something_else

I really don't understand the nofap thing. Maybe for some people it works, but for me it just makes me less focused, more horny, and more desperate. If your confidence is so fragile that jerking off makes it vanish then you're not really that confident deep down. All of the most confident guys you've ever met in your life probably jerk off on the regular.

I don’t even think about it. The more you’re in your head trying to follow some ruleset like this the less charismatic you’ll be

Fabric is good, although expensive as shit for drinks. I’ve only been out in London a few times so I don’t have any recommendations beyond that

Fuck clubs with tables man. I’m so glad I don’t live in the US where that’s standard. In the UK clubs with tables like that are almost non-existent and I’m so glad. My favourite clubs are ones that are big, almost maze like, with multiple dance floors, and a big smoking area, and ideally a chill room with seats. You can always keep moving around and exploring and just chat to new people while you do it.

Clubs with good smoking areas are exceptional for this reason. There’s always somewhere quiet you can go where you can chat, and it’s also very socially acceptable to start conversations with new people there too. I think probably half of all the girls I’ve hooked up with in clubs I met first in the smoking area.

I’ve experienced this quite a bit, and I think it’s one of the major downsides of pickup. You learn a formula that works for you, broadly speaking, for hooking up with the average girl. But then you meet someone you genuinely like and could see yourself with long term, and you instinctively fall back on the same formula. Then it falls apart. she picks up on the inauthenticity and the rehearsed “fuckboy” dynamic almost immediately. I think it’s really important to learn to balance out the “script” that works in general with authenticity. But it’s so easy to just keep running that script habitually because it gets you laid a lot. I still struggle with balancing these two things

This is not true at all. Women are attracted to intelligence, just the kind of intelligence that accomplishes real things in the world. High IQ doesn't really correlate that much with success in the real world beyond a certain number, and it probably negatively correlates with it at higher levels because really high IQ people tend to lack in EQ. Women aren't attracted to men they think are actually dumb as a general rule. You don't need to be super cool to get a wife. You just need to be relatively interesting to her, and capable of achieving stuff in the real world. Competence is attractive. If you want to hookup with a bunch of girls you need some spark of coolness. But if you don't want that and you just want to settle down with a wife, you really can get that with basic social skills and a normal job, which are pretty much the minimum requirements to be considered a functional human. All this bitterness is not helping you at all.

There are some situations where correlation vs causation is a valid criticism, and to a degree it is here too, but for something like prostate and ejaculation, which are inherently very closely linked, a heavy correlation is enough to suggest that a causation link is very likely. I'm not taking it too literally, it's exactly what you said. You softened your argument afterwards, but those were your words.

Interesting. I do like Astra, and I find a lot of models work better with a lower reasoning level for most tasks, unless it's complex. I've been using Astra on medium. Fast mode is also really cool if you haven't tried it, though it burns through usage very quickly. My usual setup is to have a Terra session, and tell it to spawn subagents using Sol or Astra if it needs to do something more complex. This seems to be a nice balance of capability and usage limits. I guess you could also have an Astra session and tell it to spawn terra / sol subagents if it needs them, though I find that can be quite slow. Fable is, IMO, still the king for PR review. It finds a lot of things OpenAI models miss, but I agree that for daily use it's expensive, slow and I absolutely fucking hate how Claude models talk. It's so verbose and unclear. Where I work we started out with Claude, but we've now mostly all switched over to Codex.

I think that's a worse experience. Threads already have a tendency to go off topic here which isn't ideal, and comment chains would only make that even worse.

I think that is the case. I'm sure Leo has said he intentionally doesn't want likes/dislikes. The purpose of the forum is to be as simple as possible. I agree the blog could do with some love though. @Leo Gura I'm a web developer if you need someone to spruce the blog up a bit

I didn’t say it causes it, I said it increases the risk. Perhaps still too strong of a statement, but there is certainly strong evidence for a link between the two, which means it quite likely that ejaculating less or not at all increases risk of prostate cancer. This is a lot less absolute of a statement than you first made with “All forms of fasting are beneficial for human health” You also need to provide an argument for what this principle is, or why fasting as a general rule is good for the body. Different types of fasting have very different effects and there is no evidence that as a general concept “fasting” is good for the body. Some types of fasting are beneficial for some people, sometimes. That is about as much as has been conclusively proven. As a very simple counter example, if you are anorexic or severely underweight, fasting is not going to be beneficial for you.

They’re pretty great if you look at least decent and have good pics

It isn’t false, there are several large well respected studies showing that there is a link between ejaculation frequency and prostate cancer. Ironically ”all forms of fasting are beneficial for human health” is a far broader statement for which there is absolutely no solid evidence for whatsoever. Some forms of fasting are beneficial to some people.

If anything sex energises me, I feel more drained when I go without it for extended periods. I don't really feel drained day to day in general either, so no fap or semen retention just feels like a solution to a problem I don't have. Not to mention, not ejaculating increases your risk of prostate cancer. The only thing I regularly do that makes me feel drained is vaping nicotine, and that's largely because it is such a strong addiction with lots of shame associated with it.

