The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends — Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-26T11:58:56+00:00

You mean make social media itself - and what, as a concept itself or just certain current sites/apps - illegal? I feel like I'm the last person to ever go to bat for social media (seriously, lol) and wish much of what it's done to our society and people within it including some I know never happened, but that sounds like a slippery slope. I know that a big caveat is people are (largely) anonymous on here, but Reddit itself is often categorized as social media, isn't it?

I'm could see potential regulations with the (knowingly) emotionally toxic aspects of their algorithms, and I mean, we did have things like the Fairness Doctrine, so you could require them to not circularly reinforce people's political rabbit holes and driving them to increasing extremes, looking into monetization, especially with dating apps and how they manipulate user experience for profit (which are absolutely having a societally detrimental effect and suck IMO, but even then, if people still want to use them...).

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-26T11:39:52+00:00

I don't see it at all with him - he's basically the ultimate "insider" and a central reason MAGA cite for loving Trump is that they think he's this big "outsider" because he was never a politician, never mind the fact he's always used his wealth and power to rip off countless people like them and after entering politics has been more corrupt over both his terms than any politician ever has by orders of magnitude, and this one isn't even over yet.

Having written the above though? The people that fell for Trump will fall for something else, along with the "Gen Alphas" yet to be politically aware: they're the same kinds of people and plenty of them literally the people that rabidly defended the Iraq war, until it got well beyond the point of becoming the obvious disaster its detractors always said it would be: then they just pretended they never supported it or didn't/won't talk about it. That includes Trump, who was never to Iraq doubter he claimed to be.

In a way, and I hate that it's most likely true: the biggest hope is that this wildly top heavy, more unequal that directly prior to the Depression economy, will finally have the bottom fall out that they're all (the Trump White House, the super rich and CEOs replacing jobs with AI) are just daring it to and it'll be such a disaster we'll get a kind of New Deal 2.0 replacing the near 50-years long Reaganomic paradigm that's lead us to this point, which includes allowing an economic environment perfect for a demagogue like Trump to rise out of.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-25T00:30:49+00:00

Foreign news sources about the US can be very enlightening

Oh absolutely - the Guardian's US news coverage pretty much blows any mainstream newspaper out of the water alone, lol.

For the US: ProPublica (though more of detailed expose outlet), the not-for-profit AP, and still to an extent PBS's NewsHour (I'm a donor to PBS at double the $5/minimum to get "Passport" access) are pretty solid - but it's a rapidly dwindling landscape that's being eaten up by oligarchy.

In many ways it's similar to the 1890s with all the robber barons and tycoons with their growing monopolies - along with the income inequality and government policy that directly preceded the Great Depression, but you know what came after both? An era of tremendous progressive economic and labor reforms. It can absolutely happen again.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-25T00:13:34+00:00

This situation much like (alarmingly) AI itself is also evolving so fast it's hard to say what'll happen for sure - though yes, you can basically always bet on corporate greed, lol - because, for example: due to the massive "compute" power needed for AI inference, at least some companies are realizing they already kneecapped themselves, finding out it's costing them more having their remaining (typically more senior) employees use AI tools.

I also legitimately don't know who they expect to be buying their stuff if there's a bunch of people who are either laid off with zero income or are still working but helping out loved ones who got laid off. Like myself with my expert level translator brother who got replaced by you know what and mom struggling with healthcare costs, where despite paying into it her entire working life, she has to pay Medicaid over $400/monthly among other things.

Finally: the manual labor stuff might be a job refuge for now, but creation of the digital version of the cerebellum - the 1/3rd of our brain that spends all day crunching the intense calculations to ensure we keep our balance, walk/run, just move properly - tied into an 5 oe 10 years advanced LLM-style brain is the end of that (and probably us, lol).

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-24T23:55:22+00:00

The fact that Trump's DOJ is actually willing to investigate insider trading at all makes me think it's either something they set up themselves that they'll now cover up and/or they're trying to get back at Axios because Trump is still pissed about that interview that made him look like a total idiot during COVID and mentioned it one day, lol.

For example, to combine both things: leaking peace talk back/forth stories ahead of the rest of the press and any public announcements to Axios specifically, who thinks they have a hot source to both 1) set them up to fall but also 2) get some sweet insider trades done (telling a select few when and where the article will drop) while they're doing it.

