Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

Psychotherapist-programmer musician-historian outsider-anthropologist healthcare-blogger science-explainer social critic essay-essayer and soothsayer. Professional wisewoman and amateur wiseass.

#PsychiatricNosology #HistoryOfScience #AnthropologyOfMedicine #EarlyMusic #EvenEarlierMusicThanThat #Galliards #Goliards #LoGaiSaber #Pestilence #TheSoCalledUSHealthcareSystem

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npub1ucd0ctg3qql0nd6d8yzsqns23g9yz8z392jh74wr7mcv4q4qrhuqg5vpz8

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siderea_at_universeodon.com@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswvxhu95gsq0hekaxnjpgqfc9g5zjpr3gj4ftl2hpldux2s2spm7qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsxjz0g8

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relay.nostr.bg

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1ucd0ctg3qql0nd6d8yzsqns23g9yz8z392jh74wr7mcv4q4qrhuqg5vpz8

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Last Notes

2026-05-11 08:38:31 UTC

In 2020, I took a Gmail account I had used for almost nothing and dedicated it to two purposes in life: to subscribe to the Arlington List and to email people on the Arlington List privately.
(The Arlington List is the storied high-volume discussion list of the town of Arlington, MA.)
I subscribed and just let it run. I have not gotten any non-list email at this address in years, nor have I sent or received any private (non-list) emails with it in years - something like 3.
Of the emails I have ever received - 99%+ being list traffic, Gmail assigned:
• 20,668 to "Inbox"
• 26,565 to "Forums"
• 2,605 to "Updates"
• About 300 to "Promotions" which I unassigned before realizing I should capture this.
• Some non-zero number to spam, but how many I don't know because I wasn't monitoring it closely and some got auto deleted I think. I think I caught a few dozen over the years.
Now, these categories aren't exclusive and Gmail won't tell me how many emails are in my account total, so I have no idea how these actually break down. [Edit: it figured it out! 39,895 total.]
Also some comparatively small number of list emails might have been reassigned by me in early days.
But basically this is what Gmail's default "smart" filtering did left to its own devices, in the easiest of all possible cases.
In case it weren't clear, this is inexcusably wrong. All emails came from the same sender and were clearly all marked as being part of the same service - both in the human-readable parts and with all the conventional header fields for identifying a Mailman list to the recipient server.
This test reveals that Gmail's smart filtering is profoundly terrible in a way which is invisible in normal usage. You would never find the misfiled emails if there were other sources they would be lost among. There would always be an excuse for why it misfiled them.
Without other senders, it demonstrates that Gmail can't reliably file things sensibly.

2026-02-15 07:44:40 UTC

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Also, a few pages in, I found a table I drew of alchemical symbols.
You know, the sort of thing you want to have handy as a reference.
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/116/073/542/754/811/633/original/da8f168ca63f6578.jpg

2026-02-15 07:33:21 UTC

I'm going through some old paperwork, and just found a pocket notebook that I must have had quite some time ago.
I flipped it open, and on the inside front cover I had written "Hotlines", followed by the tech support phone number for WordPerfect and then the specialty tech support phone number for *macros* in WordPerfect.
There's also a receipt tucked in here from Tags Hardware dated May 1997.
I'm pretty sure I never used WordPerfect in its subsequent Windows versions. I'm pretty sure I just rediscovered the magic phone numbers for getting support with WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS.
I'm a little behind in my housekeeping.

2025-12-06 12:34:40 UTC

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Hmm, it feel a bit like you showed up with a bat and glove only to discover it was a basketball game?

2025-12-06 09:22:01 UTC

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You talking about career, a relationship, or, like, Life as a Whole?

2025-12-01 12:19:49 UTC

Hey, is anybody else getting their phone blown up by scammers/spammers on #Signal? I have two Signal accounts, and one of them – the rather more public one I use for business – has been getting a spam message on average every 15 minutes around the clock starting about a day ago, each time from another account. This is vaguely annoying but mostly just mystifying.
(I also got three plaintext SMS scam messages in the same time frame, which that number never gets.)
I'm wondering if it's a product of some sort of targeted if ineffectual malevolence I should take personally or just the weather on the internet these days?
If the problem is my Signal number was spidered off my professional website, is there a clever way for me to expose it to potential customers on my website while protecting it from harvesting?
Also, I'm super curious how spamming/phishing on Signal even works. Are these being sent by actual humans lovingly hand keying each of these messages, or is there an API so a computer can do it? Can *I* interact with Signal programmatically?

