"my trauma wasn't bad enough to have OSDD/DID"

ohhhhhhhh dear. Let's sit down for this one and I'm going to hold your hand.

Companion parrots are not domesticated, as a general rule.

They cannot survive in the wild—separate conversation—but they are not domesticated.

The exceptions to this are:

* Budgies
* Cockatiels
* Lovebirds

But outside of these and maybe one or two others, companion parrots are _wild animals_ living in the care of humans.

This is _radically_ different from dogs or cats, and I've generally found people are caught off guard by what it means for keeping them.

Sofia Isella concerts are basically avant garde performance pieces where the audience is invited to be part of the artwork.

She tells everyone to take out her phones for the moment when she talks about how "all of human knowledge made us dumb."

She strips and the crowd screams (which she encourages) while she sings the song with the lyrics "there's no button you can push for third base, I'm not trying to seduce you fuckface."

It's brilliantly done.

Let's talk about panic defenses. What they are and what they mean. Because I just saw multiple people claim that murdering trans people is "legal" in 30 states.

Stop. Claiming. That. The. Defense. Being. Legal. Makes. The. Action. Legal.

A panic defense is an attempt at an affirmative plea to either the judge or the jury to consider for either an insanity defense or to try to lighten the sentence.

There are no statistics on how often this _works_, but it isn't common to even attempt it, and to the degree it does "work" it is more often going to be to the tune of a lighter sentence or charge, for example in Louisiana trying to get a 2nd degree murder charge reduced to manslaughter, because in Louisiana "sudden passion" and "heat of blood" are affirmative defenses to reduce the charge.

But even then it needs to work to get you there in the first place.

But note: even if it succeeds in that case the result is not "it is now legal," it is the difference between "life in prison without the possibility of parole" and "40 years in prison with the possibility of parole after 26 years."

Which is a far, far cry from "legal."

Often, however, it doesn't even get past the judge or get to a jury. When Allen Andrade attempted it the judge basically rolled their eyes and gave him the maximum sentence he could get away with, including with a hate crime addendum.

When Louis Church attempted it he ended up plea bargaining to avoid a jury trial—extremely standard—and being convicted for manslaughter. The judge basically ignored his reasoning and gave the maximal sentence available under the law.

I can go on.

In short: panic defenses are no good. We _should_ support and advocate for banning them. They _are_ scary. AND ALSO.

They do not render the actual action remotely "legal" and, to the degree they even _can_ succeed, they frequently _don't_.

Stop. Allowing. AIs. To. Run. Python. Code. With. Credentials.

Gods.

I hate this pattern and they all seem to do variations of it.

99.9% of the time it is better solved with some combination of awk, grep, sed, tail, etc.

Let's talk a little about what Claude recently started doing to watermark text.

It's based on the same mathematical foundations as Google's SynthId-Text ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 ) that Google published on github ( https://github.com/google-deepmind/synthid-text ). The difference is basically that they created their own proprietary implementation of it, but the core mathematical framework is the same.

Basically the way it works (and I'm going to butcher this explanation slightly for simplicity) is that let's say you are doing your word generation thing:

"The pencil is on the {next-token}"

It basically then creates a probability cloud covering what {next-token} is going to encompass. This is just standard to how these systems work.

This then perturbs that probability cloud _very slightly_ but in a predictable way that can be analyzed.

So think of it like this:

I generate a random number 1 to 6. I do this a bunch of times. To perturb the output I say:

* The probability of two consecutive numbers is increased by 5%
* The probability of the opposite face is decreased by 5%.

You can reformat this output, you can break it up differently or reformat it, and because it is probabilistic you can even change the output or alter some of the values and—with enough text—we can still detect the signal. "Humanizers" and such do not consistently protect from this kind of analysis, especially when it is done well.

This is an _extremely_ clever way of doing this. It doesn't affect the quality (for real world systems), but it allows for reliable detection if you have enough text.

It is strongest where you have a bunch of related tokens that are basically free choice (e.g., essays). It is weakest when you have highly structured output with only limited possible expressions (e.g., code, sentences that are already heavily structured, etc). It's not impossible here, but it does require more text to do the analysis.

Also because it is probabilistic and rooted in how token selection works it is basically immune from detecting, e.g., Jane Austin as being written by AI.

"we disabled the guardrails on our system, didn't adequately put security measures in place, and it started doing the things that our guardrails were put in place to prevent"

news media, breathlessly: "the AI went rogue!"

weird leftists on the internet: "the AI went rogue!"

Sigh.

If you refer to yourself as a "polymath" and "autodidact" in your profile I have found that this has a very high correlation with either being neither or being very bad at both.

One thing that doesn't seem to penetrate the brains of most cis people much in this discourse, but which every trans person is keenly aware of, is just how _long_ the process with hormones takes.

You don't take estrogen and suddenly ka-girl! That's not how any of this works when you medically transition.

No, what happens is months and months of dosage adjustments, bloodwork, and tracking. You reaffirm, depending on your modality, to continue this journey anywhere from twice a day to once a week and every time you have the option to stop. For a long, long time you have the option to stop with very few permanent changes.

