Contramuffin
@Contramuffin@lemmy.world
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 3 days ago:
This used to be a pretty common practice. It’s called a forever soup
- Comment on After 18 years, a surprise Half-Life 2 update makes it once again possible to beat a honking train on Highway 17 1 week ago:
My speculation? They’ll call it HL4 and then just say that HL:A was technically HL3
- Comment on sardonic soup 2 weeks ago:
Dose makes the poison. Most bitter flavors (that you eat) aren’t really meant to discourage you from eating them, it’s really meant for insects.
Plant: I will make an unappetizing flavor to prevent myself from getting eaten
Humans: finally, some good fucking food
- Comment on How does a guy become his most confident around women? 2 weeks ago:
If this is how you treat men, then the OP appears to be one of the smaller problems that you may have
- Comment on How does a guy become his most confident around women? 2 weeks ago:
The best thing to do is to not see gender. Treat women the same way that you treat men. I mean that in the most literal sense, not in an “equal rights” sense (though you definitely should make sure that’s true as well).
Do you know the uncanny valley? It’s the idea that things that appear close-but-not-quite human are offputting. Something similar happens in social conversations as well. People are very good at subconsciously detecting subtle signs of incongruity between your tone, body language, and spoken words. For instance, if you are nervous but act blasé. There will be subtle signs, like in how you phrase sentences or your tone, that will be noticeable, and people will think that you are hiding something. And people may find it strange and offputting.
It’s the same reason why pick up artists appear creepy - people can detect that their intentions and worldview don’t match with their exterior façade.
- Comment on Does anyone else find HiFi Rush highly overrated? 2 weeks ago:
I couldn’t finish the game myself. I thought it was a good game for sure, but it just isn’t something that I like. I’m not much of a hack-n-slasher. As far as rhythm game genre mashups go, my favorite is still Crypt of the Necrodancer
- Comment on Th EU iniative for Stop Killing Games has reached the goal of 1 million signatures!! 4 weeks ago:
No, that requirement has already been met. The final requirement (which has just been met now) is to reach a total of 1 million signatures. Basically, all requirements are now satisfied
- Comment on The UK Stop Killing Games petition has reached 100.000 signatures 4 weeks ago:
My understanding is that they misunderstood the petition, so this new one is rephrased in an attempt to avoid another misinterpretation
- Comment on I played Lovecraftian doctor simulator Do No Harm, and let me tell you, my brother in Cthulhu, I did some serious harm 5 weeks ago:
I quite like Strange Horticulture, but it felt too linear for my tastes. This seems like an interesting shakeup of that formula. I’ll keep an eye on it
- Comment on "The case for comedy in the climate crisis."-because scientific literacy has failed 5 weeks ago:
No point in being doomer about it. We try whatever we need to in order to get the population to understand.
And for what it’s worth, it kind of makes sense. Science communication is generally quite poor. Scientists aren’t trained in PR or in communicating with the public. To some extent, it makes sense that the public doesn’t understand. In the longer term, it would certainly be better to raise scientific literacy. In the short term, we simply need quippy talking points that can be repeated to get the message to stick.
- Comment on Why are living beings not being cooked alive constantly at the tekpersatures we are? 5 weeks ago:
Are you confusing fahrenheit and Celsius? Body temp can’t cook food
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Heavily context dependent, I’d say. In a vacuum, it’s not that unusual. The entire purpose of text is that you don’t have to respond immediately. If it happens constantly, then maybe it would have been worth figuring out why that keeps happening. Maybe he dislikes you, or maybe he’s just busy.
It seems you already understand that, though. So perhaps the more informative question is why you feel the way that you feel towards your ex. Frankly, it’s probably some level of infatuation (or as I call it, puppy love). It’s not intrinsically bad, but it does tend to drive people to have unrealistic expectations for their partners, which can drive conflict once those expectations become established
- Comment on The Elder God 1 month ago:
The Sun god demands more sacrifices
- Comment on Outer Wilds. Should my first time be in VR? 1 month ago:
No, unless you already know how to pilot the ship, playing in VR is probably going to get you severely motion sick
- Comment on Fabulous through the ages 1 month ago:
- Comment on geneticists 1 month ago:
Fwiw that qPCR curve doesn’t look that bad, just don’t have the y-axis be in log form
- Comment on Ke$he's Quantum Party 1 month ago:
Can she make a law that she cannot break? Checkmate Christians
- Comment on Why are you here and not on Reddit? 1 month ago:
I use Reddit through Relay and it’s gone now. Even if I want to use Reddit, I have to jump through hoops to use it.
- Comment on Do you care about up/down votes? 1 month ago:
To me, it’s a way to quantify how other people feel about my own positions. It’s neither good nor bad to be upvoted or downvoted. People have unpopular takes sometimes and you shouldn’t stake your identity on the amount of upvotes or downvotes you have.
Instead, upvotes and downvotes are most useful for other people to guage comments. Generally speaking, if a comment is universally downvoted, that likely means the position is unpopular enough that it adds no value to a discussion, and is therefore not worth engaging with.
I consider it to be a system built upon mutual understanding - that you don’t have to seriously engage with everyone’s viewpoints, and conversely, that nobody has to seriously engage with yours.
It becomes a problem when upvotes and downvotes are gamified like on Reddit, because Goodhart’s Law demands that it stops serving its purpose when people are only attempting to optimize their upvote/downvote ratio.
