AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on I put on my robe and my wizard hat 1 hour ago:
I used to do leathercraft commissions. My best customers were LARPers ordering armour, scroll cases etc., and kinksters buying fancy collars, cuffs and harnesses. Sometimes these were the same people
- Comment on Netflix used to not have ads, now it’s ‘celebrating’ two years with them 4 days ago:
That said, we’re on Lemmy, in the technology community – I’m reasonably confident that almost everyone here who is going to read your comment has the skills necessary
Yeah, my comment was getting more at the fact I have loved ones whose behaviour I can shift in small ways, such as by sending a link to an add on to block ads.
Especially as the blockage isn’t necessarily the skills, but a more nebulous sense of unease that I wonder whether is linked to the “you wouldn’t download a car” era of anti-piracy ads
- Comment on Netflix used to not have ads, now it’s ‘celebrating’ two years with them 4 days ago:
Addons like the one linked are useful for me to share with friends. I have many friends who have a soft anti-piracy stance. Not due to ideological conflicts — it’s mostly that their inexperience combined with knowing that pirating is forbidden makes them feel uncomfortable. Adblocking carries a similar sense of discomfort, but much milder, so it can be useful as a small step for overly anxious family and friends.
- Comment on Do you really want it in your body??? 1 week ago:
“(But sure, Ebola needs our DNA in the sense that otherwise we wouldn’t be alive. But so do nuclear weapons in order to kill humans.)”
For me, the fact that Ebola is an RNA virus made the meme more absurd and funny, in a “cut off your note to spite your face” way
- Comment on lab toys 1 week ago:
My PI: “Oh, we don’t use that microcentrifuge, it will ruin your results” Me: “Oh damn, how long has it been broken for?” PI: "No, it’s not broken. It’s cursed "
I thought this was just exasperated hyperbole, but nah, there’s a lot of superstition here.
- Comment on Cry Harder, Kid 1 week ago:
Thank you for sharing; I watched it and found it so silly that I went and found an even longer one youtu.be/NBH3UvlZo90 It’s so silly. I was trying to ponder what sound effect would best match, but there’s so many, it’d be impossible to choose.
- Comment on THANK YOU 2 weeks ago:
I hadn’t heard about bulldog ants before and was incredulous about your statement, but damn, yeah, bulldog ants are wild
- Comment on Please be patient. 2 weeks ago:
I like the way one of my university textbooks frames the particle wave duality thing: “A single pure wave has a perfectly defined wavelength, and thus an exact energy, but has no position. […] [Whereas a classical particle] would have a perfectly defined position but no definable wavelength and thus an undefined energy” ^([1]^[2])
I am currently in my bed. I have a lot to do today, but I’m not sure how much I will get done because I don’t know how much energy have. Thus I conclude you are right and that I am clearly a particle.
^([1]: Principles and Problems in Physical Chemistry for Biochemists, Price, Dwek, Radcliffe & Wormald, p282)
^([2]: I’m practicing being more diligent with citations, in hope that good habits will make it easier when referencing is actually important)
- Comment on Please be patient. 2 weeks ago:
A big part of quantum mechanics is the fact that matter can show wave-like behaviour, which sort of breaks a bunch of “rules” that we have from classical physics. This only is relevant if we’re looking at stuff at a teensy tiny scale.
Someone else has already mentioned that electrons are a fair bit smaller than protons and neutrons (around 1840 times smaller) and this means they tend to have a smaller momentum than protons or neutrons, which means they have a larger wavelength, which was easier to measure experimentally. That’s likely why electrons were a part of this theory, because they’re small enough that they’re sort of a perfect way to study the idea of things that are both particle and wave, but also neither. In 1940, quantum mechanics and particle physics were super rapidly moving fields, where our knowledge hadn’t congealed much yet. What was clear was that electrons get up to some absolute nonsense behaviour that broke our understanding of how the world worked.
