Arson.

Think you responded to the wrong person.

I would argue HRT changes your sex.

Frankly I prefer that to the wishy washy language around gender.

You don’t know the meaning of the word.

Frankly, as a trans person, I’m not a fan of the term. I didn’t get treatment to “affirm my gender.” I changed my sex. I literally changed my sex. I didn’t get “gender affirming treatment” or whatever the new entry on the euphemism treadmill is we’re supposed to use this year.

This has big “only trans people have gender identity” energy.

The Little Engine that Could. It will be a big budget 10 hour (12 hour extended cut) long epic spanning across three movies, directed by Peter Jackson.

I think we in the US should change our anthem to The Most Unwanted Song. It really captures our vibe right now as a nation.

Here’s what they mean. 😂

Seriously, if the point is to just have some monetary cost, why not just accept it as a bit of crypto?

The economics really aren’t there for chatbots. They don’t scale well. Each additional user costs more money than they generate in revenue. But automated taxis? That’s a different story. Currently Waymo has to go through the laborious process of creating intricate 3D maps of the cities and places its vehicles will operate in. But that mapping cost is fixed, regardless of the number of taxis driving in that city. And a lot of R&D has gone into everything. But the R&D costs are the same whether we’re talking one taxi or a million.

Robotaxis have very different economics than AI chatbots. They actually have very real economies of scale. Plus while their self-driving vehicles currently cost about $150k, that cost is only going to go down with time. And compared to the cost of a human driver? It’s hard to see how they won’t end up profitable eventually.

Are there any search engines out there that operate just on a whitelist model? A content-agnostic white list-based engine that manually categories sites via human reviewers, and filters only for SEO spam and AI slop?

Don’t forget to eat your bean soup.

Call them devil-worshipers. Trans people exist because God wants trans people to exist. Those who worship hate follow Satan, not God. They can have their religious freedom, and so do you. “I forgive you of your sin of misgendering me. But I warn you, on your current path, you will burn in Hell for worshiping hate.”

Then find a better way to phrase it. Vomiting AI slop is rude.

Calorie counting is also a plaster. The fundamental problem is that people have satiation systems that are built for ages of famine, and we live in an age of cheap abundant calories. (For most people.)

Calorie counting is a cheap hack fix for a satiation system ill-calibrated for the modern world. Yes, you can count calories, stop eating while you’re still hungry, and forcibly starve yourself down to a healthy weight. And many do do this. I did. Many times. But in the end, life happens, some stressful event interrupts, or you just don’t have the energy to keep up with it and resist the hunger.

There’s a reason diets have such poor track records. They’re an attempt to apply conscious effort to a system that did not evolve to require conscious effort. And while that can be maintained for a time, it just plasters over the fundamental problem. And it usually fails in time. That’s what I experienced. Through conscious effort, self-deprivation, and calorie counting, I could starve myself down to a healthy weight. I was healthy, but miserable. You get an irrational hunger for a completely unneeded meal at 10 PM? Just have to go to bed hungry if you want to stay at a healthy weight. No matter how long I kept the weight off, I never reached a point where my hunger levels adjusted to match what I was eating. It was endless self-deprivation. I can only maintain that effort for so long.

But GLP-1 agonists? I’m on one. And it has completely solved my weight issues. I wasn’t even extremely obese or anything. I was at a BMI of 30. After a year and a half on tirzepatide, I’m down to a BMI of 22. And through this whole time, I’ve never counted calories. I deliberately did not do so. I wanted to see what effect the medication would have on my satiation system. And yeah, I found a dose that works, while the side effects are manageable, and it’s completely solved my weight issues. I can now maintain a very healthy weight with zero conscious effort. And the side effects have been quite manageable. I maybe get a bit of mild nausea in the first days after an injection. But even then usually not. And compared to how much better being that much lighter makes me feel? There is no comparison. I’m literally in the best shape of my life (relative to my age at least.) Not being stuck overweight also gave me the confidence to find a form of exercise that works for me. My partner and I have taken up powerlifting, so I’m truly in the best shape of my life, by any measure of fitness. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, from my own lived experience? We have invented the cure for obesity. Ok, maybe it’s technically a treatment than a cure. But I would say it treats the underlying issue and by doing so cures obesity. Or maybe it’s a cure in the sense of, “knowledge is the cure to ignorance.” It’s an ongoing cure. 😂

And so what if I have to keep taking the drug? Most adults take long-term maintenance medications. Vitamins if nothing else. And if five years from now some supply disruption would cause me to lose access? It would simply put me back at the weight I was before, with the permanent benefit of having lived five years less under the cumulative health effects of an unhealthy body weight.

I also see no reason they need to be expensive. I couldn’t afford to pay retail, and my weight was never bad enough to get insurance coverage. I’m also a bit “chaotic good” in nature. So I’m taking the bootleg stuff. Just stuff from Chinese suppliers sold over the internet without a prescription. Sounds scary, but there are some reliable ones out there. And I’ve confirmed it’s the real stuff by using it. And I’ve continuously monitored my health. I’m the healthiest I’ve been in many many years. And the cost? About a dollar a day. For a dollar a day, I have simply solved my weight problem. I eat when I want. I eat til I’m full. And at least in terms of my body and weight, I am at peace.

And I see no reason these couldn’t get cheaper still. Wait until the patents expire! Wait until the massive generics really get going, making enough to supply billions of people. Oh, and they need not be injections either. Pills are in development.

The future is one where you can simply and affordably choose what weight you will carry. Want to be skinny? Want to be husky? Want to perfect your Henry VIII cosplay by becoming as fat as the old bastard? It’s all just a pill away. Another case of technology challenging a fundamental assumption of human existence.

