sonzohan

This video is incredibly misleading, and the officer should not be allowed anywhere near a survivor again until they have at minimum completed trauma-informed training and review how to work with CIT/SAT teams.

I work extensively with Emergency Services Department (ESD), Pershing and Washoe Law Enforcement (LE), Rangers, Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), Survivor Advocacy Teams (SAT), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and all the other groups. I have personally worked multiple sexual assault (SA) calls out there.

First off, the vast majority of LE officers are fantastic to work with.

To the point of the video: The officer is grossly violating/bypassing protocol. Sexual Assault (SA) is an incredibly specific legal protocol that is developed by Law Enforcement and followed by Rangers, ESD, and CIT/SAT teams. The protocol is publicly available on the Burning Man website. A few things here that you wouldn't know unless you work these calls:

1. LE appears to have shown up unannounced, at least from the perspective of the staff handling the call. This is extremely unusual, as usually ESD/Rangers/CIT/SAT confirm that the SA is one that necessitates LE involvement, and then radio for LE. While ALL SA reports, regardless of severity, will activate the protocol, not all SA reports escalate to police involvement. You can make things far worse for the survivor by unnecessarily bringing LE in, or bringing them in before the survivor is mentally ready to talk to LE.

2. When the protocol does involve LE, normally they go and interface with ESD, Rangers, and CIT/SAT to get an understanding of the situation before engaging with the survivor. All 3 groups keep extremely meticulous notes. I couldn't find any point in the video where the officer actually does this, she just keeps insisting to talk to the survivors.

3. LE works with CIT/SAT teams in the real world, they aren't a Burning Man exclusive thing. CIT/SAT teams vastly improve the outcomes of these cases. The officer saying "CIT/SAT teams usually try to convince the victim to not talk to us" is disturbingly false and incredibly antagonistic. CIT/SAT teams do the exact opposite: they advocate for the survivor, inform them of their rights, explain what the survivor is legally required to do (which includes talking to LE), and support the survivor in their decisions.

3a. If CIT/SAT teams seriously wanted "to convince the victim to not talk to LE", they could tell the victim to run or bike away. Note how all the volunteer groups (ESD, Rangers, CIT/SAT, etc.) are standing by and making sure the victim stays put. They are following the protocol, and they are making sure the survivor talks to LE.

4. Unsurprisingly, most survivors do not want to talk to Law Enforcement. CIT/SAT teams explicitly do not persuade in one way or another. If the survivor says "I don't want to talk to law enforcement", the CIT/SAT team will reply "If you don't want that all you need to do is tell the officer 'I don't want to speak to LE' or 'I don't want to file a report' and they will leave."

5. The officer doesn't respect 4, and is actually harassing the survivor. The officer needs to be told 3 times by the survivor that she doesn't want to speak with them. This is awful. The survivor just had someone violate them, do you really think she wants to engage with an authority figure who won't take no for an answer?

6. The officer says "I had a friend go through CIT/SAT training and she came out and said they tell survivors not to talk to law enforcement". I've been through the CIT/SAT training and know a number of people who have gone through it. I've never seen a module or a part of the training that says "Convince the survivor to not talk to LE." Quite the opposite, the training is about how to get the survivor to feel safe enough speak up, with the intent of finding and removing predators.

To the point of "staff manipulates and shields people from getting in contact with law enforcement" they absolutely do not, and this is incredibly illegal to do anyway. Any video you watch suggesting otherwise is sensationalist and incorrect.

You are most correct here. A lot of people don't understand that a 'death' is a legal thing, not simply a medical or biological thing.

To declare someone dead you must have the facilities to do so. Burning Man, despite having a pretty advanced medical facility (known as Rampart), does not have the facilities to do so.

Burning Man Organization (BMOrg), Pershing, and Washoe absolutely know how many people die at the event. However, a death, like most deaths in the default world, are not particularly special. To be honest, until 2018 (due to the man running into the fire during man burn), deaths and information about them were fairly private: usually the partners and the deceased's campmates were informed, but news articles and significant publicity were uncommon. There's not a lot of benefit to running around screaming "Some dude died of a heart attack last night at this camp!" People die of heart attacks all the time.

