tstrimple

There are studied cases involving brain trauma like strokes which introduce aphantasia.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7071355/

> While the loss of mental imagery following brain lesions was first described more than a century ago, the key cerebral areas involved remain elusive. Here we report neuropsychological data from an architect (PL518) who lost his ability for visual imagery following a bilateral posterior cerebral artery (PCA) stroke. We compare his profile to three other patients with bilateral PCA stroke and another architect with a large PCA lesion confined to the right hemisphere. We also compare structural images of their lesions, aiming to delineate cerebral areas selectively lesioned in acquired aphantasia. When comparing the neuropsychological profile and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the aphantasic architect PL518 to patients with either a comparable background (an architect) or bilateral PCA lesions, we find: (1) there is a large overlap of cognitive deficits between patients, with the very notable exception of aphantasia which only occurs in PL518, and (2) there is large overlap of the patients’ lesions. The only areas of selective lesion in PL518 is a small patch in the left fusiform gyrus as well as part of the right lingual gyrus. We suggest that these areas, and perhaps in particular the region in the left fusiform gyrus, play an important role in the cerebral network involved in visual imagery.

About 80% of my career could be generously described as typing what someone asked me into Google and giving them the answer back in a way they can understand. I don't even mean my interactions with non-technical folk. It's far too common with my "peers" as well.

I am of course familiar with him from Breaking Bad. I accidentally stumbled across him participating in the (awful) series by Bear Grylls The Island. He did a celebrity survival challenge. Totally wasn't expecting to see him on a 2AM YouTube binge after years of not seeing him at all.

I don't know the "magic" which goes into prompts which allows them to continue, but I've been using Opus+Fable 5+ for reverse engineering games and adding mods to games which weren't meant to support them. For some reason, I've not run into the "safe guards" around hacking despite Anthropic models happily de-compiling and examining applications at my request.

This is where I disagree with you. The rot and infection in our country isn't Trump. Trump is the symptom. It's the people willing to vote for someone like Trump (three fucking times) that represent the real issue with our country. Trump will die in the next 5-20 years. His supporters will not. And they will continue to support degeneracy and racism and bigotry. They will continue to support hurting people they think deserve to be hurt. Conservative ideology is ultimately the problem and most folks dismiss it as a non-issue.

We are not of a like mind wanting the same outcomes just with different paths of reaching it. Conservatives want a country defined by "natural" hierarchies. "Some people 'deserve' to be on the bottom and a permanent sub-class of existence so me and my people can rightfully be above them".

You see it all the time among conservatives. Look at Dying of Whiteness. Trevor was willing to die of a preventable illness because he didn't want to help "Mexicans" or "Welfare Queens".

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jonathan-m-metzl-dying...

> Debates raged in Tennessee around the same time about the state’s participation in the Affordable Care Act and the related expansion of Medicaid coverage. Had Trevor lived a thirty-nine-minute drive away in neighboring Kentucky, he might have topped the list of candidates for expensive medications called polymerase inhibitors, a lifesaving liver transplant, or other forms of treatment and support. Kentucky adopted the ACA and began the expansion in 2013, while Tennessee’s legislature repeatedly blocked Obama-era health care reforms.

> Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor was not angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained: “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”

> At the most basic level, Trevor died of the toxic effects of liver damage caused by hepatitis C. Yet Trevor’s deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma that told him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies, or from expanded communal safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and nonwhite others. Dogma suggesting to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with state assistance. Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.

This is the disease we are fighting against. Bigotry which supersedes self preservation. They hate so fucking much they are willing to die to make someone else suffer. Fuck conservatism and fuck conservatives. They uniquely make our world a worse place for everyone to exist in.

I"m sure you're not taking corporate CYA training at face value are you? They do these trainings so they can have some liability coverage despite the fact that they hire people to explicitly do these unethical things. Then when shit goes sideways they can say this isn't our culture or policy and point to the training. We provided training against these actions. Limited liability means zero accountability.

How could you possibly ever draw a line? It's Brandolini's law. It's flooding the zone. It's loyalty tests. It happens so frequently that there is no energy to focus on any one specific crime. It's all diffused under an umbrella of criminal shit. And each additional one is just one more thing thrown onto the pile no one will ever look into or prosecute because there's simply too much to dig into.

> It makes more sense to ask whether AIs have the ability to suffer.

Is that more interesting considering humanity at large is just fine with suffering across many species? A look at a factory farm would show that's just not a concern for humanity to any degree. Why the fuck would anyone care about he "feelings" of a digital entity when society at large have largely ignored the suffering of even many humans. Their own kind.

I used to love playing Magic The Gathering. But the hygiene issues at LGS and trolling issues with MTGO left me bereft. I found a YT channel which mostly played the sorts of decks I like (control) so I latched onto that as my MTG outlet. The exact same format over and over again, but it scratched the right itch to keep me coming back. Up until they added Members Only videos.

It's exactly the same sort of SEO slop you see trying to game Google algorithms.

I'd say the same, except when I land there not logged in. Then it's a shit show.

