rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
8d 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
9d 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
10d 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
10d 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
10d 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
10d 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
10d 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.
rae
22d ago
The initial wave of patients presented with the classic poorly differentiated psychosomatic complaints that are the norm in developing countries. When your native language lacks a dedicated lexeme for "depression", psychological distress predictably routes itself through somatic channels. It manifests as a vague stomach ache or random peripheral tingling.
This is really interesting, I’ve heard about this phenomenon before but never first hand.
Are those depressed patients aware at all that their mood could be low or that there’s something psychological bothering them? Or do they experience their depression purely in psychosomatic symptoms?
I’m wondering if this could be an explanation of the part of the rise in depression/anxiety/mental health conditions in modern societies, or even the mental health gap between liberal and conservatives. Previous generations/less developed countries don’t have better mental health (in fact, from stories I heard from older family members, it might have been far worse in the past), but they’re just unaware of their own mental scape, and lack even the words to describe the concepts we take for granted.
rae
1mo ago
If you’re comparing being a heterosexual man to a heterosexual woman, sure. But if you’re a relatively effeminate male and primarily attracted to men, it’s very hard to feel like the grass isn’t greener on the other side. The “carrot” doesn’t look appetising and the idea of an escape from the “stick” of masculinity seems very appealing. The reality of transition is different from the ideal of course, but that only further increases the feelings of envy.
rae
1mo ago
I was fairly similar to you in that I eventually mostly accepted my situation after 2 years or so of puberty. The problem was when I opened Pandora’s box again and tried things outside the default heterosexual male experience, and the same feelings came back up, because holy crap what do you mean I don’t have to take care of this annoying wild horse that’s always at risk of trashing my place?
rae
1mo ago
I’d love to read more about your perspective and experience on this! Growing up I felt like I was the only one having trouble integrating male sexuality into my sense of self, and standard narrative, from my peers, media, parents was just completely alien. Obviously I gave up in the end and went with the nuclear option, but maybe there would be a world where I didn’t had if the discourse was different.
Or maybe not. I didn’t even have the external pressures you described. My upbringing was irreligious and vaguely sex-positive, and I grew up before Tumblr was even a thing back when “boys will be boys” was still used unironically as an excuse. I’m not sure the problem is lack of guidance. I was already uncomfortable being told the default heterosexual dating script, and if was told explicitly by society that as a man, I must be (all the things that were the opposite of my personality and desires), I probably would have given up much earlier.
I feel like I have to be a different man to different people, and in particular how I have to relate to women romantically and -- especially -- in the bedroom in order to please them is profoundly distinct from how I am in every other avenue of my life. I have a hard time integrating those things. I actually think this is much more common than you're suggesting.
What happens if you don’t put on the mask and just stay who you are when interacting romantically or in the bedroom?
I feel like you’d be missing out on so much if you can’t be authentically yourself with your partner. Sex when you’re just acting out a persona in order to please your partner… that just means you’re both getting cheated out of real human connection, no? What’s the point then?
rae
1mo ago
I’ve hardly ever seen a gender neutral bathroom in all the European countries I’ve visited, apart from the occasional accessible bathroom available to all. I don’t think it’s realistic to retrofit all public toilets everywhere to have a separate gender neutral section, just for a tiny percentage of the population. Maybe a law could mandate it for new builds or substantial renovations, but that’s going to take multiple decades to be widespread.
Personally I’m a trans woman and I switched to using the women’s bathroom after I started getting too many stares, and the occasional comment saying I was in the wrong place when trying to use the men’s. No one has made a fuss about me since, and I’ve gone to the loo with female friends and chatted with people in there too. As far as social issues go, it’s a ridiculously minor one.
rae
1mo ago
Well firstly the “top shortage” is greatly overstated anyway. Most statistics suggest that for gay men, it’s about half vers, quarter tops and quarter bottoms, within a few percentage points.
But the men who are exclusively into twinks and femboys are almost all bisexual, and bisexual men have a lot to lose by being out. A large amount of straight women would not date a bisexual man, their masculinity would be questioned by their peers, and a lot of people believe bisexual men don’t even exist and that they’re just gay and in denial.
By being on the down low, they can have their cake and eat it too: continue dating women as a straight man, have access to easy, promiscuous sex (relatively speaking), and not deal with having to explain anything to anybody.
rae
1mo ago
This is where grouping all men who have sex with men as a single “gay” monolith goes wrong.
Because they don't want a faggy queen, they want the kind of highly masculine man who... has gay sex with faggy queens.
This kind of man exists in very high numbers, they just aren’t open about it. Go on Grindr and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of “discrete” tops who love twinks and femboys, and not enough supply to meet the demand.
If masculinity is what gay men are attracted to then logically they should masc-maxx, but if femininity is what masculine men want then it would make more sense to trans-max, so that they can "go straight" to fulfill their gay fantasy of straight sex.
Today a large number of gay men do actually masc-maxx, but just because you can look masculine doesn’t mean you can act masculine. Even if you convincingly manage to imitate masculinity, it’s still just a façade. Two partners pretending to be something they’re not in order to stay attracted to each other is just sad.
But again, there’s multiple kinds of gay men. The very feminine “faggy queens” are highly likely to transition today, not because they want a masculine man, but because they want a man who’s attracted to them as a woman, which they’ll never get if they masc-maxx. It’s not just about how you see your partner, but also about how your partner sees you.
But the vast majority of gay men today are absolutely fine with their partner seeing them as a man. I’ve seen quite a few gay couples where it’s just two regular looking guys, generally a bit fruity sure, but not excessively so and not enough to turn each other off.
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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