I didn’t see any stables, just horses chilling wherever.

Stable owners hate this one trick to save 100% on your rent!

Honestly, I think they just self-selected for the ones not eating poisonous shit. I’m pretty sure the same applies on Iceland: The horses know what they can and can’t eat, because the ones who don’t know either learn or stop eating entirely.

We coddle our darlings way too much for their natural instincts. On the other hand, that makes us responsible for compensating.

Tons of vietnamese have horses in rural areas, I should ask them their secret to affording vet bills.

Well, I assume their horses will be less of a luxury pet. They probably pay less rent for the stables, treatment will be more DIY and the attachment to a working animal will be less emotional. I also don’t know how expensive their vets will be relative to the general cost of living and the utility the horse provides. I imagine they’ll have less overhead than our specialised clinics maintaining expensive equipment, dozens of specialised drugs and all the insurance and shit that goes with it in our system.

At the point we’re at, a new horse with less health issues would be cheaper than all the money we’ve blown on ours, and she doesn’t bring any utility. But we love her, and she’s not suffering so badly that it would justify putting her down. As long as I can afford it, I will sooner invest in trying to heal what can be healed, manage what can’t, provide the best life I can for her, own up to the responsibility I accepted when buying her, and enjoy our shared time.

But again: she’s a luxury, maybe a step below actual sports horses with fancy lineages and tournament quality. I suppose if horses became more ubiquitous for transport, the affordability dynamic might shift, but for now, my remark should be taken as tongue-in-cheek and definitely won’t hold up to comparison with working animals.

Who is going to stop the 1500 lb animal?

Ours is closer to 600, but voracious, headstrong and has shown a poor intuition for what’s poisonous and what isn’t. If she decides that a plant looks tasty, strength alone won’t help you save her from herself. If you react in time, you can gently pull her head to the side, enough to turn her away but not so strongly as to hurt her.

Son of a birch

Horses are economically viable and sound

Ours sure is causing way more in vet bills than our car’s lease, insurance and gas combined, while also unable to carry either of us anywhere. She’d also not go home, but to the next patch of greenery, whether or not she can eat it…

That was ambiguous phrasing, sorry. I meant that it’ll never work for filling their pockets, because the pockets will never be full.

In fact, banniing more people probably looks good on some report or other.

From a cynical data analyst’s perspective, that report will probably be the result of something like this process:

1. Identify problem: volume of malicious users (MU) cause difficulties with partners and regulators
2. Propose solution: signal efforts to remove MU to partners and regulators
3. Objective: Ban as many MU as possible
4. Key Result: X million MU banned (X being an arbitrary estimate because we don’t actually know how many MU there are)
5. Implementation: Train and use AI to identify and ban MU
6. Difficulty: Quality Assurance to check whether the banned users actually are malicious
7. Optimisation: Stonewall or chew out people demanding company resources be wasted on QA and simply define all banned users as MU (with all the money we invested in that AI, we can’t afford conceding inaccuracy)
8. Conclusion: report amount of banned users to partners and regulators.
9. If they should ask about the accuracy, cherry-pick from the training dataset to present users your AI correctly identified. Concede individual errors, frame them as the price of progress and assure that they have been taken into consideration for refining the algorithm.
10. Affirm your commitment to a safe platform, improved security measures, yada yada

I’ve not seen any examples this egregious, personally, but I also don’t make reports for executives, let alone executives of companies with such a vile business model. This is just a scaled up version of some shenanigans I’ve been party to.

Stop selling our future in a vain attempt to sate your craving for bigger and bigger numbers. It’s not gonna work.

They’re like the worst kind of dragon: cruel, destructive, greedy and in urgent need of a slaying.

*Edit: changed “stuff your bottomless pockets” to “sate your craving for bigger and bigger numbers” to better convey that they’ll never be happy and content.

Their pockets won’t ever fill up, their craving won’t ever be sated. “Number Go Up” may give them a brief fix, but it will never be enough.

Don’t forget the part where, in sparing you from reading those sites, it also strips away context clues that might otherwise help you gauge whether it’s a reliable source and whether it even applies to your problem.

I’d say if a tool produces predictable results, even if not fully deterministic, it qualifies as a tool. It might not be right for jobs were precision is needed, but the current LLMs and GenAI are perfectly suitable for their primary purpose:

Conning idiots into trading their skills and natural intelligence for a promise of convenience, scamming managers into fucking over employees for a promise of saving money, then pulling the rug, cashing in on the desperation of those who can no longer function without it, ruining a generation of students that don’t yet have the expertise to realise the full extent of the damage they’re doing to their own skills (including, as some other post brought up, the skill to not kill people with your MedGPT malpractice), causing unpredictable damage to a host of economies and industries, fucking over residents that don’t get a (democratic) say in whether they want to have a data center chugging their water supply, fucking up the climate, fucking the whole world…

In short: LLMs and GenAI are a tool to sell our future for a quick buck we’ll never see.

