Posts by Don Jefe

Musk dreams of launching five Starships to Mars in two years

Wrong Target

Mars is just a distraction. Musk is aiming for Uranus.

FCC boss starts bringing up Musk's Starlink dominance, antitrust concerns

Taxpayer Subsidies

RDOF was never intended to provide Internet access to foreign countries or fund an authoritarian lunatic’s politically weighted on/off switch.

None of Leon’s Ponzi schemes should be receiving taxpayer funded subsidies while building monopolies. Any company receiving taxpayer subsidies should have to make access to its infrastructure available at a fair market price to other companies.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Re: COVID-19 Demonstrated Our Doom

I certainly like to hope I’m wrong. The abject failure of humanity to deal with COVID undermined a lifetime of faith in mankind rising to a challenge, unfortunately.

It definitely changed my secret desire for an extraterrestrial civilization invading the planet, causing man to band together for a common cause. After defeating the aliens, salvaging their technology and claiming our place as an intergalactic society.

COVID-19 Demonstrated Our Doom

Knowledge of a catastrophic situation only helps extremists. Religious nutters in particular. Over 7 million people died from COVID, even though it should have been fairly easy to deal with. Supply chain problems are still extant.

If people couldn’t get their collective shit together well enough to deal with a virus, the idea they can cope with a giant stone screaming (silently) through the vacuum of space towards the Earth is laughable.

Every country with expansionist dreams would march to war, hedging their bets that enough would survive the impact. Religious kooks would be killing themselves and violently converting people to ‘save’ them. People would starve because nobody is going to work. For everyone else it’ll be drinking, looting, and raping until they run out of booze. Then just raping and looting.

We’re better off not knowing until the galactic pebble of reconfiguration is inside cislunar space. That way we won’t have to deal with the consequences of all the bad decisions that get made before the end.

Google’s in-house docs about search ranking leak online, sparking SEO frenzy

Lacking Context as Core Competency

I’m not sure Google knows what the word context means. Their search engine certainly doesn’t.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Re: Slow down

There are many requirements for being President of the United States. One of them is to not engage in insurrection.

The November, 15th judgement by Judge Sarah Wallace found Trump had incited an insurrection. The Constitution is quite clear on the matter, so striking him from the ballot was a foregone conclusion.

If one amendment doesn’t matter, why do any of the others? Why should the President have to be at least 35 years old? Why should they have to be born in the United States?

It’s not a popularity contest. It’s a legal matter. Trump disqualified himself. Honestly, in a civilized country, he would have received the traditional award for second place in a coup on January, 7th.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

UFOs Are Behind It All

All the U.S. National Laboratories have been under sustained outside attacks since the launch of the Department of Defense’s AARO website in August.

Conspiracy nutters are absolutely convinced that the National Laboratory system is sitting on all the UFO evidence in order to hoard all the technological advancements for themselves and/or maintain the secrecy of their relationship with extraterrestrials.

It has become a big enough problem that the labs keep sending out organization wide messages about avoiding spear phishing attacks, reminding people to guard their electronic devices, and they’ve been changing emails in staff directories to reduce the amount of spam that specifically targeted individuals have been receiving.

With the sheer volume of attacks they’ve been getting it was only a matter of time before the cat-people broke through. As everyone knows, the female cat people were wiped out by the Lizard People’s 5G broadcast attack in 2020. The remaining male cat-people population is lonely, so they’re desperate.

X's legal eagles swoop on Media Matters over antisemitic content row

You can’t genuinely expect that right wing tripe to be taken seriously can you? Really?

Musk’s goose-stepping to bankrupting Twitter began the day he took over. Revenues were already down more than 50% before the Media Matters piece. Twitter spend was already probationary with most of the large accounts, solely because Musk is a deeply unlikable person who is prone to talking out of his ass and saying ridiculous things. Who wants to be associated with that? Sheik Chainsaw and the NFL seem to be the last stalwart compatriots of Musk. Even Donald Trump doesn’t want anything to do with the platform.

You’ve picked a strange hill to die on. It’s not too late to turn back and stop being a patsy for wretched people. Musk royally screwed up and he’s just making it worse for himself. Just let him do it.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully achieved copy and paste from Telegram.

The fact the system can be manipulated is more than enough reason for advertisers to pull out. It entirely destroys the value proposition of a targeted advertising platform.

