Its definitely just proof of concept for now, but it seems a grim, if inevitable, step in the war of ads vs adblockers.

That actually makes a lot of sense

I don’t know. It’s something I think about a lot, especially when I’m wasting too much time online. But it really isn’t that simple. I had lots of friends and saw them pretty regularly, but I moved countries to be with my partner and I’m very happy with that choice and our life together.

But I don’t speak the language here, I’m learning but slowly. So if I wasn’t in message groups, sharing memes and video chatting my friends back home I’d feel pretty lonely. And it would make the couple of trips home each year much more awkward. By keeping in touch so regularly it feels totally normal to spend the day with a friend, even if I haven’t seen them in 9 months because I know all the little things they’ve been up to or excited about.

On the other side, if I had none of that, maybe I would have worked harder at learning the language. Especially with the lack of distractions the internet provides (being able to watch tv in English instead of local stuff is probably the biggest hurdle to learning), but realistically we’re busy and live in the country, so if I had some intermediate language skills and was vastly more lonely I’d probably not have made any real friends. I’d just go to some more social events in the year and participate a bit akwardly and feel sad.

They’re all fine with some extendent. It really depends specifically what and how you’re cooking. I like cast iron for steak because you can heat it up a helluva lot, even without fat, while trying that with non-stick pans can damage the coating and make some weird smells. Similarly, I prefer it for frying eggs because I like to use a metal slice to flip eggs, and worry about scarcjing my non-stick. But I have both and happily use both.

No wonder. Artie is straight-up adorable.

I’ve probably done it occasionally, when calling them in a public space shouting ‘Daaad’ as an adult feels a bit weird. Same with talking about them to a third person, I might use their names rather than say “my mum” the whole time.

But face to face, talking with them? It’d feel pretty weird, too impersonal and distant. If I saw someone else doing it tontjeir parents, I’d probably note it as unusual, but would be shocked.

That’s a really good example, just a mix and regurgitate of older, better work trying to give consumers what they think they want.

Yeah, given that that account got deleted not long after that (if it’s the one I’m thinking of) then it quite probably was a bot…

Moog Cookbook do covers of alt rock songs on (surprise) moog synthesizers. Always felt they sound quite Jellyfishy.

Most of the time you don’t even need to say it’s your middle name. I’ve known lots of people who went by their middle name, generally guys in families where they, their dad and their grandad are all officially ‘John’, but actually go by their unique middle name. Its not that unusual.

Oh man, that’s soothing. A recipe, for a meal, and it explains what I need to do, in the order I do it, and the pictures actually show the cooking. This is some next level stuff. I hope it catches on!

As a certified manflu sufferer, I gave this an upvote. I know that there’s been a lot fun made at guys ‘overreacting’ to colds, but maybe it’s time to listen to the victims. Occasionally, I get a cold where i just feel a bit shit, tired and full of snot. But most of the time a cold shuts me down entirely, I can’t think, talk nonsense, if I try and drive I almost crash. I’m a compete mess. Sure, maybe my body is just overreacting to the virus, but so is anaphylaxis and that kills people.

I’m pretty sure that labour is worse, but…

Maybe you could ask him to measure how effective it is, by doing some tasks with ai and without, and measuring the time. If you want to make it non judgmental you could say it’d be helpful for you to hear if it’s really worth the effort of trying some ai yourself. And then if he sees that it doesn’t end up saving (and sometimes costs) him time, he might accept it.

I agree. It’s a sliding scale with generative AI currently being the lowest point (for now at least, once the dataset is a slop ouroboros, it’s only going to spiral downwards). Lazy, corporate filmmaking is bad, but lots of film noir classics were basically pulp movies knocked out to meet demand and are now widely regarded as classics. Because there’s a difference between even the most committe overseen, cashgrab product that was still made by a human with their own strengths, tastes and biases vs a genai slop factory.

But my aversion to ai slop has heightened my awareness of it, which in turn has made me notice how many things are slop adjacent. I notice myself writing a message and realsing I’m using a bunch of standard phrases and structures. I’m not an llm, but there are times when our individual responses aren’t that different. I look at stock photography, where a complex family dynamic has been reduced to “teen sits on bed looking down, woman gestures angrily” and I realise that we’ve been traveling down this road for a while now, ai has just cut the brakes.

I respect your experience, and I’m sure that is true for you. I’m not sure what country you’re from, or what generation. These sorts of things are pretty dependent on a lot of different social factors outside of gender. My experience has been that, in terms of groups conversations being dominated by sex chat it goes gay men, lesbians, straight cis women, straight cis men. But its super socially dependant - most of the men I’ve spent time with are total nerds, maybe army guys or jocks are different? Living in Britain, France and Germany the norms around those sort of conversations have been very different, and I bet America and Japan are different again.

My bigger point was you can’t infer how much something pre-occupies a person by how much they talk about it. I’ve know women who enjoyed talking about relationships and sex with friends, but were happily single and not that interested in it beyond gossip. While some guys would never discuss it directly but pretty much every decision and interest in their lives had come out of a desire to meet and impress women.

SEO is actually one of the things that started me thinking about this. Although those dumb overly long cooking blogs were (previously) written by humans, the incentives led to a style that was no longer genuine. Much worse were those shameless fake review sites that existed solely to promote some VPN or antivirus. Sure, a human might’ve put that together, but so many words with so little regard for meaning.

Yeah, lyrics are getting more repetitive and angry over time.

Gender-affirming care massively reduces the difference, but transwomen are still likely to be faster than AFAB women:

Prior to gender affirming hormones, transwomen performed 31% more push-ups and 15% more sit-ups in 1 min and ran 1.5 miles 21% faster than their female counterparts. After 2 years of taking feminising hormones, the push-up and sit-up differences disappeared but transwomen were still 12% faster. Prior to gender affirming hormones, transmen performed 43% fewer push-ups and ran 1.5 miles 15% slower than their male counterparts. After 1 year of taking masculinising hormones, there was no longer a difference in push-ups or run times, and the number of sit-ups performed in 1 min by transmen exceeded the average performance of their male counterparts.

But what season you’re born in also influences your strength and fitness:

There were significant main effects of birth-month for cardiorespiratory fitness (F=4.54, p<0.001), strength (F=6.81, p<0.001) and power (F=3.67, p<0.001). Children born in November were fitter and more powerful than those born at other times, particularly the summer months (April, May and June). October-born children were stronger than those born in all months except September and November. This relationship was evident despite controlling for decimal age and despite no significant inter-month differences in anthropometric characteristics.

So maybe it’s not fair for all those poor summer babies to compete against unfairly blessed autumn athletes?

I think women are very interested in sex, and pre-modern times the stereotype was that women were the horny gender.

But I think what you’re describing is more about gendered social norms in conversation. The fact that (some) groups of men don’t talk about sex that openly is because sexual prowess is tied up with social status and most men wouldn’t feel comfortable discussing sexual problems, failing to satisfy their partners, not really enjoying sex or anything like that for fear it makes them less of a man. And because of that, guys talking about how much sex they’re having, or how they tried this new thing and their lady went wild for it, kinda come across like they’re bragging.

Yeah, I got into a discussion on this topic and my suggestion is that sports split on other categories, not just gender. Boxing already does weight classes, which is good, more sports should do that. Can’t we have sports for people under 5’8"? I’m sure there’s lots of shortkings who’d love to compete seriously in a league where there height wasnt an detriment.

This approach seemed to offend both sides of the trans sports debate.