rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
24d ago
Is that correct?
What? No. That’s a bizarre conclusion.
What led me to these beliefs is -- basically -- that I have studied the issues very carefully and discovered that (1) the argument that man's activities are primarily responsible for recent climate changes does not stand up to scrutiny; and (2) the argument for CAGW does not stand up to scrutiny.
Why do they not stand up to scrutiny?
I’m not a climatologist. I just go by the fact that over 99% of them agree on human-caused climate change. I believe this the same way I believe cigarette smoking causes cancer, that the moon landing wasn’t a hoax, or that eating junk food is bad for you long term. It would be a massive waste of time for me to do my own research on the hundreds of topics and the likelihood that I’d be wrong (due to lack of specialty or time to spend on each) is far too high.
rae
24d ago
This seems to paint a good summary but I’m not an expert in the subject.
Your position is that climate change is happening, but that it’s not caused by humans and not a cause for concern? What lead you to this belief?
Especially the latter one. Natural rapid global warming, whatever the cause, still leads to rising sea levels, flooding of coastal areas, warming of the oceans, extreme weather events (hurricanes, droughts, etc. which can be devastating especially to less prosperous nations).
And do you think greenhouse gases don’t influence the climate at all, or that we’re not emitting enough to cause an impact?
rae
24d ago
There is no bailey, it’s all motte. There’s an extremely strong scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to global warming and there’s no credible alternative explanation for the rise in temperature. The only thing that tracks the rapid temperature rise is human causes.
rae
25d ago
This mindset is what put us in this mess in the first place. Do you not think perhaps many on the other side are the same?
Personally, I believe rightwing populist movement started off with valid grievances. But this mentality of refusing to contradict your allies empowers extremists, grifters and manipulative sociopaths that distort your movement, make you deny reality more and more, until one day you’re fighting in the service of a monster that bears no resemblance to your original beliefs.
To me this is what’s happening to the right in America and the West in general. There is no rightwing ideology anymore. The “leaders” of the movement are abandoning all of its core principles and the only thing you’re left with is vibes, bonding with your allies in saying more and more grotesque untruths, and needing to beat the “other side” at all costs.
rae
25d ago
How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage? You can be for or against gay marriage, but it’s not a fact that you can be empirically right or wrong about, unlike global warming.
You’re committing the exact same sin of picking your worldview based on what’s fashionable to the red tribe. Why can’t you accept global warming and HBD at the same time? Be against third world immigration and for trans rights?
I’m surprised there was near bipartisan support for renewables in the first place. Solar panels and wind power always felt like a green/lefty thing while the right loved their oil and gas. Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.
Maybe it’s to do with the waning influence of libertarians and tech industry CEOs on the right? They had their moment to get the populists in power, then were discarded the moment they were no longer useful, and then the right could go back to disseminating pro-fossil fuel views to their audience and line the pockets of the oil and gas industry.
Who came up with the idea that having Europe be dependent on the US for geopolitical security was this generous gift that the US did out of the kindness of its heart, which somehow only benefited Europeans and that Americans got nothing out of?
Alienating your allies, threatening to invade them when they were already giving you everything you needed, cutting off their resources, having them see your primary geopolitical as a more trustworthy trading partner and having them refuse to come to your aid in your latest Middle Eastern regime change adventure that will totally work this time (pinky promise), those are genius 4D chess moves, yes.
To be honest, I think it’s more likely that the EU will double down on renewables as a result. There’s not enough oil in the North Sea for the whole continent, but there is plenty of wind and solar to drastically reduce demand.
rae
30d ago
men generally admire competence, doing, endurance, skill, camaraderie, pursuit of an ideal, and stoicism, and I'd count myself among them.
Do you see a link between reinforcing those “masculine” behaviours and it decreasing your attraction to men? Sports and roughhousing especially. Nothing like seeing a hot fit guy take his shirt off in the locker room, or wrestling with the boys, to set a bicurious man straight…
I suspect that it would be impossible to make a gay man exclusively attracted to women just as much as it would be impossible to make a straight man exclusively attracted to men.
I agree. In my opinion, conversion therapy of that kind is essentially medical fraud, in that it’s extracting money from gullible patients (or parents) for a “treatment” that cannot possibly work. The free speech argument could be used for a priest or a self-help coach, not a licensed therapist.
Did you want to exert control to change your base attraction?
Yes, and I tried my best! I didn’t want to be attracted to women for various reasons. But in the end feeling guilty over it didn’t help, and there’s no real point trying to repress it.
rae
30d ago
This is a very uncharitable response, c’mon, you know that. Sonnet 4.6 is a cheaper, much smaller model that was released 12 days after Opus 4.6, of course it’s going to be worse.
Bubbles are surprisingly strong. I’ve never met an open Trump supporter (or equivalent local rightwing party) in real life. All the young college educated straight white men I know are at least moderately leftwing, or at least heavily dislike rightwing populists. Supporting Trump would make you an instant social pariah, and make people wonder what went wrong with you.
Interesting. This kinda supports my hypothesis that people who say homosexuality is a choice tend to be bisexual - it literally is when you’re attracted to both sexes!
At least they’re honest about it not being very effective on exclusive homosexuals, but calling that working conversion therapy feels like a stretch. It’s like having a program that can supposedly convert vegans into carnivores, but it actually just makes people who already eat meat stop eating vegetables.
