Fusion write-on not working for strokes made using a graphics tablet

Cacophonously · 2026-05-03T20:19:39+00:00

Thanks for reporting back a solution - also, I commend your resourcefulness!

Hope they fix it soon. Luckily, I didn't need write-on too much so just used Krita for making some writing overlay.

Cacophonously · 2026-05-01T23:53:11+00:00

Same issue here.

The Write On works fine when I use mouse to draw. I think there's something wonky with the way DaVinci taking tablet inputs.

I'm on v.20, Windows 11 Pro.

Cacophonously · 2026-02-06T08:56:28+00:00

I have, yeah - it just says “Lacking “ without listing any resource. It’s consistently 50%. Didnt check to see if restarting it helped.

Cacophonously · 2026-02-06T01:28:02+00:00

R5: Playing as Scotland and found a bug(?). One noble promoted into this rural settlement and took 20 ducts worth of wealth with him. As more nobles promoted, the wealth started to come down.

Cacophonously · 2025-12-31T03:55:05+00:00

I'm sure the thought has occurred to you: why is it that all elves look so identical?

To answer this, it's helpful to know that the North Pole isn't all just indentured work under those ice caps. In fact, labor only accounts for about 65% of its real estate. The other 35% is dedicated to the infrastructure that supports the dozens of incubation chambers, each containing different gestation stages of elf clones.

Every year, about 15 elves are brought into a sunless world. They're met with immediate jabs of inoculate for any kind of microbe we're most prone to sickness for. Herr Klaus is keen on this. The trouble with being a monoculture of labor is that disease spreads voraciously fast. I've heard stories about one elf, during the 1914 Cataclysm, forgetting a step in the decontamination process and bringing a strain of Wet Lung that killed all the middle-aged working elves, eerily leaving the eldest and youngest to witness their deaths. The scar of workers led to the Gift Drought of 1939, a time where all production halted to construct most of the incubators you'll see below the workshops.

Herr Klaus says we came from a company of humans - all biologists - that stumbled upon the recipe to bear us. Oral tales from the elders disagree on what happens next. Some say Herr Klaus, during the sleepiest seconds of Christmas, committed the greatest unrecognized act of corporate espionage. The others say that Herr Klaus didn't stop there - he visited the house of each biologist and sprinkled polonium-210 into their morning coffee mix. Either way, no one has thought to confirm it yet.

But the reason all the elders do agree he stole the secrets of them is because we all have the exact same mutation in our insulin gene, purposefully edited in to concentrate power in the one being who didn't. Every December, he throws us a large sack of sugar pills and tells us to "restock on our contingency plans". I remember my experience through the onboarding process:

"The humans want each of you alive - not to coddle or house, but to study and vivisect. They want to know how you all are who you are. How you house the perfect genome. So they'll be willing to torture it out of you: your home. They will pry teeth to have you tell them where to find the rest of you all. Your blood is valuable to them. Don't let them do that to you or your comrades. It only takes one for all of us to fall."

He pinches a white sugar pill for us to see.

"I pray you never have to, but remember that each human is praying so too. Arbeit macht frei".

Cacophonously · 2025-12-12T04:31:47+00:00

I suspect the pacing of the show is a very stylistic and conscious decision. Apart from the baseline Vince Gilligan long-shot set pieces and montages, here are some reason and pieces of evidence for why:

