urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I've visited the US a few weeks ago and companies seem to have been taking that excuse to put out american flag branded merch everywhere.
Part of this is simply that the 4th of July is coming up in general. Patriotic merch starts going up in US retail in May every year, like clockwork, and there’s always a lot of it.
There may be something different about this year due to the anniversary, but retail looks about the same to me on the patriotic front.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I think their answer to this question would also depend a lot on whether the woman secretly loved him in a romantic sense, like it was a clandestine love affair thing, or whether it was more like prostitution or a get laid and leave every week kind of deal. I think most of the incels would choose the former, but would seriously hesitate about the latter.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
I think you’re both right. Porn has a lot of social and sexual downsides, which we find hard to talk about, because they’re squeezed between feminist critiques of porn (which don’t really care about practical effects on male sexuality unless they can be marshaled for critiques of objectification), religious critiques of porn (for which any objective problems are post hoc evidence for a position already held), feminist arguments in favor of porn (in which case male sexual consequences are almost irrelevant), and general male liberal arguments in favor of porn (for which any sort of critique registers as one of the above, and thus dismissed).
Porn-induced is a strong word, but certainly porn-exacerbated sexual problems when encountering a real woman are real and serious. As is what the nofappers talk about with escalating pornographic taboos, where the attraction to normal vanilla content becomes exhausted by the massive overflow of sexual novelty available in porn, leading to attraction to more taboo kink content to get off, leading to exhaustion of attraction to taboo kink content, leading to more taboo kink content just to get the same arousal…
It’s not hard to meet men who’ve never touched a person’s genitals before but their entire sexuality is organized around complex kink structures. And you can’t run before you can walk, so the young pornbrained guys are unable to comprehend vanilla sex experientially.
That said, I think tretiak is right that young guys feel like they have narrow options in terms of sex. And I’m not actually convinced that men are using porn instead of meeting women, as I think men’s desire for companionship is much more complex than just locate nearest vagina. They use porn to get off, but of course the emotional longing and the desire for intimacy and the want for someone to hold on cold winter nights still remains.
Where porn damages sexuality becomes prevalent much later, if they do meet a woman they like, where they realize they’ve seen a thousand women have sex with men, but don’t know the first thing about what they’re doing.
Introversion has something to do with it, and the internet in general, but this affects both genders, and the flip side of the young men playing video games instead of touching grass are the young women scrolling TikTok instead of touching grass. I’ve met women like that. They’re often very dateable, especially if you’re an introvert. But unless you get very lucky, you’re not going to meet them.
What your argument seems to suggest is that men aren’t meeting women as much because their hunger is satisfied by porn, but I’m not at all convinced that lonely men are that way because they’re not hungry enough. But the young men we’re talking about are simultaneously ashamed, inexperienced, overexposed, under-touched, desperate for intimacy, terrified of humiliation, and living inside a culture that offers him infinite simulacra and few bridges to reality.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
A reverse situation is, of course, famously Chick-fil-a. The US obviously had blue laws in many places at one point, and shopping, working, and of course drinking on the Sabbath was once a matter of social opprobrium in the Bible Belt. That Christians generally don’t do this any more is one of the signs of the decline of strict religious practice among Christians.
In medicine I’m sure scheduling like that would override religious objection even for Christian Sabbatarians, especially since, famously, Jesus directly endorsed healing on the Sabbath. Theology in general considers medical care one of the things that permits Sunday working, like rescuing your ass from the ditch (as the good book saith).
Christian Sabbatarianism, especially outside of magisterial Protestantism, has always been more flexible than Jewish Sabbatarianism, and this is an approach of Nazarean vintage.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
The tension is obvious enough that the Seventh Day Adventists exist as a denomination to assert that worship on Sunday is a corruption of Catholicism. In addition to their millenarianism, of course. It turns out when you accuse the entirety of Christianity of violating one of the commandments, you tend to have a pretty pessimistic view of the world.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
I was always familiar with this as a real thing, though nobody I knew used it. Generally dropdowns that offered honorifics would include master as an option, even in the states.
