mezzie2 (u/mezzie2) - Readit News

mezzie2 commented on End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn

moomin · 7 months ago

I’m surprised the average kid has the nous to set up a VPN, honestly. Doing it has always seemed like a proper faff.

mezzie2 · 7 months ago

Setting aside that the others are right and it's pretty easy:

Don't need the average kid to be able to, you just need the average kid to have access to a peer who can do so for them. Which is quite reasonable.

mezzie2 commented on Attention is your scarcest resource (2020) benkuhn.net/attention/... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

qmmmur · 7 months ago

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I think it must be particularly difficult as a woman. People just expect you’ll want or have kids. Definitely already observe the being seen as children thing.

mezzie2 · 7 months ago

I do think it's harder for women, though being gay also makes evaluating that weird in my case. I find I get more static for not having a partner, as even the queer community expects women will make romantic love their life's true purpose even if kids aren't involved.

One reason I don't seriously seek partnership is that I don't want to give up my time for intellectual and creative pursuits. The usual come back is 'if you find the right person...' but I can't move out of my state without losing healthcare and as a homosexual I've got a small dating pool. Partnering would require compromise on this, and I don't want to.

> Definitely already observe the being seen as children thing.

I'm hoping this gets better as I age. I have noticed people in their early to mid 30s, particularly those following 'the' life path, can get on a really high horse. But the longer people live, the more likely something is to happen to prove to them how fickle and random life is. (e.g. a child dying, a divorce, struggling with infertility, cancer, etc.)

mezzie2 commented on Attention is your scarcest resource (2020) benkuhn.net/attention/... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

qmmmur · 7 months ago

32 and no kids. Always wondering if I’m messing my future up but the idea of having kids is not interesting to me.

mezzie2 · 7 months ago

I'm neutral on them, but I have MS so I think being a mother would be irresponsible given the lack of additional support I would have. I have always been interested in fostering, though, and plan to pursue that in my 40s if I'm legally allowed the financial stability to do so. (Earning enough to buy a home and pay off my loans means losing support for my medical care/expenses).

If you're not interested, don't have them. I had one parent that enjoyed parenting and one that did not, and having a parent that doesn't want or like kids is so obvious to the kid. It definitely causes issues.

I have found that people don't know what to do with people who don't follow 'the life path', whatever path that is. Like here, I'm an oddball for not going all in on my career or caring that much. In general life, being an unmarried woman with no kids in my late 30s means people don't know where to 'put' you. A lot of parents in particular tend to think of childless people as children/adolescents, which is rather annoying.

mezzie2 commented on Attention is your scarcest resource (2020) benkuhn.net/attention/... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

sebmellen · 7 months ago

I think this might just be age. I have kids but I’m in my mid 20s and still feel very intellectually driven.

mezzie2 · 7 months ago

I'm 37 and still very intellectually driven (no children). I do think in general you're correct, though, because it's harder to find people like this as I age.

mezzie2 commented on Psilocybin decreases depression and anxiety in cancer patients (2016) pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/arti... · Posted by u/Bluestein

seneca · 8 months ago

That makes a lot of sense. May I ask, why "limiting music"? Was it just a specific type of music, or did music in general have a negative effect?

mezzie2 · 8 months ago

Music I like is a huge dissociative trigger for me. I definitely am 'better' the less I listen to it. Luckily, I'm not usually that fond of music of the type that plays in public areas.

mezzie2 commented on I Cannot Be Technical fightforthehuman.com/why-... · Posted by u/mooreds

mezzie2 · a year ago

I had an interesting reaction to this piece in that I agree with some of what she's saying but I think she makes a lot of fundamental errors in her assumptions and her approach is wrong. Some of my thoughts have been mentioned in other comments, but I wanted to get them out all in one place without derailing any sub conversations.

For personal consideration/bias purposes before I go into my thoughts:

- Like Dr. Hicks, I'm a queer woman from an uneducated family who found success in academia. I had to leave before I could do a PhD because I got MS, but I am the only person in my immediate family with a graduate degree and I worked in academia for over a decade. I say this because, since she's relying a fair amount on standpoint epistemology, I'm in identity categories that according to her own approach say I can evaluate what she argues from that standpoint, and some of my disagreements come from her being overly narrow in interpreting her experience.