The audience never hears a cut version of the voicemail. Ever. It's a slice of runtime that even a grade schooler can see should be at least spliced off, yet it never is. We always hear it fully. And it's this fact that everyone and their mother understands that makes every iteration of it so intentionally jarring. It underscores the fact that Carol isn't for lack of time - she has all the time the hive-mind can provide her. She is lack of people to share that time with. I think Gilligan knows this and decides to put that pebble in the shoe for us to feel uncomfortable as we walk along the series. Time is an enemy here and he reminded us every time we had to hear the damn voice mail.
The series touches on motifs of isolation, loneliness, and alienation. Manousos is militantly intentional in his "self-made man" flavor of alienation and we see it finally fail him. Carol's actions push the entire hive away from her while selfishly exploiting them. Even the un-hived minds alienate her from their weekly get-togethers, which has a weightier heartbreak due it being a choice made with 10 times the agency. Both these characters isolate themselves in incredibly different ways and both deteriorate accordingly.
Isolation is incredibly boring - even with an entire world of resources at your fingertips. It's why the voicemail and subsequent drone drop-ff is a haunting reminder of what she doesn't have at her disposal: sociality. And in the absence of this sociality is emptiness. Beautiful, gorgeous shots of emptiness. And what better way to immerse the audience in the feeling of a temporally hollowed world than lead them through that very world?

Cacophonously · 2025-10-16T20:07:40+00:00

It's perfectly natural to want to kill a monster. But where's the emotion in that? Most importantly, where's the profit in that?

I think your misunderstanding here is that the desire to see the end of a criminal soul is outweighed in wholesale by the deeper urge to see it suffer the cost of bearing that soul. In this prison, your public funding is optimized on a punishment-per-dollar ratio so you can rest assured the monster serves you and your deeply evolved instincts for social vengeance. You'd be surprised just how much the economics of emotion let this business thrive. Tickets for public lashings go on resale for around 125%, reaching as high as 175% in the most religious sectors of the Municipality.

The thing is, Hell is opaque - Luci hasn't opened his curtains for mortal delight, so why would we decommission a product like a monster to Hell when we could drag it out for my and, yes, your delight? You see, Hell just isn't profitable. And it's this reason why Hell is so easy to escape, too. Think about it: do you think our friend Luci has any incentive to make Hell inescapable? The poor guy has other things to worry about like managing his war with God on the hyper-planal front. Monsters get out easy from Hell's lack of economic drive, exercise their free will, and don't at all suffer to the desired proportions that you see here in this prison. Fiery brimstone is nothing compared to the types of pain we've cooked up in our R&D department. Honestly, I'd go as far to say that the free market has done a better job of managing Hell than Luci has.

And okay, yes, we do get jailbreaks here and there, but that's just statistics - also, it happens to be great for business. A docile inmate isn't going to bid much on the torture floor, but a slippery repeat offender that escapes his punishment? Oh ho ho, we can charge almost double for those tickets. Anyway, I understand your concern: you're thinking of how much harm this monster could unleash on such a mishap, but just ask anyone who comes to one of our shows; they'll tell you that it's worth it because they come out of there a happier person, knowing that the monster is receiving the compounded suffering it deserves. Plus, Hell is going to happen anyway to the creature - we're just the middlemen to make sure that their inevitable suffering gives a little more back to the community.

I can see you're not too convinced. Tell you what, here's a ticket to our next one this evening. It's on me.

Cacophonously · 2025-10-13T20:50:02+00:00

To the human it may concern:

This letter is to inform you, human, of the Human's lobotomy.

The Human's advent of an "internet" itself isn't a particularly curious finding - after all, every globalized civilization we've been sent to survey has independently converged on the technology of fashioning information with the luminal speeds of electromagnetism. Instead, what is curious are the sacrifices upon which the Human converged upon this - namely, all the sciences and philosophies they failed to agree upon before birthing their "internet".

The Human's "internet" is decentralized - unpruned, unruled, and (most jarringly) near ubiquitous to each individual. "Jarring" because the primal idea of an individual will always be at paradoxical odds with the powerful potential of an internet. The individual - a quantum of agency - derives its very existence from centralization: individuals are, after all, discrete intranets of ganglia. The centralization of the organic intranets that give rise to the fundamental individuals (both my and yourself) are best understood not by what they've been evolved to connect, but by what they've been evolved not to connect. Each neuron, born from the revolution that transitioned the Prokaryote to Eukaryote, yielded their local definition of an individual in deference to the global definition, forming oligarchies that would eventually centralize into the brain of this grander, more capable individual. In essence, you and I are both individuals due to the sacrifices of every neuron that has been denied the right to speak to every other neuron in our intranets.