Though it is more associated with fictional British butlers in the minds of Americans.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
I genuinely got the ick reading the quoted post. That’s creepy. I get that people are attracted to celebrities, but we’re on the same spectrum of parasocial insanity as stalkers here.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
Daft Punk, deep cut Thomas Bangalter and Le Knight Club, Justice, Alan Braxe, Patrick Alavi, Modjo, Kavinsky, Fred Falke, Lifelike, Bob Sinclar, Stardust, Digitalism, Boys Noize, anything from Crydamoure, Georgio Moroder, Der Dritte Raum, Yuksek, Chris Malinchak, Chromeo, Parcels, Miami Horror, HOME, Donna Summer, Earth, Wind & Fire, Phoenix, Gloria Estefan, Empire of the Sun, Two Door Cinema Club, blink-182, The Beefs, Lenny Kravitz, Boney M., Bee Gees, Vitalic, Freemasons, Proux, Defender, Wolfgang Gartner.
I was in the top 0.1% of Duck Sauce listeners one year, and in the top 1% of Cerrone listeners the next year. This year I'm in the top 1% of ItaloBros and Purple Disco Machine listeners.
Lately I've been listening to Iden Kai's Galactica Airlines.
If it's not made on a computer and nothing is synthesized, I don't want to hear it.
But I've also never been to a club, not really my scene.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
Unironically the direct appeal of the greater Idaho movement to the people of Portland.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
I've had good experiences with Omada APs, they can be a little finnicky but most prosumer-level AP solutions can be. I have multiple SSIDs with various VLAN tags applied. My suggestion, especially since you're pulling cable, would be to use wired ethernet as the backhaul medium to connect the APs. Don't use wireless mesh backhaul, if Omada even supports that. I've heard you can use 6Ghz as the backhaul if your APs support it, but that just gives me the ick, I'm a wired-first person.
TP-Link has their Omada management platform as a software you can run on-prem, someone packaged it as a docker container that works very well. You can disable the cloud stuff and just manage it through the local network or over a VPN of your choosing.
What router OS are you planning on using for the Linux box?
I agree with gattsuru's suggestion to get a bigger switch, and bring it in the house, if possible. 16 port (let alone 24 port) managed gear can get expensive fast, but if you plan to only have one switch, it might be worth it to search ebay for older 'smart' switches with manual vlan-tagging capability. But you just bought a house, so... maybe go for gold? My fiber hookup (for 1Gig, far better than what was here before but not anything fancy) gives me an ONT that converts to copper. You may have an actual box that you'll have to set to pass-through mode. (Don't double NAT.) If you have something similar, you can run a cable from the ONT to literally anywhere in the house -- home office, network closet, anywhere -- and not have to worry about your equipment being out in the cold. You wouldn't do that to poor network equipment, would you? I guess maybe your coax terminates in the garage? In that case it might have to stay there. Sarah McLachlan judges you.
You could use one of the technically-standard home networking wall panels, but they are NOT deep, and I wouldn't put much equipment in it if any at all.
It's possible your coax is stapled in places, and so it may not be possible to pull on it. Home telecommunications wiring has always been a bit slapdash; you should see the rats nest in my parents' attic. If some of the coax can't be pulled, you can try and use MoCA to get ethernet through it... though I've had only bad experiences with MoCA, so your mileage may vary. Make sure you use solid-copper cat6 and terminate to jacks. Riser cable will work, don't pay for plenum-rated cable.
Your vlan separation is good, that's the recommended kind of segmentation for home networks nowadays. Make sure that they're not just on separate VLANs but separate SSIDs, and are blocked at the firewall level, so they can't just layer-3 route between each other. I'll note that a lot of home IoT gear can be... annoyed at the prospect of being separated from your personal devices, depending on how their system is designed. mDNS is the bane of my existence. Apple gear is particularly poorly behaving in terms of dealing with complex home networks. A lot of Apple/HomeKit/AirPlay stuff assumes a mostly flat LAN and can get grumpy across VLANs unless you set up mDNS/Bonjour reflection carefully... and I couldn't tell you how to do that, I'm still figuring it out myself. IoT devices that go straight to the cloud can probably do fine just with internet access.