It's the third-largest city in Nevada, although only for a week. There will be some deaths, there are also births. The birth in 2025 was absolutely not the first one, but it was notable because the woman didn't know she was pregnant, and her relative unpreparedness was newsworthy. Other births were planned, delivery was private, and the mother eventually goes to Reno or another hospital to report the birth and get a formal record.

Shoutout to the makers and hackers supplying those!

What are your settings and tokens/second? Even with 2 GPUs (MI100, RX 6600 XT 8GB) and 32GB of RAM it was running at a snails pace for me.

I didn't try a sched_spread with a 3090 and the MI100 which would provide 56GB ram

I also recently decided to buy a datacenter GPU and slap it into a system. Some notes from my experience that the author doesn't mention in their article:

Decommissioned NVIDIA V100s and AMD MI50s are fairly cheap, $200 for 16gb and $400-500 for 32gb, for local experimentation. They are also very old. There's an enthusiast community keeping these two cards alive and working with current platforms and models.

Nitpick, but the V100 doesn't support bfloat16. The performance hit is not a big deal if you're fiddling with local models, but the card is on it's way out in terms of hardware features.

The MI50 does support bf16, but not the current edition of AMD ROCm. Vulkan support is good and the MI50 works with most major platforms (llama.cpp, vllm, etc.), but it's not without some pain points like manual recompilation. Fortunately the open source community has already paid most of your way.

The cooling requirements for these cards cannot be understated. A consumer grade GPU may throttle if in a small case without additional fans, but if given the same treatment a datacenter GPU will overheat itself idling. You will need to buy, at least, a bunch of decent 120mm fans to prevent this or invest in some water cooling.

I ultimately went with an AMD MI100 32GB ($950). I'm an AMD fan, current ROCm editions support it, and it was low-fuss to get things working. I'm debating getting a second so I can try out bigger models like qwen3-coder-next.

Since I'm getting a lot of hate for this post and having "only 2 years"

I have 15 years of experience and counting in games and entertainment. I had 6 years of experience as a game master and software dev (in-game purchasing and balancing) before Blizzard offered me an internship. I also worked in gaming throughout all of grad school, just as a contractor instead of full time.

Those of you who have gone to grad school know stipends don't pay crap and you need a second job to make rent.

Also I continue to contract as a professor. Those of you who have worked as teachers know that teaching also doesn't pay crap.

Finally, I still work in industry. Most recent game released on Steam in 2022.

I have 15 years of experience and counting. My most recently released game was 2022 on Steam. Around 80k sales.

Also I still work in industry.

> You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all

That is not my entire games experience. I have 15 years total, spanning Game Master, lead gameplay engineer, game engineering director, and CTO. I was asked my route to academia, not my entire Gaming Industry CV.

> they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.

Nearly all of them have played games I've worked on, and can even find my name in the credits.

> Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up

You're going to make a bunch of assumptions based on a summary of my academic career and then try to insist that misogyny doesn't exist in tech?

Dissatisfaction yes, although it doesn't manifest how you'd expect.

It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews.

"The professor made the class unfun."

"The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class"

I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.

I graduated in 2011, went straight to work at Blizzard entertainment. At the same time I had gotten accepted into graduate school so I opted for an internship at Blizzard to try both. I went back to Blizzard in 2012, but quickly realized I wanted to do my PhD. So I left Blizzard and went full-time as a student. I didn't have funding so I TAd classes. Eventually my advisor and I scored a big NSF grant, so she used the funds to buy out a course and have me teach it as the instructor.

From there, I wound up at a community college running a bachelor's level degree. They hired me because I was the only candidate with NSF experience. They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.

Actually used to hire people for exactly what you want to do: be an adjunct for night classes in tech.

If you want to go that route you need to make friends with the Dean and the head of program. It's rare that we hire someone from the general application process, because most people who work in tech do not make good instructors.