Nobody is actually shitty here but some things seem like they are not going to work long term. It is reasonable to have a need for some quiet time and to unwind from work. It is reasonable to need connection and validation of the relationship. It is reasonable to be upset.

He is not being reasonable about how he interacts with you. He is taking your lack of ability to be social at the level he needs as a rejection of him and in turn rejecting you. This is a lashing out response and it is not appropriate or effective. It will either result in the dissolution of the relationship or it will result in longer term toxic behaviours which will then result in the relationship falling apart.

You need to work a little less. That is basically the conclusion you have come to above and that may take time to enact, but it needs to happen. Neither of you will be happy until then. So your action should probably be to reduce just as you have said.

On your partner’s end he needs to build his own supports to take some of the load off you. He has a lot of free time that he could use going to a rock climbing class or something similar. That would give him the social interaction he cannot get from you at the moment. He also needs to work on how he talks to you about needs and his responses. He can’t put his self worth entirely in your hands. It is unsafe for his wellbeing and horribly damaging to your relationship. He needs to internally validate his worth and that is a skill, not a trait, he can learn that.

Some of what you describe above sounds like he doesn’t really understand ASD/ADHD very well and doesn’t get how burnout works. Maybe he could spend some time learning about how to be safe and healthy for himself in a relationship with someone on the spectrum? It is hard to know how he would react to hearing this, but he needs to recognise that a relationship with you is not the same as a relationship with a neurotypical and he needs to take care of himself to be safe in that relationship. It is not worse, but it is different. If he doesn’t learn how to manage his needs then they will continue to be unfulfilled and he will have a bad time.

And honestly, the dog situation is just devastating. If my partner lost their companion animal I would expect up to 6 months of very low function. For you to be working in this condition may suggest you are not able to grieve properly and are working to be away from demands, but it could also be it just doesn’t affect you in the same way it would affect my partner, we are all different. Take care of yourself and grieve as you need to, maybe spend some time talking to him about it if you feel safe doing so.

Oh, and consider planning out movie night or similar things, make it explicit what you need and book it in. Those expectations in advance can help.

So yeah, NTA, but also, nobody is fully shitty here, his behaviour seems less ideal, both of you can do things to make life better, I think this is salvageable.

One thing that gets me about AI chat agents is the idea of attack surface. If you have a clearly defined protocol you can curtail most of the possible attacks by narrowing things, only accepting well formed requests, and validating both on the user end and then on the server end before processing anything. An LLM is inherently wide in attack surface given the way it is structured. It can take a prompt which can be any set of characters connected together into tokens. These tokens can’t easily be filtered for intent or goal and yet they can get the LLM to drop other rules or restrictions because they are just other prompts.

A simple coded padlock is not very secure, but a door with no walls is less secure.

There are a few options for age verification, but the one I like best is at the ISP/device level. You make the account at the ISP level have a flag for being a kid friendly service. You could also have the government establish simple tools for parents to install on their kids devices which would limit other apps and services, for example by blocking porn or violent age inappropriate content. You could even have it tie in with the age advice for film classification, though the current classification guidelines are pretty horrible. All of that could be handled by a very small government team and could be deliverable in 6 months.

These are active steps a parent can take to limit their child’s exposure to the internet and do not come with added cost to the parent. They would be just as available for someone who is poor as for someone who is rich. It would be possible to protect kids from many of the more dangerous aspects of the internet while also leaving unmanaged devices free and clear, preserving the good things about the open internet.

Yes, they are fantastic. They do have a little bit of a Windows 95 aesthetic but I kind of like that.

Rubik’s cube was my favourite for a few years when I was commuting by train. I had a 40-60 minute trip each way for work and it was an amazing way of killing time without going mad.

Then podcasts and audio books came in and honestly, I can manage sitting still with audio playing. I need it to be stimulating enough, but running everything at 2x speed is fantastic and really makes a huge difference.

That said, I also have a notepad and pen so I can write things down while sitting, so I plan projects and write questions to be answered later. That helps a lot. I also have my phone which is great for passing time, Offline Games is a fantastic set of games that dont require purchases or ads. I also have my first aid kit on my belt and I regularly go through it and make sure all is well, along with my tech pouch. Organising those and cleaning them out works well.

To be clear, we have more guns now than we did in the 1990s. The big thing that changed was casual, unregisted, random firearm ownership, especially around the major cities. If you were rural you didn’t have much of a change, just registering your guns and vetting rid of any that were no longer legal like sawn off shotguns etc. For someone such as myself living in a major city while growing up I just didn’t see guns. Not until cops started carrying guns, which was a mistake in my opinion.

