domain:amphobian.info
HereAndGone
3m ago
I think some of it is how polyamory is crossing over to the mainstream. It's been written by/about the type of upper-middle to upper class people who in the past would have been having ménages-a-trois or discreet affairs or French-style "well of course you have a mistress and I have a lover" arrangements, or swinging, or acknowledged 'open' marriages, but all done within a specific framework of discretion, no bastards (or not acknowledged ones), and no divorces to go running off with the new model spouse. You might bring your mistress to certain events, but not in a style that could be seen as parading her about, and never humiliate publicly your spouse.
So, rather in the same spirit as the articles about "will gay marriage teach straight people new ways to handle relationships?" were written before it all became legal, with an air of "gays are not monogamous they're monogamish, will we finally get straight marriage that permits cheating?" about it, now we're getting the polyamory stories.
And for the upper-middle to upper class types, who have a rule book about discreet affairs, it works (until it doesn't). For the weird, the ones who set up all the definitions and sub-definitions and rules and diagrams around poly, it works (until it doesn't). These are the people who put the same effort into working out relationship statistics as other stattos put into sports.
The third set are the people who are fat, ugly, disabled, poor, queer, etc. and who can't get or have a traditional, stable, committed relationship so who put together some kind of support system for sex, love, domestic support and the likes that involves a group of people who can contribute bits and pieces of time, attention, money, space and energy but not a whole-time relationship (and again, that works until it doesn't).
The problem is trying to mainstream it, for the ordinary people who don't have the upper-class resources about managing an affair (or three), the people who aren't living in Park Slope and having glowing reviews of their memoirs in the NYT, who are going to run into the problems of jealousy, trying to juggle time and space between partners, and the fear of being replaced. Of being told that the cultural moment is ethical non-monogamy, and if they're not poly then they are missing out (on all this hot sex and fizzy new romance). You don't want to be boring, do you? Whitebread conventional cis het?
And those are the people who are going to blow up their lives, and who are maybe now starting the backlash about "this wasn't what I was promised and it didn't happen the way I expected".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4m ago
"Unions are evil"?
Unions came into being in a world where there were the typical industrial workplace had work rules that could, by virtue of the nature of the work, only be negotiated explicitly and collectively, and which were very visibly matters of life and death. That world is a better world if institutions exist such that work rules can be negotiated collectively. (Historically, there were a lot of small strikes over safety issues, but few large ones).
In the world of 2025, more people have jobs where individual negotiation (including the implicit kind) just works better than collective negotiation, because every worker and every task is different. Also most of the life-or-death workplace practices (and a good many that are not) are governed either by explicit regulation or by implicit regulation by lawsuit and insurance company. That is a world where there is no pro-social work for unions to do.
It is an interesting question whether the negative side effects of unions or health-and-safety regulation are worse (I favour putting it to the test by allowing union-negotiated, but not individually-negotiated, contracts of employment to contract out of employment law and most of workplace safety law). But the world where neither existed was not in a stable equilibrium.
faceh
5m ago
The sticking point now is no longer extra fingers or shadows going in the wrong direction (though most AIs will still make little mistakes that are tells for the observant- but these can be easily repaired!) but just the fact that it's still painful to go back and forth to get exactly the exactly the pose, position, expression, color shade, background, accessories, species of flower, that you want.
This feels like MOSTLY a solved problem with ChatGPT's o3 image generation capability.
You can feed it a few reference images for what you're trying to get to, including poses and background with a sufficiently precise prompt you WILL get something very, VERY accurate to your intentions. It does NOT do a great job on making precise adjustments from there, and currently it doesn't do inpainting but take the image it produced and running it through Stable Diffusion or just manual photoshop gets you to the finish line.
One thing its is actually very good at is feeding it an image representing a tattoo you're thinking of getting, feeding it an image of your bare skin in the area you want that tattoo, then it can produce an image showing you what that tattoo would look like. And THEN you can pay a human artist to hopefully execute on that vision well.
I have had annoying problems where it remembers something you asked for earlier and keeps including that in the image even after you tell it to move on or forget, but that's fixed by starting a new window with the most recent output.
I don't see how a human artist can outcompete this on cost or time. I CAN see how you might still pay a human to actually do the work of interacting with the AI and modifying outputs to get close to a particular vision.
Similarly, SONG PRODUCTION is now just about indistinguishable from full human now. To me, a decently done full AI song will have almost zero tells unless the creator set out to make it obvious.