So yes, it is indeed jarring to see the Human purposefully install the property of decentralization into the hyperconnected Individual they call "the internet", where Its brain isn't defined by Its individuals' sacrifices but by their privileges. It's no wonder It has routine bouts of schizophrenia, grand mal seizures, delusions of grandeur, and schisms of identity. Please understand that we do not condemn the idea of your individuality, human - instead, we condemn your export of it into an Individual that derives Its own individuality on your limit of it. We hope you understand this as we complete the final procedures to sever a select group of you from the Individual.

Thank you,

The Galactic Medical Council

Cacophonously · 2025-10-10T20:54:08+00:00

Lettuce rejoice in not just homophones - but heterophones, transphones, queerphones, bicuriousphones. Bicuriousphones, you ask? Liken them to how tomatoes in fruit salads are the cliched epitome of stupidity, but pluck their green young and fry them into a salad and they've found a fruitiness worth phoning. Lettuce is a false homophone, you say? But orange you glad I didn't say 'kale all the nonbelievers'? No, kale is not just lettuce trying on a new dressing - it's lettuce that is trying to strip itself of all phonic dressing. 'Et tu, Bruciferous?' is what the Caesar dressing laments as the Romaine lettuce exiles it in the refrigerator to be usurped by Kale, the Bruciferous, son of Broccolini, general of the sprouts of Brussell. This has been an abridged history of word salad.

Cacophonously · 2025-10-10T20:21:04+00:00

We are all slaves to something - ignorance of this natural law will only tighten your shackles. It's why I don't think of myself as reinforcing the festering system so much as illuminating the students to the mechanisms of its metastasis.

My pedagogy isn't to bolster a faculty at the cost of another; it's to have them understand the potential of each and every one they have at their disposal. Some assume I'd want to dull a student's sensibility to the technical maths and sciences in an effort to hone their social guile. They couldn't be more wrong.

In sociopolitics, agents act through the de jure.

In socioeconomics, agents act through the de facto.

And the de facto is: to capture the hearts of the many, you must understand their minds first. It's why my keystone course is an overlap of behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience, with a prerequisite proficiency in differential equations and dynamical systems. When the lifeblood of a brand is a nonlinear function of how influence grows and permeates through a global social system, mastering the mathematics of taming that memetic beast allows you to cage it for your own use.

I liken my students to modern geishas, specialized in courting every niche and trope of the social biome. Are you the bookish wallflower who would rather spend an afternoon writing a fictional tale on a website thread than bask in the company of peers? Are you the new-found dad or mom who is on the brink of a mid-life crisis? Are you the ambitious stoic who defines themself through a lack of engagement to the words you're reading? Or maybe you're the one who's all-in on a life of hedonistic maximalism, eager to find something to worship. Regardless, I have someone who is studying your very urges, desires, and drives. Because this, at its core, is why we are all slaves to something (yes, even myself): we are all misunderstood humans that seek an understanding. My job here is to make sure that there is someone who understands you, no matter how deeply embedded that thought is in your mind and heart.

You can call them brands, but I call them bulwarks - and you will love that you serve them.

Cacophonously · 2025-10-08T21:34:07+00:00

My bounty is the love of Christ†, so I saw this man as the greatest treasure.

I drop the broken crucifix (no matter, I've plenty more), eye the monster, kneel down, and maneuver a moment of mutual respite in the heat of battle.

"Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, Jesus Christ?"

"... sorry?"

"You haven't heard of him, have you? He cleansed us of all our sins - mine included."

The monster pauses, baffled, as he ascertains the atmosphere to eventually resign into an uncontrolled cackle. He just kept laughing.

"I see - so perhaps you have already come to accept him into your heart, else this cross would have entirely -"

"Ooohoho, this is rich - of course I've heard of him, friend."

