PrinceWith999Enemies

@PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life By You devs spent “a month in purgatory” prior to closure, says laid-off designer, despite their sim-like exceeding Paradox's expectations⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be game devs…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨viruses⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Theoretical biologist here. I consider viruses to define the lower edge of what I’d consider “alive.” I similarly consider prions to be “not alive,” but to define a position towards the upper limit of complex, self-reproducing chemistry. There’s some research going on here to better understand how replication reactions (maybe encased in a lipid bubble to keep the reaction free from the environment) may lead to increasing complexity and proto-cells. That’s not what prions are, but the idea is that a property like replication is necessary but not sufficient and to build from what we know regarding the environment and possible chemicals.

  I consider a virus to be alive because they rise to the level of complexity and adaptive dynamics I feel should be associated with living systems. I’ll paint with a broad brush here, but they have genes, a division between genotype and phenotype, the populations evolve as part of an ecosystem with all of the associated dynamics of adaptation and speciation, and they have relatively complex structures consisting of multiple distinct elements. “Alive,” to me, shouldn’t be approached as a binary concept - I’m not sure what it conceptually adds to the discussion. Instead, I think it should be approached as a gradient of properties any one of which may be more or less present. I feel the same about intelligence, theory of mind, and animal communication.

  The thing to remember when thinking about questions like this is that when science (or history or literature…) is taught as a beginner’s subject (primary and secondary school), it’s often approached in a highly simplified manner - simplified to the point of inaccuracy sometimes. Many instructors will take the approach of having students memorize lists for regurgitation on exams - the seven properties of life, a gene is a length of dna that encodes for a protein, the definition of a species, and so on. I don’t really like that approach, and to be honest I was never any good at it myself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tells their life story⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Come on Brian, cheer up!

  I mean, what have you got to lose? You know, you come from nothing You’re going back to nothing What have you lost? Nothing!

  Always look on the right side of life!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Polisci⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, computer engineering tends to focus more on hardware. When I was doing that kind of thing in college, computer engineering did things like chip design and logic boards and so on. I had courses on DSP and VLSI, multiple assembly languages, RISC vs CISC systems, and so on. In my university, it was considered a subspecializqtion of electrical engineering, with the first two years of undergraduate study being identical.

  When I switched over to CS, I was doing things like numerical analysis and software systems architecture.

  Both majors used math, but CE (as an EE major) required students to go through (iirc) calculus 5, and I think that CS majors could stop at calc 3 but would end up having to do different kinds of math after that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The P in PhD is for Philosophy⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a theoretical biologist.

  The best book I read on multilevel selection theory was actually written by a professor of philosophy. The author broke down the individual concepts, as they do, so that anyone reading it knew exactly what each technical term referred to. Biology is my favorite subject because there’s so much that we’re still figuring out and it’s just ridiculously complex.

  I might have had a similar hot take as an undergrad when everyone has an ego based on their major - and I was even a computer engineering student for awhile, and engineers tend to be even worse at that sort of thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Overthrow a Government and Install a Puppet Dictator? The CIA will do it for Bananas!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gig companies spent $224 million to write their own labor law. The state Supreme Court could throw it out⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure there would need to be an argument made that this is a federal issue. This isn’t something like voting rights, which is potentially a constitutional issue.

  Trust me when I say I am not a fan of SCOTUS, and I supported candidates who said they’d appoint additional justices (to a total of 13, for instance) to rebalance the courts. I just don’t think they can take every case, especially those like this one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gig companies spent $224 million to write their own labor law. The state Supreme Court could throw it out⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you mean SCOTUS, I am not sure they have jurisdiction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hotwheels sisyphus⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I cannot accept this spider as payment because it only has seven legs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DeSantis Signs Law Deleting Climate Change From Florida Policy⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is because it is part of the culture wars, in which anything advocated by a Democrat regardless of how much it’s simply common sense, how objective, how beneficial, or even how conservative something is - even if it had been previously proposed by a Republican - it must be opposed on principle because it came from a Democrat.

  They’re not governing. They have no intention of doing so. We’re down to knee-jerk opposition for the sake of it, using whatever excuses come to hand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would you decorate this room?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Kids Who Lived.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨analysis⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is true. It came out a while ago. It was just entered into testimony. I didn’t actually read her statements and answers, so I don’t know what level of detail she went into, but it was in her book and she talked about it at the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Existential trolley problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If he goes to the hotel, though, he will get to hear a great story from the owner of the hotel about a once beautiful but now decaying resort that includes a sweeping adventure involving a not-exactly-straight con man, an art theft that was not a theft, Willem Dafoe, and Tilda Swinton.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Language⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Probabilistic curves are pretty much the opposite of what we normally mean when we say “free will.” Of the assumptions were correct, we’d tend to use the term “non-deterministic.”

  I tend to lean in the direction of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky who believes that it is deterministic but not predictable due to the complexity of the parts and their interactions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Language⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

  There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

  Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

  I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Soup⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see a future utopia (or non-utopian) society a thousand years from now feeling at all compelled by a legal agreement between two independent parties a millennium ago. The law firms that set up the contracts will be long gone, the legal framework that established them will have evolved if not been replaced completely. I mean, compare where we are now with where “we” were in 1024, and then think about how much more quickly things change today. Any money is going to be more meaningless than 11th century money, but with no collector’s value since they’re just numbers in a database that probably won’t even exist in a thousand years.

