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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Yeah, toxins are often the bigger risk when dealing with bacterial or fungal issues.

    For instance, botulism is caused by the toxin produced by botulinum bacteria. The toxin is a paralytic. The bacteria itself can typically be dealt with by the immune system, but the toxin wreaks havoc on the nervous system.

    That’s also why you should never feed honey to babies; botulinum is commonly found in honey. Babies’ immune systems aren’t equipped to deal with the botulinum bacteria, which allows it to bloom and start producing the toxin after they ingest it. This causes something called Floppy Baby Syndrome, from the baby being paralyzed by botulism toxin.


  • Fair warning, this could mean your account was flagged for money laundering and/or fraud, and you’ll have a hell of a time getting access back. Adding a massive charge to the account and forcing it into the negative is a fairly common way for banks to go “wait woah hold up, kill access to that account’s funds right now.”

    Like maybe it was flagged for money laundering, so they can’t have you spending any (potentially illegal) money via a debit card or making withdrawals while they investigate. So they just add a massive charge to the account and force it into the negative, so the systems already in place will refuse to let you use your card; you try to pay for something, and your card suddenly declines because your account is in the red.

    If this is the case, you should consider any money in that account inaccessible for the foreseeable future. The bank will likely stonewall while they investigate, (after all, they can’t really divulge anything about the investigation to the person who is being investigated) which can take several weeks (or even months) to wrap up. It’s likely that the bank tellers you speak to don’t even know any details of the investigation; They’ll only see that your account had the large charge. And no amount of “how the hell am I supposed to pay my bills when my accounts are all locked” will get the bank to budge.

    Source: My buddy had this happen to him. He started working at a head shop. Apparently head shops are notorious for money laundering, because his account was flagged for investigation as soon as his first paycheck deposited. It happened right at the end of the month. It took the bank four weeks to return his funds. In the meantime, his landlord had already started eviction proceedings, because he was a month behind on his rent.



  • It’s easy to say stuff like this, but the harsh reality is that disability (especially if it’s sudden disability later in life) is a massive stressor for everyone involved. Suddenly going blind is an instant and massive lifestyle change for everyone surrounding the victim.

    There’s also all of the co-morbid stuff that follows a sudden disability. Depression, anxiety, resentment, PTSD, etc all have the capacity to drastically change a person’s attitude and outlook on life.

    I seriously doubt the breakup was instant. My bet is that it was a slow wedge that got driven between them, as the husband also had to adjust to the new limited lifestyle and began to resent her disability for it. Plus with the associated depression and trauma that inherently follows situations like this, the relationship 100% has the potential to be slowly strangled.

    Source: Am married to someone who was left disabled by a sudden disease. We’re still married, but that’s largely because we were both willing to do a lot of therapy and work to remain together. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss my social life before my partner’s disability.




  • Proton isn’t an emulator; It’s a compatibility layer. All it’s doing is taking the Linux<>Windows stuff and converting back and forth. There’s very little efficiency loss, (and some games even run better because Linux tends to be a lighter OS.)

    The big issue with Linux is anticheat. Some of the largest anticheat companies have chosen not to support Linux, or the game devs have disabled Linux support on their end. But to be clear, that’s not a choice Linux has made; It’s a choice the game devs made to exclude Linux players, because they want kernel-level control which Linux won’t allow.

    Gaming on Linux used to be a big hassle, as it basically required devs to write a native Linux version of the game. But nowadays Proton does that translation for them, and is so lightweight that it’s negligible. If you have any doubts, check out protondb, which is a published list of game compatibility ratings. Gold will play just fine in 90% of cases. Platinum is going to be seamless. Native means there’s a specific Linux version. And Steam Deck Verified simply means the devs have set specific controller/aspect ratio/frame rate/etc settings for when the game is booted on a Steam Deck. Even if it’s not SD Verified, the rating will tell you whether or not the game will boot and run.



  • Nvidia GPUs are absolutely still a problem on Linux. It’s a problem that can be worked around, but it will require working around.

    It’s honestly one of the biggest issues with Linux imo. If we want to encourage widespread adoption, it becomes really difficult to persuade people when they find out their GPU is essentially incompatible without major massaging. Especially since Nvidia is the most popular GPU seller on the market.

