claudiawerner

if you could even call the writing of some guy with no credentials that

The researcher I'm quoting (who's by far not alone on writing this topic in his field) is Patrick Galbraith, a researcher and associate professor of cultural anthropology at Senshu University in Tokyo.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FLmsh_8AAAAJ

In this case, it's not; but even if it were, does that limit the ability of a text to explore interesting themes? Why?

I'd recommend reading deeper into the scholarly literature of sexual themes in anime and manga before assuming that fans necessarily interpret 'children' into the text. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639806

I don't really know how to respond to the idea that the fact anime includes fanservice means it can't deal with sensitive topics at the same time.

'Pedophilic undertones' doesn't relate to 'trashy' or 'harem', even if you read the anime that way. In fact, it can be extremely interesting to see something which is so rarely portrayed or discussed in fiction, even fiction for adults.

The reality of child abuse is neither solved nor rebuked by depictions or explorations of psychology in adult fiction.

I imagine the support for more recent Google Pixel phones specifically is better (existent).

The article specifically mentions "successfully aging" as a term to avoid if possible.

Again, I can't see those things as necessarily bad in any kind of global sense that applies to everyone, unless you claim to know what's best for everyone. Escapism might be a problem if you're neglecting your duties as a parent, for example. Infantile behavior might be a problem if you're expecting to be constantly helped in the workplace. But those are individual problems caused by underlying issues.

It's similar to gaming. You could say solo gaming reinforces escapism far more than meeting of like minded people in a furry community. But that doesn't mean gaming is bad - it's only bad to the degree that this escapism causes problems in the gamer's life.

Even if they were a 'cult of sexuality' - what exactly is the harm here? I'm always struck by how, even on HN, there is a current of moral busybodies who, often without understanding the topic or subculture, deem certain activities outside the scope of toleration - even those activities which do not cause harm. The justification is usually rather weak too if not backed up by some religious principles.

The sibling comment refers to "escapism" (as though this is always a bad thing, we should chuck out fantasy and most music too) and "infantile behavior" (citation needed, even if this is a thing we should not tolerate).

"Exposed to furries"? Come on. It's a subculture like any other, but one which (for fairly stupid reasons in my opinion) faces bullying and harassment. Where do you draw the line between a "social contagion" and a quirky subculture? Are tabletop RPGs a social contagion? What about Ham radio enthusiasts?

4chan has an extensive list of rules; only the /b/ (Random) board is exempt from most of them - with the caveat, they say, that the moderators of that board are also exempt from abiding by the rules of who to ban and for what reason.

Even on /b/, doxxing, calls to raid other boards, complaining about the moderators/admins, submitting false post reports, impersonating admins, etc. is banned. On all other boards, even seemingly innocuous things like anthropomorphic (furry) imagery or even posting images of characters from the show My Little Pony (other than in the /mlp/ and /b/ boards) is disallowed.

Porn is disallowed on the majority of boards, and even risque images are sometimes removed; the rules are enforced to the degree where a SFW board (e.g. /jp/) can have threads about Japanese porn actresses, but you're not even allowed to post a nude.

4chan is quite heavily moderated and there is a whole team of janitors and moderators for all boards that respond to reports behind the scenes; you only rarely see them chime in like dang does on HN. For a while, even "share a screenshot of your desktop" threads were routinely being removed from the /g/ (Technology) board by janitors.

As for Gab, I recall they even ban softcore/suggestive pornography or imagery. It's certainly not the wild west just because its users are more sympathetic to the first amendment.

Pithy comment, but it's a shame that the state is regulating comic materials in the interest of 'child safety' without anything to back it.

There are citations both for and against falsificationism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[0]; quoting:

"Popper’s demarcation criterion has been criticized both for excluding legitimate science (Hansson 2006) and for giving some pseudosciences the status of being scientific (Agassi 1991; Mahner 2007, 518–519). Strictly speaking, his criterion excludes the possibility that there can be a pseudoscientific claim that is refutable. According to Larry Laudan (1983, 121), it “has the untoward consequence of countenancing as ‘scientific’ every crank claim which makes ascertainably false assertions”"

From the citation on Hansson, the abstract[1] reads:

"...Furthermore, an empirical study of falsification in science is reported, based on the 70 scientific contributions that were published as articles in Nature in 2000. Only one of these articles conformed to the falsificationist recipe for successful science, namely the falsification of a hypothesis that is more accessible to falsification than to verification."

