Sal
@Sal@mander.xyz
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to mander@mander.xyz | 8 comments
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
From the title I thought that the UV opsin itself was also performing the pressure sensing function… Which would be fascinating to me, as I have worked with viscosity and pressure-sensitive fluorophores in the past (BODIPYs and DCDHF), and I would love to see living things making use of this molecular sensor design.
But I now see that it is a different molecular sensor that is also present in the UV sensing cell:
Our results indicate that the ciliary opsin required for detecting UV light is not essential for pressure sensation.
So, today is not the day we find pressure-sensitive fluorescent sensors in a living organism, but that is still a fascinating finding. I will have to read more about those “TRP channels”, the “ultimate integrators of sensory stimuli”. They seem like a very interesting class of bio molecules that I still know too little about 😁
Really nice work, thanks a lot for sharing it here!!
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
That is amazing! Thanks for sharing!!
- Comment on mycology 5 weeks ago:
I think that they are referring to Paxillus involotus
It is quite an interesting mushroom. It was considered “safe to eat” for a long time, but it contains an antigen that a human’s immune system can learn to attack.
The antigen is still of unknown structure but it stimulates the formation of IgG antibodies in the blood serum.
I once looked into whether this immune response builds up over many exposures, or if it is a random event that has a probability of happening for each exposure. I don’t remember finding a convincing answer… If it is a random event, then eating this mushroom could be considered a “Russian roulette” mushroom that will usually provide a nice meal, but, if unlucky, you may experience the following:
Poisoning symptoms are rapid in onset, consisting initially of vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and associated decreased blood volume. Shortly after these initial symptoms appear, hemolysis develops, resulting in reduced urine output, hemoglobin in the urine or outright absence of urine formation, and anemia. Hemolysis may lead to numerous complications including acute kidney injury, shock, acute respiratory failure, and disseminated intravascular coagulation. These complications can cause significant morbidity with fatalities having been reported.
I agree with you that this is probably unrelated to the “generally similar to humans” comment. I feel like this fantasy is a combination of the above fact mixed in with the fact that the Fungi belong to the Opisthokonts, which places them closer to animals than plants, and so they share some interesting cellular characteristics with us. This places them closer to animals than plants, but “generally similar to humans” is perhaps a bit of a stretch ^_^
But, it is just a meme about a guy being hyped about mushrooms. Hopefully people don’t expect memes to be super accurate 😁
- Comment on Got milk? 1 month ago:
😆
- Comment on Plant Natives 1 month ago:
Thanks!
- Comment on temperature 1 month ago:
As someone who grew up in the tropics and now lives somewhere colder, I went through the first three table entries thinking that this was Celsius and felt understood.
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
I like the idea of downvotes, and no nobody on this instance is really abusing them
That is true! I have been lucky and there has not been much trouble. Only very nice people seem to like creating accounts here 😜
Thanks for your input
- Comment on Expected instance downtime for upgrading pict-rs 3 months ago:
Sure! Thank you for creating a community!
- Comment on Expected instance downtime for upgrading pict-rs 3 months ago:
…Sorry 😅
And welcome!
- Comment on Expected instance downtime for upgrading pict-rs 3 months ago:
😅 I have read and re-read the migration guide. Seems simple enough… And the current backup is almost ready!
- Comment on Expected instance downtime for upgrading pict-rs 3 months ago:
Yeah, since it is such a short downtime - comparable to what one might randomly see anyway when the CPU spikes for a mysterious reason, I figure that it is not so helpful to plan ahead and make an announcement. I just do it when I have some time.
- Comment on Expected instance downtime for upgrading pict-rs 3 months ago:
That’s probably when I ran a quick upgrade from 0.19.2-rc-5 to 0.1.9.2! If I know it will take only ~5 mins I usually just go ahead without notice.
- Submitted 3 months ago to mander@mander.xyz | 11 comments
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
Thanks!
This is a comparatively small instance, the problem is more prominent in the larger instances!
Also, I just found out that there is a user-level setting to turn off the visibility of all scores:
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
Thanks. My initial gut instinct was that the best would be to enable it for everyone, but after reading other’s perspectives and thinking more deeply about the privacy implications, I agree that transparency is the way to go.
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
Thank you for your input, it’s very appreciated!
As for keeping down votes, I’d be reluctant to mess with a system that works as well as it seems to.
There is a toggle in the admin settings to enable/disable downvotes, and several instances do disable them.
This hides the button and the results from the UI - other instances can still vote, but it’s not displayed. This change would be easy to implement and revert messing up anything. Personally, I do think that having up/down votes is a useful metric more often than it is abused. Disabling down-votes might be a good match for an instance dedicated to, for example, sharing one’s own art, as users might feel more comfortable sharing in such a space.