    And the “it’s so easy, people just don’t want to learn” messaging doesn’t actually encourage long term use; If someone has been told that changing is easy but immediately encounters issues, then you’ve just made yourself an untrustworthy source of information in their eyes. They’re more likely to go “welp I guess it’s not for me” and just stop trying. If they’re at least presented with a realistic use-case and some of the most common pitfalls, they’ll be much better equipped to actually soldier on and learn. Just like teaching someone to ride a bike, going “it’s so easy, just keep peddling” does nothing to help when the person is laying in the grass with a scraped knee.



  • My current tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory is that’s exactly what they’re banking on. They’ll draw the trial out until right before the midterm election… Then Trump will use the resulting riots to declare martial law and cancel the upcoming midterms, so he doesn’t lose control of congress. After he has cancelled the election, he’ll make a final push to clean house, and will start ousting liberal congress members by accusing them of being riot conspirators.

    The Mangione Riots will be Trump’s Reichstag Fire.


  • It really depends on how drunk you actually were at the time, and that’s what makes cases like this so difficult. Generally speaking, simply being drunk isn’t enough.

    Hell, even being blackout drunk isn’t enough. Because you can be blacked out without being passed out; Blackout drunk simply means your brain isn’t recording things to your memory, so you won’t remember it after you sober up. Contrary to popular belief, alcohol doesn’t make you forget existing memories. It just makes it so you don’t ever commit things to memory in the first place. That’s what happens when you’re blackout drunk.

    In order to be incapable of consenting, you need to be so drunk that you can’t comprehend what is happening. Because informed consent requires two things: Information anbout what is happening, and enthusiasm. You can have both, even while blackout drunk. Because you forgetting your enthusiasm the next morning doesn’t automatically make it rape. After all, you were informed and enthusiastic when it was happening, so you consented. If you were capable of understanding what was happening and were enthusiastic, it’s not legally considered rape.

    And that’s a surprisingly high threshold to beat. You usually need to prove to the courts that you were basically passed out (and therefore unable to be informed about what was happening) before they’ll consider it rape.

    Even if people would colloquially consider drunk sex rape, that’s not typically how the courts view it. And that’s a large part of why so many accused rapists get off without a guilty verdict; The victim basically has to prove that they were missing either information or enthusiasm to overcome the accused’s “they consented to it” defense. And if the victim was blacked out and doesn’t even remember the evening, that becomes extremely difficult to do without outside witnesses corroborating that the victim was passed out and/or combative.

    And hell, in cases like the Brock Turner one, even when the victim proves that she was passed out, the rapist can still get away with just a slap on the wrist.



  • The fact that you don’t need to actually supply any real CSAM to the training material is the reasoning being offered for supporting AI CSAM. It’s gross, but it’s also hard to argue with.

    Yeah, this is basically the crux of the issue. When you get into the weeds and start looking at more than just surface-level “but it needs CSAM to make CSAM” misconception, arguments against it basically boil down to “but it’s icky.” Which… Yeah. It is. But should something being icky automatically make it illegal, even if there are no victims?

    I hate to make the comparison (for a variety of reasons) but until fairly recently homosexuality was psychologically classed as a form of destructive/dangerous kink. Largely because straight people had the same “but it’s icky” response whenever it got brought up. And we have tried to move away from that as time has passed, because we have recognized that being gay is not just a kink, it’s not just a choice, and it’s not inherently dangerous or harmful.

    To contrast that, pedophilia has remained stigmatized. Because even if it passed the first two “it’s not just a kink/choice” tests, it still failed the “it’s not harmful” test. Consuming CSAM was inherently harmful, and always had a victim. There was no ethical way to view CSAM. But now with AI, it can actually begin passing that third test as well.

    I don’t know how I feel about it, myself. The idea of “ethically-sourced” CSAM doesn’t exactly sit right with me, but if it’s possible to make it in a truly victimless manner, then I find it hard to argue outright banning something just because I don’t like it.

    This is really the biggest hurdle. To be clear, I’m not arguing that being an active pedo should be decriminalized. But it is worth examining whether we’re basing criminality purely off of the instinctual “but it’s icky” response that the public has when it gets discussed. And is that response enough of a justification for making/keeping it illegal? And if your answer to that was “yes”, what if it could help pedos avoid consuming real CSAM, and therefore reduce the number of future victims? If it could legitimately help reduce the number of victims but you still want to criminalize it, then you are not actually focused on reducing harm; You’re focused on feeling righteous instead. The biggest issue right now is that harm reduction is very hard to study, because it is such a taboo topic. Even finding subjects to self-report is difficult or impossible. So we’ll have no idea what kinds of impacts on CSAM consumption (positive or negative) AI will realistically have until after it is widely available.