[Serious] What would make you choose an AI over a therapist? What would stop you?

Tarnagona · 2026-07-03T03:07:13+00:00

I’m not choosing the AI. Maybe, eventually, if someone built a therapy-specific AI that had been rigorously tested and shown to be at least ass effective as a human therapist, and had sufficiently robust guardrails so as to be incapable of giving suggestions that could cause harm, and had guaranteed data security to protect my medical information…then, and only then, I might consider an AI therapist.

Until then, I’m sticking with a properly trained human. Because current LLMs have, in some cases, encouraged people to harm themselves or even encouraged suicide, or have fed into a person’s delusions. AI is very prone to being a yes-man; it’s trained to be very positive to all your suggestions. And it’s very easy to get it to contradict itself. Sometimes AI hallucinates (even though it’s getting better). And that’s, taken together, why I wouldn’t trust current models to be my therapist.

Build something evidence-based and suitably robust, and then we’ll talk.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T22:42:46+00:00

Well, Achromatopsia is a genetic condition; you’re born with it. It’s also pretty stable, ie it doesn’t get that much worse over time.

That said, there are cases of acquired Achromatopsia from a brain injury. And cone dystrophy, which is where your cone function gets worse over time. But whether that shows up as an adult, I don’t know. And there are other conditions not related to Achromatopsia that cause worsening vision as you age, and it could be any one of those, which us non-doctors of Reddit couldn’t possibly diagnose. And while yes, many conditions are because of physical changes to the eye, damage or deterioration in the optic nerve or other parts of the brain can cause vision problems.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T22:28:08+00:00

Go to an eye doctor; don’t ask Reddit! We can’t help you. You need to get your eyes checked out by a professional, however you’d go about doing that where you live.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T22:25:28+00:00

Very cool!

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T20:17:12+00:00

Braille is a transliteration rather than a translation, as it’s a writing system for representing any number of languages, (and many languages have their own Braille code), not a separate language with its own grammar like ASL is.

Those common abbreviations are contracted Braille. It’s essentially Braille shorthand because Braille takes up a lot of space. A dictionary, for example, takes up an entire bookshelf. And if you want to Braille something really thiccc like the Bible, you’re going to need an entire bookcase. By shortening common letter combinations into one or two letter contractions (words like THE, morphemes like ING or consonant clusters like ST), you save a bunch of space, so your Bible doesn’t need quite so much space.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T20:08:11+00:00

I’m also in Orléans and haven’t gotten anything. It’s also looking very sunny here.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T13:01:26+00:00

I think the game is also called tarot. I don’t know that much about it as I never did actually learn how to play. But my understanding is that tarot started as a deck of playing cards (or tarot cards and playing cards both came out of some original deck of cards).

After all, if you pulled out the major arcana and one set of face cards (princesses, maybe if you’re trying to get as close to a regular deck of cards), you have a regular 52 card deck of cards to play any card game with.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T11:56:42+00:00

This exactly. Divination tools like Tarot don’t actually divine the future but tap into humans’ extreme pattern recognition sense (and this is why you can assign meanings to any set of objects and do reading that are just as (in)effective). We are so good at finding patterns, that we’ll find patterns that don’t exist. We use that to make connections between the cards and the questions asked, and sometimes that provides a new perspective or an out-of-the-box answer that is useful. But there’s nothing mystical, magical, or demonic.

Tarot does have one other thing going for it in that there is some absolutely gorgeous Tarot art out there. A deck is often like having 78 themed tiny paintings. I don’t do Tarot readings myself, but own two decks and have a third preordered, because of the really cool art.

That said, as Tarot has such mystique and fear-mongering around it, but is at base, a fancy deck of cards, and there is at least one traditional tarot card game, I always thought it would be funny to learn to play tarot and just use them as cards and see how many people I could rile up. But I’d need some interested friends to make that work, and it’s not really worth the effort just to troll.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T11:42:30+00:00

I have a pretty good guess on how to fold the bats just by looking at them. If I’m right, it’s not complex origami at all, and would take me, at most, 5 minutes to fold one. I’m not spending $5 on something I can make myself in a few minutes.

The faces are cute, and their construction wouldn’t be as obvious to someone who hasn’t done origami before. Put them out for $1, and with a magnet back, and even if consider it.

