Posts

CFS, Me and ChatGPT - is CFS just always an autonomic failure ?

 So we've talked about dealing with chronic nausea before with regards to myself, CFS diagnosis and how you thought it was extremely likely I had autonomic issues. question. is CFS really just autonomic issues in all cases ? Short answer: no — but autonomic dysfunction is very likely a core subsystem failure in a large proportion of CFS/ME cases , and in some people it may be the dominant driver of symptoms. Long answer (the more accurate one): CFS/ME is not a single disease , it’s a syndrome —a final common pathway reached by multiple upstream failures. Autonomic dysfunction is one of the most common and explanatory layers, but not the only one. I’ll break this down carefully and mechanically, not hand-wavy. 1. Why people (correctly) suspect autonomic dysfunction A huge number of classic CFS features map directly onto autonomic instability: Symptom overlap Orthostatic intolerance / POTS Chronic nausea, early satiety Temperature dysregulation (cold extremities, sweating issues) ...

Computer Architecture and AIs

 I think I understand the issues with LLMs now and their massive need for hardware, power, cooling and everything. It can be summarised as this : Current hardware is entirely inappropriate for running an LLM. You are effectively running a software  emulation  of a system instead of running a  hardware  system. This is easy to understand emulation wise. Any emulation is very inefficient compared to running against the thing itself for lots of reasons. If you understand this stuff then you know, software, memory shunting, simulation of physical, is orders of magnitude slower than electrons interacting at a custom designed hardware layer. Not to mention the overheads of whatever architecure you're running your inefficient emulation on and  its  requirements. I can remember how long it took for much more powerful PCs to catch up to an old school Amiga from the 16 bit era via emulation. Ridiculous. But. Exacerbated because the architectures were very differ...

Dec 30

 I felt the touch of it yesterday. The rumble through the ground and the lurch of instability. My mental health has tumbled today. My emotions are up. Sad. Tearful. Hopeless.   Despairing. It is. In check. Just about. But I can feel it. It rises up at random points and smothers me, steals my breath away from me, and pitches me into horrible places. Also. I'm getting brain zaps. And blipping out. Perhaps this is a sign my  brain chemistry  has hit the buffers. Perhaps I need to munch on some pills.  Sigh. Another storm to ride out Johnny. The waves come in different shapes and forms. But they all require batoning down the hatches. Enduring. Suffering. Physical. Mental. Existential. It has crossed my mind many times why psychologically I am like this. I have searched for answers in genetics - stitching the same pattern across the males on my dads side of the family and a pattern of symptoms that give you a plausible diagnosis of dysthymia that dips into "double de...

Dec 29

 Felt ok enough to play some games yesterday. And enjoyed the experience. When I poke around this is I think my "high water mark". But it is very sobering. Because it's really very low. I have thought about this many times in many different ways over the last few years. That slow wax and wane of capability. How I see it in others. How really obvious it becomes in those who are health compromised. And how I think ultimately it is the pattern of your death - not withstanding sudden events like getting running over or an aneurysm. My main teacher of this was my mom. I got to see this in action. Up close. In detail. Over a critical period of 5 years. And before that. A more subtle 5 years on top of that. It's a lot of data. It teaches you a lot of the variables going on. And for a chronic systems cruncher and observer like myself. It feeds my understanding and simulation of the world. At the personal emotional level it is Not Good. Despite the "difficult" relati...