rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
8hr ago
I’m really struggling to understand how having a hard time finding a girlfriend can make someone want to dress up as an anthropomorphic animal and have sex with other men in similar costumes. I can understand having those urges, getting into a relationship and it being too embarrassing to share so you just suppress it (although I’m sure many still explore them in porn), or being single because you have non-standard sexual interests and can’t find someone that fulfils you.
I do get that the internet/porn amplifies underlying fetishes and makes you seek more extreme stimuli, but I don’t think it can make a straight man gay or vice-versa, or a vanilla person interested in furry fandom.
rae
10hr ago
I think the opposite explanation is far more likely, until recently the pressure to be in a hetero relation was extremely strong and any “divergent” behaviour was kept tightly under wraps. The Kinsey reports from the 1940s found 37% of males had at least one homosexual experience, 11.6% were about equally bisexual and 10% were more-or-less exclusively homosexual.
I’ve known plenty of gay and bisexual men and none fit the profile of “watched too much porn, couldn’t get a girlfriend”. Gay men just have completely different innate sexual appetites, and lots of bi men are closeted and cheating on their girlfriends and wives. The closest thing to what you’re describing would be bisexual men choosing to hook up with men because it takes less effort to organise than ordering from DoorDash, or men dating trans women because they’re more “chill”, but I can’t believe being an incel for long enough will make you want to shove a penis into your mouth with as much enthusiasm as these guys had.
rae
4d ago
The right totally offers solutions -- see that clip that was circulating of Charlie Kirk talking to somebody considering hormones; you just don't like the solution. (ie. talk therapy, find a way to be comfortable in your own body that doesn't involve intense, largely unstudied, lifelong pharmaceutical intake + extremely invasive surgeries, carry on with life)
And what if those other solutions just don't work? I did try talk therapy for years, I did everything I could to convince myself I didn't need to transition. I went to the gym and became very physically fit, I dated men and women both, I talked to TERFs and tried to read what they said with an open mind. And yet, the pharmaceutical route - just a estradiol gel you apply daily to your skin - is so far what has made me the most comfortable in my body and reduced my body dysmorphia by a huuge amount.
The history of trans medicine goes back over a hundred years and is not just a fringe modern leftist medical movement. If you read say, Harry Benjamin's famous book from the 1960s, he describes how psychotherapy has been completely unable to cure transsexuals and transvestites from their mental affliction and provides numerous psychiatrist reports to that effect. This is from a time when gender non-confirming behavior risked severe social disapproval, and was often outright illegal, and all pressure would have been on patients to not be a transsexual as opposed to today where there is acceptance and even encouragement. Psychotherapy has advanced since the 1960s sure, but why do you think talk therapy would be more effective at reducing gender dysphoria now than it did back when transitioning meant losing your job, your family, your friends?
There's plenty wrong with the modern trans movement, I won't deny that. But the right wing proposal - "find a way to be comfortable with your own body", "carry on with life", I'm sorry, that's not an actionable solution I can put in practice, that just sounds like "cope harder". Why would I subject myself to lifelong psychological pain, have it be this constant weight on my shoulder, have difficulty being intimate with a partner when I can just... accept that I'm trans, follow an established treatment plan, and have all that inner suffering massively reduced? I didn't pick that option out of some ideological belief, it's just the best option I tried so far, and I'm lucky enough that it hasn't had any negative social or professional consequences.
rae
4d ago
Beyond general freedom as an argument - if you start restricting the rights of individuals based on their genetic predispositions, why stop at black vs white?
The crime rate difference between whites and asians is even greater than between whites and blacks. Left handed people are more likely to be criminals as well. And of course, the crime rate difference between men and women is gigantic.
Despite that, I highly doubt @ArjinFerman and the other race realists here are sexist against men and racist against all ethnicities other than East Asian.
If there are is a genetic component in some African ancestry (although which part of Africa, as there is a huge amount of genetic diversity even within single countries?) that is correlated with lower IQ, it would still be one of many factors involved, and does not mean culture and discrimination is not a factor.
What are you or @ArjinFerman suggesting we do with that information?
rae
4d ago
Firstly, social class is not really about money. Social class is about culture. A mechanic or a plumber can make more money than a university lecturer with two PhDs. How many rich black American are from stable, two parent households in high income areas and have the same cultural values as their white counterparts? Are they engineers, doctors, businesspeople, or are they in the stereotypical high earning occupations available to black people? And can they avoid social pressures and expectations - including that from the black community itself - for their own kids as well, who might look to role models that look like them?
But in any case, if you look at the statistics, the incarceration rate for black men still sharply decreases with income. That means if you want to decrease the black crime rate, facilitating their upward mobility is still the most effective way.
rae
4d ago
I’m actually in agreement that there is political distortion from the left in the social sciences (less so in medicine), but the American right has not presented any credible alternative and instead doubled down on even worse distortions of their own, and burning down the whole thing. The American medical establishment supporting protests (perhaps due to internal political pressures?) does not mean you should distrust the whole institution when it comes to non politically influenced matters.
