Contramuffin
@Contramuffin@lemmy.world
- Comment on Petrichor 1 day 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? 6 days 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? 1 week 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' 1 week 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 1 week ago:
If you’re forced to act supportive, is that truly support?
- Comment on lab toys 2 weeks 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"? 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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) 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 ͡°) 5 weeks 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. 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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.
- Comment on Krillin 2 months ago:
Depends on the cultivar. Rice does have different flavors, and some are definitely tastier than others, at least in my opinion. Japanese sticky rice is my favorite, and although I wouldn’t eat it on its own, I can totally see why someone would enjoy it
- Comment on Launches 2 months ago:
That’s the thing - in space, orbits don’t decay. Orbital decay only happens if there’s dust or atmosphere that you bump into along your orbit to slow you down. But in interplanetary space, there’s no dust or atmosphere, and certainly not enough to decay your orbit fast enough to achieve results (otherwise, the Earth would have already decayed and melted in the Sun)
You need to spend fuel to lower your orbit to hit the Sun, and you need to spend fuel to raise your orbit to escape the solar system. It turns out to be really freaking difficult to hit the sun because it simply requires so much fuel to lower your orbit enough to hit the Sun.
- Comment on Wild times in a wild world 2 months ago:
It’s implied that in the process of trying to warn people about covid, she inadvertently caused 9/11
- Comment on Slapping Chicken 2 months ago:
Fun fact: someone actually did it
- Comment on Anon composes game soundtracks 2 months ago:
Probably inspired by Donkey Kong - Jungle or anything associated with jungles are just jazz now
- Comment on brown recluse 2 months ago:
It’s a joke that every spider, no matter what it looks like, will eventually be called a brown recluse (usually by someone who doesn’t know how to recognize a brown recluse)
- Comment on For the Lizadies out there! 2 months ago:
No, you’re right. It’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article that lack of genetic diversity is a large concern for obligate parthenogenic animals
- Comment on Youtube deletes and strikes Linus Tech Tips video for teaching people how to live without Google. Ft. Louis Rossman 2 months ago:
Technically not legal, but depending on the wording, there’s a ton of gray area in what’s considered warranty-covered damage and what’s not warranty-covered damage. Companies absolutely take advantage of the gray area, even lying in some instances because they know that their users would rarely have the know-how to call them out on it and demand rightful warranty coverage. LTT’s argument is that if there is such large legal gray area on the warranty, it is meaningless to provide one to begin with
- Comment on Words truly matter 2 months ago:
The hate jar has visible condensation. The moisture probably is driving the mold growth.
- Comment on Peer review 3 months ago:
Scientists can get really petty in peer review. They won’t be able to catch if the data was manipulated or faked, but they’ll be able to catch everything else. Things such as inconclusive or unconvincing data, wrongful assumptions, missing data that would complement and further prove the conclusion, or even trivial things such as a sentence being unclear.
It generally works as long as you can trust that the author isn’t dishonest
- Comment on I need to survive for 3 days while pooping, and eating as much as possible. It can't take up too much space. What food do I pack? 3 months ago:
Haribo sugarless gummy bears have a strong laxative effect. I’d say that’s a pretty strong contender
- Comment on Anon tries to connect with a coworker 3 months ago:
I just stumbled across one. Hopefully having the actual wording will help you pin down the specific variation that you’re looking for