Contramuffin
@Contramuffin@lemmy.world
- Comment on Can you guess, chat? 8 hours ago:
First one looks like a repeater pipette? Not sure about the second one
- Comment on Th EU iniative for Stop Killing Games has reached the goal of 1 million signatures!! 5 days ago:
No, that requirement has already been met. The final requirement (which has just been met now) is to reach a total of 1 million signatures. Basically, all requirements are now satisfied
- Comment on CRISPR-Cas9 6 days ago:
Explanation: CRISPR-Cas9 is most commonly known to be a gene editor, but since its initial discovery, people have found that with some minor tweaks, CRISPR can be made to do a bunch of other things, things that biologists could have only dreamed of previously.
If you introduce a mutation that deactivates the Cas9 protein, the entire CRISPR complex still binds to DNA. Then, you can essentially glue whatever you want onto this modified Cas9 to produce a bunch of different effects:
- deactivated Cas9, no additional modifications: blocks other proteins from touching the DNA, which suppresses a gene without destroying it
- glue on some transcriptional activators: makes the cell express a gene
- glue on some fluorescent proteins: makes your DNA glow, lets you see where it is
- Comment on The UK Stop Killing Games petition has reached 100.000 signatures 6 days ago:
My understanding is that they misunderstood the petition, so this new one is rephrased in an attempt to avoid another misinterpretation
- Comment on I played Lovecraftian doctor simulator Do No Harm, and let me tell you, my brother in Cthulhu, I did some serious harm 1 week ago:
I quite like Strange Horticulture, but it felt too linear for my tastes. This seems like an interesting shakeup of that formula. I’ll keep an eye on it
- Comment on Why are living beings not being cooked alive constantly at the tekpersatures we are? 2 weeks ago:
Are you confusing fahrenheit and Celsius? Body temp can’t cook food
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Heavily context dependent, I’d say. In a vacuum, it’s not that unusual. The entire purpose of text is that you don’t have to respond immediately. If it happens constantly, then maybe it would have been worth figuring out why that keeps happening. Maybe he dislikes you, or maybe he’s just busy.
It seems you already understand that, though. So perhaps the more informative question is why you feel the way that you feel towards your ex. Frankly, it’s probably some level of infatuation (or as I call it, puppy love). It’s not intrinsically bad, but it does tend to drive people to have unrealistic expectations for their partners, which can drive conflict once those expectations become established
- Comment on The Elder God 2 weeks ago:
The Sun god demands more sacrifices
- Comment on Fabulous through the ages 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on geneticists 4 weeks ago:
Fwiw that qPCR curve doesn’t look that bad, just don’t have the y-axis be in log form
- Comment on Ke$he's Quantum Party 4 weeks ago:
Can she make a law that she cannot break? Checkmate Christians
- Comment on Why are you here and not on Reddit? 4 weeks ago:
I use Reddit through Relay and it’s gone now. Even if I want to use Reddit, I have to jump through hoops to use it.
- Comment on Do you care about up/down votes? 4 weeks ago:
To me, it’s a way to quantify how other people feel about my own positions. It’s neither good nor bad to be upvoted or downvoted. People have unpopular takes sometimes and you shouldn’t stake your identity on the amount of upvotes or downvotes you have.
Instead, upvotes and downvotes are most useful for other people to guage comments. Generally speaking, if a comment is universally downvoted, that likely means the position is unpopular enough that it adds no value to a discussion, and is therefore not worth engaging with.
I consider it to be a system built upon mutual understanding - that you don’t have to seriously engage with everyone’s viewpoints, and conversely, that nobody has to seriously engage with yours.
It becomes a problem when upvotes and downvotes are gamified like on Reddit, because Goodhart’s Law demands that it stops serving its purpose when people are only attempting to optimize their upvote/downvote ratio.
- Comment on “Yay! We made our project objectively worse!” 4 weeks ago:
It doesn’t get crispy, but on the other hand, less microplastics on your food, so that’s a fine trade anyways.
