rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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.
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.
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