I’m transgender myself, and I would love for the left to stay out of my medical condition, and for there to be actual studying of the phenomenon and treatment options without political bias influencing it. Unfortunately the right does not offer any solutions and seems interested in stopping research and putting laws that restrict treatment.
I was a fan of the anti-woke movement early on - the intellectual dark web so to speak - but it really feels like Americans just traded one flavour of woke for another.
rae
4d ago
I’m not American so I’m not too familiar with what you’re describing. Where I live the vaccination enforcement and lockdown measures were significantly harsher than anywhere in the US, and there was broad social support from all political parties. Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
And the right in the US, especially in its current MAGA incarnation, is just as gleeful in its authoritarian tendencies. It doesn’t even feel economically right wing anymore; tariffs, protectionism, anti-immigration, the government having ownership of major companies… that was all leftist policy 50-60 years ago.
rae
4d ago
Why is the American right so obsessed with autism and discovering some unknown or suppressed cause for it?
Politicising medicine in general is baffling to me, like how Ivermectin is right-wing while vaccines are left-wing (and I remember 20 years ago most antivax people were leftwing). At some point it feels like American politics is about picking any conceivable topic and flipping a coin to declare one side Republican and the other Democrat.
No, race realism is also wrong, the actual reason is class/subculture for which you are using skin colour as a proxy, due to the US having a underclass primarily composed of black people. I live in a European country and there is a social class that behaves in identically disruptive ways on public transport, despite being as white as the rest of the population.
I get the historical and current issues with racism in the US, but I do think it blinds both the left and right to the possibility that culture is the biggest issue.
rae
16d ago
Felled-Martin’s novel is poorly written, sanctimonious, masturbatory drivel and it absolutely did not deserve the praise that it got. I stopped reading after one of the main characters (a trans woman) got a hard-on from shooting at a TERF militia called “the Knights of JK Rowling”. I wasn’t aware before but it doesn’t surprise me that the author called for the death of public figures she disagreed with, I’m glad she’s being cancelled after celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, and I genuinely hope it represents a vibe shift from the politics that dominate the kinds of media she’s involved with.
And I say all of this as a liberal trans woman who heavily disliked Charlie Kirk and found his politics morally reprehensible. You don’t have to mourn the man, you can even comment on the irony of his final words, but actively cheering on his death, a gory assassination in front of thousands of college students, should be completely unacceptable.
You can get 10-20 tokens/s with CPU only inference as long as you have at least 32GB of RAM. You can offload some layers to your GPU and get probably 30-40 tokens/s? Of course, a 3090 gives you >100t/s but it’s still only $800, I’d consider that mid-range compared to a $2k+ 5090.
Swapping from the SSD is only necessary if you’re running huge 100B+ models without enough RAM.
rae
1mo ago
If you think you’re being subsidised on a $20/month plan, switch to using the API and see the price difference. Keep in mind that providers make a profit on the API too - if you go on OpenRouter, random companies running Deepseek R1 offer tokens at a 7x cheaper rate than Claude Sonnet 4 despite Deepseek most likely being a large model.
As @RandomRanger said, it would make little sense for ALL companies to be directly subsidising users in terms of the actual cost of running the requests - inference is honestly cheaper than you think at scale. Now, many companies aren’t profitable in terms of revenue vs. R&D expenditure, but that’s a different problem with different causes, in part down to them not actually caring about efficiency and optimisation of training runs; who cares when you have billions in funding and can just buy more GPUs?
But the cat’s out of the bag and with all the open weight models out there, there’s no risk of the bigcos bumping up your $20/mo subscription to $2000/mo, unless the USD experiences hyperinflation at which point we’ll have other worries.
rae
1mo ago
TLDR for this one: for LLM providers to actually break even, it might cost $2k/month per user.
If the Big AI companies try to actually implement that kind of pricing, they will face significant competition from local models. Right now you can run Qwen3-30B-A3B at ridiculous speeds on medium-end gaming rig or a decent Macbook, or if you're a decently sized company, you could rent a 8xH200 rig 8h/day, every workday, for ~$3.5k/mo, and give 64 engineers simultaneous, unlimited access to Deepseek R1 with comparable speed and performance to the big known models, so like... $55/month per engineer. And I highly doubt they're going to fully saturate it every minute of every workday, so you could probably add even more users, or use a quantized/smaller model.
rae
1mo ago
Were you attracted to women before on any level?
