Chronically Ill Renegade

This is where I vent or just talk about my various physical or mental health issues. If it helps to see other peoples experiences with stuff like that feel free to follow! tho I probably wont be super active on here lol

[chronicallyillrenegade]

Also insomnia being a symptom of my me/cfs flare ups feels super backwards.... like wow I used too much energy and now I'm super tired? and I can't sleep about it?? Rude!

[chronicallyillrenegade]

it feels super rude that a me/cfs flare up can take days or weeks to start... like seriously tricking me into thinking I'm not gonna have to suffer the consequences of my actions only to punch me in the gut like a week later. so heckin rude =-=

[chronicallyillrenegade]

I donno if theres just something about modern games, or if I'm getting more sensitive to motion sickness (which eventually causes a migraine), cause the types of games that make me motion sick just keep going up....

[chronicallyillrenegade]

so I've recently been thinking that I probably would not be able to tell if I got long covid, cause the symptoms are so similar to me/cfs that I don't know if I'd be able to tell I got new issues instead of the ones I already have just worsening ya know? like I know I have at least one long covid symptom since I've lost the ability to smell burning food, but I have no clue if it's the only symptom or not... I donno I've been feeling tired in new ways recently (like over the last 3-6 months) and I don't know if I'm just in the middle of a flare or if it's long covid.

[chronicallyillrenegade]

does anyone elses motion sickness feel super similar to some of your migraines? cause I can have trouble telling the difference sometimes

[chronicallyillrenegade]

Me in the middle of a flare: Why am I so fuckin tired it's not like I've done anything today!

[chronicallyillrenegade]

I hate sleeping for more than 12 hours. it always leaves me feeling super gross and dehydrated....

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

what’s the story about the generative power model and water consumption? /gen

There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.

To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.

But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there's hysterical bullshit. And the whole "AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn't" thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being "real art" -- a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven't bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.

[mistakenot4892]

People latched onto the fact that training these giant models is extremely intensive work, and hence uses a lot of power. Once they're trained they aren't that costly to run and are improving constantly. You can run a lot of models on a consumer grade GPU.

[theothin]

some additional context for the energy costs of the biggest models:

AI: "it's capitalism, stupid"

AI is a new market to capture, but it also represents an unprecedented amount of influence corporations can wield against the people who use its products. And smaller tech companies (with a lot of cumulative venture capital) are racing to integrate other AI services into their various apps. So tech companies are desperate to capture the market. This is the land rush: tech companies scrambling for control of commercial AI. There is suddenly a valuable space to be captured, and every company is desperate to control as much of it as possible. This is a moment that rewards aggressive action and punishes cautiousness. This is what the “move fast and break things” model is built for. So rationality be damned, tech companies are all spending as much as they can on building the biggest, most expensive AI models imaginable right now. The promises of huge returns from speculative investment breaks the safety net of rationalism. And so now, everything clicks into place. Every tech company is desperate to train the biggest and most expensive proprietary models possible, and they’re all doing it at once. Executives are throwing more and more data at training in a desperate attempt to edge over competition even as exponentially increasing costs yield diminishing returns. Model training consumes vast amounts of energy for the sole purpose of gaining a competitive edge. The value isn’t that a better tool is created, the value is that you use tool A instead of tool B. In these cases the goal isn’t to produce something significantly more useful, it’s to shift who has what market share. Corporations are willing to place very high value — and spend vast quanties of resources on — goals that provide very low overall utility. And since these are designed to be proprietary, even when real value is created the research isn’t shared and the knowledge is siloed. Products that should only have to be created once are being trained many times over because every company wants to own their own. Profit is always the top priority, and companies are speculating that AI is a bottomless pit of profit. This means there is a spike of irresponsibly high demand for energy, and things have gotten weird. Bad-weird.

[random2908]

See, this is the real paperclip phenomenon. (Although not quite as stark an example as fast fashion, with its beaches of waste.) You don't need a futuristic AI set to optimize the production of paperclips; all you need is a bunch of business execs and a profit motive. If we want to talk about human-made xrisk, this is it; and it's not really about AI at all.

[valentineblacker]

It's not as bad as people say but it's also only free (to the degree that it is) because companies are eating the cost of all this generation. They'll start putting the vice on in a few years like they've done with YouTube. But that goes for a lot of things. We'll reach an equilibrium when they find out what people are really willing to pay.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

They think they can do that but most of them will go bust when they try. The "gain market dominance at any cost and then start charging" model works very, VERY rarely. Usually the companies die. Sometimes they keep themselves afloat for more years than you'd expect on venture capital by duping investors with fake signs of growth, giving the illusion that it's working, before they die. But they very, very rarely hit green.

