Remember It Is A Competition And You Are Here To Win, You WILL Be The Faggiest Person On The Train

the sin has been committed :3

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

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

Rule

Fuck.

I've begun to experience something really weird.

When I first questioned my gender, one of the biggest things that led to my certainty that I was non-binary, and not a man, is that I couldn't stand the idea of being intimidating to anybody, as I've always had trouble making friends and want to come across as approachable and kind as possible.

After a while, I kinda had it down. After I made the decision that I didn't want testosterone in my body anymore, and started on estrogen, it got even easier as it's much easier to connect with other women when you are girlbrained. Now that I'm 7 months in and actually appear feminine (maybe even pretty on a good day), I've found that most people really pick up the harmless critter vibe right away.

But lately when somebody is attracted to me, they instead get this like, I don't know, like angelic vibe from me instead?? And to be clear, this is by no means a brag, this has been a problem. Like every girl I talk to on dating apps tells me she wants to fuck my brains out but when I actually ask her to do so she gets all nervous and runs away with her tail between her legs.

Like, I've come full circle??? I'm now back to being intimidating but not because I'm manly but because I'm too pretty??? Man this is so fucked up Alexa play your woman by white town

True and real! I agree that gender binary is generally bad and in fact I wish that I could opt out of hormones completely without rapidly deteriorating my health.

That said, unfortunately having some binary sex hormones are generally necessary for long-term wellbeing and health. That meant that I had to choose between my birth guy hormones or woman-y hormones if I wanted to avoid a ton of health complications. I chose to transition to become hormonally more woman-y since switching hormones felt much more nonbinary than keeping the same ones, at least for me personally. (I also felt like I should definitely have boobs, regardless of my assigned gender at birth). However, I’m not a woman which makes the term trans woman a dysphoric self-identifier for me.

Now you might wonder, why do you ever need to talk about your hormonal transition? Well sometimes I really crave salty foods a lot or I really want a lot of cuddles or I have periods and I ideally like to qualify those lived experiences by noting my hormonal layout. Now sure, I could just say “I am an amab who now has the hormonal layout of a woman but I’m not a woman and I’m actually nonbinary. Anyway…” but that’s incredibly clunky. Instead, I like to have an easy and clear non-clinical self-identifier that signifies my hormonal transition to allow me to easily contextualize my experiences with my hormonal makeup.

I have also found that generally other people who have gone from guy hormones to woman-y hormones are generally similar to me in specific ways, and like most humans, I like to “find my tribe” so to speak. Having the short and clear label of transfem, especially within label based internet communities made it easy for me to find people that I especially vibe with. Without a short and clear label I would likely struggle to find other nonbinary amabs who hormonally transitioned to the woman-y hormones.

Side tangent: I disagree with you that the terms transfem and transmasc have to always correlate to birth sex. For example I have one nonbinary transmasc friend who is amab and the label transmasc is generally a good descriptor of them. They note that the term fits them well because they kept their amab hormones in their transition while embracing their masculine side throughout their social transition to being nonbinary. They also often feel more similar to transmascs than transfems or cis guys which means the label transmasc for them functions similar to me in finding their tribe.

For me, and for other nonbinary people I know, the terms transfem and transmasc help us find communities where we share the same hormones and smoothly communicate which hormones we have without causing dysphoria or feeling needlessly clinical.

I agree that imposing binary labels onto those who do not want them is wrong and I’m sorry that you have felt the gender binary reimposed onto you by the trans community via these labels. At the same time however, I still feel that the terms transfem and transmasc definitely have their place in the community and do not always coorelate to birth sex. Both can be true at once.

Really hate that the queer community's response to the creation of a gender trinary (girl, boy, and nonbinary, which is still not all-encompassing) was to... reinvent the binary. We just started grouping all genders into "masc/male-aligned" and "fem/female-aligned" and it's so fucking stupid. Even with the occasional allowance of "neutral/unaligned" it still maintains the binary as the standard. And then they don't let you use certain labels if you don't have the "right" gender alignment. The fuck.

It really does holy crap !!

Autistic Inertia is an autism experience that makes it hard to start, stop, and switch tasks.

It somehow doesn't get talked about enough - so I made this comic!

YouTube • Instagram • Twitter

Also, if you want to read the research study I based this comic on, it’s right here!

All fancy smancy generative ai models know how to do is parrot what they’ve been exposed to.

A parrot can shout words that kind of make sense given context but a parrot doesn’t really understand the gravity of what it’s saying. All the parrot knows is that when it says something in response to certain phrases it usually gets rewarded with attention/food.

What a parrot says is sometimes kinda sorta correct/sometimes fits the conversation of humans around it eerily well but the parrot doesn’t always perfectly read the room and might curse around a child for instance if it usually curses around its adult owners without facing any punishment. Since the parrot doesn’t understand the complexities of how we don’t curse around young people due to societal norms, the parrot might mess that up/handle the situation of being around a child incorrectly.

Similarly AI lacks understanding of what it’s saying/creating. All it knows is that when it arranged pixels or words in a certain way after being given some input it usually gets rewarded/gets to survive and so continues to get the sequence of words/pixels following a prompt correct enough to imitate people convincingly (or that poorly performing version of itself gets replaced with another version of itself which is more convincing).

I argue that a key aspect of consciousness is understanding the gravity and context of what you are saying — having a reason that you’re saying or doing what you are doing more than “I get rewarded when I say/do this.” Yes AI can parrot an explanation of its thought process (eli5 prompting etc) but it’s just mimicking how people explain their thought process. It’s surface level remixing of human expression without understanding the deeper context of what it’s doing.

I do have some untested ideas as to why its understanding is only surface level but this is pure hypothesis on my part. In essence I believe humans are really good at extrapolating across scales of knowledge. We can understand some topics in great depth while understanding others similarly on a surface level and go anywhere in between those extremes. I hypothesize we are good at that because our brains have fractal structure to them that allows us to have different levels of understanding and look at some stuff at a very microscopic level while still considering the bigger picture and while fitting that microscopic knowledge into our larger zoomed out understanding.

I know that neural networks aren’t fractal (self-similar across various scales) and can’t be by design of how they learn/how data is passed through them. I hypothesize that makes them only understand the scale at which they were trained. For LLM’s/GAN’s of today that usually means a high level overview of a lot of various fields without really knowing the finer grain intricacies all that well (see how LLM’s make up believable sounding but completely fabricated quotes for long writing or how GAN’s mess up hands and text once you zoom in a little bit.

There is definitely more research I want to do into understanding AI and more generally how networks which approximate fractals relate to intellegence/other stuff like quantum physics, sociology, astrophysics, psychology, neuroscience, how math breaks sometimes etc.

That fractal stuff aside, this mental model of generative AI being glorified parrots has helped me understand how AI can seem correct on first glance/zoomed out yet completely fumble on the details. My hope is that this can help others understand AI’s limits better and therefore avoid putting too much trust into to where AI starts to have the opportunity to mess up serious stuff.

Think of the parrot cursing around children without understanding what it’s doing or why it’s wrong to say those words around that particular audience.

In conclusion, I want us to awkwardly and endearingly laugh at the AIs which mimic the squaks of humans rather than take what it says as gospel or as truth.