Pro tip: microwave for half the microwave time, then bake for half the baking time. That reproduces the original crispiness without the sleeve
- Comment on Anon goes camping 4 weeks ago:
If parasites weren’t an effective life strategy, there wouldn’t be parasites in the world
- Comment on No context needed. 5 weeks ago:
Have you never seen a bottle brush?
- Submitted 1 month ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 5 comments
- Comment on PLEASE bro 1 month ago:
This is a map of signaling pathways in a cell. Essentially, how does a cell detect a stimulus and how does the cell respond to it. Signaling networks are notoriously difficult to parse, in major part because many of the proteins that make up the network are promiscuous (meaning that they target many types of proteins instead of just 1). Think of network as less of a series of defined steps and more of a chaotic mess. It’s so chaotic that most maps will select a theme (ie, hormone detection, stress signaling, infection, etc.) and only show the interactions that are relevant to that theme. Unfortunately, that also means that each map will show a network that’s completely different from the others, even though the proteins are the same.
The joke here is that it’s very tempting to make another map. This map is finally going to solve cell biology, I promise, we just have to make another map. Ignore the fact that we already have so many maps, just one more map is all we need
- Comment on I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store? 1 month ago:
It was a while ago, I don’t remember off the top of my head which specific game I’m remembering. Doing a brief search, it appears that this happened to Unreal Tournament and Rocket League, though it appears that the games still work for the people who bought it before the unlisting. I think the concern was losing functionality, especially for server-based or multiplayer games
- Comment on I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store? 1 month ago:
Sweeney (the CEO of Epic) says that he wants competition with Steam, but many of his actions point toward that he really just wants to be the guy at the top (ie, he wants to be the monopoly instead of Valve). He’s taken a fair number of anti-consumerist stances, which vary from understandable to clearly anti-competitive.
Epic is known for making exclusivity deals with 3rd party studios in which Epic bribes the studio with money, and in exchange, the studio does not release their game on Steam for 1 year.
At several points, this occurred after a studio already said that they will release on Steam, and the studio would have to walk back and delete their Steam listing.
Iirc, at one point Epic bought out a studio and had them remove the Steam listing for an already-released game, causing the game to be unplayable for people who had already bought the game
The Epic Game Store released in a non-functional state, and development on it is extremely slow. The first impression of the broken store likely still influences many people’s impression of the store. But it’s still missing many features that many gamers want to see in a store.
There were various rumors when the store first launched that it contained spyware. My understanding is that those rumors never fully got disproven, especially since some of the claims were supported by at least some evidence
Epic does not support Linux, and Sweeney has openly said that he does not plan to support Linux until it becomes more popular. He did immediately jump on board with supporting Arm though, which caused a lot of Linux gamers to think that he just doesn’t want to support Linux
Sweeney is a pretty abrasive person and iirc he made a lot of concerning statements on his social media. Several of them (as mentioned above) indicate that he wants to dethrone Valve so that he can be the monopoly instead
Overall, many gamers are in support of more competition in the game store space. Unfortunately, many gamers also think that Epic is an untrustworthy competitor, and they believe that Epic has a serious chance of making the gaming industry worse if they become more popular. As a result, many would prefer for Steam remain the monopoly rather than to take a bet on Epic.
- Comment on Partner has ADD, do I have misophonia? 1 month ago:
I don’t think you seem to have any problems, but it sounds like you’re partner may have some things that they’ll need to work out.
People are creatures of habit - while it is true that your partner is being an asshole, I currently don’t have any reason to believe that they’re doing it out of malice rather than habit.
