hard, but it implies things that are hard later. Theres a lot of labor involved, which is why I don't do it.
Same goes for people's beliefs. They may not have to take on the mental load now, but they will have to take it on.
In your example, if you were convinced that there was extraterrestrial life on earth, you'd have to reevaluate most major events and think "wait... did the aliens have a hand in this?". Your whole understanding of the world would change and have to be rebuilt based on this new belief. If you didn't have rock solid evidence of it staring you in the face, this might cause you to subconsciously reject that belief just in the face of that sheer effort.
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Comment on Against the state – a primer on terrorism, insurgency and protest in ~humanities.history
papasquat LinkAwesome article. I was in the military for virtually the entire time of OIF and OEF, and something that's interesting is that the US Military is extremely aware of all of this. David Gallula's...Awesome article.
I was in the military for virtually the entire time of OIF and OEF, and something that's interesting is that the US Military is extremely aware of all of this. David Gallula's book, Counter Insurgency: Warfare and Practice was required reading for officers, and is sort of the Bible when it comes to the inner mechanisms of how insurgencies function. COIN operations were studied in excruciating detail and very smart people spent a lot of time breaking down the strength and weaknesses of insurgency, and the Taliban and Al-Quaida in particular. It's extremely interesting stuff.
It turns out that knowing how they function doesn't actually mean you'll win though. It was a very frustrating time for the military because they knew very well that this was not a conventional war where you can just prepare the battlefield with artillery and ground attack air power, then advance your way to victory.
They knew that political will was the only true currency when it came to who won in Afghanistan in particular. It didn't help actually win though. The US has trillions upon trillions of military hardware and highly trained forces, and they could apply almost none of it.
The Taliban were simply too good at controlling the message, keeping the locals under their thumb, and spreading the idea that one day, sooner or later, they would win, and you'd have to answer to them.
So none of this is new. The US government has known all of these lessons for decades. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll be victorious though.
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Comment on Some of my family members aren't convinced that ICE isn't overstepping and that they are just deporting people that broke the law, can you help me share unbiased links that proves they are? in ~society
papasquat (edited )Link ParentMaybe it's fear, but honestly I think it boils down to the fact that changing your mind is a lot of work. We intuitively try to be consistent in an attempt to combat cognitive dissonance, which is...Maybe it's fear, but honestly I think it boils down to the fact that changing your mind is a lot of work.
We intuitively try to be consistent in an attempt to combat cognitive dissonance, which is a deeply uncomfortable place to be in.
Changing someone's mind about something fundemental then requires re-thinjing about a lot of things that that person has already settled on. That takes effort. It's easy for me to say that abortion is morally ok, but that's because I've thought about it for a long time and came up with the reasons why I think it's ok. If I were to be convicted of some fundemental fact contrary to what I already believe that would challenge that position, it would mean doing intellectual labor to reconcile that new belief. Most people just aren't interested in doing that sort of labor.
It's easier to just continue believing what you believe and dismiss any challenge to those beliefs as wrong than it is to individually evaluate them each and every time. This isn't a conservative thing. This is a human thing.
If someone came up to me and said "wow, actually the Nazis were the good guys". I would immediately just dismiss that idea. I'm not interested in hearing their arguments or engaging with the idea intellectually, even if they had fundemental arguments to back it up.
If I had unlimited time and energy, maybe I would, but I have other things to worry about, and I'm very confident in my belief that the Nazis were in fact bad.
We have these cognitive shortcuts we use so that we don't need to spend mental energy thinking about these things all the time. Changing those shortcuts is only possible if someone is willing to put in the labor to do so. Most adults aren't, and the longer you've lived, the more shortcuts you've made, so changing your mind requires a whole lot more effort.
It's also the reason why a lot of people believe what they believe because it's what they were taught as kids. Kids don't really need things to make much sense, because they don't have a lot of these shortcuts and preconceptions already built. Once it becomes a belief though and mental connections start being constructed and that belief gets internalized on a deep level. It becomes a lot of labor to change it.
Positive thinking works, sure, but that doesn't mean you need to go buy a rock to make your life more positive. If you like rocks, by all means, buy rocks, but the thing that's making you think more positively is your own thought patterns. You don't need rocks for that. If you truly feel like you need a totem or something, you could just go outside and pick up the first interesting looking thing you see.
I have very little patience for woo, not because it's offensive or dangerous in it of itself, but because it opens the door to all sorts of "vibe based" thinking. It's the sort of justifications that make people radically alter their diets due to chakras or not take medicine because it lowers their vibrational energy.
Skepticism and rationality is what brought us out of untold millennia of lynching people that acted differently from us because of demons and all sorts of other nonsense based on what feels right rather than what has been methodically proven right.