leisesprecher
@leisesprecher@feddit.org
- Comment on DNA 1 day ago:
I recently learned that mastodon (the animal) literally means breast tooth, because some thought their teeth (or tusks?) looked, well, breasty?
- Comment on My shit doesn't even stink- honest 1 week ago:
Wait, so some people just have a dangling piece of colon attached to nothing but their anus?
- Comment on 🗣 📢 W A T E R 1 week ago:
Honestly, it could be kind of cool.
If you’re doing it right, the juxtaposition of “profound” graphical appearance and nonsensical/banal text content can be funny.
- Comment on Pass the football 3 weeks ago:
My thoughts exactly.
- Comment on I can't imagine being paid to act like I enjoy working in the office 3 weeks ago:
I think this video gets flak, because (in your scenario) not you and your coworker made a video about having fun, but your boss made you come to the otherwise empty office to act like you’re having fun and use that as advertisement.
- Comment on Just the essentials 4 weeks ago:
It’s wild to me, that there seem to be so many payment schemes.
In Germany you get paid monthly, either always on the first or always 15th, but that’s pretty much all variation we have. Even unemployment benefits and parental leave support is monthly.
- Comment on Frog's Gift 4 weeks ago:
Especially if you’d add up all the inefficiencies already introduced in the name of efficiency. All those grant proposals, superfluous fluff articles to bump impact factors, etc. are all required overhead to game a system designed to seem efficient.
- Comment on Frog's Gift 4 weeks ago:
I heard the explanation “conservatives stop thinking if they like the current result”.
If immigrants committed any crime, the obvious solution is to deport all of them. Less immigrants, less crime, sounds great, no further research needed.
But if it’s about something like social security, they go to the ninth layer of indirection to “prove” that it’s bad, because now they found a study that slightly agrees with one of their talking points (p ≈ room temperature).
- Comment on Bombs Awat 4 weeks ago:
Problem is, you almost never know if that’s actually true or complete bullshit.
It seems plausible, but killing virgins for rain also seemed plausible back then in the 70s.
- Comment on Apple Explains Why 256GB Storage Is Better 4 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t call it perfectly fine. It’s a bad decision made for the wrong reasons, but it’s also not a disaster.
It’s like coke in a mug. Weird, not ideal, but serviceable.
- Comment on Apple Explains Why 256GB Storage Is Better 5 weeks ago:
Most people don’t shut down their Macs that often, the fingerprint sensor on the keyboard acts as a power button 99% of the time.
Stupid decision, but almost inconsequential in real life.
- Comment on Guerrilla Women 5 weeks ago:
No, but it causes alpha particles to be emitted.
- Comment on Oopsies 5 weeks ago:
Germany is currently considering a third way: they ask you.
Everyone in Germany has health insurance, so the idea is that the health insurance simply asks you directly to decide. Most people are in favor of organ donation, but never actually get an organ donor card or talk to their relatives. Asking them to decide won’t get anywhere near the donor rates of an opt-out scheme, but it could drastically increase them.
- Comment on ‘Star Wars’: Simon Kinberg to Write, Produce New Trilogy for Lucasfilm 1 month ago:
No, it’s a desert planet that’s legally distinct from tatooine, but still very obviously inspired by it.
Just like starkiller base was definitely not a death star and this weird mining site in 8 was definitely not inspired by hoth, it’s salt and not snow afterall!!
- Comment on A Video Game Flopped Harder Than Anything At The Box Office This Year, And The Mainstream Press Barely Noticed 1 month ago:
It’s interesting in the sense that something went catastrophically wrong here.
This isn’t just a small indie dev wasting a bit of money, it’s hundreds of millions set on fire by an established company in this industry.
The fact that “no one heard of it” is exactly the point. What went wrong here?
- Comment on 5 days with new phone number - 84 spam calls 1 month ago:
It only started this year for me (had this number for 15 years or so), and it’s mostly numbers from the UK and India for some reason (I’m in Germany).
- Comment on Absolute Units 1 month ago:
Why is that guy so annoyed, though?
A person being passionate about something is a good thing!
- Comment on Joy & Curiosity 2 months ago:
Even ascribing consciousness into others or ourselves is actually pretty stupid if you think about it.
Stemming from religion there’s this idea that human “souls” are somehow special and exist on a plane outside reality. But that’s not the case.
We are just semi-rigid blobs of mostly water that grew into weird shapes.
- Comment on Economists be like 2 months ago:
As an academic discussion, sure.
But why exactly are these guys in charge of almost everything to some degree? Economics is essentially string theory for people who are not smart enough for physics - theoretically maybe sound, but utterly useless for reality.
- Comment on Goos-Hänchen effect 2 months ago:
Hähnchen means little rooster, btw.
So this is an article about Hähnchen energy.
- Comment on Indie movies are having a surprising comeback in a bleak time for Hollywood 2 months ago:
And don’t forget that they’re not even good. Like, the CGI looks bad, the writing is bad even for action movies, the acting is weird.
It’s a simulacrum of entertainment. Why would I pay 20€ for that?
And on that note, why 20€ for a movie that shows very clearly that hardly any money went into actually making a good movie?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Wouldn’t that break the necks of everyone over 50?
- Comment on c o e x i s t 2 months ago:
And let’s be honest: the Mongolians were probably not worse than any other invader. War, destruction, looting and raping is kind of par for the course for most civilizations in history.
- Comment on ‘Transformers One’: Sleeper Box Office Hit in the Making or Franchise in Decline? | Analysis 2 months ago:
I think the implication is that a movie without large marketing budget or much attention of media became “silently” successful.
- Comment on Covert Racism in AI: How Language Models Are Reinforcing Outdated Stereotypes 2 months ago:
The real problem are implicit biases. Like the kind of discrimination that a reasonable user of a system can’t even see. How are you supposed to know, that applicants from “bad” neighborhoods are rejected at a higher rate, if the system is presented to you as objective? And since AI models don’t really explain how they got to a solution, you can’t even audit them.
- Comment on 2real5me 2 months ago:
So you feel like you’re an imposter syndrome imposter?
- Comment on The struggle 2 months ago:
You’d have to overhaul the funding system drastically.
Measuring scientific output by publications and citations is useless at best, but it’s easy so that’s how you’re measured.
Writing grant proposals is 95% useless bullshit, there’s no useful content in the proposals, but it gives a false sense of objectivity and competitiveness, so that’s how you’re funded.
Thing is, most of the world operates like that. Corporations measure useless KPIs and demand empty reports. There’s an entire caste of administrators whose entire existence is founded on this overhead to exist. I don’t see a way to change that without a very very serious disruption (that is, a major war, not a startup).
- Comment on Academic writing 2 months ago:
Many professionals (not only scientists) are really bad at crafting sentences and texts, even without jargon.
I get jargon, but even if you replace all of the jargon in a typical paper with simple words, the writing style is often horrible. It’s often weirdly repetitive, has fluff-pieces and empty phrases, and just doesn’t get to the point. (I’ll ignore the inherent worthlessness of many articles here, since this is a symptom of funding policy)
I don’t expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they’re actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can’t. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.
As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.
- Comment on Delectable 2 months ago:
Germany has Spaghetti ice cream, but that’s at least real ice cream just made to look like spaghetti.
- Comment on elucidating 🤌🏼 3 months ago:
Well, actually you’re kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.
So I’m not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) “we will deploy that in our k8s cluster” but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, that’s incredibly stupid.
Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.
I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.