So we didn’t ban guns. We regulated them. The average person could gain access to a firearm by going through the process of licencing, registration, and so on. The average person couldn’t be bothered and just didn’t. We don’t really have handguns here for the most part, our gun culture is much more focused on rifles and shotguns, things that are useful for hunting and pest control.

Now the criminal side has always had guns. They won’t obey the laws for theft, violence, extortion, drugs, and so on, so why would they obey for guns? The handy thing is they would not have registered guns and if they get caught with those they get serious time, so they only carry when they really think they need it. That means fewer gang members running around with guns most of the time, so fewer options for things to go south all of a sudden in a crowded place. A targeted attack though is still a thing and yes, a drive by shooting is still a thing here, just rare. I was living two blocks down from one in the early 2010s in Melbourne, but that is honestly the rare case that it actually happens.

Given the rise of tobacco as a black market though, we are getting way more violence. The war on drugs is fought on both sides, and society is the bystander.

Is that meant as a sort of joking, the smoking causes the cancer thing? I mean, yes, we all know smoking causes cancer, that isn’t being debated. It is more about the effect of taxation on rates of smoking and this type of strategy seems to have the effect of driving black market tobacco, not reducing smoking.

Yeah, so it makes me think that more people are professing to quit or their data on sales shows a reduction but it is more likely just a shift to untaxed tobacco.

Yeah, it is insane. My partner used a vape to quit and it was actually useful. I titrated the nicotine level down by 10% per refill, usually taking about a fortnight to get through. The use level would increase for the first few days but drop back down by the next refill. By the end when we dropped all the way to zero there was so little nicotine it wasn’t really noticeable. After that it was just the behavioural habit and that dropped by itself after a few months.

Compared with nicotine gum and patches it was way more effective and really did result in a long term quit. They are now approaching 10 years quit and it was absolutely worth doing. Harm reduction would suggest using vapes to help people quit and honestly to replace smoking all together.

In my opinion if it was just a crop like zucchini and you just had to meet agricultural standards, manage exposure to things like e. coli, get the product tested occasionally for heavy metals, and so on, it would be much better. Making it illegal doesn’t work, regulating it out of existence doesn’t work, but dealing with the harms from the other end, setting up programs for getting people off addictive things and using the health system etc, seems much better. I really think getting rid of the control and access these massive tobacco companies have and which was built directly off slavery and genocide would be a good idea.

The price for a 20 packet of cigarettes here in Australia is around $42 in AU dollars, so about $29. The production price is closer to $5, or about $4 USD. All the rest of that is taxes and that means you as a black market producer can make something for $5 and sell it for $30 and make $25 in profit, or you can sell way more at $20 or $15 and still make massive amounts of profit. You could kill the cartels and gangs tomorrow by dropping the tax and it would reduce the market for illegal tobacco to zero. The fact that our government don’t is a good indicator that they don’t actually care.

So this sounds like a good idea and I was a big supporter of it when the prices here in Australia went up, but I was wrong. We increased the prices with the thought that this would reduce uptake for young people and increase quitting or at least reduce use in older people. Instead we ended up creating a black market for untaxed tobacco. Since then we have had a massive increase in the level of gang activity. This means a fair few young people getting involved with these gangs and ending up committing crimes and going through the “justice” system. We have had drive by shootings, stabbings, abductions, and recently a mistaken abduction of the wrong person resulting in his dismemberment and death.

Increasing the price a little can have an impact but once you cross a threshold the criminal side becomes much more attractive and things become dire. The increase in people quitting may be because people have quit smoking, and I sincerely hope that is it, but in my opinion it is likely a significant portion of the change is a reduction of legal tobacco use and an increase in black market tobacco use.

Down here in Australia we constantly have people walking around with thongs (flip flops) or barefoot and in swimwear, so bikini top for women and bare for men. Honestly I don’t see a problem with it, I walk around with very minimal shoes now and I used to walk around barefoot most of the time when I was a kid. If you aren’t walking on a road with tonnes of broken glass and no footpaths then you are fine. As for people who complain about women having their chest exposed honestly, learn to not stare. It isn’t the job of women to cover up so you don’t have to put in effort.

Our beach culture is great because it is so laid back. If I had a business near the beach I would assume my customers would be barefoot and topless and make appropriate accommodations including somewhere to clean their feet off and taking care to keep the floor from being sticky. When I lived in the UK I found the constant demand to wear shoes stifling and awful and the USA felt really judgemental and gross.

