If the options in November 2028 come down to Newsom vs Trump (or whoever is his puppet), I’m still voting for Newsom. I won’t be happy about it, but if we can’t get a real progressive through the primaries, I’m still voting against the GOP and for the non-GOP candidate with the best chance of winning.

The medical school application system, AMCAS, sells the information of every medical school applicant. I had to call the recruiters’ office and explain to them that I have multiple failing organ systems and take more than 10 medications a day. I asked if they could get me a medical waiver for chronic kidney disease and they sheepishly agreed to remove my name from their list.

Most of the drug research that actually produces new, useful treatments is done by universities and government research institutions, (or at least it was before the budget cuts). That research produced with state funding is then bought for pennies on the dollar by big pharma who does the last couple steps and reaps all of the financial rewards.

The NIH and CDC would be fully funded in perpetuity (along with many research institutions and universities) if they got paid even a fraction of the profits for their foundational research.

It’s 7 to 10 hours a day and they won’t be telling you when they’ll be getting home for you to be able to leave.

To be somewhat pedantic, “Nazi” is not a demographic identifier. Demographics almost always refers to more immutable features like age, sex, gender, orientation, race, nationality, citizenship, etc. Political ideology is a way to divide and count people, but it’s not something that is reliably counted as a demographic indicator.

I have the KPDH soundtrack going on repeat. (My life is extremely stressful at the moment and I need my dopamine from somewhere)

I just don’t see a world in which it becomes the gold standard prior to getting so horribly enshittified that no medical institution can justify the cost of the accursed thing.

Some of my classmates used chatGPT to summarize reading assignments and it garbled the information so badly that they got things wrong on in-class assessments. Aside from the hallucinations and jumbled garbage output, I refuse to use AI unless there is absolutely no alternative on an ethical basis due to the environmental and societal impacts.

As far as I’m concerned, the only role for LLMs in medicine is to function as a scribe to reduce the burden of documentation and that’s only because everything the idiot machines vomit up has to be checked before being committed to the medical record anyways. Generative AI is a scourge on society and an absolute menace in medicine.

This is stupid. Fully reading and analyzing the source for accuracy and relevancy can be extremely time consuming. That’s why physicians have databases like UpToDate and Dynamed that have expert (ie physician and PhD) analyses and summaries of the studies in the relevant articles.

I’m a 4th year medical student and I have literally never used an LLM. If I don’t know something, I look it up in a reliable resource and a huge part of my education is knowing what I need to look up. An LLM can’t do that for me.

4th year med student here: I use Google to find studies and STATPearls pages because the built-in NIH search function sucks.

They can get your actual region off your billing details for subscription pricing. The content availability might vary by IP, but the pricing is going to go off your billing address. That’s why I pay taxes on some of my subscription services is because my state has a tax on that while other states don’t. When signing up for a new service, it doesn’t show me the total with tax until I enter my address.

I think it’s important for people to recognize the toxic effects of general misogyny and phenomena like Gamer Gate have on gaming communities. To this day, I see plenty of cis-male and trans-femme gamers wonder about why there are so few cis-women in gaming spaces without recognition of what gaming communities are like towards young women and girls who express interest. Nothing quashes your desire to join a community quite like incessant harassment, abuse, rape/death threats, and doxxing.

(To be clear, I am not insinuating that trans-femme folks have an easy time of things, but I can say they outnumber cis-women in gaming communities like Arma by a factor to 2 to 1 or greater. There are 3 trans-women in my Arma group and I’m the only cis-woman there.)

I’m pretty sure that’s a state-by-state code. I know in California PC5150 is the code for removing someone’s rights for being a danger to themselves or others for the purpose of a compulsory mental health examination.

The environmental impact of using generative AI is obscene. I don’t have the source for the claim, but I’ve seen an estimate that an AI generated image creates as much damage as a gallon of gasoline being burned for substantially less actual use.

Welcome to being a woman on the internet.

One thing I don’t understand is why the built in tools for self managing are insufficient, such as mute and block. If willing, I would be open to hearing your experience with that.

These tools have improved immensely over the years. It was particularly bad in those days because there was no option for private or party voice chat and a lot of games came with 3-day trial cards for Xbox Live which allowed people to make tons of sock puppet accounts to evade blocking.

I don’t really play FPS’s any more and I haven’t turned on an Xbox in about 7 years. I just play on PC now, almost exclusively with a gaming community on discord comprised of online and IRL friends. My experience is very curated now and the games I play either have minimal social interaction or are well known for their welcoming communities (eg Warframe). It felt a little bit like admitting defeat, but shutting off the public mic and just sticking to private VCs and servers has been a good way of dealing with it. I certainly don’t get rape and death threats with a side of doxxing these days.

I played a lot of Halo on Xbox live as a teenage girl in the late 2000’s. I sincerely wish they were more stringent about cracking down on assholes. A lot of the rules were in place to attempt to discourage some of the atrocious behavior I was subjected to.

If you cannot bring yourself to listen to small talk and engage with people regularly, I don’t think healthcare is the right field for you. I’m fairly introverted myself, but I turn that around to listening more than speaking and responding thoughtfully to the things I hear. I believe that I can speak with some authority on this as I have worked in healthcare (mostly ERs) for years, and I am going to be graduating medical school soon.

I will say this bluntly: as a physician, I would be hesitant to trust a nurse that cannot engage with others. Not only is healthcare a team sport, patient care is 90% social interaction. If I can’t trust you to engage with my patients in a way that is reassuring and comforting to them, I don’t want you involved any more than strictly necessary. The fact that you can’t get along with your coworkers is the canary in the coal mine for how you are likely interacting with patients.

I have the pixel watch 2, and waterproofing is very important to me when it comes to a smartwatch. I work in healthcare and have to wash my hands upwards of 30 times a day. If I had to take off my watch every time or gamble on a rubber flap adequately covering the charging port, it simply would not be worth the hassle.

The comment was referring to preferred pronouns as just “pronouns” because the cultural zeitgeist has conflated the two. There are tons of right wing assholes that say that they “refuse to use pronouns at all” without processing the difference between “preferred pronouns” and the grammatical construct of pronouns as a whole.