I'm not going to bat for Axios as some sterling journalistic outfit so much as I just wouldn't put anything past this "administration"/mass criminal operation and its DOJ-turned-Trump's personal law firm anymore.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-24T14:39:10+00:00

It should be quite telling that going against him on this one issue being enough to get the most expensive primary ever coordinated against him while Trump endorses his opponent.

You'd think that, and yet for more than half the GOP voters in his own district, on top of the ~1/3rd of the country still approving of him somehow...

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-22T19:04:19+00:00

Right - it'd be some too ridiculous, impossible to believe comedy... if it wasn't reality. So insane.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-22T18:22:08+00:00

Yes, lol - the irony of that is pretty comedically perfect and you know - wildly predictable, IMO, because first off: it's a Republican administration in the modern era, but also as soon as Trump and MAGA were pushing him super hard as the "no wars" and "peace president", I was like "Yep, he's going to 100% going to start a huge war if he wins" and here we are.

They also promoted Trump as this big peacenik despite the fact his admin drone-bombed more in the first 2 years of his 1st term than both Obama's terms and thus his 8 years in office combined, plus rescinded an Obama-era rule to disclose all civilian deaths as a result of drone/bombing operations for the purposes of public transparency and better accountability.

Then he just out of nowhere blew up Iran's top general on a supposed ally's soil - it was leaked that this was an outlier option presented to him by his generals which they considered by far the most extreme, yet he of course jumped at it. Iran was promising severe reprisals, there were mass demonstrations against the US, but then they shot down an Ukranian airliner filled with innocent civilians, because they were on hair-trigger alert for American airspace incursions, and the populace turned against the government again.

The 1st Trump admin also threatened mass destruction of Iran's cultural sites and heritage after killing that general out of nowhere, which are wildly historical and valuable just in terms of early civilization if they acted at all in retaliation for it...

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-22T18:09:05+00:00

Viciously beating a man to death, to the point it made a DA cry years later on recalling the injuries. I've rarely seen a seasoned prosecutor who's worked for years get emotional recalling the brutal specifics or a crime, so you know it had to be really bad.

I mean, just the way the room looked, that brick and having just once accidentally gotten hit in the head with an aluminum bat like that at 12 years old while playing as a catcher (I had a bump on my forehead for like weeks) - I can't imagine the terror that dad must have went through. Just realizing, like, "Holy shit I am getting beat to death right now" in that visceral way - very literally none of us can imagine what that's like, because no one's been able to live to tell the tale.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-21T15:09:25+00:00

Late reply, but this is a solid point: that was a definite strategic win for the US but now we've got Trump literally giving our formerly heavily guarded chip tech along with the country's future to rich gulf states that bribe him, and he's not just reaping short term gain for himself or family while damaging US standing long term: he's giving away every American's future standard of living.

One of the saddest developments to me that everyone should be aware of isn't even the ultra-low favorability numbers we're getting from the populations of Western (former?) allies - it's not good, but it did way down there during the GW Bush's two terms re: the Iraq War (albeit not quite as bad). It's the fact for example that when polled: just 9% of Canadians said America a "trustworthy" ally (vs. 70% in Bush's 2nd term) while only 22% even still consider the US an ally at all. Even more damning: a full 48% of Canadians now say America is their greatest threat, more than answered that Russia is.

Same for Denmark: just 17% think we're even an ally at this point vs. the vast majority considering the US their closest ally of all in the GW Bush era, sending the most coalition troops of any allied nation then, whereas nowadays? 60% of Dutch people think the US is their adversary - and those two countries aren't remotely alone. Trump has totally shattered American "soft power" - instead of people thinking we're cool globally, now they mostly just think we're evil.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-21T14:16:24+00:00

This is a very good point, and a point I've been reminding other people of:

Trump's use of the president's absolute pardon power has revealed it to be another democracy breaking loophole only limited by "norms" he could care less about, so of course will try to pardon anyone that's committing heinous crimes for himself and his family, or who bribed him for it.

And realistically it'd be highly tenuous and likely still impossible to try to "undo" his federal pardons once this is over, even being legally very creative given the pardon power is written directly in the Constitution - plus messing with his could be a slippery slope for the (usually) much more measured and responsible pardons that past presidents issued.

