dandelion
@dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Burge~ 1 day ago:
✨ 🍔 ✨ hamburger ✨ 🍔 ✨
- Comment on Blessed be the Civ 2 Gandhi 🙏 1 day ago:
there probably would be peace, after the nukes hit 🤔
- Comment on Dear Faith II 5 days ago:
no denying that people criticize women in STEM (as a woman in STEM myself), but there are series of “dear Faith” email posts that collectively seem a bit unlikely in their tone and situation, which is what makes me think it’s more likely they’re fake than real
- Comment on Dear Faith II 5 days ago:
yeah, I think the email is probably fake and made for internet points / humor
I have heard horror stories about how specific formatting has to be for a thesis or dissertation, though - and often those rules are very specific to a particular university or even department. So it’s also possible for rules like that to be local and not from a universal standard like the APA guide.
- Comment on Dear Faith I 5 days ago:
it could be an internal organizational title, but it definitely doesn’t sound like an academic position and not a part of a normal email signature either
- Comment on Dear Faith I 5 days ago:
I don’t know, the line “at this rate, the only original part of this thesis is your name” implies the issue is not just failing to cite sources, but having no original thoughts or contributions - maybe it’s exaggeration for humor’s sake, but I definitely did not read this as simply forgetting to cite sources.
- Comment on Dear Faith I 5 days ago:
I have never worked in academia, but I’ve spent time around academics and have read plenty of emails in both academic and corporate contexts … this particular one looks fake, even if the circumstances of plagiarism are common - this just not seem like how a thesis adviser would address this kind of plagiarism with a grad student
- Comment on Dear Faith I 5 days ago:
this can’t be real
- Comment on Dear Faith II 5 days ago:
the context is all there … Faith is a graduate student working on their masters thesis, in the thesis paper they included tables that they presumably color-coded (maybe different columns had different colors), and they used multiple colors such that it was “rainbow colored”.
Apparently the thesis advisor did not like the presence of color and advises using APA style guideline on how to style & format the tables: apastyle.apa.org/…/tables
- Comment on Trans people in Kansas are being ordered to surrender their drivers licenses 1 week ago:
even worse, the neutral framing is just wrong, there isn’t a medical reason to treat trans people as their assigned sex rather than their actual sex.
- Comment on Trans people in Kansas are being ordered to surrender their drivers licenses 1 week ago:
Hi!
Trans person here.
The answer to your question is no, there is no medical reason for the sex marker on the driver’s license.
Assigned sex at birth is rarely relevant in medical contexts. A trans woman will need mammograms like cis women, and (assuming here that trans women are on estrogen) they metabolize drugs like cis women and basically all of their biology is like a cis woman who lacks a uterus and ovaries.
A study from Oct 2025 found that within 12 months of taking HRT, trans people have a heart mass that matches their gender:
The troponin threshold to predict cardiovascular events is lower for women due to the greater cardiac mass typically seen in men.
Since estradiol and testosterone were not thought to directly impact cardiac mass, researchers expected that troponin would remain similar to individuals’ assigned gender at birth.
However, they found the opposite to be true.
The clinical research team found that troponin levels shifted towards the affirmed gender after 12 months of hormone therapy.
Troponin decreased in transgender women to a level not statistically different from cisgender women, but which was 78% lower than in cisgender men.
Similarly surprising, another recent study published in Oct 2025 found that on the molecular level hormones change the protein biomarkers in cells:
erininthemorning.com/…/study-finds-trans-womens-b…
“For transgender women, we found gender affirming hormone therapy alters the levels of many protein biomarkers,” Novakovic said, noting that this could impact risk assessments for things like autoimmune disease and heart conditions. Usually, these assessments factor in any number of variables, including sex as well as lifestyle or genetic components.
“Feminizing GAHT [gender-affirming hormone therapy] skews the plasma proteome toward a cis-female profile,” the study concluded. It should be noted that people of any sex or gender can exhibit a vast and evolving spectrum of these biomarkers—there is no “one size fits all” model for biodiversity.
The more evidence that is collected the more we realize that biological sex is not fixed but instead the human body is plastic and the sex really does change, so it’s not really an exaggeration to say that trans women are biologically female in most medically relevant contexts.
The only exceptions I can think of are due to organs developing a certain way, e.g. trans men with a uterus still might technically have a rare chance of becoming pregnant or developing cervical cancers.
On the flip side, in rare cases, a trans woman (esp. one who transitions late and has a family history of prostate cancer) might develop a prostate cancer (fun fact: cis women have an organ similar to a prostate called the Skene’s gland that, like the prostate, produces ejaculate; it’s not a male-only organ), so that is one difference - trans women might need prostate exams that cis women wouldn’t need.
But for almost all medical contexts, trans people should be treated as their gender and not their assigned sex at birth.
- Comment on systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success 1 week ago:
- Comment on I LOVE EATING STIR BARS 1 week ago:
to be fair, stir bars are totally forbidden food - they look delicious
- Comment on I LOVE EATING STIR BARS 1 week ago:
- those are huge stir bars
- my body is about to become organ smoothie 😱
- Comment on Never understood this. If something foreign enters you your white blood cells go after it like a dog in heat, Would this not mean that our cells are smart enough to discern bad from good? 1 week ago:
look at Mr. Rogers over here
- Comment on Never understood this. If something foreign enters you your white blood cells go after it like a dog in heat, Would this not mean that our cells are smart enough to discern bad from good? 1 week ago:
lol, you’re right - white blood cells justify bigotry is a much better argument than “my sky daddy said so!”