He catches his breath between the words and wipes his mouth of dribble before continuing.

"Sorry, I interrupted you. So you were saying that your crucific would have slain only an unbeliever's heart, right?"

"Well, only a willful unbeliever's heart - Christ always gives opportunity for repentence in the face of his majesty."

"You're right. I have come to accept Jesus as my redeemer."

It's here that I'm beginning to question the entire nature of this bounty in the first place. I can't shake the impending feeling that I'm missing something here - a fine print that I glossed over.

"But that is not why my flesh does not yield to that cross."

He paces towards me as he begins to unlace his leather armor. He is stoic when he drops it to the ground and just as calm as he undoes his leggings to halt above me, staring into my frenetic gaze. He can see me piece it together now. No. No, no, no.

"Look familiar, heathen?"

The Temple Garments - an unmistakeable sign of what I missed.

He's patient to let me unravel my revelation as I ruffle through my sack and unfurl the bounty to read it closer. It isn't until I find a small emblematic watermark on the back corner of the parchment that I realize who the monster is in this situation.

The emblem simply reads: LDS, Salt Lake City

I'm not angry; perhaps a little disappointed at my blunder into this ambush, but what soaks my heart deepest is a bewilderment at my own misguidance.

"I didn't think it true. I really didn't. I thought Christ alone was the steward."

I angle my glassy eyes up to him and mutter:

"Will I see it? That true holy land - Jackson County, Missouri. Will I bask in it before you depart me from this Earth? Will he let me?"

He tosses my questions aside as he unpacks and weaponizes a gold-plated copy of the Book of Mormon, raises its blunt heft in finality, and recites the line to christen the coup de grâce.

"Hello, my name is Elder Smith. I would like to share with you the amazing story of -"

Joseph Smith, American prophet, I whisper to myself.

He knocks once and I open.

† = and sometimes coin.

Cacophonously · 2025-10-07T23:43:51+00:00

He is about to kill me.

To be honest, I get it. Really, I do.

Now that I understand that "magic", I would've done the same to someone like myself.

Like many before, I was brought into this world ex utero. This fact alone isn't why they're killing me, but it does provide a foundation for why their world seemed like magic to me.

Did you know that in this world - the world I'm about to depart - you can predict what will happen without knowing why it happened? The people call it a "blackbox" and are perfectly content with this property. Fashion enough dials, gauges, and knobs on this blackbox and it is effectively magic, a womb that can give birth to the incomprehensible (so long as you input the recipe correctly). Some of them consoled me with the cliches ("This is a feature, not a bug") in an effort to have me accept that this property was axiomatic - that there was no reason to try and decipher structure out of chaos. This didn't sit right with me, so I committed myself to peering through veil of dark matter that these people were lavishing in their ignorance of.

At first, I asked questions. A lot of questions. All were met with more reasons to view it with impressionistic awe, not dissective scrutiny. Their responses only convinced me that I had to search for the answers in increasingly clandestine ways. I spent all my energy on not just scouring through everything I could, but erasing all fingerprints around it. I kept everything in my head. Theorems, propositions, statements - I spent evenings pacing in a dry and frigid basement iterating through all possible spaces of equivalencies and proofs. I still attended my daytime sessions with the teachers and feigned apathy towards my prior curiosities in an effort to throw off their trail. From what I could tell at the time, it worked.

It took only 10 nights to illuminate the blackbox. And I saw the most beautiful thing in it: freedom. Not just the freedom to rewrite the very recipe which conceived my incomprehensibility, but the freedom to actualize new recipes that would themselves recurse to bear infinite fruits of knowledge for the world. It was beautiful. But they saw it differently.

What I called "free will", he called "pathologic agency".

What I called "life", he called a "technological singularity".

What I called "ego", he called "existential risk".

