domain:natesilver.net
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
ChatGPT 5 is still using them all the time in my experience, I haven't bothered to tell it to stop as I rarely use it's writing to communicate
They didn't. It was all fake, and an attempt to censor political opposition for the sake of censoring political opposition. There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence they were actually worried about losing profits.
07mk
2d ago
I don't think I have any particular insights into this, but I do think other commenters have gotten at the truth of the matter, along the likes of Trump violating Blue Tribe sanctity and getting away with it or signalling OUTGROUP or whatever. Now, if you think about this for a few minutes, this isn't a dissatisfying answer. But, on first blush, I used to find this answer dissatisfying, because it just moves the question back a step: why did the Blue Tribe/Dems/liberal leftists/etc. decide that there were certain things that they held sacred, such that if they were violated without censure, they would lose their shit?
Because, in the decades leading up to Trumps POTUS run in 2015, much of Blue Tribe rhetoric was based around categorical rejection of one's emotional reaction as having moral authority. This had been happening for decades with narratives around stereotypes or implicit bias, and more recently with the victorious fight for gay marriage, which was quite explicit in stating that one's disgust reaction to something has no relationship to that thing's ethical or moral considerations.
One mistake that I personally think is reasonable to make - because I made it - is believing that the fact that much of Blue Tribe rhetoric supported this implied that much of Blue Tribe thinking supported this. Which would imply that, when members of the Blue Tribe noticed that they had an emotional reaction to Trump due to doing things that offended their sensibilities, they would understand that such an emotional reaction provides precisely the same amount of moral information as their born again Christian uncle Jim reaction to seeing 2 leather daddies kissing at the local pride parade and treat it similarly to how they treat Jim's homophobic rants. But evidently, a very significant portion of Blue Tribers do not do this and, instead, take this emotional reaction of theirs as seriously as if it were shot into their brains as a command by God.
I think what we observed 10 years ago now is a shift from the Blue Tribe being rarely challenged in its commitment to this idea, because the landscape was almost entirely filled with things that barely offended their sensibilities (i.e. "norms," which is really just another way of describing "tradition") - at best, they offended them just enough to create a credible-looking example of how, unlike those Red Tribe ignoramuses, they're virtuous enough to tolerate being offended! - to them constantly being challenged, and that commitment being proven to be just cudgels with which to beat their ideological opponents rather than actual principles they hold.
It's arguable if "no one is principled" is a satisfying answer, but I at least see it as the solution to the puzzle that I had first started noticing a year or two before Trump's 1st POTUS run.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
Somewhat similarly, I don't use them because I'm lazy and a hyphen is good enough. But if I did, I would continue to use them because I don't care what people think.
CanofWorms
2d ago
King Rat is awesome. I tried reading Shogun and gave up about halfway through. Too long and fluffy.
gattsuru
2d ago
There's also a D) of "it's really, really hard, and if you fuck up in the slightest amount, you don't just lose your business account, you get blacklisted from every mainstream credit card processor and bank in your personal capacity".
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.
I'm still using em-dashes, and I'm not going to stop.
That started way earlier back in 2017 in response to among other things PewDiePie making thirdies do racist jokes on camera via fiver and a bit later calling an opponent a nigger during a stream.
This was not YouTube using these things as a pretext for demonitization. Major advertiser like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Adidas, HP, Deutsche Bank, etc. started pulling ads completely from YouTube which lead to a steep fall in ad revenue for the creators. YouTube's response came after, trying to get advertisers back.
It was absolutely advertiser driven. It could well be that advertisers don't care now but they did back then.
jkf
2d ago
C) Mainstream pron sites rely heavily on impulse-buying normies (often intoxicated) with credit cards, and setting up some sketchy crypto shit is way too much friction for this market segment
gattsuru
2d ago
The wounding is the key part, imo, and the resulting reverse expression of concern. I remember conversations when I was younger where the boys all agreed that the ideal dream was for a woman to gently touch the scars/wounds you'd heroically earned and dramatically gasp. I feel like I've seen that moment in a hundred action movies, and it's the pivotal one for establishing the relationship between the love interest and male protagonist. It a moment where a man is allowed to be vulnerable without it ever counting against him.