- Submitted 2 months ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 5 comments
- Comment on PLEASE bro 2 months ago:
This is a map of signaling pathways in a cell. Essentially, how does a cell detect a stimulus and how does the cell respond to it. Signaling networks are notoriously difficult to parse, in major part because many of the proteins that make up the network are promiscuous (meaning that they target many types of proteins instead of just 1). Think of network as less of a series of defined steps and more of a chaotic mess. It’s so chaotic that most maps will select a theme (ie, hormone detection, stress signaling, infection, etc.) and only show the interactions that are relevant to that theme. Unfortunately, that also means that each map will show a network that’s completely different from the others, even though the proteins are the same.
The joke here is that it’s very tempting to make another map. This map is finally going to solve cell biology, I promise, we just have to make another map. Ignore the fact that we already have so many maps, just one more map is all we need
- Comment on I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store? 2 months ago:
It was a while ago, I don’t remember off the top of my head which specific game I’m remembering. Doing a brief search, it appears that this happened to Unreal Tournament and Rocket League, though it appears that the games still work for the people who bought it before the unlisting. I think the concern was losing functionality, especially for server-based or multiplayer games
- Comment on I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store? 2 months ago:
Sweeney (the CEO of Epic) says that he wants competition with Steam, but many of his actions point toward that he really just wants to be the guy at the top (ie, he wants to be the monopoly instead of Valve). He’s taken a fair number of anti-consumerist stances, which vary from understandable to clearly anti-competitive.
Epic is known for making exclusivity deals with 3rd party studios in which Epic bribes the studio with money, and in exchange, the studio does not release their game on Steam for 1 year.
At several points, this occurred after a studio already said that they will release on Steam, and the studio would have to walk back and delete their Steam listing.
Iirc, at one point Epic bought out a studio and had them remove the Steam listing for an already-released game, causing the game to be unplayable for people who had already bought the game
The Epic Game Store released in a non-functional state, and development on it is extremely slow. The first impression of the broken store likely still influences many people’s impression of the store. But it’s still missing many features that many gamers want to see in a store.
There were various rumors when the store first launched that it contained spyware. My understanding is that those rumors never fully got disproven, especially since some of the claims were supported by at least some evidence
Epic does not support Linux, and Sweeney has openly said that he does not plan to support Linux until it becomes more popular. He did immediately jump on board with supporting Arm though, which caused a lot of Linux gamers to think that he just doesn’t want to support Linux
Sweeney is a pretty abrasive person and iirc he made a lot of concerning statements on his social media. Several of them (as mentioned above) indicate that he wants to dethrone Valve so that he can be the monopoly instead
Overall, many gamers are in support of more competition in the game store space. Unfortunately, many gamers also think that Epic is an untrustworthy competitor, and they believe that Epic has a serious chance of making the gaming industry worse if they become more popular. As a result, many would prefer for Steam remain the monopoly rather than to take a bet on Epic.
- Comment on Partner has ADD, do I have misophonia? 2 months ago:
I don’t think you seem to have any problems, but it sounds like you’re partner may have some things that they’ll need to work out.
People are creatures of habit - while it is true that your partner is being an asshole, I currently don’t have any reason to believe that they’re doing it out of malice rather than habit.
It sounds like your partner may need to seek professional help, because it is their responsibility to manage their ADD/depression, and it sounds like they may be struggling to do that. It is not your responsibility to manage it for them
- Comment on Is your sleep schedule actually messed up, or are you just aligned with a different timezone? 2 months ago:
Eating is also a really big factor for the body’s circadian clock. Not sure what your lifestyle is like, but I would try to avoid eating anything when it’s late.
Interestingly enough, autism is also noted to affect the circadian clock, so it seems like medical and psychological conditions can exert an influence too.
And it could be entirely possible that you are simply a night owl. I just find it disingenuous that some people would use the circadian clock as a way to justify poor sleep habits, especially if they have habits that disrupt their circadian clock. It kind of dilutes the struggles of actual night owls
- Comment on Is your sleep schedule actually messed up, or are you just aligned with a different timezone? 2 months ago:
Amusing thought, but doesn’t really make sense biologically. Your body doesn’t know your geographical location. It just reads the environmental time using a bunch of different inputs and guesses at what the actual time is. Your body is actually fairly good at guessing the time, but people are just naturally predisposed to sleep later or earlier.
That tendency is influenced by genetics and also changes over time with age, but I also heavily suspect that people are actually just messing up their circadian clocks without knowing it. Try dimming your lights after sunset, you’d be surprised by how early you get tired.
- Comment on if pure water is not conductive why would condensation be an issue for electronics? 2 months ago:
Because it is really, really difficult to get pure water. Even distilled water isn’t pure. I’m not even sure you can get pure water outside of an industrial or laboratory setting
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I find that high school really doesn’t expose you to many of the most interesting fields and careers out there, and the subjects that it does expose to you are typically taught at a very basic, foundational level. To put it simply, I strongly believe that you and many other people in your situation don’t know what they’re passionate about because they don’t even know it exists.
I think it’s the fault of the school system for not working harder to show the intricacies of actual careers, but for now, we just have to deal with what we’re given.
We can try guessing what sorts of things you may like if you tell us a bit more about yourself. What sorts of things are you passionate about (ie, hobbies, obsessions, interests, favorite subject in school), and why do you feel passionate about it?
- Comment on LibreOffice: We still see people on the fediverse recommending OpenOffice, despite it having year-old unfixed security issues 2 months ago:
OnlyOffice. Newer and somewhat less features, but the UI is so much better than LibreOffice. I’ve been on a quest to find the best Office alternative and OnlyOffice is what I’ve settled on
- Comment on The key takeaway of science is that observation constitutes the primary reality. 2 months ago:
Maybe in the past? Modern science has shifted away from direct observation and more towards targeted probing. Modern science is about setting up intricate systems to answer a very specific question such that no matter what happens, you learn something new