Fuck MBAs.

Sincerely, a data analyst that regularly has to deal with number-junkies so high on their own buzzwords they struggle to comprehend the petty constraints we people who actually want to measure facts are burdened with.

Reliably detecting AI content would require AI to be reliable in the first place in order to be clearly detectable.

Unless you serve no results at all, of course.

I posted the link; you didn’t have to spend time looking for the article.

I didn’t see it in our conversation, sorry if I missed it.

The article said that women also find a hairless body more feminine and attractive.

…because they are pressured by social factors to conform to a certain image of beauty, which the article states to be a fairly new phenomenon.

“However, it has only become an important part of femininity between 1915–1945, especially in the Western world (Basow, 1991). Before this time, by looking at beauty books and catalogs, it is noticeable that most women didn’t remove armpit and leg hair (Hope, 1982).”

Also, the rise of feminism didn’t change this.

“With the second feminist wave and the spread of hippie culture, pubic hair was neither uncommon nor seen as unnatural (Cerini, 2020). Unshaved female genitalia even started to be represented in Playboy (Cerini, 2020).”

It certainly did. That change just didn’t hold up to the pressures of media that wanted to sell a certain aesthetic:

“This completely changed in the following decades, however, as full body hair removal became not only preferred, but the norm. […] [Brazilian waxing] exploded in the market as the media and celebrities began to support and advertise this completely hairless look (Webb-Liddall, 2019). Research associated exposure to certain magazines and TV shows with pubic hair removal (Bercaw-Pratt et al., 2012, as cited by Li & Braun 2017).”

This suggests that it’s innate.

“By understanding the history behind female body hair removal, it is possible to see how it started as a way to generate profit through the development of a new market. […] It is interesting to see that the association of a hairless body with femininity grew over the course of decades to become what men see as ideal when looking for a mate today.”

If it was innate, why would it not be an issue for millennia, then suddenly explode within decades?

Consequently, he attempts to reconcile a contradiction.

As an aside: Lígia is usually a girl’s name. This is most likely a woman investigating why her sex is subjected to certain pressures.

Also, if there is an evolutionary advantage for men liking body hair on women, why would a patriarchal society want women to remove body hair?

Evolution works on far greater spans of time than a century. It doesn’t have any bearing on this trend. But if you want to bring that into the discussion, the advantages of hair (cited from Bergman, J. (2004). Why mammal body hair is an evolutionary enigma. via the article) are "retention of heat, sexual dimorphism, attraction of mates, protection of skin and reflection (or absorption) of sunlight”. To reflect on their bearing on humans in order of mention:

1. Clothing has made retention of heat less critical. Most mammals don’t skin or shear other animals or harvest and prepare flax for the sake of crafting artificial heat retention covers. Most mammals also don’t intentionally start fires to warm themselves. Humans have done both for thousands of years.
2. Breasts, hips, general presentation provide plenty of dimorphism. Our ability to communicate age explicitly also removed the necessity of body hair to indicate fertility.
3. The attraction of mates is exactly the subject of this discussion, and as stated, has only become associated with hairlessness in the last century, for reasons mentioned before.
4. Again, clothing. We need less skin protection because we can compensate (and have done so for thousands of years). We also fashion various lotions to help protect the skin.
5. Do I need to repeat the role of clothing as a fur substitute? We also build covered housing, which helps reduce sun exposure. Most animals don’t build tents from hide or fabric or assemble a shelter from stones, bricks and mortar, concrete and steel.

The lone evolutionary advantage to hairlessness cited is that “Ancient Egyptians also shaved their heads to prevent lice infection”. Other primates have mutual removal of parasites as a social ritual. They also generally don’t have the technology to depilate. And again, they are more dependant on their fur than humans.

This is just one of many ways humans have removed evolutionary pressures from our lives. Hence, however important it might have been a hundred thousand years ago, body hair is just no longer a strict necessity for us. That doesn’t strictly mean that we’d evolve away from growing it, if there also is no pressure to the opposite, just that it stops being as strong of a selection criterion.

So why did we start favouring hairlessness a century ago? Per the article: Gilette wanted to open a market to sell a razor. In a word: Greed.