It sounds like your partner may need to seek professional help, because it is their responsibility to manage their ADD/depression, and it sounds like they may be struggling to do that. It is not your responsibility to manage it for them
- Comment on if pure water is not conductive why would condensation be an issue for electronics? 1 month ago:
Because it is really, really difficult to get pure water. Even distilled water isn’t pure. I’m not even sure you can get pure water outside of an industrial or laboratory setting
- Comment on It's My Nature 1 month ago:
Reference to an Aesop fable. In the original version, the scorpion stings the frog and both of them drown. The moral is that some people are intrinsically harmful, even against their own self interest
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I find that high school really doesn’t expose you to many of the most interesting fields and careers out there, and the subjects that it does expose to you are typically taught at a very basic, foundational level. To put it simply, I strongly believe that you and many other people in your situation don’t know what they’re passionate about because they don’t even know it exists.
I think it’s the fault of the school system for not working harder to show the intricacies of actual careers, but for now, we just have to deal with what we’re given.
We can try guessing what sorts of things you may like if you tell us a bit more about yourself. What sorts of things are you passionate about (ie, hobbies, obsessions, interests, favorite subject in school), and why do you feel passionate about it?
- Comment on Linux help and actual pros and cons 2 months ago:
The distro itself doesn’t particularly matter. Unless you’re picking a niche distro or one designed for experts, all of them will have a good level of polish. What does matter is the desktop environment, which is the look and feel of the OS.
Many distros offer various desktop environments, and it can be a good idea to take a look at different desktop environments and see which one you like. I personally enjoy KDE Plasma, since I feel like it resembles Windows 10 the most. A bunch of popular distros like Bazzite and Fedora offer KDE Plasma variants. Alternatively, many people also like Cinnamon, though I personally think it looks somewhat outdated. Cinnamon is primarily offered by Linux Mint.
With the right desktop environment, Linux isn’t actually particularly technical. There’s definitely been a push recently to try to make things more user friendly. From time to time, you might still have to open terminal to do more advanced things, but I find that you can generally get by.
However, the way you do things in Linux is pretty different than in Windows, and it definitely takes a bit of getting used to and building up a new set of muscle memory. You will get frustrated that something isn’t where you think it is. My advice is that you should dual boot and keep a copy of Windows, so that you can switch back to Windows when you just need to get stuff done.
As for gaming, basically everything just works out of the box. I don’t even bother to check for Linux compatibility. Make sure to enable compatibility in the Steam settings and you should be good to go. The only time when games don’t work is if a game uses an anticheat that specifically blocks Linux - if you plan to play online games, it might be worth checking if the anticheat that it uses allows Linux or not. I haven’t tried modding so I can’t comment too much about that
- Comment on mmmm proper mammilian 2 months ago:
Mmmm, no, very mammalian
- Comment on Anon uses Windows 2 months ago:
Ironically, windows games run better on Linux than Linux games run on Linux. I wouldn’t worry about it, Proton (the thing that lets you run Windows games) is extremely good now. Just make sure to enable it in your Steam settings
- Comment on How long does it take for someone to reach a high level of drawing? 2 months ago:
Depends on how much you like drawing. If it’s something fun for you, then it’s not time wasted and it’s definitely worth the effort.
I will say that while constant practice is definitely important, it’s also important to have structured practice. Practice without structure will just lock in bad habits.
By far the fastest and easiest way to improve quickly is to practice blocking. This is a technique where you simplify an object or a scene into simple geometric shapes - cubes, spheres, rectangles, etc. You draw out those shapes onto the page. Then, you add in the details. This forces you to map out where the objects are in your composition before you start drawing. Not only does it help with spatial awareness, it also lets you notice if the positioning of objects doesn’t look quite right and requires fixing, before you’ve spent a lot of time on drawing that object
- Comment on in case of emergencies, light it. 2 months ago:
Ok but that one at least has a reasonable explanation. The temp control on the edges aren’t as good as in the center, so it’s more prone to messing up.
Have you ever tried using a qPCR machine? That shit is actual black magic and you just have to hope that the spirits are feeling merciful that day
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I’m on board with spending federal funds on crypto. Cryptosporidium parvum that is