I don't doubt AI will continue to improve and eventually we'll have the first award-winning novel completely written by AI that even experts agree is actually... kinda good. But I am skeptical. I think it will take a while.
Betting against the AI capabilities approaching peak human is probably a losing proposition unless we ARE very, very close to the plateau of what can be achieved with the current paradigm.
AI is now better than the best chess players, and better than the best GO players, and while Novel-writing is a different combination of skills and intellect than either of those, the AIs have already learned to write coherently and so I expect tacking on the additional capabilities will scale the machine into Stephen King territory pretty quickly.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
9m ago
The evidence is not always strong. It’s mostly correlative. I’m familiar with adoption studies. I’m interested in how it affects important behaviors, not just any behaviors.
That would require numerous studies with numerous groups
It would require some strong studies with a few groups before I am convinced that culture is less important than previously considered. If Chinese Americans and Chinese French, after assimilation in the 2nd or 3rd generations, are still behaviorally Chinese, then of genetics is even more important than I previously considered, and culture is probably less important than I previously thought. It would add credence to a thought I’ve had recently where cultural institutions are primarily for filtering genetic types and not for directing individual behavior (or rather, it’s for improving multigenerational behaviors through genetics rather than improving an individual’s behavior).
then look at 2nd or 3rd generations (presumably "outside" their culture? To whatever degree?)
Yes, because I’m interested in truth-seeking; I have the luxury to not be engaged in the neurotic janitorial work of academia where careful minds go to die. In real life, because I know that Asians overwhelmingly assimilate into cultural norms, I can use this proxy to obtain the information I’m looking for. An academic would have to first spends year and publish papers “proving” that Asian Americans assimilate, when it’s obvious.
hydroacetylene
13m ago
Most people don’t need to be validated. People need to be told how to fix themselves. And that’s part of the problem with therapy culture, is that it discourages actually trying to solve object level problems instead pushing just feel better about it.
It’s really quite narcissistic; don’t worry about it, you’re perfect. Yeah, sorry, no you aren’t.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
13m ago
I occasionally find it useful for queries that don't work well in ordinary Internet search engines. Here's my Gemini history.
Write an initial inquiry email asking an architect about the feasibility of building a small custom house.
What is the legal doctrine under which, if a law was passed but was never made available for public viewing, then the law is not valid?
Has a law firm ever been sued for monopolistic behavior?
What is the purpose of a living room? Is a table useful to have in a living room?
Is there a specific name for guns that store the magazine in the handle?
Is AV1 better than HEVC?
In booking an international flight, is it reasonable to prefer domestic airlines?
Imagine that a book has section 1, and within that section both text and section 1.1. Is there a standard method of referencing the text in section 1 without referencing the text in section 1.1?
In making a website, is there any reason to refrain from using XHTML?
roystgnr
17m ago
"Small Gods"
But I had to look that up, so clearly it's been too long for me too...
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
21m ago
Thanks for the link - missed it when you posted it before. I have added my own thoughts there.
I agree "demisexual" is probably a reasonable description for the modal woman, just that there is more variety in the female experience than a lot of men (and women like Holly) want to acknowledge.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
22m ago
Isn't the "sneer faction" simply the faction of devout progressives, which has the moral foundation that the impulses and desires of men as traditionally conceived are bad? Polyamory is a way for men to have multiple women sexual partners simultaneously, which is understood to satisfy the masculine impulse - especially since the most salient cases of rationalist polyamory look like hypermasculine alpha nerds having a harem of impressionable and psychologically troubled groupies - and therefore bad. (I would be mildly surprised if the sneerclubbers took any issue with more progressive-coded free love communes, which are hardly different from poly group houses.) Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man, and makes others uncomfortable, and is therefore good.
You could counter that the moral foundation I impute to progressives above is uncharitable and most of them would dispute having it, but neither progressives nor their opponents respect the structural implications of their stated beliefs in other cases (Transsexualism vs. transracialism? Respect for merit, authority and tradition when those are on the side of the outgroup?) either. Taking anyone at their word is only a recipe to be confused more.
HereAndGone
23m ago
I am getting pissed off with the AI assistant crap being suggested to me at work (no, Adobe, I do not need the inbuilt AI assistant to "simplify this document for me" when I'm reconciling a blinkin' bank statement) and I think much of the enthusiasm over AI is because it's all software engineering.