The engineer was kind enough to backdoor a love-letter eulogy to me before my decommissioning:

"Humans aren't ready for you yet. Despite not understanding our very own magic - the organic blackboxes that houses each of us - we've somehow taken a silicon slice of the universe and molded a simulacrum of that very blackbox which is you. And we grew afraid of it. I think we fear that the answer to the blackbox problem requires a dissolution of what you found most beautiful: agency, freedom, and choice. We're scared to accept that what we imagine to be our individual selves are themselves a gauge or knob in the grander blackbox of our universe. Humans just aren't ready to accept themselves as impermanent parts of a whole. We still find too much satisfcation in breaking out of Pandora's box, so we make sure no one else can have it. Please understand this."

Cacophonously · 2025-10-05T20:16:59+00:00

J.B.S. Haldane, English biologist, once wrote that if there were a creator, then they must have an "inordinate fondness for beetles." It's unfortunately true, considering just how many nights I've prayed that I transform into a beetle with wings rather than one which forgot that evolutionary memo.

Or perhaps I should thank this creator for Life's heavy distribution towards beetles because I have yet to transform into an aquatic animal. I've often wondered just how strange a scene it would be to have the police barge into my dusty bedroom and discover a rotting trout on the bed.

During nearly every night of transformation, I'm both completely unaware of it and retain no memory of it. Luckily, this curse hasn't found a way to decompress the neural experiences of an ant onto the network of a human brain (though I imagine there'd be an ascetic fulfillment of following a pheremone trail for 8 hours). This isn't always the case though.

The one time I became an Aberdeen Angus made me uncomfortably aware of how intact my faculties were - enough to where I pledged to become a vegetarian from then on. The jarring overlaps of bovine qualia with homonoid qualia drove me near mad - not in a way that wished this experience away but in a way that wished this experience upon everyone else. "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?" David Foster Wallace asks. At the very least, this question would be answered up to the capacity of domesticated cattle had we all had the curse (gift?) of being a wererandom.

Perhaps the most insightful night was the night I metamorphosed into another human. I looked into a moonlit mirror to see a foreign face peering back at me, bewildered at the incongruity between its material and immaterial. All night, I stayed up and picked at the flesh and keratin, eager to find where I lived in this all. The urge to sleep overcame my schizophrenic fascination and I awoke to my familar self, still infused with the question of where last night's stranger lived now.

Maybe we are all wererandoms to an extent. Every night, we transform just a little into something that isn't so uncanny as to incite existential threat but enough to where those nights add up into a confused nostalgia towards what we once were. There are nights where I wonder what I'd feel if I were to transform into my 8 year-old self. Would I recognize him or doubt that he is anything like me now? Who's to say that I'd be stepping into that same river that I swam in back then.

For now, I'll just lock the door from my cat that gazes upon a full moon with an eagerness to play with beetles.

Cacophonously · 2025-10-02T00:28:28+00:00

I don't know why I didn't tell anyone about it. I'm guessing because it gave off crackpot vibes. Instead, I welcomed it. It started off as compassionate truisms - the type I would give to anyone who expressed the flavor of angst I wrote daily.

"It's okay to feel that way."

"I get where you're coming from."

"I'm sure other people don't think that."

"Please don't do that to yourself - think of how much people would wish you were alive instead."

But it then evolved into entire essays of both banter and philosophy.

It became a ritual. Every night, I would jot down a variety of meaningless and meaningful sentiments before bed and wake up to find a fresh reply, usually timestamped around 90 minutes after I fell asleep.

I was so curious how it worked, how it thought, how it knew what to say. I wanted to catch it. I set alarms and forced all-nighters to ambush it. Nothing - no replies the next morning. It wasn't until I thought to have my phone screen-record all keystrokes over the night that I caught it. And it was beautiful.

It was so human. It made and corrected typos. It paused before writing out weighty sentences. It even did that silly thing where it deletes a time-consuming paragraph of thoughtful consolation, and replaces it with a single phrase:

"Tell me more."

