to be fair to this person finding out someone you love paid for 4chan pass would be absolutely devastating

And means you no longer get support

Do these companies put their fingers on the scale? Almost certainly

But it’s exactly what he said that’s what brought us here. They have not particularly given a shit about politics (aside from no taxes and let me do whatever I want all the time). However, the algorithms will consistently reward engagement. Engagement doesn’t care about “good” or “bad”, it just cares about eyes on it, clicks, comments. And who wins that? Controversial bullshit. Joe Rogan getting elon to smoke weed. Someone talking about trans people playing sports. Etc

This is a natural extension of human behavior. Human behavior occurs because of a function. I do x because of a function, function being achieving reinforcement. Attention, access to something, escaping, or automatic.

Attention maintained behaviors are tricky because people are shitty at removing attention and attention is a powerful reinforcer. You tell everyone involved “this person feeds off of your attention, ignore them”. Everyone agrees. The problematic person pulls their bullshit and then someone goes “stop it”. They call it negative reinforcement (this is not negative reinforcement. it’s probably positive reinforcement. It’s maybe positive punishment, arguably, because it’s questionable how aversive it is).

You get people to finally shut up and they still make eye contact, or non verbal gestures, or whatever. Attention is attention is attention. The problematic person continues to be reinforced and the behavior stays. You finally get everyone to truly ignore it and then someone new enters the mix who doesn’t get what’s going on.

This is the complexity behind all of this. This is the complexity behind “don’t feed the trolls”. You can teach every single person on Lemmy or reddit or whoever to simply block a malicious user but tomorrow a dozen or more new and naive people will register who will fuck it all up

The complexity behind the algorithms is similar. The algorithms aren’t people but they work in a similar way. If bad behavior is given attention the content is weighted and given more importance. The more we, as a society, can’t resist commenting, clicking, and sharing trump, rogan, peterson, transphobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc content the more the algorithms will weight this as “meaningful”

This of course doesn’t mean these companies are without fault. This is where content moderation comes into play. This is where the many studies that found social media lead to higher irritability, more passive aggressive behavior and lower empathetization could potentially have led us to regulate these monsters to do something to protect their users against the negative effects of their products

If we survive and move forward in 100 years social media will likely be seen in the way we look at tobacco now. An absolutely dangerous thing that was absurd to allowed to exist in a completely unregulated state with 0 transparency as to its inner workings

Fuck your car, the cops aren’t gonna find it. They’re there to write a police report so you can get an insurance claim.

The only way they recover your stolen car is if the person who stole it joyrides it and abandons it. Your neighbors testimony isn’t helpful in this scenario

If your car was desirable and actually stolen for parts or to be resold it’s long gone and the cops will do absolutely nothing

Similarly if your home was burglarized. Look at the statistics of solve rates for these crimes in your city. If they’re anything like mine they are shockingly low and the only reason they aren’t 0 is because of literal happenstance like the above scenario and not actual “detective work”

However, your neighbor opening their door for the cops does create a host of potential issues for your neighbor. Perhaps they have drug paraphernalia in plain sight in their living room? Now the cops have probable cause to search their home without a warrant because you think those noble officers are going to search high and low for your shitty car (they aren’t). Or they’re an illegal immigrant, the cops are racist, and see an in to send ins later that day. Or your neighbor is rude and standoffish, escalates things with the cop (who are known for their expert de escalation skills) and then ends up getting arrested for “obstruction”

Bad advice

Don’t talk to cops unless you are legally obligated to do so. Depending on the state you may have to identify yourself, and in some locations and contexts provide identification. You should know your local laws. In my state it is not required even if detained although in practice refusal to identify just means you aren’t going home for a looooong time. You do have to give your license if you’re stopped while driving, of course, but you do not have to answer any other questions other than signing the citation. The aclu has a website clearly outlining what you are required to do in each state including wallet sized cards with the information

Real police advice: if they’re giving you shit shut the fuck up. If they’re arresting you just go with it. You aren’t going to win. They’re going to call in 900 back up units and 2 helicopters with thermal imaging and a tank to track you because they’re basically an army now. The more you resist the more likely you die and become a sad headline that people post and forget about in 20 minutes. They aren’t trained to take you down safely. They aren’t trained to de escalate. They aren’t trained to control their anger. They will often get furious if you resist their authority and take out that aggression on you with extreme violence. They will slam you to the ground, choke you, punch you, beat you with their knock off tonfa, taze you repeatedly, and restrain you in ways that are dangerous and restrict your breathing. They will outright ignore you if you plead for help or become unresponsive. They will let you die, wait 5-10 minutes despite being on camera, then call for medical who will take another 10 minutes to respond to your long dead corpse that could’ve possibly been resuscitated 15 minutes ago if they hadn’t stood around doing nothing like ghouls. They have 0 serious repercussions for this behavior, at worst they’ll get shuffled around

Let them arrest you, shut the fuck up, and fight it in court. Unfortunately you will need resources to do this and pretty substantial ones. I just hired a lawyer to process documents for a subpoena against a client in my healthcare practice. It was a fairly simple case of document review and it cost $2300. Probably took him 45 minutes of actual work, if that. The system is unfair and rigged against you.

