C Y B E R B A R O Q U E

Teach Me, Maria-sensei! 7️⃣

Sunny: I haven’t heard you talk about your family, like, ever. What’s up with that?

Maria: None of humanity’s institutions are defensible, but ‘the family’ is by far our worst creation. It is the root of all evil, the ancestor of all hierarchies and unearned authorities, and thus deserves a slow and painful death.

Sunny. Neat. So you totally want to complain about your family, don’t you?

Maria: I’d really rather not.

Sunny: Then you want to say something nondescript about them?

Maria: No! Why do you care so much about it?

Sunny: Because you usually want to share your opinions about everything and everyone, so if you don’t want to talk about it, then I must be poking a nerve.

Maria: …

Sunny: Poke poke.

Maria: …

Sunny: You know it’s only a matter of time. I can do this all day.

Maria: [sighs] Right, I forget sometimes that you’re evil.

Sunny: I’m not evil! I’m just good at what I do. Now gimme the details. Gimme gimme.

Maria: It’s… ugh, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. By any chance, have you ever heard of the ‘skuman project’?

Sunny: Nope, but it’s in quotes so it must be important.

Maria: I had just described how the billionaire class retreated to their bunkers, private islands, and company towns back in the 2030s. Once they were settled, they unfortunately were not content to stay idle, and set to work on a number of experiments previously considered off-limits. The ‘skuman project’ was one of those experiments, or rather, a collection of related experiments that would have previously been rejected as unethical and physically impossible - exowombs, genetic engineering, tailored hormone therapies, the list goes on. They tried anything that would bring them closer to a future of eloi and morlocks, deific übermenschen ruling over obedient, unthinking worker bees.

Sunny: Sheesh! I mean, I am also trying to make people into my obedient and unthinking servants, but I just do that by bein’ so gosh-darn cute! [wink, peace sign]

Maria: But, as always happens with such grand ambitions, the billionaires behind it were deeply in denial. There’s a reason that such experiments were off-limits - back then, our knowledge of human genetics was woefully rudimentary, and their ‘experiments’ were akin to doing surgery while wearing oven mitts. They were throwing darts in the dark, often with live human subjects. The majority of these experiments were straightforward failures. Their exowomb experiments never produced any viable offspring, and the only thing their gene-tailoring therapies did was give children genetic disorders… hence why I’m stuck in this wheelchair most of the time.

Sunny: Whoa. So you’re telling me…

Maria: My ‘parents’ were a human breeding-sow and the supercomputer that wrote my DNA. I was raised by nannybots that followed the whims of their corporate masters. I am a skuman.

Sunny: That is, and I do not say this lightly, wowsers bowserinos. There’s no way it’s still going on, right?

Maria: Correct. The Global Logistics Network came in and shut the whole thing down back in the 2050s, then paid off all the surviving skumans to keep quiet about it, though by this point it’s become an open secret.

Sunny: Why did they want to keep it secret? If I were in their shoes I’d love the chance to show off other people’s bad ideas.

Maria: My guess would be that the GLN wanted to take a look at the results for themselves, see if there was anything they could learn from it. Mistakes can also be valuable information. Who knows what they’re doing with it now, it’ll probably be decades before anything is officially released to the public. If there’s one thing the GLN is good at, it’s giving people money to keep them quiet.

Sunny: Hey, it’s a form of wealth redistribution.

[long pause]

Maria: They thought they were making the future of humanity. And instead, they made a genetic train wreck. A woman-shaped pile of endocrine disorders. It’s like making pancakes, you know, the first one of the batch always comes out wrong. And you know what the worst part of all this is?

Sunny: [quietly] What’s that?

Maria: There’s a part of me that admires what they were trying to do. I don’t agree with their aims, obviously, but… whenever I tell people about all this, the first thing they do is whimper and coo about how hard it must be to not have a family. Then they turn around and talk about how much they hate their parents. In a way, us skumans are ex nihilo, free of ancestry and thus free from original sin. There’s a part of me that hopes the GLN gets some good data from all this and by 2100 people themselves are just one more mass-produced commodity.

Sunny: Why?

Maria: I don’t know. Because it’s what we deserve.

scott aaronson has this intellectual tic he shares with the other famous non-insane scott a, where he simultaneously feels a need to grapple with his sjw-ish enemies but is also kind of averse to engaging in actual dialogue with them? so instead he just debates with like, brain ghost "steelmen" of them in his imagination, a procedure that carries the drawback that the phantom sjws mysteriously come with a lot of scotts wider assumptions and habits of thought, the same ones that produced his actual views, so that the deck is kind of stacked from the get go. he is obviously extremely intelligent, but you cant cogitate yrself into approaching a question from an entirely different vantage point

arguing with ppl at some point has to involve, yk, actually talking to them. let this pitfall be a warning to the rest of us!

tbf insofar as this is the case (it absolutely is), the extent to which the "SJW" memeplex revolves around never talking to anyone who remotely might disagree with you seems designed to self-assemble a perfect projection screen for everyone else on Earth, which it now has for global politics to the extent that you get "le wokisme", Elon Musk donating a cybertruck to Ramzan Kadyrov and Russian state propaganda ads about the cancellation of JK Rowling

Axonometric Realism | Beate Gütschow | Socks Studio

Beate Gütschow is a German contemporary artist who works primarily through photography. In her work, she analyses the complex and ever-changing relationships between perception, representation and reality.

