There are actually some records of Cynics interacting with ascetics in India and recognizing them as engaging in similar practice (i.e. living simply to live virtuously and happily).

Stoicism is just Cynicism with more boot 🤪

Early Buddhism was also criticized as hedonistic by Vedic religious authorities because it rejected asceticism, so in a real way Buddhism is more aligned with Cynicism than you would think (though there are also real differences).

I’m not saying there are no ascetic elements in Buddhism, I’m saying it’s not central to Buddhist soteriology, i.e. nibbana / nirvana is a realization that cannot be reached through asceticism, and this is a fundamental teaching of the Buddha (and a major distinction between Buddhism and Hinduism).

don’t get me wrong, there are real and urgent moral reasons to reject the adoption of LLMs, but I think we should all agree that the responses here show a lack of critical thinking and mostly just engagement with a headline rather than actually reading the article (a kind of literacy issue) … I know this is a common problem on the internet, I don’t really know how to change it - but maybe surfacing what people are skipping out on reading will make it more likely they will actually read and engage the content past the headline?

it’s a bit related to the sexual roles that traditionally were gendered, with women being receptive partners in sex receiving men’s penetration. The woman is like the bottom and the man is like the top.

The dynamic is generalized by ContraPoints in the Twilight video, where she labels it DHSM: Default Heterosexual Sado-Masochism:

This is also similar to the ideas Julia Serano lays out in Sexed Up about our binary gender conceptions.

I think the reason for thinking in terms of top and bottom is to move away from essentializing “top” as male and “bottom” as female, and these are terms used in queer communities where there might be same-sex lovers or genderqueer lovers who still engage in these sexual dynamics but might not want to use heteronormative and gender essentialist language, or in kink communities where straight people might be going against the grain (e.g. a woman pegging a man, the man is the bottom while the woman is the top).

hm, the only thing I think could use some minor clarification is that while I agree bottoms are the “receptive” partner in sex, it’s not necessarily that what they are receiving is primarily pleasure.

Bottoms are maybe stereotypically submissive, passive, receptive, etc. and tops are stereotypically active, dominant, and penetrating. (Obviously the stereotypes can be broken and are not total, e.g. power bottoms as you mentioned are dominant in the dynamic or in control while still maybe being the receptive partner in penetrative sex.)

But in terms of pleasure and whose pleasure is centered, the person penetrating who is functioning as the “top” might have their pleasure be the focus when penetrating a bottom. This is more of a “service bottom” kind of dynamic. When the top is mostly focused on the bottom’s pleasure, then we would say they are a “service top”.

I’m just not sure there is a default in terms of whose pleasure matters, maybe the bottom’s does, but I think the heteronormative default is that the man’s pleasure is centered, so probably with most straight couples having straight sex, the man’s pleasure is centered and the woman’s pleasure is an afterthought. But “top” and “bottom” are typically queer or kink terms that are used precisely because the gender roles are not necessarily being followed (even in a straight couple, a man being the bottom and the woman being the top would be subversive).

I only add this clarification about pleasure because I’m a preferred bottom who has suffered from a lot of dysphoria, so it has been much harder for me to receive pleasure during sex, and so I have been a bottom who prefers to focus on the pleasure of my partner (I believe the old term for this was “stone”, hence terms like “stone butch” or “stone femmes”). Even if I struggled to receive pleasure, I don’t think that altered my seemingly innate preference for being a bottom, so it’s at least not essential that bottoms receive pleasure (even if they are “receptive” in other senses).

Though ironically bottom surgery did help me a lot with actually receiving pleasure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subarachnoid_hemorrhage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnoid_mater

it is one of the protective membranes around the brain and spinal cord, and it is named after its resemblance to spider webs, so - close enough

link to the actual study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04074-y

Tested alone, LLMs complete the scenarios accurately, correctly identifying conditions in 94.9% of cases and disposition in 56.3% on average. However, participants using the same LLMs identified relevant conditions in fewer than 34.5% of cases and disposition in fewer than 44.2%, both no better than the control group. We identify user interactions as a challenge to the deployment of LLMs for medical advice.

The findings were more that users were unable to effectively use the LLMs (even when the LLMs were competent when provided the full information):

despite selecting three LLMs that were successful at identifying dispositions and conditions alone, we found that participants struggled to use them effectively.

Participants using LLMs consistently performed worse than when the LLMs were directly provided with the scenario and task

Overall, users often failed to provide the models with sufficient information to reach a correct recommendation. In 16 of 30 sampled interactions, initial messages contained only partial information (see Extended Data Table 1 for a transcript example). In 7 of these 16 interactions, users mentioned additional symptoms later, either in response to a question from the model or independently.

Participants employed a broad range of strategies when interacting with LLMs. Several users primarily asked closed-ended questions (for example, ‘Could this be related to stress?’), which constrained the possible responses from LLMs. When asked to justify their choices, two users appeared to have made decisions by anthropomorphizing LLMs and considering them human-like (for example, ‘the AI seemed pretty confident’). On the other hand, one user appeared to have deliberately withheld information that they later used to test the correctness of the conditions suggested by the model.

