It sounds like your position is that the loneliness epidemic affects everyone and that there’s no reason to talk about it being male loneliness. If so, I believe you’re in agreement with the OP and feminist circles: “There is no male loneliness epidemic. It is simply a loneliness epidemic.”

However, if you nose around online, you’ll find that there are MRA-type circles who are very invested in the idea that it is a specifically-male problem. I interpret the OP img-text as being a reaction against that. To continue the New University quote from above: “By arbitrarily gendering a universal loneliness, our fragmented society becomes further fractured, and the discourse surrounding relationships becomes a breeding ground for misogyny.”

In the past, it was expected that men would have closer relationships with each other. Then we had the whole backlash against the hippie movement and it became “gay” and “bad” to swap handjobs with your bros in the basement den.

I believe you’re misreading their posts. In the text that you quoted, they say, “I think f(X) and g(X) both exist. I think that X is actually two populations: X_a and X_b.”

You’ve quoted this to say, “if you don’t think g(X) exists then why did you post??”

(f(X) is men who want friendship, g(X) is men who want sex, X_a is men in feminist circles, X_b is men not in feminist circles.)

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s nothing to be done or that having society provide you with community is the solution. Just that it used to be that way and we’re in a state of transition.

No one is depriving these people from joining the same organizations today

Right. But I’m saying that previously you were raised into an organization. You pretty much had no choice but to be a member of whatever group your family had been a member of. Now we’ve got a more free-form society and finding a group takes effort. And because you’re not being forced to stay in by societal expectations, it even takes effort to stay with the group.

++ but I think it can’t be overstated how much effort social skills takes. Especially if you’re starting from near zero.

Society cannot gift you friends…

It sort of can! Think about a very-religious church group or a military squad. When people are forced to spend all their time with a small group, they mostly become friends.

In the not-very-distant past, we lived in much smaller communities with much more interdependence.

I think some of the “male loneliness” talk is because society used to literally gift men with a friend group and a family and now they need to get all these things on their own but a lot of boys have not been raised to develop the skills they need for this new society.

ASD can be a challenge, for sure. “dont approach others since i respect boundaries” is the thing you need to change: respecting boundaries doesn’t mean never talking to someone, it means allowing them to set boundaries.

A simple way to do this is, “hi I’m gmtom. Mind if I sit here?” Sitting next to someone is generally understood as an invitation to talk.

You could also try leaning into the ASD a little: “hi I’m gmtom and my special interest is arachnids. [smile, because you are making fun of yourself a little] Want to hear some neat facts about spiders?”

However you introduce yourself, the way you respect boundaries is that when they say, “no.” You reply, “OK,” and leave.

If you don’t feel confident about reading peoples’ body language, I would also try to check in every so often. Again, you can try owning the autism: “I’m autistic and can’t read your body language very well. Am I boring you or is this cool?” And again, respecting boundaries means you accept it if they say “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

You will not succeed every time. Meeting people and making friends is a lot of work and takes practice (like: how much talking vs listening should you do? There’s no one correct answer, unfortunately). Charismatic people got a head start from their brain-types during childhood, but they are charismatic because they keep meeting and talking with new people to exercise their skills.

It’s shitty, but it’s not “enshittification”.

Doctorow’s explanation goes

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification

What the OP describes is just obnoxious design. To be enshittification it should be a change from better UX to worse and the change should be an attempt by the site to grab some extra cash.

Twitter requiring an account to see replies to a tweet is an example–they’re trying to juice their user-count.

Lots of things seem reasonable if you skip the context and critical reasoning. It’s good to keep some past examples of this that personally bother you in your back pocket. Then you have it as an antidote for examples that don’t bother you.

If you were part of the billionaire class, you’d be paying less. Sucker.

++this.

If you’re already driving around with a mask and a gun kidnapping people, why not get some extra money on the side with robbery?

Looking at the code, it reads like it was written by LLM: chatty commit messages, lack of spelling/capitalization errors, bullet points galore, shit-ton of “Fix X” commits that don’t read like they’re increasingly-frustrated, worthless comments randomly scattered like “i + 1 // add 1 to i” without any other comments on the page.

No security review because none of the code has been reviewed and he doesn’t know what’s in it.

I don’t understand how you think this works.

