Contramuffin
@Contramuffin@lemmy.world
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
End of mankind - nothing, really. Even with climate change or nuclear war, the rich will live on. It will be a shitty, greedy, undeserving populace that lives on, but mankind will live on.
End of the world as we know it - climate change. I don’t know of anything else more existential
- Comment on How did we switched from "Dinosaur are giant lizards" to "Dinosaur are giant birds" 6 days ago:
Not a paleontologist, but I think it’s a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.
I’m pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can’t.
And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.
My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like
- Comment on Academia to Industry 6 days ago:
No, not weird at all. PhD’s are pain, but certain people like the pain. If you’re good with handling stress, and also OK with working in a fast-paced, high-impact environment (for real, not business talk BS), then it may be the right decision for you. The biggest thing that I would say is that you should really, really think about whether this is what you want, since once you start a PhD, you’ve locked the next 6 years of your life into it with no chance of getting out
- Comment on The most irreplaceable thing 1 week ago:
It is self-aware ironic cringe. This is from r/laughjokes, which is where people try to make the cringiest, unfunny jokes possible, a la Funwaa (but Funwaa does it unironically)
- Comment on Disable windows updates 1 week ago:
What I’ve done is to go to group policies and edit the policy for updates to turn off automatic updates. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).
The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don’t fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.
- Comment on Spelunky creator’s mega-collection of fictional retro games UFO 50 will finally be out this September 3 weeks ago:
Bit dismissive to all the other devs who are working on this project, who are famous and influential in their own right. But otherwise, exciting news!
- Comment on Burrito 3 weeks ago:
Found the AI
- Comment on Same naming convention Elon Musk uses for his kids 3 weeks ago:
Modern biologists naming genes: sanic the hadgehodge
- Comment on It just keeps going 4 weeks ago:
It depends on the field. My understanding is that in physics, it’s accepted to put the PI first. Seems weird to me, but I’m coming from biology, which is a PI-last field
- Comment on In our post-AI era, is job security strictly mythical? Or How to believe in careers as a concept worth doing? 5 weeks ago:
There are certain careers that can’t be replaced by AI - anything that requires working with your hands will not be replaced by AI unless robots suddenly get invented. But if robots exist, then there’s likely bigger things to worry about than your job.
I would look for non-routine jobs that require a lot of handiwork. Non-routine because it will be hard to replace with general, non-AI automation, and handiwork because AI is currently digital only.
Carpentry, plumbing, engineering, laboratory research, teaching all likely fall into the safe category
- Comment on Experiments 1 month ago:
Unlikely for there to be bubbly bits. These are bugs, so we know their shape because their exoskeleton (which is what fossilizes) is their shape. Fish haven’t evolved yet
- Comment on Morish Morals 1 month ago:
Doc Seismic from Invincible
- Comment on Carl? 1 month ago:
It also crawls into the snail’s eyestalks and starts dancing in the snail’s eyes
- Comment on If a universal basic income started today with the stipulation that you had to put 40 hrs/wk towards making the world a better place or solving societal problems, how would you spend your time? 2 months ago:
Isn’t that just a government job with extra steps? I thought the point of UBI is that it’s meant to be, you know, universal.
As a side note, people have this tendency to think that government programs must be means-tested. That is, there must be a criteria that is met before someone is eligible for the program. Same with your assumption in the post - you assume that it must be better to add a stipulation. There seems to be this natural skepticism that if there is no criteria, people will take advantage of the program. I want to challenge that skepticism.
Adding criteria for eligibility inherently means the government must establish a bureaucracy for checking that the criteria is met. This has two notable downsides that people tend to not consider. First, it causes an applicant to wait longer before they can hear back from the program. With existing programs, it sometimes takes months before someone hears back. This ends up discouraging anyone from applying, even if they meet all the criteria. After all, what’s the point of receiving aid in 3 months if you need the aid now?
Second, it causes the cost of the program to increase. A bureaucracy is difficult to maintain. The more money that is spent on checking for eligibility, the less money that people in need will get. And what is the work that such a bureaucracy will do anyways? How does it benefit society to hire someone to say that people’s needs aren’t “real enough” to get government aid?