Do some people slip through the cracks anyways? Sure. And sometimes changes happen faster for some than others. But still, in general, you get time to figure it out.

So by the time surgery becomes a major option on the table that is someone who has decided—and reaffirmed that decision—at least once a week for _years_.

Is it permanent? Yes. And also. That takes time, especially for permanent changes that cause radical alterations. It doesn't happen just because one day you wake up and take your first E2 pill.

This is part why informed consent is the way to go. Because you sign the documents and get the brochures, but that's not the really, really important verification.

The verification is then every Saturday (or whenever) when you sit down to inject yourself. Or when you wake up early to make sure you take your pill on time. Or when you go in for repeated bloodwork so that you can monitor how your body is responding.

That's one hell of a set of observations to work with.

But this is one (of several) of the reasons why the cis people going around saying "well all I need to do is _identify_ and…" are so ridiculous.

Because, if you choose to medically transition—which is the only group we're really talking about for things like sports—you haven't just signed a piece of paper that said "I'm a girl teehee."

No, you've reaffirmed that decision day after day for years. You've passed through the world in a way where society reads you as a woman and interface accordingly and then decided, every day, to keep doing that.

My continued diet+exercise+meds mixture has led me to have now about 23 lbs of weight loss since April.

I'm _definitely_ healthier.

Between the lower LDL, higher HDL, lower triglycerides, etc I have multiple objective measures around this fact. My heart palpitations have basically gone away as well.

To cover what's been going on: I had a lot of visceral fat from a medication change a few years ago. I didn't _look_ like it because of the way I carried weight, but it was still there. Unfortunately due to my genetics I carry visceral fat poorly compared to your average person—a trait I inherited from my mother. So visceral fat causes additional health complications.

But the only way to reliably measure visceral fat is with a variety of scanners that I do not have access to in my apartment. So the most reliable proxy for whether I was losing visceral fat would be inches—which are a lagging indicator and not especially sensitive on me—and the scale.

So my goal has been: get the visceral fat as low as possible. If I can keep it off for at least six months then in theory anything I gain back should be subcutaneous fat (which is fine) or muscle.

I still want to lose another 5–10 lbs—and absolutely no more than 15—and I need to keep it off, but this is an extremely positive step.

Gods I wish people better understood just how inefficient mastodon's system and protocol are.

Some of this is not mastodon's fault—some inefficiencies are baked into AP—but others are fully and completely mastodon specific.

Gods sometimes I start to think that the concept of a literacy crisis is overblown and then I run headfirst into someone who is clearly a product of it x_ x

It's most obvious when they ostensibly agree with me and are trying to correct some minor detail or expound on some minor detail.

It's _ugly_.

I really need trans media and people to stop labeling medicaid bans on trans healthcare as a "state ban on adult trans healthcare."

That's not what it is, at all.

Is it a serious step and a terrible one? Yes. Does it deny access to many? Absolutely.

But it is not, as the headlines report, a "state ban on adult trans healthcare."

OH "The children long for the Hays Code"

At a concert last night and one of the acts shouted "who here has bad taste in men!"

…which given the percentage of the audience was either a sapphic-leaning bisexual or flat-out a lesbian was an interesting choice of angles.

lol.

"Do any of you know what a fucking guardrail is" indeed.

https://youtube.com/shorts/0wqGQvz4fWQ?si=JbGfACqSH2Ks-faf

The person doing this analysis couldn't get past the first 40 pages of the book and refused to engage with the overtly sexual themes when it came to Oskar. Leading to this rosy "queer kid analysis."

But while there are several gender and sexuality themes to explore, it is _not optional_ to include those "bleaker" elements in your analysis.

Because when you _do_ include them you see the story through the lens of the cycle of abuse. You see how in the end the two roads for Oskar are either to become Håkan or to become Eli.

When you _do_ include it you see that Eli's "choice" to wear "girl clothes" is because they are someone who never in their entire centuries-of-life have ever had a _choice_ and who processes the world as a child. Because they are a victim of abuse who follows the patterns of their abuse even long after they no longer "have to." Because they were groomed and abused.

It's fine if you don't want to do analysis of Let the Right One In. It's a dark movie and a darker book. It's fine if you want to skip it in your analysis of monstrous children through fiction.

The author of this essay I'm discussing made a comment about how she hopes that Oskar, essentially, stops "creeping on" Eli (paraphrasing). But that's like… not an optional part of the analysis of what then _happens to Oskar_.

It's okay if these themes make you uncomfortable. It's okay to skip this media in your analysis. It's okay to even analyze it with some caveats using others summaries and works as a guide.

But you can't just ignore core textual components because they make you uncomfortable without taking the time to understand how this taints your analysis.

To be a trans woman is to see your group keep getting DRAGGED INTO THINGS WHERE YOU HAVE NO REASON TO EVEN BE THERE.

I don't understand how you intend to do a reading of the story of Let The Right One In _without talking about or engaging with the pedophilia aspects_ and not understanding how that then _limits your analysis_.

Diomid Turzov abbreviating to DT I'm sure is a coincidence. #GenshinImpact