Contramuffin

@Contramuffin@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How much human individuals resemble cells⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The questions you’re asking about already exist. Portguese man-o-war are colonies of multiple organisms. Bees and ants are considered superorganisms.

  It’s not going to happen to humans, if that’s what you’re asking. The evolutionary incentive simply isn’t there to form a superorganism physically, though you could definitely make the argument that society and culture can be interpreted as a superorganism

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Opening Lemmy in the morning and seeing dozens of unread comments in your inbox makes you think: what the heck did I say yesterday?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well you can have solar, wind, and hydroelectric without steam, so it’s not like you need steam

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Opening Lemmy in the morning and seeing dozens of unread comments in your inbox makes you think: what the heck did I say yesterday?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s the att/def on your Nicole? I’ll trade you mine - just pulled a disappearing Nicole. No idea what the att is, but given that it disappeared from my deck, I must imagine the def is wicked high

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨would getting back with an ex be a bad idea?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Change isn’t necessarily impossible, but it’s really difficult and requires a huge amount of self discipline - if someone changes, they will be a standout exception rather then the norm. I urge you to consider that someone who ghosts you likely does not value you enough to be willing or able to put in the effort to change. Ghosting is deeply rude to do to anyone, and especially toward your significant other.

  Take my interpretation with a mountain of salt, because I don’t know the full story. But, from what you said, it seems more likely that he reached out to you because you were a convenient backup

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does me having autism increase your chances of finding a significant other?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1. Not really, no. Love and attraction are different things. You don’t need to be attracted to someone you love.

  2. Unless you find your partner unattractive, I don’t see how sex could meaningfully change

  3. People are good at picking up social cues. That’s probably what you’re referring to. Humans are social creatures, after all. Also, people are trash at picking up social cues, so you’re probably also missing a lot of cues.

  4. That sounds like a really bad idea. Your sense of how common those relationships issues occur is warped. People don’t generally go into relationships trying to exploit someone. You’re going to cause issues (moral, logistical, and practical) with your plan, all because of a concern that’s not likely to happen.

  5. That’s the vast majority of humans. We are a monogamous species, after all. When you see “alpha males” on the internet, just be aware that they’re grifters that want your money. And the best way to make sure you keep giving them money is to make sure that you stay single and unhappy.

  6. Can’t help you there. I can at least tell you that enacting your plan in question 4 is going to lower your chances of finding a wife to 0.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨suggest me some games!!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ori is probably going to struggle a bit on a laptop

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's easier to shoot, a bow or a firearm?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People say assuming with bows is easier? What kind of world do they live in?

  I’ve shot a decent amount of bows and guns, and guns are far easier to shoot. The difference is that because guns are easier to shoot, there’s a greater expectation of accuracy. Shooting a bow at 30 meters and hitting your target is considered accurate, shooting a gun at 30 meters is considered nothing.

  That being said, I still like archery more. There’s just something very personal about the experience of pulling the bowstring and manually making the arrow fly

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the exact ramifications and consequences of the recent meeting with Zelenskyy and Trump/JD?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even before Trump and Vance lashed out, it was a shitshow. Every time Zelenskyy brought up security, Trump dismissed it because the the minerals were “more important.”

  European leaders were certainly watching, and their main takeaway was certainly that Trump can and will sacrifice the security of American allies for money.

  Europe and many of the US’s allies had lower military spending and did not to pursue nuclear programs because there was the expectation that the US would help protect these countries. This was exactly the promise that the US gave to Ukraine that got them to give up their nuclear research.

  Now that it’s become clear that the US cannot be relied upon for security, many of the US’s allies are certain to start reconsidering their stance on the military and nuclear weapons. As US soft power crumbles, I expect that new, smaller factions will arise to fill the void, and I expect that China will likely try to expand its influence as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨are "brush" and "blush" really pronounced differently? i pronounce them the same.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In most native English accents, R is pronounced by curling the tongue very significantly (more than most languages that I’m familiar with). People who aren’t used to this (often people who speak English as a second language) won’t curl their tongues enough, and the partially curled tongue will end up touching the roof of their mouths. This happens to be how you pronounce L, so in these accents, R and L will end up sounding the same.

  Try getting into the habit of curling your tongue more when you pronounce R, and you’ll end up hearing a difference

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Study finds bullies have more children than non-bullies⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The study seems to mention that the bullies have children at an earlier age. I’d be willing to guess that the relation between having more children and bullying is purely correlative and has no direct impact. Instead, it seems significantly more likely that impulsiveness drives both bullying behavior and unsafe sex, which then leads to more children.