Which leads me to a third, additional point - it’s morally questionable to require people to meet a certain criteria before they can receive aid. To put it in another way, why do you feel like you need to gatekeep other people’s needs? If a person says they’re struggling, why should anyone say that they’re not struggling enough?
- Comment on Crypt of the NecroDancer: Hatsune Miku Character DLC Trailer 2 months ago:
Didn’t expect that, but what a welcome surprise
- Comment on show them the big p-value 2 months ago:
Because when p < 0.05, the difference becomes significant
- Comment on show them the big p-value 2 months ago:
Correcting people is such small p energy
- Comment on acceptable screws 2 months ago:
Really not a fan of Hex (it just cams out way too easily) but Torx is like screwdriver orgasm. Philips just feels like intentionally bad design
- Comment on The Talos Principle: The Most Underrated Video Game of the Last Decade 3 months ago:
Bought it when it came out! Great game. The antialiasing is really funky, though. There’s a lot of ghosting no matter what antialiasing option you use. I suspect it’s probably a software bug. It does kind of detract from the visual quality aspect of its marketing.
Regardless, I don’t think puzzles sell well in general - bit of a niche genre
- Comment on Does mucous have calories? 3 months ago:
xePMBg9 learns the ways of the desert
- Comment on Caption this. 3 months ago:
Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria finds a new animatronic
- Comment on What are y'all buying on the steam sale? 3 months ago:
Heaven’s Vault, Hardspace Shipbreaker, and both Subnautica games.
Heaven’s Vault is a puzzle game where you have to learn to translate an unknown language. Haven’t gotten too deep into the game yet, but I picked it up because I liked Chants of Sennaar, which has a similar premise. Chants is 25% off right now, so I think that’s a decent recommendation
Hardspace Shipbreaker is a casual game where you break down spaceships for parts. It seemed fun, and I wanted to have something casual to balance out my library, which currently has more intense games than I would like.
Subnautica is a survival game where you’re stuck on an ocean world. I’m honestly not too sure if I would like this one too much, since I’m not too much of a fan of survival games. It just seemed unique enough from the other survival games, and it had a decent deal, and it was in my wishlist for a while. So I acted a bit on impulse and bought both games (Subnautica and Subnautica Below Zero)
- Comment on Caption this. 3 months ago:
Onlyfans users gain a new appreciation for a new fetish: head pics
- Comment on Caption this. 3 months ago:
Me when my grandma starts typing “p” in the address bar
- Comment on Please read and help 3 months ago:
Is the post cut off? I get the impression there’s supposed to be more text here
- Comment on Academic language 3 months ago:
I wonder if the wording depends on the field.
As a microbiologist, I would have phrased it like:
- The sample was destroyed during handling and was not considered for further analysis.
- The animal was not amenable to handling and was excluded from sample collection.
- Comment on Patience 3 months ago:
The difference is that the plane that you build has a chance of being built according to a safety protocol
- Comment on What are the strengths of the scientific method? What are its weaknesses? 3 months ago:
Researchers here. The scientific method is unbelievably tedious. Way more tedious than you would think. So much so that people are willing to pay researchers to do it for them. A simple yes or no question takes weeks or months to answer if you’re lucky.
But the upside is that we can remove our own biases from the answer as much as possible. If you see an obvious difference between any 2 groups, then there’s little to no point in doing the scientific method. But if the difference is less clear, like borderline visible, then biases start to creep in. Someone who thinks there’s no difference will see the data and think there’s no difference. And someone who thinks there’s a difference will look at the data and think there’s a difference. The scientific method excels in these cases, because it gives us a relatively objective way to determine if there is a difference or not between 2 groups
- Comment on Looking for emotional game recommendations 3 months ago:
If it’s emotional you want, you can’t beat To the Moon and its sequel, Finding Paradise. They’re walking sims, but they’ve got great stories that’ll make you ugly cry
- Comment on Inspired by Swift Memes 4 months ago:
This post: over-the-top satire of Americans
The comments: oh god no don’t give them any ideas
Yeah that sounds about right for America