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
I like the suggestion of mozz@mbin.grits.dev of simply making a bigger effort of letting users know that votes are “semi-public” information in the fediverse, and I have opened an issue to suggest implementing that approach (github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2316)
But above all I appreciate that you are being transparent about it and taking our opinions into account.
One of the big selling points of Lemmy is privacy, and so many users do have a high expectation of privacy. It is important to be very clear and transparent about aspects that can raise privacy-related flags. Votes need to be public for the federation to work and to prevent double-counting, at least the way they are currently implemented, so transparency is the best solution.
The argument for letting everyone see the votes is a bit more tricky. On the one hand, if the tech-savvy can do it, then why not just let everyone do it? On the other hand, if it is easy to do, you make it easier for users to witch hunt and attack each other on the basis of how they vote.
Putting some additional thought on it… Enabling it for everyone has other privacy implications. For example, old votes would also become public and I can’t get backwards-consent from everyone. Votes from selective instances federating with us will too. I would need to wipe all of the votes from the instance before enabling that. I think making the effort to be transparent is a better approach.
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
I have create an issue with your suggestion: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2316
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
I literally just federated lemmy.world/c/callofcthulhu@ttrpg.network to test
I checked the votes of the most recent post and I do see votes from lemmy.world, so it was already federating!
I also tested just now and I no longer see “0” votes, I do see a single vote (from the original poster). So that did change, but the score remains “1”. You can see:
mander.xyz/c/onewheel@lemmy.world
Yeah! I think so. It might be worth a post to a wider swathe of the community.
Since I am not confident I can code this myself, at least not quickly, I think it is better if I make a GitHub issue for it.
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
I sort of assumed that the process that downloads a community’s history when it’s first federated also includes the identity of all the past votes (I feel like it has to be that way in order to make sure we’re not double-counting votes during federation?), but that’s just uneducated guessing.
What happens is that the content arrives with 0 votes. There is no double voting, votes are just lost. The instance only sends out “user #X up-voted comment #Y” at the moment when the button is clicked. The list of votes does not get sent when a community is federated.
Honestly I think that for new users the upvote / downvote buttons should literally pop up a message on every vote that says, “Hey! Due to the nature of the fediverse your upvotes and downvotes are semi-public information!” until you check the box that says “don’t show me again.”
That’s a very good idea!
- Comment on Viewing votes 3 months ago:
Tell me if I’m wrong – since votes are federated, anyone who’s tech-savvy / motivated enough can always expose the identity of who upvoted or downvoted things anyway. No?
I think that the easiest way is to create an instance and collect votes.
But, as far as I can tell, It is not possible to retrieve the votes that were cast before the instance was created. The votes only get sent out to the subscribed instances at the time of voting. If you pull a comment or post later, it will arrive with 0 votes.
Maybe publicizing voting and making sure people know voting is public would be better (esp if it’s already exposed to all end-users through Friendica). I could see a few different ways it could lead to problems if people assume it’s private information when it’s really not.
I think so too. I have already been part of a few conversations with users who have just discovered that this is possible. I think that this transparency is something that the feature wants to achieve, but it is important to publicize it to avoid surprises.
I can include this information in the instance’s application, then at least new users would be informed.
- Submitted 3 months ago to mander@mander.xyz | 19 comments
- Submitted 4 months ago to mander@mander.xyz | 1 comment
- Comment on Hooray, we're back! So what happened? 5 months ago:
Yes, sorry!
I often check the available disk space and expand it when it reaches ~90% occupancy. I increased it by 20 GB last Sunday night before traveling for work and did not expect it to fill up so quickly, but I underestimated the current rate at which the disk is being filled. This morning the disk was filled but I did not notice until after work.
I will keep a larger empty buffer to avoid this happening, but I also want to find some way to save disk space. The overwhelming majority of the space is occupied by images that are duplicated from other instances.
- Comment on The complete sequence of a human Y chromosome - Nature 8 months ago:
The human Y chromosome has been notoriously difficult to sequence and assemble because of its complex repeat structure that includes long palindromes, tandem repeats and segmental duplications. As a result, more than half of the Y chromosome is missing from the GRCh38 reference sequence and it remains the last human chromosome to be finished
Oh wow. This is surprising! I thought the full human genome had been sequence a while ago.
- Submitted 8 months ago to mander@mander.xyz | 3 comments
- Comment on [Canvas] Thanks for joining! 8 months ago:
I thought it was appropriate that we had a mantis next to our logo
Haha, sure! Why not :p
- Submitted 8 months ago to mander@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on [Canvas] Thanks for joining! 8 months ago:
Ah! Thanks!
Then it is not something I’m familiar with. But it is nice.