  It seems somewhat odd to me that, instead of addressing possible mechanisms of this correlation, the authors talk about how bullying is an evolutionary trait to pass on genes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First Gaming PC⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a slow burn game. There is a plot, and the plot is really good, but it only becomes clear really late into the game. Instead of the plot, the primary driver of gameplay is learning. I see a lot of people approach the game as though the writings are just flavor text, or just a way to portray a clue to a puzzle. It’s really not. You’re supposed to seek out the writing because the writing itself scratches the itch of learning. The developers put an incredible amount of attention to the entire game, and paying close attention and thinking through the implications of the text will reveal the plot points and lore.

  All this to say, there is a wrong way to play the game, and that is to treat the game like nothing more than something to be completed. If you’re feeling a bit lost, yeah, that’s kind of the point. You decide which thread is most interesting to you. All I will say is that any thread that you pull will eventually converge onto the plot, so feel free to pursue another thread if you get stuck or if you get bored of the current thread that you’re pursuing.

  Also, remember that in space, there’s no friction, so however long it takes for you to speed up, that’s how long it takes for you to slow down

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Psychology⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Here, let me fill it out:

  low IQ: psychologists don’t know anything

  average IQ: psychologists don’t know anything

  high IQ: psychologists don’t know anything

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is thinly-veiled political whinging really a question just because you used a question mark?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for calling this out. I keep seeing political posts where the intent is clearly not to obtain answers but to obtain agreement. It makes me think that these people are attempting to karma farm.

  Back on reddit, wasn’t there a rule that questions had to be genuine? ie, rhetorical posts (like we see now) are not allowed? Perhaps it would make sense to start enforcing such a rule

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am glad he didn't ask for Hotdog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok but also who goes out of their way to get Burger King anyways? I feel like the only people who get Burger King are the people who can’t find literally any other fast food joint in the region

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Same vibe as Cato in the Roman Senate: ml delenda est

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What determines whether something is small enough to regrow on a mammal?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That depends on what you’re referring to. Quick caveat, I’m not an expert in regenerative biology, but I have studied it somewhat.

  The trick is that the healing that you’re referring to, it’s not really healing in the way that you’re imagining it. The skin doesn’t really quite grow back in the same way. Instead, there’s more collagen than there normally would be (we would then call that scar tissue). In essence, we’re not really healing, our bodies are just doing a patchwork fix. The presumed reason is that our bodies figure that it’s not going to cause any problems before we die from other causes. This is really quite true of other tissues as well. The liver is known to be able to grow back, but if you look at the microstructures, the regrown stuff is missing a lot of the nuances that the original had. Our bodies expect us to live 70-ish years, and so they don’t care about anything that could happen after that.

  In order to truly, really regenerate, you’ll need stem cells. Some animals are remarkably good at keeping around stem cells and regenerating, but somewhere along the evolutionary line, mammals lost the ability to use stem cells. It’s still an ongoing area of research about why this happened and whether we can generate stem cells in the lab and whether we can manipulate stem cells to our benefit. It should also be pointed out though that, by its intrinsic nature, stem cells divide and don’t specialize into any roles, so it’s very easy for them to go cancerous. In the few spots where mammals do keep stem cells around, their division is very tightly controlled, and even then they are the source of the most common cancers in humans

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nails are just vestigial claws.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Vestigial may not be the correct word. We do use our nails quite a lot for finer manipulation of tools

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Longtime buddy of mine just got a gaming PC. What games would make up a good "welcome to PC" care package?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Might consider getting something that only plays well on keyboard/mouse. Factorio comes up off the top of my head. Shooters also generally translate poorly to controllers, so perhaps that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes - I think it is fair that all murders be prosecuted. As for the gray area of morality, sentencing is variable and somewhat lax for this exact reason. I don’t believe that a judge will be lax with sentencing, but this would be a case in which I would like the shooter to receive a slap on the wrist punishment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Petrichor⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wording is funky. To clarify:

  The rain smell is due to a compound called geosmin. The bacteria that produces it is Streptomyces.

  When I taught microbiology lab, I would grow a petri dish of Streptomyces during one particular class and have the students smell it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When people say the AI bubble will burst, what exactly does that mean?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A bubble means that investors are putting in more money into a particular field than the field is really worth. How does that happen? Well, investors make money by investing money into small companies and hoping that they get bigger over time. And they need to make guesses in which company they think will actually get big. While investors generally try to make these guesses logically, there’s inherently a bit of “trust me bro” involved in making these decisions.

  A bubble happens when investors increasingly rely on “trust me bro” to make their investment decisions. And so they put in more and more money into a field that might not really need or deserve that much money. Not to say that the field is intrinsically useless - just that the hype has overtaken the actual usefulness of that field. So when you see something that’s being hyped up, you should generally view it with caution.

  AI as a field is currently very hyped up right now, and so there’s concern that AI might be a bubble.