2025-10-19 00:34:47 UTC

#cooking people!
I am looking at a recipe for how to make pumpkin pie spice mix without allspice, and it proposes that the only flavor note allspice contributes that isn't already covered by the cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and clove is *pepper*, so it basically just subs a small amount of pepper for a larger amount of allspice. The recipe winds up being in the proportions of Ci18:G4:N4:Cl2:P1.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with allspice or pumpkin pie spice to judge for myself: does this sound reasonable to you?

2025-10-15 06:27:34 UTC

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Comrade, please don't be classist. Swearing is something every blue-collar/working class kid learns to control from the get-go, because it is absolutely unacceptable for a kid to swear at an adult in that class culture. If cops are swearing at the public, it has *nothing* to do with their education.
@npub1r3n…7s47 @npub1h30…z24y

2025-10-13 19:37:34 UTC

Hey, fediversians, I have noticed of late that it has become extremely rare for me to see posts with stars/favorites on them, even when highly boosted.
Is it that people have stopped starring things in favor of boosting them, or am I looking at a technical glitch where stars are disproportionately not being propagated to my server/account/app?

2025-09-02 21:43:47 UTC

I'm watching a video ostensibly to explain "generative AI" (actually just LLMs) to the non-technical public. The video essayist expresses surprise at research into how people are actually using LLMs, showing the public is far more using LLMs for companionship than efficiency.
Well, duh. LLMs are *good at* companionship. They're terrible at efficiency.
LLMs are the virtual assistant equivalent of a secretary who types five words a minute, one of them misspelled, but who has great cleavage and keeps fawning over the boss: you don't hire her for her secretarial skills.

2025-08-16 21:57:42 UTC

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You're touching on something I've thought the world needed for a long time: a Wikipedia-like wiki site with world-curated comprehensive descriptions of the affordances of various social SaaS platforms. Ideally with a classification scheme and class-specific rubric.
While all those affordances are important, the ones I really want an authoritative, well organized reference to look things up in are moderation and social-management related. Pre-moderation? Post-moderation? Separation of read, write, and moderation permissions? Individual vs criteria based? Scheduled? Moderation authority by appointment or election or distribution? Shadowbanning? Disemvowelment? User affordances like blocking and muting? Notifications? Tracking/following? Etc.
@npub1hhf…qrnt

2025-07-18 04:05:55 UTC

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Houston, we have lift off!
I found the place in the vendor's UI where I can pay bills early, and I have successfully paid the Canadian vendor with Canadian dollars by means of my Wise virtual business debit card.
Since the dollar seems to be rallying, I have set an alert so it should ping me if USD gets up to 1.40 CAD. Meanwhile I need to decide how much CAD I can afford/need to buy.

2025-07-16 19:29:13 UTC

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Can't say I ever did. Is he around these parts?

2025-07-16 03:38:53 UTC

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Progress so far:
I have opened an account (not a trivial undertaking)
I have a virtual debit card for the account (Visa)
I have CAD$238.21 in the account
I have given the Canadian vendor my new Canadian debit card info
My next invoice should be dropping in about 10 days

2025-07-16 02:06:45 UTC

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The answer to this question ("Is there a way I as an American business person can electronically buy, hold, and spend CAD in Canada all from the US") is, as best I have been able to figure out, "The only solutions that work are maybe Wise and Revolut".
Not one bank I looked into supported doing this. TD Bank only supports people relocating from US to Canada. HSBC has a global money account but no debit card for it, leaving no way to spend the money in the account. Sony Bank (Sony has a bank!) in Japan came the closest, seemingly offering the features I needed, but then had a big red banner saying it was strictly forbidden to use such an account for business purposes.
So I am gritting my teeth, crossing my fingers, and proceeding with Wise, and will see if it actually works for this use case.

2025-07-12 01:35:35 UTC

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So, I have been slowly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that LLMs are the One Ring:
• They are seductive by appealing to a person's best nature
• By convincing the user that what they most ardently desire is almost within their grasp and they are right and good to want it and deserving of having it, they slowly turn the user into Gollum
• They are probably feeding everything the user whispers to it right on to the evil guy on the back end of a Palantir

2025-07-12 01:02:10 UTC

There's a saying that goes something like "everyone who has ever lied to you has compromised your ability to reason". Does anybody recognize this and know the original? And its source?

2025-07-06 22:58:58 UTC

Hey, brain trust! Maybe someone knows the answer to this question about platforms and AI.
It has occurred to me it might be fun and profitable for me to offer an online class – a little one-meeting webinar – for money. However, I absolutely don't want to use my own likeness for it, neither appearance nor voice.
I have a hazy sense there's platforms for delivering classes like that, but do any of them have a built-in AI avatar functionality?

