Default world US cops? Absolutely suck. Don't talk to cops.

At Burning Man? Law enforcement is more often than not, decent. BM is the only place in the US where I've ever had actually decent interactions with them, and the only place where I refer to them as LE or LEO (Law Enforcement Officer/Official) than cops.

> the fact of the matter is that cops either do not know or do not care.

LE out at Burning Man are exposed to an insane amount of oversight and accountability. Burning Man volunteer orgs (Rangers, ESD, etc.) have a 'culture of feedback'. LE Officers are required to take part in this culture. The official website even has an official feedback form for Law Enforcement (https://survival.burningman.org/law-enforcement/law-enforcem...). The feedback is taken very seriously, and is discussed and reviewed daily by the different departments. BMOrg, their lawyers, and Lawyers for Burners can make that officer's life a living hell. BM Police are forced to care.

There's also a number of community-driven layers for handling issues before LE gets involved, and the vast majority get resolved without LE. Rangers receive more de-escalation and conflict mediation than police academy recruits: 8 hours for LE, compared to 18-22 hours for new rangers and 12-16 hours annually thereafter. If things get physical, you have a private group called High Rock Security that are another layer before Law Enforcement. As a result, Law Enforcement is only requested if it's absolutely legally required, usually if an arrest must be made.

LE are out there enjoying the event just like everyone else. They don't want to do their job. Don't give them a reason to do their job.

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.

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.

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

It fits an MI250X, and the system sees it, but the drivers don't work. They tested an HPE MI250X. There's a rumor on the thread that there are two kinds of MI250X: Ones from HPEs and everyone else's. The HPEs require a special firmware, the normal ones do not. However, the majority of the MI250Xs on the secondhand market are HPE so caveat emptor.

1. I wanted an AMD card.

2. I have an RTX 3090 that's been fun to play with, but I want to get back to using it for gaming.

3. I was looking for between 30-60 tokens/second in terms of performance on the beefier models I want to run. Looking at stock Qwen3 32B the benchmarks reported about 41 tokens/second for MI100. w6800 was 18, MI50 & MI60 could do 60s but had a lot of compromises/special things to achieve that.

4. I used FitMyLLM for some spec-based comparisons (https://www.fitmyllm.com/). The MI100 is roughly double the performance on Qwen 3.5 35B A3B Q5_K_M to the R9700 (462 token/s prefill vs 239 tokens/s, 217 tokens/s vs 118 token/s for inference)

5. I was willing to throw up to $1k at a GPU; I really wanted to throw closer to $650.

To be honest, if money was no objection I would've sprung for a MI210. I also considered the MI250 as they showed up for $1250-1400 with a whopping 128GB, but the PCIE converters for that form factor don't have working AMD drivers yet.

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.

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.

Also I still work in industry.

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?

Seattle based? If so toss me your email or contact and I'll see if I can help you break into teaching if you're interested.

> What kind of PhD research did you do?

Assistive technology. I primarily worked with kids who had cleft lip and palate to improve their at-home speech therapy exercises. Trained some offline ASR models, built a therapy game, and automated metrics. I passed the research onto another student once I got my PhD, but the project lives on as https://spokeitthegame.com/

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.

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.

First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming.

From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.

Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired.

Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite."

There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.

> Would it though?

Rather than immediately shoot down your idea, let's talk about logistically implementing this:

1. Cleaning/non-compliance is already fined, if it's not cleaned properly or in a timely manner. This is serious waste like blackwater spills ($500+).

2. This would impact the the self-reliance, decommodification, and leave no trace principles. Burners don't need to be expected to clean up after themselves, they can pay someone else to do it. Yes, lots of wealthy burners would do this.

3. We'd need to set up a system of accountability. Sure, we can create a new department within the org, The Waste Accountability Department. Who do we charge for the bike graveyards (https://imgur.com/a/PolJDcI)? These are bikes that get abandoned in large clusters at the end of the event. Do they get assigned to whichever camp space they end up near? Do we start to add in plenty of surveillance (human or tech-based) to see which burner left their bike? Do we add in facial or other recognition to make sure we fine the right person? 3a. Currently bike graveyards are handled by nonprofits and volunteer orgs that take those bikes, fix them, and donate them to kids in Nevada. If we continue that program, do we pay them for taking the bikes? Do we need to appraise bikes based on their value, or do some other system of cost to repair vs value? Do we just sell blocks of "1000 lbs of bike"?

4. A core element of burning man, as mentioned in 2. is "Decommodification". This would commodify cleanup, and there are loads of first and second year burners who would absolutely pay someone $500/$1000 to clean their plot. Accountability here gets hard, as the people who are willing to pay are also the people who are unlikely to verify the quality of work. There are loads of people who would prey on burners in a rush to get out, pocket the $500, and walk off. Accountability and prosecution here, again, gets hard. The decommodification principle prevents this.

5. Who would issue the fine? Burning Man is a non-profit, the fine would require legal enforcement, collections or some other method to threaten people into paying. It would also require accounting for where that money goes and how it is used. Bureau of Land Management? They already do issue fines for blackwater spills and other serious environmental hazards (see 1).

6. Currently cleanup is handled by the Department of Public Works and Playa Resto. Both are volunteer-driven. Once we start paying people to clean up, why aren't we paying the people who deploy the porto-potties, make the streets, maintain the vehicles, and operate the core infrastructure? DPW spends 3-6 months before the event preparing the site for the event.

As I hope this demonstrates, it's not as simple as just having a group of people you can pay to clean up. There's a lot of logistical challenges, not to mention a pretty big shift in the culture.

I vote we stick with making people clean up after themselves, independent of their ability to pay.

Does the purpose change how the act should be interpreted?

> A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given

Burners give so many fucks that we willingly do a thing historically reserved for punishment in the military (de-mooping)

> in a manner where it can never be recovered from.

Environmental sustainability is an actual goal not just greenwashing. I encourage you too look into Playa Resto https://journal.burningman.org/2022/10/black-rock-city/leavi... and note that the term volunteer is used meaning these people don't get paid.

During the rains we were one of the few places still open and where you could party, eat, and grab a solid drink. Being on Esplanade also meant we were a shelter for people to wait out the weather.

Loads of great moments by doing that.

Many camps did this, and were actually turning a profit at Burning Man by taking advantage of the community of volunteers.

A few years ago the Burning Man organization put a stop to this by decreasing or eliminating camps considered to be Luxury or Plug N Play. Not just because they were antithetical to the event, but because they became famous for a slew of problems.

White Ocean is one of the more famous camps in this domain. A luxury camp that charged exorbitant fees for extremely wealthy individuals to come and party without any responsibility. They had loads of sexual assaults, dosing incidents, and campers generally being shitty people. The leads also refused to pay the hired help. This led to a now-infamous vandalism incident.

White Ocean basically has a permanent ban on attending now.

You cannot incentivize people out there with money. You have to take something away that they actually care about.