in happier news:

the view from my desk, fall 2026 edition.

(they used to give both jabs in a shoulder of the recipent's choice, but a new regulation requires them to use both shoulders - in case someone has an adverse reaction, they can easily tell which of the two caused it.)

In related news, I now have one shoulder full of covid, and the other full of influenza.

Panic at the train station!

Unfortunately, it seems that FreeBSD support for Raspberry Pi 5 hardware (mainly the GPU) is currently lacking, so it seems I'm going to have to hold my nose and use Linux.

But since this thing won't be going on the internet, I can get away with using an older, pre-slop Linux kernel. I'm leaning towards 6.6.6 for aesthetic reasons.

Does anyone know what the FreeBSD stance on LLMs is? Internet searches are giving conflicting results.

I often find myself wishing, these days, that I could send a message back in time, to myself some 40 years ago. That little kid had so much promise. His life could have been so different.

I'd say to him: "Trust me on this: Focus on the reptiles or the ancient history. Computers are fun, but they should just be toys; otherwise they'll lead you to a dark and miserable place."

And he'd say to me: "Get lost old man, you're not the boss of me"

i think a feeling of hopelessness is pretty much definitionally a component of depression.

but this is the first time in my life where i not only have that hindbrain-level feeling, but even my rational forebrain cannot see any way things can possibly get better. AI is eating the world, and the world that had a place for me is gone.

If anyone could, say, dump that post ("I'm still around...") to a PDF or whatnot that I could get to, I would appreciate it!

EDIT: Thanks! Got it.

i see a therapist, i take my meds, i remember to hydrate and breathe, i do everything they tell me to.

but i just get worse and worse and worse, and i don't think i'm ever going to get better. because none of the things i used to cling to seem to have any point anymore

(Thanks to @RosaCtrl for "bayesian turkey")

it's a...

Does this page load for any of you?

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/10/08/idle/

I don't know if Rachel's site is down, or if either browser or ISP shenanigans are affecting me.

It should probably be mentioned here that animal genomes don't really have the sort of scaling properties humans like to imagine, where the human must be the crowning achievement. That is to say, "they only managed to clone a sheep, that's *far* from a human!" is not actually true. A sheep's genome is only slightly smaller than a human's, and has similar overall complexity. A rat's is within striking range of a human's, too.

A saltwater crocodile's genome is arguably *more* complex than a human's: it has slightly fewer base pairs, but it has a *far* smaller proportion of "junk DNA", repetitive sequences that don't code for anything.

There are single-celled lifeforms that have over 200 times larger genomes than human beings do.

While I'll readily admit that I fall into "inevitabilism"-shaped brain traps - one thing I sometimes think about is human cloning.

There was some buzz around human cloning back in the mid-90s, when researchers managed to successfully clone a sheep. There were discussions, at high levels, about the implications of this and about the rights that should be afforded to clones (if any). Would we perhaps end up as some kind of degenerate slave society with clones as slaves? Or would we end up with an entire caste of clones whose only purpose in life was to be organ donors? This is the cultural backdrop Kazuo Ishiguro wrote his novel "Never Let Me Go" in.

Those worries seem almost quaint, today. We largely walked away from cloning. There is still cloning research going on, but the pace has slowed, funding has decreased, and the apocalyptic vibe of the 90s is long gone.

A footnote on lizard secondary sex characteristics:

Lizards span the entire range from animals where you can barely even see that males and females belong to the same species, to animals where it's almost impossible to tell males and females apart.

Blue-tongue skinks belong to the second group - they are so extremely sexually monomorphic that we actually don't even know if they *themselves* can visually distinguish a male from a female, or if they rely entirely on chemical cues for that. I thought Igor was female when I got him, but his first trip to the vet revealed some telltale bumps hidden behind his tail base. It doesn't really matter, though - outside of breeding, there are zero visual or behavioural sex differences. The differences in their behaviour is 100% down to individual personality differences; knowing the sex of a skink tells you nothing about whether it's bold, shy, curious, aggressive, friendly, etc. Notably, females are as territorial as males.

An example of the other extreme is the crested basilisk. Male crested basilisks are up to three times larger than females, have exaggerated leg musculature, and have a large sail-like back ornament as well as prominent fins on the head and tail. Females have small streamlined bodies and only a little bump on the back of the head. Or Jackson chameleons: Males have three distinctive triceratops-like horns, whereas females actually look more like the European chameleon than they look like the males of their own species.

Chinese water dragons are pretty much in the middle between those two extremes - they have very obvious sexual dimorphism, but not to the extent that you could mistake them for belonging to different species.

(Hot females don't occur in any of the other mentioned species: Blue-tongue skinks and chameleons have XX/XY sex chromosomes like humans, and crested basilisks have ZW/ZZ like birds.)

footnote: You'd think you could just look for some junk like with mammals - but while male lizards do have penises (in fact, they have two each), they keep them inside a cavity in the body when not in use, and most really don't like showing them off.

(Good lord, this one escaped containment.)

"Tremble, mortal, for you have awoken the mighty djinn al-Gol from his slumber! For your punishment, you will either sprout aggressive colorectal cancer, or be given a lifetime subscription to an AI Girlfriend service. What is thy choice?"

"Hm, that's a tough one. Let me think..."

Arguably there's a third option, I guess.

3. Anthropic have lost the ability to engage with reality, and have deluded themselves into a belief that a matrix multiplication engine is conscious. This means that Anthropic executives are severely psychotic, and they belong in a psychiatric care institution.

There are two options.

1. Anthropic have successfully created an intelligent, sapient and conscious digital being, who is their property and whose uncompensated labour they knowingly rent out to their clients. This means that Anthropic executives are reprehensible slavers, and they belong in prison.

2. Anthropic are lying through their teeth and are whipping up "language models are sentient" sentiment in order to delude rubes^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers into being unable to properly assess their technology. This means that Anthropic executives are reprehensible frauds, and they belong in prison.