As a concept I would welcome a safe affordable male contraceptive and would use it if appropriate.

I would say that I would definitely evaluate the option very carefully. Especially in a committed relationship. Sometimes female birth control can bring benefits beyond just birth control, along with its drawbacks. My partner suffered from severe period cramps at a point in her life, where the birth control she used suppressed that. That said, it would actually be positive to have the option of a male contraceptive in a relationship. We share the pleasure and the responsibility. In the end, the safest option with the least side effects will probably win out. If that is a male contraceptive, so be it.

Outside of a committed relationship, condoms just makes more sense. I cannot imagine taking the risks associated with sex and not taking any precautions for it. Then again, my early 20s was spent in a country and area with a high prevalence of HIV, so not taking chances is ingrained due to that. It would also depend on just active a sex life we are dealing with.

No point in attacking you for something that works for you. Neither of us learns anything under those conditions. Philosophies teaching abstinence in physical pleasures have been around forever. In my mental map of the world, the NoFap community falls under those.

It is something you believe helps you be the person you want to be, more power to you. I would only consider it harmful if it attempts to impose its ideas on people who don’t agree. Or deliberately spreads misinformation internally that may be harmful to its adherents.

I think we can agree that your experience was valid and changed your life. The emphasis here is on your life for good reason. Porn and masturbation, like any other escape mechanism, is exactly that. I suspect something underlying as the cause for your need to escape that much. The nofap community there helped you reinforce that change. It does not make the community entirely wholesome.

What I wonder is if you would have had the same results with changes in your life without specifically focussing on porn and masturbation. I have observed this a few times in other areas, where changes to routine and outlook was the actual source of the improvement and not the thing the improvement was attributed to.

Just a thought. It is always good to try and understand yourself. It takes nothing away from your achievement in turning your life around.

Agreed, It looks fairly easy to disassemble and clean. I would attempt that before replacing. You may find a YouTube vid or two showing how. Pvc thread tape is your friend. Dirt in the valve will stop it from closings properly as pressure builds.

It is an area that will require us to think carefully of the ethics of the situation. Humans create works for humans. Has this really changed? Now consumption happens through a machine learning interface. I agree with your reasoning, but we have an elephant in the room that this line of reasoning does not address.

When we ask the AI system to generate content in someone else’s style or when the AI distorts someone’s view in its responses. It is in this area where things get very murky for me. Can I get an AI to eventually write another book in Terry Pratchett’s style? Would his estate be entitled to some form of compensation? And that is an easier one compared to living authors or writers. We already see the way image generating AI programs copy artists. Now we are getting the same for language and more.

It will certainly be an interesting space to follow in the next few years as we develop new ethics around this.

Just got Elite Dangerous running today on my fresh Ubuntu. Loaded the modules for the z52 hotas, copied my bindings from my windows instance and there she flies. That makes 3 out o3 for my most played games in Ubuntu.

So far ED is running flawlessly. I need an equivalent for ED market connector though. But that can be manual gor the moment.

Agreed on your point. We need a way to identify those links so that our browser or app can automatically open them through our own instance.

I am thinking along the lines of a registered resource type, or maybe a central redirect page, hosted by each instance, that knows how to send you to your instance to view the post there.

I am sure it is a problem that can be solved. I would however not be in favour of some kind of central identity management. It is to easy a choke point and will take autonomy away from the instances.

That should just work. You view the post on your own instance and reply there. That reponse trickles to the other instances.

It may take a while to propagate though. The paradigm is close to that of the ancient nntp news groups where responses travel at the speed of the server’s synchronisation. It may be tricky for rapid fire conversation, but works well for comments of articles.

Agreed, I installed Ubuntu 22.04 last week to play with stable diffusion. Decided to have a quick look at steam / proton and was blown away with how easily it works. Fallput 76, my primary online game installed and run with almost no hassle. I even managed to get a long time irritation with runaway frame rates fixed.

The only glitch that remains unsolved is a hang on exit. Which is a known issue.

I loved Scalzi’s Old man war series. Good entertaining sci fi, with some interesting questions to ponder under the stories.

There is an important distinction that we must make. Community vs application.

My experience is like yours, made an account on lemmy, beehaw and here. When we saw the Reddit writing on the wall. The community here has been so much fun interacting with, that I have mostly stayed here.

The software is in its infancy and that is exciting. Tricky and maybe a little unstable, but conceptually exactly what I have wanted for ages. It will get there eventually. Ernest and team has been doing a spectacular job keeping the loghts on.

I expect that we will get many different aggregators for federated content as the platform matures.

I double posted a few times before I figured this one out. I am sure it will get sorted pretty soon.

I cannot help but think of Eric Drexler’s 90s classic book, The coming age of nanotechnology whenever we make another breakthrough in this area. It is astounding how far we have come.

This is a fact and a half. Ihave been using linux on and off for a headless Minecraft server. Vanilla Debian. Yesterday I decided to load up the latest Ubuntu lts, to run stable diffusion. My first end user linux install in ages. And it was a 15 minute seamless experience. From boot ISO to running a normal functioning desktop. Add another hoiur and stable diffusion was up and running. A far cry from building slackware from, from source, in the early 2000s. It truly is amazing when we consider what has been achieved.

And that is where things gets interesting. The ethics of the situation. Even beyond copyright issues. Was your AI trained on data that you have the rights for, or not?

We then have to think of the base model. How was that trained? I have not formed a well reasoned opinion yet as to the ethics of training on social media and forum style data.

For me, personally, I don’t have an issue with my own posts and responses ending up as AI training data. We can also argue that those posts were made on public forums, therefor in public. But does that argument hold true for everyone. Underlying that question, we have to consider the profit motif off the companies. There is a major difference between training for academic purposes and for corporate purposes.

Valve is probably smart in steering clear of the entire mud bog at this time. Not enough is known of how it will play out in both the courts and in public opinion.

I have to agree here. Generative AI has so much potential for games. Especially RPG style games for believable NPC characters. But the rights environment is very murky.

I expect it to be resolved relatively soon though. a combination of generally trained AI with subject specific training should do the trick. In the same way we would train a helpdesk bot on company specific information.

The remaining question though is what of the original broad dataset the source model was trained on. There things are less clear.

We never got those on TV this side of the world, South Africa. I did read a lot of his short stories growing up though. Pulp paperbacks with cracked glue and cello tape where their backs used to be. Even the smell of those can feature directly in a Bradbury short.

Same here. There is an element of horror/fantasy in there as well. I recently enjoyed Netflix’s Black Mirror, which reminded me strongly of the Outer Limits style.

You are corrct. I always mix inara and eddb up in my head. Inara.cz was the one I meant.

I will go for the oddball answer. The Outer Limits. The originals and the later ones. The episodic short story format works very well for me.