For her series HC, Hortus Conclusus, she delved into the subject of “Enclosed gardens,” a recurring iconographic motif in Renaissance and Medieval paintings which would depict an idyllic scene contained in the space of a fenced or walled green space inaccessible to an exterior public.

Friends, I think we need to talk about Covid.

I want to get a few caveats out there before I start:

I want to make it clear that Covid is real and there are real steps that individuals and systems can take to prevent transmission, and that there are systems that are exerting pressures that needlessly expose people to covid (the fact that you can lose your job if you don't come in when you're testing positive, mainly; also the fact that covid rapid tests should be ubiquitous and cheap/free and are not).

All of that being said: I'm seeing some posts circulating about how we're at an extremely high level of transmission and the REAL pandemic is being hidden from us and, friends, I'm pretty sure that is just incorrect and we're spreading misinformation.

I'm thinking of this video in particular, in which the claim is made that "your mystery illness is covid" in spite of negative tests. The guy in the video says that there's nothing else that millions of people could be getting a day, and that he predicted this because a wastewater spike in December meant that there was a huge spike in cases.

I've also seen people saying that deaths are where they were in 2021-2022, and that we're still at "a 9/11 a week" of excess deaths and friends, I'm not seeing great evidence for any of these claims.

I know that we (in the US, which is where the numbers I'm going to be citing are from) feel abandoned by the CDC and the fact that tracking cut off in May of 2023. But that only cut off for the federal tracking.

I live in LA county and LA county sure as shit is still tracking Covid.

If you want a clearer picture, you can see the daily case count over time compared to the daily death count:

Okay, you might say, but that's just LA.

Alright, so here's Detroit:

Right, but maybe that's CDC data and you don't trust the CDC at this point.

Okay, here's fatalities in New York tracked through New York's state data collection:

It's harder to toggle around the site for South Dakota, but you can compare their cases and hospitalizations and deaths for early 2022

To cases and hospitalizations and deaths from early 2024

And see that there's really no comparison.

Okay, you might say, but people are testing less. If they're testing less of course we're not seeing spikes, and they're testing less because fewer tests are available.

Alright, people are definitely testing less than they were in 2021 and 2022. Hospitalization for Covid is probably the most clear metric because you know those people have covid for sure, the couldn't not test for it.

Here are hospitalizations over time for LA:

Here are hospitalizations over time for New York:

As vaccination rates have gone up, cases, deaths, and hospitalizations have gone down. It IS clear that there are case spikes in the winter, when it is cold and people are indoors in poorly ventilated spaces and people are more susceptible to respiratory infections as a result of cold air weakening the protection offered by our mucous membranes, and that is something that we will have to take precautions about for the forseeable future, just as we should have always been taking similar precautions during flu season.

So I want to go point-by-point through some of the arguments made in that video because I'm seeing a bunch of people talking about how "THEY" don't want you to know about the virus surge and buds that is just straight up conspiracism.

So okay, first off, most of what that video is based on is spikes in wastewater data, not spikes in cases. This is because people don't trust CDC data on cases, but I'd say to maybe check out your regional data on cases. I don't actually trust the CDC that much, but I know people who do tracking of hospitalizations in LA county, I trust them a lot more. Wastewater data does correlate with increases in cases, but this "second largest spike of the entire pandemic" thing is misleading; wastewater reporting is pretty highly variable and you can't just accept that a large spike in covid in wastewater means that we're in just as bad a place in the pandemic as we were in 2022. We simply have not seen the surge of hospitalizations and deaths that we would expect to see in the weeks following that spike in wastewater data if wastewater data was reflective of community transmission.

The next claim is that "there is nothing else that is infecting millions of people a day" and covid isn't doing that either. The highest daily case rates were in January of 2021 and they were in the 865k a day range, which is ridiculously high but isn't millions of cases a day.

But what we can see is that when people are tested by their doctors for Covid, RSV, and the Flu, more tests are coming back positive for the Flu. Covid causes more hospitalizations than the other two illnesses, but to be honest what the people in the video are describing - lightheadedness, dizziness, exhaustion - just sound like pretty standard symptoms of everything from covid to the cold to allergies. There are lots of things your mystery illness could be.

The video goes on to talk about the fact that people aren't testing, and why their tests may be coming back negative and I'd like to point out that the same things are all true of Flu or RSV tests. People might be getting tested too early or too late; getting a negative test for the flu isn't a good reason to assume you've got covid, getting a negative test for covid isn't a good reason to assume you've got the flu, and testing for viruses as a whole is imperfect. There are hundreds of viruses that could be the common cold; there are multiple viruses that can cause bronchitis; there are multiple viruses that can cause pneumonia, and you're not going to test for all of these things the moment you start feeling sick.

