SoleInvictus
@SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Western Digital is already sold out of hard drives for all of 2026 — chief says some long-term agreements for 2027 and 2028 already in place 1 day ago:
I purchased two 12 TB HDDs last year when they were on sale and wow am I glad I did so. I joked how they’d last us the rest of our lives and now that might have to be true.
- Comment on Annon punches a Nazi 2 days ago:
Punching isn’t usually the best first move, but the normal rules go out the window when you’re dealing with fascists so I support him 100%. Punching is a very mild appropriate response in that context.
- Comment on The radical woke subliminal message in Bad Bunny's halftime performance 1 week ago:
Emotional ambivalence isn’t only normal, it’s healthy. I love my partner for being my friend and supporter, but have also felt genuine hatred due to them not doing the work necessary to be a good spouse, leading to us separating.
The trauma bond is a bit different, though. It’s unhealthy ambivalence, where even the positive feelings are ultimately rooted in strongly negative behavior. I had one with my father, so I get it.
- Comment on Real Struggle 😔 1 week ago:
I need to start faking computer illiteracy or at least downplaying my level of literacy. Employers notice how quickly I get computer-related tasks done, but then they expect that as my norm while my coworkers are struggling to use any device without a touch screen.
The last new hire I trained was in his mid-twenties and lacked basic tech literacy outside of the iPhone. I asked him to write up a quick protocol using a template I sent him. He typed the text of the Outlook file preview into notepad and went from there. I was baffled.
- Comment on ICE agents attempt to arrest US Citizen in St Peter, Minnesota 2 weeks ago:
Anyone’s best bet is to try to swerve around in that situation, before they stopped. I’ve had yahoos once try to box me in like that when road raging. You don’t know what they’ll do once they get out, so just swerve around before you find out.
- Comment on Anon likes pizza 2 weeks ago:
Italian rarebit.
- Comment on Anon likes pizza 2 weeks ago:
Why even make pizza? What is it really? Bread, cheese, toppings, and tomato sauce. I can knock that down to $0.25 or less per pizza.
Take a slice of bread, spread with tomato sauce, top with cheese and toppings, then broil until toppings melt. Want a calzone? Add a second piece of bread on top of the end, broil until toasted.
Boom. Pizza.
/s…?
- Comment on in all fairness italian cuisine is a relatively recent invention 3 weeks ago:
I hate Italian breakfast. My stomach doesn’t fare well with coffee, sugar, or wheat. I skip breakfast when I’m there.
- Comment on Truth hurts! 3 weeks ago:
Good question. Slender is a better term. Their skeletal structure is horizontally compact, more so than a Border Collie. Scientists can estimate musculature based on the size and shape of attachment points, but it’s all speculative.
- Comment on Truth hurts! 3 weeks ago:
Plus they were much smaller than depicted in movies. They are estimated to have weighed about 15 kg and were about 2m long, but over half of that was tail. A Border Collie has about the same body length and a much thicker build.
They were long, skinny murder turkeys.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Those were the days, when Musk still had a “will they, won’t they” relationship with being a total piece of shit.
- Comment on You don't say. 3 weeks ago:
Can confirm. I was given it to help with a medication known for spiking anxiety during the initial doses. Not only did my anxiety not increase, I was better able to do things I was usually reluctant to do because of stress or anxiety. It’s like I just didn’t care as much.
The major downside for me was lower blood pressure than normal, so I got dizzy easily if I stood up too fast.
- Comment on Lab anxiety 3 weeks ago:
Same. I’ve used tens of thousands of pipette tips. I can’t imagine what my lifetime plastic consumption is like compared to your average person. I’m guessing I’m like a small neighborhood.
- Comment on Annual merit increase 4 weeks ago:
I worked for a call center as a stop gap when I was younger. The economy had shit itself and while this company was doing great, it was looking to save money because they knew they could squeeze desperate people. Annual raises were coming up. They were based on a system heavily influenced by disciplinary action, so many of my coworkers started getting verbal and written warnings for ridiculous things.
I finally got written up for not pulling up a reference before telling a customer about a past event. I didn’t pull the reference up because I already had it and other common topics open for easy access, which my supervisor told us to do.