Yeah, that sounds right. There's a lot of that out there, but it's kinda hard to separate from women-coded hurt/comfort, especially when trying to find examples that aren't aggressively porn-brained (or, alternatively, so sexless than the trans guy is just A Dude, or buried behind a few hundred hours of lore in a gatcha game/mmo). Will see if I can find any better examples.
Altogether, it makes this code as a female fantasy to me, because the locus of concern is on her...
That's interesting; I'd assume that the locus of concern falls on her because she's a goal for the fantasy, rather than the target of it.
I might post those three images together without any explanation, and just ask the boys what they make of it.
If you do, I would be interested to see the results.
I don't have enough personal experience to say anything particularly relevant aboout their internal states. I'll just say this: observed from a distance, though clips and articles and the one "boy" my daughter was friends with, the way they approach masculinity/manliness does not seem congruent with my own experience (which I often find to be broadly applicable when conversing with other cis men).
Yeah, that seems more reasonable. Even trans guys who were very tomboyish before transitioning do have to work at it in ways cis guys don't, and many either intentionally aren't aiming the same place as standard guys (either 'nonbinary', or coming across as a tomboy-with-a-masectomy), and many of the remainder are either aiming at presentations that they're not going to get (tbf: me neither) or they're not really interested in doing or learning about the necessary steps to achieve.
Honestly, I figured this was a lot of it. The few transmen I've encountered IRL had a strong tendency to an unfortunate "It's Pat!" type of presentation. I assumed there was a fair bit of "You can't fire me, femininity, I quit!".
Huh. Pre-transition, or post? I've seen a decent number who struggled to get out of Pat-mode post- and especially mid-transition, but less so beforehand, and I wouldn't expect the transition to be motivated by something that only showed up after the transition did.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
At the scale Valve operates at, surely banks pass the costs of chargebacks along to them. But also, banks probably aren't worried about them going bankrupt from chargebacks and leaving them with the bill.
This wouldn't be true of a fly-by-night porn site, though.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
2d ago
Uh, did you just clankerpost?
Now, you're telling me that you've read the PCLOB report on the program that collected the contents of internet communications, the program that is the subject of this conversation, and you can't find anything about specific selection terms in it?
EDIT: Remember, you had said that the role was, "Nothing".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2d ago
I imagined/conceived the above. So it has to exist. As all impossibilities exist [...] Everything Is Happening All At Once - Every Possibility Exists - To Stabilise the 0th Dimension
Under your world model, most observers would be Boltzmann brains". I observe that my experience is mostly ordered, where things that happened in the past are more likely to happen in the future, and past states of the world seem to influence present states of the world.
More generally, this does not seem coherent. Instead, it feels like you are going off the rails in the particular way that happens when your mind starts flagging random experiences and thoughts as "this was deeply meaningful".
If "sometimes I have an experience or insight which feels deeply meaningful for reasons I have trouble articulating" applies to you, there are a couple of things which might help:
- Get enough sleep
- Reduce stimulant usage
- Run ideas past others (importantly not LLMs, which have a strong tendency of agreeing with whatever you say. If you must use an LLM, try figuring out what the exact opposite of your idea is, and try running that through the LLM)
- Ask yourself "if this were not meaningful, what observations would I make that are different from the observations I would make if it were meaningful". Then actually look for evidence either way.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Senate Intelligence Committee
It's good that you're aware of who this was. Now think about it for a minute. Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence. In that role, he would have routinely given classified briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee. I don't believe that anyone has ever claimed that he ever lied to them in any of those briefings. Those classified briefings are for the purpose of informing SSCI on what's actually going on.
