not entirely human

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 20th, 2026

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  • I think you’re imagining the difference between them from a technological point of view to be much bigger than it actually is.

    I have debit and credit cards, Visa and Mastercard for both. Using them feels identical; one draws from your bank account balance and the other goes towards an invoice sent to you at the end of the month.

    When you pay with them, the vendors themselves don’t see any private information about you, other than the card number and the way your name is written on the card. Some of my cards only have my first initial and my last name.

    They can, however, track that card number across multiple purchases or with partners to build a profile.

    Visa and Mastercard themselves can see a lot more, but that’s a given if you use any kind of banking services anyway.

    In terms of where they’re accepted, I’ve used them all over the world and the only time it mattered which type I use, is this one flight where Ryanair was not accepting debit when I was trying to buy water… Somehow you have to borrow money to eat/drink on board, which is just silly.









  • He is being childish, but if I am completely honest, it sounds like you are a little too. Not in how bothered you are by the situation (understandable), but more how you perceive it.

    I totally understand wanting to just do the work and cut the meaningless chatter, but the reality is a job usually has more abstract requirements outside of specific job tasks. One of these is getting your manager to like you. Social cohesion is one of the things workplaces tend to look for.

    Not every manager cares about small talk perhaps as much as yours does, but that’s the situation you are in.

    My advice would be to decide on one of the following 1) work elsewhere where you can thrive without this obstacle, 2) develop the skill of faking being interested, or 3) do nothing but get frustrated and possibly miss out on promotions or similar.

    Wishing you the best, from a socially inept person with autism who relates to that dread, haha.


  • “centred around” is a subjective projection rather than statement of a fact in cases where gamete production genuinely does not occur. For this person, her gonads never developed into either testes or ovaries, so by this definition she would be of neither sex. I’m OK with that, but it does undermine your point about the strict binary.

    My question to you is why does this matter, in the context of accessing bathrooms and changing rooms? Do you think inspecting reproductive anatomy is a proportionate measure?

    More broadly speaking, what is the point of recording the ‘biological sex’ of a person who, through transition, has changed their physiology and endocrine profile to that associated with the opposite, and no longer has their natal reproductive anatomy? Who would this benefit?



  • Gotcha. Their point is kind of right though; sex is less of a strict binary category and more 2 clusters we (people) created that allow us to more easily classify specimens based on strongly correlated traits. Both clusters have some overlap, and no trait on its own completely determines the cluster.

    E.g. I knew a case of this woman who grew up her whole life never knowing she has XY chromosomes, because she had seemingly typical female sex characteristics. It was only when she and her husband where struggling to conceive and they went to a fertility clinic, that that fact came to light. “Biological male” might be the cluster you’d want to put her under, but she lacks many of the features of that cluster, so in that case the binary classification is a little weak.

    Of course most people/animals are not intersex (or transitioned), but the point is that the biological sex binary is kind of a shorthand / way of making life easier to classify most of the population, but it’s not perfect or tidy.

    The easiest way to stay accurate is to just narrow down to the specific relevant trait (“person with facial hair”, “person with androgenetic alopecia”, etc.) depending on what specifically is measured/being talked about. But being that precise can come at the expense of being less clear/accessible to the layman, which is why we use biological sex as a concept.





  • I haven’t been able to post to reddit in years now, because I refuse to browse it without a VPN, and while it still lets me in, any account that I make immediately gets shadowbanned as soon as I make a post or a comment.

    I can’t tell if it’s because their bot filter is just terribly implemented, or because they don’t want me on their platform if I don’t surrender my public IP address.

    I’m pretty sure they just use a “how many different accounts under the same public IP” type of logic, because even if I create an account on a 4G network (no VPN) and post, this happens. Cellular networks often use double NAT (unique internal/carrier IP, shared public IP) to avoid allocating a public IP to each mobile device.

    I’ve given up a long time ago. My only exposure to reddit now is when a search results page links me to a post. The most helpful stuff is usually from a decade ago or earlier.