I don’t see how conversion therapy can work unless you start off at least a little bit bi. There’s something just neurological different about gay vs straight brains and you can’t change that through therapy anymore than you can fix epilepsy. I also find the flip side - e.g. straight men watching gay porn and “turning gay” because straight porn became too boring - to be similarly questionable.
rae
1mo ago
consistent in claiming that (contra your interlocutors) they can reason, they can perform a variety of tasks well, that hallucinations are not really a problem, etc. Perhaps this is not what you meant, and I'm not trying to misrepresent you so I apologize if so. But it's how your posts on AI come off, at least to me.
When someone writes something like that, I can only assume they haven’t touched a LLM apart from chatgpt3.5 back in 2022. Have you not used Gemini 2.5 pro? O3? Claude 4 Opus?
LLMs aren’t artificial super intelligence, sure. They can’t reason very well, they make strange logic errors and assumptions, they have problems with context length even today.
And yet, this single piece of software can write poems, draw pictures, write computer programs, translate documents, provide advice on countless subjects, understand images, videos and audio, roleplay as any character in any scenario. All of this to a good enough degree that millions of people use them every single day, myself included.
I’ve basically stopped directly using Google search and switched to Gemini as the middle man - the search grounding feature is very good, and you can always check its source. For programming, hallucination isn’t an issue when you can couple it with a linter or make it see the output of a program and correct itself. I wouldn’t trust it on its own and you have to know its limitations, but properly supervised, it’s an amazingly capable assistant.
Sure, you can craft a convincing technical argument on how they’re just stochastic parrots, or find well credentialed people saying how they just regurgitate their training data and are theoretically incapable of creating any new output. You can pull a Gary Marcus and come up with new gotchas and make the LLMs say blatant nonsense in response to specific prompts. Eppur si muove.
rae
1mo ago
I guess there’s a big difference between a bi guy who’s secure in his bisexuality and has had relationships with both men and women, and one that’s still figuring things out. The former seems to use “pansexual” or “queer” as a label more often I’ve found? I can totally see why bicurious guys would be a problem though, and I don’t think I’d want to date one.
I’d date a trans man for sure if we’re compatible. It’s not that I’d be more attracted to one, but it makes things easier when you have a shared experience over things like dysphoria and the other person just gets it. Plus you don’t have to worry about them transitioning to a woman (which is weirdly common among men willing to openly date trans women).
rae
1mo ago
Not sure if this is a class or geographical thing but that does not reflect at all the reality I live in, and it still doesn't answer why Tim Cook or Sam Altman are billionaires despite having zero interest in women.
rae
1mo ago
Of course, there are all kinds of edge cases, what if they didn't know someone was a man? Wiser men than me have ended up in Thailand drunk off their tits, and didn't realize their partner was a lady boy. Or what if they're post-op trans?
If they look like women, and if they don't have a dick (or you're unaware of it due to drunkenness), how is that an edge case? And what about the reverse - a man having a passable trans male partner? Are both scenarios gay/bi?
I think it's easier to just think of it as, if you're a man and only attracted to male characteristics, e.g. penis, body hair, muscles, general masculinity, etc. you're gay, if you're only attracted to female characteristics, e.g. vagina, breasts, small waist/large hips, you're straight. If you're attracted to both, you're bi, past a certain fuzzy point (being attracted to tall women is fine, but being attracted to tall, muscular, hairy women with small hips and deep voices starts getting a bit sus). You're not suddenly gay for being attracted to a drawing of a woman if the artist later goes "ha, I actually intended it to be a male, it just looks like a drawing of a woman!".
I agree with you that retroactively labeling people in the historical sense is a questionable task. Many cultures, particularly the Romans or Greeks, had models of sexuality that don't cleanly match onto our own. Even when it was two men, the question of who was on top versus the bottom was very important. The latter was condemned, the former condemned weaker, tolerated or extolled as virtuous depending on the exact moment in time.
There does seem to be this universal male anxiety over "does liking/doing X make me less of a man?" though. In modern times this seems to have become "am I gay for liking/doing X" which adds an layer of worry over things Romans or Greeks wouldn't have cared about, like being the dominant partner of a younger male of lesser social status. Although the Romans thought having a goatee or touching your head with your finger was effeminate, so maybe it evens out.
rae
1mo ago
The whole point of pursuing money and status through your career is to gain access to women. If you can cut out the middleman, why not? What's a job other than working 40 hours a week to make your bosses richer?
So why do straight women and gay men have careers then?
rae
1mo ago
There's many different kinds of bisexual men and you can't paint them all with the same brush. Some are mostly into women and occasionally will top men, some will only bottom for men but top women, some are 99% attracted to women but there's this one guy that takes their fancy, some are just hypersexual and will do anything with anyone. I've known chasers to be bisexual, straight or gay (the latter being into trans men), and I've known bisexual men who didn't want anything to do with trans women. I think trans women would avoid a lot of heartache if they stop being obsessed with dating 110% straight masculine guys and went for the guys that are fine meeting them for a coffee date in broad daylight instead.
