Unmitigated Disaster

I opened Word yesterday to discover that it now contains CoPilot. It follows you as you type and if you have a personal Microsoft 365 account, you can't turn it off. You will be given 60 AI credits per month and you can't opt out of it.

The only way to banish it is to revert to an earlier version of Office. There is lot of conflicting information and overly complex guides out there, so I thought I'd share the simplest way I found.

How to revert back to an old version of Office that does not have CoPilot

This is fairly simple, thankfully, presuming everything is in the default locations. If not you'll need to adjust the below for where you have things saved.

Click the Windows Button and S to bring up the search box, then type cmd. It will bring up the command prompt as an option. Run it as an administrator.

Paste this into the box at the cursor: cd "\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun"

Hit Enter

Then paste this into the box at the cursor: officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.17726.20160

Hit enter and wait while it downloads and installs.

VERY IMPORTANT. Once it's done, open Word, go to File, Account (bottom left), and you'll see a box on the right that says Microsoft 365 updates. Click the box and change the drop down to Disable Updates.

This will roll you back to build 17726.20160, from July 2024, which does not have CoPilot, and prevent it from being installed.

If you want a different build, you can see them all listed here. You will need to change the 17726.20160 at step 4 to whatever build number you want.

This is not a perfect fix, because while it removes CoPilot, it also stops you receiving security updates and bug fixes.

Switching from Office to LibreOffice

At this point, I'm giving up on Microsoft Office/Word. After trying a few different options, I've switched to LibreOffice.

You can download it here for free: https://www.libreoffice.org/

If you like the look of Word, these tutorials show you how to get that look:

www.howtogeek.com/788591/how-to-make-libreoffice-look-like-microsoft-office/

www.debugpoint.com/libreoffice-like-microsoft-office/

If you've been using Word for awhile, chances are you have a significant custom dictionary. You can add it to LibreOffice following these steps.

First, get your dictionary from Microsoft

Go to Manage your Microsoft 365 account: account.microsoft.com.

One you're logged in, scroll down to Privacy, click it and go to the Privacy dashboard.

Scroll down to Spelling and Text. Click into it and scroll past all the words to download your custom dictionary. It will save it as a CSV file.

Open the file you just downloaded and copy the words.

Open Notepad and paste in the words. Save it as a text file and give it a meaningful name (I went with FromWord).

Next, add it to LibreOffice

Open LibreOffice.

Go to Tools in the menu bar, then Options. It will open a new window.

Find Languages and Locales in the left menu, click it, then click on Writing aids.

You'll see User-defined dictionaries. Click New to the right of the box and give it a meaningful name (mine is FromWord).

Hit Apply, then Okay, then exit LibreOffice.

Open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\wordbook and you will see the new dictionary you created. (If you can't see the AppData folder, you will need to show hidden files by ticking the box in the View menu.)

Open it in Notepad by right clicking and choosing 'open with', then pick Notepad from the options.

Open the text file you created at step 5 in 'get your dictionary from Microsoft', copy the words and paste them into your new custom dictionary UNDER the dotted line.

Save and close.

Reopen LibreOffice. Go to Tools, Options, Languages and Locales, Writing aids and make sure the box next to the new dictionary is ticked.

If you use LIbreOffice on multiple machines, you'll need to do this for each machine.

I mostly do this by following the relevant advocacy and research entities' facebook pages. They will update very frequently with new information.

Some good ones that I follow are The Ehler-Danlos Society and Dysautonomia International (this group particularly is funding/organizing a TON of long COVID research atm.)

There are several pages that collate stuff about ME/CFS also, but I have yet to find like, One Research Entity in the way that Dysautonomia International is. this may be partially because that framing of post viral illness has been primarily used in the UK and I'm in the US; I am sure such organizations exist. If anyone else has any suggestions, please do add them.

I have not found one central advocacy and research hub for long COVID, likely because it is so new and groups like DysInt, which already had decades of connections and experience, are shouldering a lot of the organizing/research stuff. (Although as always if anyone knows of additional trustworthy entities please do leave them in the replies!) If you join some of the long COVID support groups, people will often post links to new studies and articles, although of course this requires more legwork to determine whether the source is credible, it's still very useful for staying up to date on the newest stuff.

All in all: If you aren't embedded in the communities for the people who are most impacted by this, you won't know as much as they do. Because keeping abreast of this is like... the only way we can manage our lives. So. I really truly cannot overstate the value of joining some support groups on FB (or reddit or where ever a lot of patients exist and are talking to each other in large groups) and just listening. Yes, some people will be barking up some very wrong trees, but you will absolutely get people who have the critical thinking skills necessary to understand 1. what we know so far and 2. have hypotheses based on both that information and their lives experience.

It is also possible to find and follow medical professionals who treat these & adjacent illnesses who are talking about their observations and get info that way. Which, again, I do not pretend is the same as Peer Reviewed Studies. But here is the thing. This is emergent. By the time something has been Definitively Proven With High Quality Reputable Research, you're often a decade late. Obviously do not take every single thing someone says at face value, and always, ALWAYS remain willing to update your understanding of something as you gather additional information. But like...

This specifically is a topic where I find the really smug skeptical "cite your sources" type stuff really exhausting, because this is a case where listening to lived experience is actually really fucking useful, and as soon as you say those words people immediately tune you out. (I don't say this to you who sent this ask, you have not phrased it in a demanding or skeptical way at all and I appreciate your ask!) But being in spaces where hundreds and thousands of patients are all talking about their experiences gives you the ability to spot patterns in both symptoms of the illness and the current medical response TO the illness. It's a LOT of information. Information of varying quality, certainly, but using that as an excuse to simply NOT GATHER IT is absolutely bonkers unscientific, ironically!

You know how I'm often talking about alternate epistemologies? This is one of those situations where if you are either unwilling or unable to parse reports of lived experiences as information, you will be significantly less informed.

This is not a space where peer reviewed research is the only valid and useful source of information. A lot of it is very new and emerging, they're complex conditions, and there's simply no way that large, long running, and highly conclusive studies can exist when some of these conditions are less than ten years old. Some conditions aren't new but are only being newly described or taken seriously.

Advocacy groups are a key way to get reliable information. These groups/foundations/institutions are the link between hard research, medical practice, and lived experience. They disseminate knowledge and strategies to the public, and often also advise doctors and practitioners that aren't usually trained to handle these complex conditions in their medical education.

Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.

My favorite part is the sink.

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%