I like the results of some of the worked examples here: www.chemteam.info/…/deBroglie-Equation.html , especially the one where they work out what the wavelength of a baseball would be (because that too, could theoretically act like a wave, it would just have an impossibly small wavelength)
TL;DR: electrons are smaller than protons/neutrons Smaller = larger wavelength Larger wavelength = easier to make experiments to see wave-like behaviour from the particle Therefore electrons were useful in figuring out how the heck a particle can have a wavelength and act like a wave
- Comment on Are 'micro-apartments' converted from offices the answer to the housing crisis? 3 weeks ago:
Without regulation, it’ll make it worse. (31 minute YouTube video by Evan Edinger)
- Comment on Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity promote scientific racism in AI search results 3 weeks ago:
It’s frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I’m autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I’ve been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they’re services for people with “Learning Disabilities”, and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won’t help you.
My problem here isn’t that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn’t been thoroughly debunked for years now.
I recently read “The Tyranny of Metrics” and whilst I don’t recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it’s definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart’s law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)
- Comment on Row as Starmer suggests landlords and shareholders are not ‘working people’ 3 weeks ago:
I’m super dubious because Starmer has done very little to earn my trust, but I would be very keen to be surprised, or even proven wrong
- Comment on YSK that there's a better index than the BMI to measure obesity called the Body Roundness Index 3 weeks ago:
That’s an extreme case, but the point still stands. For example, right now, I’m pretty fat, because I haven’t shifted the weight I gained over COVID. Even though I’m visibly way larger than I was, I’m not much heavier than I was pre-covid, because I’ve lost a heckton of muscle. It’s insane to me that BMI will look at me pre-covid, and look at me now, and say “that’s the same picture”. Especially because I personally found that the best and safest way for me to lose weight was to focus on getting strong and fit first.
- Comment on Opened an old scientific instrument to see if it works... 4 weeks ago:
I have a running list where I have been collecting words that I like for the last few years.
“Shrewd” is a good word and it’s going on my list. Thank you for the contribution.
- Comment on Infinite Suffering 4 weeks ago:
I found linear algebra super hard until I learned it a second and then third time, from different angles. I found it harder to understand when it was taught in a pure maths context, but coming at it from the applied side made me go “oh, so that’s why that’s like that”
- Comment on UK academies ‘very sorry’ for policies saying pupils must attend when unwell 5 weeks ago:
“In their letter withdrawing their pledge, Glenmoor and Winton schools flagged research by the children’s commissioner that showed that only one in 20 children who are persistently absent achieve five good GCSEs.”
As someone who grew up on a shitty council estate in a socio-economically deprived area of the country, I’m a little exasperated by the backwards understanding that measures like this show. The majority of people who die from old age have grey hair, but this doesn’t mean that hair dye will help reduce deaths from aging.
I sympathise with the school, because they almost certainly have some understanding that it’s a big blob of complex things that underlie and link attendance to attainment, but figuring out what to do about that is a whole other problem. Certainly though, I think this level of attendance requirements is silly
- Comment on Former Disco Elysium devs are working on a spiritual successor at new studio Longdue, though Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov aren't involved 5 weeks ago:
Selfishly, I hope you’re right, but with the addendum that I hope they don’t try too hard to recapture that lightning, and that they trust in their own ideas. I also hope Rostov, Kurvitz and Helen Hindpere (writer who also lost her job as things fell apart) find success and fulfillment in their future. It’s fucked up that they won’t get to work on Disco Elysium — especially Rostov and Kurvitz.
This is probably a bad example, given how it turned out, but I’m reminded of how it felt to be a Halo fan in 2013 — Halo 4 had recently come out to a mixed reception. It was the first Halo game to be developed by 343 industries rather than Bungie, and some of the disgruntled fans hoped that Bungie’s then-upcoming new game, Destiny, would scratch that itch. Destiny could obviously never be a replacement for Halo (some fans found it easier to consider the franchise to be dead), but jt wasn’t unreasonable to hope for (despite it eventually not working out that way ¯\(ツ)/¯ )
- Comment on 18 treated for severe nausea in Stuttgart after opera of live sex and piercing 5 weeks ago:
"Holzinger, 38, is known for freewheeling performances that blur the line between dance theatre and vaudeville. Her all-female cast typically performs partially or fully naked, and previous shows have included live sword-swallowing, tattooing, masturbation and action paintings with blood and fresh excrement.
“Good technique in dance to me is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate on cue,” Holzinger told the Guardian in an interview earlier this year."