  I think we can legitimately view having your body/head frozen in the hopes of being woken up as a tech version of the Catholic last rites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mine vibrates the entire fume hood like a broken washer.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool! There’s probably a small factor differentiating the two, but it’s not that noticeable.

  I did a research project looking at (iirc) kinase cascades, in which we were using a molecule-by-molecule simulation to look at cascading signals in hypothetical signaling networks, and varied the levels of phosphorylation required for activation required at each tier, and showed how the different topologies/rules governed the relationship between input and output signals, and their relationship to noise tolerance (since chemical networks can be quite noisy). It was very abstract in that we weren’t reconstructing known networks, but rather using sandbox physics to explore the idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mine vibrates the entire fume hood like a broken washer.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. For me, it’s been about creating mathematical and computational models of biological and ecological dynamics. There’s a researcher in what we could safely call computational sociology, which similarly tries to create a working model of social dynamics that exhibit/explore social processes (eg, altruism and contagion models). I e done a lot of work in that field too, because a lot of the math and systems theory is the same behind both.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mine vibrates the entire fume hood like a broken washer.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was in a freshman bio lab where an unbalanced centrifuge using glass test tubes sent blood and broken glass spraying over half the lab.

  I hated lab courses so much I ended up just going into theoretical biology.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God damn it⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That makes perfect sense.

  At one point, many years ago, I read that earth’s water cycle is such that, at some point, you’ve drunk Napoleon’s urine. The author didn’t show their math, but let’s assume it’s true. We can take the same approach to holy water.

  We might make the assumption that all water on earth has holy water mixed in with it, like cosmic background radiation. Now, obviously it doesn’t have sufficient holiness to be considered fully holy water - it doesn’t damage such creatures as vampires, possessed children, or Jews - but it’s necessarily present in at least trace amounts. And it would increase as a function of time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God damn it⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So if the water is holy, does that mean in addition that the evaporated water is also holy, or does the holy get left behind, making future batches even holier?

  If the former, does that make the air containing the water vapor holy? Is holiness a percentage thing - the more holy water humid it is, the more holy? Could you take out a nest of vampires simply by boiling a pot of holy water and letting the place steam up?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨arthropods⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that peacock spiders and related species can help people get past arachnophobia. They’re cute, they’re intelligent, and they have entertaining behaviors. The fact that they have the two large forward facing eyes makes them look less alien.

  If you want to try exposure therapy for arachnophobia, they’re a great starting point imo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨conservation⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is how biologists reproduce.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Corvids⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s the thing. You said a “jackdaw is a crow.” Is it in the same family? Yes. No one’s arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be “specific” like you said, then you shouldn’t either. They’re not the same thing. If you’re saying “crow family” you’re referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people “call the black ones crows?” Let’s get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It’s not one or the other, that’s not how taxonomy works. They’re both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that’s not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you’d call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don’t. It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨$70 titles are doomed to go “the way of the dodo” says Saber Interactive CEO⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this is the same thing streaming media companies are realizing. When it was just pretty much Netflix, media companies would license them their content and Netflix would get their subscription fees. Then the media companies decided that they could earn more by cutting out the middleman and producing their own content.

  This created a headwind where companies established departments for producing content for streaming and funded them generously. However, the fragmentation on the consumer end ended up splitting the market such that it became unprofitable to run at those levels - everyone wanted $10 per month to subscribe to their dedicated service, and looked to in house productions to drive consumer loyalty. That, predictably, fell apart and now they’re increasing fees, cutting down on family accounts, and cutting productions.

  I think that the massive layoffs we are seeing in the gaming industry is a similar reaction. Game budgets have become bloated to the point of being unsustainable. I feel badly for the devs and staff affected by the contraction, and I remain impressed by the size of the game market overall, but at some point, like streaming media companies, you have to realize there’s only so much pie to go around. The size of the pie does grow, but the expectation of demand has significantly outpaced demand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla’s Sales Drop, a Sign That Its Grip on the E.V. Market Is Slipping | Sales of the company’s electric cars dropped in the first three months of the year, even as other automakers sold more⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The designs are extremely dated, the build quality issues are still there, the other companies have either caught up or surpassed them in technology, and Elon Musk went from being a successful con man (2017: FSD could ship right now!) to the worst brand ambassador the world has ever seen.

  He made sure that he is seen as the personification of his companies like no one else, and that turns out to be a bad idea when you pull a Musk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hustle tip⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Making someone eat saltines plus peanut butter plus sardines sounds like a war crime.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Now, that's just showing off⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It sounds like someone made a wish to a genie and it was granted in the worst possible way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨gottem⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am going to try this, but I’d really like to know why it works. Someone else suggested cold water on the knife. Do the irritant molecules from the onion react with the water on your hands/wrists/knife before getting up in your eyes?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨gottem⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am especially sensitive to this. I’ve found that using a very, very sharp knife can help, but some onions are especially strong. At that point I’m breaking out the swimming goggles.