Acutulus (u/Acutulus)

Acutulus commented on Teen-age fentanyl deaths in a Texas county newyorker.com/news/letter... · Posted by u/cocacola1

riversflow · 2 years ago

Just too drive home this point a little deeper. I personally know 2 people who died last year from fentanyl poisoning. One of them thought they were taking MDMA, the other thought they were taking Xanax. Both are terrible, needless deaths but the one who was taking Xanax had actually been prescribed Xanax previously for GAD, but was having trouble getting/affording a doctor to prescribe it to them.

Acutulus · 2 years ago

I offer as many condolences to you as my internet connection can carry. Reading that you lost someone who was merely trying to take care of themselves really, really hurts.

I graduated high school in the mid 00's. When I last ran the numbers in 2018, my graduating class of ~250 had lost roughly 4% of its people over the years due to OD.

I deeply want this set of problems to get better, but I cannot convince myself that it will during my lifetime.

Acutulus commented on Teen-age fentanyl deaths in a Texas county newyorker.com/news/letter... · Posted by u/cocacola1

pcthrowaway · 2 years ago

> With illicitly manufactured oxycontin and its ilk you will come across it a majority of the time. But with other things such as MDMA, ketamine and such it's incredibly rare to see

To anyone reading: Please don't take this at face value. The article itself has a story of someone who OD'ed on fentanyl that was present in their "xanax".

From reading the results from the harm reduction tent at a nearby music festival it's in all the drugs, not just opiates

Acutulus · 2 years ago

That is absolutely horrific. I cannot fathom what reasons would compel someone to sell product tainted that way. Especially at a music festival; most of those consumers know their drugs and I imagine would not be the market at which to try selling that kind of shit. The long term money, customer base and word of mouth all benefit more from having non-opiate products sans fentanyl. Even if you're just trying to make a few grand at a music festival. hell, a hit and run business at a music festival with totally inactive products seems a better option than something like dumping fentanyl into (counterfeit) xanax bars.

And yeah, don't take what I say at face value. I'm a nobody on the internet with one story out of billions. Test everything. Every single time.

Acutulus commented on Teen-age fentanyl deaths in a Texas county newyorker.com/news/letter... · Posted by u/cocacola1

ChancyChance · 2 years ago

Oh I see. It takes 2mg of fentanyl to kill a person so I bet that much ends up on dirty lab equipment.

Acutulus · 2 years ago

Precisely this, yes.

Anecdotal: I have had many exposures to the illicit drug markets in my areas throughout the years. The symptom of many underlying unresolved issues I am sure, but that is not relevant. What I wish to say is that I have seen many pressed counterfeit tablets in my lifetime and have had the luxury and wherewithal to test a majority of them before usage. I have personally never identified fentanyl in a product that was not marketed as an opioid. With illicitly manufactured oxycontin and its ilk you will come across it a majority of the time. But with other things such as MDMA, ketamine and such it's incredibly rare to see. That is not to say it doesn't happen however, there have been instances of things containing fentanyl which had no business doing so. Despite this I echo GP's claim that it's largely due to inadvertant cross contamination than it is some intentional reason. The supply chains for these drugs are very long and windy once they are finalized for consumer use inside the US as well, with many middlemen making a few dollars to facilitate a transaction. Each of those hand-offs is one more opportunity for the new seller to say "I bought X, but could sell much more if I said it was Y", and that ends up killing people occasionally too.

Hypothesis: There is a number of factors at play here that add to the death toll. There is the occasional unintended cross contamination during production. It's also worth noting that individuals who import bulk drugs from overseas for their own sales often order multiple different substances and craft them for sale, further increasing the chance for that contamination during production. There is the fact that fentanyl and a majority of it's analogues are active at shockingly low doses relative to more classical opioids, which makes improper distribution of active ingredients into the final pill mixture highly likely when you consider they are usually not created with the best quality control procedures or equipment. There is the fact that younger users (I would argue they are more experimenters than users per se) of opioid drugs have less physical tolerance to these chemicals. We should also consider that youths also have less practical experience, and not knowing the "lay of the land" with these substances can kill you very easily. And then of course the obvious increase in the average American's listlissness, hopelessness, economic uncertainty, fear of the future and so on. The ground under our feet is shifting and drugs are a temporary respite from that, if harmful long term.

Add to this the fact that we have a very drugs-illiberal society on the whole, whose governments oftentimes think the best way to address this problem is simply banning substances or once in a while executing operations to damage the supply chain, while completely avoiding the idea that perhaps most usage of these substances is symptomatic of a problem and not the problem itself? And you end up with an firehose of drug analogues that can escape easy regulation and restriction juuuuust long enough to gain a foothold in the market and shift the consumer culture of a particular drug. It's not a problem you can legislate your way out of, and it never will be.

All of this is to say I expect US overdoses per capita, the "never-before-seenness" (and by extension lack of medical knowledge surrounding it) of the drug analogues on the market, and the overall appetite for drugs of dependency, all to continue increasing for the forseeable future. I wish it wasn't this way. But like most of the US' modern cultural issues we enjoy arguing about what could offer relief far more than we do finding a bipartisan way to address them.

Acutulus commented on Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy theverge.com/2023/3/28/23... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

SCUSKU · 2 years ago

I've seen a few of these in the wild just as a consumer and I always wonder why people even bother leaving a review. My thought is you're just exposing to everyone how ignorant you are.

Acutulus · 2 years ago

Of the (generally) many things those specific types of consumers are ignorant about, their own ignorance is usually one of them.

Whereas I read "Unsatisfied! I did not read the listing!", they feel they wrote "Unsatisfied! Seller did not explain the item in the listing!" to the benefit of the other consumers in their same category. In a perverse way I could see it actually curbing those unwanted purchases in the future, but sadly at the expense of the seller.

