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Cake day: September 25th, 2025

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  • Diagnosis is a relative thing. What do you mean, should you get diagnosed? Are you sure that ADHD isn’t mentioned in your psychiatrist’s chart? It might be hard for them to justify prescribing controlled substances in case of an audit if it’s not. Right now most pharmacies and insurance don’t require a diagnosis code to be sent to justify prescriptions, but it is something that’s starting to get traction as the industry modernizes, even if slowly. But the diagnosis may already be there and may or may not be in your chart. If it is, it likely will get out as insurance companies often require large amounts of information to be sent to them as they tend to just deny claims and say, “we need more information”, so the doctors have no choice but to send entire charts. Also, a lot of the big medical records systems tend not to have good security as well as the intermediaries that transmit data to insurance companies. There was just a big hack last year that shut down a whole bunch of systems due to the consolidation of various systems recently. Anyway, the only way to keep your diagnosis private is to ensure that your doctor doesn’t use electronic records and you don’t use insurance. Otherwise, it’s going to get leaked eventually, somewhere.

    Now as to whether that information will be used to discriminate against you, that’s another story. It might be if you intend to emigrate and you likely will be excluded from high security clearance work due to general mental health discrimination in those areas. But otherwise, an employer is unlikely to go looking for the info, at least for now. Usually jobs didn’t require disclosing medical conditions unless they require high physical labor, security clearance, or some other very specialized work that is very sensitive, so YMMV.

    And, if you’re in the US at least, the full repeal of Obamacare/ACA has stalled as conservatives have realized how bad that would hurt them. So it’s being picked apart piece by piece instead, and the preexisting conditions part is low on the priority list as it would be high on impact and thus very unpopular if done alone without hiding it in a larger repeal of the ACA.

    Anyway, I had similar concerns and decided it was well worth the risk. I may want to emigrate some day, so I have been avoiding an Autism diagnosis, but that has no treatment options for adults anyway, unlike the ADHD. And I no longer have a job with security clearance, so no concerns there.

    For reference, I’ve worked in medical billing and charting technology for a couple of decades and I’m currently a software architect for a major health insurance company in the US.


  • Or craft their argument that trans people don’t exist which is what they are trying to do in many cases by insisting that AGAB is set in stone regardless of actual biology (because biologically people aren’t binarily gendered) or anything else. Even if a mistake was made or any possibility of the existence of intersex or transgenderism, legally they want to enforce the AGAB and nothing else matters. They need well defined categories in order to ignore their existence and thus make an enemy for fascism to fight when a “fake” or “illegal” group tries to get rights, which is needed for fascism to work, and the current enemy, immigrants, are becoming a sore topic.


  • More common in rural areas were women can easily be kept very isolated where high speed internet and public transportation is not available and “traditional family values” are enforced by the small communities. And I hate to say “not all men”, but it’s not even the majority in this case in modern times of the internet and such. However, it’s definitely not uncommon, at least in the US, and is becoming more common with the political shift to fascism removing programs that used to help women in those kinds of situations.




  • I have around 3500 liked songs on Spotify alone just from the last 5 years or so and just stuff that Spotify chooses to plat for me. I have about 9,000 tracks in my primary collection from old ripped CDs and purchased MP3s/FLACs. This is without stuff that I dont really like that much anymore or stuff that I would only listen to in specific circumstances, like Mozart or something. It’s over 100GB. There is definitely some overlap there, but definitely less than 1/3 of the Spotify likes I also own. So probably I’d end up somewhere in the 125-150GB range. If phones still had SD card slots I could do it, but that’s not that common anymore since they want you to buy streaming and backup services.

    I could probably pare it down even more without missing out too much, but it would take a lot of time and it would be removing stuff I like to listen to. And I wouldn’t have room to add new stuff.

    I listen to a pretty wide variety of genres and I listen on my phone often, pretty much anytime I’m driving or on a bus/train, and I dont like hearing the same songs repeated too much unless I’m just getting to know the song. I’ve thought about writing a script that automatically randomly replaces files when I’m on my home network to take a smaller set with me, but that’s a lot of work. The other alternative is creating playlists of a few hundred songs each and switching them out when I’m home, but again, lots of work.