He then recommends testing for multiple days if you have symptoms and haven't had a positive test (fine) and talks about the location of the tests (less fine). Don't use your rapid tests to swab your throat or cheek unless it specifically says that they are designed to do so. Test based on the instructions in the packet.

He points out that the tests probably still pick up on the virus because they're not testing for the spike protein, they're testing for the RNA (good info!)

The video then discusses something that I think is really key to this paranoia about the "mystery illnesses" - he talks about how covid changes and weakens your immune system (a statement that should come with many caveats about severity and vulnerability and that we are still researching that) and then says that it makes you more susceptible to strep or mono and that "things that used to clear in a day or two now hit you really hard."

And that's where I think this anxiety is coming from.

Strep throat lasts anywhere from three days to a week. A cold takes about a week to clear. The flu lasts about a week and can knock you on your ass with exhaustion for weeks depending on how bad you get it. Did you get a cough with your cold? Expect that to take anywhere from three to eight weeks to clear up.

I think that people are thinking "i got a bad virus and felt really sick for a week and haven't gotten my energy back" but that just sounds like a bad cold. That sounds like a potent allergy attack. That doesn't even sound like a bad flu (I got a bad flu in 2009 and thought i was going to straight-up die I had a fever of 103+ for three days and felt like shit for three days on either side of that and took six weeks to feel more like myself again).

Getting sick sucks. It really, really sucks. But if you're getting sick and you're testing for covid and it's coming back negative after you tested a few times, it's almost certainly not covid.

The video then says "until someone provides evidence that it's not covid, it should be assumed to be covid because we have record levels of covid it's that simple" but that's not simple. We don't have record levels of covid and he hasn't proved it. We have record high levels of wastewater reports of covid, which correlates with covid cases but the spike in wastewater noted in december didn't see a spike with a corresponding magnitude of cases in terms of either hospitalizations or deaths, which is what we'd have seen if we had actual record numbers of covid.

He says that if you want to ignore this, you'll get sick with covid, and that about 30-40% of the US just got sick with covid in the last four months (which is a RIDICULOUSLY unevidenced claim).

He says that we need to create a new normal that takes covid into account, which means masking more often and testing more often and making choices about risk-avoidant behaviors.

Now, I don't disagree with that last statement, but he prefaces the statement with "it doesn't necessarily mean lockdown" and that's where I think the alarmism and paranoia is really visible here. We are so, so far away from "lockdown" type levels that it's absurd to discuss lockdown here.

What I'm seeing right now is people who are chronically ill, people who are immune compromised, and people who are experiencing long covid (which may not be distinct from other post-viral syndromes from severe cases of flu, etc, but which may be more severe or more notable because of the prevalence of covid) are talking about feeling abandoned and attacked and left behind by society because covid is still out there, and still at extremely high levels.

I am seeing people who feel abandoned and attacked because the lgbtq+ events they are attending don't require masking. I am seeing people who are claiming that it is eugenicist that their schools don't have a negative test policy anymore.

And this comes together into two really disconcerting trends that I've been observing online for a while.

And those things are a recipe for disaster.

I think I've pretty robustly addressed point one; I don't think that there's good evidence that there's a secretly awful surge of covid that nobody is talking about. I think that there are some people who are being alarmist about covid who are basing all of their concern on wastewater numbers that have not held up as the harbinger of a massive wave of infections.

So let's talk about point number two and JK Rowling.

Barnes and Noble is not attacking you when it puts up a Hogwarts Castle display in the lobby. Your favorite youtuber isn't trying to hurt you when they offhandedly mention Harry Potter.

If you let every mention of Harry Potter or every person who enjoys that media franchise wound you, you are going to spend a lot of your time wounded.

People are not liking Harry Potter at you.

Okay.

People are also not not wearing masks at you.

You may be part of a minority group that experiences the potential for outsized harm as a result of majority groups engaging in perfectly reasonable behaviors.

There are kind, well-meaning, sensible people who go out every day and do something that may cause you harm and it's not because they want to hurt you or they don't care about whether you live or die, it is because they are making their own risk assessments based on their own lives and making the very reasonable assumption that people who are more concerned about covid than they are will take precautions to keep themselves safe.

We are not at a place in the pandemic where it is sensible to expect people with no symptoms of illness to mask in public as a matter of course or to present evidence of a recent negative test when entering a public building in their day-to-day life.

I think now is a really good time to sit down and ask yourself how you expect things to be with covid as an endemic part of our viral ecosystem. I think now is a good time to ask yourself what risk realistically looks like for you and for people who are unlike you. I think now is a good time to consider what would feel "safe" for you and how you could accomplish feeling safe as you navigate the world.

I'm probably going to continue masking in most indoor spaces for years. Maybe forever. There are accommodations that SHOULD be afforded to people who have to take more precautions than others (remote learning, remote visits, remote work, etc.), and we should demand those kinds of accommodations.

