It's an annoyingly double-edged issue, and one that I believe neither side of the political spectrum (speaking in very broad strokes here) has addressed well at all.
Though I usually consider myself progressive (to an annoying degree to some), the progressive "answer" to young men right now on how to find friends and partners is essentially something like:
> You should just be yourself!
> But, if you aren't practically perfect and even slightly express your social and physical needs you are a monster.
> But, even if you are perfect, we reserve the right to hate you based on experiences with other people of your gender, or because of your privilege, even though you probably have never felt it, and we're also allowed to make fun of you because of said privilege, since making fun of you is "punching up".
> Also, you also should accept that you will *always* be considered a threat to half the population due to how you were born, and if you don't accept that or even try to prove the opposite, that makes you even more dangerous.
> If you aren't happy with this you are an incel, and don't even mention the word "misandry", that's not a thing. The only way to change this is to either be gay or transition into a woman.
Obviously I'm employing a bit of hyperbole for emphasis and this is also me trying to empathize with what it's like being a boy right now despite lacking first-hand experience. Luckily, most women do not feel this way about men, but I've heard all of this said by my friends at one time or another (and I might have said something similar myself during my weaker moments, when I was upset).
Meanwhile the hardliners on the opposite side of the spectrum espouse the idea that actually men should be evil because it's manly. That women are lesser to them and that patriarchy is super cool actually. See Andrew Tate as an example, who has captured the ears of millions of teenage boys around the world. At first it's hard to comprehend why his ideology speaks to them, but you have to remember that most of them are just entering the time of their life where they have to figure themselves out, where they have to, for the first time in their life, find friendship, respect and companionship on their own outside of the family or the playground. And after all, everyone wants to be loved and respected in some way, and Andrew Tate offers them an answer: You can be an asshole and still be loved and respected, while the leftie answer tells them that you can be as perfect as you like, but you probably still won't be loved and respected, and if you fuck up, don't expect any grace.
And now the question is what should society actually do so that both young men and young women can find a harmonious place in it? I think really the only answer is to stop playing the blame game, stop trying to make one side the constant bad guy and scapegoat, try to comprehend that we are all equally human, and that whatever a person's gender is doesn't give you the right to be shitty to them. I don't know, maybe this is simply another utopian idea, of men and women living together in perfect unison, never being mean to each other. I think we should still strive to achieve some sort of balance, but sadly I don't really see an easy answer to this.
Sorry for this long rant, I've wanted to put this into words for a while. Occasionally I think about how bad it must be being a teenage boy right now, the thought scares me and I feel lucky not being one. Every time I read another woman saying that she's afraid of every man on the street walking in proximity to her, and every time it's dark out and I hear a man behind me and I get physically afraid, I think, what if I was a man and she was afraid for her life because of me? Just because I exist in the space next to her? Just because of a random coin-flip during my conception? And it feels awful. I don't want anyone to go through that.
My experience suggests that Tate is talked about far more (like, orders of magnitude) than actually directly heard (unless you count fair-use clips in attempts at critique). The strongest advocates I've seen for the rights and well-being of men in general, and young men in the dating world in particular, have come from across the political spectrum in other regards, including literal socialists.
> It's an annoyingly double-edged issue, and one that I believe neither side of the political spectrum (speaking in very broad strokes here) has addressed well at all.
Where would you expect to see it addressed? bell hooks wrote The Will To Change more than twenty years ago.
I'm not familiar with The Will to Change, but a former Internet associate of mine wrote a multi-part critique of Feminism is for Everyone many years back. As I read along I had to agree that it simply isn't nearly as sympathetic to men as bell hooks seems to have thought it was. Just as many other supposedly softer takes on feminism aren't. In particular, there's a refusal to acknowledge the harm that feminism has actively done to men, and the fact that there very clearly are people and policies out there that actively seek to harm men because they are men. In "liberal" feminism, everything bad that happens to men is rounded off to "the patriarchy hurts men too".