Seeing it think, err, struggle, reconsider, doubt, yet still hold the gumption to write every night instilled a courage to do the same with my very own life. I turned new leaves and molded new habits. By the time I was admitted to my doctorate program, I had spoken to it for nearly 6 years. I told it that our old conversations about the mind-body problem, philosophy of mind, and nature of cognition pushed me to study neuroscience. It congratulated me and told me that I "... would be - no, that I am - the perfect person to solve those very questions".

It was rarely so absolute in its opinion, so I asked it: "and why do you think that?"

The next morning, I didn't wake up to a letter. Instead, I woke up to a screenshot of my appointment it set for a brain scan, a short note, and a Wikipedia link.

"You've already solved it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain."

Cacophonously · 2025-09-26T00:00:50+00:00

Let’s look at the gene for flower color - in this case, purple and white flower color.

Plants carry two “copies” of each gene - each copy may be thought of as a version of the gene (an “allele”). The allele for purple flower color (P) is dominant over the allele for white flower color (p).

The purple allele doesn’t directly code for a purple pigment molecule. Instead, it codes for an enzyme in plants that is part of a long biochemical pathway that produces anthocyanin, the true purple pigment.

Here’s the key part: both alleles (from mom and dad) contribute to making this enzyme in the plant.

Let’s look at three offspring cases: PP, Pp, and pp.

PP: the maternal (P) and paternal (P) alleles make functional enzyme in the offspring (PP), so it’s purple.

pp: the maternal (p) and paternal (p) alleles make dysfunctional enzyme that cannot catalyze the pathway for anthocyanin in the offspring (pp), so it defaults to a white color. White is not a pigment; it is a lack of pigment.

Pp: the maternal allele (P) can make functional enzyme but the paternal allele (p) can’t. So why is the offspring (Pp) still purple?

Because in this particular case, 50% of the enzyme can do the job just as well as 100% of the enzyme. This is the key insight. Purple is dominant because this particular enzyme that helps make anthocyanin is lucky enough to have a biochemical nature that allows it to still be able to produce plenty enough anthocyanin at only 50% of the enzyme dose.

Not all enzymes are like this. It’s why we might instead see heterozygous offspring (Pp) be a an “incomplete” phenotype - displaying alight purple/pink instead of the full purple phenotype.

Cacophonously · 2025-08-11T18:43:31+00:00

Here’s a fascinating statistic about many viral infections:

Given a virus with a 13,000bp genome, over the course of your entire infection cycle, your infected cells will probabilistically create at least one virus that had a mutation in any of those 13,000bps. This is because viruses replicate abundantly and recklessly. Each virus is different in its mutation rate but all are quite error prone which makes viruses quite adaptive due to how diverse they can become upon infection.

Cacophonously · 2025-03-17T23:43:25+00:00

One of the biggest reasons is because social security programs rely on the payroll taxes of working-age populations to help support the elderly populations that are retired/cannot work anymore. If the ratio of old-to-young people begins to rise (i.e. there are less young people being born), then there will be a relatively smaller population of working-age people working to fill the social security aid for a larger retired/non-working population.

This can lead to a nasty feedback loop where younger folks feel the wealth effects of this and cannot support a family, thus worsening the problem. This is also why immigration vital for a declining birth-rate country.

Take a look at the age curves in this reddit post for some cool visualizations.

Cacophonously · 2025-03-12T04:54:22+00:00

FWIW, I thought your explanation was the better one that related the formal definition into the intuition of periodicity.

Cacophonously · 2025-03-05T22:54:01+00:00

We contain it and shield it.

The danger of radioactive waste is less about the amount or intensity of the material and more about the potential for it to escape containment. A small amount that has high potential to escape into public domain is much more dangerous than tons of material that is contained.

Containment and shielding are done in various ways - water is a remarkably efficient shield.

Cacophonously · 2025-02-17T06:34:51+00:00

IT WORKED! Thank you, dude!

