Yes, Sam Altman really said that (the intelligence is utility quote). The response to this absolutely cannot be meek acceptance.
Jules of Nature
$LAYYYTER
KIROKAZE
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year


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Three Goblin Art
tumblr dot com

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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DEAR READER
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art blog(derogatory)

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Not today Justin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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@perishedoffits
Yes, Sam Altman really said that (the intelligence is utility quote). The response to this absolutely cannot be meek acceptance.

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"You can now sort your likes from oldest to newest on web and iOS. Do you remember what your first liked post was?"
oh dear
oh its bad back there.
Oh hello 2010 Tumblr...
I learned about this from this post... and my oldest like was one of yours!
Small hellsite.
Oh gosh, now I'm curious what it was :D
Best sentiment ever
"You can now sort your likes from oldest to newest on web and iOS. Do you remember what your first liked post was?"
oh dear
oh its bad back there.
Oh hello 2010 Tumblr...
I learned about this from this post... and my oldest like was one of yours!
Small hellsite.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [
ooh, new encyclical just dropped. these are the sort of dissertation-esque papers in which popes state their takes on pressing social and religious issues: this one is subtitled "on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence". i have not nearly the energy to read the whole thing right now (encyclicals are generally booklet-length if not book-length), but he starts by describing the threat of AI as people building a new tower of babel, which is pretty entertaining already
i think he also quotes Gandalf in this, if it's the same one i saw people talking about on bsky
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
37961 words, but I'm enjoying it.

