drakonka

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.

Last year I built a currency conversion assistant for my company accounting, and this year I built a self-hypnosis app for myself. They were both fun projects, and the hypnosis one was a good lesson in releasing my first Android app as well even if I haven't bothered trying to actually market it.

Thank you for sharing - I'm glad you lived!

On the programming front, I've been working on a little self-hypnosis app for myself that I'll probably go ahead and release. And outside of that I've been finishing up a novella draft.

Mine is: https://liza.io

I'm fine with email but there's also a comment system on the posts that I probably prefer :)

I think this one might be super interesting for its entertainment value, but there has been some strong criticism as to its credibility. For example, here's a pretty comprehensive debunking from The Skeptical Inquirer: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-telepathy-tapes-...

And a statement from Association for Science in Autism Treatment: https://asatonline.org/media_watch/asat-responds-to-the-skep...

Do you think if you're in that kind of situation, where you are dying on a beautiful mountain, you would have it in you to appreciate the beauty around you? I was imagining it to be more like a cold, painful death rather than a nice end where you appreciate the mountain air.

Of course the distinction itself is important in its own way, but I think/hope everyone here fully realizes and accepts that he technically donated as a private individual. You can clearly see it from the headline - it does not say "Mullvad VPN AB is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party", after all. For those who have an issue supporting Mullvad after this, that is unlikely to be the point of contention. The issue seems to be simply in this case, some people clearly find the private individual's actions objectionable enough to not want to support a product that individual is deeply associated with, profits from (and then funnels those profits into said actions), etc. Fixating on this being done as a private individual just comes off like a bit of a deflection attempt from a pretty straightforward case of individual actions having consequences.

I started doing this after moving to a university town at the end of 2024. Just taking random evening courses that sounded interesting. Having never studied past high school, it's been excellent! My first ever course was on nuclear weapons and disarmament and it was fascinating - we had professors with such a huge amount of experience researching and working directly with disarmament negotiations, policies, inspection missions, etc. Then it was a biology course with the most passionate teacher I've ever met. Last term I took a cosmology course and learned a ton about cosmology from different perspectives. My professors have all been great in the few courses I've done so far, and I don't pay attention to other students so much aside from when necessary for group work.