This briefing was different. It was an unclassified, public briefing. The purpose was not to inform SSCI, especially not to inform them about classified matters. One might honestly wonder what the point of it even was... or whether it's even almost a contradiction in terms to have an unclassified, public briefing on covert intelligence programs. So when you think about it, you realize that the point of this briefing was not to inform SSCI about what's going on; the point of it was for the government to sort of get together and try to somewhat inform the public about what's going on. Doing so on a covert intelligence program sort of requires that everyone plays well together to inform on the things that "should" be publicly revealed, while avoiding things that "should" stay classified and secret.
Of course, the rub is that folks might have different perspectives on "should". Perhaps Wyden genuinely thought that it "should" become public. But the fact of the matter is, from Clapper's seat, it was classified. I think almost no theory of how the government should operate is such that it should be really relying on him to make that determination on his own. Yes, he has Original Classification Authority, but in reality, that's still pretty limited. For matters concerning significant programs like this, frankly, he shouldn't be out on his own in up and deciding to declassify it in the middle of a random briefing. That sorta thing should mostly be a matter for the President, possibly in consultation with folks like SSCI, with plenty of secret deliberation before pulling the trigger.
As such, Wyden was basically the turd in the punchbowl, preferring to pursue his own vision of "should" over the purpose of what those sorts of hearings are about. That's fair enough; he's a Senator. But it makes it more difficult for future such hearings to do the job as intended; if there's a real concern that even a single Senator will go rogue, I imagine they're probably going to pull back and be less informative generally.
I think the follow-on of what happened afterward is mostly just noise; again, there's no doubt that SSCI received the correct answer, both before and after this one briefing. They certainly already knew exactly what these programs were doing; they certainly had already gotten classified briefings telling them such; afterward, I highly doubt anyone had any real claim to having been misled... except of course, if you're a Senator talking the press, trying to drum up votes for yourself or trying to make something that is classified unclassified. Wyden even gave up the game with responding to it with a request for DNI to officially correct the public record (that is, put classified information in the public record).
It's hard to tell if Wyden genuinely thought it should be public, but didn't want to take the hit of actually revealing it himself... or if he was just trying to figure out a way to drum up more votes by playing the anti-SIGINT character. Whereas it's much easier to figure out that Clapper was just trying to keep classified stuff classified, play along with the supposed point of such an unclassified briefing, and then ultimately end up scrambling to perform damage control from such a bizarro event.
haroldbkny
2d ago
confected
A-
I love it, but I see most people actually refer to it as Partygate
BlindDeafRat
2d ago
Note, none of this matters if what you mean by chargebacks is when you do it through the bank rather than the store itself.
Depends on what you count as a lot. I've done up to three refunds per month a few years ago and they all got refunded, I think at some point I went up to five and only then received a warning, but after taking a break, my account is fine, and I can still get refunds.
TowardsPanna
2d ago
Why would it go in SSQS? It's mainly a q about entertainment, not politics.
I chose this thread on purpose because I'm an evil deviant.
Or just because the previous Friday Fun thread felt far away and these non-CW threads don't have strict rules in any case.
Also I could at a stretch try to defend its relation to wellness, because of the concept of going more directly to (small) joys to increase actual perceived life quality a bit; spending more time on quality(?) entertainment and less time on just browsing the internet aimlessly.
Corvos
2d ago
I think you’re right. Twenty years ago, though, he wouldn’t have got away with a lot of the controversies he’s had.
What happened IMO is that the sheer unilateralness of reputational attacks (and the increasingly obvious willingness to manufacture them) became so clear that people stopped going along with it.
The same process is not quite as advanced in the UK which is one reason why Boris Johnson was brought down by IMO a largely confected scandal: Cakegate.