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World History in a Year (Week 22) - 700s BC
The 700s BC lay at the beginning of a pivotal change in world history: the emergence of widespread debate about religious, philosophical, and ethical questions such as the meaning and purpose of life, what individual moral goodness looked like, and what kind of government and policies were desirable. This transformation, termed the Axial Age by philosopher Karl Jaspers, ran mainly from the 500s to 300s BC, and during that time it saw the emergence of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Jainism and Greek philosophy, among others. A parallel development in the same period was the development of many academic disciples and ways of thought: political theory, history, linguistics, science.
Although the main Axial period was, as stated, the 500s to 300s BC, some Axial developments predated this period. This was particularly the case in ancient Israel, where the core Axial changes happened earlier (700s to 500s BC) than in the other main Axial regions (Greece, India, and China) and took somewhat different forms. As previously noted, in China one of the foundations of Axial thought had already been laid by this time: the idea of the Mandate of Heaven, that a dynasty’s legitimacy was conditional on ethical behaviour.
In 700s BC Israel one similar development was underway (condemnation of powerful people behaving unjustly), along with a new one (an emphasis on ethical behaviour over ritual). Both of these would be important parts of the Axial Age in multiple areas, and both were major changes from the typical functioning of religion in ancient states up until this time.
My main source on the Axial Age, by the sociologist Robert Bellah, describes three types of religion. First, religions that existed in non-state societies, typically oriented around rituals for interaction with powerful supernatural beings who could be helpful or harmful, but who were not necessarily considered gods. Second, the religions of early states, which underlay the power of kings and priests: one of the key roles of the king was to ensure the proper sacrifices and rites were carried out to satisfy the gods and prevent famines or other disasters. And thirdly, the Axial religions, which made religion a matter of ethics and belief and debate and contested claims, and of individual worship and feeling.
Thus, attacks on ritual on on the behaviour of the powerful would have been antithetical to the typical role of religion in an ancient state up to that time. The Biblical book of the prophet Amos from the 700s BC in ancient Israel is a striking example of this change. After condemning a number of neighbouring kingdoms for, essentially, commission of war crimes, Amos turned his sights on economic injustice within the kingdom of Israel:
“They sell the innocent for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground, and deny justice to the oppressed. …You levy a straw tax on the poor and impose a tax on their grain. Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink of them.”
Building upon this came God's denunciation of ritual and elevation of ethics:
“I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. …But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”
There were some glimmerings of similar patterns in Greece, where the poet Hesiod also denounced oppression of the poor by rulers. (I don't have any quotes here; I have a copy of the Bible on hand but I don't have a copy of Works and Days.) This was just one element in a sweeping transformation in Greek life at the time. Contact by Phoenician traders, either in the late 800s BC or early 700s BC, produced a new alphabetic Greek script developed from the Phoenician one, restoring literacy after centuries of its absence. The Iliad and Odyssey date from the 700s BC. City-states, politically independent but with a shared Greek identity, and with non-monarchical governance, emerged. The first Olympic Games were held.
Changes were also underway in Italy. The Etruscans established city-states in the north of the peninsula. The legendary foundation of Rome by Romulus is also set in the 700s BC; and while that was a legend, an ancient wall dating from this century does suggest that this was when Rome became a unified community with a coherent identity, rather than a collection of villages. Greeks and Phoenicians set up colonies in Sicily, which was a Mediterranean breadbasket and hot property.
Whereas the stage setting for Greece’s Axial Age was a cultural renaissance, the stage setting for China’s Axial Age was a collapse. In 771 BC the Zhou dynasty suffered a severe military defeat from a northern people they called the Quan Rong, who captured their capital near the present-day city of Xi’an. The Zhou lost the core of their territory and moved east, setting up a new capital near present-day Luoyang, not far from the sites of earlier Xia and Shang capitals. From this point the real power of the Zhou monarchy was broken, though some prestige remained: the rest of the 700s through 500s BC would be marked by noble houses with different regional territories jockeying for control of the Zhou king. This is known as the Spring and Autumn Period, after the Spring and Autumn Annals (‘spring and autumns’ is a poetic way of saying ‘years’) in which it was recorded.
In later records, the loss of Zhou power was attributed to a frivolous ruler, with a story similar to the Boy Who Cried Wolf. King You was enamoured of a concubine who loved to see the beacons lit and the military forces called in, and he did it multiple times to amuse her. By the fourth time the military were sick of this and did not come, and of course this time was the real warning of the Rong invasion. This was also stated as coming after decades of neglect of a key ritual. The story is almost certainly fictional, but it shows that the concept that dynasties rose on fell on the merits and responsibility of their ruler continued.
Also in East Asia, rice farming was introduced to Japan, beginning what archaeologists call the Yayoi period. (Until relatively recently historians considered the start of the Yayoi period to be much later, around 300 BC, but new carbon dates indicating earlier origins are increasingly accepted.) Many features point to this being driven by immigration from the Korean Peninsula. Rice farming did not develop gradually, but was introduced in fully-fledged form, with irrigation canals and tools matching those on the mainland, and other Korean practices like burying the dead under dolmens (one large stone set horizontally on two vertical ones, like Stonehenge’s trilithons) came with it.
Coming back to where this post started, one of the main impetuses for ancient Israel and Judah’s Axial Age (to be precise, Amos was from Judah but prophesied in Israel) was the Assyrian Empire: assertion of ethics over power, of the rule of a God who valued justice and morality, came in the face of temporal imperial power on a scale the world had not previously seen. Indeed, Assyria has been termed the world's first empire.
From the 740s BC to the end of the century, Assyria conquered westward as far as the Mediterranean; northward to strike a serious blow against Urartu, sacking its religious centre of Musasir; and southeast to conquer Babylon (a hold that remained tenuous and contested by frequent Babylonian rebellions). Unlike in the 800s BC, when they had mainly sought loot and tribute, this time the Assyrians incorporated conquered regions into their empire: as puppet states if they submitted, as provinces if they resisted or rebelled. The Phoenician city of Sidon was conquered, and Tyre made a protectorate, and heavy taxes imposed.
The consequences of Assyrian conquest elsewhere went far beyond taxation. The Assyrians engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing, most famously in their deportation of virtually the entire population of the northern kingdom of Israel following its conquest in 722-721 BC. Many other groups faced a similar fate: one estimate, based on Assyrian royal inscriptions boasting of deportations, has the Assyrians deporting 4.5 million people during the period from the 800s to 600s BC. For Assyria, this served two ends. First, detaching conquered people from their land and culture by moving them either to the heartland or to different border areas minimized their capacity to rebel. Second, it gave Assyria a captive labour force for agriculture and for the construction of royal palaces, temples, and monuments; and Assyria was in need of civilian labour due to the large share of their population conscripted into the military. Some members of deported populations were also conscripted into special military units, particularly if they had desirable skills. The lands of a deported people might be left empty, or - if they were had valuable resources or trade connections - might be resettled by Assyrians from the heartland or other areas of the empire.
Other states surrounding Assyria, none equaling it in power but all fighting with it at some points, included Phrygia in central Anatolia, Elam in western Iran, and Egypt.
