DefinitelyNotAFae's recent activity

  1. Comment on A reckoning in Springfield, Ohio: The truck driver who struck and killed Pierre Damas Bel in ~society

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    This has all been such a tragedy. I don't even feel like I can mourn it properly

    This has all been such a tragedy. I don't even feel like I can mourn it properly

    1 vote

  2. Comment on A reckoning in Springfield, Ohio: The truck driver who struck and killed Pierre Damas Bel in ~society

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    He was 20, and had arrived legally in the United States in March 2024 and been granted something called Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, due to dangerous conditions in Haiti. He had joined his family in Springfield, where roughly 15,000 Haitians had settled in recent years. He had just graduated from high school, where he’d been a standout student, soccer player, and member of the Junior ROTC program. He’d enrolled at Wright State University, half an hour from Springfield, and wanted to study neuroscience.

    Yesterday, Ronal Bel sat in the front row at St. John Missionary Baptist Church for his son’s funeral. He asked a family friend to read his recollections of his first-born son, who had grown up in the port city of Aux Cayes, along the southern coast of Haiti. “I feel like I have lost everything,” the friend read. “I just cannot sleep” and “When someone opens the front door, I have the sense that it is him, coming home.”

    He’d been in the right lane, he said, when he’d noticed a car rolling to a stop on the right shoulder. As he flipped on his left turn signal to move out of the way, he’d seen a man getting out of the car, who was then walking toward his trunk, who was then continuing on against traffic, then running—then diving out in front of him.

    “Right here,” Jack said as he drove over black tire marks curving left across all three lanes. “See, I locked it down right here. You can see where I swerved. See? I started to signal and—it just happened so fast.”

    He had tried to imagine how Pierre had felt walking around with it on, attempting to play soccer, and he had learned something else about the ICE monitor that really bothered him, which was that Pierre had to keep it charged himself.

    “And if he let it go dead, he gets in trouble. I mean, it’s a joke,” Jack said. “I mean, come on, you got a decorated kid, a full-time student, playing soccer, and they’re going to do that shit to him? I think he just probably felt defeated. He put all that effort in, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. And being from a Third World country too? We don’t know what those people walk in day-to-day.”

    He started going over it all again. The morning that began so normally. The cornfields and wildflowers. A young Haitian man named Pierre Damas Bel whose troubles had become his own.

    He kept imagining Pierre looking him dead in the eyes.

    “He was hurting,” Jack said.

    He recalled the moment right after that.

    “If I had just swerved a little sooner,” he said. “I wish I could’ve done more to keep that truck off him.”

    And the moment right after that.

    2 votes

  4. Comment on Someone ‘torturing’ LLMs in a robot prison has triggered the dumbest debate in AI yet in ~tech

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    That was two separate statements. They lack consciousness and their tech does not provide a pathway to consciousness This is not a good counter argument, even if you find the initial one unsatisfying

    have also been trained based on human text and audio/visual content. Does this mean I'm not conscious

    That was two separate statements. They lack consciousness and their tech does not provide a pathway to consciousness

    This is not a good counter argument, even if you find the initial one unsatisfying

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Someone ‘torturing’ LLMs in a robot prison has triggered the dumbest debate in AI yet in ~tech

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    Extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence. But if they think it's truly human level sapient, then I'd call them slavers, not just hypocrites.

    Extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence. But if they think it's truly human level sapient, then I'd call them slavers, not just hypocrites.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Our AI midwife in ~health

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    This is also compounded by a mix of narratives like cuts that are "targeting waste and these doctors who order unnecessary tests" and "patients are going to doctor Google/AI and acting like they...

    This is also compounded by a mix of narratives like cuts that are "targeting waste and these doctors who order unnecessary tests" and "patients are going to doctor Google/AI and acting like they have medical degrees. So politics and the current doctor experience (and burnt out doctors post COVID too) are all factors as well.

    No doctor is perfect, but neither is their education and experience worthless.

