I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.

I agree. Whenever I get into an argument online, it’s usually with the understanding that it exists for the benefit of the people who may spectate the argument — I’m rarely aiming to change the mind of the person I’m conversing with. Especially when it’s not even a discussion, but a more straightforward calling someone out for something, that’s for the benefit of other people in the comments, because some sentiments cannot go unchanged.

To be fair, the way the Krebs cycle is taught is usually pretty grim (speaking as a biochemistry major)

I don’t understand this, but it sounds cool.

Perhaps another way to think of it is that we’re a patch of localised order in an overall disordered universe

This reminds me of this quote by Alfréd Rényi (often misattributed to his friend, Paul Erdős)

“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems”

That’s so pretty. What did you use to take the super zoomed in photo?

I live near a city and it makes me want to study enough botany to identify the various plants that spring forth in unexpected places. Some of them are quite beautiful and I find myself moved by their improbability.

You’re right, that is pretty funny. I didn’t notice until you pointed it out in this comment

You’ve bamboozled my attempt to make the same joke at your expense by only mentioning one number in your comment, giving me nothing to add to it. From this point on, I conclude we should only ever mention one number in each comment, for clarity.

Thanks for sharing that post, it was super interesting.

I wish I could see behind the scenes in the Windows UI discussions, to see how we get to what we have today

Does your friend enjoy the work? People don’t appreciate how much work it is, and how difficult it can be to have your channel become successful enough to be a job (especially if you start out making stuff that you enjoy)

I am interested in taking ideas from historical costuming and applying them to modern garments (“history bounding”) and something that keeps jumping out at me is how smart people in the past were, especially regular, working people. In modern times, people tend to act like people were stupid just because modern medicine and science didn’t exist, but if you study enough to understand some of the reality of historical people’s lives, there are some really nifty solutions. It makes me think a lot about “intelligence”, and how limited our understanding of it is if we are so unable to think of pre-modern people as intelligent.

That’s a big tangent to your comment, but it’s ultimately heading in the same direction. I’m also jazzed to see cognitive science continue to increase its understanding of non-human intelligence; it’s really cool to see what we can discover when we stop projecting ourselves so hard onto other creatures.

Is this a copy pasta? If not, it should be

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but actually, I didn’t know that; I just went and read up the history of the word and it’s pretty interesting (for a nerd like me), so thank you for highlighting this. I admit, it used to confuse/irk me to hear Americans pronouncing aluminium like aluminum, so it pleases me to realise that I was wrong and that Americans are actually just pronouncing aluminum like aluminum.

I think I didn’t realise this in part because apparently aluminium is generally used in American scientific writing. This is interesting to me because many journals style guidelines demand American spellings of words (My mind blanks of specific examples right now, but I often have to replace s with z when Americanising my writing). I don’t know why, but I find it neat to imagine a kinship with a hypothetical American scholar who curses as they “correct” aluminum to aluminium before submitting their paper.

Edit: I can’t believe I literally wrote an example of a word with the relevant s/z thing and didn’t notice. Americanise/Americanize

It is (I hope) an original

Haha, that’s a big mood.

Happy belated father’s day, from someone who is glad you made this comment. I appreciate you highlighting this issue, because this is something that is sorely lacking in progressive discourse; it’s getting better, I think, but that is likely due to people like you helping people like me to understand how caring fathers are usually not respected or appreciated by the world. (Edit: like you say, “appreciation” towards fathers is usually limited to financial support, which completely ignores the vast majority of what it means to be a father (and also marginalises full-time dads whose partner is the working parent))

It reminds me of the recent Crowdstrike fiasco: apparently kernel level access was needed for their anti-malware to be able to properly work (because that way their net can cover the entire OS basically), but that high level of access meant that when CrowdStrike fucked up with an update, people’s computers were useless. (Disclaimer, I am not a cybersecurity person and am not offering judgement either way on whether Crowdstrike’s claim about kernel level access was bullshit or not)

In a similar way, in order for identity theft monitoring services to work, they surely will need to hold a heckton of data about you. This is fine if they can be trusted to hold that data securely, but otherwise… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I share your unease, though I don’t feel able to comment on the correctness of your mindset. Though I will say that on an individual level, keeping an eye on your credit reports in general (from the major credit agencies) will go a long way to helping there (rather than paying for serviced that give you a score and other fancy “features”, you can request either free or v. low cost report which just has the important stuff you need to know.)

I also know that if you want to be extra cautious, you can manually freeze your credit so basically no new lines of credit can be opened in your name. This is most useful for people who have already been a victim of fraud, or they expect to be at risk (such as by shitty family, or a data breach). I don’t know how one sets this up, but I know that if you did want to set up a new line of credit, you can call to unfreeze your credit, and then freeze it again when your application for the new credit is all done. I have a friend who has had this as their default for years now because of shitty family.

I agree that there’s a strong incentive for even entirely self-interested people to cooperate. I was listing altruism as one of many pro-social behaviours, not as a subset or requirement for cooperation

I’d argue that capitalism is unnatural because even if we work from the assumption that resource hoarding is natural, it’s also necessary to take into account the fact that evolutionarily, humans got to where we are via traits like altruism, cooperation and forming communities. Capitalism is far from natural — it’s an insidious subversion of human nature

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.