they better fuckin bill me for it

I thought june was pride month

Then I get stuck on … well they will rephrsse what I just said, and say/ask it back to me, and I’ll say no, no I phrased what I said specifically, because I meant exactly that.

they’re checking their own understanding by giving you an opportunity to correct them. by rephrasing it identically, it doesnt build any new understanding.

does it not matter to you to be understood by others? maybe that’s why you’re bashing therapy on the internet, asking for CBT worksheets instead of building rapport, and indirectly praising relationships with LLMs?

what makes you think their gender is even relevant to their practice?

CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

what the fuck are you talking about? this is objectively incorrect based on current evidence-based practices. why the fuck are you spreading misinfo about my job?

CBT IS NOT the only arghh omggg you must be trolling me. I’m not wasting any more on this

yeah they are definitely making dumb choices. it’s probably not because they’re all just dumb though. they probably have a lot of external factors pushing them towards that decision.

for example, many discussions tend to find ways to blame and shame them instead of responding with empathy. sort of like this comment. what benefit do you think you get by reframing things to blame the men here?

yep, if someone disagrees with me, it’s usually because they’re unhinged. People rarely know things that I don’t, because I am very smart. there’s no way that anyone downvoted that post because it makes statements that are inconsistent with the current scientific knowledge around this subject, because no such knowledgeable exists. I know this because if it did exist i would know about it, as I’m very smart. my AI therapist told me so. and i see nothing wrong with that post. so anyone who does must be a fool.

therapy does not have to be expensive.

around 70% of my caseload is Medicaid and they don’t pay a dime. the remainder is mostly DOC (prison), they only pay if we charge No Show fee. so they pay to not go to therapy. There’s 1-2 people who are funded by the county. they pay a $7 copay per session

Therapy isn’t expensive, luigi is.

As far as efficacy, we don’t even have data suggesting AI therapy is effective. we have ample data, however, showing that the most important part of therapy is not what you do but the relationship itself. not individual efforts. so your theory about what therapy does for us is wrong. there’s no relationship with an LLM. we have no reason to believe it would be any better than a paper journal and a CBT worksheet.

a terrible therapist at least has an ethics board

a terrible therapist at least has evidence-based interventions on their side

a terrible therapist at lest has the fact that ~80% of positive outcomes have nothing to do with the interventions or anything the therapist does besides show up and be cool (a statistic I remember quite well from grad school)

AI has none of these things

therapy isn’t fucking magic. it’s a relationship. you can’t have a relationship with an LLM. there’s no such thing as AI therapy, you’re just training it to tell you about CBT worksheets while you bitch about your problems like you’re in a nail salon

Never heard of him. He’s apparently going to be the next Mayor of NYC, if you haven’t either.

glad you found value! yes id say it’s 99% mental. the withdrawal is fuckin nothing man. watch someone trembling and shaking before they get their morning vodka, or writhing in pain detoxing off heroin, or being an anxious wreck for 30 days straight when their xanax gets cut off… THAT is withdrawal.

nicotine withdrawal, on the other hand, is nothing. is a little bit of brain fog, and if you want, an excuse to be irritable and eat extra candy for 3 days. it’s nothing.

once the physical detox is done you’re left with a LOT of brainwashing to undo. that’s the mental part. you gotta remind yourself that nicotine does nothing for you, all the benefits and advantages are lies that your addicted mind has told you to protect and perpetuate its dependency, and that you’re committed to celebrating a smoke free life. that’s it!

and the best part is… . you can undo your brainwashing before you quit smoking. smoke all you want, just pay attention to the lies, set a quit date, and don’t mope about it

oh you’re talking about a whole different drug. yeah, the vape pens are problematic for sure. they are way too strong to be a medicinal dose.

if you’re actually taking medication, you want to take exactly as much as needed to achieve the desired effects. building tolerance is one of many potential criteria for developing a substance use disorder.

the dry herb vapes are nice, though. I broke mine a while ago and have been using just a glass piece. been using CBD flower, and noticed i increased my use this past week. ironically, I think my lungs are a bit worse than when i was vaping (nicotine) lol because I’m replacing it with more smoke! oh well, can cut back on CBD too! not going back to the nicotine shackles either way. day 6 feels amazing.

oh yeah, how’d the NYC election turn out?

well 90% of the fentanyl that crosses the border is brought by a US citizen

this makes me even more excited for my plans to switch to linux. I’m gonna have to go find a good backup method soon!

I dont know. maybe to help them get ready or look like he’s doing so?

Great question. I used both concurrently. The reason for the disposable: accessibility.

The old school vapes are just getting harder and harder to find. I had to order parts online. The juice companies were getting shut down. I didn’t want to give up my addiction, and I felt so much better on vapes than i had on cigarettes, so I figured it was fine. (Nicotine alone is a bitch to your heart, though…)

I started trying out the disposables because they were readily available. I could pick one up anywhere, I didn’t have to bring juice around with me, no giant batteries or kits to maintain on the go… and in exchange a much harsher hit.

this also led to me doubling my nicotine strength. I had been using 3mg juice for ovet a year by then, but all the disposables measure out to 6mg. Nothing weaker was available. had to switch to stronger stuff on the box mod.

it pisses me off how much they enshittified vaping. it was a really cool and helpful tool that got me off of tobacco. but they started targeting it at minors. instead of rich savory flavors you get all this fruity menthol crap that middle schoolers like. you get tiny vapes with flashy blinking light and fixed high potency. you get bans on it, and regulations/fees so strict that indie vape companies that started this shit for people like me now have to shut down.

oh well. it was all a facade anyway. nicotine itself is the problem. it pushes your systems into overdrive and then wears you out on seconds, until you cant even be at homeostasis without nicotine in your system. the joy of smoking is just the temporary relief of withdrawal. it’s like wearing a pair of tight shoes just so you can enjoy taking them off for 5 minutes. I’m done living my life in withdrawals. so happy to be free! (and it was honestly fucking easy, you all can do it too)

NRT is a scam and your addiction is the scammer. You’re trying to stop poisoning yourself and you think you need a substitute for the poison! This isn’t benzos we’re talking about here, Nicotine has a half life of max two hours. The withdrawal is not that bad at all, it’s over within four days! I just reached 87 hrs nicotine free and it was a breeze, no titration or NRT or antidepressants or anything.

JUST DO IT!!

PLEASE stop using disposable vapes.

I quit cigarettes 10 yrs ago and had been exclusively using the old school refillable box mods. The kinds with big clouds, not the nic salts like disposables. I was doing fine, great even, for the last ten.

But this past year, after picking up those disposables, I kept having breathing problems. I would stop using them for like two weeks before I picked them up again. The cycle finally led to me going into atrial fibrillation, a cardiac emergency. Had to have my heart shocked. in my 30s!

I ended up quitting nicotine entirely now. it was surprisingly easy to quit! once you wanna do it, it’s already done. as long as you don’t mope about it and celebrate it instead. it’s easier than the whiners would have you believe!

it’s full of pollution from china. it’s a seasonal pattern whereby dry sandy desert air from the gobi mixes with industrial emissions feom beijing and blows over to the korean peninsula, coating everything with a yellow-orange dust every spring