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Gaywallet (they/it)

@ Gaywallet @beehaw.org

Posts
302
Comments
1203
Joined
4 yr. ago

I'm gay

  • Your doctor’s AI notetaker may be making things up, Ontario audit finds

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  • What the hell is this article? It has no source, it sounds like a half-baked thought and is all of 3 short paragraphs in length. This is low effort engagement bait at best.

    I tried googling what the hell this might be based off of, and found this article. It appears to be a review conducted by the office of the auditor general (full report can be found here). The audit was of the process for the request for bids for the scribe system - that is to say, the 'pre-approved' vendors. There is nothing about whether any of this software is used, let alone how it is used.

    Like yes, it's important to be looking at this, and it's good that the auditor is telling the government to improve its RFB process to better screen these tools, but this article is making it out like actual doctors are using this software and blatantly using it in ways that would harm the patient. That's just not true.

    Frankly speaking I should probably just remove this article entirely as its half baked at best, AI slop at worst, but I'm going to leave it up because hopefully folks will see something like this and stop reacting to a headline immediately and instead take a closer look at articles that are shared as engagement bait.

  • Depression scales may not work the same for highly intelligent people

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  • An interesting read. It never struck me as something that needed researching - the obvious bias baked into any and all tests which utilize language and probe at abstract ideas like feelings. It seems obvious to me that the idea of "sadness" is both inherently as well as culturally determined. For anyone who's dealt with individuals with varying amounts of alexithymia its glaringly obvious that some of the standard questions such as "feeling down, depressed, or hopeless" (PHQ9) would be interpreted differently, let alone questions in which context is crucially important such as "poor appetite or overeating" (PHQ9) or "being so restless that it is hard to sit still" (GAD7 - a test about anxiety) that are common on these kinds of questionnaires. Perhaps its because my interaction and discussions with clinicians tends to be folks who are focused more on the total mental wellness of someone than they are about the specific answers to a question and are using the context of the patient's other conditions and affect to assess, but this hardly seems groundbreaking... except that perhaps the literature on this itself is minimal. Perhaps this kind of clinical awareness has been handed down, rather than studied, and the corpus of literature needs to be enhanced so that more can learn and absorb it.

  • Single dose of magic mushroom psychedelic can cause anatomical brain changes, study finds

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  • It's not just neuroplasticity, it's one of very, very few things in the world that actually promotes neurogenesis. Your brain may be changing structure and connections constantly, but it's entirely disingenuous to suggest that psychedelics aren't causing changes that just aren't observed from normal day-to-day life. It's a massive dose of neurogenesis and neuroplasticity (which comes with both it's pros an cons) and we shouldn't minimize that just because the brain is normally a changing environment.

    Of note, many psychedelics upregulate BDNF too which has neuroprotective effects (I haven't seen anything linking lifetime psychedelic use to things like alzheimers and general neural decline) but we know that exercise, which also upregulates BDNF, is shown to have neuroprotective effects and slow cognitive decline.

  • Polyamorous Americans are celebrating new laws establishing their ‘inherent worth and dignity’

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  • 100% of the time "think of the kids" is used, it's because they cannot come up with a coherent reason without pulling that escape cord.

  • Paid...DMing?

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  • We live in a capitalistic hellscape where some of the best DMs are trapped in dead-end retail jobs. Why must you judge them for trying to make a living doing something they are passionate about? Yes, some will be grifters, but that is always true of any profession. With that being said, I think you're going to run into less grifters in the arts than you are in other spaces, and likely the folks trying to make an honest buck doing a thing they enjoy are not there to grift you.

  • Bill banning people born after 2008 from buying tobacco clears UK parliament

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  • having entire generation never start smoking

    Yes because making drugs illegal stops them from ever being used😂

  • Bill banning people born after 2008 from buying tobacco clears UK parliament

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  • these bans are actively targeting only children

    Quite literally true of many of the examples I brought up? I'm confused about where you are going with this. I was merely pointing out that something being done "for the children" is disingenuous framing. There is no merit in discrimination. If it was truly to protect them when they are children because children can't make the decisions with the same brain that adults make decisions with, then the ban would expire when they reach adult age. But it's not actually about that; it's about the fact that they can't ban it for adults and by claiming it's there to protect children they can gain political capital and will to ban it. It's effective legislative incrementalism against a difficult foe (big tobacco). I think limiting big tobacco is good, and I think cigarettes are bad, but I don't agree with this particular application because of the flawed framing - it opens up the ability for others to legislate in areas they shouldn't be legislating, or to use the same framework and claim its for the same reasons without it meeting the same criteria.

    conflating it with other issues is a classic conservative trope

    Are you saying that pointing out the framing is flawed is a conservative trope?

  • Bill banning people born after 2008 from buying tobacco clears UK parliament

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  • A full ban would cause serious political problems

    Yes they're selling it under the guise that one group is being "protected" because they ought to be protected and another group does not need this protection, which is a form of discrimination. They do this because they know they don't have the political capital to ban it for everyone, because many adults value the ability to make choices about their own health, well-being, and what vices they wish to partake in.