2025-07-06 17:49:47 UTC

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Also, notice that disproportionately the things for which "convenience" is a sin are domestic labor, i.e. things historically "women's work" and still latently associated with women, like preparing food.
Nobody suggests using Jiffy Lube for your oil change, instead of doing it yourself, is lazy. Nobody suggests that using a power mower to mow your lawn instead of "aesthetically" using a scythe is lazy. Nobody suggests using a nail gun instead of lovingly hand driving every nail is lazy.
Convenience is a gendered term. We use the word "efficient" for the same thing when applied to things it is commonly imagined a man does.

2025-07-06 16:56:11 UTC

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> Well, let’s just say it is inarguable that beginning with the late Silent Generation and continuing through the Baby Boomers, #crime went through the roof.
Lol, no, it is absolutely arguable.
Don't get me wrong, I like your hypothesis, and I would love to believe the article. It's just that the evidentiary basis of that article is the purest trash.
100% of what we know about the rate of crime in this country comes from police, and if you are unaware of how police departments manipulate crime statistics by selective enforcement to make themselves look good – a phenomenon that really came in with the introduction of computers to policing in exactly the relevant timeframe – you really need to look into that.
We know almost nothing about crime in this country. What we think we know about crime, we actually know about police.
Are Boomers disproportionately antisocial? Maybe. But you can't tell that from cooked data.

2025-06-29 07:27:37 UTC

I have here a recipe for a Chinese style fish dish that calls for "fish sauce". Suggestions as to what precisely I should buy? Brand recommendations welcome.

2025-06-12 19:26:26 UTC

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I entirely agree with you, but
Look, I once watched a video about people living in the shadow of a dam that was not well maintained and if it let go, would just wash the town away in an eye blink. The interviewer asked if they were concerned, and, no, sir, they were not. They were certain they had nothing to worry about. They had all sorts of mental gymnastics to prop up that attitude. And I figured that engaging in that kind of mental exercise was necessary to keep living in that town. Anyone who didn't would either move away or lose their mind.
We Americans have that same attitude about state violence. We convince ourselves that the state will never misuse violence to allow us to keep living in the shadow of the state's monopoly on violence.
That's the difference: the people setting the cars on fire aren't the state, the people disappearing immigrants are. A whole lot of Americans who object to the former look at the latter and are like, "the dam is FINE. FINE."

2025-06-11 01:26:37 UTC

Anybody got any good home organization suggestions for storing one's collection of canes? The mobility aide kind. I have managed to amass quite a number, and don't have a good storage solution for the ones that aren't my daily drivers.

2025-05-13 22:22:20 UTC

Can anybody point me at a commercially available webcam that DOESN'T have a microphone?
Situation: I live in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood that has been hit by ICE, and I have this here bay window with a great view up and down the block. I woke up to my sweetie telling me there had been a bunch of plainclothes cops running around earlier in the day, but it turned out they weren't ICE, they were on another errand.
We would both like to do our part, given the positive role citizen surveillance has played in other cases of ICE abductions.
BUT the room with the bay window is an office, used for highly confidential virtual meetings. We absolutely can't have a device with a microphone recording in there. Also, this is Massachusetts, a Two-party Consent state, where (to oversimplify a bit) video surveillance is almost always legal, and audio surveillance is almost never legal. So even if we put the cameras on the outside of the building, we wouldn't want audio recording.
1/n

2025-04-18 22:00:43 UTC

Hey, braintrust. I am a business person in the US who buys services from a company in Canada. I am thinking that to insulate myself from fluctuations in the exchange rate if the USD tanks, it would be smart to buy and hold CAD in a Canadian institution from which to pay my Canadian bills.
Additional logistical wrinkle: I am disabled and absolutely cannot travel to Canada in person.
Anybody ever done something like this and could advise me?
Trying to research this, I keep seeing breezy references to the supposed fact that some unspecified Canadian banks may be willing to open accounts for foreigners, maybe even online, but all the examples I have found (e.g. TD Bank) are expressly for people relocating to Canada, which I am not.
(Continued)

2025-04-14 02:36:11 UTC

Is there a way to report bugs to Reddit?

2025-04-06 06:08:22 UTC

Hey, #Patreon creators: how much is your revenue down due to the Apple Tax taking effect?
I saw Cat Valente's toot that she's out 28%. I'm currently out 0% – apparently I don't have anybody who subscribed through the iOS Patreon app.
How about you?

