Contramuffin
@Contramuffin@lemmy.world
- Comment on Black Myth: Wukong producer on The Game Awards top prize snub: "I came all the way here for nothing!" 6 days ago:
Translation appears accurate, but misses the cultural element. In my admittedly limited experience, this is pretty par for the course for Chinese humor. Compared to Western humor, Chinese humor is more brash and abrasive, and almost boastful when viewed from an outside perspective. I can definitely envision someone receiving that sort of response as a joke (“What, you didn’t receive game of the year? Why did you even go?”). And it would certainly agree with my impression that he makes a lot of crude jokes on his social media that don’t translate well into English (see: the IGN article on how the developers are sexist). It can really be quite difficult for inexperienced people to determine what statements are humorous and what statements are earnest, since the difference is often really subtle, even when read in the original language.
I’m not necessarily defending him, since these sorts of jokes do have a nugget of honesty to them, but my read is that he plays them up for humor.
- Comment on I'm having second thoughts about quitting my current position, I'm scared and I don't understand myself. What's happening to me? 1 week ago:
People crave routine, and experiencing a lifestyle change can be really difficult for a lot of people. It’s the same reason why domestic abuse victims don’t leave their abusers, or why people stay in loveless marriages - in their minds, it’s easier to bear with the abuse than to adapt to an unknown lifestyle.
But human emotion is short-sighted. It can only see imminent uncertainty and change. It’s the role of your conscious mind to think further ahead and determine if you stand to benefit from the change. If you’ve got a job lined up that you think will suit you better, then trust your judgement
- Comment on Is steeped tea sterile? 2 weeks ago:
That’s actually a misunderstanding. Sure, regular bacteria can’t thrive at boiling temperatures, but some of then can at least survive boiling temperatures for brief periods of time. In the same way that tardigrades can survive the vacuum of space - they’re not really doing anything in space, but they can enter a state of hibernation that’ll allow them to survive
- Comment on Is steeped tea sterile? 2 weeks ago:
No, but it may as well be considered sterile for normal purposes. Boiling doesn’t actually kill everything - endospores and also fungal spores are ridiculously hardy, and you’d need to autoclave (steam at high pressure) in order to really kill everything. And microbes are everywhere, so the tea is going to get colonized again really quickly unless you pay special attention to making sure that that doesn’t happen. Don’t attempt to can or store the tea, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Also, if you’re attempting to use unsanitary water to make tea, be aware that some bacteria and fungi make toxins that can’t be destroyed by boiling, so even if you manage to kill off the microbes, you can still get sick.
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 2 weeks ago:
Yes - I think it is fair that all murders be prosecuted. As for the gray area of morality, sentencing is variable and somewhat lax for this exact reason. I don’t believe that a judge will be lax with sentencing, but this would be a case in which I would like the shooter to receive a slap on the wrist punishment.
- Comment on FIGHT 2 weeks ago:
Researchers spend $X to find out if microbes kill poison
- Comment on FIGHT 2 weeks ago:
No, that would imply that pollution happens, which would never occur on Fox. Better version might be “see if dirt absorbs poison”
- Comment on FIGHT 2 weeks ago:
Here’s a fun game: describe your research/interest in a similar way that Fox/Republicans use to describe research. The more misleading it is from the actual research, the better.
I’ll start: watch how tired mice get when they get sick
(determine the mechanism of how microbial contact affects host circadian rhythms)
- Comment on Why are $70 AAA games slashing prices so drastically? 3 weeks ago:
On the contrary, IME they significantly slowed down the early game, but they removed the early-mid-game dip right after you unlock fluids and oil processing
- Comment on If a word can have as many meanings as we assign to it. Can was assign every meaning to one word? 3 weeks ago:
Let me introduce you to Goptjaam, probably the closest “language” that fits what you mean: youtu.be/ze5i_e_ryTk
- Comment on Anon creates a business plan 3 weeks ago:
You misunderstand. I’m willing - excited, even - to have restaurants that charge more upfront. I’m not willing to pay double the expected tip just because the restaurant hoped to hide additional costs in the bill and hoped that the payer wouldn’t see it. In case my original comment was not clear enough, that was what they tried doing. 15% gratuity tacked on in small letters at the end of the bill, and this charge was never mentioned at any point, and there was additional space to add tip (of course, with the recommended option being 15%). The sum of the pre-included tip and the tip that I gave is equivalent to tip that I would have given had restaurant not tried this kind of shady bullshit. So I fail to see how I’ve done the workers of the restaurant any wrong.
I choose not to revisit that restaurant for their shady business practices, not because I was unwilling to pay a mandatory tip. Given the original post, I figured that that was clear that that was what I had meant. Clearly I was mistaken.
- Comment on Anon creates a business plan 4 weeks ago:
OOP jokes, but I’ve went to one or two restaurants that tried to do that in the past. I deducted the pre-included tip from the optional tip, and then never went to those restaurants again
- Comment on Petrichor 4 weeks ago:
Wording is funky. To clarify:
The rain smell is due to a compound called geosmin. The bacteria that produces it is Streptomyces.
