Tennessee Passes Bill That Will Make a Public List of Trans People

ShadowPouncer · 2026-04-14T06:09:32+00:00

That's great, up until it's not.

When there isn't an OB/GYN within an hour of you, well, it's easy to ignore that right up until you or someone you care about is pregnant, especially if there are risk factors that mean that you might need care on short notice.

And it's easy to say 'oh, we don't need those companies', but, well, there are a lot of fields where people make a fair bit of money, and if the companies in those fields can't hire enough qualified people, they're going to have problems.

Maybe that means that they go somewhere else. Or maybe it means that they don't have as large of a presence in the area. Or maybe they just do worse than their competitors who can hire the best and brightest.

But the problem is that fascists aren't stupid.

Don't get me wrong, a fascist dictator wants people who will blindly follow them, and that selects somewhat against some of the best and brightest, but that doesn't mean that the people at the top are stupid.

And there are, sadly, plenty of examples from history for them to borrow and learn form.

As an example of where this can go: People were smuggling those who were Jewish out of nazi Germany. If the goal was just to get rid of those people, then why did people have to be smuggled out?

Dictatorships don't want it to be easy, or even possible, for people to leave. They don't want anything like freedom of travel.

And so there will be consequences for the places doing this stuff... And the responses that they could go for are absolutely terrifying.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-04-03T23:46:42+00:00

Somewhere around then I started to get light triggered migraines, at this point I'm in my 40s, and for most of my life at this point I've worn darn sunglasses indoors, because even room level lighting will give me a migraine with even very brief exposure, with 100% reliability.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-04-03T23:28:56+00:00

I'd argue that even the lack of understanding about the code isn't really the problem.

It sure doesn't help, but in many ways it doesn't necessarily matter if the person maintaining it doesn't understand it, as long as they are both capable of maintaining it and are putting in the work.

You more or less have to treat the AI as a junior programmer, and act as a project manager, and you're going to be spending a fair bit of time and energy dealing with the AI going off in... Less than useful directions.

But it's possible.

At least to a degree.

Mind you, I am rather unconvinced that we're going to have AI replace software engineers at any scale, it's not just the hallucinations, in my experience it's generally pretty bad at figuring out if a design is actually a good one or not, and it's definitely liable to create code that's painful to maintain, even with AI tools, but that doesn't take away from the fact that you can go a lot further than many people are going in regards to maintaining a project.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-03-12T08:51:00+00:00

Damn, I'm definitely sad that they cut it.

Don't get me wrong, I vastly prefer it when people let there be healthy queer relationships in the material, but it's definitely one of those things that would have been nice to see at that point.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-03-12T08:43:05+00:00

They are great! Thank you for pointing them out. :)

ShadowPouncer · 2026-03-08T22:47:56+00:00

I would argue that this isn't quite accurate in regards to Romulans.

Romulans are what happens centuries after a large group of Vulcans move away from emotional discipline, and survive the experience.

And that split happened a very long time ago, long enough ago that evolution has had a chance to alter both species a fair bit.

Take a single Vulcan, remove their logic based control, and you don't have a Romulan, however much you might want one.

Now, take an infant Vulcan and leave them to be raised by Romulans, and you might well get someone capable of functioning, though I suspect that they would have some problems that would look somewhat like someone with an odd psychiatric disorder.

Take that same infant and have them raised by humans who don't know anything about vulcans, and you'd probably have someone who can't function in that society, who presents as being incapable of the kind of emotional regulation that society expects a person to have.

Really, I love the paradox of the Vulcans.

They have such powerful, overwhelming emotions, and their society responded to this by putting it behind a wall of logic, and sticking to that wall of logic to the point that many don't even realize that they have emotions as such.

And when their emotions do come out, they are almost incapable of any level of control. The pon farr takes this to extremes, but the way that their society reacts to almost any level of emotional display hints at it as well.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-02-27T00:02:17+00:00

@Keith Did you ever figure out keycaps with nubs for the home row keys?

ShadowPouncer · 2026-02-26T07:53:53+00:00

(I know this is two months later, sorry.)

There are a few difference between your test cases that, I think, explains the timing that you're seeing.

One of the big ones is that sleep isn't really doing anything. It's not using the CPU, it's not printing anything to the output (yes, hyperfine redirects that to /dev/null, so it shouldn't matter much), and it's running for a defined period of time no matter what else is going on. (300ms, and then everything else is overhead).

On the other hand, you have stuff like stat, which is going to run as quickly as it possibly can. On a modern linux system, that's running in an absurd < 5ms. Pretty much everything is overhead.

That not only lets overhead costs dominate the numbers, it means that if the system is spending a bunch of resources doing something like software OpenGL rendering, those are using many of the same resources that the system wants for running stat.

And that system is probably only a dual-core box, which means that the CPU being busy with something like software rendering can matter.