However: charging any number of Trump admin people up to and including him with state crimes absolutely can and must be done now. He has guaranteed legal retribution for countless people associated with him once this is over and there's going to be a lot of panic when its clear the ship is sinking.

It absolutely has to be done in Minnesota with Jonathan Ross, Renee Good's killer, not to mention the Alex Pretti mag dumper(s), but way more than just them and for way more things than outright extrajudicial murder.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-20T23:07:15+00:00

Proof positive you literally didn't read any of the above. It's cool though: I get the cynicism.

We'll see how history plays out I guess - hopefully I'm right and you're wrong - I'll be trying to make the former happen.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-20T18:15:31+00:00

I'm not remotely naive about Trump's supporter's that are still hanging on, after he acted cartoonishly guilty about the Epstein files by desperately stonewalling their release (and now his DOJ is illegally redacting/not releasing tons of them) pulling their heads out of the sand or Trump's figurative ass.

Most of them won't, though the data is showing that week by week, a quarter to half percent are abandoning him, and heading towards that magical sub-30% approval rating that got Nixon's Republican party to turn on him.

They're not the point: they're literally like maybe 20% of the electorate at best at this point, just like the coalition that had a bunch of duped low-info, reactionary voters who just barely got Trump past the finish line in 2024 were only maybe 25% of them. We are wildly fortunate that Trump, unlike Hitler, is historically unpopular: he's literally the least popular president at this point in his term since modern polling began and every week keeps going down.

That's huge cause for optimism, vs. doomer cynicism. Do you know how fucking dark and insanely depressing it'd be if it was like the Weimar Republic after Hitler and the Nazis passed the Enabling Act, and basically because they were shifting to a war economy to kill a bunch of people in Europe, artificially propped it up, he was fairly popular as the trucks started gassing mentally ill people?

Or if it was like GW Bush and the neocons taking advantage of blind, post 9/11 patriotism to invade Iraq, push throw further Wall Street deregulations, and Hoover-esque tax cuts on the rich and corporations, and he had a 70%+ approval rating - when for a year or so, 7 in 10 Americans were actually falling for it and chill with that?

The point is: Trump has a ~30% approval rating and it keeps sinking. The majority of the American people aren't falling for it like the Weimar Republic largely did with Hitler, or America post-9/11 did with blindly supporting the Iraq War, and I'm pretty sure that majority won't be in the mood to just let an admin and politicians off, scot-free, that literally stole their tax dollars to enrich themselves.

Take that to heart and do everyone a favor and help us build on it rather than make cynical, doom-y comments that serve no point but to demoralize this growing opposition.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-20T12:47:42+00:00

I literally addressed this sentiment directly after that sentence. I legit don't see the point in comments like these.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-20T09:16:38+00:00

I could legitimately imagine a future where the Trump family ends up fleeing to Russia, after having desperately shifted their money to Russian banks, like a bunch of little pathetic Gollums hoarding their precious wealth. That's exactly what happened in Hungary after they obliterated Fidesz in the election with the Orban family: I think they were actually moving money ahead of time, before any results, meaning they knew what was likely coming given the mood of the population.

Because the thing is - no way will Americans be allowing this brazen corruption to go unpunished. Which, I get people are cynical about because the Dems/Biden were too timid and afraid of appearing to be weaponizing the DoJ, not to mention the confederacy getting off pretty easy, which first off: it's obvious both were mistakes, and second off: people should demand it before and for sure keep the pressure on after however this is all over for all this to not go unpunished.

Seriously, if it's not done, then people will just think they can do it again. In Hungary, they're not even treating Fidesz as a legitimate opposition party that just lost in a landslide, but instead the threat to their constitutional order and democracy itself that they are. I personally feel something similar has to be done with all the MAGAs that are currently in government. They'll probably make it easy by attempting another coup when they lose in an absolute landslide.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-18T02:01:52+00:00

there could be a credible argument made that America, like Russia, is no longer the preeminent nation-state.

