urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
No bio...
User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
They believe gen AI will be like NFTs, where the general consensus is that the technology was overhyped and has limited use cases and was mocked both at the time and in hindsight. They believe gen AI has few to no actual use cases and is essentially useless technology that wastes water, electricity, and compute to create text and imagery that is unreliable, useless, and has no function.
They’re wrong, but they’re very confident. In the case of gen AI images and video, they have enough numbers that they’ve been able to make gen AI art controversial and low-status, which in creative fields is a death sentence. They believe they can combine that power with generative AI becoming more expensive to use because of a burst bubble ending cheap generation for end-users to make it both low-status and expensive.
That said, I get the sense that uptake of AI generated artwork is slowly growing in the corporate space, particularly as an adjunct or aid to human design instead of a replacement.
I used Sora 2 for about a week when it came out, then never used it again. I might have used the app for funny video generation, but they insisted on watermarking everything and creating a social media bubble for Sora content, which was always a dumb idea. Meanwhile Sora 1, which actually had a cool discovery feed for generated images, was just sunsetted as well.
The OpenAI ecosystem sucks now in a way it didn’t 3 months ago. Claude is ascendant.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
The company line is to buy your own router if you need access to other settings, but that's about to become a lot harder.
Me using OPNsense on commodity hardware with an Intel NIC PCI-e card
I actually use UPnP because it makes building direct-connect tunnels over tailscale easier (and my ISP offers symmetrical fiber, but no IPv6, riddle me that), but I monitor it and have some restrictions in place. Most users shouldn't use it though.
Actually my ISP puts IPoE on a VLAN, but none of their techs know anything about it and I had to reverse-engineer it using reddit. Their loaned-out gateway (which is bundled in the price, apparently?) can give you a WAN link for your own router on VLAN 1, but that's another device you have to put in the path. Maybe breaking up Ma Bell wasn't such a good idea, they at least had "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" instead of the hodgepodge of nonsense that passes for telecommunications in this country.
My girlfriend's ISP-provided router let me change the subnet, but not the DNS IPs distributed by DHCP, weirdly enough, and they're locked to the default ISP DNS. (She at least gets v6 though, God Bless American Telephone & Telecom.) I could go through the effort to run a DHCP server on her network, but I'm really only freeloading on her network for my backup server, so I just gave all my devices their own manual DNS servers set to my preference and we're good to go.
I'm trying to write up something more serious for urquan on this, but I need to go into more detail for his use case.
Uh oh. I wasn't trying to prompt an instruction manual.
I'll caveat what I've said before with the point that I don't really engage with the gay community much any more, and when I did it was more of an experiment due to loneliness than it was a serious desire to build a world there. I think you could technically call me bisexual, but the number of men who do anything at all for me is very small, and very highly selected as the most feminine group among those. Basically the sort who you could sort of squint at and imagine they're a woman.
The kind of masculine disgust towards the effeminate and the flamboyant that you see in gay men like self_made's brother and the other gay commenters here was never true of me. Even limiting to that group, a 10/10 on my scale is about as attractive as a 3/10 woman, and that's being generous. I find true masculinity actively repulsive, and still cannot describe how even straight women could possibly find men attractive, despite understanding they have every mechanism of natural selection on their side. Given those limitations, and my romantic orientation that contrasts with what you typically find in the gay community (even if subcultures that are more assimilatory exist), the project was always rather statistically doomed to failure.
If anything, I'd say I identify more with the gynandromorphile concept that rae once discussed than with bisexuality-re-bisexuality, and I can't distinguish passing trans women from cis women in my patterns of attraction. That said, I do not experience autogynephilia and find the concept rather strange.
That's the actual takeaway I had from my college experimentation (my moral and visceral opposition to casual sex were pre-existing, though it strengthened them). Given such inclinations are fairly despised by straight men ("faggot"), gay men ("tourist"), and trans women ("chaser") alike, I had limited opportunities to act on it and ended up just dating cis women with whom my pattern of attraction was well-trod and socially legible. I broke some hearts along the way, and so some element of my subsequent interest in the topic is trying to find the right sequence of words so I can explain to myself, to the cosmos, to no one and to everyone, that my desire was never to hurt anyone and I was just lonely, lovelorn, and surprised by what I found in places I never expected to find it, and I broke hearts because I was afraid I would pull someone truly close and then devastate them in a worse way if I turned out to be wrong about myself.
'Sapiosexual' is a really obnoxious self-identifier, but it is pointing toward and around a concept with some meaning, just corrupted as a signifier by the mess of people who kinda abuse it.