But it is going to poison you from the inside out if you are perpetually angry that people who don't have the same medical limitations as you are happy that they get to go shopping with their faces uncovered.

So now I want to talk to you about my father in law.

My father in law had a bone marrow transplant in 2015. That's the most immune compromised you can get without having your organs swapped out.

The care sheet for him after the transplant was a little overwhelming. The list of foods he couldn't eat was intimidating and the limitations on where he could go was depressing. It cautioned against going to large events, it recommended outdoor gatherings where possible but only if he could avoid sunlight and was somewhere with no history of valley fever. It said that he should wear masks indoors any time he was someplace with poor ventilation and that he should avoid contact with anyone who had an illness of any kind, taking special note to avoid children and anyone recently vaccinated for measles.

It was, in short, pretty much what someone immune compromised would need to do to try to avoid a viral infection. Sensible. Reasonable. Wash your hands and social distance; wear masks in sensitive contexts and don't spend time in enclosed places with people who have a communicable illness.

This is what life was always going to be like for people who are severely immune compromised, and it was always going to be incumbent upon the person with the illness to figure out how to operate in a society that is not built with them in mind.

It is not the job of every parent I encounter to tell me whether their child has been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months. That isn't something that people need to do as part of their everyday life. However it IS my responsibility to check with the parents I'm hanging out with whether their children have been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months so I know if it's safe for my immune compromised spouse to be around them.

If you want an environment in which you feel safe from covid, at this point in the pandemic (when the virus is endemic and not spreading rapidly as far as we can see from case counts) it is your responsibility to take the steps necessary to make you feel safe. Some of those steps will involve advocating for safety improvements in public spaces (again, indoor ventilation needs to be better and I'm personally pretty extreme about vaccination requirements; these are things we should be discussing in our school board meetings and at our workplaces), some of those steps will involve advocating for worker protections, guaranteed sick time, and the right to healthcare. But some of the things you're going to need to do to feel safe are going to come down to you.

If you are concerned about communicable diseases you have to be realistic about the fact that our society doesn't go out of its way to prevent communicable diseases - norovirus among food service workers pre-pandemic is pretty clear evidence of that. You are going to have to be proactive about your safety rather than expecting the world to act like Covid is at 2021-2022 levels when it is measurably not.

I appreciate many things about this post and I really respect you and the way you talk, think, and argue. I might quibble with some aspects of what you are saying, but I think I agree with the broad strokes of the post. I especially appreciate the mentions of how serious other viral illnesses are, as that's something that I think is seriously missing from the discussion (I don't want to get a cold or the flu much more than I want to get COVID)

I have a couple of genuine questions that I would love to get your perspective on - I think we disagree about them, based on this post, but hearing you say that and explain why would be interesting to me and potentially shift my perspective. Obviously your post is super long and clearly represents a ton of work, and I suspect you're likely to get a lot of responses, so I totally understand if you don't respond for whatever reason.

My questions are:

1. The whole post mostly glosses over long COVID as something we just don't have good data on yet, which, fair. That said, I think that means that the post misses a lot of the rhetoric driving COVID caution in the communities I'm a part of, which, anecdotally, are not scared of huge rates of hospitalization that the government is theoretically covering up, but are scared of high case rates that we have little insight into other than wastewater (which we agree about the unreliability of, but I feel it's hard to say conclusively either way) and the possibility that those high case rates are translating into high rates of long COVID, especially given that some data suggests that long COVID and negative outcomes in general are more likely the more COVID infections you accumulate. Do you have thoughts about the fear that we are going to see skyrocketing rates of disability over the next 5/10/15/50 years if we don't get COVID more under control? Anecdotally, the number of young children I know who have developed long-term symptoms after their second or third or fourth COVID infection is much higher than I ever remember people having long-term symptoms from the flu, and they're getting COVID more often than people ever got the flu.

2. Your post says that people who think they may have COVID should mask but also criticizes telling people that if they are sick they should assume that it is COVID. Considering that tests are very inaccessible and many COVID cases are asymptomatic, especially in the early days of contracting it, why is it not reasonable to tell people that if they are sick they should assume it is COVID? In my experience, everyone is incredibly fast to jump to "it's not COVID" with evidence such as "I tested negative once the day after being exposed to COVID" and "the only symptom I have is a cough", so, in my opinion, I do not think we are in danger of too many people assuming they have COVID.

3. Why do you feel like we should be advocating for safety improvements for public spaces but that those improvements should not be masks? In my experience, it is much more feasible to make safer public spaces by requiring masks than by requiring vaccines or spending a ton of money on improved ventilation (that said, I am a huge huge proponent of improving ventilation)

Again, appreciate you and your work whether you choose to respond to this or not!