That’s hilarious
- Comment on A Record Number of Scientific Papers Were Retracted in 2023 For Being Fraudulent or a Having Conflicts of Interest 1 month ago:
Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: science.org/…/research-misconduct-finding-neurosc…
It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).
- Comment on Based on true events 1 month ago:
Do you apply toppings right to the edge? I’ve never had this problem despite using an absurd amount of cheese, and I was puzzling to figure out why. I think it’s because the crust rises up to act like a boundary that encloses a big lake of cheese.
- Comment on Why do social workers get upset when you don't want their help? 1 month ago:
When I find myself becoming irked by someone offering help I don’t need, it helps me to think of things in terms of people who slip through the gaps: the system that the social worker is a part of strives to help those who need it, and you not needing that help makes you a false positive. You were likely flagged because sometimes when someone is living in their vehicle, this is a symptom (and reinforcing factor) of their life being in disarray. That is to say that some people who superficially look a lot like you are in need of support, and not catching these people would be false negatives. Bonus complication is that many people who do need this help may also be resistant to support (for a variety of reasons).
Given that no system is perfect, and the error rate will always be greater than zero, we can ask the hypothetical “is it better to have fewer false positives and more false negatives, or more false positives and fewer false negatives?”. Put a different way, when you’re bothered, that’s you slipping through the gaps in a system that has opted for more false positives with the goal of helping as many people who need it as possible.
Unrelated to everything else I said, I’m glad you’ve been able to find a way of living that you’re happy in — it is a challenge when the life that is best suited for us is one that society considers “abnormal”, so I’m happy to hear about anyone who has broken into what works.
- Comment on The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter 2 months ago:
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.
- Comment on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Coffee 2 months ago:
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”
- Comment on Look Closer 2 months ago:
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.
- Comment on As He Realized His Mistake, Elon Musk Begged Twitter Staff to Turn Off the New Feature He'd Pushed For 2 months ago:
You’re right, that is pretty funny. I didn’t notice until you pointed it out in this comment
- Comment on As He Realized His Mistake, Elon Musk Begged Twitter Staff to Turn Off the New Feature He'd Pushed For 2 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Microsoft formally deprecates the 39-year-old Windows Control Panel 2 months ago:
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
- Comment on They encouraged us to insulate our home. Now it’s unmortgageable 2 months ago:
My impression is that homes in the US tend to have more wood involved in their construction generally, so it seems plausible to me that US construction methods may be more experienced with ways of managing wood moisture
- Comment on Dead Rising remaster will make Frank West less of a creep 2 months ago:
I like that as a framing question, and it helps me to further understand why it is that scenes like the RE4 one feels so weird to me.
I think the thing that makes me uncomfortable in that scenario is the fact that Leon is the hero. I’m a woman who has loved gaming for basically my whole life, so I’m used to playing as someone who doesn’t look like me — there’s a certain amount of abstracting away of gender that’s necessary if I want to be able to participate in some heroic escapism. That’s why scenes like Leon being a creep are so jarring, because he’s the hero. The narrative of the game is endorsing this kind of behaviour because it’s being done by the hero.
Dead Rising is a somewhat more ambiguous example, but still weird overall. I don’t necessarily even mind that the photography intro quest highlights the fact you can take sexy(?) photos, because the NPC in that quest is written in a way where it’s like the game itself is saying “yeah, this guy is a weird creep”. Getting points for “erotic” photos is a bit weird though, because whilst you can choose to not take photos like that, it feels like the mechanics of the game are endorsing the creepy dude’s mentality overall.
- Comment on This shitpost is preventing shutdown 3 months ago:
I’m still a relative noob with Linux and I find stuff “breaks” more on Linux (‘breaks’ as in does something I don’t want it to), nursing and it can take me a while to fix those things because I’m still learning. It takes a while in part because I want to actually understand what’s going wrong (and how to fix it), rather than just doing the thing.
With Windows, when it’s doing something I don’t want it to, it’s usually a much more straightforward troubleshooting process because often, it’s a problem I can’t solve. The stuff I can change is quicker because I have more experience with Windows, but overall, the experience is much more frustrating because of all the stuff I need to tolerate. It makes it feel like my computer isn’t my own.