It’s preposterously disingenuous to say that everyone is upset because of one individual posting hate propaganda. Twitter has become Der Stürmer and this just happened to be the last straw for advertisers who see the writing on the wall. Nobody wants to be the next Dehomag that chooses profit over human rights.

It doesn’t matter how many times if happened. Almost no advertiser wants their ads to be appearing adjacent to hate speech and white supremacy advocacy. A key value in an ad platform is the ability to dictate where your ads appear. You can’t screw that up. It’s a core competency and value proposition.

The fact that the system can be manipulated proves Media Matters’ point. Twitter is an unstable, unsafe platform. Full stop. For advertisers to continue throwing millions of dollars at it is a recipe for disaster. It’s not a free speech issue, it’s capitalist self interest that caused advertisers to leave.

If you’re unfamiliar with the history, the private sector played a huge role in the atrocities of WWII. For almost 80 years, people have been asking how things would have been different had the private sector chosen human rights over profit. If Dehomag, for example, hadn’t gotten involved millions of lives would have been saved. Now that Twitter has become Der Stürmer, the private sector is taking a stand by exercising its right to not fund hate. Musk’s lawsuit is toothless.

Re: I assume that the eagles have been paid up front

It reads like a tin pot tyrant diktat that has been edited by paralegal interns to remove the all caps and insert punctuation and legalese.

I don’t believe it’s a good faith suit. It is pandering to the remaining, decidedly lowbrow, Twitter audience. An audience who has no idea what a genuine “thermonuclear lawsuit” is supposed to look like. They just see Musk’s name and think it must be what he says it is.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Re: Mmmmm

That’s not really accurate. The board is part of OpenAI Nonprofit. The for profit company, that Altman was part of, is OpenAI GP LLC., a traditionally organized company.

Microsoft invested in OpenAI GP LLC. Because of the company’s structure the equivalent of Class A preferred shares lie with the for profit company. The NPO is like Class B common shares but instead of being convertible or liquid, they’re tied up in a wonky Y Combinator arrangement.

That’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s close enough.

Under this arrangement, OoenAI GP LLC. owns the first $86 billion of company value and the intellectual property. OpenAI Nonprofit has oversight of the executive team of the for profit, but it does not own the assets or company itself. After the first $86 billion is achieved by OpenAI GP LLC, OpenAI Nonprofit can begin siphoning off money to use in furthering its mission (which, incidentally, includes a “post-money world”).

It’s a silly arrangement intended to keep up appearances and satisfy the revenuers. They had hit a wall with fundraising because the original structure as an NPO wasn’t attractive to corporate investors. High value investors didn’t want to donate to something, they wanted to invest. Thus OpenAI GP LLC was born. After this fiasco it’s entirely possible the whole NPO board structure will be relegated to the wheelie bin.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

Re: Industry Input

Thanks Jake!

Re: Industry Input

They moved away from that quite a few years ago. They hit it wall with fundraising as a nonprofit. OpenAI Nonprofit has oversight of OpenAI GP LLC. OpenAI GP LLC, which Altman was CEO of, is very much a typical company.

Industry Input

I haven’t been around much lately, but thought I would chime in. I’ve been in tech VC for a long time, and this is the most disastrous thing I’ve ever seen. For a lot of reasons.

This fad of non profit boards that make everybody feel good is an abomination. This whale song love-in nonsense has got to stop. Who the hell wants an unbiased Board of Directors? Who wants an ethical Board of Directors when the ethics haven’t been identified? The Board has to address the issues a CEO brings into focus. You don’t sack the CEO because you don’t like the issues. That’s peril sensitive sunglasses mentality of the worst kind. They still have to deal with the issues, but now they’ve got no one to do it.

That’s because the competition just picked up the leader. OpenAI jettisoned the entire generation of AI directly into the gaping maw of Microsoft. I’m a big fan of Microsoft, but I’m also a realist. Giving Microsoft the AI industry won’t be good for anyone. We’re looking at decades of antitrust litigation and more rubbish “accept all cookies” buttons and weird pre installed software and stupid partnerships. Now personalized to make you hate yourself even more.