- Unlike Dr. Hicks, I'm an oddity in that I'm Technical (by her definition) by birthright (I'm a 3rd generation programmer and 3 out of 4 of my grandparents as well as several other elder figures in my family were all hackers/tinkerers/etc. - I started programming when I was 4-5 years old.) I'm not good or spectacularly talented since I've focused on other areas and talents of mine, but I have unambiguously done 'Technical' work and would be/am considered 'Technical' by most people. I've also observed 'Technical' culture for a long time and have what I would consider to be a fairly robust knowledge of the history and development of that culture. A fair number of my disagreements come from my own observations so I think clarifying my own position is important.

Where I agree with her is in her pointing out that there is unambiguously a 'Technical' culture that has an often antagonistic relationship with other cultures and that has a sense of self-superiority which often goes unchecked. I also agree that there are various aspects of Technical culture that result in some very, very offputting decisions when those decisions are enacted on a wider society. And that, because of the massive amount of societal power this culture has begun to wield in such a short time (on a historical scale), the faults and downsides of this culture are causing harm and suffering. I relate a great deal to her realization that the people who treat her nicely do not do the same for her friends/loved ones. I'm in the culture and so generally treated decently, but, like Dr. Hicks, I spend a lot of time around people who aren't/don't and the discrepancy in treatment really bothers me.

That said, she gets a lot of things wrong:

- She pretty much only studies the culture by observing the most materially successful inhabitants. It's like only studying how the royal family lived in England in 1600 and using that to extrapolate about English culture in general. Ironically given her talking about having to study the opposites of matters to fully understand them, she completely discards anyone Technical who is not working in Big Tech. The legions of IT workers and devs at lower companies, FOSS and general non Big Tech techies (like I don't think anybody would question Linus Torvald's 'Technical' status), freelancers, etc. Working at any company or organization usually requires at least somewhat licking the boot of whatever culture they profess - it's a self-selecting pool. Of course people she studies in Big Tech are going to act that way: It's a prerequisite to being there in the first place!

- She ascribes a lot to Technical people that she sees as unique, but I don't think are. Like when she talks about not wanting to be a U/X or tech 'People Person' because she can come up with a good, robust idea and can't make the engineering managers do it. Does she think that non Technical managers are any better at taking feedback and policies from people they consider outsiders? They aren't, in my experience. There's a decent amount of friction between academic librarians and other faculty members at a lot of institutions because the academic librarians don't always have a PhD, and good luck trying to convince the Sales and Marketing departments in a giant megacorp to do something that makes sense if it goes against their temperaments. Likewise, it's true that it's a mostly male group and this causes them to overlook some aspects of the female experience. I've found that groups and places that are overwhelmingly female do the same thing in the other direction. The results are different because of how our society is set up, but any group full of one type of person is going to be bad at considering matters outside of that group's experience because humans are pretty self-absorbed. I can also assure her that academia is very hostile and condescending to people outside its bubble on much the same level as high-status Technical people, and I see much of the same discrepancy of treatment there. High-status Technical people treat my working-class friends poorly, and so do academics. She just might not notice because she's in that club - most working-class people who 'make it' end up very attached to the culture of the people who lifted them out.

- She seems to think that Technical culture status is conveyed on high by some central authority, when in my experience, squabbles over who is in the culture or not are fairly common and not all of us agree. I, for example, would absolutely consider some devs at Big Tech to not be 'Technical' based on various measures. When people are offering her 'access to the tent', they're saying they see her as one of them. There's not a group chat where we update who's in and out. Likewise, you can absolutely convey 'Technicality' on to someone, but you don't do it by just saying 'this person is a techie'. You do it by introducing them to the culture, teaching/mentoring them, and helping them with projects/work. Then you let them speak for themselves and their own work. Having someone speak for you is actually kind of an anti-signal in some ways, because a strong indicator of Technical culture is being able to speak for yourself, your work, and your thought process.

- I think she lacks an understanding of Technical history. A lot of the hostility in Technical spaces came about because the first generation to 'make it big'/be socially accepted and impactful had very hostile interactions with mainstream culture before that point. She notes that she's treated with hostility because she doesn't meet Technical expectations or qualifications, but that's the same experience a stereotypical Technical person has outside of Technical spaces. I move in 'people oriented'/mainstream non Technical spaces well because I'm a bubbly, somewhat charismatic white woman who can read social cues well. I'm attractive/feminine enough to not be considered 'weird' or 'creepy', and I know how to tailor my appearance/speech/etc. to different groups. It's better than it used to be, but a lot of that top down antagonistic culture from Technical people is reactive, and the superiority is partially a defense mechanism/coping. This is also one reason Technical people tend to take critiques from outsiders poorly, especially when that critique is 'you need to be more like us! :)' This is also related to the changing demographics and dynamics of the Internet/Web and a lot of Technical people feeling like they lost a bubble and safe place.