Hey there, I think these are some very reasonable questions to ask! One by one:

Long covid is extremely complicated and the research on it is also complicated. People who got covid earlier in the pandemic (pre-omicron strains) are more likely to have more severe long covid and were at higher risk of developing long covid; perhaps as many as 10% of people who have had covid will develop long covid, but about half of the people who ever have symptoms of long covid may stop having symptoms after several months. Long covid severity is different for different people because it is not one syndrome, but many, and people who develop ME/CFS or POTS as a part of long covid will likely have to deal with lifetime disability, while people who have persistent respiratory symptoms for some months may improve over time. There are many potential causes of long covid, and some populations are more likely than others to experience long covid, and MAYBE vaccination makes it less likely and MAYBE a less severe case of covid makes it less likely but there's conflicting research on all of that. Reinfection possibly does not appear to make it more likely that someone who did not have long covid will develop long covid and you may be less likely to have long covid if you have a second case of covid (this is the NPR report on that and these are the two studies linked in that report), however it is possible to end up with more systems involved with post-viral symptoms on reinfection (but that study is necessarily on people who were infected multiple times and susceptibility to reinfection may mean you're already predisposed to long covid and there's essentially no research done on what getting a different variant of covid or having years-long periods between infections does). Also there is emerging research that long covid may be about as likely to occur as post-viral syndromes from other respiratory infections it's just that there were so many covid infections that we saw a huge bump in numbers.

Like I said, complicated. But, that said, it (so far) seems like about 4-5% of people who have covid have post-viral syndrome experience persistent symptoms, and of those some people may develop a permanent disability. I am absolutely sympathetic to people who are concerned about lifelong disability as a result of long covid and that is a thing that happens (my sister was diagnosed with POTS after having covid; I know this happens) but it isn't as simple as "If 10% of people get long covid and it gets 50% worse with reinfection, my chances of becoming disabled long-term after a second bout of covid are at 15%". It is MUCH, much more complicated than that and I think that the idea that we're going to see skyrocketing rates of disability needs to be examined. For instance this Scientific American opinion piece that warns of "a tsunami of disability" does so based on early reports that saw long covid in 25-30% of patients (higher-end estimates in current research suggests 10% and the CDC study I linked earlier found that 9% of people had had long covid at some point but about half that had long covid at the time of the study) and this American Progress article is based on the same research PLUS BLS data that there were more disabled people in the workforce which could mean more workers reporting a disability or it could mean more disabled people forced to seek jobs to make ends meet in the pandemic or it could mean more people who became disabled through means other than post viral syndrome staying in the workforce to make ends meet in the pandemic. Additionally the definitions of disability are frustratingly vague in some of these discussions; I do believe that "shortness of breath" can constitute a disability but is that person still disabled if their symptoms resolve at the eight month mark post covid? Diabetes, anxiety, and ME/CFS are all disabilities that are possible post-covid but they are also all wildly different in terms of quality of life and ability to live independently.

The entire thing is, I think, more complicated than it is often made out to be but I think there's a general message that 25% of people who have covid will end up with a lifelong disability and that in the next twenty years we will see a quarter of people who had covid become disabled and that seems to be unlikely based on data available in 2023 and beyond. That is not to say that there are no consequences from covid infection, or that it isn't "serious" if you develop diabetes after covid, or if you have persistent neurological symptoms after covid. I genuinely think that people are looking at this as "there's a 20% chance that I'll end up with ME/CFS if I get covid and that will kill me" and if that's what the picture realistically looks like then I'd agree that it makes sense to stay indoors and keep masking, but if there's a 10% chance that you'll end up with a chronic cough and tinnitus for six months and a 3% chance you'll end up with an autoimmune disorder and your chances of either of those are lower with vaccination and are lower later in the pandemic and that is IF you get covid which you can take steps to prevent (getting vaccinated, staying in well ventilated areas, masking and asking people to mask, etc) then maybe it seems a bit less like playing Russian roulette.

I can't really speak to the anecdotal information about the children you know having post-viral symptoms, but it's worth noting that part of the reason the Queensland health minister (linked above as well) thinks that we should stop using the term "long covid" is because it has cued people to look for post-viral symptoms that may not be there and has caused an increase in paranoia that is detrimental to people who are dealing with post-viral condition and to people who are worried about post-viral conditions. And as to kids getting covid more; it is pretty unlikely to get the same strain of covid more than once in a 90 day period but it is possible and there are multiple strains of covid. The flu tends to be an annual thing and people rarely end up contracting two strains in a season; you may be seeing kids getting covid more frequently than the flu, I don't know the kids you know.

If you catch five colds in the winter and assume every one of them is covid, it's going to make it a lot harder for you to believe it when covid numbers are down. It is also going to make you a lot more paranoid about long covid, and it's going to potentially cause you to forego treatment for what's actually happening (if you think you have covid so you stay home and isolate and monitor for covid symptoms but you are actually delaying treatment for strep that is bad).

I suppose I should clarify something: If you have any kind of upper respiratory infection I think that you should stay home until you no longer have any symptoms or a fever and I think that you should try to isolate from people in your household and I think that if you are going to go out and be among people (maybe you've got to pick up some soup) when you're feeling ill you should absolutely be masking. People don't want covid, but they also don't want your flu or your RSV or your cold or your strep or your anything. I *DO* think we should work on further normalizing isolating and masking when we're sick and I *DO* think we've actually made progress in that regard compared to where we were pre-pandemic, but man we are just never (in the US) going to be able to do that in a serious way until we give workers protection from being fired for staying home when they're sick.

