They'll get their money refunded...oh wait, no one fucking pays for that service. A quick google puts estimates of only 5% have paid. I've missed the dating apps, for better or worse, by meeting my wife in college, before they were a thing, but my single friends tell me OKCupid is a sewer of married men who don't want dating app charges appearing on the credit card statement and broke losers. Ever female friend of mine who tried it said they were instantly harassed by the lowest quality garbage men the local area had to offer....and LOTs of dick pics from strangers...and that ANY service offers a better experience.

So yeah...if you're not the customer, you're the product. No one is going to let you get laid for free. They want your data to resell as well as sell you ads. OKCupid is a shitty dishonest company....but I also have limited sympathy for the fake outrage..."OMG...you mean that free app that helps me smash isn't respecting my data and misleading what they're doing with it?"

Sorry, if I was single, the last thing I'd want to do is spend time looking for women too cheap to pay to find someone. If you can't pay $20 to meet your future husband...something tells me you are either too young for me to be dating or have issues that will surface later.

Finding out that OKCupid is not fully on the up and up is like finding out those hot dogs that roll on the heaters at 7-11 for hours, if not days, before serving are bad for you.

This is veering close into MAHA territory, in my view...treating minor lifestyle details and major health factors. You just stated a lot of what appears to be impressive scientific data. While I don't WANT microplastics in my blood, how can I quantify the actual risk? I know that's not YOUR job, you're just the messenger presenting what appear to be facts, but that's why I am skeptical. Having been burnt by bullshit science + media hysteria telling us red wine will prevent heart attacks and tooth decay causes them, I am not ready to get alarmed. You say, people with above-threshold level of nanoplastics are more likely to get heart attacks, but given I've heard a half dozen of these bullshit things in my life, I have to ask the correlation vs causation question.

Much like red wine drinkers...in that Americans who enjoy wine are more likely to be wealthier or have lower stress in life than those who don't (the poor can't afford it and blue collar folks drink other things). Are microplastics worsening their cardiac health?...or are people with more realistic contributors just likely to be exposed to more microplastics. For example, if you're poor, you're probably not replacing plastic food containers that's heavily worn down. And being poor or stressed out will kill you waaaay faster than microplastics can...I am sure we both can agree on.

So my question to the scientific community, and I know you're just the messenger, is can we show epidemiological among regions? I think it's safe to say that not every region is exposed to microplastics at the same rate. Do the Southern Europeans use as much plastic? When I visit France and Italy, they seem to prefer glass...do they have less microplastics in their blood than North Americans or the Chinese? What about Africa or rural Asia...do they have higher levels or lower ones? Can we see holistic trends there?

The world spent 20 years chasing down trying to figure out the Blue Zones paradox...only to find out it's just coincidence and bad record keeping. Food is not medicine. I know the MAHA crowd would like to disagree, but it's true. Abusive eating can be poison, but switching to the Mediterranean diet from an otherwise reasonable American diet is not going to cure your heart disease. Similarly, if microplastics really caused heart attacks, it would be quite easy to prove.

In the end, I know microplastics aren't good for you, but I also am not convinced they're highly harmful. I will wager that if scrutinized, the data will show a much stronger correlation between the classic heart disease factors, which to my knowledge, in order are: genetic predisposition, smoking and drug abuse (booze, illegal stuff), stress, obesity, being-out-of-shape, prescription-drugs(like ritalin) and legal stimulants...then a far, distant.....EVERYTHING else, including microplastics or environmental toxins.

In the end, I am all for avoiding microplastics, but I put that in the category of things that "MIGHT" be bad for you, but we're not certain it's significant, like artificial sweeteners, caffeine, non-organic produce, etc.

Everything you said is true about theoretical AI, but not about real-world AI...or at the very least Claude Opus/Sonnet 4.6. It hasn't improved in any measure that I can identify in the last 2 years. I've been using it every workday, by mandate from my employer. So I am not a naysayer...I'm a frustrated user.