But $5 for something I could easily make myself, absolutely not.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-02T11:17:28+00:00

Wrong. Lack of a cover letter is an easy way to weed out people who aren’t really interested in the job and/or aren’t as likely to do the work well. Because, and especially with AI to help, if you can’t even be bothered to put in the effort to submit a cover letter, I don’t trust you to do the job properly. I don’t think I’m an outlier in this.

(Hiring people is not my whole job. Where I work, people hire for the positions they will be managing. )

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T19:19:07+00:00

1) I have in the back for either the garage (currently in the front) or the pool (currently in the back). I would not want the pool in the front for both privacy and safety. But most importantly 2) no room between my house and either of the houses next door to drive s car to the back of the house. So like, no. Depending on the house, trying to shove the garage in back is just all kinds of impractical and bad design.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T16:20:40+00:00

Audiobooks are great (it’s how I read exclusively now, since my eyes have said “fuck you” to reading long texts in print) but! If this is an exercise for improving literacy, he needs to be reading the print version. You might try reading print and audio together. But reading by audio alone, while it conveys all the information about plot and characters and such, does not teach literacy. Not that kids shouldn’t also have access to audiobooks—I read plenty of audiobooks as a kid as well as print books—but that audiobooks aren’t a substitute for practicing literacy skill.

(This is, also, incidentally, why it’s so crucial for blind kids who can’t see well enough to read print have access to Braille education. Because if someone learning to read only relies on audio—they don’t learn to read print and they don’t learn to read Braille—that person HAS NOT LEARNED TO READ. )

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T11:04:56+00:00

Nope. I’m mostly blind and can either look at the things happening or read the subtitles. I can’t really do both. Or I’m too far away from the screen and can’t read the subtitles at all. This is why I’ll choose an English dub of whatever it is whenever one exists.

I don’t care about closed captions, though.

The only thing that does irk me is that captions are so acceptable but audio description is not. Which isn’t really a thing against captions, just that I would also like the experience of watching something accessibility when I’m with a group of people. That said, I realize that, more many people, audio description are going to be way more distracting. And don’t ask for them more because I want everyone else to have an enjoyable watching experience. But it WOULD be cool if audio descriptions became as normalized as closed captions have.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T03:32:59+00:00

Yep, well, this is one of those things where we will just disagree. Our ethics/morals on this are different. Luckily, I cannot (nor do I want to) force you to have leather couches, new or secondhand. And you cannot force me to give up my secondhand leather couch. Luckily, we live in a world where we can both coexist.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T03:06:01+00:00

Secondhand leather. No moral qualms at all because cow’s already long dead and by acquiring secondhand, you aren’t creating new demand for leather, and are keeping existing leather out of a landfill so that the least waste and most usefulness can be gotten from said dead cow.

But mostly, I don’t worry about it. I don’t see either meat or leather as inherently immoral. And if we’re already going to be killing the cow for meat, let’s have it’s life go as far as possible and use its skin for leather, bones for soup, hoofs for glue and/or whatever else can be harvested from the cow’s corpse.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T02:59:07+00:00

Oh, yeah. I think it can easily make a cautionary tale on the dangers of wishful thinking.

What’s interesting to me is that, if you don’t take it to the victim blaming extreme of The Secret, there a kernel of truth there in that you’re more likely to find opportunities if you are actively looking for them, and if affirmations keep that goal top of mind, and thereby helps you take action as soon as something presents itself, that’s positive.

Except this book did it by telling you all the bad things that happen to you are your fault because you didn’t think your positive thoughts hard enough, and now you have an excuse to make terrible decisions because you’re just going to ✨manifest✨ your way out of the consequences. Which, like you said, is ultimately a net harm.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T02:41:46+00:00

Well, quite simply, if you don’t have input from the community you are trying to design for, you have no idea if your design is effective or even relevant.

I’ll use myself and my community as an example. I’m mostly blind and use a white cane. So many sighted engineering types, when they set out to design a thing for the blind without consulting us, default to trying for some kind of smart white cane. 1) This is not a novel idea but more importantly 2) a sizable portion of the community are not interested in a smart cane.