One thing you could do with your BEEFY linux box is run your own DNS, with ad-block capabilities. You could use Pi-hole or AdGuard Home for that. I love it. Makes the internet feel actually usable. I'd recommend using virtualization for it, so you have flexibility. People love Proxmox, I have a soft spot for XCP-NG, not because I have any love for Xen but because their management and backup platforms are more flexible.
Congrats on the new house! I hope your home internet turns out great. Funiculus coaxialis delendus est.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
At some point GPUs aren't even GPUs any more, they're something else.
Wild to think that the lineage of the graphics accelerators with weird aliens on the box is now utterly revolutionizing the world.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
Hm. That's not my experience, at all. They're not the most common, but they're out there. This may just be a generational or regional thing, I'm not sure. But it also sounds like what you're talking about is highly g-loaded, more than simply pop culture geekery. Of course, people interested in smart people things are going to be pretty rare, just because of the bell curve.
Somebody Told Me
I had to look this one up -- not very familiar to me. I have to admit, the first thing that came to mind was Smash Mouth.
When You Were Young
Not familiar to me at all.
But me not knowing rock bands doesn't really mean much, I almost exclusively listen to disco, disco house, and Europop. Disco Demolition Night was an offense against God.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
The only context in which I encountered it was an old Soothouse video in which they did one of the "Google translate 1,000 times in various languages" games with the lyrics, producing:
Get out of my fucking cage
And I did all right
He must go
I want all the reasons
She began to kiss.
How it ended?
This kiss, kisses
I'll sleep
She called a taxi
Despite the fact that there is smoke
And she performs oral sex
Now they sleep
My stomach is very painful
All in my head
But she touched her breast
NOW HE GATHERED HIS HARVEST.
Let me go
I can not kill me.
Avoid
Hey, turn to the sea
Swinging lullaby
STRENGTHEN YOUR POWER
But that's the price I paid.
The fate is calling me
Open the sight,
Because I'm Mr. Brightside.
But I'd never actually heard the music, and still haven't.
Surprisingly, most of the context came through, and the "She's taking a drag" line becoming "And she performs oral sex," is almost a metaphor implicit in the song. I don't know how Google Translate somehow amplified the sexual content.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
The secession @ToaKraka is talking about was directly about the ethnic makeup. The Sudanese government, controlled from the north, was orienting itself explicitly towards being an Arab-dominated Muslim state, and the southern Sudanese, who are largely black, were not happy with this. The south seceeded with the implicit support of the US; Salva Kiir, the country's first president, took a liking to George W., and wears a stetson everywhere because W. gave him one as a gift.
After the secession the militant government descended immediately into civil war and ethnic cleansing; South Sudan is not a great place to live.
Sudan-Sudan, the northern country, is 70% Sudanese Arab and is dominated by Arab culture. South Sudan is overwhelmingly black, but split between different ethnic groups, the largest of which is the Dinka.
"Sudanese" as an ethnic marker refers generally to Sudanese Arabs, who identify as Arab and are descendents of Arab traders and local African tribes.
It drives the differences in how many women get into STEM, it drives the "I'm sorry, but I'm just flat-out exhausted by the constant string of even decent suitors thinking I'm their last romantic shot" that women in STEM/atheism/whatever have been writing about for 25 years, and generally it's pretty hard to find natal women who are into any given nerdy thing.
Hm, I guess this hasn’t been my experience. It’s true that you’ll find it hard to find a woman into, say, retro gaming, PC hardware, AI inference as a technology (rather than as a tool, which is controversial but not as much as the internet wants you to believe) or whatever particular nerdy thing you’re into, but from my zoomer perspective women who are geeky in general alongside a feminine disposition to geeky things aren’t rare. They’re often not the most beautiful women in the world, but male geeks are rarely the most handsome, and they’re good matches for each other.