My experience with chasers has been that they make themselves known in the first 5 minutes of conversation so it's never been an issue I guess?
rae
1mo ago
Great write-up as usual. I'm surprised at how stereotypically gay these lads were, you really got lucky from an ethnographic POV.
I clarified my presence, attributing it to a combination of cultural unfamiliarity and severe myopia. FG gestured towards the numerous pride flags. I claimed to have interpreted them as generic contemporary decor. He then indicated the very large flag by the entrance, to which I could only plead a fundamental lack of situational awareness.
Wouldn't this also be affected by Pride celebration? Where I live even the burrito place will be covered in pride flags for a good two months in summer, and a big greasy burrito full of beans is probably not the kind of food you'd want as a gay man looking for a hook-up.
I was also offered, variously, two blowjobs, a rimjob, and a golden shower. I declined with gratitude. It is good to be desired. It is also good to have boundaries.
I'm grateful that no gay man has ever been this crude with me in person. At worst they've just asked me to go home with them and the rest was implied, or made suggestive innuendos.
I declined to explain how I know the sound.
You could just have said you had a gay roommate or something like that. Declining just invites more questions and idle speculation.
How often do you encounter men who are closeted or who identify as bi? FG avoids them. Too messy, too much drama, too many norm mismatches, and in his experience too much reluctance to test for STIs. Others nodded. This was not about identity policing. It was about risk management.
Closeted men is perfectly valid, but bisexuals? That's not risk management, that's bigotry (pun intended?). And they contradicted themselves anyway, they were offering to hook-up with you despite you having clearly stated you were heterosexual from the get-go, so they were hoping you were at least a little bi-curious.
But from your description of these gents I do get it in one sense. They basically want someone of that's "culturally gay" like them, for whom offering a golden shower to a stranger over a couple of drinks is normal behavior.
Sex in dark corners and in toilets tends to discourage straight tourists and is conveniently hard to legislate away without awkward free speech arguments.
As far as I know sex in a public lavatory is illegal in the UK regardless of the sex of the participants. I would assume a pub (i.e. a public house) counts? I know straight people who've had sex in a bar toilet, so there's no argument to be made that it's an exclusively homosexual act.
In any case, your talk with these gents made me understand the perspective of some more intolerant people. That "gay culture" seems to be purposefully designed to be repulsive. I understand that being a pick-me isn't helpful, and that loud gays were the ones that paved away for LGBT rights while the polite, respectful homophile movement accomplished little... but still I feel like I've had the most headway with conservatives when I explained that deep down we just want to be free to live the same lives straight people do. Popper-inhaling, incontinent, promiscuous people who go to bath houses and have sex in the corner of a bar where anybody can come in and have a drink, well, I have little defense of that beyond my general liberal principles.
rae
1mo ago
I recall you had a post a while ago where you said you’d dated both men and women. Did you develop a preference for men, or how did women fit into this?
I’ve always been attracted to masculinity, which obviously made it a bit harder. Plus it’s really hard to avoid gendered expectations when you’re male and dating a woman.
Well, I guess all I can say is, join the club. We don’t have fun prizes but there are occasional butterflies in the chest. And you get a stamp on your card when someone says, “you’re sweet but I don’t see this going anywhere.”
That’s a very relatable post. I think there’s many more men out there like you than it seems, but sex-forward, superficially attracted men feel like they’re the majority due to social pressure. How much of locker room talk is posturing to impress other men, as opposed to actual genuine feelings?
Interesting. I’d never considered that being played could actually be preferable to sex-forward behavior, but I can see it. I guess gay men just didn’t even make an effort? Just, “oh, no dick pic, seeya?”
There’s a number of other body parts that can keep them on the hook, but yeah it’s 100% visual.
I’m not saying that that being played is actually good of course, obviously I’d rather they make themselves known, but the fact that there is no real gay male equivalent of a straight man seducing and manipulating women into sex is telling.
Some of the gay guys I knew hadn’t even cuddled anyone once despite having high enough body counts to get multiple STDs. They called their hook-ups “fuck and go”: no kissing, no foreplay, just send pics, go to a guy’s place, leave 10 min later. To me that’s just soulless and depressing.
rae
1mo ago
I might very well be the only heterosexual person here, on a Saturday night.
Hey you got pretty lucky! From what I hear the average gay bar is mostly filled with straight cis women nowadays, and I’ve even seen middle aged women and their (perfectly straight looking) husbands at drag nights.
3-5% would be exclusively gay men, 37% would be the number that had any homosexual experience regardless of their orientation. It might actually have been more common in the past because there were more male-only spaces and since being gay was so taboo, there was paradoxically more leeway. Friends I know who went to single-sex schools reported a lot of “gay stuff” happening despite most participants being straight, with the motivation being hazing, power dynamics, sexual frustration due to lack of women, etc (see what goes on in prisons).
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