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Inside the App Where Queer Gooners Run Free

WIRED

In light of Zoom crackdowns and Skype shutting down, Batemates has emerged as an alternative for "bators" who like masturbating together online. One night not long ago, Jaxon Roman sat naked in front of his laptop wearing only a pup hood as he masturbated with single-minded zeal to the attention of eight other men watching onscreen. It was a typical weekday for the 33-year-old Arlington, Virginia, program analyst. "When bros praise me and say they're enjoying [me], I get to that edge point so fast," Roman says. His favorite instances are "when they all come to what I'm doing." Sometimes, when he's feeling especially kinky, Roman, who is bisexual, likes to ask for permission before climaxing.





Microsoft crosses privacy line few expected

FOX News

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG . Your phone shares data at night: Here's how to stop it'Everything is on the table' in Nancy Guthrie search, former FBI assistant director says Spain's Pedro Sanchez vows crackdown on social media at World Government Summit How Ring will use new'Fire Watch' tool in real time FBI director defends Georgia election probe, touts'historic' crime drop Why Trump's lawsuit against the IRS is'something you don't see every day' Inside the FBI's investigation into paid protest groups Tech expert warns social media execs sound like'drug lords' as addiction trial begins Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on FoxNews.com.


Do Persona-Infused LLMs Affect Performance in a Strategic Reasoning Game?

Licato, John, Steinle, Stephen, Hollis, Brayden

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although persona prompting in large language models appears to trigger different styles of generated text, it is unclear whether these translate into measurable behavioral differences, much less whether they affect decision-making in an adversarial strategic environment that we provide as open-source. We investigate the impact of persona prompting on strategic performance in PERIL, a world-domination board game. Specifically, we compare the effectiveness of persona-derived heuristic strategies to those chosen manually. Our findings reveal that certain personas associated with strategic thinking improve game performance, but only when a mediator is used to translate personas into heuristic values. We introduce this mediator as a structured translation process, inspired by exploratory factor analysis, that maps LLM-generated inventory responses into heuristics. Results indicate our method enhances heuristic reliability and face validity compared to directly inferred heuristics, allowing us to better study the effect of persona types on decision making. These insights advance our understanding of how persona prompting influences LLM-based decision-making and propose a heuristic generation method that applies psychometric principles to LLMs.


The Effect of Enforcing Fairness on Reshaping Explanations in Machine Learning Models

Anderson, Joshua Wolff, Visweswaran, Shyam

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Trustworthy machine learning in healthcare requires strong predictive performance, fairness, and explanations. While it is known that improving fairness can affect predictive performance, little is known about how fairness improvements influence explainability, an essential ingredient for clinical trust. Clinicians may hesitate to rely on a model whose explanations shift after fairness constraints are applied. In this study, we examine how enhancing fairness through bias mitigation techniques reshapes Shapley-based feature rankings. We quantify changes in feature importance rankings after applying fairness constraints across three datasets: pediatric urinary tract infection risk, direct anticoagulant bleeding risk, and recidivism risk. We also evaluate multiple model classes on the stability of Shapley-based rankings. We find that increasing model fairness across racial subgroups can significantly alter feature importance rankings, sometimes in different ways across groups. These results highlight the need to jointly consider accuracy, fairness, and explainability in model assessment rather than in isolation.


Statistical NLP for Optimization of Clinical Trial Success Prediction in Pharmaceutical R&D

Doane, Michael R.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work presents the development and evaluation of an NLP-enabled probabilistic classifier designed to estimate the probability of technical and regulatory success (pTRS) for clinical trials in the field of neuroscience. While pharmaceutical R&D is plagued by high attrition rates and enormous costs, particularly within neuroscience, where success rates are below 10%, timely identification of promising programs can streamline resource allocation and reduce financial risk. Leveraging data from the ClinicalTrials.gov database and success labels from the recently developed Clinical Trial Outcome dataset, the classifier extracts text-based clinical trial features using statistical NLP techniques. These features were integrated into several non-LLM frameworks (logistic regression, gradient boosting, and random forest) to generate calibrated probability scores. Model performance was assessed on a retrospective dataset of 101,145 completed clinical trials spanning 1976-2024, achieving an overall ROC-AUC of 0.64. An LLM-based predictive model was then built using BioBERT, a domain-specific language representation encoder. The BioBERT-based model achieved an overall ROC-AUC of 0.74 and a Brier Score of 0.185, indicating its predictions had, on average, 40% less squared error than would be observed using industry benchmarks. The BioBERT-based model also made trial outcome predictions that were superior to benchmark values 70% of the time overall. By integrating NLP-driven insights into drug development decision-making, this work aims to enhance strategic planning and optimize investment allocation in neuroscience programs.