HeinzStuckeIt

The safety I have heard demanded directly from women to me as a partner – or from female friends about the man they seek – is the safety of being a provider, giving them a feeling of security that they can’t manage to achieve on their own. It’s not just about a man being safe to be with. Again, you are speaking about something I haven’t heard from actual women, and I think I’ll trust the latter (and reportage matching it) over a HN stranger for forming my assumption of what women want from relationships.

And again, maybe part of why women might be having problems with dating is that many men today don’t want to be seen as a big emotional support for a partner either. That’s draining and time-consuming. This might bother you, but my whole point is that the social pressures are no longer there to compel men (or women) to act a certain way, and that is impacting dating.

Perhaps one of the problems with modern dating is that women expect a man to provide safety, but many men don’t want to be viewed as a source of safety? Me, I am only interested in relationship for companionship, someone with whom I can share interesting experiences, because joy is not complete unless it is shared. But when it comes to safety and security, a partner is on her own. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t do this or that for a partner, but it would be supererogatory. My male friends have a similar complaint, this isn’t just a HN thing.

Again, this is probably an outcome of modernity. I likely wouldn’t think this way as a man, if I didn’t grow up in a modern age hearing that women are strong, they can take care of themselves and no longer depend on men.

For most people, git is that you work with pull requests, and already early on some bristled at the term “patches” which implied an obsolete way of working.

I think the claim that modernity is different is easily defendable. No society during the rest of history had such effective birth control, nor welfare states that removed pressure to produce offspring or even interact so much with family or other members of society. Again, as a man I feel like I am able to live a life very different than I would have been pressured into before, and this surely has ramifications for modern dating and relationships.

Reminiscent of the shooting of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where there was a toxic-waste-producing facility right nearby (and you can supposedly see toxic waste on camera) and some of the cast and crew got ill or died from horrible cancers.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Filming

If you read journalism about why women are frustrated with dating today, one of the number-one complaints is that the men they are meeting are “flaky”, women can’t trust that the man will be there for her. Your depiction that “women don’t really need men” completely misses the current trend that this thread is about.

The parent post is getting flack, but it’s hard to see why it is controversial. I have heard “women want a man who will provide and protect” from every single woman I have ever dated or been married to, from every female friend with whom I could have such deep conversations, and from the literature I read in my anthropology-adjacent academic field. At some point one feels one has enough data to reasonably assume it’s a heterosexual human universal (in the typological sense, i.e. not denying the existence of many exceptions).

I can believe that many women are having a hard time under modernity, because so many men no longer feel bound by the former expectations of old-school protector and provider behavior. Some men, like me, now view relationships as two autonomous individuals coming together to share sublime things like hobbies, art or travel, but don’t want to be viewed as a source of security. Other men might be just extracting casual sex from women and then will quickly move on. There’s much less social pressure on men to act a certain way, which in turn impacts on what women experience.

Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though. Around 2010 I said in passing, in a forum discussion about how a FOSS project was getting along, “…you’d think someone could send in a patch…”, and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.

Your post above wrote “the location of the proto-Germanic speakers”. Terminology matters; Proto-Germanic is something strictly defined as to what it was, with a longstanding consensus about where and when it was. If you wanted to talk about pre-Proto-Germanic speakers (or “Paleo-Germanic” speakers as this paper does, though I suspect some would quibble with that term used for a very early date), then you could have done so.

Moreover, you posted about a “new theory”, but the paper here only gives new evidence for an old theory.

By the time the actors I mentioned were written about as having dementia, many film fans had already assumed they were dealing with dementia precisely because they were no longer being written about or seen in the media much. Such speculation about Jack Nicholson, for example, was rife on film forums well before those paparazzi images appeared.

Yes, I’m afraid that you are still misunderstanding the research. Your linked article speaks about gene flow associated with the movement of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers to Scandinavia, but later Proto-Germanic formed in southern Scandinavia according to the longstanding consensus. This is clearly spelled out in the abstract: “Following the disintegration of Proto-Germanic, we find by 1650 BP a southward push from Southern Scandinavia.”

There’s no new theory here at all, just some nice archaeogenetic evidence to support a quite traditional view. FWIW, I work in a closely related field and am constantly reading Germanic–Finnic and Baltic–Finnic contact literature, and I can assure you this is old-hat stuff.

Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.

> there's a recent theory putting the location of the proto-Germanic speakers in Finland.