But most importantly, and my main point, is the ridiculous danger OpenAI now poses. They’ve backed themselves into a corner. Ilya Sutskever is deep in his cups with Judas Syndrome, the executives are utterly rudderless, the Board is sitting in a circle with a tub of soy butter waiting on someone to initiate the next Teams circle jerk, and 700 of their 770 employees have signed onto an open letter of no confidence in the remaining leadership. They’re desperate.

Every imaginable ethical line will be entirely erased by week’s end. Board members are going to be replaced with “results oriented” psychopaths whose only mission is to squeeze as much as possible out of the company. OpenAI had a sell target of $86 billion. Everybody who has money in the company is going to want that $86 billion goal to be met and they’ll do whatever is necessary to try and achieve it.

This is bigger than OpenAI. It’s bigger than VCs getting their money. The AI sector demands stable, forward thinking companies who are capable of dealing with globally redefining technology. Not companies that run away from their responsibilities. Not companies that are desperate to hit spectacular valuations before the last lifeboat launches. It’s impossible to overstate the magnitude of potential in AI, but it’s also undeniably dangerous and that has to be dealt with head on. Boards need to get back to business. This pretend executive shit has got to go.

IBM-led advertising X-odus gains steam as more flee Musk's platform

Re: "a global Jewish cabal"

You’re more right than you may know. The Great Replacement, Great Reset, Great Tartaria, and mudfloods are all rooted in 19th century Nordicism (the forerunner to Aryanism). A lot of it is 100% plagiarized from the literature that would inspire colossal dickheads like American journalist and conservative thought leader Lothrop Stoddard to write bestselling ideological hate treatises like “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy” and “Racial Realities in Europe”. His most famous contribution to history was his coining of the term Undermen, which would be translated as Untermensch in German.

The further you dig into any of those popular topics, the worse it gets. It’s just straight up NSDAP mythology with the names changed so the audience doesn’t realize what they’ve gotten into until they’re too deep to care. The worst part is that updating the facade of Nazism is enough to let it spread on social media without so much as a second glance.

Re: Marketing = prefessional bullsheit

Anne Frankly, I do not find it funny.

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

NYT Bestselling Book Title

“Blue Bird In the Emerald Mine: It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup's outrageous valuation."

The whole quote is going to be the subtitle. That statement is, without a doubt, the most out of touch thing I’ve ever heard a tech leader say.

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

Re: What's the point?

Exploitation is a function of perceived benefit.

If the video was of a spider manipulating an organic cornea or performing open heart surgery on a premature infant it would be hailed as a civilization changing, if weird, development.

Everybody would be pontificating on the potential of lady bugs for melanoma treatment and stag beetles for tubal ligation. But it’s yanking a thru-hole component from a breadboard and people can’t see beyond that.

Zuck says Facebook made an 'operational mistake' in not taking down US militia page mid-protests. TBH the whole social network is a mistake

Facebook Infowars Stormfront White House

Facebook is an echo chamber for this kind of thing, but they’re not the only player. Sites like infowars and other extremist breeding grounds engage with much more action oriented groups.

The original “call to arms” is still posted on the Alex Jones hate porn site and the comments are telling. Some saying that if the police attempt to impede the militants then they will have sided with the “terrorists” and must be treated appropriately (presumably shot by armed children).

Facebook does have a role to play, but as long as there’s a rabid racist in the White House actively demonizing protestors, while simultaneously approving of white nationalist retaliation, it’s (unfortunately) unfair to hang everything on Facebook.

TikTok CEO quits after less than three months in the job

Pointless

There was no reason for him to stay. He knew China was going to block the sale, as they have now done.

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

Re: Elon Musk Is An Ass

Tesla isn’t an “Other” automaker. They’re a fringe boutique automaker. They don’t have the history, weight or funds to act like a giant faceless corporation.

Elon Musk Is An Ass

I bought two Tesla’s in the last year. I won’t buy another after all this garbage. Elon Musk is a selfish child and deserves to be smacked with a glove.

US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes

Shut out foreigners and throw money at everything else. That’s the only solution President Dickbag has.

Re: Another brick in the wall

Thank you!

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

Re: Seems insane

Nah. Shareholders are awful creatures and they are sucking the planet dry of ethics, morals and even basic human respect.

Coronavirus conference cancellations continue: Google and Microsoft axe WSL and Cloud Next

Re: In the future...

