haroldbkny
2d ago
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton
How did this case come about to begin with? Is Texas just requiring the same sort of "age verification" that's existed since the 90s (the website says are you 18 and you click yes)? If so, how was it possibly worthwhile for FSC to sue over that?
haroldbkny
14d ago
Not sure I understand what you mean. Or maybe you misunderstood what I meant. I didn't mean, like, the chance of getting laid with a new partner is slim, I haven't had to deal with that for decades either. I just meant that your sense of how hot the sex is (which to me makes a big difference in how pleasurable the sex actually is) is entirely dependent on the other person and potentially conflicting desires or awkward interactions. As opposed to how you can just find porn exactly as you want it at the click of a button.
haroldbkny
14d ago
I want to agree with you, but after a lifetime of feeding my animalistic brain porn and more porn, I kinda think porn may be better than sex, at least in some ways. I feel worse after porn, but it's much easier to reach similar levels of sex-high with porn then with real sex. Porn allows your idealized image of sex to dominate, vs the actual thing which is limited by real social interactions and physical sensations. I'm currently trying to ween myself off of porn, in the hopes that doing so will make sex easier and more pleasurable, but it's really hard to do. I've had mixed results so far.
Note: I'm on anti depressants, and have been for decades, which may totally blow my whole equation out of the water. They seem to make it very difficult for me to feel sexual pleasure, especially during sex as opposed to watching porn. So everything I wrote here may not apply to others.
haroldbkny
14d ago
For almost a decade I have worked two days a week and I have never been happier or ironically more successful.
What do you do?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Who uses the gender of their baby/toddler to decide what bathroom to take their baby/toddler to change in?
I do. Or rather, I don't let there only being a women's room available stop me if need to change my daughter.
Well, maybe. But here's how they might know:
- They could have entered rooms where men use urinals, whether to change their baby boys, or if it's gender neutral, or if there's no other restroom
- They could have a sense of physics, based on knowing how flys work, and envisioning how far men's penises need to stick out of the fly to pee, and picturing the angles you'd need to be at in order to get a glimpse
- They could know that many (most?) men have a certain homophobia, and wouldn't use urinals if they felt like they and other men were mutually exposed
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Yuppies, probably all between 25 and 38. Maybe it's something different about being a kid on a college campus vs being a yuppie in a professional environment.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
In non-Trump news, I have some new data on revealed preferences. I live in a pretty leftist place, and my employer recently made a switch for about half of the non-single occupancy bathrooms on each floor to be gender neutral. What's interesting is that this has resulted in women completely abandoning those bathrooms. Shortly after the switch, I even saw a number of women about to go in the former women's rooms, realize that they're now gender neutral, and reverse course to presumably go find an actual women's room. Some female coworkers mentioned to me that they like trans people and "have trans friends", but don't like the bathroom change. I guess I like this change, because it's effectively increased the number of men's rooms, since no women want to use the former women's rooms. So make of this revealed preference data what you will.
One bad aspect of this is that they've covered over the urinals in the former men's rooms. I asked my wife if she would care if there's a urinal in a bathroom she was using, and she said that she wouldn't like it, because she doesn't want to see a guy's dick. I guess women don't know that you can't really see dicks of someone using a urinal unless you specifically look around their body to try to see it.
haroldbkny
3mo ago
Would you agree that the simplest, most obvious solution to the wage gap and indeed every other politically significant, statistically-measured gender gap in existence is for all men to say they are women?
Hah, this immediately made me think of Dr Seuss's The Sneetches. That'd be an interesting state of affairs to live in.
haroldbkny
3mo ago
I'm asking because I'd love to be in an industry that's more normal than tech: what are normal jobs that have that hiring routine, in your experience? Are we talking like working in a construction site, being a teacher, being a librarian, working as an accountant, all of the above?
haroldbkny
3mo ago
If there were a covid sized pandemic during another presidency, like a Democrat, would that president get the blame? Does the president automatically deserve some blame for a covid sized pandemic? My guess is no for both of those questions, but I think they deserve to be asked.
haroldbkny
3mo ago
You know, I've always wanted to learn how hackers do what they do. I don't think I would be able to actually use those skills for material ends, because I consider myself a moral person, but I just love learning about how things are done, and I love amassing "super power" skills. Maybe even save the skill for one day, if I wanted to exact revenge on a company or person that I feel had wronged me or something.
But I don't even know where to go to learn how to do this kind of thing. I'm probably just naive. I have learned all about how to prevent hacking attacks, but I've never found a course or instruction manual that says "here's how you can spy on someone else's email" or "use this program to access files on someone else's machine". I suspect one problem is that a lot of hacking is actually just social engineering, which I find super boring and a non-starter for learning to hack.
So, is it possible that there aren't enough hackers because it's not the sort of thing that you can learn easily, and you have to roll your own everything in order to do it?
You might be right. I in no way think that it's evident that DOGE is taking good steps that will bring about positive change with certainty. But I'm just sick (as I have been since 2016) of people ascribing evil or stupid motives to Trump that he probably doesn't actually have.
Also, sort of a nitpick, but having been in companies that have taken the break stuff and downsize approach, losing money isn't the only, and certainly not the earliest, feedback signal leadership looks for in deciding what to reinstate. Applying pressure downwards by defunding stuff causes your reports to take the initiative to make a good case to you what is actually important, which does a lot of the legwork for the "serious investigations", and lets you apply your best judgement more easily.
