AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on What's your answer? And in the picture which news story is being reported? 12 hours ago:
Margaret Thatcher getting rid of milk snacks in schools. I grew up in a mining town, so from a very young age, I was acutely aware of how much everyone hated Thatcher. However, I just thought that people really liked milk, and that’s why they hated “Margaret Thatcher the milk snatched”. I don’t like the taste of milk on its own, and I can remember being 3 or 4 years old and bemused by the intensity of feelings towards her — I guessed that people must really like milk
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 15 hours ago:
Friends tell me that seeing Kneecap live was incredible
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 15 hours ago:
Any recommendations for punk electronic music? I’ve been wanting to get into making electronic music because disability means that’s a more accessible genre for me than playing traditional instruments, but it’s daunting to get into a new genre
- Comment on Has anyone here ever doubted if your parents were your "real" parents? Is it normal to have these weird thoughts? 1 day ago:
I’m sorry that you find this relatable. Unfortunately, I do too. It seems pretty unlikely that your parents aren’t your real parents, but regardless, it’s valid and okay to wish that you had different parents.
I don’t necessarily wish that I had different parents, but more that I wish my parents were different people when they had me. That probably doesn’t make much sense, but what I mean is that I am estranged from my parents because it wasn’t possible to have an emotionally safe relationship with them. My mom in particular tried her best, but she was pretty messed up from abuse that she suffered as a child. I often wonder how things could’ve been different if she’d been able to get a bunch of therapy and find a supportive community before she had kids.
Like I say, it’s okay to feel wistful, just try not to ruminate too much. The key thing to remember is that you deserve good parents, and it’s reasonable to feel grief if that’s not something you have; I’ve found that trying to force myself to not feel hurt by the unfairness can just make the sadness more intrusive.
Having shitty parents is a pretty tough disadvantage, and certainly I often wonder how many of my mental health problems are attributable to my childhood. Your background doesn’t need to define you though. I know many people who, like me, became properly estranged from their parents, and felt liberated afterwards. It sucks that I had to go no contact with them, but after I had the freedom to build a life of my own, it was a healthy step. I also know many who were able to build a healthier relationship with their parents as adults — basically what I tried to do, but it worked out well for them.
The point that I’m trying to make is that you’re not defined by your parents. Not now and not ever. Just never forget that you deserve love, care and respect, especially from your family. I’ve found this is a key thing for avoiding the wistfulness spiral into a deeper depression. If your blood family isn’t able or willing to give you the support you need to thrive, then take it from me that family isn’t just something you have by blood, but it can be something you build, and that found family is valid.
- Comment on Microsoft's role in world’s first AI-driven genocide, in Gaza, exposed 1 day ago:
It’s from 2024, but some of the best coverage of the use of AI in this genocide is from 972mag, a journalistic outlet whose team includes Israelis and Palestinians. www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
- Comment on return 2 krebs 4 days ago:
It’s just covers different topics; it’s titled “Cell and molecular processes”. I don’t find it as fun as a topic, and it’s also far less comprehensive than the metabolic pathways one (possibly because cell biology is more complex and thus it’s much harder to capture all that we know at a given time)
- Comment on 4 days ago:
Gay humans exist today, they existed throughout history, and they will continue to exist for as long as humans do.
Do you consider Uhura being a bridge officer to be “pushing a narrative”? Because that was a political statement in much the same way that gay characters in Star Trek are (arguably more so).
It sucks to be a person whose very existence is political in this world that we live in now. Sci-Fi that includes those people is a way of saying "hey, wouldn’t it be nice if people could live their lives without their existence being the battleground for political ideology.
- Comment on return 2 krebs 4 days ago:
I fucking love the Krebs cycle. It’s so cool. Something I love is that on the big Roche Biochemical Pathways poster, if you zoom out, you can see the Kreb’s cycle in the centre. It’s so cool at how it is so central to cell metabolism. It’s obviously key in carbohydrate metabolism, but it also acts as the entry point for the metabolites formed from the breakdown of amino acids and fatty acids.
Here’s a zoomed out view (low res, you can’t zoom in):
The interactive website is down at the moment, but a high res image can be found here
- Comment on AI behavioral analysis on factory workers, every step is monitored including attention detection from facial expressions 5 days ago:
Most of my life, I’ve had people scrutinizing me and believing my emotions to be inauthentic because I didn’t contort my face in the precise manner they expect of people feeling a particular emotion.
Given that AI is well documented to reproduce existing biases found in the training data, I’m betting that this is extra assholish to autistic people.
- Comment on true love is rare 6 days ago:
I liked the 20-200 also.