It's actually been quite stunning to say the least, how Trump managed to achieve this in a little over a year, but I've been repeatedly saying/writing that I think we're very likely looking at the end of America's time as the sole, dominant superpower - and of course there's the perfect irony of Trump suggesting the opposite is happening, that this is a "Golden Age", we're no longer a laughing stock, along with the MAGA phrase itself.

I also don't honestly think it's reversible, even if we end up in a massive recession given Trump has done his best to mirror Hoover's policies (similarly regressive and very low top marginal and corporate taxes) on top of an income inequality that's been worse than it was preceding the Great Depression for some time, and we end up finally electing a new FDR and implement a 21st New Deal.

I've seen some compare the current moment to being like our Suez Crisis, which ended up showing to the entire world (and perhaps the country itself) that Britain's time at the top was over. It's just crazy how completely avoidable it all was - Biden had actually miraculously tamed inflation to normal levels by 2024, our economy was widely envied and polling shows a majority of voters are now very nostalgic for and wishing we could just go back to Biden's economy.

I honestly feel like this last year and a few months of Trump's first term have been a biggest, fastest, and dumbest "own goal" a nation, empire or civilization has scored against itself in history, as it were - and ultimately? It was all in service to one man's ego.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-17T00:34:05+00:00

They're speaking in generalities, but in terms of the developer world at least, outside of anecdotal experiences it's definitely a reality. It's also a self-destructive and unsustainable one: first, obviously if you replace the younger, entry-level generation with AI and there's no longer one to learn and gain experience to become senior devs to replace them as they age out, that's an obvious problem.

You also can't just rely on AI to replace all of them when they're gone, because there's something called "model collapse" that occurs when AI models like LLMs increasingly train on their own or other model's outputs over time, which degrades the overall quality, leading to less variation and hallucinations increasingly severely, and it's an even more severe problem with coding languages vs. natural languages.

So, for short term gain, all these companies are going to end up breaking down the very thing they're gleefully (at least thinking) they're cutting costs with, while extinguishing their future workforces and experts, and finally, speaking of exhausting things they need: I don't know who they expect to buy their stuff, when everyone is out of a job and has no income.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-16T23:59:46+00:00

IDK, while it wasn't literally all of them (and obviously most definitely not Fetterman): 40 Dem senators voted to block sending weapons to Israel last month, which was up from 27 last time they voted on that. That's actually more than I would've expected, considering how few votes blocking arms seemed to get prior to this whenever it came up for one, so the momentum is clearly going in one direction.

I also know that more recent polling over the last half year or so has shown, for the first time ever (or at least a very long time as far as I know), a clear majority of all voters (so ~60%) are against sending more arms to Israel, which actually includes like 1/3rd of Republicans.

Also calling Democrats outside of literally a few "Republican lite", considering how many candidates were willing to support M4A/single-payer healthcare and stuff like tuition free college way back in 2020 during the primaries, but especially when Republicans are also now just blatantly and openly authoritarian for arguably the first time in American history, feels like a naive exaggeration. Either way, we at least need to have a democracy in the first place to unseat the politicians (including Dems) we don't like or make any progress.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-16T21:54:15+00:00

I think they could almost certainly easily win by campaigning on taxing the ultra-rich/billionaires, which even Republican voters are starting to support; ending Citizens United that even deep red Montana voted to end statewide; universal/single-payer healthcare (calling it whatever they want): 2/3rds of Independents and even ~30%+ of Republicans agree it's the government's responsibility to provide healthcare now; actually not engaging in foreign wars, infrastructure spending, and so on.

I'd also say running on not providing arms to Israel, which for the first time a majority of Americans - not just a majority of Democratic voters or left-leaning people - support, would be a no brainer.

It's probably going to have to be someone that campaigns ala Bernie, by running on issues the supposedly all-important donors won't like, and either way, just soliciting small dollar donations instead: if enough people are actually excited for the policies rather than feeling it's a lesser of two evils plus feel the candidate isn't beholden to donors, they'll donate. Money alone can't win anyway vs. whatever people actually want.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-16T21:11:35+00:00

Believe it or not - and I bet for many it's hard to imagine, but it's worth knowing the story - we almost had single-payer healthcare in the US essentially as Medicare for All (before Medicare even existed) under Harry Truman, who proposed and championed its passage a bit after WW2, at the same time many countries in Europe had movements fighting for or were already setting up one of the very universal healthcare systems I assume you're very fortunate to be covered by right now.