I wonder what effect that will have on culture. We used to value being fat because only the rich could afford to do it. We now value being skinny and fit because only the rich can afford that. What happens when anyone can just choose whatever body type they want with no effort and little money?

Anyway, pardon my ramblings. But I really wanted to share a personal anecdote. Apologies for the length.

We’ve invented the cure to obesity. We should be dancing in the streets and throwing parades for scientists. Again. We invented the cure to obesity. It’s just a distribution problem at this point. We just need to work on getting the drugs out to everyone that wants them at a price anyone can afford. Do that, and the obesity crisis is solved.

It turns out that when you give humans calorie abundance, it just breaks a lot of our “full meters.” And we can fix that with a simple shot or pill. Generations fretting and brow-beating people over morality and gluttony. Generations of forcing people to painfully starve themselves to achieve a healthy weight. Generations of shame, guilt, and cruelty. But all along, the real issue wasn’t moral. It was medical. Or perhaps, historical.

The reality is that many of us just have a part of our biology that isn’t calibrated for the modern world. We have satiation systems that are designed for ages of famine. It’s only in the last few centuries that food has become cheap and abundant, and it’s still not that way everywhere. You take a satiation system that is evolved for an age of famine, but require it to live in an age of abundance? Obesity is the inevitable result. Sure, you can always starve yourself into a healthy weight. But the point is human beings aren’t evolved to have to maintain their weight through painful conscious self-denial. We’re supposed to simply eat when we’re hungry and stop when we’re full. That’s how human beings have lived for most of history and pre-history. And until the era of modern cheap calories? Our ancestors never really had to worry about eating themselves to obesity. There was only so much honey you could get a hold of, and it required taking quite a few bee stings to get it. Maybe the Lord in his castle had to worry about obesity, but this is a burden our ancestors never had at scale. We guilt ourselves for failure to maintain healthy weights, when that’s just not something humans should have to consciously do.

But we need not accept endless calorie counting and weight maintenance through intentional starvation. We also don’t need to return to an age of deprivation. We CAN have our cake and eat it to. We don’t need to accept obesity or starvation. We can build a world where calories are cheap and abundant, but people can simply modify their satiation systems to achieve whatever body weight they want without conscious effort. Find a way to get these drugs to everyone. That is how you solve the obesity crisis. Some may not want to take them or have medical reasons they can’t. But it doesn’t matter. Imagine lamenting if we only cut the obesity rate by 80%. Simply giving these drugs out free to as many people as want them will inevitably be the most effective form of obesity intervention a government could ever do. Forget public health campaigns and presidential fitness tests. Just get people the damn medicine they need.

We invented a miracle. Let’s share the wonder.

At least in the US, I actually do support open boarders unironically. People like to use “you’re standing on stolen land” as an empty platitude. But I actually internalize it.

I live on stolen land that was given to my ancestors after a genocide. I didn’t personally commit such an act. I don’t feel a moral responsibility for things that happened before I was born. But still, I do benefit from it today. Morally, we probably should give the land back to the natives. There’s no statute of limitations on returning stolen property. As a practical matter, however, we simply can’t just give all the land back to the Native Americans, regardless of the morality of it. You can’t just make 300 million people stateless. We can’t undue the Native American genocide. We can’t even give all the land back. There’s no way to give that much land back without creating a humanitarian disaster on the scale of the original Native American genocide.

Giving the land back is impossible. But at the same time, I realize that I as a white person living in the US have fuck-all right to tell anyone they can’t move here. My ancestors had no right to come here, and they did anyway. What right do I have to tell someone from another country they can’t come here? Fuck anyone lamenting the loss of “American culture” and “the American way of life.” Unless you’re Navajo, you can fuck right off with that. The native people can complain about the loss of a way of life. The rest of us are just a bunch of illegal immigrants squatting on native land.

I think we in the US should be “the nation of the world.” It should be a place where literally anyone, anywhere, has a right to come here. What better use for a land conquered by genocide? We should have open borders, or as close to open boarders as practically possible. You can’t take in a hundred million people over the course of a single year. But the only limits on the number of immigrants we take in should be logistical ones. But as long as we can keep growing enough food and building enough housing for the new arrivals? We should have effectively open borders.

I don’t even think this is a losing issue. Democrats have been trying for years to move further and further right on immigration, and it hasn’t worked. Biden deported more people than Trump did in his first term. But when the Democrats move right to try to appeal to Republican immigration voters, the Republican party just moves even further to the right. There’s no actual immigration policy that the right won’t portray as open borders. The Democrats fell into a trap.

Instead, Democrats should go hard the other way. They say we want open borders? No Democrat has ever actually publicly campaigned on that. But fuck it, maybe we should. You’re damn right I want open borders! What right do I, a squatter living on stolen land, have to tell someone else they can’t squat here as well?

This is why Democrats have been stuck with empty platitudes. They decry the cruelty of Trump’s immigration policies. But their actual policy proposals aren’t that different - they’re just less performatively cruel. They have no interest in dismantling ICE. If MAGA loses in 2028, Democrats will maintain most of the same policies as Trump, just with fewer ICE thugs brazenly harassing people in the streets.

Democrats don’t actually have a response on immigration, which is why they’ve lost so much ground on it. Maybe the answer instead is to revive the American tradition of viewing itself as a beacon and refuge to the world. It was carved onto Lady Liberty for a damn good reason.

You’re not adding anything to the conversation though. If you’re going to post AI slop, just post:

“I don’t have time to write it out. Post this prompt into an LLM of your choice if you don’t feel like doing research yourself.”

You added nothing more in value beyond that prompt. It’s no different than instead of using an LLM to expand a bullet list into a long multi-paragraph email, you should just email the damn bullet points and save everyone the time.

Don’t share the results of the LLM. Share the prompt, if anything. You’re not adding any additional information beyond that.