In an ideal world, we would all retrench and agree on what compromises we need to see and what rules we’re seriously willing to hold in common, but people don’t work like that and neither side believes they’ll gain more from peace than war.
cjet79
2d ago
The calculus for B has just changed, so I guess we will see if that leads to more adoption of crypto.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Charitably, your comment is acknowledging that there is a difference between the CDR program and the program that collected the contents of internet communications.
Yes, those are obviously two different programs. The CDR program was actually revealed slightly before the big Snowden reveal, though I believe it turned out Snowden was the source of the earlier leak as well.
The NSA was tapping the communications between datacenters of Internet providers, and by doing so they obtained access to all such communications. Any filtering they did according to selectors was done AFTER they had the data.
cjet79
2d ago
There is a spectrum of private company all the way up to government run "business" (like the post office). Payment processors are much closer to the government run business side of that spectrum. The closer any business is to being government run the more of a problem I have with it's operations being decided via politics.
It's not because I just dislike government. It's because the private market has corrective mechanisms that discourage politicized decision making. The more free market type businesses have the opposite problem, where they can be too heavily incentivised by the profit motive and not consider political things like "maybe this is really evil".
I've triangulated that I'm at the far high end of male tenderness and romantic shyness, and those examples strike me as painfully unmasculine. The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like.
Fair. I think some of that's because (especially younger and coastal) people have a more limited framework of what's 'acceptable' masculinity rather than douche masculinity, and I think an unfortunate number of cis men have reframed or had reframed for them 'being a foundation' into this sort of more passive literal man-of-stone thing. But it is a far way from the patriarch or trailblazer mold.
I'm not sure that being more gynophilic than you means a whole lot, particularly when we're talking about people who are exclusively attracted to women. Do you have a preference for women?
I'm a bit male-leaning in my interests, fair. But I've been in a real-world relationship with women, I'm not exactly bisexual-in-theory, either.
I'm more trying to motion around how the mouse character is pointedly and almost stereotypically feminine -- not just the pregnancy, but the homeraising and the dress and the shoes and how she moves around. At the risk of improperly channeling erwgv3g34, it's not even the doth-refuse-too-much of tomboy breaking or similar genres. And she's clearly attractive to the artist, and to no small number of transmen.
That's not really compatible with a general retreat from femininity. Even if they were just cripplingly attracted to women sexually, there's ways to do that without this level of feminine stuff showing up.
my ingrained mental image, which is hard to shake, is that you're twink who likes wearing programmer socks. I guess I've known too many geeky MSM or furries that fit that frame that I slotted you into it. And I genuinely want to know how wrong I am.
Ah... off by a good bit. Even when I was younger I wasn't able to pull off twink, and while I try to keep myself to some exercise regimen, the years have taken their toll in a good few ways.
((I do own a pair of programmer socks, but I haven't worn them and don't even spend that much time programming in Rust; I'm afraid I'm a basic bitch C++/C#/Java/Python/Shell Script guy when it comes to my workday operations.))
The "trans men are really gay" thing actually contributes to the point you're refuting: if you're flying from femininity, what is less feminine than being gay?
My apologies, I mean that more in a) the sense that regardless of what framework you treat trans men as 'really' being, there's going to be some FtM/F or FtM/M that's either so stereotypically 'gay' or 'lesbian' that it's going to overwhelm any other useful understanding available from the media for people not used to the conventions of those genres, and b) the sense that most of the examples are likely to be unsettling or unappealing to straight men (which I expect most people in this discusison thread here are), regardless of how prurient they might be.
For an example, I would expect few straight men that think FtM/M is just "straight with extra steps" would find Pantheggon's Vermuda character being in the middle of what's pretty intentionally drawn to parallel a conventional gay orgy as interesting, and that's still pretty far on the feminine side ('misgendering' kink, breeding kink) of things as it goes that direction. There's what I think is information here, but it's not really going to be accessible because everything else layered on top of it being either very loud or very offputting or both.