Look, you can show me bullshit theoretical papers and press releases all you want. There's a simple test that will prove either of us right or wrong and that's the real world and the market.

ChatGPT was released nearly 4 years ago. By year 4 iPhones were largely successful and disrupted many existing industries. My favorite example was the gay bar scene was annihilated by grindr. Why overpay to go to a windowless bar, face potential discrimination, and deal with sexual harassment and frustration to date a limited pool...when you can just check for available dick on your iPhone? It was starting to disrupt cabs. It annihilated sales of GPS units and even cameras. And iPhones were EXPENSIVE and had a fraction of the penetration ChatGPT does. FAR more people have used ChatGPT than have even used iPhones today, let alone 4 years into their existence....yet few come back.

LLM-based AIs? The only people making money in this gold rush are the pick and shovel vendors. No one is launching new LLM services that people actually want (everyone hates chatbots). I can think of a dozen KILLER usecases for easy money if AI was as good as you said. For starters, how about resurrecting ancient video games? Epic could spend 20k of Claude's time and easily reboot a major video game, like Unreal Tournament in UE5....if the shit actually worked. EVERY compiler maker could optimize binaries further if LLM-AIs actually worked. While no one pays for compilers these days, every hosting company would love to make their binaries 20% more energy efficient...get more hosts on a machine, get better response time, etc. Or more obvious use cases are apps that convert legacy COBOL code or any other language to the modern language of your choice (rust/Java/C).

Put simply, LLM-based AI resembles bitcoin more than it resembles the iPhone or internet or even minor tech revolutions like cloud computing and big data. Right now, the only people profiting off it's introduction are the pick and shovel vendors...the AWSs, the nVidias, the AI providers. Once I see pioneering businesses doing useful things with AI, beyond selling AI, then I'll start believing the hype.

Compiled code does have to work perfectly. Code generally has to work perfectly. Does it have to be optimal? No...but code with errors is intolerable in nearly all scenarios.

The CEOs are lying and LLM-based AIs are greatly overrated. They're helpful, but they're more like an enhanced version of Stack Overflow. If you know what you're doing, they slow you down. For example, I know Java really really really well. When I have Claude Sonnet or Opus generate Java, it takes them waaay longer than it takes me to write it, so I can't be lazy and outsource it to them. It seriously takes the AI minutes to do something it takes me seconds to do.

OK, so what about things that take me minutes?...like writing a unit test?...well, that's my favorite use case for AI. I'd LOVE to see it succeed, but I work primarily in Java, a compiled language...and it is strict about getting things right, so I see the errors immediately. Python users who vibe code, just ship bugs and let their users find them. OK, so with enough tries, it barfs out a unit test. It looks pretty good...afterall, LLMs are top-notch guessers. Unfortunately, the unit test is completely wrong and useless...so I have to go make it actually test the code instead of testing bean getters and setters and stupid shit like that. The scary part is that it looks good. It looks correct. But it often isn't, so you have to evaluate line-by-line.

One of my coworkers is more bullish on AI and introduced over 20 bugs last week with his AI slop, including undoing half my fixes for the week. His boss is consider putting him on a Performance Improvement Plan for his AI use. He's not a dumb guy. He just didn't understand the pieces I worked on, didn't read my docs and comments, and was fooled by the AI when it undid all my code to make his component's test pass. He is in India and didn't wait for me to review the code and had someone in IST review it who knew even less.

The only powerful use case I've found for them is for scenarios where you need to work with a technology you used to know well, but have forgotten. As a backend software engineer, this would be front-end code, RegExes, obscure stored procedure method calls, etc. For RegExes, I write them maybe 2x a year...so I never am confident of things I write. I can review the code better than I can write it from scratch.

If you've never used a technology, the code is unreliable. At best, it might save you some time learning. For example, if I had to write something in C#, a language I barely touched 20 years ago, it might double the ramp-up time, but I'd still have to spend a lot of time learning the fundamentals of the language. It would take the place of a really well written book...helpful, but not a game changer.

