No, it’s a lot worse than that . Your friend is into you at the same time as not being capable of being honest with himself. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the case here, but people get murdered in this situation even after being friends for years.

There is plenty of potential here for you to get hurt very badly if you pursue him, or worse out him, while he is trying to appear totally straight for his community. Once again, you did nothing wrong and the signals are pretty clear even to read, but this form of homophobia is very, very dangerous to both of you in every way.

Please don’t press him unless he comes out on his own, otherwise there is great potential for danger for both of you. It’s an awful situation and I hope you’re able to navigate it and go on to get everything you deserve from someone who’s available and safe.

This has everything to do with your friend and your status as a gay person, nothing to do with who you are. You can’t fix your friend no matter how much you may want to. Only he can come to terms with his own issues. It’s not fair that you are collatoral damage in his identity crisis, but it’s his crisis that you didn’t cause. You are only guilty of being a good enough friend to him that he felt comfortable exploring intimacy with you. Please believe me when I tell you the biggest issue you have now is the sunk cost fallacy. Again, it’s extremely unfair to you and it’s a shitty situation. Now that you know you can’t get what you need from him, you can either waste more effort on him or save your effort for someone who can reciprocate.

If anyone deserves to die, billionaires deserve to die more than anyone who has ever lived. Regardless, I personally don’t think anyone deserves to die. What I would prefer is that billionaires be put on trial for their crimes and sentenced to rehabilitation, and afterward live as equals with other humans. China made the last heir to the old empire a farmer who lived a happy life. That’s the happiest solution I can think of for everyone.

What would you be risking if you were honest? There’s a reason you believe you shouldn’t be authentic when you’re around others.

When you are dealing with people or institutions which hold power over you, it is an exhausting obligation to put on the performance that they want. No getting around it unless you find a different situation.

When you are with people who don’t hold power over you, masking is only a benefit if you are seeking to run confidence schemes. Unless you are seeking to deliberately defraud your peers, the best thing you can get from masking is that you will have to continue to perform the character they like and keep yourself suppressed to keep knowing them. If you are authentic around your peers, they will like or dislike you based on who you actually are, no acting required.

If you are suddenly authentic around the people who are exhausting you because they need you to play the character, they will not react well. You may be afraid of that. I promise you that losing your ability to connect to others because you believe you must always suppress yourself should scare you much more. It is a good thing to lose people who require you to not be yourself.

I looked up the event to see that it is indeed a literal white nationalist conference. I won’t link it out of principal but the tagline for the event is:

Shaping the future of Europe and the West through sovereignty, identity, and demographic renewal.

It’s weird to read articles like this because they’re framed as new problems when the problem is rather that things aren’t changing. At no point in my life has rape culture been under control.

The historical record doesn’t cover any culture at all which does not in some way have to deal with agricultural and imperial societies, even if those cultures are resisting these forces.

Exactly my point.

Agriculture is not the enabling factor of human existence in most areas. Agriculture is the enabling factor for settlements of many people in most areas. Humans populated the entire Earth prior to agriculture.

Again, exactly my point. Agriculture is the thing enables hierarchies like this. Personal agrarian community is a compromise to me because we already have people to support who wouldn’t survive a transition to a system we know hierarchy can’t proliferate, which is hunting and gathering. I think civilization is possible (however unlikely) only at the most personal level, and every step beyond that personal level we see the consequences of empires.

The problems shared by cultures according to historical records are the problems of cities I’m talking about. Whether you would call them cities or not, among the fertile crescent civilizations there were definitely empires and there have been empires ever since. The written records history is based on are more modern than either empires or agriculture. I struggle to think of any issue which exists in my lifetime which was not caused in some way by the effects of empires.

Agriculture is the enabling factor for empires, so in my opinion agriculture must be practiced in a deliberate way which prevents the formation of empires. To this end I think people living intentionally in agrarian communities which minimize the burdens of regular life is less likely to plant the seeds of caste and hierarchy than a community in which people are alienated from the influence of their labor or have weaker connections to the people sustaining their lives.

What’s the most obvious question?

It’s weird that I’ve spent most of my time living in a post-economic world of abundance which I’m not allowed to acknowledge or encourage others to acknowledge because the pretend economy of valuation and confidence depends on exclusively on showmanship and nothing else. The LLM bubble may persist because the work being “saved” never needed to be done in the first place, so it not being done makes no difference to investors being told what got done as usual.

I’m biased against urban agriculture since it caused all of the problems humanity has been beset with for the last 10,000 years. Maybe if there was some kind of check against a city that starts using its massive resources to be predatory on less defensible communities as they always have.

There are too many people to live in a way other than agrarian at this point.

In the US , the word “liberal” can be understood as any ethical action which frustrates moral charlatans. I’ve heard an older American say that Salvador Allende was too liberal for American business intrests to tolerate, when in fact the business people were the liberals and Allende was a socialist. It’s important to distinguish liberals from leftists because liberal is understood to mean far more than it actually means in the US, and many “liberals” are actually leftists.

It’s marketing. Nintendo deliberately under stocks new hardware to make the value of the device explode on the secondary market. Scalpers know this and usually buy out most of the first run. When you can’t get the new Nintendo device because it’s unavailable and scalpers are selling it for 2-3x retail price, you are far more likely to buy is asap when it comes back in stock. They make less money initially but in a way that makes the value of the product extremely high, giving people extremely high motivation to buy while they can. Also, a sale to a scalper is worth as much to Nintendo as sale to a consumer. Nintendo is notorious for doing this every time.

I’m not violence neutral, I’m anti-violence. Defensive violence is 10000% necessary as long as military of any kind exist. As long as there are military, there is the capacity to create the world we are living in now through a combination of aggression and survival. When there can’t be military because there would be no point of forming one, only then would non-violence make sense to me.

I hope this wasn’t deliberate, but if it was Valve is going down the dark Nintendo path.

I can tell you are experienced with Rubberducking. Thanks for the detailed answer.

Thanks for specifying a legitimate use-case for this tool. I understand that google search has been the most valuable programming tool for a very long time so it makes sense LLMs would be more helpful in the same kind of way. Search engine technology is quite a bit different than blockchain or VR in terms of consumer and business demand.

For my purposes of news and history research, the unreliability of LLMs making me have to check all its claims every single time negates its usefulness as an assistant because I will have to examine its references anyway so it’s more time effective for me to skip the questionable output I would get and do the research myself in the first place. How have you been able to manage the issue of unreliability with the volumes of data you’re dealing with? Is the kind of data which you’re dealing with less likely to be unreliable since it is of a kind the LLM is more likely to process correctly?

The difference that I’ve seen is that the internet was a development of communication technology which has been in clear demand since at least the 1800s. Chatbots have been around for the last few decades and have been treated as novelties by consumers for brief periods intermittently throughout my life. LLMs are the most sophisticated chatbots ever designed and are better than ever at imitating Austin Powers, but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can’t do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?

LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble. What is the value proposition for “intelligence” which can’t reason nor possibly determine fact from falsehood? When consumers start to pay what it actually costs to run these things, is it possible to profit? What are they good at other than confidence schemes?