I think it has value for guys who struggle with excessive urges to masturbate or watch porn. In my case, I enjoy sex, and I enjoy jerking off. Neither has really impacted my life in any direct way. I don't really feel any shame around either and I don't find that abstaining has any significant impact on me, beyond making me less able to focus on important stuff because my mind focuses on sex. I guess you can argue that eventually you learn to control those urges after lots of abstaining and somehow that benefits you, but I struggle to see what the mechanism would be there. Most likely you just end up more desperate than you would otherwise be because women are your only source of orgasm, so you need women more. IMO if you don't naturally struggle with an addiction to jerking off, all you do by getting into nofap and semen retention is give yourself a massive complex of shame around something that's pretty natural and healthy.

Honestly I find when I don't cum it makes me more desperate for women if anything.

Most people give zero fucks about this, though. Few people really care about privacy enough especially if privacy requires the slightest inconvenience or sacrifice, and similarly, most people trust corporations out of convenience or ignorance. NFTs taking off in the way you suggest would require corporations to support them heavily, which they’ll only do if it makes them more money somehow. Otherwise why would they give up any control? Ownership only really matters if it gives you some actual benefit. A million dollars does. If an NFT proves I own an album or movie or some digital knick knack but everyone else can download the exact same thing anyway, then the NFT is barely doing anything useful. Multiplayer video game items make more sense for NFTs because they trigger the same part of our mind that gives objects in the real world value, largely because our mind is modelling the video game world as the real world. But even then the games company still has to recognise the NFT for it to have any real value so they still hold most of the power. If the game shuts down your NFT becomes worthless. So it's still ultimately pretty gimmicky. Also, a lot of game enthusiasts hate monetisation of games. It actually ruins the experience in many ways because it becomes less about the quality of the game and more about getting rich. I think if you can actually explain what the day to day experience of using NFT tech would look like for an average person in this scenario where it becomes ubiquitous, I'd be more convinced. Most revolutionary tech of the past 30 years has revolutionised the world because somebody made extremely useful but abstract tech accessible and easy to use, think computers > Windows/MacOS/Desktop/Laptop/Keyboard/Mouse/Smartphones the internet > browsers/web design/apps AI > Chat based assistants and agents It's hard to imagine what would come after the > here for NFTs.

What is your body count, out of curiosity? I wouldn't give it much thought tbh. 5 people isn't that many people. If you are genuinely good in bed, which it sounds like you are, and you guys get on well together this isn't something that needs a lot of thought.

Good luck dude. Hope it goes well for you

I think there are some practical applications of NFTs, like video game items, ticketing systems and corporate loyalty programs. But even there, the value is pretty limited. The same things can largely be achieved cheaper without NFTs. I just don't think NFTs will ever be particularly mainstream, they're limited to very specific use cases. There is just not that much social value in being able to say "I have the original copy of this digital asset!" when everybody can type the name of that digital asset into Google and see an exact copy. Rare digital assets don't have the same value to humans as a physical asset like a painting or a playing card, perhaps with the rare exception of video games. There, the feeling of owning a rare digital item does have some value. But again, games have been creating that feeling for years without NFTs. It's also often the case that the digital asset itself isn't even stored on the blockchain. Often the NFT is just certifying a link to that digital asset on somebody else's server. If you bought a 500k original copy of a JPEG you aren't even certified as owning the JPEG. You're certified as owning a URL to the JPEG on some other company's server, or if you're lucky, distributed storage of some kind. Copyright is another thing entirely. Owning an NFT does not automatically give you ownership of the copyright or any other legal rights over the associated work, those rights must be transferred or licensed separately. There are just many issues with it. I think it's likely that this tech will be silently used by companies in ways that it's actually useful to them, but is unlikely to ever become mainstream.

Honestly Astra doesn't feel like a massive jump to me, at least day to day when using it for coding. It's better, but not world shatteringly so. It still has the same flaws as every other coding agent, which is that it doesn't really make high level architecture decisions very well and needs to be guided through such decisions. Not to say AI hasn't changed how I work massively, it's completely changed software engineering and the productivity boosts are insane. I just don't think Astra is really that deserving of all the hype.

The issue with evo psych is that it’s largely all speculation. There is often no way to actually confirm the root of a behaviour is evolution, not social or cultural. It ends up being a lot of valid sounding stories that cannot be proven or disproven.

It’s definitely a form of non-monogamy, and arguably polyamory by the strict definition. But it runs pretty strongly against the ethos of most poly communities, which tends to emphasise autonomy and rejecting possessive or unequal relationship rules. If you’re saying you’re allowed multiple partners but every woman must be exclusive to you, you’re consciously baking a very asymmetric power structure into the relationship. That’s why “harem-building” is generally viewed extremely negatively in poly communities, even if you can technically fit it under the broad definition of polyamory.

Again, what you’re trying to create isn’t really polyamory, It’s a harem. So the studies on polyamory don’t really transfer to that.