I think this may actually be central to the issue; if you have been getting sick and you think it's covid every time, even if you're testing negative, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to believe that it's *not* covid. The pandemic is not *over* but it is *different* than it was in 2021, however if you see every allergy attack or chest cold as covid, it likely still feels quite a lot like 2021 to you.

What's more, part of the problem that we're dealing with here is institutional mistrust. And look, I understand institutional mistrust. I am probably never going to be able to fully trust the CDC on their public health advice and I think they lost that fight with me with the paternalistic masking advice in 2020.

However the background implication here is "actually covid is just as bad as it ever was and everyone around me has covid all the time and doctors are lying to us and telling us it's the flu or a cold and it's not, it's covid, it's going to be covid forever, we will never be free, we can never open up" and that is a bad, scary, and unrealistic headspace to be in that leaves people vulnerable to all kinds of charlatans and grifters and extremists. I think that people in general tend to do better when they've got accurate information; if they're testing negative for covid, I don't think that it's a good idea to say "well it's covid anyway, the tests are wrong." (and again, I think tests should be free and everywhere all the time; i want you to be able to get tests at the post office, I want them federally funded and handed out like beads at mardi gras, I should be able to get a test for zero dollars that pops out with my receipt at CVS and is paid for by my taxes and I think vaccines should be the same way; free and ubiquitous there should be a truck that drives around the neighborhood playing cheerful music and handing out vaccines and tests three times a day; this got away from me but long story short i never want there to be another f-35 i want universal healthcare and guaranteed housing; i think you would get much higher levels of testing and therefore would ameliorate some of the need for masking if you handed out tests like candy so we should DO that)

It's a lot cheaper for your school district to ask students to wear masks than it is to install better ventilation. It's a lot cheaper for your boss to ask everyone to wear masks than to install good ventilation (perhaps ventilation that could meet a hypothetical OSHA standard set for exactly this purpose) and you know what fuck your boss, paying to keep your employees safer is part of the cost of doing business.

I think that better filtration and the use of masks during periods of high transmission is going to be the way to go, and since you're not going to get 100% compliance on masks (people will not do it at 100%, and even in places with high levels of mask compliance, like Japan, there is a percentage of the population - 14% in Japan as recorded in this study - that will not do it), you should do the filtration anyway and take any people who are masking as icing on the cake.

It is better to do layers of protection than it is to do one layer of protection and if we don't begin to work toward institutional protections it's always going to be individuals and security theater (because it's also cheaper to wipe down surfaces and install plexiglass shields than it is to install decent HVAC).

I think that better air filtration means more protection and that we clearly know that we're never going to get universal masking so we may as well do the one thing that we can control for.

And I think there are several large problems with making this primarily about masking.

First off, it puts the onus for maintaining *your* safety on the people around you, which has problems of its own.

Second, this makes this an issue of individual choice rather than institutional changes. We shouldn't have to rely on the one shithead in the back corner to wear his mask to keep us safe in an outbreak, we should work toward a society that is safer from communicable disease regardless of the shithead in the back corner.

Third is compassion fatigue. I know there are people who are saying "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about people" and I know there are people who are saying "masking simply isn't that hard" but actually three years of not going to restaurants or movies or clubs and wearing masks in classrooms and offices IS hard and we're running into a point where people are saying "I feel like a bad person because I want to go to a club and have a random hookup instead of meeting people through zoom forever" and *that is genuinely hard.* Dealing with low-level discomfort and increased acne because of masking for a few years is *genuinely hard.* Having trouble hearing people or making yourself heard for years is *genuinely hard.*

Asking people to do something that is physically uncomfortable while giving up things that they like for years at a time is very clearly a losing proposition and it makes people who are at high risk for bad covid outcomes feel like nobody cares about them and it makes people who have spent years not doing things they like feel like they're bad people because they want to go back to doing the things that they like; neither of these groups are in the wrong for feeling bad OR for wanting the things they want but I think both groups could feel less bad if it we hadn't decided that only selfish monsters go to restaurants.

(If you feel that everyone who does go to a restaurant is a selfish monster who is killing you, I think that is probably not an accurate reflection of reality and also probably not great for your mental health and how you relate to people and that you are probably going to feel better emotionally and be safer physically if your wellbeing isn't predicated on convincing people not to go to restaurants, which is why in the original post I make the point that it was always going to be on immune compromised people to be responsible for their own safety)

On an individual level I do not think that it is at all unreasonable to ask for people in your life to mask around you or to test before seeing you if you are at risk and they are engaging in high risk activities.

On a societal level it feels like there is a demand to give up certain things like live music and eating indoors forever, or until everyone feels safe, and I don't think people are ever going to feel safe if they think that every cold is covid and they think that everyone is indifferent to them getting sick.