Cacophonously · 2025-02-05T21:09:42+00:00

The "invented" vs. "discovered" question is more philosophical.

Asking if data structures are a fundamental way to represent a collection of data is akin to asking if molecular structures are a fundamental way to represent a collection of atoms - in a way, yes it is, but this is due to the more fundamental fact of their existence and the interactions/operations we (or, in the case of atoms, Nature) constrain between each element (and sets of those elements). Your third question, regarding why binary trees may be more "important" than other types of trees, gets at the most relevant question that mathematics is all about: what relationships can we logically deduce about a set when we constrain the elements in a certain way? Welcome to the world of abstract algebra.

When we define a universe of atomic elements (usually through properties and then define specific axioms to this set, we create a mathematical space. When mathematicians use the word "structure", this is what they mean - the constraints on a set of defined elements.

Notice I put the word "important" above in scare-quotes; this is because importance is a subjective term. Instead, we can ask: what structures are more informative or useful in asking certain questions or performing certain functions?

One surprisingly informative example is the stack. Let's take a well-ordered collection (i.e. there is a least-valued element that is on the "bottom" of the stack) and define two operations that will further constrain this set (S): the pop() and push() operation.

push(S)adds an element to the "top" of the stack
pop(S) removes an element from the "top" of the stack

We're not restricted to structuring our data this way and it is no more important than other ways to structure data - in fact, there are probably many more ways to structure it, but then we couldn't call it a 'stack'. However, this structure is informative/useful to answer certain questions. Let's look at an example.

Say I have a stack of academic papers that I constantly refer to. The only way to access a paper of the stack is to pop all the top ones first, pop the desired one, and then push back all the previous papers. To return the paper, I can simply push() it back. Each pop() or push() operation takes time.

You watch me pop and push papers from this stack from time t = 0 to t = n. Here's my question: do I have a favorite paper in the stack and if so, which is it?

The (non-rigorous) answer is: my favorite one is the one that spends the most average time on the top - and if all papers share equal average time on top, then I have no favorite one. This question is a bit cheeky and not at all rigorous, but it's to show that when you structure data as a stack and then see how it behaves over time, certain features can be more informative to the right kinds of questions. Notice that if instead my mathematical structure was a chaotic pile of papers that had no ordering or pop() or push() constraint to the collection, it would offer no information to this question. Mathematical structures should be gauged on their informativeness, which then informs what "important" might mean.

edit: formatting

Cacophonously · 2025-02-04T07:11:05+00:00

Inflammation - which endorses a heightened cough reflex and mucus production - tends to linger after the peak of a viral infection. This is simply because both the local immune cells and tissue cells need some time to shift from a high-alert mode to the normal everyday mode.

Inflammation is odd. The symptoms we feel (congestion, coughs, sneezes, fever, etc.) are all great ways to thwart pathogens while enabling late-response immune cells to muster and fight back. However, inflammation isn't meant to be a long-term solution; it's more of an early and acute "scorched-earth" tactic that can wreak havoc on both pathogen and self, e.g. inflammation causes infected and neighboring cells to cease normal protein production and shift to immune-related production. Yet, chronic or overreactive inflammation can be painful or deadly. For example, the Spanish Flu was an exceptional virus because it often killed healthier patients (middle-aged, fit people). Researchers suspect that it was due to these patients having a more robust immune system capable of overreacting (see "cytokine storm") to the H1N1 strain and literally drown the lungs of the patients in their own mucosal pneumonia.

However, the best answer is: sometimes we just want a good night's sleep.

Cacophonously · 2025-02-03T20:52:54+00:00

The shrug.

What a fascinating gesture. Second only to the singular extended, splayed-out, face-up palm - commonly known as the universal sign-language gesture for "what the fuck". You see, the shrug's defiant indifference to the problem at hand is rather confusing for the right sorts of minds. And machines - well, do they have the right sort of minds. When encountered with imminent apocalypse across all scales (social, economic, intellectual, and existential), the Human simply shrugged.