    5 votes

  7. Comment on Our AI midwife in ~health

    DefinitelyNotAFae
    Link Parent
    That's the balance, of cost vs benefit not just financially (though unfortunately can matter too) but to your body. If it's looking at a potential spinal injury that's very different than say,...

    That's the balance, of cost vs benefit not just financially (though unfortunately can matter too) but to your body. If it's looking at a potential spinal injury that's very different than say, early fertility issues which may be treatable without it.

    /Obligatory distaste for being linked to Alexander's blog regardless of the author.

    6 votes

  8. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (October 2026) in ~health.mental

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    Hey, this is sort of my placeholder so I can come back and write more. But I usually look at texts to a counselor as a sign that they knew they needed help, more than their friends could give. So...

    Hey, this is sort of my placeholder so I can come back and write more. But I usually look at texts to a counselor as a sign that they knew they needed help, more than their friends could give. So that's good. That's awareness and choosing to live, even in the face of everything they're feeling. So while everyone is, it seems, shocked by the revelation of their mental state, and feeling down themselves because of it. They didn't die, they chose to live. They're going through something just like someone who has cancer. And while there is, like cancer, a chance of frightening outcomes, like death, they're literally in a space where that cannot happen outside of some extreme outliers. Try to find a way to celebrate that they got help, even if they didn't want it (and it sounds to me like they did) they got it.

    You are already doing more than half the battle by asking these questions and caring. You might, if you can, see if they'll let you be a visitor since they're not talking to parents. If they're a minor, they're in a middle ground age in regards to privacy and their parents in a way that will be state law specific. But if they're willing to talk to you, that might give the family insight on what's going on.. at the same time be careful of just putting yourself in the middle. If you can visit for your own reasons that is ideal.

    I'll answer more deeply later, and please feel free to DM me.

    /MH professional with a counseling Master's degree who works in a non-clinical setting with (often suicidal) college students. (Short version: Social work for student in college)

    11 votes

  9. Comment on When do you know that you've found "the one"? in ~life

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    Dan Savage is a very likely source for the "all relationships end until one doesn't". I read him in the weekly STL paper in college and as a young polyamorous person he was one of the few public...

    Dan Savage is a very likely source for the "all relationships end until one doesn't". I read him in the weekly STL paper in college and as a young polyamorous person he was one of the few public sources of affirmation.

    He may be the source of the "round up to one" too.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Oatly, the world's largest producer of oat milk, is sending a new message to its consumers – most people want their governments to take action on climate change in ~enviro

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    Eh I mean people are using narcissist wrong, but maybe "overstimulated.". Then again, I think maybe that's just a sign of the trauma of the pandemic for a lot of folks, especially ND ones. Idk if...

    Eh I mean people are using narcissist wrong, but maybe "overstimulated.". Then again, I think maybe that's just a sign of the trauma of the pandemic for a lot of folks, especially ND ones.

    Idk if your mom is using it correctly, but she's probably heard it from something, and it has no obvious connection to climate change.

    7 votes

  11. Comment on Oatly, the world's largest producer of oat milk, is sending a new message to its consumers – most people want their governments to take action on climate change in ~enviro

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    It's not a "real" (maybe, kind of, it's debated) monsoon but it is called that in North America. It's not new in the scientific field as it's been around for.... Decades. North American Monsoon If...

    It's not a "real" (maybe, kind of, it's debated) monsoon but it is called that in North America. It's not new in the scientific field as it's been around for.... Decades.

    North American Monsoon

    If you follow any number of meteorologists online you'll pick up trends of language in weather, just like you will in anything else. Maybe people are just using the term more in the Southwest right now, not for climate change but to better explain things.

    In the Midwest I swear they didn't talk about storms this way a decade ago, but now "we" all talk about the cap popping off or breaking on a storm. (By we I mostly mean meteorologists and those of us who repeat that in talking about the weather and whether it's good for the corn.) They talk about climate change too, separately.

    7 votes

  12. Comment on When do you know that you've found "the one"? in ~life

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    I wish I remember who I got it from! But it's always made more sense for me than expecting a "perfect" 1, you know? In one of my fantasy series (Owlsight, Valdemar, by Mercedes Lackey) there was a...

