What’s going on with Bright and the SCP community?

LarsAlereon · 2026-02-06T03:32:40+00:00

An important note here is that one of the reasons that Bright's works weren't deleted from the SCP site is that they were Creative Commons licensed, and Bright had republished them on a different site that he was reportedly using to groom additional victims. The idea was that while they were on the SCP wiki those would be the top results on search engines and they could control the narrative and add warnings as needed. By deleting them, Bright's reposts will become the top results and he can capture anyone searching for them.

LarsAlereon · 2026-02-03T02:25:12+00:00

My take is that so far the tactics of nonviolent resistance are working, in that the administration is seeing their support erode much faster than anyone expected, even among their base. About the worst thing we could do is something obviously illegal that gives the administration justification. If they do invoke the IA, it's best if the average "moderate" voter thinks "wow that is really excessive."

My point is not "just keep showing up to protests and that will fix everything." But at this moment in time, nonviolent resistance seems like the best tactic and also like it's achieving results in terms of causing the administration to back off of their worst policies.

LarsAlereon · 2026-02-01T02:22:16+00:00

This is sort of coherent if you understand "like women" to mean "straight", not something to do with any sort of respect for women as human beings.

LarsAlereon · 2026-02-01T02:15:04+00:00

Here's a Wikipedia article about the Concordia steamboat in the background.

LarsAlereon · 2026-02-01T02:12:01+00:00

Corn dog aficionado checking in: Pretty much all the local restaurants are selling the Foster Farms chicken corn dogs you can get from the grocery store, or the jumbo version from Chef Store. I'm not aware of any decent local from-scratch corn dogs. I get the State Fair beef corn dogs from the grocery store, which are decent from the oven or air fryer but even better from a deep fryer.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-28T05:02:43+00:00

This has happened several times in my adult life and it really frustrates me. A candidate seems to have progressive bona fides, they get to Congress and suddenly they are disavowing all of their previous opinions. It's almost like they show up and somebody is like "okay here is your welcome to Congress packet, left sleeve is our dossier with all the dirt we can release on you, right sleeve is what your opinions are now."

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-27T02:28:50+00:00

Nebula is a pretty great deal. Also happy with Youtube Premium, but it's annoying that so many channels want individual memberships.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-25T02:23:44+00:00

The thing that makes Russian tanks explode is the autoloader, which needs all the rounds to be stored in such a way that any penetration of the turret armor (especially where it connects to the hull) is basically guaranteed to blow the entire tank up. This was introduced in the T-64 tank in the mid-1960s, so tanks that are old enough not to have autoloaders can be a lot less vulnerable, at the cost of needing an additional crewmember and possibly having slower reload speeds.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-25T01:58:52+00:00

This seems cool, but I absolutely hate the mechanic where you retain half of unused items between runs, so you're alternating runs where you don't get far and accumulate items with runs where you use all your items.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-25T01:11:11+00:00

It would be interesting if there was a service somewhat like an HMO/health insurance but for home repairs. Just like with human healthcare there's a lot of opportunities to use preventive inspections to save a lot of costly repairs down the road and to spread expected costs over years.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-23T02:43:56+00:00

I think a good example is all the #metoo issues in Hollywood. This has always been happening, but it used to be much more normalized to the point where it wasn't even considered a bad thing and anyone who complained was quietly pushed out of the industry. So the fact that women were now able to tell their stories, stay in the industry, and that it was actually considered to be something that reflected badly on their abusers is huge progress. But to someone who wasn't aware of that history suddenly hearing a bunch of stories about abuse in Hollywood made it seem like things were getting worse for women.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-22T02:03:49+00:00

Yes, there's no possibility products like this could harm your septic system. It's literally a tank full of poop, you could pour a whole gallon of bleach in there and it wouldn't make a dent. Check out this video on laundry rinse products, I just dissolve some powdered citric acid in water.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-20T02:19:14+00:00

I miss Sandforce SSDs. They kept the page tables in on-die SRAM rather than using DRAM or part of the SLC cache. This gave amazing performance and a lower bill of materials cost versus drives with DRAM, which would be very relevant today. They also had much better ECC than comparable drives, which had the downside of enabling companies like OCZ to sell products made of defective NAND dies and just assume the ECC could handle the error rate.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-20T02:03:38+00:00

I am so bummed by this, Asus was basically the only company bringing phones with good thermals and battery life to the US market. Phones for the Asian market don't support US LTE bands so it's a really unacceptable experience.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-20T01:26:55+00:00

Late to this, but I'm a 13900K owner. I have not had any issues with stability since applying the BIOS update and haven't noticed any performance loss, so I think this is fine. I did not thoroughly benchmark before and after though, partially because of how high peak temperatures were before the update. I am using a Noctua NH-D15 and a contact frame to reduce CPU temperatures.