IDK, good on anyone who reads my word vomit, I just wanted to get my thoughts out. They're not particularly well formed or organized, though.

mezzie2 commented on Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift' bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/1659447091

nemomarx · a year ago

I don't think they make much of a show of caring about trans rights in the UK right about now, unfortunately. In the US you can make a strong case that a big database of faces and IDs could be really dangerous though I think

mezzie2 · a year ago

It's mostly about the service's audience. Discord is a huge trans/queer/etc. hub. If Discord were X or Instagram etc. it wouldn't matter. Users of Discord are, as a group, more likely to be antagonistic to anything that could be transphobic or racist than the general populace. (Whereas they don't care about disability rights, which is why people with medically delayed puberty aren't a concern.)

A tactical observation more than anything else.

mezzie2 commented on Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift' bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/1659447091

jjice · a year ago

Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern.

If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E situation as well). I understand what they're going for, but I'm not sure this is the best course of action. What do I know though :shrug:.

mezzie2 · a year ago

It's not even edge cases - I was a pretty young looking woman and was mistaken for a minor until I was about 24-25. My mother had her first child (me) at 27 and tells me about how she and my father would get dirty looks because they assumed he was some dirty old man that had impregnated a teenager. (He was 3 years older than her).

I think, ironically, the best way to fight this would be to lean on identity politics: There are probably certain races that ping as older or younger. In addition, trans people who were on puberty blockers are in a situation where they might be 'of age' but not necessarily look like an automated system expects them to, and there might be discrepancies between their face as scanned and the face/information that's show on their ID. Discord has a large trans userbase. Nobody cares about privacy, but people make at least some show of caring about transphobia and racism.

> So many questions.

Do they keep a database of facial scans even though they say they don't? If not, what's to stop one older looking friend (or an older sibling/cousin/parent/etc.) from being the 'face' of everyone in a group of minors? Do they have a reliable way to ensure that a face being scanned isn't AI generated (or filtered) itself? What prevents someone from sending in their parent's/sibling's/a stolen ID?

Seems like security theater more than anything else.

mezzie2 commented on Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair mikelikejordan.bearblog.d... · Posted by u/gmays

whatshisface · a year ago

They mean a problem they didn't immediately think of something to try for.

mezzie2 · a year ago

Yes, this. And I don't have a PhD, I have a Master's. I'm not saying the wall doesn't exist - that's why I specified I chose an 'easy' path. I'm just saying in my case the wall wasn't intellectual.

mezzie2 commented on Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair mikelikejordan.bearblog.d... · Posted by u/gmays

popularonion · a year ago

I got put into some “smart kid” activities in grade school, but as a poor kid with zero advice from parents, I really had no idea what to do with it.

No one told me that math is really 90% about writing proofs, all those homework problems I did were just the weed-out stuff, the academic equivalent of Leetcode.

So when I got put into some “real” academic math as a teen, I crashed and burned hard. I didn’t have a tutor and it never would have occurred to me to ask for one, so that was that.

When I was 18 years old in my first year of college, after my first semester grades came in, a guidance counselor set up a 1-on-1 with me to talk about the Rhodes Scholarship process and what my research interests were.

My response was: 1) what the heck is a Rhodes Scholarship and 2) how could I possibly have “research interests” as an 18 year old college freshman.

That was the final chapter of society considering me “gifted”, but it was just as well, I couldn’t imagine any greater success beyond getting a job and being able to afford my own apartment.

mezzie2 · a year ago

I'm curious how old you are?

Mostly because a lot of my personal interests/ability to self-develop was related to Internet access. (My parents made VERY QUESTIONABLE financial choices and opted to pay for Internet access instead of food or clothing so I might have been freezing and my clothes all had holes in them but I could go online to talk to other smart kids.)

Also because I remember me + my parents being sat down when I was in elementary school and having my options talked about. In middle school once I was proven to have programming and math aptitude during the dot com boom, educational experts came to us and discussed specific gifted learning options (including things like private schools, skipping grades, or even pulling me out of school altogether for private instruction). None of this was initiated by my parents - it was brought to us. This was in the 90s.