When I taught microbiology lab, I would grow a petri dish of Streptomyces during one particular class and have the students smell it
- Comment on Can someone give me atleast 5 examples of Democrats being against the working class? 5 weeks ago:
Democrats in the past 10 ish years have been absolutely horrendous at marketing, allowing Republicans to take up all of the media talking space, traditional or otherwise. TV, news, podcasts, social media influencers, YouTube, etc. are all generally Republican leaning.
Republicans control the talking points and co-opt anything that the Democrats say. Meanwhile, Democrats are either unable or unwilling to do the same.
Republicans’ control of the media allows them to get away with way more things than the Democrats. It allows them to essentially claim that they’re for the working class while simultaneously working against working class interests, especially when heard by people who don’t generally follow political news. Meanwhile, Democrats get called out for relatively smaller issues, and that makes them seem elitist and uncaring of working class issues.
One major facet of the Democrats being unable to control their marketing is their unwillingness to use populist rhetoric, even though by policy stances they should be (comparatively) more closely associated with populism than the Republicans. I’ve heard several takes on why Harris lost the election and the one that I most agree with is that she failed to use populist rhetoric and was unable to differentiate herself from Biden. People wanted change, and Harris offered the status quo.
Remember that the vast majority of Americans don’t pay attention to politics, and so voter impressions are decided by tone and messaging rather than specific policies
- Comment on When people say the AI bubble will burst, what exactly does that mean? 5 weeks ago:
A bubble means that investors are putting in more money into a particular field than the field is really worth. How does that happen? Well, investors make money by investing money into small companies and hoping that they get bigger over time. And they need to make guesses in which company they think will actually get big. While investors generally try to make these guesses logically, there’s inherently a bit of “trust me bro” involved in making these decisions.
A bubble happens when investors increasingly rely on “trust me bro” to make their investment decisions. And so they put in more and more money into a field that might not really need or deserve that much money. Not to say that the field is intrinsically useless - just that the hype has overtaken the actual usefulness of that field. So when you see something that’s being hyped up, you should generally view it with caution.
AI as a field is currently very hyped up right now, and so there’s concern that AI might be a bubble.
How does a bubble pop? Randomly and without warning. The problem with bubbles is that they’re driven primarily by hype and “trust me bro,” and so if anything blows the hype, it will cause all the investors to snap back to reality and pull all their money. That’s a lot of money being pulled from a single field at the same time, and that’ll absolutely crash the field. A company going under might trigger a pop, or it could be a random news article that went viral saying that AI is a fraud, or it could be a lackluster product launch. Hype is inherently unstable, and so it can be difficult to predict when and why a bubble pops.
The implosion that happens during a pop isn’t referring to any particular company, it’s referring to the entire field as a whole. It could very well happen (though unlikely) that not a single company goes bankrupt during a pop. It’s merely that those companies would lose a lot of the investor funding that they have previously been relying on
- Comment on anyway, i started blastin' 5 weeks ago:
So will bacteriophages and viruses be snapped as well? Does it mean that scientists can utilize the Thanos snap to determine for good whether viruses are alive?
- Comment on Anon's highschool tries to be supportive 5 weeks ago:
If you’re forced to act supportive, is that truly support?
- Comment on lab toys 1 month ago:
Just yesterday I had a CO2 valve close on me during an experiment while I was away for a moment. It takes effort to turn the valve so it couldn’t have just shaken closed or something. The valve was in the corner of the room and was blocked off by boxes, so nobody could have accidentally bumped it. And, besides, nobody was in the room anyways. Before the experiment I made damn sure that the CO2 valve was open, and even looking through the computer records (which records the CO2) says that the CO2 valve was open until I walked away.
I still have no idea how the valve could have closed on its own. Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation. I’ve clearly angered the science gods and I would do well to sacrifice some more cells to the science gods to appease them
- Comment on How long do you think we'll keep seeing "formerly Twitter"? 1 month ago:
Without another name change, I don’t think that phrase will ever go away, for the simple fact that X as a name is too short and nondescript. In speech, X could refer to a someone you broke up with, or it could just be the beginning of another word, serving as a prefix. In text, it could refer to the actual letter itself, or the close button on a window, or a placeholder, or something NSFW.
There’s simply too many ways that X can be interpreted that even if people associate Twitter with X, people will still specify “formerly Twitter” just to avoid confusion
- Comment on The Magic Words 1 month ago:
Science is like going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. There’s always more things to do and more things to check out. At some point you just have to draw the line and say that enough is enough. Other scientists are likely to ask why you stopped where you stopped, and so saying that “it’s outside the scope of the paper” is basically the nice way of saying that you stopped because you felt like it
- Comment on Do PhDs HAVE to use Dr? 1 month ago:
Most PhD’s in university actually prefer to be called by their first name. As a graduate student, one of the most jarring culture shocks is to learn to call professors by their first names. At least that’s the case in the US, not sure about elsewhere
- Comment on Should I or should I not use/bother with using Linux? (READ THE WHOLE POST) 1 month ago:
It’s a multifaceted answer for me, I feel.
