Zephiris - Another Transfem Programmer

My tattoo design

It represents wave particle duality which is a great metaphor for my gender: I am both a probabilistic wave and a discrete particle. I am constantly collapsing into a particle when I’m observed (you either know my position or my velocity but not both). When I’m not being observed I am a probabilistic wave of possibilities.

The two particles — one in the middle and another up and left from the center — represent why I continue to do anything, my reasons for existing:

The middle dot stands for understanding how the universe and everything in it fundamentally works — an aspiration that the fractal theory of everything helps me with.

The other stands for mutual unconditional love — especially the love I have toward my partner who is the first person I felt mutual unconditional love with.

I look forward to adding many more dots over my lifetime whenever I find a new achievable goal to strive toward. I hope eventually I will find both fixing the increase in societal inequality over time and fixing the increase in global warming achievable.

As of present both of those issues are far out of reach for me due to the immense inertia that both of them have and I don’t want to spend time fighting for one small shove against those boulders rolling down a mountain, a shove that might crush me in the process. I would rather figure out how to meaningfully change their paths for the better. Maybe that involves exploding the boulders. Maybe that involves flattening the hill. Maybe that involves adding a ramp to the hill so the boulders fly away, never to be seen again. Maybe that involves learning to be a Jedi so I can use the force on the boulders. I’m not sure what the solution will be but I know I’m not at the point where I can have a meaningful impact on either of them so instead for my well-being I would rather focus on issues that I do feel I can make a significant impact on today, in the hopes that eventually I will have enough wisdom and power to make a meaningful difference on those two big issues at hand.

Me having my estrogen pills for breakfast: 😋

It's (mostly) done!!

brightgreendandelions.neocities.org

Flag Maker!!

the flag maker is finally in a presentable state :) not the embarrassing pile of default css it was on the first day...

i even added a little OpenGraph image preview!!

Hi I just went to a forest rave in the Oakland woods so uh if anyone else went dm me? I’m just curious if my internet life intersected with my irl life tonight

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

Please sign this petition to advocate against apple’s decision to disable Progressive Web Apps on iOS in the EU.

letter.open-web-advocacy.org

Open Letter to Tim Cook: Sabotaging Web Apps Is Indefensible

Open Letter to Tim Cook: Sabotaging Web Apps Is Indefensible

For context, Apple has recently been forced to obey EU regulations and decided to be maliciously compliant in doing so. They argue that they cannot support both multiple browsers and progressive web apps for safety reasons because there is no way to know that those other browsers will treat permissions in the same safe way safari does, breaking the trust and safety of the web. They also mention that in order to have safe PWAs they would have to introduce “an entirely new integration architecture” which they noted their team wouldn’t make the investment into given that so few people use PWAs currently and because apparently Apple doesn’t have enough developers to build the “integration architecture” that would be required.

Most people don’t use PWA’s because Apple hasn’t even supported push notifications on PWAs at up until about a year ago while android supported notifications for almost a decade, since 2015. And still the web push notification support is largely incomplete — not implementing several functions within the Push API specification.

Please take the time to sign the above petition if you appreciate having an open, free, cross platform, and largely unmoderated app distribution channel. You can read more about Apple’s plan for the EU here: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-announces-changes-to-ios-safari-and-the-app-store-in-the-european-union/

And here is the direct statement from the Apple article linked above addressing Progressive Web Apps:

The iOS system has traditionally provided support for Home Screen web apps by building directly on WebKit and its security architecture. That integration means Home Screen web apps are managed to align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS, including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis.

Without this type of isolation and enforcement, malicious web apps could read data from other web apps and recapture their permissions to gain access to a user’s camera, microphone or location without a user’s consent. Browsers also could install web apps on the system without a user’s awareness and consent. Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.

unfinished song synth rock thing. idk if i'm gonna finish it so i'm posting it. I want to post more on this site but i don't really have anything to show because i'm not actively working on any personal projects besides music

For SF Pride I wore two fits, one which was fem 💕 (for the trans march on Friday) and one which was masc 😎 (for the main parade celebration on Sunday)

I love playing with gender so much!