Acutulus commented on Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news tomshardware.com/news/win... · Posted by u/taubek

globular-toast · 2 years ago

Last Windoze I used was XP. Back then most geeks reinstalled the OS from scratch every few months or so. This was necessary to combat the inevitable rot that happened to every installation. There was always a number of things that were necessary to install to make the system usable every time. We worked out how to streamline some things by building custom installation discs. But there was still a load of effort and accumulated knowledge applied to just using the damn thing.

I'd been playing with Linux for a while but hadn't got beyond the dual-booting phase. Then at some point I realised that if I put as much effort into Linux to learn how things worked etc. it would probably be just as good in practice. Why did I continue to put up with Windows? Turns out I was right. I haven't had Windoze in my house for well over a decade at this point. I never had to use Vista. One of the best choices I ever made.

Acutulus · 2 years ago

We come from similar eras. I never made the transition to 7, permanently moving to ubuntu 5.10 thanks to the CDs they sent out in the mail. Ubuntu for over a decade until late 2020, then arch and arch-likes since

Just a couple weeks ago I was backing up some scripts and adding some arcane linux lore to my obsidian database when it occurred to me that I haven't re-installed my OS in 2.5 years. That felt pretty wild to think about, especially when I consider all the scripts, packages and late night pamac hammering I occasionally do when I find a curious piece of software. While I tinkere with my linux installs far more than windows, they seem to have held up over time far better. Whether this is a consequence of the software itself, my behavior changing, or whatever, I cannot say for sure. But it's been a far more pleasurable experience using and maintaining my linux systems than windows installs.

I think there is a distinct difference between people who compute for the sake of computing versus people who compute as the means to an end. One is a person who uses tools at least partially for the joy of tool usage itself, while the other a person who uses tools to complete tasks, the other . I cannot fault the latter for just using whatever works, if they are happy in doing so. But I think those of us who fit into the former category are far more likely to engage with linux and its brethren. My computer is a machine which, largely, I demand does what I instruct it to do. I prefer an OS that will do so and then get out of my way and I will accept idiosyncracies in exchange for this. So long as a laundry list of dependencies doesn't explode overnight from a goofball update or my nvidia drivers don't just disappear because they feel like it, linux meets those needs very well.

Acutulus commented on Poor sleep drove me insane, and my long path to recovery writing.samsonhu.com/how-... · Posted by u/Wagthesam

thisismyswamp · 3 years ago

Can't you drink one coffee in the morning?

Also would like a source on the 2X cardiac event risk, couldn't find that in the linked article. Big if true!

Acutulus · 3 years ago

The enzyme responsible is CYP1A2 if I understand correctly. Here is the paper I found that supports increased risk of a specific cardiac event to slow metabolizers. I'm not the most adept at reading medical papers so I can't verify if it claims the risk is doubled, but I think it's possible.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/202502

Coffee, CYP1A2 Genotype, and Risk of Myocardial Infarction Marilyn C. Cornelis, BSc; Ahmed El-Sohemy, PhD; Edmond K. Kabagambe, PhD; et al Hannia Campos, PhD JAMA. 2006;295(10):1135-1141. doi:10.1001/jama.295.10.1135

Acutulus commented on The Samsung Galaxy S23’s bloated Android build somehow uses 60GB of storage arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/carride

nfriedly · 3 years ago

Man, HTC made some of my favorite phones. I wish they were still doing it.

Some of Motorola's mid-range phones are actually pretty good these days - the moto g100 has performance roughly on par with a flagship from a couple of years ago, a huge battery, a microSD slot, a headphones jack, USB-C video output with "Ready For" which is arguably better than Samsung Dex (aside from the name), and official LineageOS support. I got mine for ~$270 on ebay, and if it broke, I'd probably buy the same phone again.

The Sony Xperia 1 IV and 5 IV are also interesting, with many of those same features, but the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 CPU is hot garbage and Sony didn't provide sufficient cooling (or tuning) to keep it from overheating and thermally throttling after a few minutes of usage.

Acutulus · 3 years ago

HTC devices were great.

I too have had pretty good experiences with motorola lately. In early '21 I wanted a decent and metaphorically disposable phone so I got an unlocked moto G play from the local Target. I expected it to, like seemingly all others, have a locked bootloader and/or completely prevent root access. But I was pleasantly surprised! With a visit to motorola's website IMEI in hand and a couple hours of pulling up XDA pages (like the good old days) I had my device the way I wanted it.

It would be nice if mine didn't ship with the amount of bloatware that it did given that I couldn't find a replacement ROM at the time. But after some filesystem scouring and ADB commands it was cleaned up enough for me.

When I end up needing another new phone I'll likely hunt down another motorola, and probably the g100 given your positive experience; thanks for sharing it

Acutulus commented on Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say time.com/6252617/effectiv... · Posted by u/s17n

SOLAR_FIELDS · 3 years ago

Codeine + cough syrup is so popular in Texas that it spawned an entire subculture dedicated to its use. See DJ Screw in Houston (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw).

Lest you think this is no longer the case - “lean”, as it is known by Houstonites (due to your tendency to lean on things while under the influence) was a major plot point of a recent mostly autobiographical Netflix series centered around Houston that was released late last year: https://www.keranews.org/arts-culture/2022-08-25/houston-ooz...

Acutulus · 3 years ago

Vice released an excellent short piece on Houstonian screw & slab culture years back. Might still be on youtube! It was an excellent piece at the time, but I haven't seen it in quite a while.

Acutulus commented on Why the U.S. Isn’t Shooting Down the Chinese Spy Balloon theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/fortran77

Acutulus · 3 years ago

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae01d4

I don't know for sure of course. But I would hazard a guess this RC-135U ELINT aircraft has been keeping a close eye on it, given its flight path.