2025-03-31 05:21:11 UTC

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While I am always here for railing against the utter fuckery of the EHR industry, I object to this characterization because of how it lets the US federal government off the hook. It makes this look like a little whoopsie-doodle of an unintended consequence, "oh, noes! Subsidies accidentally attracted bad actors and the poor innocent healthcare industry didn't know better, so sad". Motherfuckers: the federal government railroaded healthcare systems into adopting quarter-baked garbage through Meaningful Use, which was basically extortion, a la, "Nice Medicare caseload you got there. Be a shame if something... happened... to it."
I remain convinced that the poor security was a feature for Congress, not a bug, because it facilitated government surveillance. And THAT is why they made a common cause with the insurance industry to force not-remotely-ready-for-prime-time EHRs on healthcare.

2025-02-13 21:49:53 UTC

Can one FOIA a Federal agency's database structure?
I found out what the underlying tech stack for PubMed is. It's on MongoDB + Solr + Django. Which implies that they cooked up a homebrew solution. Can I FOIA their configs/custom code/asset model?
(I've never worked with a noSQL. What do they call the equivalent of an dump of the db structure in noSQL-land?)

2025-01-26 03:02:14 UTC

Is there an Information Scientist in the house?
Help. How do I mirror PubMed?
They have their whole corpus conveniently available as XML files for download while supplies/democracy lasts. I speak Unix and disk space is cheap. Once I have all the XML, then what do I do?
#InformationScience

2025-01-04 00:45:45 UTC

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No, but I found the answers on my own. Buttondown does not touch the money, the creator has to have their own Stripe account to integrate with, and if they don't have one, Buttondown has handy instructions for getting one.

2024-12-24 02:11:07 UTC

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AND FOR ANOTHER THING! This is a great article, which by intention focuses on just one of the heinous parts of #TheSoCalledUSHealthCareSystem, PBMs. But there are other heinous aspects – aside from the kickbacks to employers which @npub1fdr…lvhs explains – which incent corporate America to oppose universal healthcare or even reforming the present system.
In the article, where he explains why the big pharmas don't want to get rid of the bribes because they make it hard to impossible for smaller pharmas to compete with them? Well, the exact same dynamic exists with big and smaller EMPLOYERS, competing in the market for labor: bigger corps can offer better health insurance than their employees can get from smaller companies or on their state's exchanges. Fear of losing their health insurance keeps employees from leaving jobs with big corporations: the "golden handcuffs", medical style.

2024-12-19 04:08:00 UTC

Hey, #Buttondown creators and paid subscribers! I am entertaining moving from Patreon to Buttondown, and sent Buttondown a question but never got an answer back.
Who actually bills paid subscribers? Does Buttondown have their own Stripe acct or similar to bill all the paid subscribers themselves then pass the revenues on to the creators? Or do they just have an integration with Stripe where the creator has to have their own Stripe account?
Put another way: who owns the merchant account that bills paid subscribers? Whose name shows up on paid subscribers' credit card bills? Does Buttondown touch the money? Does Buttondown issue 1099-Ks to creators?
(And consequently, who has to satisfy Stripe's requirements, you or Buttondown? Do you have to trust Buttondown to handle your revenues? Is Buttondown in a position to bundle charges across creators? This is a HUGELY consequential issue.)

2024-09-25 05:45:36 UTC

Hey, #Android users. Is there a way to insert the contents of a text file at the cursor? Like position the cursor in a random text field (the body of an email message, the new toot window of a mastodon client, the notes field of a calendar entry, a text field in a web page, etc) do a thing, and be prompted to select a text file off the file system, and once you do the contents of that text file appear starting where the cursor was.

2024-08-14 07:39:47 UTC

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So, what happened this spring was the CDC belatedly announced boosters for the vulnerable, and then extra belatedly expanded the criteria for whom they were recommending them for. They fumbled it really badly, and uptake was really poor.
They have already announced a fresh formulation will be coming out this fall.
My recommendation to Americans is that, unless and until you hear otherwise, you should plan on getting yourself whatever booster is available in April and October every year. If you wait on the CDC to announce it, you may find yourself in a mad scramble at the last minute.
To the best of my knowledge, it is still the case that each vaccination wanes in effectiveness after about 4 or 5 months. A shot in October will get you through the holiday season; a shot in April will get you through the inevitable "surprise" surge sometime May to July.