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/#Fals

[1] https://philpapers.org/rec/HANFF

as opposed to some bro watching anime and watching documentaries about sushi and samurai swords who feels they've "made an effort to learn the culture"

You've used this strawman previously in this thread; perhaps it would be better if you elucidated what elements of culture you're actually referring to.

They don't want people merely having "made an effort to learn their culture" to immigrate in their country in any great numbers.

Who is "they"? I feel like you're ascribing very specific opinions to people who I suspect would be perfectly happy with law-abiding immigrants who don't hold parties at 3 a.m.

They prefer people having grown into their culture - that is, their own people.

Is this even true? And to what degree? For example, there are cases of non-ethnically Japanese people who were born and raised in Japan, but still face challenges with discrimination, whereas immigrants of Japanese ancestry from America only seem to face issues with language. There's even a politician who immigrated to Japan and was elected by Japanese people: https://www.japan-zone.com/modern/tsurunen_marutei.shtml - in what way was someone who grew up in Japan preferred?

You may argue that these are minor examples and exceptions, but even one example is enough to show that these feelings are not based on logic or probability, but on mere gut feeling when one encounters someone different.

Cultural assimilation can happen to varying degrees and varying time frames with mixed results; the degree to which it is successful is also dependent on how accomodating or welcoming that particular culture is.

It's their country. You don't get to feel "bullied" for them not wanting foreigners there.

Why shouldn't I? You don't get to dictate how I "get" to feel. The very idea of racism and xenophobia is fundamentally offensive to me. As with the Amazon native population, I would not approve if they didn't let me in by virtue of some immutable attribute of mine such as my appearance.

So long as you make an effort to learn someone's culture, I don't think there's any justifictaion to exclude someone on the basis of the brute facts of their body or upbringing. Actions ought to matter far more.

I'm not aware of any moral theory that has been justified in academia or elsewhere which prescribes that such discrimination is permissible. This also is evidenced by the fact that many Japanese people claim to abhor racism while simultaneously practicing it against sections of their own population and other populations.

("I like multiculturalism, as long as every country has the same cultural mindset as mine").

To some degree, this isn't a bad idea. For example, I abhor female genital mulitaliton (FGM) and I don't think it's particularly wrong to say that regardless of it being the "culture" of some people, it shouldn't be done.

If I weren't a moral nihilist, I certainly wouldn't be a moral relativist.

I agree with you, but in some jurisdictions the distance between stuff generated with AI and actual photographs of child abuse are treated rather closely; either way, possessing either could result in what the England & Wales calls a "sexual harm prevention order" (SHPO). To me the idea that someone could be served such an order without ever possessing real CSEM (or "child porn"), never mind actually never being near a child is rather worrying.

That's funny; I immediately thought of BQN when I saw this character pop up on HN :)

When I went in 2018, I loved the 'creepy otaku stores', maybe because I am a bit of an otaku, hah. To each their own.

I use locally hosted LLM models for roleplaying almost exclusively, and I've found that the only acceptable models for that use case are 30B or larger (though the jump between a 40B model and a 65B model reaches the point of diminishing returns as far as my experience goes).

What I'd really like to see improve is having larger contexts. The current context size available for llama.cpp-compatible models is 2048 tokens, which given the scenario and character descriptions at the start of the prompt only gives the LLM about 3 paragraphs of memory. It just forgets anything you said more than 3 paragraphs ago, which makes for a pretty miserable longer term RP experience unless you constantly update the summary of what's happened in the story/roleplay so far to be sent with every prompt.

4096 or larger contexts running efficiently (>= 1 T/s) with 12GB/24GB consumer grade GPU layer offloading would be fantastic, and bonus points if we can get 30 or 40B models working with that.

But watching a woman getting chocked while DPed in her anus while a half dozen men ejaculate on her is not the type of extra-curricular activity [1] I want my soon to be teenaged daughters' boyfriends interested in.

If this is consensual, it actually sounds rather fun. But it's interesting that the example is simply an amalgamation of relatively common things:

* Choking is a common kink * Anal sex is a common sex act * Group sex is at least a common fantasy; I don't know how common double anal penetration is outside porn though * Providing and receiving facials is also quite common as an alternative to spitting.

All of the acts are relatively innocuous on their own, but the combination is portrayed to be almost demonic :)

That's fine with me, so long as they don't get a PS3 or newer.