    New Zealand has already enacted such a law, without seemingly much blowback.

    It's pretty easy to enact laws on a small group when they have limited participation or voice in governmental affairs.

    For what it's worth I'm not against this legislation, but I am critical of it. Big tobacco is bad. Cigarettes are bad. But this kind of "save the children" mentality often leads to a lot of corrupt and incorrect decisions and legislation. Alcohol is objectively even worse, and yet we're not banning that. Why? Will similar legislation try to capitalize on this and ban things like nicotine in general (almost certainly, despite nicotine being a relatively harmless substance in comparison). Worse yet, will they try to ban things like gender affirming care, or other objectively good things because there is a moral purity angle? I suspect so.

  • Bill banning people born after 2008 from buying tobacco clears UK parliament

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  • My favorite part about this is that it's targeted at a specific age demographic, rather than a full-on ban. Love the cowardice. Ban it for all ages or don't ban it at all you absolute morons.

  • Chat @beehaw.org
    Gaywallet (they/it) @beehaw.org

    How's your week going, Beehaw?

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    I’m Supposed to be Visible Today — But Why?

    www.coyotemedia.org /im-supposed-to-be-visible-today-but-why/

  • Study finds chat bots can sway opinions on historical events

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  • India set to launch free nationwide HPV vaccination for adolescent girls

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  • It's really annoying how they discount how boys can be a vector as well. Yes, HPV generally doesn't cause cancer in men, but being able to transfer it to girls means its a good idea to vaccinate them as well! Not to mention the other ways in which HPV can effect men. Public health is so frustrating sometimes.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I love how this is smug and offers no advice. Peak substack vibes

  • How video games help trans people find gender euphoria

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  • You either didn’t understand my comment or whatever the case is here.

    Please, feel free to explain what you meant.

    I am saying that your or others gender should not be a factor deciding how games are developed.

    Yes and you'll see my removal comment states "'games where it doesn't belong' you don't get to decide what an artist does with their art". This was true. This is true. Your statement above is clearly dictating that gender should not be a factor (or sexual identity, or frankly any other identity such as race or ability). If an artist decides it should be a factor, then that is up to them. You don't get to dictate what the art should be.

  • How video games help trans people find gender euphoria

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  • Hey there,

    No one said you had to enter this thread. Ignore it if you don't want to participate in the discussion. Don't force your opinion on others. Queer folks aren't going to feel safe in this space if you kick down their door and tell them to shut up.

  • Amy Westervelt: It’s Time We Stopped Treating Corporations As People

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  • This solves nothing, the exact same people will just move to another company.

    The only way to effectively stop this kind of behavior is with regulation. The following types of regulation can help curb this behavior:

    1. Steep financial penalties for violations that are actually enforced. These need to be anchored directly to total value or profitability over a certain time frame. A specific number value will easily be outpaced by consolidation and gigantic companies can basically ignore them. Even a 100 million dollar fine can be ignored by companies the size of Amazon, Nvidia, and so forth. The EU has been good at architecting this kind of legislation.
    2. Strong rewards for whistle blowing on criminal behavior. Note that this is not prosecution of individuals responsible for said behavior because it will be very difficult to prove this in court and utilizing simple information warfare tactics, folks can be glass cliffed, made into patsies, or otherwise obscured from any record of their involvement or require extreme in-depth investigations to figure out.
    3. Strong criminal prosecution for repeat offenders and funding for real investigations of any company who has been found liable of any penalties or suspected of bad behavior. Some people hop from company to company doing the same thing over and over again. When we are focused on the companies rather than the people behind such bad behavior, they get a slap on the wrist at most and continue to do damage to society. We need to more aggressively profile and prosecute individuals with a track record of malicious behavior. As already mentioned, this is unfortunately the most difficult of the above to both legislate and enforce as what is considered "malicious" behavior is up for debate and difficult to quantify.

  • The more you look, the worse this gets. I've been enjoying some lively Discord derision on a few servers, so I thought I'd share the pain.

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  • You should quit social media for good

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  • A bit strongly negative on phone use in general, but I'd say it's a good overview of why most major social media websites (with algorithmic recommendations being a heavy handed component of one's feed) are bad and why the traditional method (time-based sorting with subscriptions or feed curation) are better although not perfect.

  • The Golden Age of Protest Is Now

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  • Well.... yes and no. Violence can have both positive and negative effects on a movement, it really depends on what kind of violence, who is committing the violence (racism sexism etc. all come into play here), and what kind of resistance they are met with. Here's two great reviews which outline what the literature has to say on this.

  • Character.AI bans users under 18 after being sued over child’s suicide

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  • It could be the person was already in a problematic situation with family and friends, and they just need to blame someone or something and don’t want to admit the real problems. Kind of what often happened back in the day with videogames getting blamed for killing humans.

