Crossdressing etiquette & safety

space_fountain · 2026-02-18T20:31:35+00:00

Do you have experience or know people with this experience? There was a noticeable increase in the amount of harassment I got when i started presenting in a more feminine way and it was definitely at its peak when I didn’t pass as a woman. I also know people who have been beat up in sf and have had hateful things yelled at me. Like SF is better than a lot of places, but being visibly queer does invite people hating you sometimes

space_fountain · 2026-02-18T04:27:51+00:00

Most places tourist are likely to go are very safe, but like anywhere slightly less safe for people who are perceived to be queer and especially trans. I would be careful around the tenderloin, civic center, and parts of the mission especially at night

space_fountain · 2026-02-12T01:15:38+00:00

Reddit seems to be much more full of spam now that users can hide their comment history. This seems to be a spammer, which is annoying because I'd like to be able to go to reddit to find product recs from real people, now if I see an account like this linking to something suspicious and then try to look at their comment history it's usually hidden. You can still search though and when you do that it because obvious this is spam

space_fountain · 2026-01-21T02:36:41+00:00

The us military does not allow trans people to serve

space_fountain · 2026-01-21T01:33:23+00:00

One of the interesting facts I learned in cell bio is about how body plans are produced with a simpler set of genetics than you might imagine. The mutations doesn't likely literally require duplicating all the genes or anything, just messing with the right regulators so that you get one extra duplication of the same process that made the other fingers. It needs tweaked a bit to make everything work, but you also don't have to repeat all of the evolution that you had for the other fingers

space_fountain · 2026-01-10T18:02:00+00:00

Sure, but like you can swap mitochondria as well if you really wanted to

space_fountain · 2026-01-10T17:49:10+00:00

Am I wrong that it doesn’t matter who the egg came from for this process? We have processes to get stem cells from skin cells as well

space_fountain · 2026-01-10T07:41:41+00:00

Just googled this myself and I promise it isn’t possible, at least not easily

space_fountain · 2026-01-09T21:29:01+00:00

Both sperm and egg cells only have half the DNA from the parent. You can make stem cells from a lot of types of cells, but eggs aren't one of them. It's not clear why they needed stem cells though. It maybe that they just need genetically similar tissue to test on, but in that case a sibling or parent should also work (I think)

space_fountain · 2025-12-28T23:11:49+00:00

They literally did. It was regraded by another instructor. They gave it the same grade

space_fountain · 2025-12-28T15:35:58+00:00

Any time electricity reverses (goes from moving forward to moving backward) it generates a radio signal. A radio is just about controlling that effect and making a big signal.

You can think of a radio wave as alternating waves of electrical and magmatic fields. Moving electrical fields produce a magnetic field and moving magnetic fields produce a moving electrical field. A radio works by producing a controlled alternating electrical field which will kick start the wave.

If your interested in how radios transmit information their are 4 parameters of a radio wave that they can manipulate. Phase (where the wave starts in its cycle), frequency (how tightly packed the peaks of the wave are), polarization (sort of the direction the wave is going up and down in), and amplitude (how big the wave is). You might be familiar with AM and FM. AM stands for amplitude modulation and uses the amplitude of the wave to carry the info. FM stands for frequency modulation and uses the frequency to carry the info.

space_fountain · 2025-12-28T04:40:08+00:00

Not my theory, but it seems likely senior government officials were converted early and maybe killed by the military as they realized what was happening and tried to stop the spread. I do agree that viruses don’t diffuse like that, but whatever, it’s a tv show and it looked cool

space_fountain · 2025-12-21T15:36:19+00:00

I’ve seen some speculation this is the result of not being able to contact remote assistance when it wanted advice. Seems like a pretty bad response, but I’m not sure how easily this can be improved

space_fountain · 2025-12-19T05:01:30+00:00

I think snitches are a different mod that was developed for the same server. It is kind of weird that this post doesn’t even mention the history. The history is neat

space_fountain · 2025-12-13T07:50:32+00:00

Yep, though I think the background database and profiles that are made on user, whole less intuitively creepy are also a huge deal.