Just to reply in a real and not snarky way, the BBC has a strong anti-trans bias as well. The question is about factuality and reliability. Fox News will run anything that fits their ideology and in the case of trans issues demonizes trans people and trans affirming care.

To be clear, this doctor is making a vague claim of there being “young children” getting “irreversible” medical interventions. I mean technically getting a vaccine is irreversible, getting antibiotics cannot be taken back, and setting a broken bone can never be undone. Irreversible is meaningless in this context. What he is claiming is that there is some sort of harm. This is not true.

Surgery is not done on young kids in general. The rare cases are not really worth considering and do not represent trans care in general. The exception does not prove the rule and honestly I have not seen any evidence of children getting trans surgeries.

What is common is the use of puberty blockers. These are medications used safely for preventing precocious puberty and they delay the onset of puberty. This allows time for the child to work through their gender issues and be able to make an informed decision before starting hormonal transition to trigger the correct puberty for their gender. Putting off puberty has small enough consequences to be reasonable and for trans kids it can be really important for reducing risk of harm.

Fox News is dishonest, this doctor is dishonest and violating their Hippocratic Oath, and this discussion is a bullshit anyway. This constant ranting and raving about half a percent of people is just crazy. Nobody needs to talk about this without a qualification or loved experience. If you don’t know what you are talking about then it is a good idea to say nothing.

Pictish.

It is a lost language from the British Isles and from one of the coolest populations in the area. They would paint patterns on their skin in blue then charge into battle naked. I reckon their insults and swearing would be absolutely raucous.

Also, if you do decide you need to escalate past this asking them to explain the joke can work really well. It works wonders for bigotry and other issues too, if they say “it’s just a joke” say “I don’t understand, can you please explain the joke?” This makes them articulate their explanation for why they find it funny and chances are they will sound like a complete dingus in front of you and others, heavily disincentivising this behaviour.

Yeah. The titanium is awesome. I have screws and they bonded very well with the bone, absolutely no issues. Apparently the titanium expands and contracts less with temperature changes which is good for preventing aching in weather changes.

Lindsey Vonn

She is a competitive skier and had a had injury recently and the doctor is sharing x-rays of the injury. Recovery from this type of injury is very hard because of how separated the bones are. It is hard to get them to actually knit together so you often need to use wire or screws to connect the bones and it often is only partially successful, requiring second or more surgeries to set things in place again. I had a much more minor injury which required two surgeries because the muscles in my hand were not held correctly due to the compromised bone and dislocated another bone.

In our current capitalist hellscape I think the crew will be listed as test equipment for measuring radiation.

This is a legitimate concern and has been addressed to some degree in some areas. Unfortunately we don’t have a perfect way of knowing that a specific specimen is from a specific species. Two very similar skeletons could be from the same or closely related species. The same goes for development over the life history of a specific organism. Adult humans have a different skull to height ratio to babies, but the ratio between toddlers and young chimps is very similar.

Fortunately we have many different aged animals of the same species in the same context to compare. We can see the infant, child, adolescent, adult, and aged forms for many species and this acts similarly to transitional fossils, they help close the gap. We can be more sure with more hints like sharing a space, being buried in the same context, having the same nitrogen isotope ratios in teeth, and eating the same prey. Lots of other things can act as clues to the relationships and make us more or less certain of a given relationship.

That said, fossilisation is rare. Not all that many individuals will be fossilised. Different types of tissue fossilise to different degrees and in some cases not at all. If an animal is mostly spongy material they may degrade too fast to fossilise and preserve structure. Other examples may only leave their imprint as a hollow or pressing of one material into another. I think the record is very sparse and will remain so, but adding more example allows more connection and conclusions to be made.

Yeah, so for Bedrock it is hosted by Microsoft and they are responsible. For any hosting infrastructure they will need to manage things themselves, but Microsoft seems to be taking things a step further. They seem to have blocked chat for Java users who are not verified to be adults. This means you may have to use a third party provider to verify your account by providing them with various details and trust that they won’t sell that information on.

Honestly, it is not something required by the law and it fits with a pattern I have noticed over the last few years. VPNs are being banned, age verification is being required on more and more sites starting with porn but now moving to things like video games, and the third party companies who can verify your age seem to be able to either sell that data on or sell things derived from that data. If I were planning to use authoritarian methods to control a population, similar to what ICE is doing in the USA, I would choose this strategy. Given the information in an age verification check I can train my AI systems to recognise specific faces and link them to the IMSI from a mobile phone present at a protest. This would identify the protestors and allow retribution at scale. Is that what is happening? I don’t know. But does it look exactly how that would look? Yes.