The point being...AI doesn't tangibly save time. It might save a bit under some circumstances, but not enough to justify layoffs. The CEOs are full of shit. They're AI washing routine layoffs. Either they overhired, or they wanted to shut down products and features or they wanted to get rid of dead weight....but apparently it's more fashionable to overtly lie to investors? It baffles me why shareholders haven't filed a lawsuit against Beinhoff....or any other CEO.

OK, so they make their own fabs. Aren't the components in short supply? Aren't they paying more for ASML machines?...etching chemicals?...high-end silicon? It's like the Strait of Hormuz closing...the USA is now an oil exporter, so we're not impacted, right?...nope!!!...because everyone who is impacted is now buying from the USA and our gas prices went up nearly as much as everyone else's. OK, so Apple can make their own chips?....what's to stop them from jacking up the price since the market is willing to pay? They make more money, but they're not going to be virtuous and underprice their machines in a market that's willing to pay far more than they should.

If you were correct, then this wouldn't apply to laptops and open-market RAM and storage. Consoles are not the concern...the fact that I have to pay a fuckton extra for SSDs and RAM and devices of all sort, even those not subsidized as a loss-leader, is the concern. I don't even want a PS5, but this does apply to everything I do want to buy in the next year that draws electricity.

This is a problem, well-documented, by the fact that the major AI vendors are buying all they can...it's a basic market problem. The only solution is to let the horrid bubble pop. My frustration is that they're subsidizing it in a circular manner and hiding from everyone how horrid their business model is.

LLM AIs will outlive this hype cycle and all the destruction they're causing. AI is here to stay. I just am sick of suffering because the major vendors are lying to investors and lying to their customers about both their business model and the capabilities of their technology.

Chips are not only more expensive, their supply is unstable and unreliable. It impacts everyone who buys computer components. Apple has more leverage than Sony, but trust me, you'll see the same level of price increases from Apple, probably this year and every year until this horrible AI bubble pops. It's fucking surreal to want to buy devices early to save money. All my life...you wait to buy something, it goes down in price and gets better. Now we just pay more for the exact same performance every year.

This is pure bullshit. It's a 5.5 year old console and priced more than it was during introduction! OK, so Sony is overcharging me...well, so is everyone else. Every device is going up in cost, purely due to us subsidizing this LLM circular economy. Fuck every LLM provider. I want useful devices, like consoles, laptops, phones, and tablets...without shortage pricing...not your useless LLMs that can't even generate code that compiles, Claude 4.6 opus/sonnet. This week, I used it like 10x...EVERY fucking attempt was a failure..."why did I get this exception?"...failure..."update this json schema to validate across 3 fields"...failure. "Update this code to the latest version of Spring"....failure. "Change this legacy for loop into a lambda"...failure...didn't even compile and hallucinated methods that don't exist.

I have to listen to employers AI-washing their failures and convincing the industry they can lay us all off.

I have to pay a lot more for any device I want...with the prospect that things aren't getting better any time soon.

So far, I am not seeing any tangible benefits to these technologies, yet lots of suffering.

This bubble can't pop fast enough.

I know AI will someday be useful, but it's been nothing but a curse. Instead of getting slow, steady progress, we're getting fever-pitched investment that's not paying off, disrupting the job market, and now making it a lot harder to buy useful technology. Fuck these guys. I am sick of paying for their stupidity.

I don't know the answer to that, TBH. The experts say it's bad. It's illegal...so I tell them they need to follow the law. I don't think a 10yo and 12yo should be picking and choosing which laws the follow or don't follow. Generally, when I don't know the answer, I defer to experts....I also just don't care enough to follow up. Life is just fine if they do normal kid stuff rather than goon to the worst the internet has to offer.