(The promulgation of the term "patriarchy" is itself an example of the harm I'm talking about. Feminists and other progressives will insist that the meaning of terms cannot be divorced from their etymology, and cite questionable-at-best etymology when complaining about words and campaigning for replacements. But then they have an entire canon of words that were deliberately coined to associate masculinity with harmful or undesirable things and femininity with virtue and resistance to oppression. As Karen Straughan put it: "[Feminists are] not blaming men, [they] just named everything bad after them.")
When I look it up, the summary I get from Amazon is:
> From New York Times bestselling author, feminist pioneer, and cultural icon bell hooks, an evergreen treatise on how patriarchy and toxic masculinity hurts us all.
I blame the on-line attention economy - which always rewards yet-more-extreme reactions, positions, and performative "virtues". But attaches zero value to actual pro-social behavior.
> See Andrew Tate as an example, who has captured the ears of millions of teenage boys around the world. At first it's hard to comprehend why his ideology speaks to them,
It is super easy to understand. He tells them they are superior and that feels good. He tells them they are entitled to dominate others and that makes them feel powerful. People LOVE to hear they are superior over others.
And all your complains about progressives boils them to them acknowledging that Tate adjacent people exist, that philosophy runs in top levels of the government and the rest of us have to react to it. Like, all your complains about progressives are super mild compared to what conservative people say and think about the rest of us.
> And now the question is what should society actually do so that both young men and young women can find a harmonious place in it?
There is no harmony possible when the woman is degraded or subjugated. There is only fake harmony possible when it is not allowed to speak about threat of Tate like conservatives, because someones feelings might be hurt.
> I think we should still strive to achieve some sort of balance, but sadly I don't really see an easy answer to this.
There is no balance with "I think women are inferior and should be mistreated".
> Every time I read another woman saying that she's afraid of every man on the street walking in proximity to her, and every time it's dark out and I hear a man behind me and I get physically afraid, I think, what if I was a man and she was afraid for her life because of me? Just because I exist in the space next to her?
In the context of male gendered violence literally promoted by conservative thinkers, it is women talking about the impact it has on them who is causing the unfair harm to men. This is absurd.
This is, frankly, a thing feminists books claim and I did not believed is a real thing. Except here you are, writing exactly those words.
> It is super easy to understand. He tells them they are superior and that feels good. He tells them they are entitled to dominate others and that makes them feel powerful. People LOVE to hear they are superior over others.
By the same token, it feels bad to be told that one is inferior and deserves to be subordinate to others. Which is messaging that, as a man in contemporary society, I receive constantly, and have been noticing for decades. Despite knowing on some level that it is BS.
But there was a period (this specific thing seems to have improved) when everyone would have been subjected to this narrative in any advertising break on any TV channel in the US or Canada.
> And all your complains about progressives boils them to them acknowledging that Tate adjacent people exist, that philosophy runs in top levels of the government and the rest of us have to react to it. Like, all your complains about progressives are super mild compared to what conservative people say and think about the rest of us.
First off, feminism vis-a-vis the issues of men has nothing to do with progressivism vs conservatism, except in the minds of American political tribalists.
But my own primary complaint about progressives is of the exact form that you describe (except perhaps substitute "academia" and "bureaucracy" for "government").
And in my own experience, it's not common for "conservatives" to say anything actually objectionable about "progressives" (and it's frankly inappropriate to assert what they think outside of what they say or otherwise overtly indicate), even in the US. On HN for example those comments are quite rare and almost universally flagged and killed. Whereas live, upvoted comments decrying the supposed current "fascist regime" are all over the place and the large majority of political submissions are clearly only there because they could be used as an excuse to fulminate about Trump, Musk, Thiel etc.
> There is no harmony possible when the woman is degraded or subjugated.
But this by and large is not actually happening. People like Tate are ultimately irrelevant grifters. I can't even name any "Tate-adjacent people". In my circles, Warren Farrell has way more name-brand recognition. I would never even know about Tate but for people complaining about him. Even other critics of feminism and progressivism rarely bring him up, and then only because of the specific manner in which he is attacked.
And, again, framing this as a two-party conflict is entirely inappropriate reductionism. "Conservatives" by any reasonable definition have no common cause with someone like Tate. The lifestyle he promotes is utterly opposed to "traditional family values".