My first girlfriend in school was very into Doctor Who (very “girl, but geeky” of her), I dated a girl in college who loved anime and went to conventions in cosplay (dressing up and being cute — very “girl, but geeky”), and my current girlfriend is a woman who works in biotech, is obsessed with molecular genetics and is learning Python for bioinformatics work (biology is peak “girl, but in stem”) who I met actually at an atheist club, if you can believe that. She also, of course, is fascinated by true crime (and reverences Othram’s genetic genealogy program), likes cute things, loves to call animals silly names, and reads dark academia novels.
I think geeky guys often make the mistake of looking for women who are essentially men — and yeah, there aren’t many of them. Men generally enjoy machines, systems, engineering, to a degree and in a way that women don’t, and likewise women generally enjoy creatures, cute things, fashion, social issues, learning about the dark side of the world, to a degree and in a way that men don’t. You’re unlikely to meet a woman whose personality and interests line up with men’s, or with yours.
So? You look for a woman who shares your disposition towards the world, your attitude towards the things you like even if applied to different interests, and that’s what geeky girls are like and have always been like. They’re not men with boobs, they’re women with geeky traits.
And a lot of things that are traditionally male-geek have surprising crossover: TikTok has found a way to market mechanical keyboards to white collar women, which is why my girlfriend now has two keyboards with “thocky” or “creamy” (gag) linear switches. And my girlfriend and I share an interest in history and church architecture, and relentless curiosity.
I had a coworker when I worked in PC repair who had an adorable girlfriend who played games on a PC he built for her. The dude was built like a blueberry, but he and his girl seemed to really love each other. What did she do? She was an English student aiming to become a teacher. Peak girl energy.
You don’t have to date in STEM to meet a woman that’s cute, affectionate, culturally compatible, and a good match. I like women whose hobbies and personalities are notably feminine; I like women, I want to be associated with a woman who is a woman and does woman things, but also shares my intellectualized, obsessive, fascinated posture towards the world. Such women are not so rare.
If SF makes finding such women particularly hard, my advice would be to build a nest egg and get the hell out of there. The kind of money we’re talking about counts as exquisite to most women of this country.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
I don’t see how the company fails because of one unusual incident like this. There aren’t that many options in lots of markets for LEGO buy/sell/trade, and few people are trading in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sets.
That said, I always got the sense that BAM was on the low-end of third-party LEGO retailers and most of their smaller competitors are more liked in their particular markets.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
an English speaking, very attractive, attentive Eastern European girlfriend of his type
What's missing is the intellectual companionship, which is the selling point of the Aella sort to their particular clientele. The Eastern European woman might be attentive and attractive, and she might speak English, but she also is from a very different background and worldview, and possibly has a very different personality and level of intelligence.
Which is definitely strange to me -- surely there are enough decently-smart, decently-attractive, actually kind of geeky ladies for men with the kinds of money we're talking about to find one who might fall in love with him non-transactionally, but maybe the Bay really is a harsh place for straight love.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
I looked up the second panel shown in your link. Is this supposed to be some kind of a cuckold thing? She's got an arm around her but Man Child is sitting on the couch watching.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
Christians historically would have said this is a direct parallel to Eve choosing to eat the forbidden fruit. The Genesis narrative describes her being lied to by the serpent, but notably it also describes her making her own appraisal of the situation and making a decision: "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it."
The original sin is a free choice, and likewise the decision that leads to salvation has to be a free choice.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
Mandalorian and Grogu is currently doing worse than Solo, and is being beaten by a horror film. I agree with you. The sequels divided people, which was enough to cause people to lose interest in it, but now most of the voices who were defending them are quiet. Nobody cares enough to press the issue any more.
I recently saw an article in one of the geek publications where the author was like, “yeah, the sequels were inconsistent and undermined each other, but the people who say this was because of feminism are still misogynists.” I’ve never met someone who defends the movies. They suck. But cancelling them wouldn’t do much. The energy’s already gone.