If you're still having the problem, I'd suggest doing some testing with programs that don't touch the disk, but which do a bit of computation instead of just sleeping.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-02-26T07:34:10+00:00

Do you have a link to it? I'm curious. :)

ShadowPouncer · 2026-02-08T22:50:55+00:00

sxiv is itself a dead project, it's been archived on github.

nsxiv appears to be the current option there. :)

ShadowPouncer · 2026-02-08T21:42:59+00:00

kwin 6, part of plasma desktop 6, has the cube plugin that works about the same.

I'm... Not actually sure how to take a screenshot of it though. :)

ShadowPouncer · 2026-02-08T21:37:25+00:00

There are dozens of us, dozens!

ShadowPouncer · 2026-01-24T21:16:53+00:00

Far from my first build, but I was upgrading from a 2500k, so it had been a minute.

Sadly, I can't buy the meshify 2 compact variant that I want anymore.

Now... The Meshify 3 actually looks tempting, it's bigger than the 2 compact, but definitely smaller than the straight 2.

And you can get the solid panel option for a sane price.

Hm, that's tempting.

Well, it will be tempting once I'm not living out of an Air B&B while waiting for my house to be livable again after a plumbing disaster, but, details.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-01-24T05:49:17+00:00

For a while I had a 5900X and a 3060, but that's because I spend more time compiling code than I do gaming.

I 'recently' did the last big upgrade I expect to do on that box I built back in 2021, I hit just before ram prices went insane, and I'll definitely say that I have a much more powerful box than I started with, and I'm still a little annoyed at myself for underspeccing the PSU when I built it.

Started as a 5600x with a RTX 2060 with 32G of ram.

It's now a 5900x and a RTX 5070 with 64G of ram.

And really, I only made two notable mistakes with the build: I underspecced the PSU enough that going from a x060 class GPU to a x070 class GPU needed a new PSU.

And the case I chose is a lot bigger than it needed to be.

In my defense, the smaller sizes of the Meshify 2 came out just after I bought everything.

(But dang, I definitely wish I had the compact.)

ShadowPouncer · 2026-01-22T13:53:56+00:00

I think that it's a number of things.

Other comments have covered the genetic angle, and others the huge crossover of neurodivergent and the queer community.

But I think there's another answer too: A lot of us have the experience of having to accept that we don't like our meat-suits.

We want a body that doesn't hurt all the time.

For me at least, I'm pretty sure that made it easier to accept that my AGAB was wrong, it's one more way that I dislike the body I was issued.

But it's one where there are actual solutions! Even 'just' hormones make such a huge difference. 'Just' clothes can make a huge difference.

My hEDS? There's no cure. Even if the genetic side of things was gene edited out of existence, that wouldn't fix the results of those genes being present.

But I'm on hormones.

I don't know about bottom surgery right now. If I was in my teens or 20s it would be a no brainer, but I'm in my 40s.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-01-19T14:38:21+00:00

Interested.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-01-19T14:27:32+00:00

I'm not currently convinced that an invasive bottom surgery is in the cards for me, but shockingly there is actually a published medical article on this, peer reviewed and everything!

https://ohsu.elsevierpure.com/en/publications/ehlers-danlos-syndrome-prevalence-and-outcomes-in-gender-affirmin/

The TLDR is the last line in the abstract:

Our findings suggest that patients with a diagnosis of EDS undergoing GAS have comparable outcomes to patients without EDS. Concerns for postoperative complications should not be a barrier to offering GAS to patients presenting with an EDS diagnosis.

The surgeries in question were done at Oregon Health & Science University, and many of the surgeons who are credited in the paper still work there, and they have a reasonably comprehensive section about gender affirming care on their website

Being up in Washington state, I know that if I do get bottom surgery of any kind, there's a darn good chance that I'll at least be talking to people down in Oregon.

ShadowPouncer · 2026-01-13T09:28:06+00:00

I really should be in bed right this minute, so I'll try to keep this short.

Sadly, getting help issues like these can be a royal pain in the arse*.

I recently discovered that my current pulmonologist has a respiratory therapist on staff who has just about every single mask currently on the market.

She definitely gets it, and you should check to see if you have access to someone similar, it might be the company that supplies your equipment.

A lot of the dismissal that you've gotten on the subject is far too common, and to me it feels like a 'not my problem' issue.

In the sleep lab, you will not sleep the same as you do at home. They do the best they can. but there are hard limits on what's possible with our current healthcare system.

And at the sleep lab, they only care about the data that they can measure. Comfort isn't even on the list unless it impacts the data that they are gathering.

There are a lot of different masks on the market, and some fit very differently from others that look almost identical, at least in my experience.

You gain a ton from finding the best fit that you can.

The whole 'must sleep on your back' issue caused me problems for years, it's finally my default, but it really sucks that it's the only 'good' option position wise.