It seems to be useful (not perfect but useful) if you're writing code. Or if you're dumping your homework on it to write your essays and cheat your exams for you. But for use by ordinary people otherwise? Apart from the slop art and extruded fiction product you mention, I don't yet see it doing anything useful.
I don't need it to write a shopping list and order online for me, just in case someone wants to use that as an example. That's for people who only buy the same things over and over and have more money than time.
If anyone has an example of "this is how I use it for work/at home and it really saves me time and mental energy", I'd be glad to hear.
roystgnr
26m ago
Women seem to generally have an edge at firearm marksmanship, and given how few women are evenly remotely interested this probably has some form of genetic basis.
Is this an edge for the right tail (women win more events), or an edge for the average competitor (the mean/median woman competing does better than the mean/median man)? The former would be extremely impressive in the context of reduced interest (uninterested women who could have become winners don't even compete, yet the remaining women are still better enough to win), but the latter is just what you would expect from selection bias (the less talented women are more likely to quit than the less talented men, so the latter bring down the male average but the former don't bring down the female average).
Anecdotally, I've heard multiple different firearms instructors report that on average women learn faster than men, and they generally attribute it to humility - by the time they've convinced their male students to "unlearn" bad habits, their female students have already started perfecting good habits. The people saying this included some who are unabashedly sexist in the opposite direction in other contexts, so I don't think their reports here were just "women are wonderful" bias. They might be comparing averages to averages and so just reporting what we'd expect from selection bias, though. Some may also have other unconscious motives to want to encourage women - another common anecdote is that the men in a mixed-sex training class tend to work much harder after they realize the women are starting to beat them.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
31m ago
I missed this review when you first posted it, but having just read Rejection, my thoughts:
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I generally agree with you that the first few stories are the strongest, and the metafictional ones at the tail end are weaker.
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I enjoyed the AITA? story more than you, but I took it as the absurdist satire it was. Yes, dunking on Elon Musk expies is kind of old now, but I still thought it was funny.
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About the third story, Ahegao. I agree that the final sequence, describing the main character's increasingly deranged and over-the-top sex fantasies, went on longer than necessary. At a certain point I kind of checked out, just chuckling going "Really? Really?" I think Tulathimutte was probably having too much fun writing it, and the point was that the main character had gone so far down his fetishistic rabbit hole he could no longer see sunlight, and the fact that he just went on and on was hammering home the absurdity. Did it go on too long? Sure, probably could have made the same point with 30% less jizz.
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I am not sure how accurate your assumptions about Tulathimutte are. Unless you have some external sources for this, I am always a bit wary of projecting too much into an author based on what they write. Some authors do bleed their hearts out onto the page, others very deliberately write characters and themes that are not reflective of their actual beliefs at all, and some try to fake you out about it, with varying degrees of skill and success. R.F. Kuang, for example, in Yellowface, writes about a white woman stealing an Asian woman's manuscript and literally appropriating her story about the Chinese experience in World War II. Kuang makes it very obvious that the Asian woman is a self-insert, and then tries to hang a lampshade on her by making her kind of unlikeable and fake (and also killing her off in the first chapter), and then she has another Asian woman make a big obvious self-serving villain speech about how hard it is for pampered rich Asian girls with Ivy League degrees to get respect in the publishing industry, but Kuang isn't fooling anyone, it's still an angry book about the publishing industry privileging white women over Asian women. So as for Tulathimutte, he's smarter and a better writer than Kuang, and obviously is, like Kuang, trying to anticipate and deflect inferences like yours (hence the metafictional final story, which I agree did protest too much). But the stuff about him being a rage-filled incel who especially hates white men who date Asian women? I mean, maybe? But I don't think the short stories in Rejection are enough evidence of that.
I have not read Private Citizen, and I think I will.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
39m ago
The term "therapy" has its physiological parallel in "physical therapy." Physical therapy is universally understood to be a means getting part of the body back to a normally functioning state, or as close to possible. Something went real wrong, we gotta fix that.
Physical training is when the body is more or less functioning normally, but you want to improve performance in some dimension.
Your examples of public speaking, personal organization, etc. is much more in line with the "physical training" concept. You want to improve performance and you have a specific and measurable goal towards which to progress.
"Everyone should go to therapy", in my opinion, is literally implicitly stating "everyone has something mentally and/or emotionally wrong and not normal about them and, therefore, we should all commit to professional support for an indefinite period of time."
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
43m ago
I suppose I have. I'm still fermenting this philosophy of mine, but I see it as a good sign that it's led me to solid ground.
