Stone Mason, Canadian ExPat living in the UK, Hobbyist musician.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Yeeeesh! Yeah. That’s… that’s definitely a reason to get a new Dr.

    Half my life ago I was doing…alllllll the drugs. At levels and mixes that quite honestly should have killed me. Of the friend group I had at that time, 7 of us, there’s myself and one other that aren’t dead, or been in the clink for 15 years and looking at a minimum of another 20.
    When I saw the way I was headed, after the first of our group had died, and while I was serving a frankly very lenient non-custodial criminal sentence, I detoxed off coke/crack, meth and heroin (smoked not injected) all at the same time.
    I can tell you, not exactly how bad or in what way, it’s gonna suck. I really really feel for you. Just make sure you follow advice on how to safely come off it, there’s a lot of drugs, legal and not, that can easily kill you if you just stop taking them.
    Be safe fam.

    So I’m in the UK, and while there’s a bit of leeway to see a GP that’s not in your catchment area, the next closest to where I live is really far. Also it’s not really the GP’s fault. They’re required to follow protocol dictated by the NHS. He walked me through it. There’s a program, you punch in the symptoms, follow the questions down the flow chart, it gives you a likely cause. Things like the intensive testing I’ve been told to try and get? He’s really just not authorised to refer me for that. We’ve had quite a long chat about it, and it really just isn’t something that he’s able to do. That would have to be something that a specialist sends me for. I’ve been on the waiting list for 25 weeks, so only 20ish more to go.
    The results of decades of underfunded health care systems…


  • This…fuck…my DUDE!

    So up until Tuesday I was driving and hour into work and, due to traffic, my way back would be minimum an hour and a half, but sometimes up to 3 hours if everything is fucked. I had considered that I might have a similar issue, mostly from not having cruise control and how I position my leg/foot while driving on the highway. Haven’t had a chance to look at the videos yet, but I suspect that they’re either the same, or very similar, exercises that my physio has had me doing.

    I’ve not been at it long, so I’ll give it time to cook. And, as of Tuesday I’ve switched depot, so my commute is now a 15min bus ride, with a ~5mins walk on either side of it, so hopefully that’ll help too…




  • Ohhhhh… that’d definitely be a hard yes.

    Tap for more over sharing.

    I’m on a lengthy wait list for the NHS urologist, so I went private. Paid £300 for a pleasant man in his 50s to fondle me for about 3mins, and to say nothing wrong anymore, whatever it was has probably passed and it’s your brain not accepting that, so here’s a referral to my equally expensive colleague for an initial consultation for chronic pain management. GP isn’t authorised to refer me for the more extensive tests that might show something wrong. Wife and I are going private for IVF, so we’ve been seeing a bunch of private specialists trying to get the best chances we can for that. Every one of them has recommended a semen culture test…

    The tests I was given by the GP were all urine based, but if it’s a low level infection in the tubes from the tests I was given wouldn’t have shown anything. And if it’s, say antibiotic resistant, then the several courses of heavy duty antibiotics would have done exactly fuck all… it’s a motherfucker.

    Honestly? Kinda wish it was like… fucking cancer, or a torsion, or fucking something I could point to and be like: THAT’S the issue, let’s work it out.












  • I personally believe there could be a place in a person’s creative workflow for the use of AI as a tool to enhance their own creative work…with caveats…

    As for the ethics of using AI to copy and art style? It’s theft. End of.

    These models are trained on stolen data. The artists/musicians/writers/intellectuals, or their estates, never gave permission for their works to be used to train these models. They never receive royalties, or payment of any kind, for the use of their works. And as we’re finding out, at the very least, Meta took that data…those creative works… illegally. People’s lives have been destroyed by laws put in place to protect IP. I personally feel those laws are fucked and should be fully scrapped in favour of something that actually protects the people creating these works. That doesn’t change the fact that when Joe Shmoe shares a torrent he could be hit with fines and possibly jail. Fines alone could essentially make a person’s life literal hell for however long they have left. The companies who have trained these models are likely going to get a “cost of doing business” slap on the wrist.

    It’s ethically ambiguous if you look at it from the standpoint of “IP law shouldn’t exist” while totally ignoring that even if these companies get away with it common people nearly never will.


  • because why else would you go to a whole other post to “prove a point” about downvoting?
    It wasn’t you (you claim)

    I do claim. I have an alt, didn’t downvote you there either. Was just pointing out that you were also making assumptions. And it’s all comments in the same thread, hardly me going to an entirely different post to prove a point.

    We will not get the benefits of Generative AI if we don’t 1. deal with the problems that are coming from it, and 2. Stop trying to shoehorn it into everything. And that’s the discussion that’s happening here.

    I agree. And while I personally feel like there’s already room for it in some people’s workflow, it is very clearly problematic in many ways. As I had pointed out in my first comment.

    I’m not going to even try to justify to you what I said in this post or that one because I honestly don’t think you care.

    I do actually! Might be hard to believe, but I reacted the way I did because I felt your first comment was reductive, and intentionally trying to invalidate and derail my comment without actually adding anything to the discussion. That made me angry because I want a discussion. Not because I want to be right, and fuck you for thinking differently.

    If you’re willing to talk about your views and opinions, I’d be happy to continue talking. If you’re just going to assume I don’t care, and don’t want to hear what other people think…then just block me and move on. 👍


  • and here you are, downvoting my valid point

    Wasn’t me actually.

    valid point

    You weren’t really making a point in line with what I was saying.

    regardless of whether we view it as a reliable information source, that’s what it is being marketed as and results like this harm both the population using it, and the people who have found good uses for it. And no, I don’t actually agree that it’s good for creative processes as assistance tools and a lot of that has to do with how you view the creative process and how I view it differently. Any other tool at the very least has a known quantity of what went into it and Generative AI does not have that benefit and therefore is problematic.

    This is a really valid point, and if you had taken the time to actually write this out in your first comment, instead of “Tell that to the guy that was expecting factual information from a hallucination generator!” I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did. And we’d be having a constructive conversation right now. Instead you made a snide remark, seemingly (personal opinion here, I probably can’t read minds) intending it as an invalidation of what I was saying, and then being smug about my taking offence to you not contributing to the conversation and instead being kind of a dick.