Real real police advice as a result: avoid them at all costs.

Hey if you own it that’s totally cool and fairly noble. And frankly even if you don’t it’s cool too. Not my job to decide who to take on as long as you’re within my practice scope and not actively suicidal, murdering people, or diddling kids, which are like three main dealbreakers for getting your therapist to snitch (varies by state and there are other exceptions check the fine print)

One of the things I explain to people when I’m doing needle desensitization is that the phobia does make sense to a degree. At its core there is a threat. We know that it will hurt. It’s why I fucking hate it when people use bullshit lies to get people to get shots, “oh it won’t hurt at all!”. No, that’s a lie, it by definition will cause some pain. And it’s pain you see coming. A scrape is different. We generally get those accidentally and often don’t notice it’s happened until the pain registers. But a shot or blood draw is more analogous to torture: I get a sharp needle, put you in a weird chair, and let you know that I will absolutely stick this into your body, piercing your flesh. You anticipate it. You tense up.

The thing to remind yourself is that it’s irrational and your anxiety is magnifying the intensity. The pain is real and will happen, that is true, but it is generally not that big of a deal outside of certain scenarios that are uncommon for most people. And even in some of the more painful scenarios like lumbar punctures there is an anesthetic involved (trust me I’ve had one. It’s not awesome but not as bad as you’d think).

Desensitization can help for the obvious reason of lowering your anxiety in reaction to the aversive stimuli. Avoiding it only serves to sensitize you and lower resilience to the stimulus. However this is the challenge of the phobia. Often they’re things we don’t have regular exposure to: vomiting, spiders, air travel, etc. so we desensitize, do much better, and then don’t have to deal with the thing for months or years and end up with it being an issue again. Maintenance is always necessary.

But with needle phobia there is a specific benefit. If you can calm yourself down during blood draws and relax your body the blood draws will actually hurt less. Tension held in your body makes the piercing of the needle sting a bit worse. It’s not a huge difference but apparently a noticeable one.

I am a therapist who does desensitization for specific phobias as part of my repertoire and one of the things I do somewhat regularly is needle desensitization for kids that struggle to get their vaccinations and blood draws, especially kids with autism. It’s no fun but unfortunately a part of life.

Often when I do it their parents have to leave the room or look away which is outright cowardly and sends a really bad message to their child who is terrified of needles

anti vaccination originally started rising in popularity because a lot of parents of kids with autism wanted an explanation for why their kids were “disabled” (keep in mind this goes back to like the 90s leading up the the discredited wakefield study in 1998). Then it had other people latch on for similar reasons, by the early to mid 2000s those people were blaming ADHD, dyslexia, generic “learning disabilities”, allergies, etc on vaccination. This is all pretty well established.

But I have this theory that it kept growing in popularity because people were simply afraid of getting needles. Covid was the catalyst for it to truly explode because a great deal of adults could skip most compulsory vaccinations. Before Covid if you were really stupid you could skip flu shots and your parents probably forced you to get most of the truly necessary ones ages ago. But then all of a sudden the big bad government is saying you need to get a big scary needle!! And not just one, but two!! And then maybe get them indefinitely!

The core kooks who say it has 5g nanochips or whatever probably truly believe that. But that’s probably a small minority. A great deal more are probably people who are otherwise sensible but are willing to enter delusional beliefs and are extremely susceptible to the kooks rhetoric because it allows them to believe something that enables them to endorse what they truly want to do, which is avoid the extremely brief moment of pain, because they are entitled whiny babies that cannot handle even a second of discomfort

This is just my theory though

To back this up with garbage anecdotal data I have talked to physician friends who describe adult patients having a much lower likelihood of getting bloodwork orders filled, a much lower rate of getting things like flu shots and newer vaccinations like hepatitis, shingles, hpv, chickenpox, etc.

In the 90s I beat smw so hard, all the dragon coins, all the secret exits, tubular, the palette change, etc. it took years. I was convinced there was still more to find in that game even when the gba version came out and I finally had access to walkthroughs. I’m pretty sure I consulted Nintendo power on a few things though

I recently watched a guy play through the nes Bart vs the space mutants though and that was legitimately a like “no kid ever beat this”

I mean yes but it’s also the official title for the English release of the game.