I disputed the write-up but the department manager denied it as “the information could have changed between calls, so you should have looked it up through our knowledge base”. I asked how the past could have changed and was told it doesn’t matter: it’s policy. I asked to see the policy. The goalposts immediately changed: “disciplinary action is at management’s discretion and this was a serious error in judgment”. I told them that I was shocked anyone could say that and still expect to be taken seriously, even by themselves, and refused to sign my write-up. I was pulled into the HR manager’s office and given a “Final Warning” write-up for my attitude and not signing my initial write-up. I signed that one and got on a PIP, so they were happy.
Annual reviews were that week. I had extraordinary performance stats but got a $0.04 per hour annual raise - $83.20 per year! I walked out once I got a new job.
I just checked: my old manager is now a “boss babe” who sells essential oils and scented candles for MLMs. Sometimes a life well lived really is the best revenge.
- Comment on Valid Theory: Scientists Are Actually Wizards 4 weeks ago:
I’m even the kind in your picture!
- Comment on dating 4 weeks ago:
I agree, you just should tell people first! Unsolicited story time:
We had been dating for a few weeks. She was smart, nice, and very fun. I really liked her and had decided to consider getting serious. I thought she had ghosted me for our dinner date, though, so I had left and was feeling sad. She called over an hour later to apologize profusely and beg me to come back, saying she’d explain and buy everything that night as apology.
What she didn’t mention was that she was going to alternate between incoherent rambling and staring, silent and unresponsive, into one corner of the cafe’s ceiling. I had no idea what was going on. I got ahold of her roommate, who said she had eaten a bunch of shrooms and walked to her friend’s house. I left after he arrived and I learned he was her roommate… and her boyfriend. Fun.
I went full no contact. Years later, we worked together briefly in graduate school, where she pretended not to know me despite having already told our lab mates we used to be friends. Super awkward, maybe mental problems.
- Comment on Valid Theory: Scientists Are Actually Wizards 4 weeks ago:
I am one, and it’s the closest you can get to being a wizard. You use the in-depth knowledge and tools of your domain to do things the general population often doesn’t fully understand and can’t do well themselves, if at all.
Sounds like wizards to me.
- Comment on dating 4 weeks ago:
I had a formula: “Hi!”, my real first name, a brief mention and open-ended question about something I found interesting on their profile, then closing with something like “Online dating can be a lot. I’d love to hear from you, but only when you’re ready. No pressure. I hope you have a great day.”
So about four sentences. It took me like two minutes. I got about 1 response in 10 instead of over 1:30 that way, at least from women. Success!
I then proceeded to have all of the worst dates I’ve ever been on. One person showed up on shrooms, a woman interrogated me about marriage and children within ten minutes of meeting, another seemed to be fabricating their entire life story on the spot… and more! There were good dates too, but soooo much bad.
- Comment on Hooded Horse ban AI-generated art in their games: "all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult" 5 weeks ago:
I had never heard about temp tracks, but this makes so much sense. That’s a powerful homogenizing force.
- Comment on Generation Wars 5 weeks ago:
Do you mean the pistil? The stamen is the part of a flower that creates pollen.
Assuming yes, it grows a tube down the pistil into the ovary, then sends sperm to fertilize the flowers ovules.
- Comment on Generation Wars 5 weeks ago:
Yep! Pollen are haploid, but technically they’re actually monoploid (or equivalent, depending on polyploidy) given they’re a fully functioning organism.
This is surprisingly common. All the pollen, male bees and ants (and actually a bunch of males in the order Hymenoptera grow from unfertilized eggs), and algae, for example. Certain fungi go through most of their lifecycles haploid and have a brief diploid phase, which undergoes meiosis to get right back to haploid, albeit for gametes this time. Tons of stuff! Nature is fucking wild.
- Comment on Generation Wars 5 weeks ago:
I was about to respond Jarvis to continue the chain, then realized the name sounded familiar. Yep, right in the comic.
It’s me. The comic is about me.
Ask me about microbes!
- Comment on Generation Wars 5 weeks ago:
Totally. Each pollen grain is a more or less self-sufficient organism, at least for its task, which is being transported to another receptive plant, then producing sperm for fertilization.
The closest analogy would be if humans had loads of tiny testicles that they sprayed everywhere, hoping one would hook up with a female so it could produce sperm in them for fertilization.
- Comment on Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes 5 weeks ago:
But what does it say?