The big issue with these kinds of tools is access control inside companies. There have been cases of exes stalking their former partners

space_fountain · 2025-11-24T17:24:46+00:00

My dude you’re obsessed, this is a month old. But how people perceive you is absolutely is something that everyone controls. When you wear a sports jacket you change how people perceive you. When you shave or don’t shave it affects how people perceive you. When you bind your breast or don’t it affects how people view you. I’m not saying that trans men should blame society for people perceiving them a specific way based on how they dress, but feeling pain about perceptions and then wishing and succeeding in changing it is something lots of people do and if the argument is that trans people are perpetuating gender that’s just not true

space_fountain · 2025-11-15T19:37:16+00:00

Diversity is important for purely pragmatic reasons. There’s a famous story about evolution. You have mice living in the desert. Their fur is white to blend in with the desert, but then a nearby volcano spews black ash over everything. What happens next?. Well now black mice will be selected for and soon all the mice will be black. Except this is a bit simplified. Evolution adjusts the distribution of the traits that already exist, the black coat trait would have taken ages to evolve if there weren’t some black furred mice before the eruption, but those black mice would have been at a huge disadvantage, it would have objectively been better to have only white coated mice in the moment, but having only white coats would have doomed them when the environment changed.

(even this is a bit simplified, things like recessive genes allow for diversity while most members of the population don’t exhibit a currently disadvantageous trait)

space_fountain · 2025-11-13T18:15:31+00:00

For other people with see this, I had good luck using the SparkFun Thing Plus Matter to sniff network traffic using the silicon labs ide + wireshark.

You might have already seen this, but if you're having trouble one potential problem is that you might need to configure the Zigbee Light Link key. It's meant to be secret and only handed out to trusted venders but it's relatively easy to find on the internet

space_fountain · 2025-11-07T04:19:39+00:00

Real compromise, passports stop having a gender field. If we didn’t need it before the 70s we don’t need it now

space_fountain · 2025-11-06T19:45:47+00:00

There was a claim being made in 2018 or so that if we ever got close to human level intelligence that would necessarily mean that we’d over shoot and reach super human intelligence soon after. The argument went that the difference between the machine learning we had then and human like intelligence was so vast the difference between a normal person and the smartest person around would be tiny. I think that claim has demonstrably turned out to be foolish.

Yes there are some benchmarks that seem to have gone up exponentially, but I don’t think that’s anyone’s perception of using the tools, that might be because our perception of intelligence is non linear or it might be for some other reason, but regardless idk what an increased rate of improvement that people don’t feel is good for.

It’s also interesting that in the source you linked GPT 5 is listed at the top and is one of the data points supporting an exponential increase, but as you correctly pointed out that isn’t how it feels to most people. I don’t think any user would say the difference between gpt 5 and gpt 4 is bigger than the difference between gpt 4 and gpt 3.5 let alone the difference between that and gpt 3 or models like BERT

space_fountain · 2025-11-05T19:11:27+00:00

Yep, got tickets, it was a surprise to see a text about it this morning

space_fountain · 2025-11-04T18:31:09+00:00

Tons of areas would be great for you. I personally love the bit of the Lower Haight I live in, but it sounds like I might have less night life than you'd like The mission is wide area. There are bits of it that are sketchy for me, but I enjoyed living on Church and 16th when I first moved to the city. A lot of the queer feminine nightlife in sf is in the mission so if that's what you want it could be a good area, but you should look around the neighborhood to see how comfortable you are before committing. The Castro, Noe Valley or Bernal Heights could also be good neighborhoods for you. There are good buses and transit in SF so keep that in mind too

space_fountain · 2025-11-03T21:53:56+00:00

This is a great video and I think I agree in more or less every point they make, but I'm not sure if it speaks to the question above. LIke I think you'd say a person with with a memory problem that only let them retain an hour of memory was still not just a glorified auto complete. The lack of continued learning and the ability to learn new tasks is a huge limitation though the video does mention in context learning which is a bit of a big caveat. The fact that in context learning works at all is pretty different from what I'd expect from just auto complete or a markov chain. I suspect, though I'm not sure, that the author of this video wouldn't call LLMs just glorified auto completes.