And why does it continue to be considered sexy? “When women shave, they are removing one of their secondary sexual characteristics, and as a result they will look younger, in a prepubescence stage. In popular culture, infantilization of women is often seen as sexy (Sullivan, 2012). […] With this in mind, it is possible to assume that women shave their body hair to look prepubescent, as men feel attracted to youth.”

I’m not sure how much more explicit you can get that it’s a social and cultural phenomenon than saying “In popular culture” (emphasis mine). If anything, we ought to explore whether an attraction to youth is innate. Again, this might not have any evolutionary advantages, but we don’t need to optimise for that. It’s not like resources “wasted” on mating without expectation of procreation is a problem.

Since I believe that humans were created,

By a moron, a sadist or both, given the cruelty our creator would have planted in us

I can simply say that humans were designed

…suboptimally so that we need to compensate?

to find women without body hair more attractive

Why not make women not grow any in the first place then?

just as humans were designed to find earrings on women attractive.

Again, not universal, but there also is an evolutionary explanation if you’d care for Hanlon’s Razor: Display of wealth signals financial stability and an abundance of resources, since it implies being able to trade some of it for ultimately useless, labour-intensive trinkets. Once that abundance becomes less exceptional, the evolutionary advantage falls away, but the cultural connotation remains.

(You’ll actually find that pattern of “was reasonable, became normal, persists even beyond necessity” in many things, by the way, like the sexist mentality that women are less suited for some jobs, just because pre-industrial societies faced pressures to separate duties by “can be done while pregnant or caring for childen”)

You dislike the Totenkopf tattoo on Platner because of its meaning but if you were an employer, how would you know what tattoos are offensive? Platner said that he didn’t know Totenkopf was a Nazi symbol.

Historical education? I’d argue that a politician with high ambitions should be aware of ideological connotations, but also, I think that people in general should be educated. I realise that this is an ideal that reality doesn’t (yet?) attain, but even if you don’t know, once someone points out that something is associated with offensive ideologies it shouldn’t be hard to confirm that against the historical record and respond accordingly.

It would be simpler for an employer to have employees cover up tattoos at least for upfront employees.

I guess we should all hide our hands too, since someone might use them to flip the bird or do the Hitler Salute. And while we’re at it, sew our mouths shut, just in case they’re used for insults. What about our eyes, that might express disgust or leer at children?

Or maybe make less of a big deal out of mistakes. If an employer hires a racist without realising, then sacks that racist once they learn of it, that should be enough to rectify the mistake.

If we’re talking about offensive ideologies, by the way, I should point out that creationism is often associated with certain religions that have historically and predently exhibited bigotry, hostility towards non-believers (variously referred to as gentiles, heathens, infidels and other such terms), even violence motivated by religious exceptionalism.

Particularly in the present, one dominant religion espousing that belief also has a well-known problem with sexual abuse of children across many different confessions. That would actually bring us back to the topic of attraction hairlessness:

“[T]he primary reason for the male preference for a hairless body is the preconceived expectation towards women regarding youth and femininity. There is a socially constructed, artificial link between shaving and attractiveness/femininity. Biologically, sexually mature females have body hair, but society has made femininity more connected to youth and pre-pubescence than to a woman’s ability to reproduce. […] As a result, their expectation is transformed into societal pressure, as women start feeling abnormal for having body hair and decide to remove it in order to be seen as attractive.”

Are you really going to defend “I don’t like tattoos on women” with the justification “We were designed to sexualise children”?

I should probably spell it out, yeah.

It’s my favourite counterbalance to certain managers at my company regurgitating a half-understood “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (which is also almost entirely bullshit, but MBAs need a one-size-fits-all solution in order for the whole premise of their degree to work, so they attempt to make businesses conform to their methods instead of adapting their methods to the business). You can’t use a single measure (or only directly dependent measures), then tell people to improve that measure without figuring out just why it’s lagging and working on that instead.

I mean, yeah, the tech itself is fascinating. It’s an amazing application of complicated math to a complicated type of problem. I took some classes on AI in university and I’m in awe of the advances made in the field.

But the way it is being packaged and sold is toxic. Pewdiepie isn’t trying to get kids into studying Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing and the works. He’s not teaching them about the philosophical problem of attaching meaning to words and mapping words to semantics, nor its real implications for machine “intelligence”.

It can be useful for generating texts, but in the process, your skill to write those texts yourself will deteriorate. Particularly with structured language like code, you have validation for whether the output is syntactically correct, but using it to code has been proven harmful for devs’ own coding skills.

These issues create a dependency on that tech in the same way GPS has many people unable to navigate by map and in the same way too many essential things require a smartphone now.