There’s a lot of business that gets done at conventions that would never happen elsewhere. Instead of too many conventions happening I’d say there were too many people going to conventions without a justification.

After blowing $100m to snoop on Americans' phone call logs for four years, what did the NSA get? Just one lead

Re: No surprise

Or they would say that because it what people expect them to say. At the end of the day you can’t trust anything any of them say. It’s best just to take their money away and give someone else the chance to waste it.

Re: No surprise

Or there was nothing to listen to in the first place.

Thielicious

Peter’s Palantir is eating $1B/annual these days. You can’t expect that sort of private sector performance if you start killing the programs that feed it.

Our government has completely abandoned the idea of growth through excellence and is nothing but the pivot man in the biggest circle jerk in history.

It’s embarrassing.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

Redundant systems quickly become big liabilities if not handled with great care. Guys in steam powered rockets are not known for their great care.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Shit Speakers Shot Across The Bow

Sonos speakers are lifestyle toys. If they get bricked, or effectively bricked, over time it’s unfortunate, but that’s all. But this kind of bullshit is coming to your durable goods like home appliances as well as safety products like environmental sensors (smoke detectors et al.) and doorbells, automobiles and, eventually your pets (probably). We’re a decade out from the kind of extortion that just isn’t fun or safe.

I don’t like looking to legislation for help or protection, but this kind of thing isn’t something market pressures alone can mitigate. Regulation is going to be a slippery slope, but it can slow down the march of these kinds of assholes and it’s much better than nothing.

Re: Why indeed...

Kumquats to donuts, stoats to pangolins, cow burgers to Incredible burgers, Spendor to Sonos, etc...

You can’t really compare actual audio products that use the clever application of physics through engineering to manipulate a physical medium to Sonos products that are (in)effectively faking physics via software.

Blackout Bug: Boeing 737 cockpit screens go blank if pilots land on specific runways

Re: Why is the company still alive?

Not to defend Boeing in any way, but they’ve got over 10,000 planes in the air and almost 6,000 more on order. Then they’ve got a telecoms empire, missiles, all kinds of weird microwave products as well as radar, IR and a corner on foundational remote sensing tech. They’ve also got a substantial financial operation, leasing services as well as third party support services for everything imaginable. Key to their ongoing success is their contract services for their products. Wall Street loves a company with over a decade of guaranteed future revenue...

The point is they are a very large company with interests in many areas. It takes a lot more than what they’re going through to bring down something that big.

Back up a minute: Private equity outfit coughs $5bn for Veeam

CEO’s are just employees and are subject to office politics like any other employee. Take Steve Jobs for example.

NASA's monster rocket inches towards testing while India plots return to the Moon

Re: Nothing so hard on laurels as resting on them

Unfortunately a lot of their work now looks more like the Federal lobbying agency for the aerospace industry than the agency for the science and engineering of space exploration. Political appointees are awarded administrative positions and they spend their tenure trying to balance Federal policy with the strategic goals of industry players and pork barrel demands of Congress members.

Boeing & Friends created a situation where they are driving not only mission selection, but also the technical aspects of those projects and the metrics of success. The biggest impediment to returning NASA’s rocket program to excellence is its role as a political reward. Currently it’s what you give someone when you’re out of military, State Department and agriculture presents to hand out. It’s treated like a toy and it sucks.

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

Re: Remote bricking

What they’re saying is that previous versions will not perform as well as the latest versions with the newest technology.

It’s sales speak designed around some low key FUD. It has nothing to do with the performance of an older version compared to the performance the same older version but the way it’s worded is supposed to make you think an older version is intrinsically bad.

Audio equipment lasts for a very, very long time. Assuming non-abusive use degradation over time is not a factor for years, often many decades. It’s part of the reason audio companies charge so much and have such a hard time staying in business even if they have good products.

Re: "the backlash is a wee bit overdone"

Lewis “Plutonium” Page was rabidly rhetorical in his support of a hotter planet with a more corrosive, slightly glowing, atmosphere. It was embarrassing enough to keep some people from coming around here, but he was just loud and liked managing comments to suit himself. It wasn’t really El Reg, or the peanut gallery though, just the one guy who let his own authority override his editorial sense.