There are two definitions of “manchild.” One is a man who doesn’t uphold adult responsibilities, sarker’s definition. The other is a man whose hobbies are considered childish or underdeveloped. I guess this is more the counterpart of Quirk Chungus or 5434a’s Disney adult.
The two are frequently conflated, sometimes by women as a justification for their ick at male hobbies like gaming or science fiction or LEGO, and sometimes by men as a dominance play against other men they consider beneath them because they indulge in said icky hobbies. Sometimes women will just use “manchild” to refer to a man who is emotionally underdeveloped, in whatever way she thinks he is, like in the Sabrina Carpenter song.
All words with emotional valence eventually just become synonyms of “good” or “bad.” Manchild is one of them. We have plenty of female equivalents — “basic bitch” is one women like for the hobby sense, “foid” is closer to the Sabrina Carpenter usage as deployed by men. For the other equivalents used by men, read the motte.
I have mixed feelings about AI; I have concerns about it being used to automate military decisions that should require human moral judgment (the traditional Terminator-style concern over computer command and control), and also the potential for deepfaking and manufacturing false content to mislead or manipulate. The latter has already been used in new and more sophisticated scams, and I worry about what a nation-state-level actor could do with that kind of power. Economic disruption is there as a genuine possibility, and that's difficult, but I'd prefer if people expressed that possibility directly as a livelihood threat rather than trying to launder the (genuinely sympathetic) concern into environmentalism or moral grandstanding about human creativity or interpretations of IP law in which AI training is assumed-illegal.
I've rarely actually heard someone say, "I don't like AI because doing my job without it gives me satisfaction and a good-paying job, and the introduction of AI into the workplace makes me feel like I'm losing the livelihood I prefer." Instead, I typically hear things like "AI was developed by stealing the intellectual property of hardworking people in order to enrich the billionaires and ELON MUSK and DONALD TRUMP," part of the large egregore of "all my enemies are evil rich fascists."
People would rather be angry than admit vulnerability. Our discussions over issues of social importance would be strikingly improved if people were willing to admit when their principles are self-serving -- which there's nothing wrong with, everyone deserves to advocate for themselves -- instead of trying to convert everything into an argument in which justice, law, the hand of God, and the long arc of history all militate against whoever you think is opposing your interests.
I don't agree with the environmental or land-use concerns for the most part, and it strikes me as degrowth corporate-hate and NIMBYism rather than principled objections. Energy use is not automatically immoral. I'm disappointed in the ways in which AI's demand for silicon is draining the consumer market of computer components and I worry about the impact on individual people's ability to control the means of technological production, but at least so far, this is offset to me by the increase in the ability to interface with computers using natural language.
The kind of generalized AI hate I see out there, online, occasionally in person, is hard for me to wrap my head around. I'm in the 10% of Americans who are more excited than concerned about AI. Generative AI has been great for me, in ways similar to what it's been for you. I enjoy using it. I get value out of it. I think AI slop memes are funny sometimes. I don't like when it's used to write personal messages or fill out marketing boilerplate copy, but I don't hate AI text as a general principle, especially if it's used to bolster and not replace human effort and creativity. And I dislike the invective and contempt that valid uses of AI generate in critics far, far more than I dislike the silliness or laziness of uses of AI that are in poor taste. That's the self-interested vulnerability of my own: I don't want a tool that has expanded my capability to become socially radioactive.
I don't know enough about AI to comment with any level of expertise on the research frontier. But I do have a skeptical prior towards the idea that this generation of AI will produce genuinely generalized AI that can meaningfully, affordably, and trustworthily replace human oversight. But we've gone farther with agentic AI use than I would have expected, so I might be wrong about that.
I don't know. Maybe that's true. I don't know that you could ever say I was in the incel category, but when I did feel foreveralone during college, I would have felt like a woman desiring me without having affection for me would be an insult. I was offered a friends-with-benefits arrangement and turned it down. Sex without affection is just empty, gross.
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