This is like a codified form of self delusion.

Maybe your negative thoughts are right

Trying to keep this eli5 (though it may be more like eli10):

The point of therapy is to work with someone called a therapist to learn (healthy) ways to identify and change negative thought and behavior patterns that make you feel bad or get in the way of your goals. A therapist is like a teacher or a coach who will use conversation, exercises, and homework to help you practice and learn these new skills.

—-

Not eli5: I am a clinical psychologist who does mostly time-limited cognitive and behavioral therapy, which focuses on maladaptive thought and behavior patterns as maintaining factors of a problem and, thus, as proximal mechanisms of change. Regardless of therapeutic orientation, goals in therapy are aimed at improving quality of life, particularly emotional (eg alleviating distress) or functional, occupational, or social (eg reducing impairment) etc. There should always be a goal that you set no matter what type of therapy you do; different therapeutic orientations simply posit different ways of getting there (ie different mechanisms of change)… some with more or less evidence behind their effectiveness depending on the goal one is trying to achieve / problem one is trying to address.

If someone is not sure what they’re working on in therapy, the goal might be poorly defined or (and I’m not saying this is your case) it may be an indicator the person is not in need of therapy (not everyone is). Your therapist should help you identify and nail down your goal (using SMART goals can be helpful here). They should also be able to tell you exactly what type of therapy they’re doing and the rationale for how that will help you achieve that goal. If they can’t, I would be just as skeptical as if my pcp gave me some medicine but couldn’t tell me what my diagnosis was (eg strep throat), what they’re prescribing for it (eg an antibiotic called penicillin), and why that should work (eg antibiotics mess up vital processes in bacteria —> which kills them or stops them from spreading —> and helps my immune system fight off the infection). Edited to add: much like antibiotics, also consider recommended duration and frequency of treatment and how that aligns with your expectations when trying to determine whether you see any benefit.

Apple would sue

For Germany it's because of the different tribes. The Allemans next to France (Allemagne), the Saxons in the northeast (Saksa in Finnish), etc.

If nothing else, therapy is a good way to talk about your thoughts + feelings to a neutral third party, for some unbiased feedback.

We're talking about the same exact card, right? In that 3 seconds, the charge slip is already being printed out, whereas it takes 8 for the dipped chip?

I suspect the app on the terminal reading the EMV takes its sweet time to talk to the card since it knows the card is just there. Whereas with contactless, the an imperative to optimize the communication. TL;DR bad programming of the app.

Both should work more or less within the same time window. Or at least not take 5 frigging seconds longer.

Yeah this. I work with contactless payments. When you load a card on your phone, the phone doesn't even have your credit card information. It has a token which is associated with your credit account and software which talks to your CC network (VISA or MasterCard or whoever) via the payment terminal. There is no way to pay without the CC network being in the loop. The built in token on your credit card works similarly.

Thanks

Thanks for the explanation.

I am not a therapist but a psychology minor. The popular therapy now is cognitive behavioral therapy. The idea is for patients to do exercises which help them change their own thinking, emotions, and behaviors.

A simple exercise would be to draw on a sheet of paper two columns: negative thoughts and replacement thoughts.

When you think something negative you want to stop thinking, write the negative thought on the left column and a replacement or better way to think about it in the right column.

Re-read your list often and when you find yourself having negative thoughts actively replace them with your replacement thoughts.

That's it. It's just repetitively reminding yourself of your negative thoughts so you recognize them then replacing them with better thoughts.

While our brains and thoughts and emotions are complex sometimes a simple exercise can reprogram them to focus on healthier thoughts.

4 in decimal form actually doesn't exist in the computer. It either draws pixels in the shape of a 4, or you have a 4 drawn on the keyboard, they're the only places "4" exists like that, the moment you press the 4 key, it's already in binary form. Your keyboard sends the binary scancode representation of "4" to the computer.

oops I didn't answer the question directly - the point of therapy is to increase psychological well-being.

It's hard to really get to that place if you can't settle into the first spot .. and that is, being prepared to believe that the therapist thinks you are perfect exactly as you are. That doesn't feel right if you have an internal narrative that is negative.

First, you find out that someone (the therapist) sees you as perfectly okay just as you are.

You don't really believe them but you wing it - you start telling them about your stuff. The more you do that, generally, the easier it becomes to believe them - I mean, they didn't run screaming from the room.

You kind of get into the groove at finding bits of yourself that are okay. And then letting other thoughts and feelings you have begin to become okay too.

Then together, you and the therapist might work to explore an idea - like, what has you pulling back from your brother? In this safety you can find new information about yourself, you can make new choices.

A therapist might offer you a reframe, or might teach you a coping skill, or might help keep you focused on a topic that you find hard to stare at but want to see through.

A big part of therapy for me has been re-understanding parts of my history now with smarter eyes and a bigger heart, rather than having history jangle around in my pockets weighing me down.

Not all of us can connect easily. Many of us who have experienced trauma find connecting painful or threatening, so the very idea of it is not appealing. It takes skills sometimes to help us get through that. Doesn't have to be a therapist - maybe someone who has been through the same things. Therapists are trained though to help us build the inner tools it takes to be in the world - like emotional mechanics.

