sp3ctr4l

I mean...

Looking at mic_check's figures...

Lets say we are just talking straight, hetero people.

We got all straight men at 43:55 Dem to Rep, thats a 22% higher chance of a woman randomly picking a Rep instead of a Dem.

Meanwhile you can just, as a woman who is looking into dating a man...

Just pick a random, single, never married dude.

Bam!, now its 61:37 Dem to Rep, a 65% higher chance a random, never married dude will be a Dem than a Rep.

...

We are talking about these stats in the context of dating, right?

Where people like, talk, get to know each other?

Not just being randomly assigned partners from a slot machine?

Do dating apps not like, allow you to filter by something like this, or... talk/chat to a person, and ask them questions before you meet them...?

Its kind of silly to paint individual people with a broadly accurate brush... when the ostensible whole point is to get to know a person individually.

Sure, use broad stats to form a broadly accurate general worldview, but realize its limitations.

Disclaimer: Please consider this a sort of fork of your discussion so far, I only mean to say anything about the parts of your comment I actually reference.

...

Why would women seek out a women-only app? And inversely, why would men seek out a men-only app? The answer to each will be fundamentally different, which means the user bases will be fundamentally different as well.

To a significant degree, yes, but I think you are overstating that degree.

Tea is imo more like a gossip app, ala Nextdoor, just specific to dating.

Tea isn't a dating app, it is... I guess you could call it ... dating-app-meta-review app, from a technically minded standpoint?

A supplement to a (or many) dating app(s).

~~But it doesn't actually directly link to~~

[(EDIT: whoops I accidentally a sentence there.)]

It is named 'tea', as in gossiping, the deets, the low down, the real story, etc.

Literally this is their own marketing:

https://www.teaforwomen.com/about

It is literally just a replacement for Facebook 'Are we dating the same guy' groups, but better, if you pay, because the Premium account allows you to run background / criminal / sex offender records.

...

So, a rough equivalent for guys would probably be named something like MPH, officially Miles Per Hour, unofficially, Miles Per Hoe, I dunno, something edgy for the manosphere crowd, where guys would gossip about cheating girls/women, and also be able to run background checks on them for a premium.

I can guarantee you that men would be broadly interested in such an app if it existed.

...

Now imagine the inverse. Most guys probably wouldn’t even think of using a men-only app for safety reasons. Like it’s not even on their radar, because safety while dating isn’t something they’re concerned with.

Maybe not as much in the safety sense of immediate physical danger, but absolutely in the sense of... is this person financially abusive, emotionally manipulative, do they have kids, or a massive amount of debt/bad spending habits, an STI, etc, that they don't mention untill they've been dating you for some time, do they have a history of acting like they're committed when they've in the past cheated whilst acting like they were monogamous?

These kinds of things apply to both men and women, and are far more common to occur in a dating/relationship than physical abuse.

Yes, women are more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence or stalking...

But its not like this doesn't happen to men.

I can personally tell you that I, a guy, have been so lucky as to have had all three of those happen to me, done by women.

But lets not just use myself as an anecdote, here are the stats on that from the CDC, last updated before the Trump Admin got into power, doesn't look like they've fucked with this page.

https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html

IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:1

About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact.

Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

We could quibble about the exact stats of what sex/gender the partner was, and they do cite some studies directly, but uh, oversimplifying to pretend only heterosexuality exists...

About half as many men have been seriously, violently victimized or stalked as women, and I'd be willing to bet the psychological abuse numbers are at least a bit closer to equal if you account for men being unwilling to admit to being victimized in that way due to internalized machismo, 'shut up and deal with it', whatever you want to call it.

...

Point of me saying all this is to throw numbers toward countering your claim here:

Most men probably wouldn’t think of seeking out a men-only app at all. So the pool of men who would be willing to go out of their way to engage with a men-only app is going to look vastly different. The average user likely won’t reflect the average man, because the average man wouldn’t even think to seek out a men-only app.

I agree that it wouldn't represent the average man, but we've got a potential user pool of 50+ million men in the US who've been through a bad relationship and would probably also not want to go through that again.

Again, yes it is absolutely true that women more often experience a more severe form of relationship than men, no argument there.