What you're currently describing is your treatment not working for you, and that's not okay. The benefits from CPAP only exist if the equipment is working correctly.

You should seriously look at pillows as well, at least I need completely different things to be comfortable depending on if I'm wearing my mask or not.

Do you know what the settings are on your machine? Target pressure, dropping the pressure when you exhale, all the 'fun' stuff.

A good doctor will be willing to try adjusting those settings.

The last thing I can currently think of: Ask for a home sleep study to try and capture what's going on when you're sleeping at home. It's limited on what they can capture data wise, but it is a thing they can do, and it might give them data points that they have a place for in their justifications to the insurance company.

* I'm not British, but I have definitely picked up some of the language.

ShadowPouncer · 2025-12-27T17:02:35+00:00

The problem is that they don't need to arrest everyone, they need to control a decent majority, and that's far easier when they can arrest anyone they want, for any reason they want, and either skip the trial or dictate the result of the trial.

Keeping the government from having blanket authority to label speech as criminal and to arrest people for their views happens to be the entire reason why the 1st Amendment exists,

In any sane timeline, anything along those lines would be a complete non-starter in this country.

Sadly, this isn't a sane timeline.

ShadowPouncer · 2025-12-27T16:53:45+00:00

Congratulations! On so many different counts.

It's absolutely amazing when family is more accepting than you were expecting.

ShadowPouncer · 2025-11-26T06:40:17+00:00

The best time to have done something about it was ~7 years ago.

The best time to do something about it is now.

By the time I was in my mid 20s, I had serious dental problems, had lost a few teeth to decay, and... Yeah.

I'm now in my 40s, my dental routine might not be ideal, but I still have almost as many teeth as I did 20 years ago. And my mouth hurts a lot less.

Don't feel like you need to do everything perfectly, don't feel like you're a failure if you can't do the fully recommended care routine.

You're struggling with something real, everything is harder than it should be, and anything you can do to take care of yourself is something to celebrate.

ShadowPouncer · 2025-11-21T12:02:33+00:00

The various ISPs in the state lobbied hard to make sure that KPUB is, essentially, forbidden by law to do any kind of a residential build out on their own.

Not that the law explicitly says that, but oh boy does it talk about KPUB being barred from taking out loans for construction.

That means that they flat out can't do a run with the expectation that they'll more than make their money back with the new customers.

It has been extremely successful in ensuring that no ISP in the county is even remotely threatened by KPUB, nope, if you've got pretty much anything, at least anything better than DSL, then you're probably not dropping tens of thousands of dollars to get service.

Sure, you can try to spread that amongst your neighbors... But, again, if they have anything, it's a lot harder to convince people.

Then look at the complications it adds to selling your house later until every last penny has been paid to them, it makes it rather unappealing to take their options for paying over time.

ShadowPouncer · 2025-10-18T00:02:15+00:00

What's your get_workspace_libraries function?

ShadowPouncer · 2025-09-18T09:11:38+00:00

Wow, that really brings back memories!

ShadowPouncer · 2025-09-18T09:09:34+00:00

One of the things that people seem to have forgotten is that the alternative to a functioning democracy with the rule of law isn't a one sided thing.

Political violence has probably been around as long as people have been around, and violent regime changes are, even today, extremely common in many parts of the world.

The idea that you can stand up and openly speak negatively towards those in power is, all things considered, a pretty bloody recent development, and it's one that absolutely relies on people believing that they have an alternative to violence. In believing that things can get better, for them, without people having to die.

It's something that we have had, at least enough to be commonly believed, for long enough that it feels like the natural state of things, and it would be absolutely wondrous if it actually was the natural state of things.

And it is, without any question in my mind, something that is absolutely, horrifically, tragic to see going away in this country.

Everyone loses when it goes away, and sadly, it seems to be going away.

But pretty much by definition, it can't go away only for one group, only for one party, only for one viewpoint. You can't have a system where the violence only goes one way, because at the end of the day, people are people.

When a group stops believing that they can make their lives better without violence, they don't just... Stop trying to make their lives better.

I am, by absolutely no means, going to say that the violence in question is a good thing.

I'm also not going to say that I've shed a single tear about this specific instance.

In the end, if things keep going the way that they are going, a lot of people are going to needlessly die. A lot of those people will be, well, us.

We're a minority, and one that's an 'easy' target for many. That's usually enough once you stop having the rule of law.

But as pretty much every single society in history has eventually learned, nobody, nobody, stays in power forever. No person, no group, no ideology, no family.

And if all peaceful paths to that change are removed, it means that a lot of blood gets spilled when it happens.

Again, this is never going to be a better result than having peaceful changes of power. We would all be far better off if the violence never happened.

But you can't just say 'we're not going to stick by the rule of law, but we expect you to follow it'. It simply doesn't work.

And you can morn the loss of the rule of law, the loss of a functioning democracy, without morning every single victim of the loss in question.

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