Great article. I laugh at the folks who think this dude is bought into the fantasy that some folks have turned into what best represents a spirituality. As in if they haven’t seen folks who go a little too hard in any one specific part of their life. Sure, gooning as a term has long since entered the cultural zeitgeist and has been used, both ironically and not, as a way to simply now refer to excessive masturbation. But to discount that there is a loneliness epidemic out there and folks who have turned to gooning as some form of extreme kink or outlet for some need for human connection and healing, going 24/7 like many dom/sub relationships or cnc, ferality, etc. shows either a lack of exposure to the vastness of this damaged world or an attempt to poke fun at the author for seriously studying a cultural phenomenon. Either way, this is a fascinating look into a weird niche subculture and a really well written article. Thank you for sharing.
Gaywallet (they/it)
I’m gay
- 59 Posts
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Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word
12·1 month agoUnfortunately the world has become so divorced from reality it no longer matters whether something is true. It only matters whether you can convince someone it looks or feels true. Management wants subtle changes made by a hallucination engine because it doesn’t matter if they fail, they still get their golden parachute and move on to another company they get to ruin 🤷♀️
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Gaming@beehaw.org•It’s official: EA is selling to private equity in $55 billion deal
4·1 month agoYea fair there is definitely the sportswashing angle on this, but they are absolutely leveraging debt for this purchase which they will put on the company. Their deck also talks a ton about AI, which is where the AI/stripping angle comes from. As to whether they can just ignore the debt because oil money, that’s I suppose another question entirely.
Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgto
Gaming@beehaw.org•It’s official: EA is selling to private equity in $55 billion deal
4·1 month agoActually, it’s pretty clear they are planning on completely gutting this company. They’re taking on debt to buy this deal, which they will put on the company. Their pitch is to eliminate jobs with AI (which they probably know won’t work) which means they’ll cut most of the staff and “replace” it with AI, likely contracts with companies they own so that they can continue to leech off whatever income comes in from game sales. The company will continue to churn out trash and make some money by repeating last year’s sports game this year but now with AI coding until it eventually declares bankruptcy and is either auctioned off to be stripped for what’s left of its parts or simply shutters forever.
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Technology@beehaw.org•LinkedIn set to start to train its AI on member profiles
1·1 month agoAs someone who basically doesn’t use linkedin anymore, and also doesn’t particularly care if they train a terrible AI model on my information, can someone explain to me why should I bother to turn off this setting (I have not logged into linkedin in months)?
Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgMto
World News@beehaw.org•Tyler Robinson In Custody As Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect (Live)
24·2 months agoThe right as a political machine didn’t bat an eye when democratic government officials were assassinated. They also have completely ignored the facts of just about everything and inserted their own ideology or fantasy about what’s true and what’s not. What do you think “shouting from the rooftops” is going to accomplish here? This same nonsense has repeated itself multiple times with the attempted Trump assassinations and with other figures on the right. 99 times out of 100 it’s a young straight white conservative male behind shootings, yet there is never introspection on this issue. I cannot imagine this will change the minds of any significant number of those on the right. As Kirk himself said, this is the price of business.
This is just one of the many far reaching effects of the disinformation age we are headed into. It would not surprise me if, in the future (assuming humanity survives our climate crisis), this period of time will be contrasted with the middle ages as periods of great loss of human knowledge.
For what it’s worth, a lot of what the article is bringing up isn’t particularly new. Fake studies are nothing new, but the scope of them will definitely increase. While it is manpower intensive, this is easily solved by peer review. In fact, perhaps ironically, AI could be used to do a first-pass review before and summarize what seems like it was AI created versus human created and send that along to a human.
Corporation funded studies designed to get around regulation or to promote their product, on the other hand, is something we’ve been dealing with for quite some time and an issue we haven’t really solved as a society. Anyone who works in science knows how to spot these from a mile away because they’re nearly always published in tiny journals (low citation score) which either don’t do peer review or have shady guidelines. The richer companies have the money to simply run 40 or 50 studies concurrently and toss the data from every one that doesn’t have the outcome they’re looking for (in essence repeatedly rolling a d20 until they get a 20) which allows them to get their findings into a bigger journal because it’s all done above board. Some larger publishing journals have created guidelines to try and fight this, but ultimately you need meta-analyses and other researchers to disprove what’s going on, and that’s fairly costly.
Also, as an aside- this belongs in the science community more than tech in my opinion.
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World News@beehaw.org•Vaping may be causing irreversible harm to children’s health, doctors say
7·2 months agoI’m fairly certain that this is what’s being cited. The journalism, unfortunately, is quite poor and it’s hard to confirm precisely what article she was referring to.
