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!

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.

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.

Oh God yes. The studio push for reboots, remakes and adaptations already runs the risk of by-the-numbers ‘creativity’, but those live action remakes are the natural progression. Not even a new take or reimagining, just a lazy, safe cashgrab.

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.

We really need to come up with some DIYable devices. A future where most nation states insist in this sort of backdoor feels distressingly inevitable at this stage…