I don’t like the term hallucination because it would require a perception of reality in the first place. It predicts a text that sounds plausible, but because it lacks any understanding of the reality those words represent, it fundamentally cannot take that meaning into account for its prediction. That’s not hallucination so much as ignorance.

The harm comes from people mistaking that ignorance for confidence and trusting it to “look up” things. A minor “can make mistakes” disclaimer isn’t enough if people assume it mostly does tell the truth. It would be the responsibility of companies peddling these things to make it clear the LLMs don’t communicate facts…

But that wouldn’t be profitable, so instead they pretend it’s a direct substitute for human reasoning, or even an improvement over it, and quietly sweep the limits under the rug.

That’s why the topic gets such hate. Sincere technical discussions have no place in public forums full of people that don’t understand the technical intricacies, because they will misunderstand it for the type of AI SciFi has been dreaming of for decades, a lie the corporate frauds are all too happy to cash in on.

Or maybe people hate that it’s a toxic technology wasting resources to spare you having to exercise basic skills, which is being hyped as replacement for actual intelligence, deceiving people into trusting a text generator’s mimicry of meaning and mistaking its facsimile for facts.

I looked up the article you alluded to earlier. As an aside, articles are generally referred to by author and year, not just the institution. Given that it’s the only relevant paper I found from Brandeis University, I’m going to assume you mean Azevedo, L. (Fall 2021). Male Stigmatisation of Female Body Hair.

It refers to a previous study by Prokop that had a sample made up of 96 students from a single Slovakian university, which is most certainly not a balanced and representative sample. It also refers to an entertainment video made by a fashion magazine with three participants, which is about as unscientific a source as you could come up with.

Azevedo then proceeds to acknowledge that, besides these two sources, there is “not enough evidence […] on men’s opinions regarding female body hair.”

I will note here that Prokop at least specified the source of his 96 participants, while I fail to see any indication how Azevedo’s 21(!) participants were selected. That is a smaller sample size, less transparent and if I’m reading this right, the survey consisted of three pairs of pictures.

This “study” is, put mildly, worthless filler, and has the gall to call that “confirmation”. It might indicate a potential direction of research by suggesting a the tendency to perceive shaved women as younger, but that is all it is. Any results you might see in it wouldn’t require “further scientific study”, but rather “actually scientific study”, because this sure isn’t.

The article does cite plenty of other sources, which is the more valuable thing about it. These sources are, among other things, used to cement the impression that men seem to find younger women sexy. Specifically, “a hairless body is a direct representation of a pre-puberty body”.

As for the question of natural or cultural, the article actually answers that by stating that women try to fit in with patriarchal expectations and by citing these other sources to illustrate that hair removal only really became “an important part of femininity between 1915–1945”, started in part by Gillette trying to sell a razor and accelerated by pornography sexualising youth.

It concludes that, as a result of easy access to said pornography, men “form the wrong expectation of how the female body should look”.

Frankly, I had my doubts about your claim before. Now I’m very much convinced you didn’t even read the source you cite, just made up a conclusion and grasped for anything to support it.

it could indicate

This is a wonderful way to isolate yourself from any accusation of having implied a claim. Your mention of scientific studies could indicate that you’re actually interested in the point. It could also mean you’re just trying to double down on the assertion that women are objectively more attractive without tattoos by reaching for the closest thing you get to a confirmation that plain skin could be more attractive.

You know the worst part of all this? Even if you were right, even if there was some measure proving that they’re objectively more attractive and all the people who actually like tattoos are just freaks of nature, it still wouldn’t give you, or me, or anyone else any right to tell women what to do with their own fucking bodies.

Then there should be nothing wrong with employers requiring women to hide tattoos since they’re attractive only if hidden.

Look, I get that you’re not big on reading, but I’ve already disambiguated that “only” is misplaced here, because there are multiple ways tattoos can be attractive.

And even if it was the only way, an employer has no right to demand attractiveness from his employees, regardless of their gender or presentation. Women don’t owe sexiness to anyone, period.

Employers are stricter towards up front personnel regarding dress code because they give people an impression of the company.

And that impression is…? Whether their employees are willing to submit to arbitrary, antiquated and pointless social standards about attractiveness?

That was my point: Customers having a stick up their arse is the only justification to demand conformity to that arse-stickery. Whether your clerk or cashier is ugly or attractive or the hottest person to ever walk the earth has no bearing on their competence. Bodily hygiene, sure, that has health and olfactory implications. But personal appearance shouldn’t be anyone’s business.

You would not tolerate all tattoos. Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senator from Maine was criticized for having a tattoo of Totenkopf, a Nazi symbol. He had it covered up.