    This is not a fair analogy for what is going on here. Video games being blamed harkens back to times when music or other counter cultural media was blamed for behavior. We have a lot of literature which shows that the passive consumption of media doesn't really affect someone in the ways which they were being blamed. From the beginning, this argument lacked a logical or hypothetical framework as well - it was entirely based on moral judgement values by certain individuals in society who simply "believed" that these were the cause.

    AI on the other hand, interacts back with you, and amplifies psychosis. Now this is early days and most of what we have is theoretical in nature, based off case-studies, or simply clinical hypothesis [1, 2, 3]. However, there is a clear difference in media itself - the chatbot is able to interact with the user in a dynamic way, and is programmed in a manner by which to reinforce certain thoughts and feelings. The chatbot is also human-seeming enough for a person to anthropomorphize the chatbot and treat it like an individual for the purposes of therapy or an attempt at emotional closeness. While video games do involve human interaction and a piece of media could be designed to be psychologically difficult to deal with, that would be hyper-specific to the media and not the medium as a whole. The issues with chatbots (the LLM subset of AI) is pervasive across all chatbots because of how they are designed and the populace they are serving.

    we could end up in a society where everyone undermines real problems in physical world and blames Ai to sideload the question

    This is a valid point to bring up, however, I think it is shortsighted when we think in a broader context such as that of public health. We could say the same about addictive behaviors and personalities, for example, and absolve casinos of any blame for designing a system which takes advantage of these individuals and sends them down a spiraling path of gambling addiction. Or, we can recognize that this is a contributing and amplifying factor, by paying close attention to what is happening to individuals in a broad sense, as well as smartly applying theory and hypothesis.

    I think it's completely fair to say that this kid likely had a lot of contributing factors to his depression and ultimate and final decision. There is a clear hypothetical framework with some circumstantial evidence with strong theoretical support to suggest that AI are exacerbating the problem and also should be considered a contributing factor. This suggests that regulation may be helpful, or at the very least increased public awareness of this particular technology having the potential to cause harm to certain individuals.

  • U.S. News @beehaw.org
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    Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”

    www.kenklippenstein.com /p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-common-beliefs
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    FBI Readies New War on Trans People

    www.kenklippenstein.com /p/fbi-readies-new-war-on-trans-people
  • Technology @beehaw.org
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    An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism

    hai.stanford.edu /news/an-ai-social-coach-is-teaching-empathy-to-people-with-autism
  • Humanities & Cultures @beehaw.org
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    Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Clients are triggered.

    www.technologyreview.com /2025/09/02/1122871/therapists-using-chatgpt-secretly/
  • Science @beehaw.org
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    Scott And Scurvy (Idle Words)

    idlewords.com /2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
  • Humanities & Cultures @beehaw.org
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    How algorithms, alpha males and tradwives are winning the war for kids’ minds

    19thnews.org /2025/06/internet-culture-algorithms-alpha-males-tradwives/
  • Humanities & Cultures @beehaw.org
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    Supportive housing offers cost-effective response to homelessness and opioid use

    news.stanford.edu /stories/2025/06/supportive-housing-first-homelessness-opioid-use-public-health-cost
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    The rise of Whatever

    eev.ee /blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/
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    Exploring the Dangers of AI in Mental Health Care

    hai.stanford.edu /news/exploring-the-dangers-of-ai-in-mental-health-care
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    Republicans pass bill stripping transgender Americans of health care

    www.yahoo.com /news/breaking-republicans-pass-big-beautiful-150406364.html
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    Republicans pass bill stripping transgender Americans of health care

    www.yahoo.com /news/breaking-republicans-pass-big-beautiful-150406364.html
  • Science @beehaw.org
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    Study reveals that decent living standards for 8.5 billion people possible with only 30% of current global resource and energy use.

    www.sciencedirect.com /science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
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    Exclusive: Trump White House directs NIH to study ‘regret’ after transgender people transition

    www.nature.com /articles/d41586-025-01029-8
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    Immune ‘fingerprints’ aid diagnosis of complex diseases in Stanford Medicine study

    med.stanford.edu /news/all-news/2025/02/immune-cell-receptors-complex-disease.html
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    Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for programs with 'improper ideology'

    apnews.com /article/trump-smithsonian-executive-order-improper-ideology-558ebfab722f603e94e02a1a4b06ed4d
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    Generative AI Tool Marks a Milestone in Biology - Evo 2 can predict the form and function of proteins in the DNA of all domains of life

    hai.stanford.edu /news/generative-ai-tool-marks-a-milestone-in-biology
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    CA Gov Gavin Newsom "Completely Aligns" With Charlie Kirk On Trans Issues In Podcast

    www.erininthemorning.com /p/ca-gov-gavin-newsom-completely-aligns
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    Australia’s ‘Bee Man’ is Saving Native Species, One ‘Hotel’ at a Time

    www.goodnewsnetwork.org /australias-bee-man-saving-native-species-one-hotel-at-a-time/