I think it's probably better for them to not have their developing brains saturated with porn designed to stimulate jaded 30-something sex addicts. For example, step-sibling, choking, anilingus, calling each other "mommy" and "daddy"...that kind of stuff...I'm old, so for me, I grabbed every porn I could find when I was underage, but it was typical 80s stuff: hot women with huge hair doing very conventional sex stuff. The most extreme thing I saw until the 2000s was fake tits. I don't think it harmed me at all. But again, the porn of the 80s was quite tame. The 70s porn was downright wholesome!...all natural.

While I may fully grasp the intent of that specific law, I think it's a reasonable restriction. Also, life is just easier when you demand your kids follow the law..."Sorry buddy, I'm not the one saying you can't look at those titties....it's the federal government! Blame Donald Trump...he could let you see them, but he doesn't want you to!"

The USA used to be a reliable protector for it's allies. Trump has changed that...in my mind, for the worse...but history will tell. Like I said...shit was horrible when the USA was looming?...OK, well, you'll soon see what life is like when the USA loses interest in your region. The CIA has done shitty things in the Middle East, but let's see how shitty they get once the USA doesn't really give a shit because we have enough oil and Trump doesn't respect alliances....especially since hypersonic missiles now cost the same as a luxury car.

I have 2 kids. We've had many conversations about sex. I've told them they're not allowed to watch porn or consume inappropriate content. However, I also educate them as to why they should wait until they're 18 and frankly, when they want to talk about sex, I make it a boring academic discussion about science and reproduction...so instead of "ooh nice titties"...the conversation goes to lactation and hormones produced and how babies rely on mother's milk during their early years. Sex isn't naughty or scary. When they ask me inappropriate questions, like "how often do you and mommy have sex?"...while it's tempting to remind them there's a lock on the door for a reason....I just politely tell them that's personal information and I don't want to share it. My strategy is to make sex clinical and educational, not naughty.

Both of my pre-teen kids have watched porn without our permission before and had questions. I told them they cannot do that again, but I went through and explained every detail. That naughty cumshot? I explained about the different organs in the male anatomy and the different fluids produced and their purpose and framed things from the perspective of people starting families...which is easier for them to understand. However, I didn't shame them. I'm honestly glad they saw it because then I don't have to explain to them what ejaculation is. Both of them feel very comfortable asking me questions and ask me a lot of them (my wife is less comfortable, but really appreciates how I answer it and how much sex ed trivia I remember).

So rather than let the internet and their friends be their sole source of information, I've set up an environment where they know they can trust me and ask me whatever and I'll never shame them. I prepare my children for the world we live in, not demand the world change so I don't have to teach them what sex is.

But to the point, sex is like traffic. We teach our kids to look both ways before they cross the street. We teach drivers to be mindful of pedestrians, especially children. We don't go around banning cars to nerf the world for our children.

Porn is irrelevant to feminism. People who oppose legal porn for non-religious reasons have issues with sex....no other reason. It's like drinking. I don't like to drink, some do. However, I don't go around claiming people who enjoy drinking legally are harming women because I am uncomfortable around drunk assholes. I just accept they're into something I find disgusting and not good for me, personally. Porn is a profession with a market. It's no more degrading than driving an uber or cleaning someone's toilet....but often more lucrative. However, as you've stated, there is no problem. It's a fucking job, or more likely, a side hustle. Some jobs suck, some are awesome. To me, sex performers are like any other performers...being a struggling musician seems like a worse life than showing your tits on OnlyFans, IMHO. However, it's a valid line of work providing a service than harms no one. Women who claim porn is sexist are trying to control others.

Porn is often pretty gross to many people. That's OK. It's not for you. Most of the hit songs on the radio are gross to me. Every major religion is gross to me. I don't go around telling everyone we need to ban annoying pop music or religion. I don't even shame people who are into it. I'm happy they find their joy so long as they don't harm me or try to make me partake in their gross behavior.

