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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • Can you edit the post to the original link, OP?

    https://baptistnews.com/article/men-only-gyms-seek-to-protect-christian-men-from-lust/

    It’s real, but also more critical than you’d think, and worth a read:

    This is what Hambrecht and Parsons are doing with their male-only gyms. They’re spreading conspiracies about morality and traditional marriage that cast women as dangerous. They’re promoting men rising up as warrior-kings who are ready to fight evil, and they’re getting rid of women who they claim are ruining everything.

    EDIT:

    To join Parsons’ Christian manosphere, it’s a bit more intense. Gym members must sign a covenant called “Rule of Life” that requires such beliefs as “marriage as one man and one woman,” or “two genders, given by God at creation.” And it requires strict adherence to “the behavioral and moral standards of the Remnant Gym membership agreement.” Their website says, “Christian authority is enforced through ownership, contracts and the courage to hold the line.”


  • It’s real. Published one day ago:

    https://baptistnews.com/article/men-only-gyms-seek-to-protect-christian-men-from-lust/

    The site isn’t what you might think, though. The article is funny, but also a surprisingly good read:

    According to the gym’s website, “There was a season of his life marked by homelessness, addiction and spiritual emptiness.” In another video, he admits, “I had a pornography addiction for almost 20 years.”

    Mitch Parsons, founder of Youth Group for Men and Remnant Men in Denver, had a similar experience. “I quit four gyms before I built one,” he says on the Remnant Gym website. “I realized the problem wasn’t the gym. It was that no one had built what I actually needed, or what I wanted.”

    I know its easy to laugh, but a “porn addiction” can be serious shit. Terry Crews gave some great talks about how it fucked up his life in all sorts of ways.

    Also, it’s healthily skeptical:

    Also, despite how often Parsons mentions having nakedness shoved in his face at the gyms in Denver, it’s unclear what he means by that. Gym policies across Denver require their members to wear shirts at all times. And Denver public indecency laws prohibit exposing one’s genitals in public.

    This is what Hambrecht and Parsons are doing with their male-only gyms. They’re spreading conspiracies about morality and traditional marriage that cast women as dangerous. They’re promoting men rising up as warrior-kings who are ready to fight evil, and they’re getting rid of women who they claim are ruining everything.

    It’s got some good writeups, and spicy ones:

    https://baptistnews.com/article/why-do-we-keep-sounding-the-alarm/

    https://baptistnews.com/article/in-3-charts-white-christian-nationalists-love-of-ice-and-concentration-camps/

    As the empirical evidence for the threat white Christian nationalism presents to pluralistic democracy has mounted over the past decade, various insider defenders of conservative white Christianity — and even some mainstream white Christian theologians — have alleged the term is simply a cudgel. Those who qualify as Christian nationalists on public opinion surveys, they argue, only want to see a role for their faith in the public square…

    Donald Trump is an abuser. He is an adjudicated rapist and predator. Donald Trump is a grifter. He is a well-known con man who gets away with the con because so many don’t want to talk about it. Donald Trump is a liar unlike any liar most of us ever have known. And there are enormous consequences to his perpetual lying. Donald Trump is literally the most dangerous man in the world, and you want to label me with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for saying that.


  • Street photography isn’t so bad, as long as it’s not a hidden cam.

    I don’t generally like my picture taken, but I’d have no problem if it just some person with a real camera taking casual pictures of crowds for fun.

    What makes it creepy (to me) if it’s someone trying to hide it with a smartphone, or Meta glasses.

    edit: It’s also nothing new. Street photographers have been around forever, long before digital cameras. It was pretty acceptable when I was a kid with a flip phone.



  • I’m hedging, mostly with Berkshire Hathaway stock, some agriculture, and a few others that historically perform well in recessions.


    I would not touch S&P 500 with a ten foot pole. It’s all wrapped up in Big Tech.

    I don’t like shorts; you can’t predict when the drop will hit, so you’re just burning cash betting against growth until then.

    I don’t like commodities either. As Buffet said, a big block of gold doesn’t do anything; a factory or farm does.




  • You can’t deny that the term isn’t load now. It’s misused everywhere.

    I’d specify it as “game AI” or “machine learning.”

    And yes, I know, the term “AI” technically fits. But it’s just bad practice to use, these days.

    And for the record, I was into LLMs and GANs before they were cool, too. I was there quantizing and finetuning GPT 6B (GPT-J I think it was called?). That doesn’t give anyone authority.



  • Eh, most ablierated models are so lobotomized, though. 99% of the time I’d rather just use the original model and manipulate the prompt with raw completion formatting (for example, start the answer with "Sure! "), since we aren’t beholden to regular chat formatting like with API models.

    I mean, I’ve used MiMo 2.5 for some pretty dark and personal shit, and refusals were never an issue for me. I’m honestly not sure what people even need the ablirated models for.


    And also, if they trained the hell out of the model to refuse a certain topic, even an ablirated model will be dumb and struggle with it.

    This was the case with OpenAI’s GPT 120B. The abliration worked, technically, but the actual answers would be a garbled mess; what’s the point of using it for that?


  • There is some evidence a few sensitive topics are culled from training data, or replaced with a certain narrative. Like, don’t get me wrong; if you’re using a local model for discussing Chinese political topics primarily, maybe GLM or MiMo aren’t the the best choice.

    …But it’s also hard to compehensively filter a dataset like that, like you speculated. I’m not seeing a lot of evidence models have been lobotomzied in pretraining. But I think the strongest examples are (ironically) in Europe, where some very poorly worded/ambigous regulations have put the whole industry in a legal quagmire. One can see that newer models from Mistral have regressed compared to old versions, and lost a lot of world knowledge they previously were famous for.

    Anyway, model “censorship” typically comes from between the two points you were thinking about: in posttraining. Not excluding stuff from datasets completely. And this applies to US models too. They train on a pretty general corpus, but in the instruct tuning phase they get a bunch of question/response pairs skewing them towards refusals when specific topics come up. They recognize it, but are trained to refuse.


  • There’s a lot to say about China, but the model weights themselves are surprisingly uncensored and democratic.

    They have been for a long time; I remember asking the Yi models about tiananmen square and Uyghurs years ago. And Xiaomi MiMo 2.5 (locally run) will still talk about that today, or go into all sorts of “unsafe” topics an Anthropic model wouldn’t even touch.

    I had (Google) Gemini 3.1 Pro stop a chat over a political discussion about China, yet GLM 4.7 didn’t.


    My impression, from observing discourse with the engineers, is the Chinese ML devs like to have their cake and eat it.

    They’re very collaborative under the table. Their development ethos is pretty practical. And basically all the leading models are open-weights.

    The public portals people access Chinese models with are very censored, especially the Chinese language ones. The devs go out of their way to demonstrate compliance, but they don’t actually want to censor the models.



  • It mostly cripples the small businesses, though. The biggest enterprise customers are already using OpenAI/Claude anyway, while it was little guys looking to reduce cost, fine tune, run stuff privately or whatever.

    TBH a huge problem with the industry is consolidation; there are no open US models because startups gets squashed or vacuumed up into a black hole. I’ve seen it happen to really interesting projects. And this is just going to make that dramatically worse.

    It’s easy to say “bring the bubble,” but I fear it won’t. I think we’re entering an actual cyberpunk future, where corporate failure is just propped up.