I wouldn’t tolerate Nazi symbols in graffiti either, or any other medium. That has nothing to do with tattoos or visibility, but with my general sense of ethics being fundamentally incompatible with their ideology. Covering it up doesn’t make the problem go away either if the ideology persists.

Regardless of what you folks think about Valve, does anyone believe that a marketplace should have this kind of leverage over their suppliers?

On principle, no, and Valve should not be above criticism.

I’m cautiously in favour of uniform retail pricing, such that no sales platform could either gouge customers or undercut to win more people over, such that the competition is determined by the available selection of products and other amenities, but my gut says that kind of price fixation would end up a minefield of complications, exceptions and loopholes. Few things are ever as easy as a layperson may think, and I sure am one.

Either way, one retailer dictating the prices for all others definitely seems unfair.

For instance, should Amazon be permitted to force manufacturers to set the price of a product outside of their marketplace?

Aside from the obligatory “fuck Amazon”, that would open the door to a particularly vicious level of fuckery. They would set their own price, sustained by cheap, fucked-up working conditions and the capital to afford selling at a loss, which they already do and which is bad enough, but to also dictate that price to other vendors that definitely can’t afford to operate at such a loss? If they’re currently on the road to monopoly, that would turn it into a bullet train: fast, on rails and with no stop to get off at.

If a metric becomes a target…

How many times do we have to teach you the same lesson, old man?

The Brandeis study indicated that most men find body hair on women unattractive. This suggests that men innately find body hair on women unattractive.

I don’t know that study or how representative it is, but even if it were, there are two glaring errors here:

1. The suggested link between stated opinion and some innate tendency overlooks the possibility that this opinion might be a cultural product, rather than some natural state. If we’re permanently exposed to media feeding us a particular beauty standard, that is going to shape our perception.
2. How people feel about body hair doesn’t have any immediate bearing on how they feel about tattoos. For instance, I could advocate for women shaving their legs so I can better see their leg tattoos. Not that I have any right to tell women (or anyone else) what to do with their body, of course.

In any event, that study also isn’t representative of the cultural environment I move in. I don’t know what culture you’re from to feel so strongly about this, but it certainly isn’t universal.

Your hypothesis that the attractiveness of tattoos on women is that they are hidden

My claim is that, specifically for hidden tattoos (regardless of the wearer’s sex), part of the appeal may be that they’re hidden. This isn’t the only reason tattoos might be attractive, just an appeal a specific subset may have (and not all within that subset either – some tattoos genuinely are ugly, but that doesn’t mean all are).

is counter intuitive since something beautiful would seemingly want to be shown such as earrings on women.

Pussies are beautiful too, but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to show them to the world. Some beautiful things are only shown to select people, and that’s fine.

But also, many beautiful tattoos are shown in public, and I love that, and I know many people who love that, and any claim that men categorically find them unappealing in women is just not representative.

You contradict your own hypothesis that tattoos are attractive on women if they’re hidden.

I made no claim that they are only attractive when hidden, or only when public, because attractiveness is generally nuanced and complex and can’t be broken down to absolutes like that.

Consequently, you should have no problem with employers telling employees to cover their tattoos.

1. How would that contradiction (or either position alone) imply any logical connection to what employers tell their employees or how I would feel about that?
2. I have a problem with the general expectation that customer service has to be conventionally attractive, but it’s particularly bad for women. Tattoos are just one notch on that tally of things that really shouldn’t matter in a professional context. If my tax advisor is ugly as sin, but gives good advice, they’re a good tax advisor.

The whole topic of tattoos, particularly when it’s straight men talking about women’s tattoos, often veers into men policing women’s bodies. Women don’t exist for your or my viewing pleasure. If you think they’re ugly, that’s your opinion. Even if it was a common opinion, it would still be an opinion.

Announcing “I don’t like this thing some people do” is a dick move in the first place. Let people enjoy things. Let them do with their bodies what they want.

But to make it specifically about women and keep doubling down? Fuck the fuck off. No half-baked attempt at providing scientific backing for sexism is gonna make it less sexist.

I’ve been trying to be charitable thus far, but let me be clear here: Tattoos, no matter the sex, gender, ethnicity, religion or favourite sports team of their wearer, are an expression of individuality. Whether or not they’re beautiful or attractive by any standard shouldn’t matter.

I happen to love them, but that’s incidental to my basic human respect for other people’s dignity.

Zionists claim to represent all Jewish people, so that any criticism of the former can be deflected to use the latter as meatshields and cry “Antisemite!” They’re a cancer to their own people, everyone around them and forming metastases all over the world.