Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space

understand that what they are looking for is that you cannot maintain full-time work. are you unable to stay on task for 8 hours? do you have to take lots of breaks? do you have to call out multiple times a month? are you inconsistent? the bar may actually be lower than you are expecting, BUT the hard part is proving with documentation that you meet it.

when you see doctors, make sure to include how your condition is limiting you. if you apply for disability, they will look at all your records and what they care about most isn't your diagnosis/symptoms but how they are actually limiting you. if you have this documentation from before you became unable to work, this can strengthen your case.

if you mention things you do, always include how you had to accommodate yourself or the repercussions you had to be able to do them. for them to see "i went to a party over the weekend" comes across differently than "i went to a party over the weekend but i had to sit down most of the time and when i got home i crashed."

be sure to review your doctor's notes in mychart and correct anything that is wrong. your medical record is weighted more than what you say. even if it was your doctor misunderstanding something you said to them, because it's your medical record that would count more than what you tell social security yourself.

keep documentation of work accommodations, absences, write-ups, etc. related to your disability. again this can strengthen your case even if it was before you became unable to work.

keep documentation of what previous jobs and doctors you had because they will ask for this info and it can be hard to remember!

SSI and SSDI are different programs. in short, to qualify for SSDI you have to have a certain number of work credits. SSI is the one you might hear about where they cannot have much income/savings, whereas SSDI is more flexible since you have paid into it with your work taxes. if you have the work credits, don't be scared off by some of what you see about "disability benefits" where they don't specify - check if it applies to SSDI or only SSI.

if you become unable to work, apply as soon as you can. there is backpay but it cuts off at 1 year before your application date.

get a lawyer from the beginning!! you don't need to have money. they are paid a set percentage of what you get awarded if your case is approved. you don't have to pay anything unless you win. there are many ways you can shoot yourself in the foot by answering questions incorrectly. you think you know but you don't 😂 the lawyer understands exactly how to navigate the system and present your case in the best way. don't wait until you are denied to get a lawyer, because now you've already submitted things which harmed your case.

Listen: GENERATIVE AI SUCKS, OBVIOUSLY

But the insurance companies are using AI to instantly deny you care and write your denial letters

Sometimes fighting fire with fire works - especially when it's you, your time, and your budget, vs. the unbelievable amounts of money, time, staff, and lawyers that insurance companies have

Anyway it's free for everyone permanently and the source code (? is that still the term with AI??) is available for anyone to fork on Github

Fight Health Insurance uses AI to help you draft health insurance appeal letters. Our AI is a tool to assist you — it is not a replacement for professional medical or legal advice. You should always review and customize any generated appeal before submitting it.

How It Works

When you submit a denial or chat with our system, we use fine-tuned medical language models (like MedGemma) to draft an appeal letter tailored to your situation. We run multiple AI models in parallel. Our system also searches PubMed for relevant medical literature to strengthen your appeal with citations.

Training & Data

We generate synthetic training examples from publicly available state appeal decisions from California, and other states, and use those examples to fine-tune our models. These public decisions describe the diagnosis, treatment, denial reason, and outcome of real appeals, but contain no private patient information. No real patient appeal letters are used in training.

We fine-tune using LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation), an efficient technique that adapts a small fraction of model parameters while preserving the base model's "knowledge." After fine-tuning, we quantize the models to reduce their size and power consumption while maintaining quality. In general generating an appeal uses less power than playing a video game on a modern PC.

We update which base models we use as better open language models become available.

For more details on how we handle your data, see our Terms of Service. You can also request deletion of your data at any time.

Sustainability

We care about the environmental impact of running AI. A few things we do:

Low-power inference: Our models are quantized so they run on a single GPU, consuming a fraction of the energy that large cloud-hosted models require.

Solar powered when possible: During the day, our inference servers run on solar power. We aim to shift compute to daylight hours when solar generation is available.

Efficient serving: We use vLLM, a high-throughput inference engine that maximizes the work done per watt.

--

I haven't done a lot of research on them, but I've been following them since they publicly launched, and everything I've seen so far has sounded legit. Allegedly they've generated over 10,000 health insurance appeals

I also like them because of their motto (which you can see in the above screenshot):

Make your health insurance company cry too

Source

leaf obtained, purpose unclear

ground:

unclear

sibling obtained, purpose: biting

❄️ The Prompts ❄️

This year’s event will feature prompts from last year’s Winter Wonderland Fest. So if you didn’t get a chance to participate then, now’s the time!

Plain text versions of the prompts are available below the cut!

❄️ NSFW, Special, Chilling and Dark, Dead Dove and Taboo Prompts ❄️

This is a long one, so bear with me.

We first meet Cinderella in the village, which is BURSTING with color from the walls of the shops to the clothes of the villagers to the boxes Cinderella is holding.

Cinderella herself, though, almost stands out in the village in her browns and muted reds.

During “The Sweetest Sounds,” we see that the prince is also wearing those exact same colors during his “undercover” excursion into the village. They both are feeling trapped and are trying to blend in and settle for being someone they’re not, just in different ways.

Cinderella’s stepfamily, on the other hand, are wearing very brightly colored outfits. And when they get back from the village, we see that they live in a similarly brightly colored house. There’s brightly colored tiles on the walls of the stairs, all the furniture is brightly colored, there’s flowers and baubles and colorful feathers everywhere.

But during “In My Own Little Corner,” we see that the kitchen, where Cinderella spends most of her time and is most comfortable, is mainly browns and some muted reds. There’s a few greens spotted here and there in a fruit bowl and things like that, but you have to look for them. And Cinderella herself dresses in effectively the same colors, browns and muted reds/pinks. So she disappears into her kitchen haven but she stands out like a sore thumb in the brightly colorful areas of the rest of the house.

The palace meanwhile, is also colorful, though it tends more towards purple and rich dark reds to signify their royalty. The Prince will dress in purples to match his parents and be who they want him to be, despite how stifling he finds it.

The kitchen gains more colors during the reprise of “In My Own Little Corner” when Cinderella is once again attempting to retreat to her little haven where she pretends her life is tolerable, but her dreams of entering the real world and actually being able to be herself kept intruding on her. There’s even blue light coming in from outside when before the light was more yellow/orange, probably indicating the outside help of the Fairy Godmother that’s about to appear.

And of course, she only gets her beautiful blue ballgown after she decides to actually accept her godmother’s help and go to the ball. She moves from the brown kitchen to the colorful outside, proving she’s making the choice to go against orders and do something about what she wants. Her brown and red clothes are literally magicked away and turned into a resplendent colorful dress while surrounded by colorful flowers and the front of the house.

During the ball scene, the Prince is immediately recognizable in a white top, signifying how out of place and uncomfortable he is amongst a sea of blue and purple, people indistinguishable from each other, both to him and the audience.

The stepsisters clash with the Prince in their neon green and pink gowns, but Cinderella compliments him with her light blue gown, immediately matching the very subtle light blue vest he has on underneath his jacket. Cinderella and the Prince are able to stand out from the crowd and be themselves while still being PART of the ball. The stepsisters by contrast are playing a part their mother has told them to play and disrupt the entire ball to the point that when Cinderella arrives, several people have fallen to the floor in the commotion.

After the clock strikes midnight and Cinderella and the Prince are separated, we get THIS:

Warm and cold tones highlighting their differences. Cinderella is back in her browns, back to feeling like she has to hide herself away and can’t fit in, can’t find love or belonging. Her transformation into confidence was only temporary, she doesn’t truly believe yet fully that she can have what she wants. The Prince, however, is 100% there. He’s fully invested in Cinderella and finding love, he’s got the confidence now to go after what he wants, to be the kind of Prince HE wants to be and that starts with finding the woman of his dreams.

During “A Lovely Night” Cinderella, for the first time we’ve seen, tries to fit into the colorful house with her stepfamily, utilizing what’s left of her courage and confidence from earlier. And she nearly succeeds, but she’s still always in her brown rags, she never truly belongs with them, no matter how much she tries to keep convincing herself she does, no matter how hard she tries to honor her last promise to her father to stay together as a family, she does not belong there and never will.

She always gets overshadowed by her stepsisters and her stepmother. And after she’s shot down once again by her stepmother, she goes to her haven, where her stepsisters’ things are waiting for her to put away, the only spots of color in the room except for some blue light coming from the window. She immediately turns around and goes outside, to the world of color and possibilities, to finally say that she knows she deserves better and deserves to be loved and so she can’t stay here the way she promised her father. She doesn’t have any hope of being able to be with the Prince, but she’s gotten to the first step towards freedom.

Back at the palace, the Prince is now FULL of color, but instead of a bunch of purples and dark reds like his parents wear, he’s got a bright blue coat on.

He’s embracing his responsibility and his destiny, no longer pretending to be someone he’s not, but he’s also going to do it HIS way. He won’t settle for a half life.

And, of course, at the end, when Cinderella and the Prince are dressed all in white for their wedding day, everyone else dresses in white to match THEM, and the stepfamily is still dressed in full bright colors and now THEY’RE the ones who don’t fit in.

The color schemes in the film are leading us towards the message of the film that you can’t truly get what you want from the world until you actively go after it instead of just dreaming about it and accept who you are instead of trying to settle for being who someone else wants you to be.

The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.

That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.

If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.

I guess God wanted the little robot to enjoy some sushi 🍣 🥲