Linux is weird, on a technical level. It’s funky and broken and has weird quirks you have to remember. But it’s not malicious. Wendel from Level1Tech said it best in one of his videos: the headaches with Linux are haphazard, the headaches with Windows are adversarial.
It’s not a perfect solution to Windows, but at least for some people, the respect that it has for its users (ie, no ads, not trying to fight you on everything you’re trying to do, gives you the ability and freedom to tinker as you please) offsets its technical problems.
Additionally, Linux is missing a lot of core applications. There’s many applications that do have a Linux version, and many that can run through a compatibility layer, and out of those that are left, many have really solid replacements. Heck, you might be surprised to find that some of the software that you use already were originally intended to be replacements for Windows-only applications.
But there’s still a handful of core applications that don’t work on Linux and don’t really have a good replacement, and even missing 1 can easily break someone’s work flow. No, LibreOffice isn’t a full replacement of Microsoft Office, no, GIMP can’t actually replace Photoshop.
As for terminal, there’s no way around it. You will have to open terminal at some point. To be clear, most, if not all, things that you might imagine yourself doing likely has some way of doing it through a GUI. The issue is that as a new user, you don’t know where the GUI is, or what it’s called, or how to even ask. And when the tutorials that you find online tell you to just use terminal, that ends up being the only practical way of getting things done. So it’s a weird Catch-22, where only experienced users who know where all the menus are will know where the GUI options are, but it’s the new users who need it the most.
My understanding is that Linux developers in the past several years have been explicitly trying to make the OS more accessible to a new user, but it’s not quite there yet.
Overall, I think Linux is deeply flawed. But seeing how Microsoft seems to be actively trying to make Windows worse, Linux ends up being the only OS where have faith that it will still be usable in 2 years.
If anything, the more people switch to Linux, the more pressure there will be to make the OS more accessible to new users, and also for software companies to release a Linux-compatible version of their software. Some brave people just need to take the dive first
- Comment on We're all on the spectrum 2 months ago:
I get very suspicious if a paper samples multiple groups and still uses p. You would use q in that case, and the fact that they didn’t suggests that nothing came up positive.
Still, in my opinion it’s generally OK if they only use the screen as a starting point and do follow-up experiments afterwards
- Comment on ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 2 months ago:
Well, we are pretty big for insects
- Comment on How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality. 2 months ago:
I think having higher frame rates isn’t necessarily about whether our eyes can perceive the frame or not. As another commenter pointed out there’s latency benefits, but also, the frame rate affects how things smear and ghost as you move them around quickly. I don’t just mean in gaming. Actually, it’s more obvious when you’re just reading an article or writing something in Word. If you scroll quickly, the words blur and jitter more at low frame rates, and this is absolutely something you can notice
- Comment on Data is a plural 2 months ago:
“is” is correct here, due to the implied nouns. “Data” in this case is an appositive and serves to describe the implied noun, “word.” And “plural” is an implied noun for “plural word”
You can see it most clearly if you fill in the implied nouns:
(the word) data is a plural (word)
- Comment on Oxygen 2 months ago:
It’s very simple - the sun isn’t burning. The sun is actually a very large healing crystal. As you may know, healing crystals capture the harmonic vibrations of the universe and turn them into things that are good for our health, like warmth, vitamins, essential oils, and positive ions.
The sun is made out of a healing crystal that converts the vibrations into warmth, witch is what we see as sunlight. The sun is so big that it’s able to capture a lot of harmonic vibrations and so it makes a lot of warmth.
The real question is who polished the healing crystal that forms the sun, and who put it up into space. The natural answer is that it’s clearly done by my good friend Moonlight Namaste, and she will teach you how to do the same thing if you visit her blog and sign up for her meditation classes. With enough guided meditation, you too will start to see the universal vibrations and learn how to change your oscillations to match the universal vibrations. The first 200 people who sign up will get a free dream catcher, so sign up today!
- Comment on Mental hell 2 months ago:
Definitely not the same, at least in my experience. It differs by field, but in my field, grad programs basically have zero classes, and whatever classes there are are generally automatic A’s. In turn, the difficulty comes from the fact that you are basically in indentured servitude to your advisor, and there is no actual recourse for trivial things like “overwork” and “burnout.”
I know of people who did 70 hour work weeks, and for a period of time, I had to do that as well. Also, you get paid less than you would if you had just gotten a 40 hour per week job at a company.
Anyways, the advisor that you pick really makes or breaks your experience.
- Comment on Academic writing 2 months ago:
It’s something that people, in least in my field of microbiology, have been recently aware of and are trying to correct. The problem is not just an in-group signifier, since everyone, even experts, finds the author insufferable and difficult to understand
- Comment on Mornings 2 months ago:
Is it alright to go around wiping the OS off of other people’s computers?
- is what your comment reads like to me.
To be clear: each machine generally needs a computer to be permanently plugged into it. Generally the computer belongs to the university. You’re not plugging in your own personal laptop into the machine. Saying to install Linux on these computers is essentially tampering with the university’s electronics and IT will be very unhappy that you did that.