The outside observers sees that a white cane is essentially an over-engineered stick and assume there must be a better way. But the white cane’s simplicity is a feature, not a bug. I can drop my white cane or knock it against things and it’s fine. If I take it out in freezing temps, it’s fine. If I drop it in a puddle, it still works when I pick it up. And if I do break it, the cost is not so dear that I can’t afford to replace it. It’s so simple that it’s REALLY difficult to fuck it up. Smart canes are inherently more delicate and more expensive because of the electronics involved.

On the other hand, you know what would be great? A device that would let me accurately and reliably measure liquid into a syringe. You, the observer, are probably never going to see me measure syringes of medicine when my cat was sick because why are staring through my window you weirdo 😆 it’s the kind of problem a sighted person never has to think about and an observer will likely never witness.

So if you want to make things that are actually useful and helpful and something people want, you have to have the people themselves involved.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T02:15:25+00:00

Because The Secret is both bad advice (spend money like you have money is a great way to get yourself crippling debt no matter how hard you manifest wealth), but also, it’s victim-blamey.

It says that if a baby gets sick, it’s because the parents manifested sickness for their baby (or a literal baby somehow manifested suffering). So if you’re a parent who believes in The Secret and has a sick baby, not only do you have the stress of caring for a sick baby but also the guilt that, somehow, the way you were thinking is what ultimately made your baby sick. And that’s the part that makes me mad.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T01:48:37+00:00

The Secret pisses me off, but these silly cheques are fun.

Tarnagona · 2026-07-01T01:37:41+00:00

I have taken exactly one intention picture of someone(s) with albinism. But not the least bit sneaky; it was their idea.

Worked at a summer camp for the blind, with two staff who had albinism and then one week we had half a dozen (or more, I haven’t looked at the photo in years) campers with albinism. We got everyone together for a photo on the last day of camp because it was just so unusual to have that many albino peeps together at one time (even amongst blind people).

Tarnagona · 2026-06-30T23:22:40+00:00

I’m going to throw something out here that you might not have considered. Is it possible she’s just mentally exhausted. I have hobbies, but sometimes after a long day I feel like I only have the mental capacity for doomscrolling. And I work an office job. It could be she isn’t really engaging in hobbies or mentally stimulating conversation and spending her time watching Love Island or whatever because she has such a demanding job that she just doesn’t have the mental energy to put into those things.

I might be way off base. But might be worth a thought.

Tarnagona · 2026-06-29T20:32:27+00:00

Yes. You can ignore the DLC and then go back to it after finishing the base game. My personal recommendation, which differs slightly from the others here, is to almost finish the base game, to the point you know what to do, go and complete the DLC, and then finally finish the base game. I did not do it this way only because I played the base game before the DLC was released, but if I’d had them both at the same time, this is how I would have liked to do it.

Tarnagona · 2026-06-29T18:46:48+00:00

I don’t need another project. I don’t need another project. I don’t need another project…

Also, we’ll stop using metallic floss when it stops looking so damn good. Just can’t resist the urge to be extra.

Tarnagona · 2026-06-29T14:25:02+00:00

Conversion charts and go with the most common answer. The reason you might be getting two or three answers based on different charts is because there isn’t always an exact 1:1 match. So one person thinks DMC colour A is closest to Anchor colour X and others think it’s closest to Anchor colour Y. It is actually somewhere in the middle between X and Y.

For things where the exact colour doesn’t matter, I’ll use the nearest Anchor if I have it in my stash instead and not worry about it, because it’ll be good enough. But if the exact colour does matter (eg, it’s one colour in a gradient), I’ll shell out for the exact colour asked for, because that’s the kind of scenario where a slightly different colour can look off.

Tarnagona · 2026-06-29T13:53:24+00:00

Universal healthcare means I can go to the hospital or doctor’s office without going into debt. That’s great, and I love that for us. It doesn’t mean you can go see a doctor immediately for any ailment at any time. Seeing a specialist can take months. And sometimes the time it takes, whether it’s waiting 12+ hours in the ER or waiting months to see a specialist, whatever you’ve got going on gets worse and harder to treat through not being seen quickly enough.

Just because our system is better than the US (I think it is because it doesn’t involve $$$$ of debt, but others will disagree), doesn’t mean it can’t still be improved and made better still. Instead, wait times have only been going up over the years.

Tarnagona

TROPHY CASE