There are probably a number of different ways one could do that ... people heal in running groups, knitting circles, church communities, volunteer agencies, film buff societies ... people heal singing and doing yoga and acting in local theater ... people heal loving animals ...

Either way, when i keep moving towards healing, doesn't matter if i am walking driving or flying, if i keep facing in the same direction i am going to get there one day. :)

Every character that you use in the everyday world is associated with a binary number per ASCII standards. The character '4' is not actually associated with the binary equivalent of 4 but rather with the binary equivalent of 52. So, if you input '4', your computer receives a signal of 110100 and proceeds from there.

There’s a little computer on a microchip inside your keyboard. That chip has a bunch of pins that are constantly (say 100x per second) checking the state of every single button on your keyboard. The buttons on your keyboard work like light switches; there is power on one side and it either connects the power or disconnects it.

When it sees a button state change, software on the microchip goes and looks in a table to see what code it should send to the computer.

Here the button code is sent to the computer over the wire or wireless connection. (Not ELI5: In this case the button code for the “4” key is the value “21” decimal; you can look them up in ch10 here: https://www.usb.org/document-library/hid-usage-tables-14 ).

Then the computer takes the button code and sends that text (still not the value of “4” but the character “4”) to the software that is running. This software can interpret it however it wants, basically through another lookup table. In a calculator application it will convert it to the value of “4”, in a game it might select weapon slot 4, in a document it might just output the text of “4” directly to the document without converting it.

When you type 4 in your keyboard, the button you pushed presses on one of many physical switches, which each produces a unique number (in binary) called a scan code which tells your computer which of the many keys you pressed. At point the computer knows which button you pressed, but not what that button represents (you may have seen keyboards for different languages have different physical layouts)

There is then, in the operating system, there is a table which knows the layout and can convert those scan codes into the appropriate binary representation of the number, letter or symbol that the key you pressed represents

Digits are usually represented by their ASCII code, with '0' having code 48 (binary 00110000) and '9' having code 57 (binary 00111001). So for a single digit the first step is to simply subtract 48. That would convert your '4' to binary 00000100.

For multi-digit whole numbers, the computer works from the first (leftmost) digit. For each ASCII digit it subtracts 48. If there's another digit following it multiplies its current answer by ten then continues, adding future digits to the total.

So, for '1234' (ASCII 49, 50, 51, 52) it goes:

• 49 − 48 = 1
• ×10 = 10 (binary 1010)
• add 50 − 48 = 12 (binary 1100)
• ×10 = 120 (binary 1111000)
• add 51 − 48 = 123 (binary 1111011)
• ×10 = (binary 100110011110)
• add 52 − 48 = 1234 (binary 10011010010)
• No more digits so we stop there.

I don't know the exact answer youre looking for, but there is definetly a way to convert decimal to binary.

Use a loop that compares the number with increasingly larger powers of two.

Find the power of two that is just below (or equal)

So for 103, the power of two just below would be 64. Aka 2⁶

So then we know that in binary it is a six-digit number.

If the number is equal or larger than 2⁶ subtract 2⁶ and note a '1', otherwise note a '0'

Then repeat in descending order for 2⁶, 2⁵, 2⁴, 2³, 2², 2¹, 2⁰

>= Means greater than or equal to

!>= Means not greater than or equal to

103 !>= 128 so '0'

103 >= 64 so '1', and 103 - 64= 39

39 >= 32 so '1', and 39 - 32 = 7

7 !>= 16 so '0'

7 !>= 8 so '0'

7 >= 4 so '1' and 7 - 4 = 3

3 >= 2 so '1' and 3 - 2 = 1

1 >= 1 so '1' and we are done.

Unless I made a mistake, 103 in binary should be 01100111, you also could cut off the extra 0 and just say 1100111.

A computer processor can only give two signals - on (or 1) or off (or 0). Everything is binary on a computer when you remove all the layers.

I don’t know how it works beyond that - but it’s not just decimals, numbers - but everything. Colors, videos, programs, etc - everything is just 0 or 1. It’s the only thing a processor can do is on and off - yes/no electricity.

[removed]

I originally started therapy to deal with PTSD. I was having horrible flashback nightmares every night and was sick of it. I worked through the PTSD with EMDR therapy which helps your brain reprocess the traumatic event in a healthier way. I was hesitant at first but was really surprised by the outcome. The nightmares stopped and now when the traumatic event crosses my mind Im not stressed out or angry about it. I still see my therapist just for someone to vent to about stuff. It’s better than always dumping that on friends or family :)

It honestly sounds like you don't want them to help. A big part of therapy is believing that therapy can work... If you have a negative feedback loop of believing that therapy never works, it's never going to work. A big part of this is actually understanding your reasoning for wanting to see a therapist.

That’s odd because sometimes I can be using the chip and it takes about 8 seconds and when I do contactless it usually finishes in 3 seconds based on my experience.

If contactless doesn’t verify authenticity what’s stopping criminals from scamming retailers and using fake contactless cards with accounts that don’t exist at checkout?

… and how much was already removed by humans

Please tell me you dont actually think there is an impenetrable barrier