The massive problem with the Feminist movement is that it isn't official. Anyone can claim to be a feminist and we have a bad habit as a society of taking them seriously. In contrast, Catholicism has well defined doctrines. Someone can't go around applying their personal prejudices based on being a Catholic...they can't say "Fat chicks are gross and heretical to the Catholic Church"...you could ask any priest and they'll quickly tell you that person is full of shit and doesn't speak for them.

Unfortunately, because feminism is an idea, not a specific movement, there is no authority to say what is feminist and what isn't. So you're some awful misandrist who blames men for all your failings in life?...and I know a LOT of women like that. You can go around and call yourself a feminist. You can say you speak on behalf of feminists...and everything that irks your personal prejudices...like women more attractive than you monetizing their bodies and receiving adoration you will never receive is sexist and anti-women.

And my tribe, the liberals, have a VERY BAD habit of not questioning people that speak for them. So many are too afraid to be called sexist, so it's easier to just let Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Gail Dines, Susan Brownmiller, etc rant and say absurd bullshit like "Porn is rape"..."All performers were coerced into performing (which is technically rape)"...and Brownmiller's famous "porn is practice for violence against women." None of these horrible people bothered to talk to the performers. Dworkin was ABSOLUTELY nuts and thought marriage was rape...all men are rapists...all bi/heterosexual women are anti-feminist traitors, etc.

Liberals let female incels define a major wing of feminism because they didn't have the common sense to question their obvious bullshit. Few would let Andrew Tate speak for the male gender....yet Andrea Dworkin's obviously stupid bullshit is taught in universities...not as being actually correct, just as being an alternate idea.

And their worst nightmare has come true. Porn is legal. Porn is VERY prevalent. EVERYONE enjoys porn. Guess what....violence against women is down...rape is down. Misogyny is down since everything they wrote. Why?...PORN HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PROBLEMS WOMEN FACE!!!!! The crimes against women had a lot more in common with crime, in general, which has stronger roots in socio-economic issues. Turns out the way to reduce rape is to same way to reduce robbery and murder...don't ban the porn, but increase economic opportunity....provide substance abuse treatment...lock up the mentally ill with criminal intent that can't function in society.

"Genocide is the deliberate, systematic destruction—in whole or in part—of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group". Israel is not targeting civilians, but terrorist organizations. The point of genocide is to target the people, not the combatants. Are they committing atrocities?...maybe, but that's not genocide. Words mean things. Also, that's not the correct use of the world "literal"

Is Israel the good guy?...in my mind, yes, but I am not confident of that and I am open that maybe I'm wrong.

However, what I am very confident about is that Iran is far worse. They do target civilians. They fund groups that target civilians. The only reason Iran isn't committing LITERAL genocide against the Israelis and probably most of the Sunnis is because they lack the ability, not because they're more ethical.

You're comparing nations against your ideals, not reality and their peers. Israel spend a fortune trying to precisely attack specific targets. Iran has no qualms about killing non-combatants. That's a major difference between a democracy and an authoritarian theocratic regime. Again, I'd rather be a civilian living in a nation attacked by Israel than Russia or Iran. No one WANTS to be attacked, obviously, but at least civilized nations make the effort to do the right thing. They fail often...and that's the horrors of war...but the uncivilized ones? Nope...Russia will happily bomb daycares, schools, and civilian powerplants to simply weaken the resolve of their opponents. If Iran has the ability to, they'd do the same. I have no doubt about that.

If you want to discuss things like adults, with actual facts, we can...if you want to be vague and inarticulate...well...go back to your bubble. I'd rather be living Guam or Puerto Rico than Ukraine or any country in the Soviet Union...what about you? Again, be an adult and read the original point instead of mindlessly regurgitating your propaganda. Has the US done bad things? Absolutely! Were they worse than the Soviet Union? NO! Russia? NO! Do we have to go back to before the 20th century?

Read about world history and you'll see the USA sucks...but far less than it's peers.