Meh, worse case scenario they drive us to extinction. We’ve had the wheel this far, and are doing our best to set the planet on fire / speed run different ways to mass murder each other anyway. I say give the robots a shot.
Think of it like an experimental medication on a terminally ill patient.
I mean you still gotta understand some shit for Ctrl+F to be helpful. If you’ve ever taken an open book quiz without prior study you’ll learn pretty quick that open book does NOT = easy A (depending on the class / prof I guess, but you get the gist).
So, open book Ctrl-F’able bar exam, I could probably get an okay score just on key word matching, not knowing jack shit about law; but it’d be far from a perfect score. Current state of machine learning appears to be in a comparable boat.
Numbers can be (and VERY often are) spoofed. You might be hit up from some bot in India or something; get annoyed and block the number; and succeed in blocking some grandma in Ohio who has no idea her number was even used for that call.
It’s basically a heavily abused version of an office building with lots of specialty areas that each have their own actual phone number that can be called directly; but when they call out, your caller ID just shows the main line for that building, which prevents random people from calling back directly to that office.
Moral of the story: blocking spammers doesn’t do shit.
When they call, just let it ring and go to voice mail then ignore the voice mail, and don’t send any kind of response to their texts.
Your best option is to support the possibility that yours is an old number that’s no longer in use and thus not worthy of even a bot’s attention.
If they thought that it was possible [to beat out] blackness,
Don’t give em any ideas. That’s actually far more plausible than trying to beat someone out of being gay or trans: the part of the dermis that actually has the concentration of melanin to make skin appear dark is like less than paper-thin. I’ve worked on black burn patients, and when that portion of their skin gets burned away, the skin (still skin, not subcutaneous or muscle or anything) that’s left is as white as mine, and I’m a pasty mofo.
Edit-
Warning - not gory necessarily, but if you’re squeamish you might want to skip this one.
This video shows a dermatome taking a skin graft from a dark skinned patient. A dermatome is basically a razor blade that vibrates and takes a specific thickness of skin… it’s basically the bastard child of a cheese slicer and those vibro-blades that some people obliterate their turkey with around November.
Anyway, this appears to be a partial-thickness graft, which means most of what they’re taking is the epidermis, and leaving the dermis mostly intact. Notice the contrast when the epidermis comes up.
…so many stupid problems through the entirety of our history over the biological equivalent to tissue paper. -_-
The how’s of skin healing are largely over my head - I’m a surgical tech, so my focus is mostly on surgery setup, knowing the surgery well enough to keep the surgeon equipped with the instrument they need throughout the surgery, tear down and clean up, rinse and repeat. Our education on physiology is pretty limited relative to everyone else in the OR, especially in my case since I was trained to be a surg tech when I joined the Air Force, and the military version is WAY abbreviated and requires no academic background (vs most civilian programs which require college level anatomy & physiology courses, and then actual surg tech school is like 5x as in depth compared to mil). I’ve only just recently caught up to my civ peers academically bc I took the prereqs for nursing school, for which there’s significant overlap with normal surg tech program prereqs. (just finished 1st semester of nursing school, woot woot!!)
…and tbh, grain of salt on civ surg tech program info I just mentioned - that’s all 2nd hand info from other techs that I just took at face value. I have no reason to doubt it, but still.
Aaaanywho, my understanding (which is like tip of the iceberg basic) is that the epidermis is mostly just the dead skin cells that flake up to the top to form the outer layer of your skin. The dermis underneath is vascularized, and healing pretty much starts with blood (delivering nutrients and platelets etc). So yeah, wounds heal from the edges inward and from the deeper parts outward. Wide area wounds can be painful af, have a high infection risk, and you lose a lot of fluid through them, so that’s where grafts come in to replace that protective outer layer, which acts as a barrier to pathogens and keeps the underlying tissue moist. Even with the mesher, the graft is effectively covered in holes to cover a wider area, but that still acts as a scaffolding for new tissue to form.
I imagine you get used to it, but I feel squeamish just looking at the graft, not to mention the injury that required it!
Yeah you get used to it. Funny thing with the AF: many active duty surgical techs are placed via “open general” which is a recruiting tool to place warm bodies in open job slots as fast as possible. Basically people go to a recruiter, aren’t picky about what they want to do once they enlist, so they just let the AF decide for them. Some of them get surg tech, and there’s an “Oh shit” moment when they realize medical jobs were on the menu and they’re the type that passes out at the sight of blood… TOO LATE, THEY ALREADY SIGNED! So they finish Basic, go to surg tech school, then go to work at the OR at an on base hospital where they STRUGGLE (in part because they’re a source of great fun for the other staff, lol) for about… 4 months. Much after that, them being elbow deep into a stranger’s abdomen to hold a bunch of intestines back out of the surgeons way is just another Tuesday, doesn’t phase em at all.
Squeamishness is just a matter of exposure; as that increases, so does tolerance.
…also on the off chance anyone reading this is considering enlisting into the AF, do not - DO NOT - go open general unless you’re sincerely cool with spending the next 4+ years doing ANY of the jobs listed in general, which is a massive category that could land you as a medic, cop, line cook, roach exterminator, weather, etc. And if you want medical and your recruiter recommends you go “open medical”, that doesn’t exist - there’s a number or email on the back of his business card to file complaints, write that motherfucker up for lying to you. Apparently that’s a common trick to get people to sign open general.
Most of the ones I’ve done, we take it with the dermatome, then run it through a “mesher” which cuts little slits in an alternating pattern all over it, which allows the graft to expand and cover twice the area. Then you cut a piece large enough to cover the burn or wound or w/e needs the graft, stitch if into it, then stretch the remainder out and stitch it back to the site we cut it off from.