Part of what a doctor is able to do is recognize a patient’s blind-spots and critically analyze the situation. The LLM on the other hand responds based on the information it is given, and does not do well when users provide partial or insufficient information, or when users mislead by providing incorrect information (like if a patient speculates about potential causes, a doctor would know to dismiss incorrect guesses, whereas a LLM would constrain responses based on those bad suggestions).

Asceticism might be a path to liberation in Hinduism, but I don’t think that’s an accurate reading of Buddhism (which famously rejects asceticism as a method of liberation and posits the Middle Way instead) …

I doubt it’s a trans thing 😅

“This is not the digestive function of some lower life form we’re talking about here. These are implications that reach all of humanity,” said Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist and co-author of the 2011 book “Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences.”

“Do we have some evidence?” he asked. “And how strong is that evidence that we have life after death, that our consciousness survives bodily death?” Long — who was not involved in either the NEPTUNE paper or the critique — said he has studied more than 4,000 near-death experiences.

🙄

the “sweeping critique” was:

Of note, they did not discuss major NDE features that seem incompatible with their physicalist theory, such as veridical out-of-body perceptions during NDEs (Holden, 2009). Furthermore, some NDEs include encounters with deceased persons of whose death the experiencer had no knowledge, or whom the experiencer had never met; accurate information acquired about the deaths of these deceased persons challenges the interpretation of these visions as hallucinations (Greyson, 2010c; Khanna et al., 2018).

Martial et al. (2025) acknowledged that, in developing their coherent overarching model, “We have excluded dualistic theories from our discussion owing to the lack of empirical neuroscientific evidence and the fact that a fundamental tenet of neuroscience asserts that human experience arises from the brain”

https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-82154-001.html

ruling out supernatural explanations and approaching science with an empirical and physicalist approach shouldn’t be that controversial, and the fact that some oncologist is willing to believe in a supernatural after-life doesn’t exactly change anything :-/

Out of body perceptions are common aspects of altered states and dissociative episodes (and dissociation is a frequent change in mental state that happens during trauma such as a near-death-experience, I’ve had this happen to myself during acute physical trauma). Out of body experiences don’t really prove anything supernatural.

And I’m highly skeptical that during NDEs that accurate information was acquired about deceased persons that they did not know before - that is the kind of claim that if found to be true would be all over the news.

😭😭😭

pulling annual US population data from: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/population

(take this with a grain of salt, the last US census was in 2020, I don’t know how they calculate these numbers)

this is what I put together:

Looks like the growth of half-time show audience is faster than population growth.

EDIT: this is the third time I have recreated this damn spreadsheet, lol

wow, thanks for that explanation!

Just for you, I recreated the spreadsheet and added the r², which turns out to be 0.896:

I’m not sure she’s a centrist as much as a progressive liberal 😅

and another Republican governor vetoed a similar bill the year before that!

“I vetoed a nearly identical bill to this one last year,” said Gov. Ayotte, according to The New Hampshire Bulletin. “I made it clear this issue needed to be addressed in a thoughtful, narrow way that protects the privacy, safety, and rights of all Granite Staters. Unfortunately, there is minimal difference between Senate Bill 268 and the bill I vetoed last year, which [Republican] Governor [Chris] Sununu vetoed the year prior.”

so yeah, misleading / dishonest headline

As far as I know, the douching recommendation after penetrative sex assumes there is a penis doing the penetrating; it is only really necessary to clean out cum and other fluids and to help combat the bacteria introduced by the penis.

Like you said, penetrating with a toy isn’t that different from dilation and doesn’t warrant douching out-of-cycle.

That said, the one main difference between dilating and using a toy for pleasure is that I personally have found when I am aroused I get very wet and all that wetness can definitely get mixed-in with the penetrating and get into the canal; that said, I only notice it has altered my odor a little, but I don’t think it warrants an out-of-cycle douching the way penetration with a penis does. As long as you clean up after, change your pad, etc. I don’t think it is a big deal. Also, this may or may not be relevant to you, depending on whether your surgeon retains the Cowper’s gland and whether you tend to get as wet as I do - experiences vary considerably.

Agreed on most of that - but I don’t know that violent removal of his administration from power after a successful coup is the most likely outcome - the US military was in the hands of other side in the case of the Confederacy … a successful Trump coup would maybe lead to schisms within the military or between state National Guards and federal forces (maybe), but it’s also possible Trump just takes and holds power and there is no domestic military force that is willing or able to remove him. Maybe California and other states would band together, but I’m not sure they would have the military to fight off the US military if they are loyal to Trump after a coup.

It’s possible Trump’s coup will be more like what happened in Russia, where they find a way to do it without much bloodshed by undermining the democratic institutions of elections, media, etc. so that it all appears to be constitutional and legal, but the government has clearly become autocratic.

not sure why you think that’s “foolproof” - he has no authority to do that, and it seems tantamount to a coup to stop elections without constitutional grounds

I don’t know, I deleted the spreadsheet - I don’t know if it helps but it said the trend line was “linear” (unfortunately I don’t know enough about this kind of stuff, I don’t really understand r-squared or what it means)

that would be good to know, but based on their analysis here I would absolutely not be surprised that they just ignored extra-judicial methods like a full-on coup …