The government parties do.

The government parties who approved these regulations…?

In general the default for cats and dogs is the male form, though it can be ambiguous between male and don’t know / don’t care.

For instance if you saw a random unidentified cat you could say you saw “un gat / gato / chat”, and it would be impossible to tell whether you were referring to a male cat or a cat of unknown gender (while if you used the female form it’d be unambiguous).

Romance languages really could use a neutral form, but “gat@”, “gat*”, or “gatx” just don’t work when you try to figure out how to say them out loud, and using the female form for neutral just moves the problem to the other side.

About 80% of orange cats are male; not as clear as one in three thousand for calicos, but stilll.

The problem is that what sounds good in German doesn’t necessarily sound good in other gendered languages (romance languages, for instance), so if you know both you need to know multiple mutually incompatible lists of arbitrarily gendered words.

Many romance languages have both; for instance, in Catalan “gos” / “gossa”, “gat” / “gata”, in Spanish, “perro” / “perra”, “gato” / “gata”, or in French “chien” / “chienne”, “chat” / “chatte”.

Exactly.

What we did to dogs was monstrous.

Take a wolf and give it the brain of a neurotic brain damaged human toddler, biologically enslaved to us to the point of needing constant work and praise to avoid being a bad dog.

(And we didn’t stop there; no, we had to keep meddling and turn them into misshapen shrunken parodies of themselves, living in constant pain and horror.)

I suppose it was somewhat fine back when we spent all day working together, but keeping that locked up all day in a small house or flat with nothing to do but bark at the occasional passerby is downright animal torture.

I don’t need another reminder of humanity’s hubris every time I get home. I have more than enough guilt as it is.

At least cats did it by themselves¹, on their own terms, and won’t tolerate the kind of abuse most dogs routinely endure, if given an option.

1.– Except for designer breeds, of course. If cruel and unusual punishment had a place in society it’d be being applied to child abusers, people who talk or use their phone in theatres, and pet breeders.

I grew up with dogs. I swept several cubic metres of dog hair every spring and autumn for years. I’ve been on many several hour long trips in a car with a dog and no air conditioning, in the summer. (And I mean dogs, not those pocket abominations bred by people who obviously enjoy causing lifetime suffering to innocent animals.)

Yeah, if I meet a dog that hasn’t been too badly trained and I have somewhere nearby to wash my hands and I don’t need to keep my clothes clean and not covered in hair and drool I’ll pet it, and tell it it’s a good dog, and if I’ve got time and space I’ll probably toss them a ball or a stick for them to catch for a bit.

But otherwise? Yeah, I can do without dogs. Too much work, too much brainless need for attention, too much stink, too much hair, and drool, and grease, and noise. And pain, when they go and die on you (I had the misfortune of living with a boxer for a few years; lovely animals, drool aside, but the way they suddenly explode into a ball of tumours at around five to six years old is just not right).

Cats are cleaner, smarter (sure, some dogs are smarter, but they’re work dogs, and have no place in a house unless you can dedicate 150% of your time to them), much less needy (though they still do need attention, which is why I can’t have one either, poor critter would spend most of its time alone, which is no life for a pet), live significantly longer, and you actually need to earn their love instead of them biologically having no choice but to love you.

LLMs are obligate yes-men.

They’ll support and reinforce whatever rambling or delusion you talk to them about, and provide “evidence” to support it (made up evidence, of course, but if you’re already down the rabbit hole you’ll buy it).

And they’ll keep doing that as long as you let them, since they’re designed to keep you engaged (and paying).

They’re extremely dangerous for anyone with the slightest addictive, delusional, suggestible, or paranoid tendencies, and should be regulated as such (but won’t).

Meh, just upload a dick pic.

Speaking as a disgusting fat bastard myself, feel free to criticise and mock me as much as you want.

Maybe it’ll finally motivate me to do something about it.