fracture [he/him]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • haven’t had a kid, but 2 weeks with a wife who has chronic fatigue seems really short. honestly the start up life doesn’t strike me as great for having a kid, but idk what your job situation is. can you peace out for a day or two every week without things going off the rails? if so, you might be fine. but usually, start ups are pretty lean, and rely pretty consistently on the presence of each person on the team (or at least, this is what i’ve heard, i haven’t done a start up, either)

    how much do you have to help your wife? have you asked her thoughts on the situation? does she work?

    you’d might want to do some research on child development to help form some timelines. e.g. when does the baby start crawling around / how long are they breastfed? learning stuff like this should help you roughly forecast how much supervision you’ll need to give (it’s probably not linear, fwiw)

    last thing to consider is, what if your wife or baby comes out of this requiring more care than average? what benefits does your work provide in those situations? not everything goes as planned, and i’d be a little worried about that given your wife already has one chronic condition. pregnancy is not exactly easy on a body

    regardless, i hope you can figure things out and everything works out well for you and your family!


  • beyond the obvious ways this is fucked up, imagining this happening with AI gen text is insane. trying to craft a post to both empathize with another poster, kindly demonstrate flaws in thinking or logic about a point they usually care a lot about, and trying to explain how the different point of view better supports the things they care about it such a monumental effort already that AI just cannot do. no actual persuasion will come out of this (not that a ton happens on the internet to begin with, but even less than that)

    and honestly if you’re firehosing people like that, AI is just going to absolutely drown out any actual communication from happening. at some point, we’ll just have bots going to war for us about our points, and no one will be reading it


  • i would have liked it if this had offered a COVID perspective on communal baths. i’m inclined to think that a hot moist environment is a likely place for it to flourish, and it seems odd to neglect to mention that three years of a pandemic probably had an outsize impact on the number of bathhouses still open in 2022

    obviously we probably don’t have a ton of data on how to circulate air and filter COVID out of bathhouses, but i also bet there’s a way to do it in a relatively energy efficient way

    anyways, it feels like a major spot that’s lacking in an otherwise informative and well thought out read




  • it’s an interesting article, but i think the authors are conflating friction for wanting genuine human interaction; its easier than ever for me to make friends because i can instantly connect with and message back and forth, quickly and in real time, over various platforms e.g. discord, the depth of which is only limited by our interactions and how we treat them. forcing us back to sms/email/paper mail doesn’t make our interactions deeper, even though it adds friction. it means we can easily choose what the depth of connection we want is

    that isn’t to say that there aren’t examples where less friction leads to less interaction. dating apps are a great example. but i think the authors are conflating the friction for the interaction. yes, you could add friction that would encourage interaction, but you could also add friction that doesn’t. i think the more salient point would be, encouraging interaction often includes friction, but one shouldn’t shy away from that, as a UI/UX developer

    which, granted, isn’t as catchy of a title. but they could have gone into greater detail for that in the article, too

    regardless of this critique, i enjoyed reading it and the perspective it offered, even if i don’t strictly agree


  • oh okay, sorry, i took away a different impression from your OP talking about how the FDA process is flawed due to appeals being the starting point (which very well may be true) - but including that with this article made it seem like you felt that way about this particular incident (e.g. the link was supporting evidence), not that the commentary on the FDA process was it’s own, unrelated thing

    glad to hear that we’re in agreement about the denial, though

    i can’t really comment on the process, i’ve never taken mdma myself. that said, you say there’s no way you wouldn’t know you’re on it, but there’s a number of substances out there where you’d think that would be the case, but it isn’t (think like, the stereotype of people acting drunk with little / no alcohol, just thinking they had it). also, the dosages may be lower / less obvious, although i have no idea what the dosages used for recreational use vs for therapeutic use are here


  • idk dawg this seems pretty sound according to the article

    The FDA and its advisors identified flaws in the design of the clinical trials, missing data, and a variety of biases in people involved with the trials, including an alleged cult-like support of psychedelics. Lykos is a commercial spinoff of the psychedelic advocacy nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

    FDA advisors also noted the public allegations of a sexual assault of a trial participant during a Phase II trial by an unlicensed therapist providing the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

    On Saturday, using the existing data and scientific literature to support MDMA therapy got a little more difficult for Lykos. The journal Psychopharmacology posted retraction notices for three studies that involved Phase II clinical data of the therapy. The studies included a 2019 rationale for a Phase III trial design, a 2020 pooled analysis, and a 2020 study on how antidepressant use may affect the response to MDMA therapy.

    The retraction notice cited two reasons for the retractions, including “protocol violations amounting to unethical conduct” at one of the clinical trial sites—a reference to the sexual assault allegations—and undisclosed conflicts of interest by the authors.

    like. these are pretty good reasons for not going ahead. it’s on lykos and the scientists running the trials for not keeping their paperwork straight and, you know, not warning people about the risks of the study

    from an article cited within (https://qz.com/1809184/psychedelic-therapy-has-a-sexual-abuse-problem-3):

    A few years ago, a therapist working in a MAPS MDMA study publicly spoke about his challenges dealing with a patient’s sexuality. Early in his career, Richard Yensen was working with a “lovely young lady who became very sexualized in her relationship around the [MDMA] sessions,” he told an audience at California Institute of Integral Studies in 2016. “It got so intense,” said Yensen, that the chair of his department saw him mid-therapy session and told him to leave the room, warning him to always have another therapist alongside him during sessions. “And thank god, because she became more and more and more activated sexually,” said Yensen. “I don’t think I could have handled it.”