I’ve been around here for a long time and the climate debate actually gets a pretty fair shakeout here. Something that’s exceedingly rare on either side of the arguments. I’m living proof that you can say grossly unpopular things here and still sway the masses if you’ve got a good argument.

Starliner: Boeing, Boeing... it's back! Borked capsule makes a successful return to Earth

Re: A done deal?

The preferential treatment Boeing receives is no coincidence. Jim Bridenstine, the NASA Administrator, is a presidential appointee whose aerospace expertise is as a Congressman where he pushed a space policy that feeds Boeing & Friends billions. He pushed for greatly changing the way the government approaches civil and defense activities in space (Space Farce for example).

Lockheed-Martin rewarded him for his work in Congress with his NASA appointment and now he’s working on his next paycheck as consultant with Boeing (although I think Lockheed may up their bid if Bridenstine manages the Boeing debacle well).

My point is, SpaceX isn’t playing at that level and they’re never going to get a fair shake until they do. The whole thing is disgraceful.

Re: Welcome back Don Jefe

Thanks! I’ve just been busy. I had to clear my stuff out of Tranquillitatis before it gets crowded.

Re: Not reassured by the easy, obvious nature of the problem

We’re not getting the whole truth, I think that’s fairly clear. My vast experience in the field of obfuscating a paucity of excellence says that a defense related system is the actual culprit, but we’ll never hear the actual details. This thing wasn’t landing at White Sands to celebrate the new National Park there.

No Motorola Razr comeback orders in 2019: Costly foldy nostalgia mobe pulled back

Production Profits Pointlessly Small

“Demand is high” is a meaningless marketing statement. The fact is every major element of the modern phone production line is geared to unibody devices.

From a manufacturing standpoint a flip phone is effectively two devices. They have to dedicate a line to produce half of a single device when the same line could be turning out complete devices instead.

That’s an expensive prospect and that can be seen in the high price.

Boeing, Boeing, gone! CEO Muilenburg quits 'effective immediately'

Re: Cascade failure

Boeing shares are up 3.57% after the news. That’s the point of changing the CEO. Fixing the actual problems with the plane, and other problems, will fall to the technical people, the way they always do.

Cracking copyright law: How a simian selfie stunt could make a monkey out of Wikipedia

Re: @DJ

I've actually thought about your notion of some sort of gradient/curve for copyright for the last day or so (something similar never crossed my mind before). I actually like the overall idea. In fact, I like it a lot.

Without getting into the muddy trenches, the big concern I see is that in the binary 'copyright/non-copyright' system we currently have the abuses are just overtly obscene. I'm a huge fan of semantic debate and argument, but the fools currently mucking up copyright for everyone have been able to do so when there are only two possible outcomes to any argument.

If it wasn't so detrimental to the general consumer it would be hilarious, but it really is shit. My concern is that debates rage for years over a single point, a curve introduces a lot of new points that gum up the works even more. The idea is certainly interesting though!

Finally, a practical use for 3D printing: Helping surgeons rehearse

I think you might be surprised at how much bone moves. Particularly when it's broken. When I was being fitted for my aftermarket ankle assembly (the OEM assembly had been crushed in spectacular fashion) there were eight or nine imaging sessions of the damaged parts in the weeks leading up to the surgery and two sessions each day of the day of the surgery.

It's a little known fact, but except for bones at your extremities, most bones in your body are connected to other bones. It's also quite common for muscles to be attached to those bones (people in movies diagnosing broken bones by the fact they can move that body part is dumber than too many bullets in a gun) . If you're dealing with a severe break with splintering and lots of little bits have simply been crushed to powder then movements in seemingly unrelated parts of your body can move all sorts of stuff around. So much so that even with completely custom made replacements and no budget ceiling the manufacturer still had a guy in the OR with a rolling cabinet full of various doodads specifically to deal with movement in the bones.

Granted, my incident was severe, but, as a rule, you really want doctors working on bones that aren't severely damaged to know what the fuck the bones look like without a 3D model. Bone structure is pretty basic stuff. If the design guys at Herman Miller know more about your bones than the doctor who wants to cut you open then I suggest a different doctor.

If it's a truly serious issue then the number of variables is high and subject to change until everything is completed. If it's a simple issue then they shouldn't need the model to begin with. Either way, I can't see this as practical or useful, at all unless the hospital you're at is just plucking random people off the street to perform surgery on you.