Paid-for AI features might have a future in art and company software (packaged into things like Photoshop and sold that way) but Guy Who Generates Character Faces For DnD Or Backgrounds For His Webcomic won't pay for them or watch enough ads to pay for them, and the better we're able to protect our labour rights re: AI exploitation, the less value they have to anybody trying to automate art and knowledge work. I don't think there's enough of a market anywhere to support the sheer number of horses in this race. In every physical and practical sense this race has nothing to do with NFTs or crypto but boy is the bubble looking similar to those ones.

[chronicallyillrenegade]

I am doing my best to fight the urge to play a video game that makes me motion sick and or gives me a migraine within an hour of playing... It is so hard tho cause I really really want to play it...

[chronicallyillrenegade]

I made a mistake.... I thought it'd be fine if I stopped before the headache started, turns out no, just playing it for a bit plants the seed of a migraine and now I'm in pain Q~Q

[chronicallyillrenegade]

I am doing my best to fight the urge to play a video game that makes me motion sick and or gives me a migraine within an hour of playing... It is so hard tho cause I really really want to play it...

[chronicallyillrenegade]

I wish I could find a minecraft like game, specifically a 3d free camera type game, that I can play without getting either motion sick or a migraine...

[chronicallyillrenegade]

theres this game I really Really wanna play, but I can't cause it gives me a migraine... But it's so fun and it's all I can think about, and everything reminds me of it and I wanna play it. But when I play it my brain hurts for at least the rest of the day if not the next one too.

[chronicallyillrenegade]

I have a doctors appointment later today, but currently have the beginnings of a migraine and I do not have faith it will be gone by the time I need to go... I am not looking forward to being in a doctors office with a fuckin migraine... they're bad enough when my head doesn't hurt.

[chronicallyillrenegade]

so I ended up going to the er for my chest pains and while it took forever and they kept drawing poking me with needles I was actually pretty comfortable while I was waiting and spent a lot of it just kinda dozing.

and today I actually feel more relaxed than I have for ages. I guess I was more worried about my heart and lungs than I had realized and getting solid data that they're fine was a huge relief.

even tho I know I'm gonna suffer from over doing it so much I'm genuinely so so glad I went.

tho also all the nurses and docs who stopped by me were so shocked by how high my heart rate went lol (it was around 120-130 for most of the day lol)

[chronicallyillrenegade]

oh also I got a good grade in patient too! cause they did a strep throat test on me, and the nurse who took the swab said with a lot of shocked relief that that was the easiest swabing she had ever done cause I was able to just sit still through it.

which I appreciate her telling me cause i thought I did a bad job cause I flinched when it first hit my throat lol

also something similar but they also gave me this liquid medicine stuff with lidocaine and something else, and it tasted and felt gross af and I knew it'd taste gross af so I downed it as quickly as I could. and of course I had to make a noise to express how gross I thought it was. and the nurse hadn't been looking at me so after I expressed how gross it tasted she started saying "you need to finish it" before looking at the cup and seeing that I had in fact finished it. I guess most people sip at it? and don't drink it all right away? I donno she looked surprised tho.

I take a lot of pride in being a good patient so moments like these always makes me happy

[chronicallyillrenegade]

so I ended up going to the er for my chest pains and while it took forever and they kept drawing poking me with needles I was actually pretty comfortable while I was waiting and spent a lot of it just kinda dozing.

and today I actually feel more relaxed than I have for ages. I guess I was more worried about my heart and lungs than I had realized and getting solid data that they're fine was a huge relief.

even tho I know I'm gonna suffer from over doing it so much I'm genuinely so so glad I went.

tho also all the nurses and docs who stopped by me were so shocked by how high my heart rate went lol (it was around 120-130 for most of the day lol)

[chronicallyillrenegade]

that chronic illness feeling when you suddenly get weird chest pains like someone with a spiked glove is gripping the inside of your chest, and you google the symptoms of a heart attack cause you're a little worried. But turns out most of the symptoms of a heart attack are just things that are normal everyday things for you...

Like dizzyness? check. shortness of breath? yeah. Nausea? sadly... shoulder and or back pain? lol always.

Do I actually think I am currently experiencing a heart attack? no not really. it's more likely to be an air bubble caught in my chest somewhere and I just gotta dislodge it so I can burp it out.

[chronicallyillrenegade]

Can anyone recommend me a scentless (or at least fragranceless) lotion that doesn't feel greasy or sticky? I have extremely dry skin and mild eczema so should probably be using some kind of lotion. But I hate the feel of most lotions, they just feel gross and sticky even when people tell me the one they use doesn't. I'm also sensitive to smell and since one of my stimming items is a blanket with my smell on it, if my hands have any kind of fragrance on them it'll transfer to the blanket and wont smell right for hours or days. And if it doesn't smell right I can't calm down.

[chronicallyillrenegade]

turns out I actually meant odorless.... I didn't realize how sensitive I've gotten to smells...