The article actually explains that the mushroom is essentially being hijacked for some of its sensory abilities, like light and heat. The mushroom is connected to an electronic circuit. The electronics make decisions about what to do based on the mushrooms’ sensory observations.

It’s a clickbait title, but the article does clarify.

They have released a guide on making a CLR (basically several different pieces of lab equipment controlled to automate some of the process) and software to run on it to assist in the process of making the medications. Specifically to try and improve consistency of the medications produced.

It’s a really great cause. Worth reading the article. If someone had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars cost to access life-saving medication, and they couldn’t afford it, something like this could legitimately save their life.

True. A lot of drugs you can perform tests on. But there is an inherent risk. I don’t think making medicine at home is going to be many people’s first choice. I think the people most likely to pursue this are those for whom obtaining medication other ways is not possible. When the government makes it impossible for someone to obtain health care, either due to literally making it illegal or by allowing it to become completely unaffordable for working class people, then they have to resort to other options.

With patience and diligent work it is possible to make many medications with (by comparison) significantly cheaper resources. And if someone were to do this, presumably, there are others who also have similar needs for the medications being produced. Which is how community medicine networks are formed. DIY Hormone replacement medications for trans people living in places where it’s illegal for them to access medication, or otherwise extremely difficult often access medicines made through networks like that.

This isn’t really a new thing, but the ease of access certainly is.

Yep. Telecom corporations are essentially uncriticizable. Even media pushback doesn’t do anything. Everyone knows they’re pure evil and it doesn’t affect them in any way.

We should never have to accept being a side issue. It should categorically be unacceptable for the political party that is protecting our rights to show passivity in the face of what is happening to us.

I don’t believe that being passive on trans issues benefits them whatsoever in terms of votes. Transphobia in the US is closely aligned with American neo fascism. Transphobes are never going to vote Democrat. So what is gained by being silent about us? Like materially, how is that a good political move? All it does is make their support for minority rights seem vacant. Trump and his ilk show up to rallies and rant and rave about us. About how we’re demons. How we’re vile and repulsive and how we should be ostracized and ridiculed and locked away from society.

And the Democrat response at the DNC is to say nothing? How can that be a good political move? And what does that say to the American people about trans people? Our rights aren’t worth any vocal pushback. Obviously, a platform of passive acceptance is better than a platform of hate. But our rights matter, and our suffering matters. Progressive politicians should be actively pushing back as much as possible against the transphobic platform of the republican party.

Oh… wow. What a bunch of fucking idiots. People have such an irrational hatred towards non-binary people that they would like to change the usage of they/them in the English language entirely. Substituting he for they in a note about no specific person is just using the language properly.

Depends on many factors, like dosage of your medication and how you’re taking it. For me, it had noticeably changed when I was around 3 months on hormones.

It’s basically like. Someone drawing a picture. Then watching the buttons you’re pressing on a controller. And then drawing a new picture. And based on the game that they think you’re playing in their head trying to guess what the next picture ought to look like. With no error correction and no conceptualization other than what the next picture should look like.

The… many limitations of this is the inability of image generators to rationalize 3 dimensional space. It can only approximate it based on what it thinks should appear on the screen. It lacks any ability to keep track of variable information. It really is more like a Doom-style hallucination than anything else. Some of the videos on that article are truly bizarre looking. I’d imagine after a few minutes every single one of them would devolve into an endless loop of being trapped in non-sensical geometry or killing the same enemy over and over again as the AI has no way of remembering the enemy existed to begin with, let alone that you killed it.

I’ll be honest I don’t think there is much use in this at all. It suffers from the same limits as any other model AI. Believability at a glance is not believability under scrutiny and if it’s only believable at a glance then there’s not much practical use in it. The advance in computational power and model sophistication required to stand up under scrutiny is massive.

Nah, pigs are shitty everywhere else too. Just in less blatantly militarized ways.