Hm. I'm not familiar with any changes in the term's significance since around 2013 or so, but I dated a girl in school who unironically called herself that. And genuinely every woman I've ever dated has said words to that effect -- my current girlfriend jokes that she wants her children to have "your juicy brain genes." I'm not the sort of person that goes around bragging about IQ, but the thing that is statistically unusual about me is verbal intelligence, so it's not really surprising to me that people who went, "that guy is special" all identify the same trait in me as the most attractive one. But words, of course, are both my gift and my fortress, and the instrument I use to connect is the same instrument I use to hide.
Maybe it means something else now, but back then it meant something like, "attracted to intelligence as a personality trait more than other features (but not exclusively)." Some people are like that.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
She's saying he's hot.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
There was a motte post that was memorable to me, and I keep trying to find it so I can quote it exactly and reference it. I can’t remember if it was on this site or the subreddit. But it was a discussion of dating or bullying of some kind, and ended with the commenter saying, “most of the women I’ve been friends with or dated were outcasts from the ruthless social competition of high school girls, and they bore the scars of that experience.” I thought it was an interesting point.
Does anyone have any clue who posted this or what the original comment was?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
the trans issue
Which, in Britain, where Theroux is from and where the panic about the manosphere is most prominent, is a feminist issue. British feminists are a strikingly powerful and organized bloc and feminism continues to be a major culture war issue in the UK.
TERF opposition to trans stuff is directly connected to feminist opposition of the manosphere. They see both as manifestations of men attempting to wield power over women or harm them.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
The manosphere stuff appeals to two kinds of men -- men who can't get laid, and men who can get laid more than they think is reasonable. You see that in the distribution of complaints about dating on the motte: on the one hand you have the Hock guy, and on the other you have Sloot. One side talks up to women, even if they're complaining; they see women as having more power and options than them, and are annoyed/frustrated/alienated by the gap. The other side talks down to women, seeing them as weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone who, in the words of Sloot, defend their wonderfulness even as they violate it.
The point of the manosphere, and perhaps why the outrage is so high, is that it consists of men who are in the latter group trying to recruit men in the former group to join them. Feminists get upset at this because its goal is to convert men with less power than women into men with more power than women, who look down on women and see them as manipulable, and it's not hard to see how feminism would find that alarming. Conservatives/normies/romantics get upset at this because it asserts that any kind of complementarianism/egalitarianism/mutuality is false consciousness, and that's their whole orientation towards intimacy. Traditionalists get upset at this because it argues that women are weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone, and men should exploit this for their own benefit. Traditionalists instead make the very different argument that women are weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone, and men should be beneficent to them because of it. That tension is pretty explicit; some of our trad posters will say essentially just this, and then in the next breath call Sloot a sexist.
That said, I have no clue what feminism is actually saying to men nowadays. I actually think they're saying nothing. Like you said, normies/trashy women are spilling their tea all over the internet now, and so exposure to women's concerns about dating is unregulated and not filtered through feminist beliefs except insofar as young women reach for feminist concepts they've heard of to ground whatever feelings they have in something concrete. For that reason, a lot of the dating and marriage complaints just come across as petty and boring, not meaningfully different from the complaints that you could hear about boyfriends and husbands in 1980 or 1999.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
High cost of healthcare, big corporate malfeasance, immigration etc. Every president comes in promising to fix the issue and doesn't fix it.
These problems won’t be fixed because fixing them would require stepping on the toes of powerful industries or interest groups who have skilled lobbyists. The current situation pleases enough of the middle class+ that even appeals to the power of the voters won’t work to create change. And any movement on them will be easily weaponized into a deadly political attack: “government death panels,” “big government interference,” “socialism,” “ICE hates brown people.”
Trump actually ran appealing to his personal wealth as a form of independence from lobbyists and party machines, but governed in his first term as a fairly standard Republican allied with industries like steel and coal.
We’re in the situation because it’s a stable equilibrium since the 80s. Some kind of massive shock would be required to change anything, something bigger than dot-com, bigger than the recession, bigger than Obama, bigger than Trump. In other words, if things changed to the point that major political reform were possible, we’d have bigger problems than healthcare costs.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
Maybe we should pay them more in exchange, if their research is so useful.
Or ban it, if it isn’t.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
Wow, that’s… insane. I thought my red state ran the DMV poorly but here you can walk in to an office and get a temporary ID document same-day, and a card in the mail within a month. You might have to wait an hour for everything, but you’ll get it done. Appointments for the DMV aren’t even a concept, lol.