    Not long after, Yensen was accused of sexually assaulting a PTSD patient, Meaghan Buisson, during a MAPS clinical trial on MDMA

    like. even GENEROUSLY assuming that nothing truly unethical happened. this is a huge issue that will only get worse if it’s made publicly available

    i’m not taking a position on whether or not it should be made available as a treatment. i don’t know and i’m not qualified to determine that. but given what’s been said, it feels reasonable to want more data and perhaps go “hey think you could run a trial without getting accused of assaulting people?”



  • instead of learning to stop over thinking and being less anxious, i’ve decided to lean into it and try to prepare / predict every situation, along with the most common / reasonable ones, and prepare accordingly. and once i have, i let it go

    for example, i’m at the airport to take a flight soon… so i packed earlier today to the best of my ability. both for necessities and entertainment. is it possible that i forgot something? you betcha. but according to all of the possibilities i’ve simulated in my head, i’ve got everything i need within the possibility sphere i’m likely to occupy

    of course, there are some situations which could happen that i would be screwed if they did… the most concerning of which is, embarrassingly, whether or not my nose hair gets long enough to make my nose itch while i’m gone. but hopefully that was a one off itching that won’t come back later!

    the possibility space of a trip away from home is pretty small and tame, but the possibility space for interactions with other people is much bigger, as well as unique to every individual. plus, the ever present threat of a traumatic reaction adds a lot of randomness to the scenario

    still, i’m hoping that i can build a broad, general enough map to cover most situations. it’s quite a herculean task, but i feel like humans are mostly the same at heart. guess i’ll find out if that’s true or not 😅

    please note that relaxing and accepting the possibility of things going “wrong” (in unforeseen or undesirable ways) is still a very important part of the process. for the best results, you’ll still want to be able to take in, process, and respond to any given situation, which you’ll need to be able to accept and calm down to process in the moment

    the key difference here is recognizing that the main way a social interaction falls apart is when a traumatic reaction occurs, and researching and recognizing what that looks like, and understanding the mechanisms at play behind it, and the best ways to act and respond when it happens; while also taking into account that you, yourself, may have a traumatic reaction in response, with the associated skillsets learned and developed to counteract it

    so yeah, writing all of that out is why my brain is a little funny. i don’t really think i should, because it feels like i’m talking a little bit too much, either about how i work, or how people work, i’m not sure. buuut i’m at the airport and a little tipsy and have nothing better to do… and you asked! so i hope it was kind of a fun or interesting read




  • thanks for sharing this information with us, i think it’s important to discuss this stuff on the fediverse

    i notice that beehaw doesn’t have a similar clause in its TOS, as far as i can tell. without the expectation of you answering this question, i’m wondering what the difference is between the two such that cohost has such a clause and beehaw doesn’t. maybe it’s because one is run by an individual and one is run by a small company?

    i did a search on cohost itself to see if anyone else talked about this and found this quite extensive thread: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1588769277053739010

    so based on what you’ve said and what’s in that thread, i’m gonna update my post with some qualifications about cohost. thanks for piqing my interest in the TOS




  • i, uh, hm. well, in a marriage, you don’t know if someone is exploiting your goodwill, but ideally you marry someone who you don’t have to actively worry about it e.g. someone you can trust

    relationships aren’t a hard science, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t science about them. for example, you could check out the book, “a general theory of love”. or you could check out the work of john gottman on relationships and love, he’s done a ton of work on them

    for more general information on like, how humans work, you can check out paul ekman’s work on facial expressions and the facial action coding system (FACS). i’d also recommend marshall rosenberg’s non-violent communication - i don’t recall how strictly research-based the work is, but he (until he died, anyways) and his org do trainings across the world in this stuff, and he has a phd in clinical psychology, so i… think… it has a reasonable foundation? (it’s been a while since i read it)

    and of course, because trauma invariably deeply affects relationships, you can read “the body keeps the score”, which is maybe the foremost research based text for the layperson about it

    sorry, i’m not sure how open you are to actually receiving this kind of information… it’s totally understandable if you’re not. i used to feel a lot like you, i think, kind of unsure and untrusting of others. and all of these things are things i’ve read and learned from that have given me a lot more confidence about interacting with other people in general

    obviously, the knowledge itself isn’t enough, but maybe you’ll find it helpful nonetheless



  • it’s insane to me that someone could understand the ramifications of trauma on neurobiology and conclude that free will doesn’t exist

    i feel like, without free will, no one would ever escape their trauma. without saying something shitty and uncompassionate like “you’re only held back by your trauma because you’re not strong willed enough”; that’s not true at all

    but i think, at it’s core, healing from trauma requires two things: a person who you feel safe enough to trust, and the willingness to take the leap and trust again

    if you don’t have one or the other, you’re going to really struggle

    and that moment where you choose to trust, how can you see that as anything but free will? when everything about your past, your nerves, your biology is screaming at you to do otherwise?

    i dunno. i don’t think any of us would have grown past our trauma at all without free will

    that said, i think there’s also just too much going on in the brain to conclude there’s no free will for sure. i guess that’s not the same as saying it’s deterministic, which you can’t really say, because physics gets too fucking weird at low levels, right?

    anyways, i guess we can never really definitively say whether free will exists or not. but i think you can still make very strong arguments for being compassionate to poor people / traumatized people / people with mental illness / etc without saying we all don’t have free will. it feels a lot like saying we’re all doomed to be what we were made to be and we can’t make a better life for ourselves

    it just starts with convincing people, and believing, that we all deserve that