Pretty sure I still catch myself smiling over the girl in highschool 18 years ago that said she was jealous because I had really long and pretty eyelashes.

In the USA? It won’t, your voting system is fundamentally broken.

Wow, that kind of blows my mind to think about, cleaning is often the longest part of preparing and eating food for me. I hate doing it and I will choose what I’m cooking and how to cook it based on the dishes in prepared food to wash up.

My partner once asked why the carrots I cook are always chipped in a rustic style …because I’m not dirtying a chipping board for a carrot, I fruit ninja that shit.

But I’ve come to find the cleaning up therapeutic, it makes me feel like the process is over, it’s a sense of completion and a job well done.

That said, it’s only therapeutics when it’s my dishes, and I’ve got a clean kitchen. If I’m working around, or expected to deal with someone else’s dishes, I’m having a protein shake for dinner, because I will lose my temper at inanimate object trying to cook in someone else’s mess or having to do 2-3 loads of dishes so I can eat 1 meal.

It helps that I’d had several previous surgeries, so I’d had practice at keeping my cool. Plus my surgeon was in discussion with me for months with multiple consultations to really understand the issue, I don’t think I could have possibly been in safer hands.

Regional Australia. I know they’re common in new builds, but not the kind of landlord special flips I’ve lived in obviously 😂.

Well either it’s 1 in 10,0000 in my country, or the department of health, my surgeon and GP are all missing a zero… which isn’t more likely because there’s no way our risk would be that much higher than the UK, and the NHS public health resources is 100,000.

Hence why the body neutrality movement is the way to go for a gentle love approach to health through weight management, fat acceptance is a strange concept, fat isn’t healthy, why accept poor health for yourself?

The body neutrality movement is exactly that, your physical body is neutral, no judgement for whatever size or shape it is, so just focus on improving your mind. Are you struggling with addictive tendencies around food? address that, your body will catch up to the health improvements you make for your mind.

Well then it’s definitely a deal breaker 😂

(Are dishwashers that common in the states? I’ve lived in 16 houses and never had one, when friends get them installed it’s a celebration, they’re dishwasher owning kind of people now, fancy)

It feels a little dot com boom 2.0

I genuinely can’t tell if you’re being facetious.

I thought you were fully serious, but then I hit the line

Even if prices in reality do not need to compensate, because margin is already big enough, it gives retail a free card to jack prices,

And assumed you were just poking fun and the poor widdle corporations and their giant profit margins, but then you continued with your paragrap, and now I’m not sure again…

Why bother going through the checkout at all, the fastest way out is straight through the door. Unrelated, the weather is changing so I’m thinking of buying a really big coat, and I’ll want pockets for my keys and other essentials.

Hence why star wars is a chosen one, hero’s quest, prophetised fantasy. Not a Sci fi.

When you and your kin are all prophetised to do important shit, there is no coincidence. it’s all part of a bigger divine plan of fate. Or it’s the midi-chlorians or something I dunno, I slept through the prequels.

Learning that the intensity of your hunger sensation is not related to how much you need to eat to satisfy the hunger, but rather, how soon you need to address the hunger, is what changed the game for me.

Instead of responding to feeling ravenous by getting in the kitchen cooking a big meal and sitting down to eat, 40 minutes after I felt hungry, eating easily 2-3 portions, and justifying it with “well I haven’t eaten all day”.

Now I have an orange or something the second I start to feel that intense hunger, go distract myself, and then 20 minutes later I can think clearly, without food noise and intense hunger to cause me to pile crap onto my plate. So now I can plan a well portioned meal that fits within my goals.

But I think part of that is that I have poor interoception, I never felt hungry unless I was already ravenous. Learning to identify hunger before it turns into “eat everything in sight” is something I need to do. I’m still not very good at it, but I’m better. (for context with my interoception, I also can’t tell when I need to pee, or when I’m tired, or when I’m too hot or cold. I’ll just randomly feel shooting pain in my hand, look down and notice my fingers are turning blue, then remember to put a jacket on)

I don’t like feeling over-hungry because it gives me migraines and I get really nauseous and end up dry wretching when I know what I need is calories. Hence why in the past if I started to feel hungry I’d overeat to really try and nip that sensation in the bud. I failed at diets in the past because I assumed that you were supposed to be constantly hungry, and for me hungry is painful, so I’d give up on diets pretty quickly.

So I personally need to stay on top of my hunger to stay on track with my calorie intake.

I always think about it this way; I was a fat baby, fat toddler, fat kid, fat teen, and fat young adult, I spent 25 years learning how to be an obese fuck. I was a master at it.

Why should I expect myself to be even halfway competent at being a healthy person after just 1-2 years of practicing those skills.

The goal isn’t to be healthy tomorrow, it’s to take steps every day to learn to be a person who has naturally healthy habits, and grow into being that person for the rest of my life. If that takes 10 years to be able to say “this is who I am now, not a fat fuck” then it takes 10 years, and that’s still a faster learning curve than the 25 years I spent obese.

Though I will shout out “the paper towel effect”, the first 25-30kg I didn’t really see a difference, nor did anyone around me, but every other kilo since then has been a visible change to my appearance and that’s very motivating, especially as it gets harder to induce a calorie deficit because I’m getting closer to my goal and maintenance weight range, plateaus are more common. But at the same time it’s exciting to be slowly shifting gears into maintenance.