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Gaming@beehaw.org•'The dumbest thing I've ever heard': Amazon Web Services CEO lambasts replacing junior employees with AI, but he still loves AI
2·2 months agohey there, removing this because its not a gaming article, feel free to repost it in a more appropriate community
Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World [404 Media]
6·3 months agoDisgusting typical techbro behavior, I hate it.
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Gaming@beehaw.org•Hollow Knight: Silksong is coming out on September 4
5·3 months agowild they managed to keep it under wraps for so long given its so soon
Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgto
Gaming@beehaw.org•Hollow Knight: Silksong is coming out on September 4
12·3 months agoSept 4 like, 2 weeks from now? or 1 year and 2 weeks lol
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Technology@beehaw.org•Meta appoints anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck as AI bias advisor
8·3 months agoThe president really made an executive order about preventing woke AI? Humanity is cooked fam
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Technology@beehaw.org•Your CV is not fit for the 21st century
161·3 months agoThat’s going to take some research and a rewrite to get it looking like those it was trained to match. You need to be adding synonyms and dependencies because the AIs lack any model of how we actually do IT, they only see correlations between words.
Very simple solution: ask AI to rewrite your resume for specific job applications or fields.
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Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•Polish Train Maker Is Suing the Hackers Who Exposed Its Anti-Repair Tricks
10·3 months agoFYI this was already posted to technology, here.
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Technology@beehaw.org•Google search boss says AI isn’t killing search clicks
4·3 months agoHaving seen how so many average people are using AI, I’m sadly not surprised that people are just going with whatever is up there, even when it is wrong.
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Technology@beehaw.org•White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite
18·3 months agoThe difference is that Camacho is a himbo, our current president is more of a bridge troll
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World News@beehaw.org•Cuba's huge leap forward in trans rights– citizens can now legally choose gender
3·3 months agoIt’s almost entirely medically irrelevant, and the times in which it becomes medically relevant you need to go to a doctor to manage the transition and they can explain to you the times where you need to disclose it (practically never).
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Technology@beehaw.org•Grok's Hate Speech Meltdown Exposes AI's Hidden Bias Crisis
1·4 months agoIt really isn’t hidden lol. But you will get countless LLM defenders online who claim you can eliminate the bias with prompting or other hacks which don’t address the underlying issue or do anything but patch a broken system. To fix LLM bias you need to systematically correct, and very few folks have bothered to try and design methods to systematically correct. In the case of Grok, it’s actually explicitly designed to reference Musk’s bigoted musings on subjects first before examining other information.


















This is not a fair analogy for what is going on here. Video games being blamed harkens back to times when music or other counter cultural media was blamed for behavior. We have a lot of literature which shows that the passive consumption of media doesn’t really affect someone in the ways which they were being blamed. From the beginning, this argument lacked a logical or hypothetical framework as well - it was entirely based on moral judgement values by certain individuals in society who simply “believed” that these were the cause.
AI on the other hand, interacts back with you, and amplifies psychosis. Now this is early days and most of what we have is theoretical in nature, based off case-studies, or simply clinical hypothesis [1, 2, 3]. However, there is a clear difference in media itself - the chatbot is able to interact with the user in a dynamic way, and is programmed in a manner by which to reinforce certain thoughts and feelings. The chatbot is also human-seeming enough for a person to anthropomorphize the chatbot and treat it like an individual for the purposes of therapy or an attempt at emotional closeness. While video games do involve human interaction and a piece of media could be designed to be psychologically difficult to deal with, that would be hyper-specific to the media and not the medium as a whole. The issues with chatbots (the LLM subset of AI) is pervasive across all chatbots because of how they are designed and the populace they are serving.
This is a valid point to bring up, however, I think it is shortsighted when we think in a broader context such as that of public health. We could say the same about addictive behaviors and personalities, for example, and absolve casinos of any blame for designing a system which takes advantage of these individuals and sends them down a spiraling path of gambling addiction. Or, we can recognize that this is a contributing and amplifying factor, by paying close attention to what is happening to individuals in a broad sense, as well as smartly applying theory and hypothesis.
I think it’s completely fair to say that this kid likely had a lot of contributing factors to his depression and ultimate and final decision. There is a clear hypothetical framework with some circumstantial evidence with strong theoretical support to suggest that AI are exacerbating the problem and also should be considered a contributing factor. This suggests that regulation may be helpful, or at the very least increased public awareness of this particular technology having the potential to cause harm to certain individuals.