domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
2rafa
44m ago
I work a lot with non-native English speakers and I think ChatGPT has definitely improved things, especially when they want to try to explain more complex aspects of the business, their funding needs, answer certain questions. I used to get a lot of emails so poorly written and barely comprehensible that it would take much longer to parse the meaning than if they had just sent the email in whatever native language and let me Google translate it. Mostly these are intelligent people, they’re just too proud to hire a translator (but not to use an LLM).
To me this is kind of a mass production of furniture or fast fashion thing. At the high end, the amount of genuinely enjoyable and well-produced writing will decline, not even because LLMs aren’t capable of it but because they will default to simple, emotive English in the new style, and because even good writers won’t be bothered in most cases to write themselves or to tweak prompts for better output.
But for the 99% of people who either don’t speak the language they’re ’writing in’ natively or don’t have good verbal ability, communication can be much easier, the gap between what is in their head and something someone else can read has, in my opinion, shrunk.
hydroacetylene
50m ago
Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas
These areas are usually not blatantly violating federal law.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
51m ago
Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"
Khan is definitely the civilisation-killer one, the one that can't be fixed. But you're over-focusing on pre-existing criminal dispositions; it's entirely possible people will accidentally or deliberately introduce psychopathy via the "high-IQ psychopaths have higher income than high-IQ non-psychopaths due to doing white-collar crime and other exploitation" correlation.
hydroacetylene
52m ago
The people who actually wrote these policies are not Jewish. The people who made the decision to actually go through with it are not jewish. Jewish organizations have been asking for this for a long long time and not getting their way. This is about a cudgel for hitting democrats with.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
55m ago
It's lame you had to do this but I get it
I did really enjoy his ability to kick off an argument, although I get why the way he does it is against the spirit of this place
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
57m ago
McMansions are better housing than NYC apartments. Literally- they're bigger, they have more amenities, it's harder for neighbors to affect you, they're less likely to be infested by rats, etc.
This is purely your opinion and given the price people are willing to pay per sqft, one that millions of people do not share with you.
NYC apartments have something McMansions can never have: location, location, location. This is the ultimate amenity.
You may not value it, which is fine, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable.
Huh? The majority of teenagers come with much more programming of anti-slut defenses, parental controls installed, innocence which keeps them away from sexuality. I'm surprised that anyone thinks that human sexuality is primarily innate, rather than cultural, as regards the kinds of things that typically occur in pornographic media.
From personal experience: dating teenagers-to-twenty-year-olds (when I was that age) was mostly a process of breaking down barriers around sexuality, while dating older women they know what they want and they know what they are going to get. Things are much more direct and simple. I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:
All of which amount to a core logic that dating older women is simpler and more convenient than dating younger ones.
So beyond the obvious "They're hot" and "16 or 18 or 21 is just a number with no inherent relation to human development in particular cases" I propose another reasoning for teenagers being the protagonists of your pornographic novels:
#4 For Older Fantasists, when placing a teenager in the leading role of a sexual fantasy, are placing themselves within the fantasy at the appropriate age to fuck such a girl. The fantasy of the younger girl is one of nostalgia for one's own lost youth, the freedom and opportunity inherent therein.
Let's discuss a particular example of this: Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Listen to it, it's a classic and I don't want to hear shit about anyone here loving America if they don't like Billy Joel, but here's some lyrics for close reading:
I'm pretty sure everyone, ever, who has listened to the song pictured Virginia as a Catholic schoolgirl, around seventeen or eighteen years old; sixteen at the youngest nineteen at the oldest. Now, Billy Joel was twenty seven years old when he wrote this. My parents, who loved this song, were in their twenties when it came out. Does anyone who listens to this song imagine the narrator as twenty-seven talking to his Catholic schoolgirl girlfriend? I mean, I guess somebody might, but if they did we can all agree the song would be deeply creepy and awful, closer to horror than to pop. Even the most determined TRPer can't possibly argue that it's normal or good for a twenty-seven year old to be trying to talk his way into his teenage girlfriend's panties.
No, the normal listener to Only the Good Die Young is picturing a teenage boy talking to his teenage girlfriend. Particularly given the later verse about running with a "dangerous crowd;" we're picturing a charming juvenile delinquent who will straighten himself out later. If we're instead picturing a twenty seven year old criminal, once again, creepy fucking lyrics.
You can tell the song is primarily nostalgic for Billy, and his audience's, younger days in that Only the Good Die Young is the start of Joel's nostalgia-retro-oldies period. You have a series of songs that mime the doo-wop of Billy's youth: Uptown Girl, Tell Her About it, The Longest Time. Then you have a series of songs that explicitly reference and call out Billy's boomer memories: It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Keepin' the Faith, We Didn't Start the Fire.
Joel is picturing himself at sixteen, talking to his sixteen year old girlfriend, and remembering the joys of being a teenager. The freedom of dating at that age, one's own strength and virility, with no stakes for either of you beyond mom's disapproval.
And I think a lot of ephebophilic fantasy is of this nature: the fat out-of-shape 38 year old porn consumer doesn't picture himself as a creepy 38 year old porn consumer when he watches "barely legal" porn, or reads it, rather he pictures himself at his prime at 22, when he at least had potential. Even moreso in a novel.
Moreso yet in real life. So often the balding but rich middle aged man who marries a young floozy second wife is trying to recapture his own rapidly-fleeing youth, when he had hair and freedom.
I'll also add in as a freebie throw-in:
#5 Male attraction is recursive and social in nature, and younger women provide higher status because they provide higher status
Men want to pretend that our attractions are purely simple and biological, but they aren't, they're deeply social and status seeking in nature. One can see this in the way "trends" in attractive women in pornography occur over time. What men want is what other men want, because when other men see that you have it, they will think that you must be pretty fuckin' bitchin' to attract such a girl. Marty's loser dad gets the hot girl in Back to the Future, and instantly everyone wants to make him class president and hang out with him. This applies to age as well: only rich and high status men can get the twenty year old girlfriend, so men seek out the twenty year old girlfriend as a status symbol. So much more the status symbol to have an illegal girlfriend, and be so powerful that no one can stop you!
As for me, hot women are hot, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The rest is just a question of what price you are willing to pay.
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