AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Day 491 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 2 days ago:
Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.
- Comment on It never hurts to practice when you have the chance 2 days ago:
"taint’ is an informal word for the perineum
- Comment on Japanese court orders Cloudflare to pay $3.2 million over manga piracy 2 days ago:
I think the problem is that so many of our laws (especially intellectual property laws) seem to be ill equipped to deal with the reality of our increasingly digital world.
For example, recently there was an example of “worst person you know makes a good point” when 4chan and Kiwifarms opposed the imposition of the UK’s recent Online Safety Act (OSA). They argued that they don’t operate in the UK, none of their employees are based in the UK, none of their services are hosted in the UK, so under what jurisdiction can they be fined for not complying with the OSA? The UK’s stance was that the OSA does apply to them because some of the users of those sites are from the UK, but the counterpoint to that is that it shouldn’t be 4chan’s legal obligation to police their users in this respect. UK users would be beholden to UK law, Nepalese users to Nepal’s laws, US users to US law etc. — it isn’t reasonable to expect a website to have a comprehensive understanding and compliance of the laws of every country that their users belong to. They argued that if the UK has beef with UK users going to a non-UK website that doesn’t comply with the OSA, then they should take that up with entities based in the UK (such as ISPs).
The lawsuit was doomed from the getgo, because sovereign immunity means that they could sue a country, but it raised some super interesting points about jurisdiction and legal compliance. Buying and selling stolen goods is illegal, but what about if the person buying couldn’t have reasonably known they were stolen? There’s plenty of case law around that question, but does the same burden of evidence and “reasonableness” apply in an online context? Is embedding stolen content that’s hosted on a different site seen the same as directly hosting that? Let’s say that linking to stolen content is agreed to be the same as hosting that content directly — what about linking to a place that links to stolen content?
Even if we agree that buying and selling stolen goods is illegal, actually applying that to an online context gets messy real quick. Case law can be sparse, or contradictory in some cases. I share your view that intellectual property and copyright are bullshit, and I think part of what makes them so bullshit is how ill-suited they are to our current reality. There’s always been a tension between the intention of copyright and the effects in practice, but I feel like that’s gotten worse over the years. I don’t know what a good solution would be, but I know for certain that the current system isn’t working
- Comment on 2B email addresses and 1.3B passwords compromised in data breaches 6 days ago:
The best way to keep yourself safe from stuff like this is to use a password manager, and to generate a new password for each account.
Starting using a password manager is one of the single most powerful improvements to my wellbeing in years. It’s so nice to not have to do the “Forgot my password” process for a site I rarely use, only to discover when creating a new password that the site has weird rules around password requirements (explaining why none of the variations for my standard password at the time worked to login).
I use Bitwarden
Most people on this community probably already use a password manager, but if you don’t, then this comment is for you
- Comment on While we eagerly await the second coming of Steam Machines, it's worth remembering what a gloriously awful mess Valve got itself in over a decade ago 1 week ago:
Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.
I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.
I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.
- Comment on The Rockstar Workers Fired Before They Could Finish GTA 6 [People Make Games 19:17] 1 week ago:
Glad to see People Make Games cover this. They have a lot of reach
- Comment on Wikipedia urges AI companies to use its paid API, and stop scraping 1 week ago:
From skimming that linked page, I think that this download perhaps doesn’t include recent pages? Because in the section talking about enterprise stuff, it mentions the paid API for recent articles
- Comment on Nvidia's Jensen Huang: 'China is going to win the AI race,' 2 weeks ago:
You win by acknowledging that AI/Machine Learning research has existed long before this bubble existed, and is continuing to happen outside of that bubble. Most of what we call AI nowadays is based on neural networks (that’s what Geoffrey Hinton and others got a recent nobel prize for), but that’s not the only way to go about the problem, and for years now, there have been researchers pointing out problems like hallucinations and diminishing returns from increasing the amount of data you feed to a model.
An example of one such researcher is Song Chun-Zhu, who has recently moved back to China because he was finding it increasingly difficult to do research he wanted (i.e. outside of the current AI bubble) within the US. That linked article is a bit of a puff piece, in that it is a tad too mythologising of him, but I think he’s a good example of what productive AI research looks like — especially because he used to work on the “big data” kind of AI, before realising its inherent limits and readjusting his approach accordingly.
He’s one of the names that’s on my watch list because even for people who aren’t directly building on his research, he comes up a lot in research that is also burnt out on neural nets
- Comment on GTA 6 dev Rockstar says recent firings were due to leaks of "confidential information" and were "in no way related to people's right to join a union" 2 weeks ago:
What does OC mean in this context?
- Comment on My block list in a nutshell: 2 weeks ago:
I think the analogy still applies. There are loads of people who I interact with who say things I don’t want to hear/profound disagree with. The block list includes people with whom it doesn’t feel viable to have a discussion with without things descending into flames.
- Comment on The wonder of the sea 3 weeks ago:
No, I get it. Humans are capable of such destruction on unimaginable scales, just by living our lives. Governments and corporations are such huge structures of diffuse accountability that often, we are unaware of the extent of the harms done by humanity. This video feels like an act of resistance to that. A whole team of divers take the time and resources (air) to help this little octopus that was a victim of human existence. It doesn’t erase the harm done by humans, and it would devalue the act if we pretended that it would be possible to balance the scales in this way.
It’s a powerful gesture precisely because it’s so insignificant. There are many humans who are also being harmed by the ruthless machinery of human society, and taking the time to be present and compassionate something that can be hard. Watching the video made me feel more human, because it highlights that I don’t think that humans are inherently the problem. Some humans are assholes, sure, but most of the problems are because we’ve made a lot of dispassionate systems that are far bigger than we are. I often think that it’d be easier to fight these things if we could make space for our humanity.
- Comment on Aldi just launched its own £16.99 rival to Ring's battery video doorbell – and it's completely subscription-free | TechRadar 3 weeks ago:
I don’t have input on cameras specifically, but I have gone pretty deep into trying to understand how to maximise security and interoperability in smart home stuff, through open source control.
A starting point for the you-in-control app to use for smart devices is Home assistant. I was surprised by how easy it was to set up self hosted smart home stuff, largely because there’s loads of guides that build around home assistant. So whether a particular camera works with home assistant is a good starting search filter
- Comment on What's your answer? And in the picture which news story is being reported? 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks ago:
Friends tell me that seeing Kneecap live was incredible
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks ago:
I liked the 20-200 also.
- Comment on true love is rare 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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