There is no credible theory to that effect. Either you have stumbled on something that is not taken seriously, or you are misunderstanding the consensus. Namely, Proto-Germanic speakers did visit the eastern Baltic coast for trading and raiding, and so there are Germanic loanwords into Finnic languages of Proto-Germanic date, but the agreed location where Proto-Germanic formed is in Scandinavia, not Finland.

The South China Morning Post itself recently wrote on speculation that Beijing could try to challenge Tokyo’s control of Okinawa, given its history and proximity to Taiwan.[0]

[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3333468/ch...

Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.

This has long been pretty obvious to anyone using Nitter on desktop. There, you can ctrl-click on usernames to open a new tab, and it is readily obvious from the account’s post history that the people behind so many “authentic American” accounts are not authentic Americans. They make little telltale mistakes in their English, they post single-mindedly about a particular topic like few real people (no matter how much they like political battle) would, the profile pic was obviously created by GAN3-style AI, etc.

It’s fast and trivial to verify on any non-enshittified interface. One of the problems with modern social media is that people are looking at it (usually on their phones) through the platform’s intentionally crippled UI that doesn’t allow quickly opening new views.

Reminiscent of a finding reported at a neurology conference in the 1960s that served as the epigraph to J.H. Prynne’s collection of poems Wound Response:

“Of particular interest in the present context are the observations made on patients whose middle ear had been opened in such a way that a cotton electrode soaked in normal saline solution could be placed near the cochlea. A total of 20 surgically operated ears were studied. Eleven patients heard pure tones whose pitch corresponded to the frequency of the sinusoidal voltage applied to the electrode… One patient reported gustatory sensations.”

During the 2016 election, it was big in the news that a whole ring of fake-news social media accounts and news websites was run out of North Macedonia.[0] And not out of nefarious meddling in American internal affairs, but because the men involved knew American culture well enough to know that riling up readers in a wealthy but politically polarized country could bring in profit. How fast that story was forgotten.

[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science...

This has long been pretty obvious to anyone using Nitter on desktop. There, you can ctrl-click on usernames to open a new tab, and it is readily obvious from the account’s post history that the people behind so many “authentic American” accounts are not authentic Americans. They make little telltale mistakes in their English, they post single-mindedly about a particular topic like few real people (no matter how much they like political battle) would, the profile pic was obviously created by GAN3-style AI, etc.

It’s fast and trivial to verify on any non-enshittified interface. One of the problems with modern social media is that people are looking at it (usually on their phones) through the platform’s intentionally crippled UI that doesn’t allow quickly opening new views.

Two ordinary paragraphs like one would find in any serious publication, are now enough to make an “impenetrable wall of text”?

You also overlook the fact that many Reddit posts are not links to content. For example, they could be text-post questions posed to a community in order for the OP to receive guidance. This recent culture discouraging substantial discussion about things that are complex and can’t be abbreviated, makes the site less useful that way.

Social media might be getting less attractive for that, though. Compare Reddit now to ten years ago, and you can see that even on more serious subreddits, everyone’s comments have become very short, often little more than a single line. If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.

I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum profit, a community that doesn’t do that looks like a bunch of weirdos, maybe a cult.

> Maybe that's a new thing, because I've never heard of it.

You mentioned in another post attending a lecture from Feynman. I think you might be a few decades behind modern academia.

> At my university, I was taught by professors and grad students, none of whom had a teaching degree.

Professors and grad students may well have done a course on how to lecture. It is obligatory and/or an easy way to pick up credits in many PhD programs. In any event, grad students teaching badly, because the department has allowed the more competent faculty to put their teaching burden on grad students, is a common complaint about US universities.

I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.

Gibson was writing about California specifically, and the Bay Area specifically. That state and that part of it had already had, since the 1960s at least, a reputation for attracting homeless people from across the country thanks to its clement weather. He could have merely been extrapolating from that and not necessarily prophetic about any of the issues today.

The very active ecosystem of blogs I followed in the first decade of the new millennium, on arts themes (literature, cinema, non-popular music) and religious-denomination news, were mainly people above 30 blogging, sometimes much older. Wordpress had made it easy for any computer user, not just tech nerds, to set something up.

> Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream.

Content creation is indeed something a minority of society practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being ousted, religious denominations’ leadership being shook up. All the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs before that.

Watch the last episode of The Onion’s series Sex House from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time. It wasn’t until just after this that Google began deranking niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people on their sites for maximum engagement.

If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.

Strangely, The Far Side is even known here and there on the European continent in translation, even though so many of the jokes depend on English puns that the translators don’t even attempt to work with. The result is weird and inexplicable, but that creates a humor of its own, even if it is different from what Gary Larson intended.