- Comment on true love is rare 6 days ago:
I really enjoyed it. I haven’t used a pipette in a few years because most of my focus is more computery nowadays, but I really miss the zen of pipetting. My arms did ache after a long day in the lab, but I sort of liked that. I think it stems from a deeply silly part of me that enjoyed how sciencey I felt when using a pipette.
It helped that when I first started my undergrad studies, I seemed to be much better at it than many of my peers — a boon which was compounded by being good at being systematic in a manner that caused me to make fewer mistakes and thus finish labs sooner, despite taking longer to get started doing the actual wet lab work.
I especially liked the practicals where we used a spectrophotometer to measure the initial rate of an enzyme catalysed reaction. Pre cutting out squares of parafilm for mixing the cuvette, organising my workspace so everything was in arm’s reach and unlikely to be knocked over during the rush stage, the stressful tension of carefully adding reaction reagents (sans enzyme) to the cuvettes, ensuring I wouldn’t get them mixed up — it felt like gearing up for a difficult boss fight in a video game. All culminating in a frantic flurry to perform efficiently once I set the reaction going and had to start taking measurements. If a protocol required us to take another spectrophotometric measurement of each cuvette 2 minutes after the initial one, I could just do it one at a time, and twiddle my thumbs waiting. That would be far too simple however, and I relished the challenge of taking the initial readings of another few cuvettes in that time, until I would have liked 4 or 5 going at once. If I misjudged my abilities, I’d end up not taking the second reading of the first cuvette in time and I’d likely need to prepare a replacement sample for the one I’d botched up. It was the kind of low stakes, high intensity pressure that I live for.
Even before I stopped doing wet labs, I never did as much fun pipetting as I did during undergrad labs (which makes sense, given that they’re drilling you with the skills), but I always look back fondly on those labs.
Except when I got one of the shit pipettes. They did the job, but they were not nice to use and it’d be enough to make me grumpy for the whole day.
- Comment on Fight me 6 days ago:
Our entire existence is a temporary rebellion against entropy. In light of that, hubris seems inevitable. I reckon a little bit of it is useful for us
- Comment on How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral 1 week ago:
As a society, we need to better value the labour that goes into our collective knowledge bases. Non-English Wikipedia is just one example of this, but it highlights the core of the problem: the system relies on a tremendous amount of skilled labour that cannot easily be done by just a few volunteers.
Paying people to contribute would come with problems of its own (in a hypothetical world where this was permitted by Wikipedia, which I don’t believe it is at present), but it would be easier for people to contribute if the time they wanted to volunteer was competing with their need to keep their head above the water financially. Universal basic income, or something similar, seems like one of the more viable ways to improve this tension.
However, a big component of the problem is around the less concrete side of how society values things. I’m a scientist in an area where we are increasingly reliant on scientific databases, such as the Protein Database (pdb), where experimentally determined protein structures are deposited and annotated, as well as countless databases on different genes and their functions. Active curation of these databases is how we’re able to research a gene in one model organism, and then apply those insights to the equivalent gene in other organisms.
For example, the gene CG9536 is a term for a gene found in Drosophila melanogaster — fruit flies, a common model organism for genetic research, due to the ease of working with them in a lab. Much of the research around this particular gene can be found on flybase, a database for D. melanogaster gene research. Despite being super different to humans, there are many fruitfly genes that have equivalents in humans, and CG9536 is no exception; TMEM115 is what we call it in humans. The TL;DR answer of what this gene does is “we don’t know”, because although we have some knowledge of what it does, the tricky part about this kind of research is figuring out how genes or proteins interact as part of a wider system — even if we knew exactly what it does in a healthy person, for example, it’s much harder to understand what kinds of illnesses arise from a faulty version of a gene, or whether a gene or protein could be a target for developing novel drugs. I don’t know much about TMEM115 specifically, but I know someone who was exploring whether it could be relevant in understanding how certain kinds of brain tumours develop.
Whilst the data that fill these databases are produced by experimental research that are attached to published papers, there’s a tremendous amount of work that makes all these resources talk to each other. That flybase link above links to the page on TMEM115, and I can use these resources to synthesise research across so many separate fields that would previously have been separate: the folks who work on flies will have a different research culture than those who work in human gene research, or yeast, or plants etc. TMEM115 is also sometimes called TM115, and it would be a nightmare if a scientist reviewing the literature missed some important existing research that referred to the gene under a slightly different name.
Making these biological databases link up properly requires active curation, a process that the philosopher of Science Sabine Leonelli refers to as “data packaging”, a challenging task that includes asking “who else might find this data useful?” ^[1]. The people doing the experiments that produce the data aren’t necessarily the best people for figuring out how to package and label that data for others to use because inherently, this requires thinking in a way that spans many different research subfields. Crucially though, this infrastructure work gives a scientist far fewer opportunities to publish new papers, which means this essential labour is devalued in our current system of doing science.
