Tolstoshev
@Tolstoshev@lemmy.world
- Comment on Helldivers 2 has received 100,000 negative reviews since announcing players must link Steam to a PSN account 6 months ago:
The irony is that the game trained the playerbase to work well together to accomplish missions and now that solidarity is being turned against them.
- Comment on What do companies get out of rewards programs 6 months ago:
Protip: use the Jenny phone number for any loyalty programs you don’t want to sign up for. I use 512-867-5309 as the alt ID and it works every time.
- Comment on How does South Park get away with trashing identifiable people? Are they sued often? 7 months ago:
Yep that one is true as well. Paul is a vegetarian and didn’t want a song about non vegetarian food. He didn’t have a problem with parody in general, just that specific instance. Geez, I know way too much trivia about Weird Al :)
- Comment on How does South Park get away with trashing identifiable people? Are they sued often? 7 months ago:
That he does. The only snafu he had was with Coolio for Gangster’s Paradise. Apparently the label said yes but didn’t actually check with Coolio and he wasn’t happy about it. Weird Al apologized for the mixup and they made peace with it later. Weird Al said the only star that has consistently turned him down was Prince, who didn’t find the whole parody thing funny.
- Comment on How does South Park get away with trashing identifiable people? Are they sued often? 7 months ago:
Nirvana famously said they knew they had made it when Weird Al did a parody of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
- Comment on xkcd: Machine 7 months ago:
I remember XKCD #1. I just did the math in my head and it’s been ~20 years. Fuck I’m old.
- Comment on Europe’s space agency prepares to blot out the Sun 7 months ago:
- Comment on Trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida 7 months ago:
What the fuck?
This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.
- Comment on Tidal has found the right way to share music with friends. 7 months ago:
Just learned about this in a chatroom today and it’s perfect. Now I don’t have to choose between excluding people with a Spotify link or subjecting them to YouTube ads.
- Comment on Steam now has over 100,000 games listed 8 months ago:
And I own 1 out of 100 of them. Time to work on my backlog some more.
- Comment on What are the best indie games you've ever played? 8 months ago:
Spelunky. My Vita was basically a Spelunky machine.
- Comment on What games do you replay regularly/annually ? 8 months ago:
I usually try an ascend at least once during the annual Nethack tournament:
- Submitted 8 months ago to [deleted] | 24 comments
- Comment on Sam Bankman-Fried deserves 40-50 years in prison for FTX fraud, prosecutors say 8 months ago:
The Madoff Mistake, a classic.
- Comment on Did we? 8 months ago:
- Comment on AI image-generator Midjourney blocks images of Biden and Trump as election looms 8 months ago:
Well they better turn that feature on because last time I used MJ it happily accepted images of people who were banned in text prompts and gave me results.
- Comment on AI image-generator Midjourney blocks images of Biden and Trump as election looms 8 months ago:
All well and good for text prompts, but MJ also lets you upload images as prompts so how are they going to recognize every image of Trump or Biden that is uploaded?
- Comment on Image-scraping Midjourney bans rival AI firm for scraping images 8 months ago:
Everything Midjourney generates is public domain since AI can’t copyright anything. At most Midjourney can complain about the clumsy scraping taking down their site.
- Comment on Reddit: Return Of The Junk Stock IPO 8 months ago:
From the article:
Reddit earns an Unattractive Stock Rating.
Of course it does, have you seen the average redditor?
- Comment on How does delisting a game make/save money? 8 months ago:
This. And layoffs.
- Comment on What are the strengths of the scientific method? What are its weaknesses? 8 months ago:
Good example and well explained. We should team up on a book on science for lay people!
Your point about specifying the null hypothesis and the p value is very important. Another way studies can fail is if you pick 20 different variables, like you mentioned, and then look to see if any of them give you p<0.05. So in your example, we measure smiling and 19 other factors besides being told jokes. Let’s say the weather, the day of the week, what color clothes the person is wearing, what they had for breakfast, etc. Again, due to statistics, one of those 20 is going to appear relevant by chance. You’re essentially doing 20 experiments in one so again you’ll get one spurious result that you can report as “success”.