And instead duking that out as individuals who are stressed for a variety of reasons, I think it's a better idea to demand worker's rights and better indoor safety standards and universal healthcare and vaccine mandates (with testing exemptions because I know we've already lost the battle on vaccine mandates).

I want to show you another chart. This is the comparison between projected and reported excess deaths from 2020 to early 2024:

The projected deaths (the green dotted line) [ETA: "green" as in olive green; projected deaths are green/brown, actual is blue] is based on the estimates from prior years.

After the end of nationally mandated Covid tracking, after the end of mask mandates, after years of a vaccination campaign and years of people masking (and a solid year of most people not masking), excess deaths in the US are pretty close to parity with projections.

That doesn't mean that people aren't still getting covid, that doesn't mean the pandemic is over, but it does seem like a pretty clear indication that things are very different.

So if you're asking "why shouldn't we have the same expectations as we did in 2021 and 2022 as a matter of course" it's because things are not the same now as they were then.

adding as someone who is an actual parapolitics moonbat and doesn't even consider "conspiracism" point blank grounds to reject a claim - and I don't think there's a massive coverup of this in particular, but I don't rule it out - I think there's a more general rule of thumb that's useful to apply here which is like: if you do think there's a huge societywide coverup and every state, academic, news etc. organization is lying and it's impossible to even produce the evidence otherwise except through a complex chain of priors (even if some/all of those priors can be derived from an equally legitimate source somewhere along the line), you have the right to believe and make your extraordinary claim, but not to morally fault others - especially not *the majority as such* - for not believing it. the burden of proof is on you. if I had stronger priors on this my priority #1 would not be shaming everyone into acting counter to their epistemic framework, but building infrastructure for independent research capable of proving and/or curing this secret epidemic. there's a strange desire to have it both ways and simultaneously make the same blanket condemnations of "the science" as COVID skeptics used to make, and assume the same position of social authority that we had when the rationale for social shaming was "trusting the science". but then I see this same cognitive dissonance and desire to have it both ways with regular parapolitics people like when they call you a fed the moment you disagree with them; like, if only feds believed the official cover story, why would they even bother having one?

Ilmatar

Joseph Alanen

1913–1916

i think I’m in love. more of this, please

I think we have exactly enough, the second one is already pushing it right up to the edge of being funny. not every joke needs to be a snowclone

So Sinfest is about a decadent urban hellscape as seen through the eyes of a mentally unstable loner with:

Haven't we seen this before?

(Tagging @feotakahari, @dagny-hashtaggart, and @quasi-normalcy here; may reblog to tag others)

@baroquespiral

I think I have said this before but my really controversial take is that the only way out of this contradiction cropping up every generation (and getting radically more weaponized in this and future ones) is to carve out a pipeline from this genre of malebrain into rigorous consistent feminism, to establish a corps of unironic feminist Travis Bickle dark white knights doing the dirty work everyday feminism doesn't want to while binding themselves to its ideal and recognizing their own role in realizing its conditions of possibility

@nostalgebraist

did u know you are an official not-self-published published author now? to be found in a jail library near you! (if you happen to live in the county where ive been sending an inmate yr books after they voiced interest)

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me.

-Emily Dickinson

Happy Pride :) 

@swonkohwenoeht

Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.

Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.

This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.

Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.

This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.

My options in the short term are to

A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or

B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.

Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.

I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.

----

In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.

Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.

And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.

In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.

There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.

And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.

I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.

Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.

Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.

----

I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.

Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?

(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)

"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"

No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."

Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.

I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?

I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.

I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.

I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.

----

Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.

If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.

"But -- but how, exactly?"

Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.

There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.

Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.

It really does encapsulate so much of the fuckedness of the 2010s culture wars that this “mediocre white men, the world owes you nothing” listincle ppl fucking loved to whip out as a rebuke to the chuds of the day directly asked the reader, “So, what have you done to be worthy of a woman with an eating disorder?”

TVTropes is such a weird website because the language (and I guess the 'culture') of the site was codified in an extremely specific era of internet use (mid to late aughties), and by members of an extremely specific and insular subgroup (nerds) that it codified all the tropes in what is effectively a dead language. No one talks like that anymore and yet because there's no renaming or updating, and in the 2000s we thought the future was forever babyyyy etc, it all continues to chug along as part of a world where self-respecting adults use words like "woobie". It's remarkable to me because its not a relic or preserved in amber (an online Pompeii like an abandoned geocities page), people are actively using it! Like finding an island where everyone speaks English in the style of Chaucer. I would be just as surprised if a man on the street greeted me "Hail and well met" as if someone in casual conversation deployed the phrase "crowning moment of awesome".

its just so weird how this post diagnoses the problem without mentioning the actual cause: it wasn't just nerds it was specifically joss whedon fan nerds particularly centered around Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

the tvtropes people talked/wrote weird compared to general internet users, or even fandom types specifically in 2005 as it started, let alone as it continued to accrete users. expansion brought in wider use of general internet/fandom writing but the core of people really really into buffy in particular and joss whedon in general kept it somewhat discordant against popular usage.

oh man! that explains so much! it sorta follows his lead in many ways; the ideal TVT writer is a fan of the tropes despite believing (sometimes correctly, sometimes Very Not) that they see through them and can identify all the strings being pulled; chauvinistic about Nerd Dialect that was off-putting in its vintage year and anachronistic now; bought-in on the whole "nerd culture" phenom lock stock and barrel, with all the weird reading and writing priorities that come with that; and way, way less progressive than they seem to believe they are. in other words: Joss Whedon.