The ones I’ve done have all been split thickness grafts where we only take the epidermis; full thickness takes the dermis and epidermis, and I assume can work the same way with a mesher.
I don’t think subcutaneous tissue is ever grafted in that context - that’s more liposuction territory, which I’ve seen that grafted in facial plastics stuff like lip restoration.
Former White House Situation Room officer Mike Stiegler revealed that then-President Donald Trump never called down to check on then-Vice President Mike Pence as Trump fans hunted him at the Capitol, and that we were “that close” to losing the VP....
Not sure if Pence dying would have made a difference there actually. There was already an insurrection, so if martial law is what he was after, he could have just used that as an excuse regardless of how successful the insurrectionists were.
I like to think that ‘we the people’ wouldn’t tolerate a Trump instigating an insurrection and then calling for martial law on the basis of that same insurrection; but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’d have been disappointed at our collective lack of a spine.
Target plans to cut prices on thousands of consumer basics this summer, from diapers to milk, as inflation cuts into household budgets and more Americans pay closer attention to their spending....
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is historically significant for many reasons: it was the first Star Wars movie in nearly 16 years, the last Star Wars movie shot on film, and a polarizing, pulpy entry in the storied space fantasy franchise. It debuted on May 19, 1999, 25 years ago almost to the day, and earned over $1...
The Israeli military said Thursday that five soldiers were killed and seven injured in a friendly fire incident in northern Gaza, amid renewed battles in the area against regrouped Hamas militants....
“Cave Johnson here. I have bad news, and I have good news. The bad news is that the AI we developed for our melee sentry turret concept developed a targeting error due to misinterpreting the verbal input ‘aim for center mass’. We think it misheard the last word. It only ever delivered nonfatal injuries to the test subjects rectal regions.
The good news is that one of our interns replaced the knife with a dildo and stationed one in his supervisor’s office along with a scathing resignation letter. The supervisor reported faster and more intense prostatic stimulation than any sex toy currently on the market - apparently this guy’s a connoisseur! HA!
The turrets have all been refitted with different sizes and shapes of dildos, and tight little studded leather vests. Testing will resume tomorrow morning: we’re rebranding and exploring its potential for the sex toy industry.
Also find that intern, we need to get him back as a paid employee - that type of innovative thinking shouldn’t go to waste!”
New research predicts a rise in life expectancy worldwide over the next three decades, particularly in Africa. Meanwhile, obesity and other factors are also set to play a larger role in poor health....
DuckDuckGo is down. Is there any info about it?? [EDIT: IS BACK] (lemmy.world)
Update: bleepingcomputer.com/…/microsoft-outage-affects-b…...
Conservatives are freaking out because they learned that some animals are gay (www.lgbtqnation.com)
Remember how ChatGPT totally aced the bar exam? Wow! yeah, turns out that was just a lie (www.nytimes.com)
archive archive.ph/is57b
That Blue MAGA outreach... (lemmy.world)
Horrible voter outreach.
Trump lashes out after DOJ reveals classified documents were found in his bedroom (www.independent.co.uk)
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, known for brutal crackdowns against political opposition, dies at 63 (www.nbcnews.com)
First they tried to "cure" gayness. Now they're fixated on "healing" trans people. (www.motherjones.com)
Stay on the designated path (lemmy.world)
Sperm count fall could be due to microplastics, new study finds (www.euronews.com)
The tiny plastic particles were found in all 23 human testes in a new study, and all 47 testes from pet dogs....
Trump's social media account shares a campaign video with a headline about a 'unified Reich' (apnews.com)
Jan. 6 Situation Room Officer Reveals Trump Fans ‘Came That Close’ To Murdering VP In Stunning New Interview (www.mediaite.com)
Former White House Situation Room officer Mike Stiegler revealed that then-President Donald Trump never called down to check on then-Vice President Mike Pence as Trump fans hunted him at the Capitol, and that we were “that close” to losing the VP....
If society collapsed what is your best case scenario for what comes after?
You can come up with the details on the kind of collapse....
Target to lower prices on thousands of basic items as inflation sends customers scrounging for deals (apnews.com)
Target plans to cut prices on thousands of consumer basics this summer, from diapers to milk, as inflation cuts into household budgets and more Americans pay closer attention to their spending....
25 Years Later, I Am Now A Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Apologist (kotaku.com)
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is historically significant for many reasons: it was the first Star Wars movie in nearly 16 years, the last Star Wars movie shot on film, and a polarizing, pulpy entry in the storied space fantasy franchise. It debuted on May 19, 1999, 25 years ago almost to the day, and earned over $1...
If Trump wins, what would hold him back? (www.vox.com)
Joe Biden Condemns International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s Pursuit Of Arrest Warrant Against Israeli Leaders: “What’s Happening Is Not Genocide” (deadline.com)
5 Israeli soldiers killed by friendly fire in northern Gaza (www.nbcnews.com)
The Israeli military said Thursday that five soldiers were killed and seven injured in a friendly fire incident in northern Gaza, amid renewed battles in the area against regrouped Hamas militants....
has black mesa made a statement? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Anti-Abortion Activist Who Stole 5 Fetuses Sentenced to 5 Years for Invading Clinic (www.jezebel.com)
Americans will find a new way to ruin their tastebuds every single day (lemmy.today)
Global life expectancy set to grow by nearly 5 years by 2050 (www.dw.com)
New research predicts a rise in life expectancy worldwide over the next three decades, particularly in Africa. Meanwhile, obesity and other factors are also set to play a larger role in poor health....
Why physicists now question the fate of the Universe (bigthink.com)
For nearly 25 years, we thought we knew how the Universe would end. Now, new measurements point to a profoundly different conclusion....