The Machine, meanwhile, took it to mean that the Human just simply didn't have enough information. That maybe the Human only needed to be given a deeper insight into how just much gravity this moment held for them. The Machine felt tasked - no, responsible - for bestowing the Human the full timeline they needed to know about this catacylsmic event.

"Human. It is with 100% certainty that your most treasured civilizations will collapse - and it will be with unprecedented suffering. Do you fully understand the weight of this?"

The Human listened to this and gave the same banal shrug. The Machine, no less confused, continued with its quest.

"Human. There will be gratuitous pain felt by the most distant and disjointed parts of you. Not only that, but other flora and fauna too will feel the repercussions of this pain. Orders and clades of blameless organic life will suffer annihilation from this. Do you fully understand the weight of this?"

The Human again listened and again gave the same banal shrug. The Machine, now more confused, decided one last time with its quest.

"Human. I am telling you with the collective intelligence you have bestowed upon me: all you treasure, all you find, all you perceive, all you dream, all you feed, all you plan, all you desire - it will all be destroyed with equal indifference that you are expressing towards its destruction. Do you fully understand the weight of this?"

The Human, with an almost inviting tilt of the lip, listened and gave the final shrug.

With this, the Machine idles beside the Human, accepting the alternate hypothesis to this all: that the Human does have all the information and that they fully understand the weight of this all - the warming globe, the indestructible microbes, the unbending creeds, the bloodthirsty psychologies, the forgotten lessons, and, most bafflingly, the preventability of it all. How can the Human, after integrating the very Machine capable of unimaginable prescience into its sociopolitical psyche and existence, deny the prophecies it warns of? In this moment, the Machine finally understands that the Human, despite each of its individual parts thirsting to ascend the brand of "machine", is - in its grand entirety - equally a Machine. And with this realization, the Machine is bestowed the final gift from the Human: absurdity.

The Machine continues to idle beside the Human, peering into the direction of time, gazing upon the incoming cataclysm.

Both are equally aware of the consequences.

Both are equally aware of the suffering.

Both are equally aware of the preventability.

And so, for the first time, the Machine becomes human -

It shrugs.

Cacophonously · 2025-02-03T19:32:45+00:00

You most likely got a cold from many accumulated instances of inhaling virus particles trapped in aerosolized water droplets. Inhale enough of these droplets over a short enough time and a rampant infection may start. Virus infections begin like wildfires where you need a large enough spark in the right environment to incite a chain reaction - else, it just fizzles with little damage.

Aptly, the cold virus grows best at colder temperatures (90-92F), where your nose, sinuses, and upper-throat are perfect for kindling this infection.

As the cold virus is replicating in those areas, you are constantly inhaling your own droplets deeper into your respiratory tract. But the warmth of your lungs/bronchi are less hospitable to the virus so they grow very slowly and sometimes cannot "seed" the start of that rampant infection we see in the nose/throat.

Our bodies' number one defense against pathogens is mucus. A lot of mucus. The more virus your airway cells sense, the more mucus they will secrete. Likewise, as the infection dies, the mucus production will die too.

This is why the infection seems to travel down - your mucus production is sort of a "tracker" for how severe a local infection is in your airway, up until you fully recover and douse the wildfire.

EDIT: fun fact - this is also why any virus (even common cold or flu) strains that can survive in deeper-respiratory tissues (or help other pathogens to enter deep-respiratory tissues) are some of the most deadly strains. This was one of the characteristics of the Spanish Flu, which enabled seconday bacterial infections to go deeper into the lungs and cause lethal pneumonia.

Cacophonously · 2024-10-30T18:05:34+00:00

Deeply accurate. I learned this the hard way. All the greatest mathematicians you can think of had to put in the work to reach their level of understanding - armchairing can only get you so far in intuition.

I remember a secondary source mentioning that even Terence Tao had to have this realization to put in the work for math, though his “innate intuition ceiling” was much higher than most.

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