And the only difference between a standard state ID and a real ID is you need ONE MORE piece of mail sent to your address. When I realized that was the difference I laughed at how much of a political fight it was for and against it.
If that’s the reality for a lot of the country, then no wonder voter id is controversial. Y’all need to fix the DMV before anyone talks about voter ID.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
First of all, I’m so sorry for your loss.
My opinion is that you should work on getting a backup of his data and not worry so much about repairing the computer. There’s an SOP in IT that you should always focus on data recovery first, and that’s something I try to follow in my personal life. You never know what might be in his disk partition that would be meaningful.
I doubt you’re in a place where the resale value of his computer plays much of a role in your thinking. I don’t know that I would be. I actually don’t know enough about the secondary component market to say whether it would be worth it for that reason to invest in a repair, but of course that depends on what the problem is.
I can’t read a fellow geek’s mind, but I can say that hardware raid with raid cards has gone out of fashion in the consumer enthusiast space. Motherboards often have raid features built in, but those have also gone out of fashion, because they’re unreliable and often lead to tough data recovery situations at times like this.
I’d presume the system uses Windows, in which case my main concern would be not getting bitlockered out of the data on the drive. Microsoft’s hard disk encryption… isn’t great, but it’s persnickety, and often works by only allowing access to the data on the drives from the computer itself, based on hardware encryption keys. If he was using bitlocker, that would definitely make repairing the system as it stands your best option. This scenario would make the SATA-to-USB adapter option unfortunately not viable.
Boot loops could be the power supply (although that’s not really where my mind would go to first) but it could also be a lot of things, of course. Including software issues. Since you’re in that place where you’re dealing with grief and decision making/critical thinking can be impaired, this might be a situation where asking a friend or family member with IT experience, or hiring a reputable PC repair company, would be the right call, even if you have the technical experience to do some troubleshooting yourself. Grief and data loss are two things I wouldn’t want mixed.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
Leaving your phone at home can also be presented as evidence of intent to commit a crime, especially if your usual pattern is to carry it with you everywhere. This has been successfully presented as circumstantial evidence by prosecutors at trial in various cases.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15d ago
Uh oh, I may have to diagnose you with megachurch American.
I can’t judge though - I was baptized in a megachurch, which didn’t even do me the favor of keeping any baptismal records. This became a slight issue when I needed documentation of baptism. Fortunately I had videographic evidence.
In a lot of ways the broader evangelical orbit has become megachurch-y, even if most of the clearly negative elements like pastoral financial enrichment are absent. I’m well aware of the social movement in evangelical circles towards imitation of whatever gets people to keep coming.
That said, there’s also a clear movement away from the Jesus rock/stage entertainment model of evangelical services, and I know of evangelicals converting to conservative Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, as well as some unusual Baptists who believe Baptists should have liturgical prayer. Lutheranism and Catholicism are less porous, perhaps for sacramentalist reasons, although as a rather high church fellow I insist on baptismal regeneration.
Ah, interesting. When I was writing my post about the meaning of the term "Evangelical" in Lutheran circles, I actually hypothesized that the split between the ELCA and the confessional churches had something to do with the German vs Scandinavian split, but it's interesting that I was actually on to something.
My great-great grandmother had a copy of Walther's hymnal, in the German of course, which is now in my possession. My mother often tells me the family story about her praying in German. The other family story about her German ancestry consists of her fastidiously sweeping the floor while her husband, a full-blood Scots-Irish good old boy, spat tobacco on the porch. But Lutheranism in my family was wiped out a few generations ago in favor of generic American evangelicalism, or Holiness Pentecostalism.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15d ago
I'd argue a majority of megachurches are actually affiliated with a denomination technically speaking, but a defining feature of the megachurch is that it downplays the denominational affiliation if it has one, and focuses on the pastor and brand energy™ to solidify the church's identity. Denominations, like the SBC, or some historically charismatic/Pentecostal denominations that have megachurches affiliated with them often have a tense relationship with the megachurches because they're renegades. But they also are huge, attract large crowds that put money in the plate, and therefore wield large influence in the denomination.
That said, old-school Baptists/Pentecostals are immensely critical of them, particularly among the Pentecostals. Megachurches generally downplay or outright eliminate the 'holy roller' elements associated with classical Pentecostalism, the dancing, the speaking in tongues, and the snakes, because those are generally highly off-putting to lapsed Christians who want a church that entertains them without challenging them. Pentecostals without those elements are essentially Baptists, so except for the minority of genuinely charismatic megachurches, you'd be hard pressed to tell a megachurch affiliated with a historically Pentecostal denomination from an SBC megachurch from a non-denominational one.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15d ago
The theology is de facto based around the "born-again" experience and the personal relationship between individual believers and Jesus (if you are being polite) or about being gay for Jesus (if you are being rude from a male perspective) or about Jesus wanting to be your perfect romance-novel boyfriend (if you are being rude from a female perspective).
