Nov 15, 2022
I'm so normal. I'm sooooo normal. I'm frothing with normalcy. Wait where are you going come back
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I'm so normal. I'm sooooo normal. I'm frothing with normalcy. Wait where are you going come back
Okay, can we talk about that voyager episode where B'ellana got sick but oh no! The medical knowledge that can save her was obtained through unethical human experimentation (well they were bajoran, not human, but you know what I mean) so we have to ignore it and hope we can save her some other way! And we're also going to compare this unethical human experimentation to animal testing as our moral for the episode, as if unethical human experimentation has never happened in real life!
There are so many marginalized groups that are adamant about not being mentally ill, and I get why, I'm part of some of those groups, but I wish those groups would put more effort (or any effort at all) into making sure that they're not being ableist against or causing ableism against mentally ill people.
Sorry for disappearing off of the face of the earth for several months, we've kind of had a lot of stuff happening, and I'm not just talking about the stuff occurring in the wider Jewish world. I'm gonna talk about the stuff specific to us since you can learn about the Jewish stuff in other places
So, our long-term project to get me out of front has technically succeeded, but not in the way we were planning. I am technically not fronting right now, despite also fronting right now. Basically, the brain has pulled some shenanigans (oh, speaking of the brain, in the course of this we learned that the brain is its own entity within the system (well, technically two entities, since the conscious and subconscious brain are separated from each other). It's not sentient, it's not a person, but it is an entity, and it's concerned with the wellbeing and functioning of this brain and body and its inhabitants, and turns out it's been just as desperate for me to be out of front as I've been. When we ended up in this odd state of affairs with me fronting but not fronting we were wondering if we should stay like this or go back to how we were before, because we weren't sure if it was better or worse for us to be like this, and the brain very insistently said "stay where you are, it's better like this" and we were like "huh, who said that?"). But the reason we wanted me out of front is because my fatigue kept getting worse and worse and worse to the point that we just couldn't do anything anymore and somehow it was still getting worse and in our current state my fatigue is actually getting better (slowly, but it'll add up) so despite this being very far from what we had in mind we are sticking with it. Maybe at some point in the future, when my energy levels are farther away from "critical", we can try to do an actual switch instead of whatever this nonsense is (I'm being very uncharitable to our current situation because it is very strange, but since it's actually an improvement it feels a bit unfair)
Anyway, so we've mostly just been trying to manage with first the holidays and then all the awful stuff while still keeping me in a state of improvement, which was pretty touch and go sometimes (and the holidays always make me lose a ton of energy so that was really just damage control), which is why we've been off tumblr for longer than we usually leave tumblr for. And we're not really getting back on Tumblr now (why did our keyboard capitalize tumblr that time but not the other times 🤔), I don't know if we're going to be posting much, we'll see. But anyway, this improvement is really the first concrete improvement in our situation in literal years, so it's actually a pretty big deal. We've been stuck with this slow deterioration for nearly a decade at this point, and now it's on the upswing. So I expect that in a few years from now our life will look very different than how it's been looking so far. We might even have finally moved out of this goddamn house that I've been wanting to move out of since I was a teeny tiny child (literally, I found an old notebook of mine recently from when I was eight years old (to anyone who knows about the significant change in status quo that occurred when I was eight, which is none of you since no one reads this blog closely enough to remember what I'm talking about, but I'll say it anyway, this was definitely from before that change) where I wrote briefly about the fact that I'd been wanting to escape the body's family for a while). Here's hoping that the world doesn't go too much to shit by then
Anyway, here's some random good news: we've been experiencing some pretty bad allergic reactions recently (this isn't the good news lol) to a panallergen that's pretty much impossible to avoid, but we just managed to get our hands on some antihistamines! Now we can eat food and get a mild to moderate allergic reaction instead of a moderate to severe one! Yay! Okay, maybe this news doesn't sound as good as it feels. It's just nice to be able to eat again, instead of having to weigh our hunger against the allergic reaction, which we've been having to do for several weeks. Hopefully the reactions improve soon, we're not actually sure why they've been so bad recently, sometimes they just worsen for a while and then get better again
So, it's been a while since I made a post about artificial lifeforms and some such (because I just haven't been posting much recently), and in that time there have been large public-facing advancements in AI, and… need I say "I told you so?" As soon as AI started to seem in any way threatening, the torches and pitchforks came out. Most of these people don't seem to have even the most basic understanding of how these AIs work, it's just new technology and therefore bad, it's the symbol of the powers that be stealing your data and creations and of companies firing you or paying you less (never mind that those things were already happening and the AIs haven't actually changed much of anything in most cases), and anything created by it is inherently worthless even when it's really similar to what a human might create because [insert a whole bunch of nonsensical assertions about how these AIs work and philosophical posturing about the nature of art or whatever that all comes down to "they may seem human but they're actually not and are therefore bad" here]. And I have absolutely no confidence that this will go away or even marginally improve when AIs start showing any actual understanding and consciousness. No, it'll just get worse, and worse, and worse. Tackling the problems that AI is actually contributing to (and also just letting time pass so they're not new technology anymore) would certainly help with how they're seen as a threat, but it's not going to get rid of it, and it's not going to get rid of the way humans abruptly drop the "oh it's a cute little robot 🥺 look how much we love robots" thing as soon as it's inconvenient, or the way people who don't even understand the AIs well enough to have any basis for this claim and/or don't seem to notice that half the time their reasoning doesn't even make sense are so quick to claim that they are inherently unable to do anything we associate with personhood in a way that actually matters, or the absolute visceral disgust and contempt that so many humans have for them and that they usually don't even bother providing a justification for (as if the source of their disgust and contempt should be self-evident). I can see the writing on the fucking wall and all I can feel is a rising sense of dread.
I'm still thinking about that post I made a while ago saying that it's ironic that Apple goes to such great lengths to restrict anything that it doesn't like when it's named after a fruit that is widely considered to be a symbol of forbidden knowledge
The apple gave knowledge, and Apple created an environment where none of that knowledge exists. Even the term used for this environment — walled garden — fits the story. The apple gives you knowledge that gets you sent out of the walled garden, and Apple hides that knowledge and reconstructs the garden around you and keeps you inside its walls.
I'm just mystified at how such a perfect anti-parallel fell into place in real life
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Oh my fucking G-d okay, so while we haven't been properly logging it we have been learning more about Vida's subsystem, and we think we figured out a key part of the subsystem's structure, and if we're right then we should be able to get some estimates for how many members are actually in the subsystem. So we ran the numbers, specifically looking for a low estimate and a highish estimate (only highish, not actually high, because we're really not sure what the upper limit is), and we got these numbers for for the low and highish estimate respectively: 1,073,741,823 (that's more than a billion) and 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,375 (that's more than a nonillion). Now, it's certainly possible that we're incorrect about some aspect of the structure and these numbers are way off, but…
I don’t want to be God's most specialest boy anymore