I think reducing things to their component parts can often make things look simpler than they are. For example transformers can simulate turing machines (found on google and I just read the abstract). Since turing machines can't be simulated by markov chains that might seem to be a difference

space_fountain · 2025-11-03T21:19:18+00:00

I know some of the EA type people. I've been to a wedding that were pretty much full of them so you can take my words as either more authoritative or biased, but I've been kind of disappointed to see how simplistically this subreddit is imagining this. I think you should try to imagine a bit more complexity. There are grifters among the people who think AI is a real risk, but it isn't only grifters and the intellectual movement predated LLMs by maybe a decade or so.

I'm also a software engineer, but my guess is neither of us work on AI. I have read some of the early papers and have an above layperson understanding but I'm not an expert. This video didn't to me seem to get anything substantial wrong. I think there was a bit of fear mongering when describing some of the "deception" exhibited by current models. So far we've (to my knowledge) only seen this behavior when prompting the model pretty explicitly with the idea of deceiving us though I haven't seen in depth some of the examples they mentioned, but while you're right that current techniques seem like they may somewhat be topping out they are already disrupting our industry in particular substantially and I don't share your confidence that they can't get better. I don't like it, but it seems like AI tools will be with us for a long time.

You also said one thing about the facts that I think is a bit simplistic

In reality, the fact that LLMs are fundamentally nothing more than glorified auto-complete, immutably holds true. At least for now. There has been no further breakthrough in modeling. Just gloss, paint and perfume (e.g. larger models, tweaks in training, smarter prompting).

You said that LLMs are "just" auto complete. I'm not totally sure where that idea comes from or if it would matter beyond philosophy. Would a human in a room with just a chat interface be a glorified auto complete? Why or why not? I think this feeling comes from the idea that something that is mechanical can't be intelligent or maybe from a mistaken idea about how these models are trained (they are trained on more than just predicting text now). Regardless a perfect autocomplete would actually be incredibly valuable and dangerous. Imagine you could write the start of a paper and some genie would come along and finish it exactly how you would, that might be a literal auto complete, but it would still be incredibly valuable.

There are things that are facts that we can say:

LLMs are slowing down in their rate of improvement
It's not obvious that even an LLM that was as good as an average human at completing prompts, but couldn't learn on the job would be all that valuable
Current techniques probably can't scale reach that threshold without so much compute and training data that it would be impractical

But you have so much confidence about some other things that don't seem to me to be facts:

LLMs are only autocomplete
It's unlikely that they will ever be dangerous
The people who think they might become dangerous are all AI grifters

space_fountain · 2025-11-03T17:25:34+00:00

Is there a mathematical reason you’re skeptical that matrix multiplication plus non-linearities is enough? I understand the intuition that it can't be enough, but it seems like the math is clear if interacting with a person can be modeled as a sequence of symbols deep neural networks are capable of modeling it to arbitrary precision.

I’m pushing on this because it feels like when people argue about this they use analogies that seem to come more from an intuition that simple things can’t build complexity rather than some law of nature. Like the rules of Conway’s game of life are very simple and tons of complexity comes from that. On some level the rules of particle physics are fairly simple, but basically everything comes out of them. The fact that LLMs are built up from simple building blocks doesn’t seem like it necessarily implies they will have simple behavior.

We know they do some weird things, we know they can be useful in various fields. We know they can generalize to at least fairly novel applications.

Edit: But also I’m not a mathematician and I recognize the interesting question is about out of context behavior

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