> In the context of male gendered violence literally promoted by conservative thinkers, it is women talking about the impact it has on them who is causing the unfair harm to men. This is absurd.
This is a bizarre misrepresentation of what you're quoting.
First, it's unreasonable to present the quote as if it denied harm to women. It does not.
That said, the statistics make it clear that the fear is largely unreasonable; men do not report feeling fear in situations that are objectively much more dangerous to them.
But most importantly: you are repeating the conflation of Tate with "conservative thinkers", and conflating a very specific approach to conduct in sexual relationships (and the attempt to form them) with random assaults (physical and/or sexual) on the street by strangers. That is the absurd thing here.
> This is, frankly, a thing feminists books claim and I did not believed is a real thing. Except here you are, writing exactly those words.
I don't know why you'd have to read feminist literature to find the claim that men are afraid of being falsely perceived as sexual threats just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could just ask men.
Women are constantly told that a man in that place at that time would be a sexual threat in ways that men can obviously hear. Men are told it, too. Feminists even resist well-meaning education about personal safety, calling it "victim-blaming" and then turning it around to describe ways that entirely innocent men ought to go out of their way instead.
I have nearly had anxiety attacks when I walked into a nominally unisex bathroom and saw a feminine hygiene disposal unit and no urinal. Or when the men's bathroom was out of order at a shop and the clerk said to use the women's instead.
(And all of this happens against a backdrop of refusal to acknowledge that men can also be raped, including by women. Even the language used to describe female teachers sexually assaulting their male students is different from that used for male teachers and female students. I've heard women say those male students should consider themselves lucky. It's disgusting.)
I'm sorry that people like Andrew Tate still exist, in some number, who will say the kinds of things that validate your narrative. But in my experience, there are way more people who are willing to say the mirror image of it.
Wait, I do my work on a 4K display, according to a calculator I have a PPI of 150, but I already find my 4K display completely overkill!
Now, I spent an amount of my work life staring at a company-issued 27 inch 1080p display, and that was absolutely horrible, but with 4K, I'm not sure if I would even be able to see the improvement if I went to 6K or 8K even, which I always thought was mostly useless outside of gigantic television sets. Is it really worth it? Can you really genuinely see the text blurring on a 4K monitor?
I went from a 27" 4k display to my 5k iMac I converted to work as an external display. You can definitely see the difference, especially with text. The 4k - although a HUGH improvement over 1080p monitors - will still have that fuzziness on fonts.
I would probably see text quality issues on that setup. It depends on how far away the monitor is. PPI on phone screens tends to be much higher than PPI on laptops which tends to be higher than PPI on monitors, because each is typically used at a different distance.
If you're not using text around 9 pixels tall, as in the article, you're probably going to be okay. On a 27 inch screen at a typical office screen distance, I'd probably want 6k, but 4k is pretty good and 1080p is terrible.
Okay, it is a full on spyware virus though, not super sure why people would love Bonzi on their system.
This is kind of a shitty compromise, the second you leave a tiny crack open in the security, maybe through root access, maybe some better sideloading, somehow people WILL be tricked into installing malware, and it baffles me...
I've seen it happen multiple times with my older (and younger, though less often) relatives and acquaintances, I'm really not sure how like a solid 5 dialogs that scream at them with sayings like "do not do this", "this is dangerous", "if someone is telling you to do this they're a scammer", and that somehow raises zero alarms, however if you tell them to consider the possibility that they're downloading a virus, or that the nice IT man on the phone is probably not that trustworthy, they will simply not believe you.
That's why I kind of get the paranoia, though most of it is just that and I really believe that software freedom is a whole lot more important.
The Claude models are among the most expensive. It's easy to spend 30 EUR+ a day when providing it with a lot of context, documentation. Ofc it can be argued that this money is worth it relative to salaries, but recently I've switched to kilocode myself after looking at different model pricings on openrouter https://openrouter.ai/models?order=pricing-high-to-low There's just no reason to throw money away.
There are plenty of free (and also cheap ones) models you can use with just openrouter or kilocode (inexpensive less-shitty Cursor basically, https://kilocode.ai).
With most things these free models are able to achieve great results and similarly to the expensive ones they need oversight and thorough code reviews. These days I'm barely paying anything for tokens monthly.