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I'm not a fan of term limits for many reasons, but the Democratic Party's strict adherence to decorum and ceremony are a part of why we're in the mess we are. They care more about decorum and process than actually helping people and stopping the rise of fascism in our country. I'm confident the next Democratic administration will try to "return to normal" and "reach across the aisle" just like every time they get power to the detriment of their voters.

Just shows how effective conservative propaganda is. They are uniformly terrible for the economy and it is proven literally every time they have power. Even by the 80's conservatives were fucking over the economy. Nixon probably represents the most significant shift leading us to where we are today (See Nixonomics). That's late 60's and early 70's which "coincidentally" follows the realignment of parties after the Democratic party passed the Civil Rights Act.

Yeah, it takes right wing brain rot to come up with "Camela Harris" and "Democrats seem to mostly run on literal socialism right now". Deeply unserious takes from the most stupid people in humanity.

> This seems like an overstatement. After all, Germany came back from Nazism.

So all we have to do to come back from it is have Nuremberg style trials for GOP leadership and to ban their ideology and symbology from being displayed in the country?

You need to lay off right wing media. It's seriously warped your perception of the world.

You're underselling decades of preparation from conservatives trying to lead to exactly this point. Pretending like it's just a Trump issue is incredibly myopic. Trump didn't write Project 2025 and he couldn't implement it alone. Furthermore, we have a significant portion of the voting public who fully support this. The fact that it's Trump's 3rd election and second win should tell you there's something deeply wrong with Republican voters. Trump is just the latest symptom of the sickness of this country.

This is what happens when you feed the sea lion.

I've settled on markdown with optional linking semantics. I've bounced around between the various popular apps, but having plain text files at the end of the day is important to me. I was quite happy with logseq and abandoned them as soon as they decided to invest in a database first model. Fortunately all of my notes were mostly just markdown and migration is relatively easy. In the era of LLMs I'm not really using a dedicated notes front end. I've got a notes system which includes the ability to add things to Family Apple Notes and Apple Reminders under various categories. My "LLM Assistants" can read my Apple Notes and Reminders so that's the way I stay in sync on most devices I own.

For some reason, as an elder millennial, I don't use my phone in this way at all. I've tried getting into mobile games, but they are typically garbage in-app-purchase machines. The PC is for gaming and large purchases, the phone is for light browsing and apps I'm forced to install.

In case you're curious. The ten states with the highest rate of child marriage per capita between 2000 and 2021 were:

  * Nevada
  * Idaho
  * Utah
  * Kentucky
  * Wyoming
  * West Virginia
  * Alabama
  * Mississippi
  * Tennessee
  * Texas

You assume harm reduction is everyone's goal. Some people just want to fuck young girls. Many of the current political party in power included. It's pervasive. Just grab them by the pussy and no one takes the victims seriously. If you go after them for their many crimes it's "lawfare".

I'm talking mostly about "family meals" where we're all designed to sit down together for the meal. In those cases, I won't exclude anyone. In some cases adding animal protein after the fact isn't too difficult. That doesn't mean I don't make things which include gluten, dairy and/or meat on occasion. Just that my desire to be creative in the kitchen for the family has been effectively killed due to friction.

Jeff Hayes is probably the best narrator I've experienced in audiobooks. Technically there are spoilers in this reading, but it's so isolated nothing will really make sense but still give you a feeling for his voices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ54CpkUoaM

The Count of Monte Cristo is probably the worst "popular" classic I've ever read. It was trash. So repetitive. It's clearly a product of its time and not a proper "novel". It's a series of newspaper serials aggregated into a book where Dumas was paid by the word. And he used as many words as he could to say as little as possible. One of the rare examples of where many video adaptations are better than the original written version. My favorite part of the movies was him learning to be the Count and that part is basically non-existent in the books. It just skips over to him being a master of everything.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is stupid in the best of ways. It doesn't take itself seriously until it does and those parts work as well as all the zany shit.

My wife developed lactose and gluten intolerance around 40. My 14 year old daughter has been a vegetarian for the last 9 months or so. My other two kids eat vegetables fine, but really prefer meat based dishes. As the primary meal maker in the family I’ve come to dislike making family meals anymore. It’s too much of a chore screening every ingredient and item for dairy wheat and animal products like just basic gelatin and finding alternatives or making dedicated side dishes for certain issues. I used to like making new dishes and trying new things but now it’s a small rotation to keep people fed. We can’t even reliably find a restaurant for us to eat at that would make everyone happy.

My wife was a volunteer coordinator at our school district. One time she roped me into making food for 150 teachers for teacher appreciation week. I’d much rather do that than prepare for a party in my house regardless of how much or little food I have to prepare. The food prep is the easy part. I can put in AirPods and listen to an audiobook while prepping or cooking things late at night. I can hand over the food and receive compliments via proxy. I don’t have to interact with people at the end and spend hours counting down the minutes until my house is empty and I can relax again.

When the derecho came through Iowa and many businesses were out of power for up to multiple weeks, the very large organization I was working for at the time in the insurance space got to discover just how many of their processes relied on machines sitting under people’s desks. Business critical servers and processing just chilling on a PC under someone’s desk. Also tens of billions of dollars in revenue a year.