drakonka

I've had someone approve my PRs within a minute of me opening them, and likewise expect immediate approvals on his own PRs. When asked questions about parts of the code sometimes the answer would be along the lines of "Claude did it this way", or verbose AI-generated responses to the question.

> “Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”

Seeing this sentiment expressed by Proton's leadership may be enough for me to start transitioning away after eight years. Is Tuta a reasonable alternative to investigate first?

I think I understand what you mean, but to me the exemption doesn't seem performative. It seems like the equivalent of him talking to his employer and having them agree to not force him to use tech he is concerned about, he just used a particular legal avenue to justify it as part of that discussion. It may be performative in the sense that it also got attention (e.g., in the form of this article), but in this case even that part of it seems like it could be a useful precedent for others who may be considering a similar route.

Then again, maybe even seeing it as _slightly_ performative, potentially, is overly pessimistic. It may seem performative simply because it's novel, but if he legitimately considers this part of his religious beliefs and his employer (seemingly) agrees, what is performative about exercising his rights like many other people of other religions do?

I didn't get the impression that the man here was looking at LLMs as some fantastical threat. It seems like his concern was about offloading his thinking and decision making to AI, which seems pretty non-fantastical.

I've felt this sense of intensity myself in things I really cared about and pursued, and have usually succeeded in those things. But it is difficult to manufacture. I have seen what has seemed to be an attempt to manufacture/enforce intensity among employees in a startup environment. I believe the strategy caused more harm than good to both the employees and the product.

A few:

- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (thrice)

- The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson (twice)

- Fox 8 by George Saunders (twice)

I am now going to make it my mission to befriend a crow.

Warmth, intimacy, companionship, curiosity, discovery.

I used to be a big dash lover in my writing. Now I shamefully cull them as well. For my personal blog I don't care that much, but for university essays etc where they explicitly disallow AI formulation I just worry they'll get the wrong idea.

I'm reading Awakenings by Oliver Sacks in English and Medmänniskor by Stefan Einhorn in Swedish.

Companies will have a breakdown of token/credit spend by user for team subscriptions, so they could know that way.

I'm taking a year-long sabbatical to study a language at university right now and they're changing their assignment processes to curtail AI use. We have two versions of written assignments - the first to be written by hand in class with just a Swedish-Swedish word book available, and the second version to be typed at home implementing the professor's corrections from v1.

At least in this course students seem to be taking their strict 'no AI' policy quite seriously. Then again this is also the kind of course you do when you want to actually learn the material. It provides a qualification for further higher education in Swedish, so if we don't legitimately learn the stuff there's just no point as we won't manage in future courses.

In this case it sounds like AI may be more of a scapegoat. The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact. Though the primary issue seems more one of people carelessly offloading this type of work to AI in the first place (or being pressured to do so?)

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...

I had been in a similar boat towards the end of my last job a few months ago. I'm taking a sabbatical to study full time for year. It's a massive pay cut, but will be useful and so far very rewarding. I still love programming and plan to keep doing it (and am working on hobby projects in my spare time now), but with fresher eyes.

Something about seeing "gregarious nature" used to describe a non-human animal feels so... whimsical? I like it. Likewise with "intimate embrace" and other descriptions that follow.

I do. I feel that I was faster and more accurate on phones with a T9 keyboard. Maybe my memory is off as it's been so long, but typing on a virtual keyboard is never a not frustrating experience for me despite small fingers. I just need to find that goldilocks "dumb phone" with a T9 keyboard that is still smart enough to install the apps I really need for banking and comms.

That makes sense and there are some philosophical questions about whether our own world may be rendered similarly to a video game - do the things not within our senses actually render? Or do they only 'load in' when we observe them?

For me the real surprise is the fidelity of the visual I _do_ get. Sounds, sight, and touch feel just like real life (in lucid dreams especially now that I think of it). If the quality of our waking visualization is really meant to be the same as it is in our dreams, for me it is nowhere close.

In a dream I actually am fully immersed and can see the entire world as if it was real. In a normal dream I assume the dream is the real world, and in a lucid dream it is vivid enough to feel, look, and sound like a real physical experience though I know it's not. But in a dream there is no real visual still being processed to compete with the dream visual, so surely it can't be exactly the same? If it's really like dreaming then TIL I may have aphantasia..

I have been wondering this as well. I took part in a study at the local university that seemed related to visualization ability. Aside from various questionnaires about imagining different types of objects, they had me do a test on a PC where I had to look at moving shapes for a few seconds at a time. The shapes would then disappear and I'd have to click on it when it reappeared in a new position a few seconds later. You were meant to be able to predict the location based on the shape's trajectory and could react faster that way.

I doubt it was trying to identify aphantasia though, since that seems like a task you could do well in even without being able to visualize the shape.

This is an interesting one and I just tried it. I could answer all the questions about the ball, but none about the person or the table other than them existing in a hand-wavy sense. But rather than informing any level of aphantasia, it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.

When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?

I'm not personally concerned with male reproductive function, but have looked into the hormonal effects in women as well. Some have been beneficial when peppermint is ingested in appropriate amounts. Everything in moderation.

I wonder if the benefits could be seen to some extent with peppermint tea as well. I generally drink a cup daily because aside from just being relaxing I find it helps acne or other skin inflammation calm down faster.

The description of it as well as one of the theories on the cause make me think of burnout:

> Kreher and others believe that the mind plays an equally important role. Because your central nervous system influences your brain as well as your physiology, he theorizes that true overtraining syndrome is triggered by a combination of psychological and physical stress.

> “That’s the multi-system nature of the condition,” Kreher says. “The interaction of the mind and body is incredibly influential.” To finish a 100-mile race requires a psychological thrashing, and some runners have described a kind of post-race depression. As they try to rally to train for the next goal, perhaps beating themselves up for their prior performance, that mental stress, in addition to the physical depletion, could bring on OTS.

The article addresses this:

> That’s not to say that athletes in other sports aren’t working hard. They are. But they typically do so within a team environment or under the direction of a professional coach, providing them with well-established frameworks for success. Even though ultrarunning has grown, there’s still little infrastructure to support its competitors. Sponsorships mean full-time careers, but that rarely includes coaching.

No, no one else around. Just me and the monster and I'm sure it will get me. The whole dream is pure terror throughout until the moment I decide to give up and let it get me, at which point it’s just a flash of relief and then I wake up.

I wonder what information we have on keeping this drainage system healthy before developing Alzheimer's.

I have an example I think, that I've been curious about!

Every few years I experience a recurring nightmare, where I am being chased by some kind of giant monster, but I've never gotten a look at what it is and I don't know specifically what it wants but always just assume it wants to do me harm. After a long time running from it and panicking, eventually I realize no matter how hard I try to run, it's futile - the monster will catch me eventually. So I just decide to accept there's no way out and give up. Either I jump off a cliff to go ahead and kill myself (in which case I always wake up before hitting the ground), or I just stop, sit down, and begin to turn around so I can finally get a look at the monster before it catches me (in which case I always wake up before it gets me, AND before I can see it).

I have scary dreams sometimes, but this is the only one I'd classify as a real nightmare. Nevertheless, I find myself waiting for the nightmare to come again, because I really just want to finally get a look at what it is that's chasing me.

Sometimes I wonder if, when I finally get to see it, I'll somehow be changed as a person.

Right now I'm playing around with some of the concepts mentioned by Michael Levin in his Ingressing Minds paper preprint. I'm implementing their agentic bubble sort for fun. I'm also working on finishing my novella and preparing to start studying full-time in a couple of weeks. Scary but exciting!

Given me a place to put down my thoughts.