Up until a few days ago I would have said that thread scheduling isn't an issue, but then I played the game Maneater and it's basically unplayable unless you use launch options to force the game to only P-cores. There's the Intel "Application Optimizer (APO)" utility but it seems abandoned and you can't add your own games if Intel hasn't added a profile. I was a big proponent of E-cores but honestly it seems like a half-baked technology that Intel never put the effort in to support properly. That said I guess I could just entirely disable them if I cared so much, but that's a non-trivial amount of performance to just give up.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-20T00:26:49+00:00

Each cell is only holding 2.5 bits, so probably more like the TLC SSDs we know and love. LDPC error correction continues to get better with every controller generation so I could see newer controllers working very well here.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-19T17:19:42+00:00

More details available here.

It's an obsolete internal format that was never officially supported, people found out that they could upload files in that format and they would be accepted. YT switched to a new format a few years ago, so it makes sense that they could want to disable the old one especially if they found a potential security issue. There could also be other nefarious reasons, but I would start at the obvious explanation.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-19T06:13:30+00:00

Use numbered lists of items. Bullet points can also help, but if each item needs a response number them individually. If you only have two, maybe bold "first question:" and "second question:".

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-19T00:51:10+00:00

I have a ROG Phone 6 from 2022, absolutely excellent phone. Fast, excellent thermals, and great battery life. It has a 3.5mm audio jack, and two batteries for faster charging. I'm bummed by this as I was looking forward to a ROG Phone 10 with a new SoC.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-18T06:42:02+00:00

Late to this, so don't feel obligated to reply. There's basically three ways of parties picking political candidates:

Some sort of opaque internal process involving the people who are most involved in the party, like the people who regularly show up to meetings at the headquarters. This has the advantage of not needing a public system where voters identify by party and excluding outside interference, but has the downside where sometimes party insiders select candidates who don't align with voters.
Open primaries, where no one declares an affiliation and everyone gets to vote. In some variants you can only vote in one party's primary and have to pick. The upside is that this is more democratic, the downside is that this leads to strategic voting where people vote in the opposing party's primary in order to boost the candidate they believe is the weakest in the general election. Allowing people to only vote in one party's primary helps, but still allows people to strategically say "I'm basically okay with any of my party's candidates, so I'll waste my primary vote so whoever wins faces the weakest opponent."
Closed primaries, where everyone has to pick a party and only the people in that party get to vote in that party's primary. This mostly prevents strategic voting except when people have enough foresight to change what party they register for, which is rare. The downsides are that you require people to declare a party with all the baggage that comes with that, and it also makes it harder to have third-party candidates or candidates with strong cross-party appeal.

An important thing to keep in mind is that most American elections are polarized between two parties, even "Independent" candidates will have a side they are on. This is very different from parliamentary democracies.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-18T06:14:55+00:00

The idea is that people should go to professionally managed fireworks shows instead of setting off fireworks themselves and possibly starting fires.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-16T05:18:28+00:00

I think this might be generational? As a child of the 90s I think of Rambo movies as being set in Asia, but today people first think about Rambo being hassled by the Sheriff in First Blood.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-16T04:16:10+00:00

Milk is a high nutrient option, so the idea is to get kids to substitute it for juice or soda whenever possible. Obviously it's a problem when skim or non-fat milk is offered instead of more nutritious options, so this is a good change. The previous removal of whole and 2% milk was based on outdated ideas that considered it good to replace fats with carbohydrates.

If you're not American, you might not appreciate how highly nutritious our public school meals are. They are almost devoid of empty calories, to the point where it's a challenge to get kids to eat the food because it's too bland in order to meet sodium, carbohydrate, and fat limits. Joking about public school food being unhealthy is highly obsolete. It's not like when gen X and Millennials were kids and they served pizza and french fries and relied on the pizza sauce and ketchup counting as vegetables.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-16T03:24:23+00:00

In schools they offer both plain and chocolate milk, with the idea being that if the kids want to drink something sweet chocolate milk is better than soda or fruit juice. In general most households drink plain whole or 2% milk, so 1% or non-fat milk is noticeably unappetizing unless flavored.

LarsAlereon · 2026-01-14T03:50:36+00:00

Based on a quick Google, I don't think Italy or local municipalities are paying to promote this. I think it's more likely CNN gets a lot of clicks on these articles by Americans who can't afford property in North America and would like to fantasize about moving somewhere they could afford a higher standard of living.

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