Most social norms just won’t be violated very often. Being the first person to do anything is too risky, even if the only downside is just embarrassment. But generally, all it takes is two people to agree that a social norm is silly, and something amazing can happen.

Strong connections to Wagner, “Bringing Sexy Back.”

When it’s “punching up” to pretend the other gender’s loneliness crisis is self-imposed

Maybe the problem truly is with capitalism in that the nature of consensual sex relies on a supply-demand dynamic.

It’s easier to “de-center” men if you don’t want to have sex with them

More notes on heterofatalism, a la Garnett, “The Trouble With Wanting Men.”

Great comment from @polytropos365182:

Being in love, or even just being “down bad” for somebody, is a really vulnerable— and in many cases, humiliating— emotional experience. I think that often, resenting the gender that you’re attracted to, with or without an ideological rationalization, is a defense mechanism driven by fear of that vulnerability, or a way to palliate the psychic wound of humiliation. The really tough thing is that (as any gay person could tell you), things like rejection, getting dumped, infidelity, etc are personal, not structural. You won’t escape them by abolishing the patriarchy or leveling the longhouse.

Beyond the fact that plenty of OCD manifestations are just too taboo for public consumption, I think one thing that really irks people is when someone has a high degree of insight into their OCD, but still frequently falls victim to it and is unable to be cured. In their minds, mental illness always has an endpoint. It becomes a weird prior chapter of your life, you can turn the page, and look back on it to say, “Ahh, those terrible times, before I discovered therapy.” They are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that you will be like this forever.

This is also the conclusion I’ve come to in dealing with my own intrusive thoughts. I shall save it for 1:1s w/ my therapist and share with no one else. Otherwise, it’s ultimately too exhausting for everyone involved.

Everything shared is fair, but maybe instead it would be better for this kind of guy to not get married and find an aligned sex partner. I dunno. Like, it kinda feels like author’s saying men should intentionally develop an attraction to their partners, and that seems a little LessWrong-y to me. Also feel a connection to Doyle, “Wife Guy.”

One commenter, @jessumsica, puts it best:

There are men who like women and men who like to fuck women. You’ve got to find the middle of the Venn diagram.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/three-cheers-for-the-tomboy-chaser

This summer at the Topos Institute, under the supervision of Dr. Sophie Libkind, I studied the composition of attractors. The project itself started earlier with my advisor, Dr. William Kalies, who asked me the following question: how do attractor lattices behave when we combine dynamical systems? In this post, I explain how attractor lattices in decoupled product systems can be characterized algebraically in terms of the lattices of their component systems.

Note to self: if my language has shell programming, there’s no reason you shouldn’t do it the way Julia does.

via: https://julialang.org/blog/2012/03/shelling-out-sucks/

Let’s learn and grow. New things are cool!

Simple economic arguments for why solar, batteries, and other renewable energy technologies are possible RN and clearly the future.

And then some much needed discussion of politics.

The Game Awards 2025 sparked yet another round of indie discourse with Expedition 33‘s historical sweep causing many to ask what does it actually mean for a game to be “indie”?

The pain of semantic drift.

The tsundere is a well-known anime trope, that many people still love to this day. But something happened to it since its inception, and I want to talk about that.

The “database” is a very interesting comparative media concept; will keep it in mind.

Waifus are a very well-known part of anime culture. So many have strong opinions on them, and yet very few know the full story.

Great way of explaining this classis paradox in analysis using uniform convergence.

One of most people’s biggest complaints about anime is the abundance of fanservice. But what is it? And is it always bad? Let’s take a deep dive into anime fanservice and find out.

This is a good video, and I especially appreciate its sex-positivity, but I do wish the author applied more of a feminist lens. People reacting poorly to fanservice as a concept goes far beyond it being utilized poorly and Puritanism, me thinks.

A viral tweet made me curious about looking into the history of fanmade adult content, and I ended up diving into a rabbit hole that goes further than you could ever expect

via: https://youtu.be/yUVWXyNkR2I

I think my inability to accept people’s hatred of me before was fundamentally the same inability to accept the social power they were handing me. And this was uncomfortable for me and probably other people too, because turns out I do in fact have social power. It turns out you can’t not be handed social power. I sorta believed that if I just shrugged and said ‘aw shucks’ enough that this would save me from elevation, but it didn’t. I thought it ought to save me from elevation, but that was the very lil nugget of fuckery that the rest of my psyche was tangling around.

Status is scary.

via: https://aella.substack.com/p/pt5-women-are-low-status

Bro is starting off the year strong:

God, though, I understand why so many people are chasing that dragon, even though it’s going to ruin their careers, and maybe even their lives. I get why people fall for this, in spite of the externalities that they must know of by now. In spite of the colossal waste, the loss of fresh water resources, the fact that AI datacenters are the fastest growing source of carbon emissions, the people suffering sky-rocketing power bill and rolling outages near these new datacenters, the reams and reams of fascist propaganda these machines are producing to tear our society apart, the corruption, the market manipulation, the plain and simple fact that the ultimate purpose of these tools is to put their users out of a job entirely… well, once you finally get a taste of what it feels like to be great… I suppose all of those problems seem so far away.

The first reason, then, that we care about low-level is that it allows us to make better choices. We can make better software by starting in the right place, with the right frame and the right stack. Low-level programming allows us to build trucks instead of Trucklas.

I love Ben’s work, but he has a bad habit of not giving credit where it’s due, and makes him come off as smug in his writing. Yes, I too care about performance in apps. But this should not be the sole decision-maker when picking the technology stack.

Being clear about what your blog posts are about lets people who are interested in what you have to say find your writing more easily. The more paragraphs you spend getting to the point, the bigger the odds they’ll lose patience and click on something else before you’ve presented your thesis.