But I don't think you can just say that a man version of tea would only appeal to blackpilled manosphere men.

Yes, that would likely be a large proportion of the user base, but there are tons of men who are not misogynists and also would like to avoid being played or abused.

...

Also, uh:

You say that,

The active engagement is seen as a positive thing, and she’s willing to jump through a few hoops (like uploading a photo ID) to get there.

But what I am seeing is:

To access Tea, women have to verify their gender by submitting a selfie, which is then verified by the app’s team.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91374409/everything-to-know-about-tea-the-viral-and-controversial-app-that-lets-women-mark-men-as-red-flags

The rest of that quote is that the picture is 'verified by the Tea team', but I think we both know that almost certainly means they just use an AI face scanning tool.

Anyway, point is: taking a selfie is a way, way lower bar to entry than taking a picture of your driver's liscense... basically every dating app already does the former, this is totally normal now, whereas the latter is... so uncommon I cannot think of an example.

So....taking a selfie is not that much of a trifle, not a strong potential blocker, for a guy who's already used a dating app in the last 5 ish years.

...

EDIT 2:

Occured to me on reviewing this:

... Yeah, an AI face recognition to verify gender?

How... does that work for trans folks, or even probably just non white women, and are women who are maybe bald or have more typically masculine coded shorter hair cuts, with less stereotypically/heuristically feminine facial features?

AI has fucked up this kinda shit in the past quite badly.

Wow that was fast.

I did not even know this app existed untill about 8 hours ago.

Already comprimised.

EDIT: Also, lol, this arguably is not even largely a hack.

These idiots just had everything stored in a fucking publically accesible firebase bucket... amazing.

They didn't delete anything they claimed to.

Either way you look at it, anywhere on the spectrum from:

A ] A bunch of women reasonably concerned for their safety

B ] A bunch of gossip mongers

... well, they've now all been doxxed, ironic from each angle.

What a fucking disaster.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eZjOdAIqgzU

Here's a pretty decent video format explanation of just how fucked all of this is, in the US.

(Not exactly the same details and focus as the EFF article, but very similar)

Wow, I don't think I've seen anyone go into this much detail explaining writing a fragment shader before, especially not one so ... well, the code is actually not too complex, but the result is intricate!

Reminds me of the old days of custom screensavers and music visualizers like milkdrop, haha!

I will also have to check out the lightning effect, that also looks extremely neat =D

https://www.merchantmaverick.com/adult-payment-processing-merchant-account/

Or, use one of these, and make your own wholly NSFW version of itch.io

You could try to tie it to a crypto, but uh, if you don't want to just be paying creators directly in WhateverCoin, you basically now have to run a foreign currency exchange operation.

Theres a good deal of cost and risk to that, and... the alternative use of crypto would imply you are actually regularly holding a large crypto balance as an operating budget, which can be rather bad, as even the least bullshit of cryptocoins are way, way more volatile than almost any real currency.

...

Also, Nutaku still exists, though they've seemingly also completely axxed all paid games that actually have explicit sex in them.

Free ones are still there, but yeah.

Nutaku is in the position of being known for mostly adult android games... they could switch to an adult payment processor, and also expand to other platforms.

Itch io is... in arguably a less good position, as they sell / distribute adult and non adult games, so they basically have to pick one or the other.

Interesting. I haven't watched enough of his stuff to know what claims he's made.

As you seem to be an actual serious person who generally values their time:

Probably don't bother lol, unless you want to just watch multiple hours of youtubers going through his ... literal decades long history of hyping himself up, lying or manipulating the context of what he says and does.

I can best summarize it all as: He is a malignant narcissist sociopath, akin to a cult leader in terms of how charismatically skilled he is and how intricate his fabrications are.

Specifically as it refers to his coding abilities, now, a number of other coders on youtube have done exhaustive breakdowns of his sloppy code, and also shown that he often acts like a seasoned expert in specific technical concepts that he is at best only vaguely familiar with at the level of a sky high overview.

No pun intended:

Well fuck.

You're right, they literally did just do this, almost tagged everything NSFW/Adult no longer appears in itch.io's search, I just made a new account and specifically checked the 'show nsfw stuff' setting and.... yep.