I already had those eight hours (after work, before sleeping) to myself, and as much as I appreciate the fact that modern conveniences make it easier to squeeze as much as I can out of that time, the amount is still palty compared to eight or nine hour work days four or five days a week. The issue isn't so much that I can come home and get things done, it's why the vast majority of people think it makes any sense to slave away for eight hours under the watch of someone else because... that way I can buy my own smoker?

I don't think anyone disputes that such metrics are better than before; the issue is staying complacent with what we have in a world where we are seeing yet another wave of potential productivity gains being captured by people who can afford to use it to gain more time. Saying "Things are better than they've ever been, why complain?" feels like the wrong approach.

"Hey, at least I'm not dead." as the answer to "Why haven't we seen meaningful increases in free time for first world workers over the past three decades?" is a real head-scratcher.

Although that's true, it's important to acknowledge that you've shifted the conversation from time, which was the original topic, to merely having things in a world where most people have little flexibility in the amount they work anyway. Even if I hadn't bought that phone, I wouldn't necessarily have any more time to myself.

How-to sex guides and the like are not appropriate for a high school library.

I wasn't saying they necessarily are; I was saying that such a representation isn't necessarily pornographic.

Is it? I don't recall having been shown anything like that.

I do, even if it was many years ago.

I think you need to figure out the difference between sex education and a sex guide on your own.

I have figured it out; the fact is that there is a continuum of representations of sex between a cut-out diagram of the interior anatomy of a penis penetrating the interior anatomy of a vagina, a diagram showing how a condom is applied, a picture of one adult on top of another in a book in a "How are Babies Made" sort of book for children, and showing how sex with a strap-on works. I don't see any reason to consider any of these necessarily pornographic - as all lack the primary intention to titillate.

Such images are shown in books about human sexuality, or sex guides. The purpose of those books is not to tittilate in an erotic sense, but to provide information or education.

To go further, almost everyone agrees that a cartoon of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position for the purpose of procreation is not necessarily pornographic; this is a standard sort of picture in age appropriate sex education materials.

Granted, these images concern sexual reproduction. However this only makes me question why people deem that image appropriate, but images of other positions or acts not worthy of learning about in other contexts.

The fact is that we do learn about sex at school for other reasons. "Safe sex", consent, and in many cases contraception are all taught.

So hypothetically, if we're fine with images to educate about reproduction, and images to educate about consent or safe sex for nonreproductive purposes, what makes the images in the book so different as to deserve to be forbidden knowledge?

Employees in the UK don't have access to an employment tribunal unless they've been at the company for longer than 2 years.

I didn't call you an anything-ist. The term is used in the studies done on these people, unless you'd rather there just not be a term at all. Whether you think it's "valid" is up to you, but we can say this about any sexual orientation. I'm sure to some people homosexuality is not "valid", and that's fine. You're allowed to have an opinion.

Arpopos the 21st century - this is actually a good point! It's a very 21st century form of attraction, isn't it? And keeping up with the times can be good.

In the same way I can decide someone being in love with an underage child... someone being in love with an anime character[0]... someone being in love with their dog[1]... is dodgy

Are you seriously comparing pedophilia with being in love with an anime character? For what it's worth, there's a lot of research on the "2D complex" and moe, in particular in the context of Japan - and the intersection therein with asexuality and fictosexuality. Your moral judgement of those ways of feeling means very little. "Dodgy" doesn't mean anything other than "Ew, I don't like that" - which, ironically, I'll agree is a 'valid' way to feel.

It's a shame that it's still socially acceptable to cast moral aspersions on how people feel and appeals to normalcy in 2023.

In another comment you mentioned the appeal of these relationships - the idea of a safety net provided by an object of desire that will never leave you. I think that this is mostly wishful thinking to justify to yourself why you think that these sexualities are wrong or the product of some kind of disorder. You have no evidence that most people with a 2D love orientation turn their attractions this way because of that reason.

If the value is what offer and demand agree on, exploitation disappears, in Marx's theoretical model.

This is not true; Marx's model of exploitation (known to modern economists as the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Model (PECP)) does not concern itself with what demand and offer agree on within a labor negotiation. Marx says that workers do not sell their labor, they sell their labor-time (e.g. X units of time/goods) during which they exercise their labor-power. The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced during that time is where this 'exploitation' comes in.

The idea that exploitation is a matter of opinion or agreement adds a moral or justicial spin to what Marx considered to be a fact of the capitalist economy. Whether the people involved are happy with the situation or agree to it does not change this discrepancy of value or its representation in money.