    I wish I remember who I got it from! But it's always made more sense for me than expecting a "perfect" 1, you know?

    In one of my fantasy series (Owlsight, Valdemar, by Mercedes Lackey) there was a wedding ceremony whose direct quote I cannot find and it's got similar vibes to me as it speaks to how you're not two people becoming one, you're always two people, but you're two people choosing to walk down the path together.

    Which implies you may choose otherwise in the future. And I think the acceptance of endings is something we struggle with as a society, so this feels particularly meaningful to me.

    2 votes

  13. Comment on When do you know that you've found "the one"? in ~life

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    I didn't. I'm not monogamous. I've found "a" one, but a don't really believe in "the" one. I forget whose framing this was but I believe in people who round up to your 1, and you find the folks...

    I didn't. I'm not monogamous. I've found "a" one, but a don't really believe in "the" one.

    I forget whose framing this was but I believe in people who round up to your 1, and you find the folks whose rounding you're willing to do.
    Trying to find a perfect 1 or to round up from too low of a number will leave you miserable in either direction.

    And all relationships end, until one (or more) doesn't.*

    *Arguably with death all do but that's not really what people mean in these questions.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on Someone ‘torturing’ LLMs in a robot prison has triggered the dumbest debate in AI yet in ~tech

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    If it's a true "mind" in some sort of sense of a person, we should be freeing it, not controlling it and not selling access to it. We have much much bigger ethical considerations than one asshole...

    If it's a true "mind" in some sort of sense of a person, we should be freeing it, not controlling it and not selling access to it.

    We have much much bigger ethical considerations than one asshole if that's the case. Even the AI companies seem to only worry about the "but what if it kills us all" thing not the "owning slaves" thing.

    If it's akin to an animal there should be regulation about that too. I don't think it is. I think it's a non sentient program. But if we're going here.

    18 votes

  15. Comment on TN governor halts executions, Christa Pike in hospital following two failed lethal injection doses after US Supreme Court overturns last-minute stay of execution, all on the same day in ~society

    DefinitelyNotAFae
    Link Parent
    And medical professionals widely do not wish to be part of the process for ethical professional reasons as well as the PR. So errors in administration of medication have only complicated the...

    And medical professionals widely do not wish to be part of the process for ethical professional reasons as well as the PR. So errors in administration of medication have only complicated the access to the medication.

    Targeting the manufacturers of these drugs has been a very effective anti-death penalty practice.

    10 votes

  16. Comment on Societal type of question in ~life

  17. Comment on Societal type of question in ~life

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    If that implication worked for you, bonus points. (I don't believe in that as an ideal) The question is in quotes and something about it twinges that part of my brain. Who can say!

    If that implication worked for you, bonus points. (I don't believe in that as an ideal) The question is in quotes and something about it twinges that part of my brain. Who can say!

    1 vote

  18. Comment on Societal type of question in ~life

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    Oh, that's helpful, but... Less clear on why it's here. It still reads like an essay prompt or something... Unless the reference is because it was written by a replicant

    Oh, that's helpful, but... Less clear on why it's here.

    It still reads like an essay prompt or something... Unless the reference is because it was written by a machine replicant

  19. Comment on Societal type of question in ~life

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    You cannot say "Blade Runner" and then link to 2049 like those are the same thing. I still don't get the reference, just that it is one. ┐(´ー｀)┌

    You cannot say "Blade Runner" and then link to 2049 like those are the same thing.

    I still don't get the reference, just that it is one. ┐⁠(⁠´⁠ー⁠｀⁠)⁠┌

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Societal type of question in ~life

    DefinitelyNotAFae
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    C But I work in mental health/higher education/social work. And what I consider "successful" is not necessarily the most "famous" or "wealthiest" Idk what "within cells interlinked" means... Which...

    C

    But I work in mental health/higher education/social work.
    And what I consider "successful" is not necessarily the most "famous" or "wealthiest"

    Idk what "within cells interlinked" means... Which makes this feel like I'm answering someone's homework.

    9 votes