One of the most motivating things for me is going to the gym and grabbing weights equal to the weight I’ve lost, picking it up and just thinking “fuck, I used to carry this weight around with me 24/7”

My strength training is falling behind my weight loss, I can’t even bench the amount of weight I’ve lost, I can RDL it but that’s because I’ve still got the glutes of a fatty.

Depending on what you’re treating, 50% sounds pretty good.

I remember when I went for my last surgery and I was signing all the consent forms, my doctor was emphasising the 17% chance of this known lifelong complication, and the increased 4% chance of general anaesthesia fatality (compared to 1 in 10,000 for general public).

My mum was freaking out because when she had the same surgery she’d been seen much earlier in the disease process, she wasn’t expecting such a “high” risk of complications in my care.

But all I was hearing is that there’s an over 80% chance it will be a success. Considering how limited and painful my life was by the thing we were treating, it was all no brainier, I liked those odds. Plus my condition is diagnosed 1 in 100,000 people, so how much data could my surgeon really have on the rate of risk, the sample size would be laughable.

Still the best decision of my life, my surgeon rolled his skilled dice, I had zero complications (other than slow wound healing but we expected and prepared for that). I threw my crutches in the trash 2 years later, and ran for the first time in my life at 27 years old after being told at 6 years old that I’d be a full time wheelchair user by 30.

For some people with disabilities it’s a social services problem because they will never have the capacity to work for their income with their own type of disability. For others like myself it’s an occupational support issue. It took me a few years and several intensive OT programs, but I now ace every work task expected of me, I have progressed through my company and hold a senior position. After failing for 7 years after highschool to get a proper job, doing we’ll in interviews and then being let go before my probation ended because I wasn’t picking physical skills up fast enough, finally I landed a patient and understanding employer who responded to my OT and gave feedback to the my OT and worked with me to develop the skills I was lacking.

This was done through an existing social support program in my country where the government will subsidise a business for part of an employee’s wage, if that employee is enrolled in a disability occupational program, that way the business isn’t paying full price for half the labour while the employee skills up.

This program has existed for over 30 years, and yet it’s very difficult to get businesses to enrol in the program because it’s still expected that you come to a job on day one with the fundamental skills like being able to hold a pen properly to write (took me until I was 21 to consistently do it without pain, but I got there eventually). I’ve been on both ends of the program now, having signed up my organisation for a new hire, just a few years after I had finished my program. From the business perspective it’s 15 minutes of paperwork, you can hire a temp with the money the government gives you so you can have 2 employees for the price of one, and sure it’s a bit awkward because one of those employees isn’t yet fully able to do the job, but you quickly see improvement because you’ve got the right professionals involved, and it doesn’t matter because if its truly entry into level the temp will have it covered while the disabled employee learns.

This program exists, so within my country specifically I’d argue that’s where the ableism comes in. When the financial cost of hiring someone with a longer than average training period is removed, the only other reasons that remain are that you’d rather just hire the easiest person to train and that person is likely able bodied, and I’m not saying that’s wrong, that’s smart business, so I completely understand why businesses do it. My point I guess is that my current employment status and output of work is proof that people in my situation aren’t unemployable because we can’t do the work, we’re unemployable because we pose an added barrier to training, and therefore we have no edge in a capitalist society.

Even if I was eligible for a good, livable disability pension I would still want to work/volunteer in my same role because it’s what it love doing with my time and it fulfils me even without a pay cheque, but that still wouldn’t be an option for me without access to OT programs today learn through skills I need (I’m not eligible for a pension, in my country if you can work more than 8 hours a week you can’t claim a disability pension. I can work 10-12 hours, so I can’t claim)

Unfortunately the models are have trained on biased data.

I’ve run some of my own photos through various “lens” style description generators as an experiment and knowing the full context of the image makes the generated description more hilarious.

Sometimes the model tries to extrapolate context, for example it will randomly decide to describe an older woman as a “mother” if there is also a child in the photo. Even if a human eye could tell you from context it’s more likely a teacher and a student, but there’s a lot a human can do that a bot can’t, including having common sense to use appropriate language when describing people.

Image descriptions will always be flawed because the focus of the image is always filtered through the description writer. It’s impossible to remove all bias. For example, because of who I am as a person, it would never occur to me to even look at someone’s eyes in a portrait, let alone write what colour they are in the image description. But for someone else, eyes may be super important to them, they always notice eyes, even subconsciously, so they make sure to note the eyes in their description.

People with physical disabilities and the capability of doing labor don’t generally go together.

And yet we’re given no other means to ensure our survival other than to try to labour for a chance to earn a living.

I guess my question would be, why do you need the picture as a visual aid, is the accompanying body text confusing without that visual aid? and if so, by having no alt text, you accept that you will leave VI people confused and only sighted people will have the clarification needed.

If your including a picture of a table with nothing on it, there’s a reason, so yes, that alt text is perfectly reasonable.

Personally I wish there was a way to enable two types of alt text on images, for long and quick context.

Because I understand your concern about unnecessary detail, if I’m in a rush “a table with nothing on it” will do for quicker context, but there are times when it’s appropriate to go much deeper, “a picture of a hard wood rustic coffee table, taken from a high angle, natural sunlight, there are no objects on the table.”

I think so, but I don’t have the mental energy at the moment to sit down and figure out if the AI detection software is accessible either. I know some of my colleagues use programs to check student work for LLM plagerism, but I don’t assign work that can be done via an LLM so I haven’t looked into that, and that’s different from the AI images.