2024-08-14 02:25:49 UTC

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Apple only supports the common subscription model that is widespread among payment processors and crowdfunding platforms. They do not want to have to support the innovative things that Patreon was doing, so they told Patreon that to be compatible with Apple, it could only offer the same thing all the other platforms offered.
At least on the iOS app.
To be absolutely crystal clear: Patreon presumably could have complied by, instead, simply making it such that users of the iOS app cannot access or subscribe to or manage their subscriptions to creators that used non-compatible services, and allowed the creators to go on using them.
But instead, it paved its own orchard to give Apple a place to park.
This is not a surprise, in that at least one of the two offerings it is canceling is something those of us who use it have long suspected Patreon was just itching to get rid of.
2/n

2024-08-14 02:18:38 UTC

A lot of people are unclear why so many #PatreonCreators are quite so upset at the recent news about #Patreon. This is largely because what is being reported in the news is the business with the 30% Apple tax, which only affects iOS users.
The thing creators are upset about is that Patreon is SHUTTING DOWN two of its three offerings. Creators which were using one of those two are now screwed. How screwed they are depends on how and why they were using the services being discontinued, and ranges from "extremely inconvenienced" right on up to "existential threat to their creative endeavor".
One of the services Patreon offered – the one I use – basically has no alternative. None of the other crowdfunding platforms support it.
Indeed, a lot of creators were stuck using Patreon *because* it did things differently other crowdfunding platforms, and it is BECAUSE it did things differently, that Apple is requiring them to give up those services.
1/n

2024-08-13 03:31:48 UTC

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If you, too, are a #PatreonCreator or #PatreonPatron who would like to complain to #Patreon, you can do it at this web page:
https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

2024-08-13 03:29:19 UTC

What I just wrote to #Patreon:
Hi, team. Just wanted to reach out to you to add my voice to the no doubt many others raised in complaint about today's bombshell announcement.
I just wanted to point out that we are at odds. While maintaining the presence of an iOS app in the Apple Store is in Patreon's financial interest, it is not in my financial interest. It would be considerably more advantageous to me for Patreon to drop the iOS app rather than force my account to convert to a subscription model which is incompatible with my business model.
1/n

2024-08-09 09:09:53 UTC

Heads up, massholes, if you have recently registered to vote or plan to register to vote soon.
I just moved earlier this year, and I finally got around to doing my re-registration to vote. I did it a few weeks ago through the Secretary of State website.
There was apparently a glitch.
After a week or two, I got a boilerplate letter from the municipality I had left saying, "Hey we understand from the Secretary of State that you are registering to vote somewhere else, so we're taking you off the voter rolls here." But I didn't hear anything from the municipality I had moved to. Odd.
So I got around to calling them up and asking what was going on with my voter registration, and they were like, "huh, we have never heard of you, nothing here from the Sec'y of State about you, you want we mail you a voter registration form?"
So I called up the Sec'y of State to notify them of a problem.
Two days later, voila, I was registered to vote with no further effort on my part.
#Massachusetts

2024-08-06 02:00:08 UTC

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A lot of us have advocated for this, but it's a very minority opinion and seen as extremely antithetical to how the fediverse functions. People get reeeeal upset when you mention it.
The problem is, it's those of us with larger readerships for original work who need tools like this. We're an edge case from the designers of ActivityPub and Mastodon and other parts of the fediverse.
To put it crudely, most people identify with *being* audience, and only a few people have to deal with *having* an audience. People who identify with being audience want to have all the freedom in the world to shoot their mouths off to whomever they want whenever they want however they want; too often they slide into valorizing complete liberty from moderation as "not being censored".
People who have audiences have to worry about getting killed.
@npub1dml…x796 [@mos_8502](https://studio8502.ca/@mos_8502 ) @npub10je…3zd3

2024-08-05 22:31:43 UTC

Hello left wing of the US. I feel you are missing something delicious and enjoyable, so allow me to point it out.
I just observed someone noting something I expect is nigh-universally true: Harris's pick of a VP has absolutely zero effect on whether or not they'll vote for her. Of COURSE they'll vote for her, regardless of who she picks as a VP. Everyone who doesn't want fascist takeover of the US is going to vote for her, regardless of who she picks as a VP. So why all the attention on who she picks?
Answer: because her press strategists are goddamned geniuses.
This whole picking a veep thing? It's *drama*. It's a *spectacle* (fistbump Guy Debord). And omg the media is eating. it. up.
Yo, her political opponent GOT SHOT. NOT EVEN A MONTH AGO. And now *nobody cares*. Her campaign managed to suck all of the oxygen out of the room that is the media like an out of control house fire.
This is some of the most masterful PR I have ever had the pleasure to witness.
In summary:
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/112/911/769/093/997/244/original/72ce8700add68393.jpg