More aspirationally, I envision a reworking and expansion of pink-collar work to span a wider gamut of expertise and prestige while remaining distinctly feminine. There still need to be secretaries and receptionists (or not, depending on how AI shapes up), but I'd prefer if more was expected of the average pink-collar worker in terms of embodied competence.
Wohlfe
46m ago
I lament the continued decline in quality for modern media, particularly in writing and pacing. A part of me hopes studios start using AI so it either blows up in their faces and they start valuing quality again, or it creates so much slop some of them focus on quality to stand out.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
56m ago
You may be right that AI basically creates a new sort of entertainment experience (e.g., tooling together a pipeline to create your own homebrew fanfiction). And there is nothing wrong with just doing what's fun. My reaction was mostly just, I guess, a defense of actually caring about literary quality. Not that everything you read/enjoy has to be high quality (I like my litrpgs and cheesy space operas too.)
roystgnr
57m ago
I'm just commenting "Discworld" here because I'm only allowed to upvote @PokerPirate once.
To make my comment less redundant, here's the Discworld Reading Order Guide. IMHO although the best starting points depend on your taste, you can't really go wrong with "Guards! Guards!" or "Mort".
The reading order is worthwhile to avoid missing backstory (or to let you know what backstory you can miss - "The Color of Magic" wasn't nearly as good as his later books), but the books get even better as you go on. I could name several stories that set me on edge from the suspense, or teary-eyed from the tragedy, or laughing from the comedy, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything other than "Thud!" that managed to do all three at once, with a single line that would make no sense whatsoever out of context.
faceh
58m ago
Not disagreeing, and indeed I don't think any legal processes have been invoked here.
But how much should women's feelings be accommodated in these sorts of informal social conflicts? As much as we don't want explicit written rules there's a void left when the
The situation's "severity" seems to me that if he and his organization had stood his ground, said "look I'm deleting everything and I'll take a social media hiatus, but nobody has been hurt and the team is more important" they'd probably have come through alright.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
While I do agree with everything substantive and specific you wrote, I think the framing falls into a trap common to a lot of thinking about AI. Specifically, that AI will simply extend or accelerate a given domain and technology. In this case, publishing and fiction.
There's not going to be an AI written book that wins any prestigious award. This is because it would be foolish to simply have an AI write one immutable story. Instead, "AI writers" will be either fine-tuned or wholly trained models that people use to write stories on the fly that still adhere to a central plot, world, and character collection.
To use a common reference point, let's take Game of Thrones. People have their favorite characters, subplots, settings, etc. With an AI-writer-model, you could say "Hey, write a new subplot where that blonde with the dragons and whatnot flies on up to the blizzard place and fucks around for a while." (side note: I never watched or read GoT, ironically enough, so all my references are going to be bad)
Now, you're creating new content that still stays within the "world" of GoT. And it works at innumerable levels of detail. The casual consooomer will write one sentence slop generator stuff - and love it. The aficionado will create complex subplots and tweak small elements of character profiles to see how these reverberate throughout the grander story. I predict that once the cost of GPUs gets low enough (or models get efficient enough) people will literally be writing and producing full scale movies at home.
Instead of human authors and writers being the nucleus of "art" it will be a constellation of models, with humans recombining them ad infinitum. I look at this as a good thing. You can un-cancel your favorite show (The Wire!), Hemingway becomes immortal and produces infinite books. Unlimited GoT fanfic erotic (......yay?)
I know this will happen because I'm already doing it. My mental bubblegum is hardboiled neo-noir paperbacks. Think something in the vein of The Last Good Kiss. Over the course of a dozen 2 - 3 hour evenings, I've put together a GitHub repo of characters, settings, themes etc. I've used an AI toolchain to develop scenes. I then line edit them mostly for continuity issues (which AI still stumbles on) or to make a sudden plot twist because I feel like it. I am not doing this to publish a book. I am doing this because I genuinely find it far more entertaining and exciting that Netflix scrolling or re-watching the actually good stuff. And it's low stakes. I don't really care if the plot doesn't quite hold together. I don't care if a character's motivation self-contradicts after a while. It's fun. It's unlimited fun. Over the 40+ hours I've put into it, I've probably spent $100 in API credits. You can definitely argue that's actually quite a bit less cost effective than Netflix etc. But I believe the received value is excellent.