In the latter half of the 700s BC, Egypt – at that time ruled by Libyans – was conquered by the state of Napata in Sudan, successor of the middle bronze age Kerma kingdom. The Napatans followed Egyptian religion and regarded this as a liberation of Egypt from Libyan control and a restoration of Egypt's religion and culture. They allied first with the priesthood of Amun in Thebes (Luxor) to conquer Upper Egypt (the southern part), and then under a later king extended their conquest to the northern part around Memphis (Cairo). In the Bible, when King Hezekiah of Judah made an alliance with Egypt against Assyria, it was the Napatans he was allying with.
This had fateful consequences for both Judah and Egypt - Judah more immediately. Sennacherib of Assyria invaded and captured every walled city in Judah except for Jerusalem, and then laid siege to Jerusalem; the siege and capture of one city, Lachish, is detailed in an Assyrian bas-relief at their palace in Nineveh. However, Sennacherib departed without capturing Jerusalem. The Bible attributes this to divine intervention; most historians attribute it to Hezekiah paying Sennacherib a large amount of tribute (an action which is also stated in the Bible), and Sennacherib deciding that, with authority restored and the the rebellion crushed, a further siege was not necessary. Assyria's military campaigns over the next few years were reduced in extent, so it's not impossible that things went less well than Sennacherib claimed.
I recognize there's been a lot of Bible stuff in this post; the collision of archaeologically-documented events, Biblical accounts, and some major religious changes all in the same area were interesting to me.
A couple of additions.
1. While Jaspers came up with the Axial Age idea for Eurasia, it doesn't apply to SE Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Also, not every religious historian agrees with Jasper; some just reject the idea of an Actual age. Others agree with him. And some agree but have a more materialist approach: universalizing religions and philosophies (Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and then Christianity, and Greek philosophy) were responding to more universalizing challenges, because trade and other long-distance interactions throughout Eurasia raised these questions. In fact, this helps us understand the lack of African and American Axial Ages - intensive long-distance interactions were geographically more difficult for them.
2. Assyria being the first empire depends upon the definition of "empire." Flannery and Marcus (2012) define empires as states that have conquered other states, so they argue that empires appeared around 4,000 years ago. It's still true that Assyria was a big, big empire.
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers
Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word "enjoyers" instead of "users" or "bloggers" -> You left a comment a while back asking, "Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can't think of what a Tumblr accent would be." I almost never see anyone use the word "enjoyer" anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.
Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.
There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"
I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.
There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can't currently remember off the top of my head, but I'll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It's always a bit startling to see them out of context.
when I was in university one of my modules was about internet slang and for our grades project we had to compile and analyse a small database of 100 words used by a specific community of our choice. I chose tumblr and that's how I stumbled across Gretchen McCulloch's research and discovered that yes not only did tumblr have its own vernacular and syntax (as @lierdumoa demonstrates), it was at the time a crucible of slang and memes probably unrivalled by any other part of the internet. and it's stayed that way! even the very title is McCulloch's book because internet is an example of this specific phraseology.
sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought
I am holding the side of your face and looking deep in your eyes and telling you that love is stored in the syntax, and that we are rotating words together all at once as we all nod at their new and baffling meanings. if the devils sacrament be tumblr then the devils gospel is our collective voice. thanks for coming to my tedtalk
I am being perceived.
I feel like generative AI is much like the mechanical bird in the story The Nightingale by HC Andersen.
I grew up with Andersen's fairytales and many of them has made a permanent home in my heart. The nightingale (or nattergalen, as is the original title) has always been amongst my favourites.
It is the tale of how the emperor of China learns that a great bird exists in his empire and he asks it to come and sing for him. The song deeply touches him and all the people at the palace, and the little bird is celebrated for his voice and song.
One day, a box is sent to the emperor, and within is it a golden mechanical bird, an artificial imitation of the real nightingale. They are asked to sing side by side, but it doesn't work well. The nightingale improvises and goes with his mood, while the mechanical bird can merely repeat how it has been programmed.
Still, hearing the mechanical birds makes the crowd ooh and ahh, and it can sing without mistakes and much more often than a real bird. It is wound up again and again for the amusement of the emperor and the people. The real nightingale leaves discouraged.
But as the time goes on, the mechanical bird starts to break down, and eventually, it doesn't work anymore at all. When the emperor becomes deadly ill, the soft song from a nightingale is all that can save him, but his little wind-up toy cannot help him.
The real nightingale comes back and saves the emperor's life, for it had been so touched when it first sang for the emperor and it made him shed tears. It remembers that first touch of something oh, so special as sharing its voice. The emperor learns the error of his ways.
Gen AI can only ever be an intimidation of the real thing. It is stuck in the same grooves as a mechanical bird. It can do it "perfect" and faster than humanly possible, but it is and always will be an imitation that cannot stand on its own. It might be enough to impress but it is not sustainable.
Only with the real music, art and writing can what is special be perserved. It must be created by living beings. We are able to adapt and change and create stuff outside of set parameters. But it is very understandable that it is highly discouraging to see gen AI spit out music, art or writing that to the untrained, or uncaring, eye is praised.
I reckon that the well will dry up eventually, whether it will be a crash, or behind a high paywall, and everyone who grew accustomed to it will cry out in despair. The mechanical bird is broken. Death will come and sweet song is not there anymore.
The nightingale flew home and continued with his life. He kept singing to the forest, but in another version of the tale, maybe he had stopped singing. It would have been a tragedy for both himself and all the people who eventually realised their folly in depending on a mechanical bird over the real thing.
So keep creating. Keep making music. Keep making art. Keep writing. Gen AI is imitating us, and it is arguably trying to replace our works, but it is not as good as the real thing and it cannot last.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Edited down a long tweet. (x)
random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.
also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
Search Engines
Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)
WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.
Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.
Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.
Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.
Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.
Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.
Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.
Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.
MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.
Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.
Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.
https://www.mojeek.com/
https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.
https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.
https://yep.com/ is a crawler
https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx
https://www.dogpile.com/
https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)
https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?
https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?
https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.
Other Searchers
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