- Comment on Anon thinks about wheat 1 month ago:
It’s so substantial, even chewy. I love oat groats for this too.
- Comment on Anon thinks about wheat 1 month ago:
Thank you! I was looking for this comment before posting about it. Almost every grain can be cooked in large amounts of boiling water, like pasta.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 1 month ago:
I can tell you, I’m a real molecular/microbiologist!
Tl;Dr: It’s mostly bunk.
Most of these services don’t analyze your entire genome*, but instead just regions of genes, looking for something called SNPs: single nucleotide polymorphisms. DNA is composed of four nucleobases, commonly represented by their initials: T and A, C and G. A SNP is a spot on a gene where there’s some variability in these, e.g., a C or A or even a T instead of a common G.
Through whole genome sequencing and statistical analysis, these companies were able to identify frequency trends in SNPs according to where the person lives and their self-reported ancestry. Now they use a cheaper, less comprehensive (but still fairly accurate) process to look for the SNPs that data suggests are most strongly correlated with different regions/ancestries and dole out your supposed ancestry.
There are problems.
Conclusions are only as good as your data, and the data are often based strongly on self-reporting, which is usually pretty inaccurate.
SNPs aren’t static - every child has some, about 20 to 60, that their parents don’t have. Many detrimental SNPs can lead to death, so most that persist have no effect, though some are weakly detrimental or, even more rarely, beneficial. That means there’s a limited pool of viable options, so your kid might have spontaneously developed a few strongly associated with a region they’re not at all connected to. You have a few too, as does your coparent and all of your parents. Through a couple of generations of new SNPs, a person’s ancestry results can shift. Through random chance and no new SNPs, one might inherit a combination of SNPs commonly seen in other regions, simply through the right combination of ancestors not at all from that area.
Some SNPs are better than others. Those on what are called “highly conserved” genes, i.e., fuck this gene up at all and you die, tend to be less common and more stable. If a defined group has an unusual SNP or SNPs on these regions, it’s a far better indicator of relatedness than a SNP on a gene for something like vitamin C synthesis, which we have but the process is broken so it doesn’t matter if we break it more.
In summary, these services are built on data of varying quality (shitty data) and moving targets of variable utility (shitty targets).
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
*If you can swing it, genome sequencing and analysis can be really interesting and useful for healthcare decisions. You can learn a lot about how you, specifically, work, and we’re learning more all the time.
Just be sure to get sufficient sequencing coverage, at least 30x if you want “good enough”, 100x or more if it’s medically vital and/or you’re looking for rare genes. 1x is fairly worthless, paying for it is a waste of money.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 1 month ago:
I also find it maddening, not only because it’s silly, but because the analysis is largely crap anyhow.
My mother’s family touted their “Irish heritage for three generations”, then quickly shut up when their genome analysis “proved” they were instead largely English. I’ve had to point out Ireland and England’s relative positions and ask them if they thought anyone in our ancestry might have ever moved from island to island. Maybe consider that they were from somewhere else in Europe even earlier? Now they’re “Irish” again.
Point entirely missed, JFC. They were Irish, their ancestors were maybe English, and way back, their ancestors were definitely African, but I don’t see them getting into African cultural heritage. Thankfully.
You’re United Statesians. I get the draw, they’re looking for genuine but effort-free connection, identity, and belonging in a country whose dominant culture is homogenization, commoditization, and exploitation, but their search for culture through tenuous connections to long-dead ancestors instead of family, friends, and neighbors is just as hollow and unfulfilling.
Don’t obsess about great³-Grandpa Pádraig’s life harvesting peat from the bogs; he’s long dead and probably would have hated you. Embrace what and where you are and utilize and improve what you actually have.
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 1 month ago:
Or that the editor misquoted the source entirely. I’ve even found articles that are littered with “citation needed” that have persisted as such for weeks or months.
I think sometimes people unfairly discount Wikipedia’s utility and overinflate its problems, while others are too cavalier about them. Wikipedia is a useful starting point for research as long as the researcher has the knowledge required to evaluate articles and perform further inquiry into their sources.
- Comment on My kitten loves his hammock in the bathroom window, but my neighbor's trash pile ruins pictures 1 month ago:
I was thinking a “poorly aimed” bottle rocket “from a neighbor kid”.