Currently I am only seeing like uh... 3 games.

There used to be 100s, probably more like 1000s.

They have not taken down the actual urls for actual games, but you have to know them directly.

Kotaku seems to have an actually decent overview, very recent:

https://kotaku.com/itch-io-nsfw-porn-games-delisted-collective-shout-1851786841

Well uh... if itch actually sticks with this decision... either as you say, somebody is gonna have to figure out how to run a crypto based adult game platform of similar scale to itch, which will not be easy for all the reasons I've described, or create their own nsfw-friendly payment processor system, which would also not be easy.

So, that means that largely donation based nsfw game development is now effectively over, at a stand still, untill someone figures out how to at least semi-automate some kind of workaround via probably some kind of much, much sketchier 'sending money to a friend' type loophole in venmo/cashapp/chime, etc, which is also probably very legally dubious/iffy at a platform level.

The whole problem with all this (aside from the business/platform end costs and complexities) is that even if you do switch over to crypto, or make your own payment processor, or use some kind of loophole, its now much more difficult for an average person to go through all these steps.

I guess this is the -current year- version of back in the 90s and early 00s, the FCC and RIAA cracking down on 'explicit' music, the younger generations will now have to get clever and do something analagous to invented torrents, but that actually results in money moving around to support devs.

EDIT:

A quick search shows that there are indeed alternative, minor payment processors oriented toward or friendly to things like strip clubs / sex toy shops, who transact in USD.

https://www.merchantmaverick.com/adult-payment-processing-merchant-account/

Probably the most straightforward business solution for an adult game platform would be to use one of these, but uh, they'd likely have to make a whole new brand name, a new website/domain, a different company legally, to avoid what PayPal would otherwise possibly see as you violating their policies.

Again, you could use crypto, and wow hey, finally an actual compelling use case for it!, but uh, either route you go is gonna be complex and risky for platforms, creators, and users/consumers... tradeoffs.

IE, Ben Shapiro actually trying to sell flooded homes to Aquaman.

It's also probably the most common type of breach. It's way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.

Yep, absolutely.

The uh, funniest one that sticks in my memory was the hack of basically an early build of GTA 6.

Somebody social engineered their way into someone at Rockstar who had some level of admin acces, I think via fake / intercepted and reformed 2FA auths to the target's phone, along with some spear phishing.

Then, they were proficient enough to exploit thier way throughout the intranet... but not smart enough to cover all their tracks.

A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that's because people like glamorous titles. If you've spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines.

You would think this, but everywhere I have worked in the industry... most people cannot infact read between the lines.

I've attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they're like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground.

Impressive!

I've been to some, never spoken though... also, not DEFCON though.

I imagine cyber security conferences are similar. (mostly exist for networking)

I agree.

But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that's what gets people to watch.

Yeah, but Thor takes it to an uncommon point of basically being a conman, with his so much of his reputation built, by himself, on vastly overstated credentials.

Its like getting a 2 year nursing assistant degrer and then acting as if you can safely perform a brain surgery.

Welp, I guess sufficiently melanated Italians are back to being 'not white' in the US.

He did technically end up in cybersecurity, but basically yeah, a role that involves almost zero actual technical skill.

He did social engineering, aka, worming his way into people's emails and texts and social circles, sending fake 'your account has been comprimised, send me your user name and password to fix' type shit.

Ironically, social engineering is quite a fitting uh, subclass, for a low technical skill, high charisma narcissist to slot into.

He thought hacking and DEFCON was the coolest convention to go to, so him and some buddies... won the scavenger hunt badge, I believe thats more or less running around the Con with your network analyzer open on your phone, to find wifi/bluetooth enabled hidden scavenger hunt items, maybe with a couple extra steps.

Its literally a gimmick badge, its not really anything to do with actual pentesting, nothing like developing a totally novel exploit.

EDIT: Like, I am reasonably confident I know more about ethical hacking than he does, just having futzed around with tryhackme and some other free online sort of, 'basics of hacking' tutorials with simulated demonstrations on VMs, for a few years in my spare time.

Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are, and why they are important, and I'm guessing he would have to look it up, whilst making it look like he is not looking it up.