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Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
DEFINITELY read below the fold.
Remember, when profits are at stake, truth is one of the first casualties.
unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!
(warning: loud chirping throughout)
source: hellgate osprey cam
Osprey (Pandion haliaetus)
European starling (Sturnus vulgaris)
Movement nudge, coach John makes the period stretches more accessible
X
I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.
And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.
It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!
Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.
We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.
And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.
We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.
Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.
Cystic fibrosis used to be a "disease of childhood" because people who had it rarely lived to be adults. Now it's considered a chronic illness.
I know I'm saying this as someone who's career largely depends on this, but: please, this is why we need basic science research. If you ever see a headline or snippet about something "ridiculous" that scientists are doing, you are being propagandized. You are being lied to. And it's in a way that aims to stop this progress.

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Intellectual property laws used to mean something when it targeted the consumer.
Now the venture capitalist steals the IP to make derivative AI bullshit.
I would totally watch an annotated adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. We have so many technological options for this now, but like subtitles with historical context notes, David Attenborough-type voice over where he explains the mating rituals politics of ballrooms, a "directors commentary" but instead it's a literature professor and three historians.
Annotated novels are popular! This would be like watching footnotes. I would pay for it. I think other people would pay for it. I think it would be a delight.
Not quite what you asked for, but may I recommend the BBC documentary "Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball" (2013), presented by Amanda Vickery, in which they staged a historically accurate version of the Netherfield ball for the bicentenary of P&P's publication, with candlelight only and the right size of room (not anywhere near as big as in most adaptations) and historically accurate food and clothing.
The commentary from the historians is great, and the thing that really struck me is that the professional dancers struggled with the stamina required for the accurate choreography. Turns out Regency ballroom is a crazy workout.