This is simply evangelical Christianity, as practiced since the great awakenings. There are plenty of small, very non-megachurch churches where the theology on this point is indistinguishable.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
Genuinely "smoke machine as in theater." I would also count it as a yes if any of his churches have ever conducted a men's conference featuring monster trucks.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
Have any of your churches ever utilized a smoke machine during a worship service?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
If N. Ireland and Scotland ever end up leaving, will you revert to St. George's cross or just keep the Union Jack? And if you keep Wales, can you make the flag depict St. George and the Dragon? I presume that would coax them to leave too, but I would also like to present the historical missed opportunity of a victorious Britain in the American War for Independence stepping on snek.
In Lutheran circles, "evangelical" means "believes in the gospel according to Luther's understanding of the gospel," or in other words believe in salvation by faith alone. Luther originally wanted his followers to be called "evangelicals" becaue he believed that his understanding of the gospel, evangelion, was the most important element of his theology. By this definition virtually all protestants are "evangelicals," roughly speaking, and it has that meaning in some of the northern European countries where Lutheranism became the normative version of Protestantism.
The term has come to mean different things in the British and US context because of the history of great revivals with the goal of convincing mass numbers of people to have an emotional experience of surrender to the divine, which was central to their understanding of the gospel in a way that Lutherans/Calvinists/Catholics generally connected to sacraments rather than conversion experiences. Evangelicals (in that sense) also strongly defined themselves as popular preachers who wanted to make large numbers of people have a conversion experience, and felt that naming themselves after the evangelion was worthwhile because that was their message. You could make the argument that Anglo-American evangelicals were also evangelicals in the sense Luther would have meant it, but they just shouted it really, really loudly.
In that sense, Methodism, Pentecostalism, and most forms of the Baptists had major evangelical influences, and you can still find some Anglicans in the UK (a few) and the US (a few more) who would identify with the evangelical movement.
The "Lutheran" term came about because the common Catholic custom was to call a heresy by the name of its inventor, as in Arianism, Hussitism, Calvinism, and also the old-fashioned Christian term for Islam that hydro likes to use, Mohammedanism.
I guess the lesson is that the terms people call themselves rarely denote something concrete. "Democrat" and "Republican?" Their dispute isn't really over whether the US should be a democracy or a republic, though some particularly confused and pedantic Republicans like to claim "the us isn't a democracy, it's a republic!" like those aren't compatible, and the US is of course a Federal Democratic Republic and those terms lent their names to the first American party system (Federalists vs Democratic-Republicans) and to the current party system, while "Democratic Republic" on its own means communist, and "The Democratic Republic of America" is basically the "Man in the High Castle" of conservative fear fantasies. We live in a confusing world, and whales are fish.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
Aw, that’s sweet.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
Presumably it means, “Lutheran, with conservative theology,” or in other words a Lutheran who believes in the real presence as a literal metaphysical belief and takes the Augsburg confession as a literal statement of truth about reality.
Though I’m not sure it’s true we don’t have any. I know we have some confessional Protestants who have positive views of Lutheran scholasticism. Presumably at least one of those is a Lutheran.
Having been a teenager during the bronie era, I thought you were trying to say that the man had both a multi-monitor setup and a my little pony collection. Also, IMO, multi monitor setups are highly popular in the workplace among both men and women, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me for a woman who works a computer-based job at home to have a multi-monitor setup for productivity.
That said, on the trans question, I’ve met trans women who struck me as masculine in their hobbies, some who struck me as more autistic than anything else, and some who struck me very feminine in a stereotypical sense, like being a reader of romance novels or having strong opinions about makeup in the way only women and guys like James Charles do. If some fraction of gay men are feminine, like gay hairdressers, it doesn’t beggar belief that some trans women would be, too.
Having grown up in a very red part of the US, I’d say that trans women from rural or conservative environments often seem much more invested in femininity than trans women from the coasts, which may speak to the level of dysphoria or femininity a person needs to reach in that kind of environment before taking the social risk of transitioning.
As magicalkittycat says, this type of person is rare, very rare, and my very loose outsider’s impression is that they’re happy to ally with the more flamboyant elements of the trans coalition or the broader the LGBT coalition because of strength in numbers, while privately being more reserved and actually rather conventional, if you get to know them.
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