Plasticless Office

OK, this is fine and dandy and all, but isn't it kind of like printing the code from a beta version of a piece of software? Sure, it'll give you a general idea of what's going on, but five days inside the Human body is a looooong time and anything you see on the model will not be as accurate as a pre-op CT/MRI that reflects the present.

Printing an out of date model when every major healthcare system on Earth is still struggling with digital records seems like things going backward.

Intelligence blunder: You wanna be Australia's spyboss? No problem, just walk right in

Re: So What?

It was a step down, to be sure, but the Elizabeth lady who is in charge is a lovely person and I just couldn't bear to hurt her feelings.

So What?

I once occupied an entire country and declared myself Lord of the Seas, Supreme Commander and Pope of the Exchequer and nobody even noticed. A bunch of government bureaucrats can't be expected to notice when their boss shows up for work.

Re: Automatic Revocation (Not likely)

Too expensive to integrate with their HR system, probably. But I can guaranfuckingtee it is integrated with their security clearance system. It's entirely possible that not booting him out was simply to save the Once and Future Ruler the indignities of another colon level security screening.

To me that sounds highly plausible as I can't imagine any Once and Future staff wanting to catch hell for putting his Once and Future boss through the screening process because of nothing more significant than a contractual oversight. It would not be a fun place for an admin to be. Sure, they wouldn't be fired for annoying the New Old Boss, but they could sure as shit be reassigned to act as on-site liaison/exchange in some hellhole like Texas (or somewhere equally awful). Senior

Management never plays by the rules anyway, and as the guy responsible for breaking rules and being ultra-secretive about it I would expect 'by the book' compliance to be even less prevalent. Seriously, who do you report that kind of thing to? Those five days would seem like a super compressed 1hr 33mins and your sphincter would likely never fully recover from the strain.

IT blokes: would you say that lewd comment to a man? Then don't say it to a woman

Re: You'll Get The Respect You Deserve

No, you completely miss the point. Raping people is an entirely different thing and even making the comparison is outrageously childish as well as indicative of the fact you aren't ready for commenting on the issue.

In a professional capacity ones will, as projected in their confidence and demeanor, is the only thing you have that might trump anything else in the room. Somebody is always going to have more money, more power, more everything than you, that simply can't be avoided. But will and self respect neutralize all that other stuff, if you actually have will and self respect.

It never ceases to amaze me that so many adults have no idea how the world around them works. They get sidetracked and think it takes money or special connections or fame or other such nonsense to get respect. That's just bullshit coming from people with, at best, no self respect and at worst absolutely no idea of what respect actually is. Which makes a lot of sense. If they knew what respect actual was they would have some for themselves. How can you possibly respect others if you don't know what respect is?

The answer is you can't. There's always a respect fire brigade running around to come claiming to be protecting the respect of others, but the fact of the matter is they're most often seeking their own self respect by pandering to the public. The opinions of others goes right up there with arrogance, boozing and sluttiness as a facade of self respect.

Long before I was anybody there was approximately zero chance of someone not respecting me. They fucking knew better. Even then I didn't have to say anything nor did I have a reputation for violence or confrontation. People know how to behave, even if they are extremely drunk, and they are going to behave in a manner befitting the most willful person involved in the situation. If that person turns out to be the kind of jackass to say inappropriate things and/or get grabby then you really shouldn't expect much.

The trick then, is to be the most willful. You don't even have to deal with the bullshit behavior of others. They're not going to fuck with you. You should be able to walk right into the center of the rudest, most disrespectful group of people you can find and have them instantly treating you as you deserve without saying a fucking word. If they don't do that then you're going to need a mirror to see the problem.

Christ, take my wife for example. Outside of her field the only people who know her know her as my wife, not who she is. People who have no idea who she is still give her tremendous respect. She's super tiny, extremely bashful and has such a small voice that she's hard to hear in the car, and she doesn't get harassed. If she does choose to speak people automatically stop talking. Nobody would even carry on a conversation of which the subject matter might embarrass her, even if they are complete strangers. Why do you think that is? Why would strangers alter their behavior just because she shows up? If you need a hint, it sure as fuck isn't because she's threatening.

If you don't understand all this then I feel sorry for you. You'll obviously have lost so many opportunities simply because you've got no presence. That's sad.