  How does a bubble pop? Randomly and without warning. The problem with bubbles is that they’re driven primarily by hype and “trust me bro,” and so if anything blows the hype, it will cause all the investors to snap back to reality and pull all their money. That’s a lot of money being pulled from a single field at the same time, and that’ll absolutely crash the field. A company going under might trigger a pop, or it could be a random news article that went viral saying that AI is a fraud, or it could be a lackluster product launch. Hype is inherently unstable, and so it can be difficult to predict when and why a bubble pops.

  The implosion that happens during a pop isn’t referring to any particular company, it’s referring to the entire field as a whole. It could very well happen (though unlikely) that not a single company goes bankrupt during a pop. It’s merely that those companies would lose a lot of the investor funding that they have previously been relying on

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨anyway, i started blastin'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So will bacteriophages and viruses be snapped as well? Does it mean that scientists can utilize the Thanos snap to determine for good whether viruses are alive?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lab toys⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just yesterday I had a CO2 valve close on me during an experiment while I was away for a moment. It takes effort to turn the valve so it couldn’t have just shaken closed or something. The valve was in the corner of the room and was blocked off by boxes, so nobody could have accidentally bumped it. And, besides, nobody was in the room anyways. Before the experiment I made damn sure that the CO2 valve was open, and even looking through the computer records (which records the CO2) says that the CO2 valve was open until I walked away.

  I still have no idea how the valve could have closed on its own. Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation. I’ve clearly angered the science gods and I would do well to sacrifice some more cells to the science gods to appease them

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long do you think we'll keep seeing "formerly Twitter"?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Without another name change, I don’t think that phrase will ever go away, for the simple fact that X as a name is too short and nondescript. In speech, X could refer to a someone you broke up with, or it could just be the beginning of another word, serving as a prefix. In text, it could refer to the actual letter itself, or the close button on a window, or a placeholder, or something NSFW.

  There’s simply too many ways that X can be interpreted that even if people associate Twitter with X, people will still specify “formerly Twitter” just to avoid confusion

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Magic Words⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Science is like going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. There’s always more things to do and more things to check out. At some point you just have to draw the line and say that enough is enough. Other scientists are likely to ask why you stopped where you stopped, and so saying that “it’s outside the scope of the paper” is basically the nice way of saying that you stopped because you felt like it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do PhDs HAVE to use Dr?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most PhD’s in university actually prefer to be called by their first name. As a graduate student, one of the most jarring culture shocks is to learn to call professors by their first names. At least that’s the case in the US, not sure about elsewhere

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I or should I not use/bother with using Linux? (READ THE WHOLE POST)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a multifaceted answer for me, I feel.

  Linux is weird, on a technical level. It’s funky and broken and has weird quirks you have to remember. But it’s not malicious. Wendel from Level1Tech said it best in one of his videos: the headaches with Linux are haphazard, the headaches with Windows are adversarial.

  It’s not a perfect solution to Windows, but at least for some people, the respect that it has for its users (ie, no ads, not trying to fight you on everything you’re trying to do, gives you the ability and freedom to tinker as you please) offsets its technical problems.

  Additionally, Linux is missing a lot of core applications. There’s many applications that do have a Linux version, and many that can run through a compatibility layer, and out of those that are left, many have really solid replacements. Heck, you might be surprised to find that some of the software that you use already were originally intended to be replacements for Windows-only applications.

  But there’s still a handful of core applications that don’t work on Linux and don’t really have a good replacement, and even missing 1 can easily break someone’s work flow. No, LibreOffice isn’t a full replacement of Microsoft Office, no, GIMP can’t actually replace Photoshop.

  As for terminal, there’s no way around it. You will have to open terminal at some point. To be clear, most, if not all, things that you might imagine yourself doing likely has some way of doing it through a GUI. The issue is that as a new user, you don’t know where the GUI is, or what it’s called, or how to even ask. And when the tutorials that you find online tell you to just use terminal, that ends up being the only practical way of getting things done. So it’s a weird Catch-22, where only experienced users who know where all the menus are will know where the GUI options are, but it’s the new users who need it the most.

  My understanding is that Linux developers in the past several years have been explicitly trying to make the OS more accessible to a new user, but it’s not quite there yet.

  Overall, I think Linux is deeply flawed. But seeing how Microsoft seems to be actively trying to make Windows worse, Linux ends up being the only OS where have faith that it will still be usable in 2 years.

  If anything, the more people switch to Linux, the more pressure there will be to make the OS more accessible to new users, and also for software companies to release a Linux-compatible version of their software. Some brave people just need to take the dive first

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're all on the spectrum⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I get very suspicious if a paper samples multiple groups and still uses p. You would use q in that case, and the fact that they didn’t suggests that nothing came up positive.

  Still, in my opinion it’s generally OK if they only use the screen as a starting point and do follow-up experiments afterwards