It’s rather like how some of the people who are adding poor quality articles to non-English Wikipedia feel like they’re contributing because using automated tools allows them to create more new articles than someone with actual specialist knowledge could. It’s the product of a culture of an ever-hungry “more” that fuels the production of slop, devalues the work of curators and is degrading our knowledge ecosystem. The financial incentives that drive this behaviour play a big role, but I see that as a symptom of a wider problem: society’s desire to easily quantify value causing important work that’s harder to quantify to be systematically devalued (a problem that we also see in how reproductive labour (i.e. the labour involved in managing a family or household) has historically been dismissed).
We need to start recognising how tenuous our existing knowledge is. The OP discusses languages with few native speakers, which likely won’t affect many who read the article, but we’re at risk of losing so much more if we don’t learn to recognise how tenuous our collective knowledge is. The more we learn, the more we need to invest into expanding our systems of knowledge infrastructure, as well as maintaining what we already have.
[1]: I am not going to cite the paper in which Sabine Leonelli coined the phrase “data packaging”, but her 2016 book “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study”. I don’t imagine that many people will read this large comment of mine, but if you’ve made it this far, you might be interested to check out her work. Though it’s not aimed at a general audience, it’s still fairly accessible, if you’re the kind of nerd who is interested in discussing the messy problem of making a database usable by everyone.
If your appetite for learning is larger than your wallet, then I’d suggest that Anna’s Archive or similar is a good shout. Some communities aren’t cool with directly linking to resources like this, so know that you can check the Wikipedia page of shadow library sites to find a reliable link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive
- Comment on Due to Federal Government Shutdown, SNAP Benefits Suspended Beginning November 1, 2025 1 week ago:
It sounds like you don’t seem to understand how poverty works. Either you have no lived experience of it, or you do, but you’ve internalised the notion that it’s possible to pull oneself out of poverty by the bootstraps — possibly because it’s more comforting to think this than to reckon with how many of us are just a few strokes of bad luck away from poverty.
Often poverty is entrenched precisely because many people don’t have a choice about whether to keep a 1-2 month buffer of resources. Social safety nets exist not just out of compassion, but because a society becomes better when people who are struggling don’t have to worry about how they’re going to feed themselves.
Place the blame where it is due: the maliciously incompetent legislators who see poor people going hungry as a feature, not a bug.
- Comment on a sight to behold 1 week ago:
A friend once had to go to the hospital due to extreme and chronic constipation, and whilst her… evacuation was less… explosive than this, she describes the relief as being so great that for a few glorious moments, she forgot that she was in the ER with a tube up her ass (and that the tube was only necessary when multiple members of medical staff had failed to move things along manually).
- Comment on a sight to behold 1 week ago:
Nurses are such integral parts of a functioning healthcare system, and it annoys me how they are systematically devalued. If we could wave a magic wand and make every nurse into a doctor (with the magic including the extra money it would take to fund this), it would be a downgrade. We often talk about nurses as if they’re just doctors, but worse, when in fact the role that they fulfill is qualitatively different to doctors and requires a different, not lesser, skillset.
- Comment on Amazon Allegedly Replaced 40% of AWS DevOps With AI Days Before Crash 1 week ago:
Exactly. DevOps engineers are already super skilled at using automation where appropriate, but knowing how and when to do that is still an extremely human task
- Comment on Amazon Allegedly Replaced 40% of AWS DevOps With AI Days Before Crash 1 week ago:
A handful of senior engineers or developers. And then we’re even more ducked when they retire or die, because the no-one is hiring junior engineers or developers
- Comment on I present: Torum! A crappy yet functional bearbones selfhosted forum site for termux. 1 week ago:
This is supremely silly. I will never use it, but I’m glad that it exists; you’re delightful
- Comment on 'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment 1 week ago:
It’s a big part of why I love that scene of delightful weirdos. I actually was only at that nightclub because a friend was nervous about going alone, but I enjoyed the vibe so much that I went on my own a few times after that.
- Comment on 'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment 1 week ago:
Gay bars can be super creepy. It’s worse for guys, but it’s also something I have experience with as a queer woman. Unwelcome groping from women happens less often for me at a gay club than by men at a straight club, but when it happens, it’s way more overt.
I wish there were more spaces for LGBTQ folk that weren’t centred around drinking. I’m fortunate enough to live in a city where there are at least some venues and events of that sort, but in some places I’ve lived, there wasn’t even a local gay bar.
- Comment on FTC removes Lina Khan-era posts about AI risks and open source 1 week ago:
What do you mean by “ideological reasons”? You’re using the phrase as if it’s a bad thing, but I struggle to imagine how anyone could exist in a political role such as FTC chair and not bring their ideology into their work.