In the LGBT community it’s already a meme that most bisexuals end up marrying someone of the opposite sex, even in progressive social settings. Add even the slightly bit of social pressure and encouragement to focus on your heterosexual attraction, and pretty much any “conversion therapy” would work.
How did it work for you? Were you exclusively homosexual before, and are now 100% straight? Or did you reinforce an existing attraction to women?
It was, mostly, fairly standard therapy with some unusual homework exercises centered around a self conception as a man/woman designed by God for that role.
What kind of homework exercises? I hope you don’t mind me asking - the stereotypical media depiction of conversion therapy is “teenager gets sent to an abusive camp against his will, pretends that it works on him and then has a happy gay adult life”, so how it actually goes on is something I don’t think many people know of.
I’m bisexual myself and despite my best efforts, I never felt like base attraction was something I could exert real control over. Behaviour, yes, but not the underlying desire.
EDIT: is the Dutch book you’re referring to from Dr. Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg by any chance?
rae
30d ago
While I haven’t tried Cline, I know that Claude works best in Claude Code and Anthropic is trying its best (leaks aside) to have people locked into its ecosystem.
You won’t get a good picture of the capabilities of AI agents until you’ve tried the top models in a decent harness, unfortunately.
rae
30d ago
Gemini 3.1 Pro answered this question without issue, along with any variation (sink, bathtub, substituting the Titanic for an arbitrary cruise ship).
rae
30d ago
This was with the latest version of Claude Sonnet. We don't have access to the latest version of Opus, but I'm sure an AI-bro on here would insist that Opus would totally get this right. Regardless, it failed spectacularly at what would be an easy (but tedious) task for a mid-level developer and above (or a sufficiently talented junior).
I’m no AI bro, but Opus 4.6 is genuinely really good and I’m concerned about my skills atrophying because I’m becoming highly reliant on it.
How did you use it? It makes a big difference if you use /init in Claude Code, followed by /plan where you describe what you want, and give it the ability to compile/run/test the code in a feedback loop.
Are you aware that what you propose is literal nightmare fuel from dystopian fiction? Very few people would consider making 50% of the population property to be anything but pure evil. How would you convince anyone to want to live in a society like that, let alone defend it?
rae
1mo ago
Which LLM, what prompt, and what data, and how are you presenting it?
There’s a big difference between copy pasting a document in the free ChatGPT interface, making an API call directly to a frontier model with a custom system prompt (instead of putting instructions in a user message), or using agents with custom tool calling abilities. You might be better off having it write code to analyse the data, versus having it analyse the data itself directly.
I’ve had good results with verifying outputs by using another LLM API call with its own, different system instructions, but you still have to learn how to write good prompts to get the best results. Because they write in a (reasonably) human-like way, it’s easy to fool yourself into believing they also think in a human-like way.
It’s more likely that they couldn’t compete with open source models, Chinese offerings, and other companies specialised in video generation. They also bet on this strange social media app while most AI video generation users want to post their slop on YouTube, Instagram and Tiktok directly. Take a look at the average person’s feed and you’ll see how prevalent AI videos are.
Unscrupulous content creators probably prefer services that let you make videos with little to no censorship, something that OpenAI couldn’t offer.
rae
1mo ago
There’s more than one way to have a homosexual relationship. Some couples are perfectly comfortable having a more masculine and a more feminine partner. I think the main upside of not being straight is realising you don’t have to fit into the heterosexual norms, but also that you don’t have to deny them entirely and can pick and choose - be a feminine man who feels safe and petite in your partner’s arms, but is also the main breadwinner, be a masculine stay at home parent, etc.
rae
1mo ago
I’m surprised that tensions are running so high in this thread (myself included). Meanwhile this forum has unusually civil discussions on many topics that would devolve into nasty flame wars pretty much anywhere else.
rae
1mo ago
(Out of curiosity, do lesbian fujoshi consume yaoi, or just yuri?)
As far as I know lesbians are more into yaoi.
Kinda funny that yaoi appeals to everyone from lesbians, straight women and (some but not all) gay men, while it’s mostly straight men that are into yuri.
rae
1mo ago
And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN.
This is so absurd in the face of all the news I remember from the early days of the pandemic. Where did you see this information?
The covid injections cause more harm than it abates
Are you saying covid vaccines cause more harm than good? This also goes against all information that I have seen.
I’m no Covid zealot. I have little emotion about the pandemic other than relief that it’s over, and concern that the next one will be far worse, that governments will be too cowardly to enact the measures necessary to deal with it due to the increased number of politically polarised, anti-vaccine conspiracy minded populists.
rae
1mo ago
I’m capable of being persuaded that lockdowns were ineffective and other measures would have been better, but you should lead with figures and statistics, not anger over the tyranny of stay-at-home orders. Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.
rae
1mo ago
Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID. I remember hospitals and the healthcare system being utterly overwhelmed in the early days of the pandemic. The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done, we didn’t have vaccines or effective antivirals, and there was a real fear of running out of ventilators.
Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly. Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years (and before modern medicine, the only available tool). Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary. And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.
What kind of heartless man wouldn’t want to spend as much time as possible doing “dumb kid stuff” with their own child? Or calls it “dumb kid stuff” in the first place?
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