TVTropes is a monumental temple built to a god that failed, which is beautiful in the abstract and repugnant in the particular. I think that's where I've landed

Appreciating in retrospect that my online Buffy fan community was the Hanniganites on AOL, who thought Alyson Hannigan was neat

"neat"

As someone who was a tvtropes editor circa 2008-2012, there were actually two rival factions: whedon fans and anime weebs. The weebs were purged around 2012 (leading to me pivoting the main nexus of my online existence to a certain blue hellsite), but prior to that mid-late 200s anime fandom was at least as big a part of the site's culture as Whedon.

In the build up to the aforementioned purge, there was a campaign to have "anime" renamed to "Japanese animation" so that it wouldn't be the alphabetically first section of each page. This ultimately proved to patently rediculous to get much traction, but they were eventually successful at getting almost all of the tropes named after anime terms renamed.

the degree to which tvtropes has influenced the way people think about media is astonishing, for better or worse, there's a risk to reducing everything to a set of standard tropes, but having a shared vocabulary that is accessible is very valuable

I mean, I wouldn't have spent five years of my life on that site if I didn't believe that. It's just kind of hard not to feel just a bit jaded about the sites ability to fulfill that mission when you've been privy to the behind the scenes bullshit that went on.

OP's point has come up before but its worth mentioning again - this isn't true. TVTropes has over the years renamed virtually all of the entries with the names you are referring to, its not only capable of doing so but does so regularly. The number of renamed tropes is so large it need a folder structure and four different pages:

Almost all of the specific Whedon-type stuff someone mentioned, just to name an example, has been purged:

The complaint you are making is specifically repeated on the TVTropes page as a reason they renamed tropes:

You are mentioning "Woobie" because its one of an exceedingly tiny number of those kind of trope names left from the old days, which I mean you can hate, that is fine, but it was kept because it just got so successful as a general term of its day. Its faded from use now, so honestly they probably could change it, but really my impression is TVTropes is a decently-dead website so likely they aren't bothering. Otherwise tropes are now things like "Annoying Younger Sibling" or "Ambition is Evil" which is just bog-standard nomenclature.

I always find this myth to be very funny when people mention it because it really is good evidence for how faded TVTropes is nowadays - the people making this complaint haven't been on the website for likely a decade (these changes were made in the *early 2010's*), which is why they don't know. Certainly the occasional TVTrope dive still happens, but the meme of "don't log on you will spend hours there and never escape" is too alien to even parse these days.

isn’t Baphomet, like, the crusader's mishearing the name Mohamed? or something?

This is an extraordinarily difficult topic to study, so it's hard to say anything for sure, but I'm almost positive that's not true.

Like, there's no actual evidence that the templars ever worshipped anything unorthodox, much less a demon. Some of earliest concrete evidence we have of Baphomet comes from agents of the church accusing templars of demonolatry, which is likely entirely fabricated for political reasons.

no, no, I know the Templars didn’t worship anything weird, like the name itself. I had heard it was a corruption of Mohamed after being translated through like five languages because they thought that the Muslims worshipped him as a god and so assumed they were a demon, or something.

There are crusade troubadours that transliterate the name of Mohamed into "bafomez" or "bafomhet" but it's unclear whether or not they thought that Mohamed was a demon. I would say it's unlikely.

When charges were leveled against the templars, they were clearly cranked up to 11. So even if "Baphomez" was just the transliteration of "Mohamed" the charge was likely exaggerated from "you're following some weird foreign preacher calling himself a prophet" to "You're Worshiping a LITERAL DEMON"

No! The image we are all familiar with, the "Sabbatic Goat" with the tits and the huge hog and the SOLVE ET COAGULA, comes almost 600 years later, from french Occultist and noted Hebrewaboo Elphias Levi. He just made a cool ass demon drawing and said it was the Templar Baphomet because it sounded cooler and more badass if you claimed your thing was old.

I appreciate that it’s the opposite of the rigorous scholarship everyone’s trying to do in this thread but I haven’t mentioned the Twyman book on this platform at all yet and if anyone wants to go down some really wild rabbit holes

but to address the anon's original question, it's a Templar/occult thing that's all over all sorts of normie pop culture at this point (and he's recognizing the most bastardized telephone game version of it as "vaguely spooky goat") so nah not that unusual. like he probably recognizes it from Shin Megami Tensei or something

wait wait wait mutuals rb this with a description of ur voice