- Comment on 'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment 1 week ago:
Thanks for the additional context; I appreciate it. I was already feeling solidarity with Emiru, and I’m glad to learn more from her perspective
- Comment on 'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment 1 week ago:
“To tell you honestly, I am a lot more hurt and upset by how Twitch handled it during and after the fact.”
Man, I hate how hard I relate to this. I’m so used to creepy guys that it often becomes part of the background noise of being in public. I remember the first time I went to a kink nightclub, I was startled by how infrequently I was randomly groped; being in such a consent aware space made me realise how many people in a regular nightclub will use the crowdedness as plausible deniability in trying to cop a feel. That stuff is honestly so prevalent that the individual instances hardly bother me anymore (though thinking about how often it happens and how powerless women are to stop it does get to me)
However, sometimes, something happens that goes beyond this, and makes me feel genuinely unsafe and violated. Often, it’s scary because it represents an escalation of harassment, such as a coworker who becomes increasingly invasive. There have been enough times where reporting harassment or an assault has gone ignored (or worse) that now when it happens, I feel desperately anxious in not knowing whether to report a thing.
Beyond the effect of the harassment on me, I feel that it’s my ethical duty to report things like this. It would obviously not be feasible to report everything that was sus, but some things cross the line and need to be reported. However, my greatest fear in reporting something is that it may reveal the organisation to be shitty. The betrayal hurts more than the harassment. Even if it’s a big company like Twitch, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be giving a fuck, there’s still the desperate hope that “the system” will respond to flagrant violations of codes of conduct (and also the law). It’s demoralising when those in power act like sexual harassment and sexual assault don’t have laws against them. This undermines the law, and makes it as though it isn’t even there.
- Comment on Mom they're fighting again 1 week ago:
A paper I quite enjoy is “Queer Theory for Lichens” which argued that queer theory is genuinely a useful framework for studying lichens; Lichens resist categorisation in a manner that feels like they’re actively mocking our taxonomic efforts.
- Comment on New Rules Could Force Tesla to Redesign Its Door Handles. That’s Harder Than It Sounds 2 weeks ago:
“too dumb to understand code requirements in every industry and profession.”
Or selfish. Unfortunately Hanlon’s razor can only cut so deep.
- Comment on Was the fall of Rome this stupid? 2 weeks ago:
Something that I find interesting with Rome is that arguably one of the ways it managed to keep going for so long is that it was continuing to push its borders outwards through conquest. Assimilating a land and its people into the Republic/Empire is one way of dealing with the problem of invading “barbarians” (even if that is just transmuting the problem such that your external threat is a new group of “barbarians”, and the old potential invaders potentially pose a threat from within).
Continuing to push outwards is a way to continue developing the military though, and to distract the military from the potential option of seizing power for themselves. There’s only so far you can push before the borders you need to secure are too large to do effectively, and the sheer area to be administrated is too large, even for Rome.
As you highlight, it’s a common misconception that people don’t realise that the Fall of Rome was far more protracted and complex of a process than a single event. I think that’s a shame, because I find it so much more interesting that historians can’t even agree on when the Fall of Rome even was.
- Comment on Was the fall of Rome this stupid? 2 weeks ago:
“Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob.”
I’m not sure how linked to the Fall of Rome these things are when they existed throughout basically the entire history of the Roman Empire (and even the Republic before it). The “secession of the plebs” was effectively a general strike of the commoners that happened multiple times between the 5th venture BCE and the 3rd century BCE — many centuries before the Fall of Rome.
- Comment on Was the fall of Rome this stupid? 2 weeks ago:
Commenting to echo my agreement. Rome was bloody huge, and it was hard to administrate. Things like high quality roads and advanced administrative systems help to manage it all, but when you’re that big, even just distributing food across the empire is a challenge. Rome only became as large as it was because it was supported by many economic, military and political systems, but the complexity of this means that we can’t even point to one of them and say “it was the failure of [thing] that caused Rome to fall.”
An analogy that I’ve heard that I like is that it’s like a house falling into disrepair over many years. A neglected house will likely become unliveable long before it collapses entirely, and it’ll start showing the symptoms of its degradation even sooner than that. The more things break, the more that the inhabitants may be forced to do kludge repairs that just make maintaining the whole thing harder.
Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I’ll check it out. I learned about a lot of this stuff via my late best friend, who was a historian, so continuing to learn about it makes me feel closer to him
- Comment on The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe 2 weeks ago:
Is it? I didn’t get that sense. What causes you to think it’s written by chatGPT? (I ask because whilst I’m often good at discerning AI content, there are plenty of times that I don’t notice it until someone points out things that they notice that I didn’t initially)