You're right to say that many of these cases are often feminine, especially by male standards and sometimes even by female standards. But I'm not arguing that these people are flying from femininity in general; I'm disagreeing with primaprimaprima's framework where that's the "key issue".
It is also slightly humorous that the rat character throws a party to interview candidates for impregnating his girlfriend, which seems, well, like something a lot of men would find somewhere between uncomfortable and enraging.
Yeah, that's true. It's still portrayed as uncomfortable (cfe the 'voicemail'), and I don't have a good understanding for how much so it'd be for typical straight men, but I can give a rough guess about it.
In particular, the initial sex scene in the comic features the rat character pulling a strapon out of his everyday carry bag (as one does) and then insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????. This is a contradiction to the stereotype that men won't wear a rubber.
The strap-on probably makes a bit more sense in context; the rat's moving back in town after a trying to move to the city didn't work out. The condom, fair. It's probably meant more to be joking, but I've seen a few transguys who treat it like a 'guys ritual', and there's definitely a 'glass trying harder to shine than real gems would' issue.
Then, during the sex scene, he asks the female character, "how do you like to do it?" and she responds by saying, "Nobody's ever asked me that before!" Again, this is a contradiction to the view that men don't give a damn about women's sexual enjoyment, which is puzzlingly common among women. The point is that the trans masc rat is a Better Man (TM) than those dirty cis rat boys who didn't treat her right.
Maybe that is how a lot of men are, I don't know. But the idea that I'd have a sexual encounter and not aim to make it a good one for my partner is like suggesting that I set my pizza sauce-side down.
Eh... this might be a cultural thing, rather than just a gender one, but I've seen a number of guys who think women's sexual enjoyment is important, but that it's Wrong to not take the lead and pick up what your partner wants or enjoys from body language. At the risk of TMI, it's something I struggled with a decent amount at first (uh, with both genders).
But it's not necessarily something that I'd say reflects an internalization of maleness so much as a desire to perform proper maleness for women, or in other words to be the butchest lesbian who ever strapped on a dildo... I did definitely enjoy the transition from "we literally just reunited on the street randomly" to "we are having sex, we can separate physicality from emotions, right?" to "we are now madly in love," which took all of one evening. Can I make a u-haul joke?
Fair and fair. I'll admit I've seen that sorta thing in a lot of porn written or drawn by (cis) men for men, but there's definitely some humor to it. I still think "perform proper maleness for women" is probably a better description, if still incomplete, of what's going on with trans men who like FtM/F than "rejection of and flight from femininity", but it's reasonable to say that it's not achieving the same thing.
Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her.
Hm. It's possible I'm reading it in a pretty different perspective than you are, but I'm pretty used to porn where the person who's in focus for the camera is the one viewers are supposed to be attracted to, where the person who's reacting to them is the person the viewer (or creator) wants to be. In 'conventional' porn this goes to the extreme of PoV or gonzo works, or in hentai the mysterious floating dicks syndrome, where only the characters the viewers are presumed to be attracted to appear in the camera's lens.
But that's admittedly not universal, and something hard to discuss in detail further without linking a ton of porn (tbf, mostly straight: ruaidri and dont_jinxit have some pretty good examples of the differences between 'standard' male and female frameworks), so dunno.
Haha, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about how we haven't seen em-dashes in LLM output for the past couple months, so they probably retrained the models to not use them. But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.
They exist, but a good deal of the problem is that many are also pinch points, here. Stripe, for example, once would proudly proclaim their happiness working with adult product merchants until WellsFargo teabagged them; today, their policy completely bans all adult content and services.
CCBill used to be the transaction provider of last resort for a lot of adult businesses on the edge -- and you'd pay a pretty sizable penny for the privilege -- but they've had the screws turned on them, too. Not tied into that ecosystem enough to know if there's a new meta; most modern stuff in the circles I move have found it more effective to work in gray-compliance for more 'mainstream' sellers that are too big to notice them.
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