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.

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 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.

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.

I just use nonsense answers or answers that make absolutely no sense to anyone else. (Inside jokes and the like)

I do have a tech background in addition to being a medical student and it really drives me bonkers that we’re calling these overgrown algorithms “AI”. The generative AI models I suppose are a little closer to earning the definition as they are black-box programs that develop themselves to a certain extent, but all of the reputable “AI” programs used in science and medicine are very carefully curated algorithms with specific rules and parameters that they follow.

The discriminative AI’s are just really complex algorithms, and to my understanding, are not complete black-boxes. As someone who has a lot of medical problems I receive care for as well as being someone who will be a physician in about 10 months, I refuse to trust any black-box programming with my health or anyone else’s.

Right now, the only legitimate use generative AI has in medicine is as a note-taker to ease the burden of documentation on providers. Their work is easily checked and corrected, and if your note-taking robot develops weird biases, you can delete it and start over. I don’t trust non-human things to actually make decisions.

They don’t use the generative models for this. The AI’s that do this kind of work are trained on carefully curated data and have a very narrow scope that they are good at.

The important thing to know here is that those AI were trained by very experienced radiologists who are physicians that specialize in reading imaging. The AI’s wouldn’t have this capability if the humans didn’t train them.

Also, the imaging that AI performs well with is fairly specific, and there are many kinds of imaging techniques and diagnostic applications that the AI is still very bad at.

I do this now and didn’t have to as a kid…however, I have a weird kidney problem where my kidneys will just dump water, whether or not I have the water to spare. This means that I have a minimum water requirement of 4 liters a day. It’s not as bad as when I was on a really horrible medication that started the whole issue. When I was on that medication I had to drink about 4 gallons of water a day.

End result: I have a stupid party trick where I can down a liter of fluid in about 10 seconds, and a gallon of fluid in about 5 to 10 minutes depending on how recently I’ve eaten. (I did give myself water poisoning once, but that took 8 gallons over about 14 hours)

Edit: Also, having multiple water bottles means I have somewhere to put all my awesome stickers!

I was looking for someone to mention Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop.

What are your thoughts on Fullmetal Alchemist? I personally adore FMA: Brotherhood and I think it meets these criteria.

That is astonishingly stupid.

Ft Leavenworth is the military’s prison. They don’t send civilians there.

That’s why the trailer has me so hyped for this game. It looks like the game is going to be different because Ciri is the protagonist. Her experience, reactions, and approach to saving a young woman from being sacrificed are totally different than what Geralt’s would be. I hate it when games like Mass Effect are like “Oh! You can play as FemShep! That totally counts as representation!” even though it changes literally nothing about the story.

I want more games that actually address the real and significant differences in the experiences and perspectives of different characters. I’m always disappointed when there’s a “female” option that’s just a re-skin of the male character with no changes in how the character interacts with the world and the story. (This happens a lot in non-video game media too.)