Like to be clear I’m not being the person who’s like “oh have you seen Kôkaku Kidôtai?” And then you’re like “what the fuck is that” and I’m like “uh, I guess if you’re uncultured you might know it as ghost in the shell.” And then everyone in the room groans because of fucking course every single person who speaks English as a native language has always called it ghost in the shell

なに?!

The new one has more game music than old ones did. But to get a lot of it you have to subscribe. Thankfully the subscription isn’t terribly expensive ($10/3mo) and it’s easy to get it in a way that doesn’t auto renew. Music licensing is stupid though so music games are dying and will probably forever be subscription services going forward. The days of buying a game like guitar hero are long gone.

It has the classic ones like Mario medley, Zelda overworld, Kirby, persona 5, undertale, etc. but the game pass adds stuff like tekken, id@lmaster, ridge racer, tales of symphonia, ace combat, etc.

it’s a weird mix that’s definitely missing a lot of iconic stuff though. The push is definitely more pop/vocaloid/anime music

Alternatively you can get something like opentaiko or tjaplayer (closer to the real game) and use custom charts from a site like https://ese.tjadataba.se/ESE/ESE . You need a pc but it doesn’t require a particularly great pc and pretty much every drum controller, including the official console ones, work on pc.

I definitely wish it was more popular in the west. Online play is an absolute ghost town unless you play during Japan time. Like if you play during peak us hours matchmaking will literally spend 20-30 minutes to find no one.

That’s not Japanese fyi, 太鼓の達人 is the Japanese name

It is Japanese drumming game with an associated controller, I posted a guide with pictures to modify the drum controller so it’s more sensitive to being hit

I posted a guide to modding a tatacon for taiko no tatsujin

I mean they’re obviously arguing chromosomal sex is the end all be all

while it is true the gonads and external genitalia of embryos appear the same regardless of chromosomal sex it is also true that generally that embryo will develop sex characteristics in weeks 7-12 based on chromosomal assignments that occurred at conception.

The xy embryos have the presence of the sry gene on the Y chromosome which triggers development of gonads into testes, testosterone, and amh. Wolffian ducts become early stages of a penis, amh causes Müllerian ducts to regress

Xx embryos lack sry gene obviously, which allow the gonads to become ovaries. The wolffian ducts regress without amh and the Müllerian ducts become early stages of a vagina

Then week 12+ is when uterus/prostate start

That said biological sex is obviously much more complex than this. Intersex people exist. And there’s a great deal of variation in that.

Gonadal dysgenesis can occur when the gonads do not fully develop into testes or ovaries, incomplete or ambiguous genitalia.

True hermaphroditism can occur where both ovary and testicular tissue is present, again usually leading to ambiguous genitalia (no futas)

Androgen insensitivity can lead to ambiguous genitalia or in some cases an xy person with female external genitalia

Alternatively excess androgen can cause masculinized genitalia in xx people

Kleinfelters (xxy) can give underdeveloped testes, infertility, and low testosterone

Turners (x) underdeveloped ovaries, infertility

And this just kind of hand waves all those people away. Do you feel like your identity is linked to the fact that you’re in this minority and maybe doesn’t match what people perceive you to be? Are you an xy person with female genitalia because of androgen insensitivity who feels that your genitalia don’t match who you are. Well technically you’re a guy now I guess by these rules although we all know they mean “if you look like a chick you’re a chick”

And this all is besides the scientific evidence on transgender neurology, which is large and growing.

The bed nucleus of stria terminals is associated with gender identity and is typically smaller in cis women and larger in cis men. In amab trans women it tends to be similar to that of cis women

Cortical thickness of trans individuals tends to align more closely with their preferred gender

Trans people tend to show brain connectivity patterns in regions associated with self perception and body image aligned with their identity

Etc. this is already a novel. And this doesn’t even touch upon the *many many * more things at play here like genetics and epigenetics, prenatal neural developments and hormonal factors, social structures around gender (though tbf they did somewhat touch on this if only to outright deny its validity without offering any real rationale other than “we think it’s dumb”)

But these people obviously don’t give a shit about any of this. They’ll negate it, attack the source, outright deny the claims with no counter evidence, etc. or they’ll just do what they’re currently doing, remain completely ignorant on the topic and seize authority and power to implement their will regardless of the scientific consensus.

Dark times but fuck them. You don’t need the governments approval to express yourself. although I do recognize this will probably be an absolute nightmare for anyone who has not gotten a name change, modified birth certificate, drivers license, etc. if you haven’t done that maybe do it asap, especially for federal documents like passports (especially if you plan to bail on this shithole)

lmao clicked that link and one of the first comments I see is “reddit is pretty decentralized”

I get that 404 needs to make money but this article could greatly benefit from not being paywalled. Or at least list a definition of what decentralized social media is with some actual recommendations before the paywall because people clearly have no fucking clue