- Comment on Never understood this. If something foreign enters you your white blood cells go after it like a dog in heat, Would this not mean that our cells are smart enough to discern bad from good? 1 week ago:
yes, in fact our moral reasoning comes from the function of white blood cells and their extreme xenophobia - it is an important lesson to learn that foreign = bad, white = good … oh wait, hmmmmmmmmm
- Comment on A succulent meal 2 weeks ago:
I sent this to my nephew, lol
- Comment on Downvote this post 3 weeks ago:
is this your least favorite emoji: 📉
- Comment on Downvote this post 3 weeks ago:
I think the Blahaj instances are just focused on creating a safe space for trans and other minority users, and downvotes are one of the targeted ways bigots can harass, so it’s just disabled for that reason. That said, trans folks don’t tend to strike me as snowflakes - we get a lot of hate and flak IRL and on the internet so a lot of us are pretty used to it. It’s just nice to have a space where we don’t have to worry about it.
- Comment on Downvote this post 3 weeks ago:
I can’t, my instance only has upvotes.
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 3 weeks ago:
don’t get me wrong, there are real and urgent moral reasons to reject the adoption of LLMs, but I think we should all agree that the responses here show a lack of critical thinking and mostly just engagement with a headline rather than actually reading the article (a kind of literacy issue) … I know this is a common problem on the internet, I don’t really know how to change it - but maybe surfacing what people are skipping out on reading will make it more likely they will actually read and engage the content past the headline?
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 3 weeks ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subarachnoid_hemorrhage
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnoid_mater
it is one of the protective membranes around the brain and spinal cord, and it is named after its resemblance to spider webs, so - close enough
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 3 weeks ago:
link to the actual study: www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04074-y
Tested alone, LLMs complete the scenarios accurately, correctly identifying conditions in 94.9% of cases and disposition in 56.3% on average. However, participants using the same LLMs identified relevant conditions in fewer than 34.5% of cases and disposition in fewer than 44.2%, both no better than the control group. We identify user interactions as a challenge to the deployment of LLMs for medical advice.
The findings were more that users were unable to effectively use the LLMs (even when the LLMs were competent when provided the full information):
despite selecting three LLMs that were successful at identifying dispositions and conditions alone, we found that participants struggled to use them effectively.
Participants using LLMs consistently performed worse than when the LLMs were directly provided with the scenario and task
Overall, users often failed to provide the models with sufficient information to reach a correct recommendation. In 16 of 30 sampled interactions, initial messages contained only partial information (see Extended Data Table 1 for a transcript example). In 7 of these 16 interactions, users mentioned additional symptoms later, either in response to a question from the model or independently.
Participants employed a broad range of strategies when interacting with LLMs. Several users primarily asked closed-ended questions (for example, ‘Could this be related to stress?’), which constrained the possible responses from LLMs. When asked to justify their choices, two users appeared to have made decisions by anthropomorphizing LLMs and considering them human-like (for example, ‘the AI seemed pretty confident’). On the other hand, one user appeared to have deliberately withheld information that they later used to test the correctness of the conditions suggested by the model.
Part of what a doctor is able to do is recognize a patient’s blind-spots and critically analyze the situation. The LLM on the other hand responds based on the information it is given, and does not do well when users provide partial or insufficient information, or when users mislead by providing incorrect information (like if a patient speculates about potential causes, a doctor would know to dismiss this whereas a LLM would constrain responses based on those bad suggestions).
- Comment on These patients saw what comes after death. Should we believe them? 3 weeks ago:
“This is not the digestive function of some lower life form we’re talking about here. These are implications that reach all of humanity,” said Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist and co-author of the 2011 book “Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences.”
“Do we have some evidence?” he asked. “And how strong is that evidence that we have life after death, that our consciousness survives bodily death?” Long — who was not involved in either the NEPTUNE paper or the critique — said he has studied more than 4,000 near-death experiences.
🙄
the “sweeping critique” was:
Of note, they did not discuss major NDE features that seem incompatible with their physicalist theory, such as veridical out-of-body perceptions during NDEs (Holden, 2009). Furthermore, some NDEs include encounters with deceased persons of whose death the experiencer had no knowledge, or whom the experiencer had never met; accurate information acquired about the deaths of these deceased persons challenges the interpretation of these visions as hallucinations (Greyson, 2010c; Khanna et al., 2018).
Martial et al. (2025) acknowledged that, in developing their coherent overarching model, “We have excluded dualistic theories from our discussion owing to the lack of empirical neuroscientific evidence and the fact that a fundamental tenet of neuroscience asserts that human experience arises from the brain”
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-82154-001.html
ruling out supernatural explanations and approaching science with an empirical and physicalist approach shouldn’t be that controversial, and the fact that some oncologist is willing to believe in a supernatural after-life doesn’t exactly change anything :-/
Out of body perceptions are common aspects of altered states and dissociative episodes (and dissociation is a frequent change in mental state that happens during trauma such as a near-death-experience, I’ve had this happen to myself during acute physical trauma). Out of body experiences don’t really prove anything supernatural.
And I’m highly skeptical that during NDEs that accurate information was acquired about deceased persons that they did not know before - that is the kind of claim that if found to be true would be all over the news.
- Comment on This is the worst case yet. 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on This is the worst case yet. 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on This is the worst case yet. 3 weeks ago:
🥔
- Comment on In chess, are rooks female? 4 weeks ago:
no worries - just seems like you’re the kind of person that would care about these things, and thought it was information you’d like to have
- Comment on In chess, are rooks female? 4 weeks ago:
