Zephiris - Another Transfem Programmer

You, a human, can also do this! It’s surprisingly comfortable. Try it at your local treebranch today!

Yknow the thing where red pandas just lay down on a branch and let their legs hang and they’re just like vibing

Uhh I’m gonna use this as an excuse to infodump about graphs and fractals and how those two combined help me reason about everything from artistic composition to neural networks to psychology to neuroscience to quantum physics to distributed systems to astrophysics to etc etc etc. I’m calling this theory the:

Fractal theory of Everything

And I’ll probably post a lot of #looooonnnggggg posts about it under the tag “#fractal theory of everything” if you wanna adjust your filters accordingly. This is just the intro post to explain the theory. Actually using this theory to explain everything will be the posts which follow this one.

TLDR located here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DF9lYoQXZbebiIgB071Pv_lHiISCiocuSq-pbubD_xg/edit

Google Docs

Graphs Approximating Fractals: a model for anything intelligent

Graphs Approximating Fractals: a model for anything intelligent Graph Approximating Fractals: Think of everything as a graph of nodes where

Imagine everything as a bunch of nodes (cities, people, classrooms, photons, tumblr users, etc) connected by edges (roads, friendships, paths, quantum strings, followers, etc). This representation is called a graph and you might be familiar with it (looking at who follows me) from math and/or computer science.

This representation of a graph is useful because sometimes a large enough graph is self-similar at multiple scales, meaning when you look at like 100 nodes it looks about the same as when you look at 100k nodes. See percolation which shows why magnets stop working when they get too hot or too cold.

I argue that any graph with meaningful data (meaning not all noise and not all uniform) is an approximation of an n-dimensional fractal. As the graph approaches a more and more accurate approximation of a fractal the data becomes more and more meaningful.

Applied to explain the Double Slit Experiment (one of many applications of this model I've thought of so far)

If you assume that energy is finite (change in the momentum of objects over time) then you start to think about how the universe could possibly exist with its near endless complexity (see fractal graphs from above with their complexity).

My conclusion from energy being finite is that adding a new particle to the universe must scale at most linearly, otherwise adding more particles would make the universe quickly use way too much energy way too fast. Think about a universe where every particle collides to some small degree with every other particle. If you add one more particle to a 2 particle universe then you’ve added 2 more collision checks which is not so bad, right? However, if you add one more particle to a 100 particle universe then you’ve added 100 more particle checks. It becomes obvious that if energy is finite then this is a massive waste of energy for very little increase in scale of our universe. Since intelligent life which can reason about stuff like this can only exist in a sufficiently large universe, there’s a bit of a survivorship bias in that we must live within a universe which scales linearly at worst in order for us to be able to reason about all this, assuming energy is limited.

Since the universe must scale linearly, each particle can only “talk to” the top X most important particles around it for each “update frame” of the universe. (Time is weird though because the universe kind of slows down fast moving objects and my theory is that fast moving objects get more frames compared to slower moving objects but this is even more speculative and hazy than the rest of this infodump. There’s also some weird time shenanigans with looking back through time - see double slit experiment).

Having each particle only talk to their X most important neighbors means that the universe can scale linearly since every particle doesn’t have to talk to every other particle anymore (yay!).

However, limiting the number of edges each particle has also has ramifications in quantum behavior (behavior of particles on a quantum level or dealing with 1 to 100 particles rather than billions).

Basically when a particle only has a few other particles near it in spacetime it’s as though that particle has a weak GPS signal and the particle ends up moving in ways it shouldn’t because the particle only has a few friends to orient itself with. I theorize that the double slit behavior seen with a laser beam entering two slits is due to that particle having to guess where and when it is in spacetime based on the very few particles around it (see math theory of multilateration).

Therefore since the particle can't orient itself it has to guess where it is using probability and some sort of pseudorandom process. This creates the wave pattern seen in the double slit experiment.

honestly getting infodumped to is like. dreamy

there's nothing that melts me more than just hearing someone be passionate about something. And if someone has hurt you in the past and makes you reluctant to fuckin completely go off on the expanded canon of the X-Files or whatever, I'm gonna hit them in the head with a big mallet. You're adorable, show it. Please

Reap - To terminate a child process that has previously exited, thereby removing it from the process table.

Until a child process is reaped, it may be listed in the process table as a zombie or defunct process.

Zombie (process) - zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution (via the exit system call) but still has an entry in the process table: it is a process in the "Terminated state".

Daemon - a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user.

bring back the era of whimsy that gave us "reap", "zombie", and "daemon" as technical terms in CS

There has been a lot of research about autistics over the years, but this one really took the cake!

This is what happened when researchers attempted to compare the moral compass of autistic and non-autistic people…

Why don't you take Spiro anymore? (You mentioned this in a recent post)

My T is sufficiently suppressed without it. Estrogen and Testosterone inhibit each other through indirect pathways- both signal the hypothalamus and pituitary, which in turn signal the testes/ovaries to produce more or less of their hormone. Unfortunately, T is a more potent suppressor of E than vice versa, so a blocker is needed to drop T levels at first (usually), which then lets E get high. Once E is high enough, then it can suppress T production on its own. For me specifically, I've never had a problem suppressing T, especially later into HRT when my E was getting somewhat higher. Even after quitting spiro, my T has never gotten above 20 ng/dL, and is mostly around 15 ng/dL, which is on the low side of normal even for cis women. AA in general are theoretically unnecessary once E is high enough to suppress T on their own, but this varies strongly dependent on the individual hormone metabolism from person to person. Fun fact, this is also why masculinizing hormone therapy is way simpler than feminizing hormone therapy- T is potent enough to inhibit E right off the bat without extra help.

Personal consideration to add here: I'm quickly learning that I'm a rapid metabolizer, along with about 20-30% of the human population. Essentially this means that most medication has shorter effect periods on me, and I believe it also has had an effect on how effectively my T got suppressed. My T levels were low almost immediately when I started HRT, and I started with spiro. But, the price I had to pay is that its taken forever for my E to go up. With that in mind, I realized that for me specifically, I didn't have to worry about my T going back up if my E wasn't high enough yet.

The above are about why I felt spiro was unnecessary, but why not take it just in case? Simple- side effects. I was having very noticeable diuretic side effects to the point where it interfered with my usual routines, so I tried to quit as soon as I could. Once I quit, a brain fog that I didn't even notice was there, lifted. I was having a lot of issues that I now realize were due to low sodium- my energetics were fucked, my vision was getting hazy when I stood up, and my heart pounded in situations it didn't need to. When I quit spiro, these stopped almost immediately, and I realized that these were side effects that I hadn't even registered as side effects.

These were considerations I made based on my own personal situation, but hopefully it helps. I haven't been on an AA since February or so. I actually just got a levels test back (spreadsheet update pending) and it confirms that my T has been within cis female ranges since early October, and on the low side of cis female ranges since early November.

In my personal opinion, AAs should be used more conservatively than it currently is, but are still necessary for HRT. My ideal HRT based on papers I've seen, personal experience, and conversations with my provider is essentially: brief period of E monotherapy-> E+AA until T is suppressed and E levels are high -> E monotherapy -> additional considerations (like prog). This is not coming from a medical perspective, though, just an anecdotal one.

m1=52.3 m2=97.4 m3=62.6 (solar masses) v1x=-2.801 v1y=-1.534 v2x=5.925 v2y=2.449 v3x=-0.815 v3y=-2.604 (km/s) x1=-35.0 y1=-17.0 x2=32.0 y2=9.0 x3=1.0 y3=-28.0 (AU from center) Music: Prelude in C-Sharp Minor – Rachmaninoff

Autism is an evolutionary advantage because if I wasn't talking to myself walking home at 2am it wouldn't have scared off the skunk waiting around a corner to spray me

Capitalism is so disgustingly goopy, sticking and amassing into deposits which never seem to release, creating increasingly larger gaps in equality.

How do you get a billionaire to care about anything when they’re coated in a mucous bubble of capital, sealed off from the real world?

& a bonus acoustic version of bless ur heart which never fails to get me to cry when I feel like I need to cry

like black people are present in every single fucking genre and scene and popularized and straight up created several but people are so fucking hell bent on finding every possible excuse to not engage with their music because its easier than trying to confront their own racism. like okay well if its truly just a disinterest in most rap music then surely you listen to black artists in other genres right? who am i fucking kidding. of course you dont.

I’m such an aleve girlie