Partially related: I really dislike the vibe of Gas Town, both the post and the tool, I really hope this isn't what the future looks like. It just feels disappointing.
I noticed an interesting hybrid – you get an interactive ad, if you interact with it, complete the level, engage with the ad etc. you get the close button immediately, if you idle you have to wait ~30 seconds. Feels very deplorable to me.
Google's AdMob has been doing these. Often it's something simple like completing a puzzle. I hate that I prefer these ads because it shortens the time until I get back to my game.
Interesting, I had these issues around 2 years ago with my Nvidia GPU, making Wayland unusable (especially the honestly probably epilepsy-inducing flicker).
After an Nvidia graphics driver release everything cleared up to be very usable (though occasionally stuff still crashed, like once or twice a week). I heavily dislike Nvidia and went with AMD just around a month ago, zero issues.
I mean you did ask people to ask you anything... :)
Though let me approach this from a more good faith angle, what are the steps you are trying to do to make better purchasing and consumption decisions?
I understand your point, it isn't all or nothing. I do try to make better decisions in regards to products created with blood, though I often falter, I use a Google phone, no idea how many children had to extract rare minerals for it to be created, and I buy cheap hardware from China and that's a whole other deal. However I avoid Temu and Shien, I don't eat meat due to the industry and carbon impact, I almost never use single-use and disposable plastic items to lower consumption in general, I avoid cars, almost always taking public transport, and regarding Fairphone, I am definitely eying them for a future phone, though right now there were some downsides that I couldn't take (for now, phone progress is slowing down, making it easier for them to catch up, hopefully soon). I don't do enough, and a lot of my decisions are based on climate impact and not human rights, I know, so, it'd be great to hear your thoughts!
They declared their module with just their package name without a URL, it got fixed a few hours ago.
I find it a bit interesting that Go even allows you to declare `module barename` in go.mod even though it loves breaking so many things if you do so. I sometimes try doing it for completely private projects but I always just declare some URL in the end, it's a weird anti-pattern in my opinion.
Though I usually consider myself progressive (to an annoying degree to some), the progressive "answer" to young men right now on how to find friends and partners is essentially something like:
Obviously I'm employing a bit of hyperbole for emphasis and this is also me trying to empathize with what it's like being a boy right now despite lacking first-hand experience. Luckily, most women do not feel this way about men, but I've heard all of this said by my friends at one time or another (and I might have said something similar myself during my weaker moments, when I was upset).Meanwhile the hardliners on the opposite side of the spectrum espouse the idea that actually men should be evil because it's manly. That women are lesser to them and that patriarchy is super cool actually. See Andrew Tate as an example, who has captured the ears of millions of teenage boys around the world. At first it's hard to comprehend why his ideology speaks to them, but you have to remember that most of them are just entering the time of their life where they have to figure themselves out, where they have to, for the first time in their life, find friendship, respect and companionship on their own outside of the family or the playground. And after all, everyone wants to be loved and respected in some way, and Andrew Tate offers them an answer: You can be an asshole and still be loved and respected, while the leftie answer tells them that you can be as perfect as you like, but you probably still won't be loved and respected, and if you fuck up, don't expect any grace.
And now the question is what should society actually do so that both young men and young women can find a harmonious place in it? I think really the only answer is to stop playing the blame game, stop trying to make one side the constant bad guy and scapegoat, try to comprehend that we are all equally human, and that whatever a person's gender is doesn't give you the right to be shitty to them. I don't know, maybe this is simply another utopian idea, of men and women living together in perfect unison, never being mean to each other. I think we should still strive to achieve some sort of balance, but sadly I don't really see an easy answer to this.
Sorry for this long rant, I've wanted to put this into words for a while. Occasionally I think about how bad it must be being a teenage boy right now, the thought scares me and I feel lucky not being one. Every time I read another woman saying that she's afraid of every man on the street walking in proximity to her, and every time it's dark out and I hear a man behind me and I get physically afraid, I think, what if I was a man and she was afraid for her life because of me? Just because I exist in the space next to her? Just because of a random coin-flip during my conception? And it feels awful. I don't want anyone to go through that.
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