    Streaming just covers it well for my use case, if it was reasonably priced and did it’s job well to help discover new music, but seems that’s not what they’re selling anymore. I also don’t have a data cap anymore, or at least it’s a soft cap and not ridiculously low, but not sure how long that will be the case either.


  • Radio only plays a few dozen songs or only “classic” stuff, so I never get to hear new stuff. Having streaming audio was always my way to find new music. That said, Spotify has started doing the same, just playing the sponsored songs and the themes they have generally only play stuff I’ve heard a million times. Rarely “b-sides” or new stuff based on my actual interests.

    I miss the days of the original Pandora service with its database of music elements, and it would go across genres to find things with similar elements and didn’t have any influence from the recording industry sponsoring songs because they were actively destroying their own industry fighting to kill off streaming, instead. I found a bunch of new stuff I never would have heard otherwise. It totally changed my listening habits.

    So with the streaming services consolidating and raising prices as a result, I likely won’t stick with it anymore. My music library is too large to store locally on my phone and I like variety rather than making playlists. I’m thinking of setting up my own streaming server, but music discovery is still an issue I need to solve.


  • Attraction greatly depends on the other person’s presentation. Also, heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual are terms that exclude non-binary people and the fact that both experienced gender and gender presentation are typically spectrums, not extreme binaries.

    So it depends on your definition of bisexual and what aspects you’re looking at. What I think people often mean is that almost everyone finds some aspects of both stereotypical femininity and masculinity attractive. Primarily that’s because most of that stuff is learned, not instinctual, otherwise how can you explain changes in those stereotypes across generations. But also because the way people choose to express gender is dynamic and varied. Labels are fine for personal identification and communication, but not for imposing restrictions on others.




  • But why are the patches kept separate at all. Especially if it’s a copyleft licensed code they’re patching. Many of those require release of the code. And the spirit of that was to make companies who profit off of the code release anything they add as they add it. Otherwise, they’re welcome to instead of taking open source code and patching it, creating closed source code from scratch without using any of the code from the open source version and selling that. It’s very simple. The license says, you want this code, you’re welcome to it, but release any fixes or improvements you make do we all benefit, not just developers, but users all benefit. If they keep it locked up, even if they release it as a patch that’s not accessible to the large majority of users, then it’s violating the spirit if in some cases not the letter of the license.


  • There’s lots of things that could be innovated without faster processors. I mean if we’re just talking cell phones, adding a camera was an innovation, adding a touch screen and eventually touch keyboards that actually worked, different form factors. These things were aided by faster processors, but not directly dependent on them. But these could be totally unrelated devices to phones or even computing at all. Innovation across the board including med-tech, business models, city planning, and tons of other industries have suffered from privatization, deregulation, and leading then to consolidation and thus little need to compete and thus little need to innovate.







  • But charge the capacitor with what? That’s the point. If it doesn’t kill the data immediately upon pushing the button, even when unplugged, it’s useless unless some bumbling idiot thief/cop/agent plugs it in before just disarming the button.

    And as for fully physical, do tests with what? Another computer? Its a memory storage device with only an I/O driver and basic firmware. There’s no CPU to separately run software to detect if the components are destroyed. And if there were, that would have to be physically/electrically separated from the short that is going to kill the device and then physically reconnected, which would mean some kind of mechanical device most likely. Now were getting into a huge device, not a flash drive. The device already has capabilities to read and write data. Very easy to add a chip to give that random data to write over the existing data and a lot less power than a processor and motorized components.

    And again, it doesn’t solve the redundancy problem. Single point of failure is always going to go wrong at least one in some number of cases. Even top of the line components and the best quality control available can’t beat redundancy and it’s way, way cheaper.


  • Exactly. But the corporations do it because it benefits them more than starting from scratch. They should release all changes to the central repository for all to consume as part of the agreement to get the benefit of the already created software. Not hold onto the patches to give them to their customers and people who pay them with their personal information.