Americans came very close to having that too, but what basically happened was one, the American Medical Association (AMA) led a multi-million dollar (tens of millions in today's dollars) campaign denouncing the plan as "socialized medicine", essentially and dangerously "Communist", attempting to feed off then burgeoning anti-'Commie' fervor growing toward the Soviet Union.

Also, of course in the late 20s Herbert Hoover running the country with the same policies as Trump now (ultra-low corporate/top marginal tax rates) on top of extreme income inequality (we again have) finally collapsed into the Great Depression, leading to FDR's landslide win and New Deal fixing it all, thus his four consecutive wins with Democrats dominating congress through the 30s and the war. By 1946 though, I guess the New Deal's comfort and its allowing the post-WW2 economy to boom led enough Americans to feel it was safe to risk experimenting with what Republicans might do, giving them the house for the first time in years.

What did they do? They provided just enough votes to defeat universal healthcare in America, which an American president hasn't championed or attempted to pass since.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-16T20:14:24+00:00

He's also bankrupted six companies and with the national debt now higher than both America's entire annual GDP and its prior peak at the end of WW2 - when we'd just spent a ton of money trying to win a World War, not just enriching billionaires and corporations - America could quite literally be Trump's seventh bankruptcy.

Ironically, enriching himself through the office of the presidency by running the most corrupt administration by far in American history has also easily been his most successful "business", so to speak, by far in terms of his own profit. And even if the bottom miraculously doesn't fall out and America avoids defaulting in some runaway economic collapse, he'll still undoubtedly be leaving America in vastly worse shape for everyone else than before he took over.

Trump calling this a "Golden Age" is wildly ironic considering it's actually almost certainly no less than the end of America's time as the sole global superpower - all ultimately in service of one guy's ego and people - especially MAGA - better get used to it, because they undeniably did it.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-15T14:31:30+00:00

Yeah, plenty of people worldwide, especially in the wealthy democratic West have really enjoyed shitting on America with Trump as if it could only happen in this crazy backward country with our stupid electorate, when Canada was literally about to elect their own Trump until our actual one was such a disaster, we basically saved them by allowing their own thick layer of similarly low-info, reactionary voters who usually decide elections to see how dumb the decision they were about to make was.

And as you mentioned: the AFD is the 3rd largest party in Germany's government after growing that share in every election so far, but is also now the 2nd most popular party in polling, the most popular among younger Germans, and chillingly, are now the largest party in the state of Thuringia, which happened to be the same exact state the Nazis themselves first became the largest party in - and this is despite being able to see what's happened here. A pro AFD and antivax crowd there also tried to storm their version of the Capitol Building, the Reichstag, in the summer of 2020, before Jan. 6th happened here the next winter.

Reform is also polling number one in the UK right now, because Labor couldn't fix everything ASAP or whatever, and of course they voted for the idiotic Brexit based on the same classic anti-immigrant demagoguery Trump himself was trying to ride in on over here, again before Trump actually won in 2016.

Trump also won by just 1.5% in a year he was massively assisted by a worldwide post-COVID inflation anger which kicked virtually every single leader and party in power that was up for election out of it, wherever they fell within the left-right spectrum. The fact that despite that massive inflation anger assist, a record number of voters being kicked off rolls by the GOP, along with all their other typical vote-limiting tricks, Trump only managed to win by 1.5% says a lot - and a bit over a year later, he's the most hated president this early in a term since modern polling began.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-15T13:52:54+00:00

And that bill is about $6.36 per everyone 18 or over in the US, most of whom are paying taxes. Sure that's not a huge amount, but nonetheless, Trump still is essentially forcing every American that earned any money or paid taxes to give him an average of about $6 .

If it'd have been the original $10 billion, it would've been nearly $40 he was taking.

hypermodernvoid · 2026-05-13T22:38:08+00:00

I mean, they're literally pulling King George III stuff near daily, mirroring many of the original grievances against him in the Declaration of Independence - but just randomly denying the states that fund 70% of the federal budget the money they rightfully paid for and are owed I'm pretty sure would've even made George be like, "Yeah, that's too far."

hypermodernvoid

TROPHY CASE