He/him

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The pharmacist did say that it was to reduce the queasiness since both the antibiotic and the steroid I was prescribed are apparently quite rough on the stomach, so I have to take the pills with food, which I inferred to mean as a meal. Which was fine when I took them with lunch and dinner yesterday since obviously that’s gonna be tons of food to go with it, but then it came to this morning, and I don’t normally eat breakfast. I wasn’t sure if something simple like toast or a granola bar which I would take with the morning dose would be enough food to counteract it, since obviously I didn’t want to spend my morning with a miserable stomach.




  • Depends on how the fight resolved. Sometimes you get snippy for a bit but ultimately either come to an agreement or the fight resolves and that’s it. You rankle for a bit after, get over it, and move on.

    Sometimes the fight isn’t about what you’re fighting about. They’ve had a bad day and it manifests as some bitchy comments about how the dishes were done. You stop fighting about the dishes but you’re still upset because they’re taking their bad day out on you, or they’re still upset because they feel you don’t care about them. These can last much longer because the fight revealed bad blood, but didn’t do anything to address it.







  • The big question then becomes: “is that behaviour inherent to all systems like this, or just this one?” Like, if you go to the store, buy a basic sprinkler, and then test it and it behaves exactly opposite to how you might expect it to. Or it does something completely unexpected, like phases into another dimension and starts pumping strawberry jam. Your next step shouldn’t be to say “Oh, weird, I guess that’s that.” You’d start knocking down variables. Is it the same with every sprinkler or just this one? Does the amount of suction applied affect it? If I replace the water with something else does the outcome change?"

    If you’re doing research like this, you’re kind of expected to do the same sort of elaboration even if the result of a basic experiment conforms precisely to your hypothesis, because the question isn’t if any given sprinkler setup behaves in this way, it’s about whether this is a universal phenomenon across all similar setups. Because there’s an xkcd for everything, it’s this.


  • I think it’s also fair to say that “too cold” is generally more livable than “too hot”. It’s quite a bit easier to generate and conserve heat than to ward it off, and even a planet that is so cold that its atmosphere has precipitated into snow could theoretically be survivable with habitat domes or the like, much like a proposed moon base. “Too hot,” on the other hand, can potentially be hot enough to melt basically anything we send there, which is why there’s a lot more focus on colonizing Mars right now than Venus.





  • I can’t help but feel like if we didn’t live in a capitalist hellscape, the increasing democratization of art would be unambiguously a good thing. I’d be more than happy to see “art as decoration” (as opposed to “art as a human means of expression”) opened to being something shunted off to machines, if it weren’t for the fact that this is a method that people currently use to make sure they have enough money to not starve to death in the cold. Advertising art of polar bears drinking Coke is nicer to look at than big block text saying “consume”, but it’s hardly a soulful expression of the human condition. Or maybe it is, which is even more depressing, but the ultimate apotheosis of this is pushing that sort of messaging to robots to make anyway.

    Meanwhile, giving people who aren’t necessarily “artistic” a vehicle to create art as a means of expressing themselves is also really neat, and in the hands of people who are artistic, it gives them a low-impact tool for pre-visualization, inspiration, and a new medium to experiment with. It also reduces barriers for people with disabilities to make art. I’d love to see artists training LLM systems on their own work as a way of sharing their “style” with the world — something which is difficult to justify in a world where your style is something that needs to be jealously protected against copyright infringement, which again comes down to needing to monetize your expression as a matter of survival.