Experimental design is tough and it’s hard to grok until you’ve had to design and run your own experiment including the math. That makes it easy for people to pass off bad science as legitimate, whether accidentally or on purpose. And it’s why peer review is important, where your study gets sent to another researcher in your field for critique before publication.
There’s other things besides bad math that can trip you up like correlation vs causation, and how the data is gathered. In the above example, you might try to save money by asking subjects to self report on their smiling. But people are bad at doing that due to fallible memory and bias (did that really count as a full smile?). Ideally you want to follow them around and count yourself, with a clear definition of what counts as a smile. Or make them wear a camera that does facial recognition. But both of those cost more money than just handing someone a piece of paper and a pencil and hoping for the best. That’s why you should always be extra suspicious of studies that use self reporting. As my social psych prof said, surveys are the worst form of data collection. It’s what makes polling hard because what people say and what they do are often entirely different things.
- Comment on Is there a word for the phenomena where everyone benefits from design decisions made to help vulnerable populations? 8 months ago:
I like that and will start using it. We’re all pretty helpless after birth and before death, so being able bodied is just a temporary phase in the middle, for those lucky enough to not be born with a disability or acquire one in the middle of life.
- Comment on Having a low income is like being a kid again – though now every expense comes with guilt | Deirdre Fidge 8 months ago:
Being poor shaves 13 points off your IQ due to the stress and extra cognitive load of having to make these tough decisions for every little thing. Those 13 points come back should you be lucky enough to improve your station in life. Meanwhile the loss of brainpower increases the likelihood of bad decisions that make your life worse and the cycle continues.
- Comment on Is there a word for the phenomena where everyone benefits from design decisions made to help vulnerable populations? 8 months ago:
Plus people rarely know in advance that they might become disabled later in life, so they are shooting themselves in the foot by protesting when they are lucky enough to be able bodied.
- Comment on What are the strengths of the scientific method? What are its weaknesses? 8 months ago:
P<0.05 means the chance of this result being a statistical fluke is less than 0.05, or 1 in 20. It’s the most common standard for being considered relevant, but you’ll also see p<0.001 or smaller numbers if the data shows that the likelihood of the results being from chance are smaller than 1 in 20, like 1 in 100. The smaller the p value the better but it means you need larger data sets which costs more money out of your experiment budget to recruit subjects, buy equipment, and pay salaries. Gotta make those grant budgets stretch so researchers will go with 1 in 20 to save money since it’s the common standard.
- Comment on What are the strengths of the scientific method? What are its weaknesses? 8 months ago:
P<0.05 means one in 20 studies are relevant just by chance. If you have 20 researchers studying the same thing then the 19 researchers who get non significant results don’t get published and get thrown in the trash and the one that gets a “result” sees the light of day.
Thats why publishing negative results is important but it’s rarely done because nobody gets credit for a failed experiment. Also why it’s important to wait for replication. One swallow does not make a summer no matter how much breathless science reporting happens whenever someone announces a positive result from a novel study.
TL;DR - math is hard
- Comment on If frozen embryos are considered as children, then it must be acceptable to freeze children. 8 months ago:
Just don’t accidentally grab the wrong container or it will be murder and cannibalism! Shades of Kronos.
- Comment on Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power | AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up. 8 months ago:
At our current pace I agree, so I think we need to be doing a fusion moonshot to speed things up. And also investing in renewables and other options. The cost of fossil fuels, both in climate damage and in economic terms is taking humanity down fast.
- Comment on Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power | AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up. 8 months ago:
Possibly true. The joke in the industry is that it’s always 10 years away. Although some big breakthroughs lately:
- Comment on Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power | AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up. 8 months ago:
It’s nuclear fusion or die at this point. Civilization can’t survive without cheap energy.