I hope that information can flow to them somehow and the things which train up the scientific workforce get repaired sooner rather than later.
Yeah, me too. It is a scary time, no question.
Part of me wants to say, "it's been a scary time for the past 5 years due to the government destroying the economy with their stupid covid responses, and now they're just trying to take unprecedented drastic measures to fix it", but I don't know if I fully believe that.
It's a dilemma in my beliefs vs my hopes. I don't really believe that tearing down the system, or even coming close to doing so, is ever really a good idea. But I always hope that something can make things better. I would have said in the past that technological advancement was basically always that force that makes things better and saves us from economic depression, but this time, the technological advancement that's on the horizon may be just as dangerous. So it makes me want to hope that an attempt to fix the system will actually save us instead, despite my rational judgement. But really, that's just emotions, and it's not something to be trusted, just as I tell leftists who want to tear down the system.
haroldbkny
4mo ago
I may be naive or simply out of the loop and not following what's going on with DOGE this month vs last, but is the point to actually defund science? Or is the point to "break stuff", in order to stress-test the system and find out what's actually important, so that we can then focus on just the important stuff, while cutting out the stuff that was previously being funded but not likely to help anything? Basically, by downscaling, the stuff that's actually important will come forward and be made apparent, so we can continue to fund it. That's at least what I thought they were trying to achieve.
I'm not saying what DOGE is doing is correct, or that they're actually managing to successfully achieve the goal of cutting out only the waste. But I see a lot of people saying that DOGE no longer wants the US to do science research, and I guess I just doubt that that is actually true.
haroldbkny
4mo ago
That might be the case. That'd make me happy if my kids grew up in a high school where they didn't have to act like they don't care about anything.
But also, having lived in several different areas, even recently, I think the people in my particular area are more rude than in other places.
Social conversation in the UK sometimes feels like its 50% a competition about how cleverly you can insult the other person. This is really distracting if you ever want to talk about something substantive. Despite it being mostly in good humor, the constant negativity is really draining.
Hah, this is interesting. I've felt drained recently because specifically where I live, social conversation is about how little you give a fuck about anything, and how blatantly and non-cleverly you can be about insulting the other person, but still have them take it. And I remember in high school that to have any interests at all made you a loser. All of life is about seeming like you don't give a fuck, here. But this is very specific to my region.
For 1, I also want to ask what costs of living are like in each place, because that is as relevant as your salary. I feel like costs of living here are astronomical near cities, which is where most people want to live. But I don't know what it's like in the UK. I would have assumed that the socialized structure makes things cheaper to match the lower pay, so I'm curious to hear your take on it.
For 3, I think the climate sucks here too. But I've always lived in the northeast. Here the skies are gray 3/4 of the year.
6 is interesting. I feel the opposite, but maybe it's because I've lived here my whole life.
Oh, I guess that makes sense. Do doctors work their asses off in the UK like they do in the US? Whenever I talk to my doctor friends, their lives sound miserable, almost like they're being hazed by a fraternity for years on end. I don't personally know anyone who became a doctor who wasn't pushed into it by strong family expectations.
haroldbkny
4mo ago
Just curious: why do you want to be in America instead of the UK? If I had no family or friends in America (maybe you do, I'm just assuming you don't), I think I'd be equally happy here or in the UK. I might even prefer to UK for some reasons.
haroldbkny
4mo ago
I don't think it's conclusive that nothing has passed the test before, because I don't think the test is necessarily set in stone. There are variations, and I think it's been romanticized enough that people have moved the goalposts for the test as we progress. I mean some people could be fooled while others are not. Eugene Goostman is another one from 2014 that is said to have passed the test.
I agree with your main premise, but a nitpick:
For a long time, people considered the Turing Test the gold standard for AI. Later, better benchmarks were developed, but for most laypeople with a passing familiarity with AI, the Turing Test meant something.
I'm not really sure that's true. The Turing Test has been passed in some form or another since 1966, with ELIZA, and I also remember various chat bots on AOL instant messenger doing the same back in the early 2000s. I think that people realized quickly that the Turing test is just a novelty, something thought up by Turing in the early days of computer science that seemed relevant but was quickly proven not to be, and that various technologies could beat it.
haroldbkny
4mo ago
I've spent the last 15 years telling leftists who want to "tear down the system" how much that's a terrible idea, because when the system is torn down, tens of thousands of people die. I think there was some SSC post about this but I can't find it. I think it's beneficial to remember that tearing down the system is bad when the right wants to do it, just as when the left wants to do it. Now, defining what constitutes tearing down the system vs cleaning house and getting rid of waste and cruft may be the next place this argument would go, and I don't know any really good answers for that.
I really don't know if what Trump and Musk are doing is good or right, and I'm far from Trump's ardent defender and fan, but I also don't think it's that ridiculous what they're doing. They're using the big tech playbook, which is what Musk is used to. Slash budgets, break stuff, and the stuff that's really needed will become apparent as a result. It's what people who want to actually make change and make their companies better will do, not what people who want to preserve the status quo at any cost. (Read: it's what actual businesses do, not governments, because businesses care about cutting out waste, and governments don't really).
Maybe it's completely the wrong tactic to take. Maybe that playbook should never be employed for government because the programs are too important to have even a temporary gap. I don't know what the right answer is. But it's certainly interesting that they're trying something so unique. Where every other politician has claimed to want to make changes and failed to do so, this strategy might succeed, because it's never been tried before in government.
Ah, I see. Well, that makes more sense, then.
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