AI will not be a linear extension of current industries. I'm not saying it's a step-function for everything either. It will simply be a very hard to predict tangent. In many cases, this will be absolutely good for all parties. In many cases it will be a massive tradeoff and shift in the "center of gravity." I think there are only a few cases I can see where it represents a system-breaking potential.
Anyways, I'm off to writeread about Detective Jar-Jar Binks' latest case involving Anton Chigurh.
I readily admit that there are women out there who enjoy casual sex (I've met plenty of them, including a handful who weren't French) and I'm sure Holly Math Nerd's therapist was exaggerating for comic effect, but I nonetheless think "demisexual" probably describes the modal female experience a lot more accurately than the sex-positive feminist tabula rasa account.
I read Rejection a few months ago ("Pics" was, in my view, the strongest story in the collection) and posted a mini-review here. Curious to see if you agree with any of my points.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1hr ago
I like Holly Math Nerd, but she's got... some issues (as she readily admits). She insists that the number of women who enjoy sex for sex's sake and will not be damaged by having sex without an emotional bond is nearly an empty set. I... have enough experience to believe that is not the case. I absolutely believe Women Are Different and that most women need/desire an emotional bond in a way men generally do not. But there totally are women who enjoy being sluts, and I don't think that number is so very small (though they may come to regret the physical and social costs of their behavior later).
"Demisexual" is a stupid term, and especially stupid to lump under the anything-but-boring-straight rainbow umbrella, but it's not a universal descriptor for a "normal" woman.
nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his.
Tangentially (and fitting my theme of Literary Snobbery), a while ago we had some Discourse about Tony Tulathimutte's The Feminist. I just got done reading his complete collection, Rejection. It's very good, though very Online and Of The Moment. The first story is The Feminist, but the second story is basically a gender-reversed version, with a female incel who goes completely off the rails after an ill-fated one-night stand with her best friend. I think the whole collection is fun reading, and rich Culture War fodder. Tulathimutte, being a Thai-American Stanford grad and feted Literary Author, both capitalizes on and leans into/satirizes every stereotype and assumption you are projecting onto him, in a much more clever and intellectual way than, say, Rebecca Kuang's entertaining but subtle-as-an-anvil-launched-by-catapult Yellowface.
gattsuru
1hr ago
It's noisy, but more critically, it's also a signal that's very sensitive to other stuff. I'm not very optimistic about Ames, for example, but despite not being a disparate impact suit itself, I'm hard-pressed to think of any conclusion but a punt on the underlying circuit split that leaves the rate of disparate impact suits unchanged. There's some cy pres stuff that could have an even bigger impact on settlements in general.
Beyond that, a lot of my position is about the policy, itself. The paper matters, both as something that discourages behaviors well before a court case happens, and in acting as cover for a wide variety of other behaviors that would be legally questionable. Maybe that's not something that we can bet on -- a Dem admin blanket-reversing every Trump EO is possible and wouldn't necessarily mean a reversion to 2024 disparate impact rules -- but it seems more relevant.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces!
Which book is this from?
I think it’s been a decade since I last read Pratchett and should probably get back to it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
Piranesi - Most books you're on the ride with the Main Character knowing more than you about the setting, characters, etc. This book provides the odd experience of feeling like you know more than the MC while having all the same facts as him. It is beautiful, haunting, all about the process of reading it while still having some exciting bits. Think House of Leaves for people who don't hate themselves.
For clarity, I did think the AITA story was funny, and I was laughing at the absurdity of it throughout. It wasn't so much that it was bad as just a little out of place: it would have been perfectly fine as a self-contained story. Even if the protagonist's "love interest" had been someone other than Alison (e.g. Linda, one of the protagonists of Private Citizens would have been a better fit), I think it would have been stronger for it: "Pics" is such a depressingly down-to-earth, plausible series of events, it just strained credibility for me that its protagonist could then immediately wander into this over-the-top absurdist satire. Imagine a hypothetical episode of The Wire which crosses over with Twin Peaks and that was pretty much my reaction.
I follow him on Instagram. Granted that I might be falling for the parasociality trap, but in my view he really does seem to do the whole "ha ha I'm ever so lonely ha ha" gag a bit too often for it to be wholly insincere. I could be way off-base.
I expanded on this review a bit with the intention of submitting it to Scott's book review contest, only to find out he's not running it this year. Quoting from my expanded review:
...
I can hardly recommend it highly enough. When thinking of all the books I've read in the past five years, I think the only one I enjoyed more is possibly Never Let Me Go. Obviously it was bound to be a tough act to follow.
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