Notices by Ed Suominen (edsuom@hachyderm.io)

I’m not feeling a lot of love for people who want to make protecting your health illegal.

#Covid #CovidIsNotOver and yes, dumbass, #CovidIsAirborne

The world we had in 2015 is never coming back.

Neither is the more stressful world of 2019 when we had a deranged narcissist wannabe Hitler for a President but my wife and I could at least commiserate with friends about it over breakfast every Sunday morning.

These are terrible times. They’re so bad most people have given up believing what’s happening is even real. Which then proceeds to make things even worse.

How does one end a post like this? “Have a nice day?”

@EricCarroll @noyes @jik It really is, especially considering that LLMs are gigantic neural networks that get trained to say things that match a certain pattern. Deviate from that pattern, and the model parameters get updated so it’s less likely to deviate from it next time.

That’s pretty much what they do, isn’t it? For the guys who write the checks?

That quote I posted from the New York Times about brain injury got boosted 150 times. Clearly, there is some interest in the topic I’ve hashtagged with #NoToBrainInfections and you may wish to follow the hashtag. It’s free and will let you see any further posts I do about that, which will be fairly infrequent.

May I scream into the void for a second, though? Consider the horror of what’s happening: Kids are getting brain damage in their classrooms, and nobody cares. It’s surreal.

My youngest will be graduating high school this spring and hasn’t been inside a classroom since the administrators and teachers there decided it’s fine for kids to be inhaling a dangerous airborne pathogen that gives them brain damage, diabetes, weakened immune systems and—in percentages parents would be up in arms about if it were anything else—months and perhaps a lifetime of disability and misery.

This is not fucking OK.

#covid19 #Covid #LongCovid #CovidIsAirborne #CovidIsNotOver

“‘It’s not just fog, it’s a brain injury, basically,’ said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, chair of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. ‘There are neurovascular changes. There’s inflammation. There are changes on M.R.I.s.’

—New York Times, Nov. 13, 2023, “Can’t Think, Can’t Remember: More Americans Say They’re in a Cognitive Fog”

An increasingly rare honest article about #Covid and the damage it’s doing.

#NoToBrainInfections

When people get older, they’ve tended to talk about how hard things were for them back in the day, how these spoiled youngsters have it so easy.

I’m not doing that. I grew up in a green and vibrant world alive with possibilities, where nature was not lashing out at us and withering before jaded traumatized eyes trying their best to look away. Where we breathed each other’s air without a second thought.

Where companies were places to build careers and products people needed.

Things are not OK.

I haven't had the mental energy to write a substantive blog post lately, and it's disheartening to see so few readers nowadays. From thousands to less than a hundred.

But I have some Big Thoughts about this surreal stage of the #Covid #pandemic and the global Jonestown-level self-poisoning event some of us are watching from the jungle's edge, as the masses line up for their cyanide-laced drink of #SARS2 while the forces of greed & power cheer them on.

Boost if you want it written. Meanwhile...

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

Some hashtags, for all three of you out there who still care: #Covid #CovidIsNotOver #Wastewater #Washington #Spokane.

@HeavenlyPossum I’m an electrical engineer and there is an aspect of planned obsolescence shittiness that doesn’t get talked about but pisses me off: LED lightbulbs.

The LEDs basically last forever. It wouldn’t be hard to design a long-lasting power supply to convert the 120 VAC to the voltage the LED uses, using film capacitors that cost pennies more. But nobody even thinks about paying more for something that lasts years longer and what pays is to stuff landfills full of “dead” lightbulbs.

@nova You’re doing great. Very impressed new user of the instance you and your team created.

I tried donating on Ko-Fi but it seemed to leave me no alternative but to get a PayPal account, but that’s something I won’t be doing (see: Peter Thiel). Is there another way?