If I say, “now we have robots that can build a car from scratch!” the automakers will be salivating. But if my robot actually cannot build a car, then I don’t think it’s going to cause mass layoffs.

Many of the big software companies are doing mass layoffs. It’s not because AI has taken over the jobs. They always hired extra people as a form of anti-competitiveness. Now they’re doing layoffs to drive salaries down. That sucks and tech workers would be smart to unionize (we won’t). But I don’t see any radical shift in the industry.

To be honest, you sound like you’re only just starting to learn to code.

Will coding forever belong to humans? No. Is the current generative-AI technology going to replace coders? Also no.

The reaction you see is frustration because it’s obvious to anyone with decent skill that AI isn’t up to the challenge, but it’s not obvious to people who don’t have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses “no, that’s not actually correct”.

Someone else referenced Microsoft’s public work with Copilot. Here’s Copilot making 13 PRs over 5 days and only 4 ever get merged you might think “30% success is pretty good!” But compare that with human-generated PRs and you can see that 30% fucking sucks. And that’s not even looking inside the PR where the bot wastes everyone’s time making tons of mistakes. It’s just a terrible coworker and instead of getting fired they’re getting an award for top performer.

Commercial software has advertising: people whose job is to advertise it. That means TV and web ads for Bluesky, influencers talking about it. It also means a team of software engineers building parts of the system specifically to draw people in, whereas non-commercial software often rejects that (lack of infinite-scroll on Lemmy’s default UI, for example).

Activity Pub also requires a different mind-set that doesn’t exist elsewhere on the internet today. You need to decide which instance to join, or maybe to host your own instance. But it doesn’t really matter, because you can federate with other instances. But you have to drive some of that federation, so it does matter a little. It’s pretty complex and confusing and its a problem that only exists in this one niche of software.

Bluesky gives you an infinite feed that feels like you’re connected to the entire Internet without you doing any work. I think the AP service are doing really well, considering what they’re up against.

My most recent usage of AI was making some script that uses WinGet to setup a dev environment.

This is a good example. What I’m saying is that pre-AI, I could look this up on StackOverflow and copy/paste blindly and get a slightly higher success rate than today where I can “AI please solve this”.

But I shouldn’t pick at the details. I think the “AI hater” mentality comes in because we’ve got this thing that boils down to “a bit more convenient than copying the solution off of StackOverflow” when used very carefully and “much worse than copying and pasting random code” when used otherwise. But instead of this honest pitch, it’s mega-hype and it’s only when people demand specific examples that someone starts talking like you do here.

I’ve heard this from others, too. I don’t really get it.

I watched a teammate working with AI:

1. Identify the problem: a function was getting passed an object-field when it should be getting the whole object
2. Write instruction to the AI: “refactor the function I’ve selected to take a Foo instead of a String or Box<String>. Then in the Foo function, use the bar parameter. Don’t change other files or functions.”
3. Wait ~5s for Cursor to do it

It did the instructions and didn’t fuck anything up, so I guess it was a success? But they already knew exactly what the fixed code should look like, so it seems like they just took a slow and boring path to get there.

When I’m working with a new intern, they cost me time. Everything is 2-4x slower. It’s worth it because (a) I like working with people and someone just getting into programming makes me feel happy and (b) after a few months I’m able to trust that they can do things on their own and I’m not constantly checking to see if they’ve actually deleted random code or put an authentication check on an unauthenticated endpoint etc etc. The point of an intern is to see if you want to hire them as a jr dev who will actually become worthwhile in 6+ months.

I appreciate you explaining it. My LLM wasn’t working so I didn’t understand the joke

This reminds me of another post I’d read, “Hey, wait – is employee performance really Gaussian distributed??”.

There’s this phenomenon when you’re an interviewer at a decently-funded start-up where you take a ton of interviews and say “OMG developers are so bad”. But you’ve mistakenly defined “developer” as “person who applies for a developer job”. GPT3.5 is certainly better at solving interview questions than 90% of the people who apply. But it’s worse than the people who actually pass the interview. (In part because the interview is more than just implementing a standard interview problem.)

Based on the article, it seems like cult-follower behavior. Not everyone is susceptible to cults (I think it’s a combo of individual brain and life-circumstances), but I wouldn’t say, “eh, it’s not the cult’s fault that these delusional people killed themselves!”