MagosInformaticus

@MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does DNA decide the shape of the body?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.

  One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.

  All of that signaling is controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.

  So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What’s a “sovereign citizen “?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

  • Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government’s authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
  • People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under “natural law”.
  • People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

  Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, what natural law looks like, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
  Primarily it’s a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes as in Germany, it’s a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

  You might enjoy münecat’s longer form explanation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would magically turning all trans people into the gender they want to be be unethical?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. I guess for me the “trans” bit just isn’t as strongly coupled to the person - that it’s natural to use “man” for such a person in general, but there are contexts like healthcare and the politics of healthcare that make the subcategory someone falls into relevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would magically turning all trans people into the gender they want to be be unethical?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I describe someone as a “tall man” or “clever man”, do those qualifiers/subcategorizations call into question whether he is a “man”?
  If they don’t, I’m genuinely interested in hearing what distinction you apparently see between those two and saying he is a “trans man”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have companies that claim to anonymize the data gathered on individuals ever been independently audited to verify that?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It becomes inherently difficult to make datasets actually anonymous the more data points they have about a given individual - it doesn’t much matter whether names and such are listed data points if they can be inferred from the rest. This investigation by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes, for instance, managed to identify a named German member of parliament (Valerie Wilms) and other public functionaries within a data set on web browsing habits they received from data brokers. Most countries do have data privacy legislation and relevant regulatory/enforcement agencies, but the data brokerage business is big and intensely international so the picture on audits is kind of unavoidably complex.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘ChatGPT detector’ catches AI-generated papers with unprecedented accuracy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Overfitting is the normal term.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Insomniac on Spider-Man 2's release⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Miles Morales is Puerto Rican and the flag has previously featured in the Morales home/Miles’ living areas in the game series. This time they used a Cuban one by mistake.