The lettuce.

It’s great because it started out as a sarcastic joke, but as her premiership progressed, there was a sense of dawning hilarity as we realised that she actually wasn’t going to outlast the lettuce.

Man, I hate people like you, because I am constantly reminded of how I really need to get round to checking out Searx, but I never get round to it.

(I am joking, because the only person who is putting pressure on me about this is me, and that’s because finding time to do this is something I want to do. Thank you for reminding me, even if I will keep procrastinating)

Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know of any communities, perhaps because I’m a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.

However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.

https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn’t much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.

A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley’s https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I’ve discovered many other cool researchers through her site.

I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng’s books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without “dumbing things down”. I recently finished “The Joy of Abstraction”.

Apologies that this isn’t what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren’t available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.

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I like that as a framing question, and it helps me to further understand why it is that scenes like the RE4 one feels so weird to me.

I think the thing that makes me uncomfortable in that scenario is the fact that Leon is the hero. I’m a woman who has loved gaming for basically my whole life, so I’m used to playing as someone who doesn’t look like me — there’s a certain amount of abstracting away of gender that’s necessary if I want to be able to participate in some heroic escapism. That’s why scenes like Leon being a creep are so jarring, because he’s the hero. The narrative of the game is endorsing this kind of behaviour because it’s being done by the hero.

Dead Rising is a somewhat more ambiguous example, but still weird overall. I don’t necessarily even mind that the photography intro quest highlights the fact you can take sexy(?) photos, because the NPC in that quest is written in a way where it’s like the game itself is saying “yeah, this guy is a weird creep”. Getting points for “erotic” photos is a bit weird though, because whilst you can choose to not take photos like that, it feels like the mechanics of the game are endorsing the creepy dude’s mentality overall.

I’m still a relative noob with Linux and I find stuff “breaks” more on Linux (‘breaks’ as in does something I don’t want it to), nursing and it can take me a while to fix those things because I’m still learning. It takes a while in part because I want to actually understand what’s going wrong (and how to fix it), rather than just doing the thing.

With Windows, when it’s doing something I don’t want it to, it’s usually a much more straightforward troubleshooting process because often, it’s a problem I can’t solve. The stuff I can change is quicker because I have more experience with Windows, but overall, the experience is much more frustrating because of all the stuff I need to tolerate. It makes it feel like my computer isn’t my own.

The thing I’m concerned about is how little non-programmers know. I think that much of the world went “oh, GenZ are digital natives, that means they’ll know their way around computers naturally” when if anything, being “digital natives” is part of the problem. But like my original comment said, I attribute a lot of blame to Microsoft’s impact on IT education.

I can’t speak much on how much programmers tend to know, because I am a biochemist who started getting into programming when studying bioinformatics, and then I’ve continued dabbling as a hobbyist. I like to joke that I’m a better programmer than the vast majority of biochemists, and that’s concerning, because I’m a mediocre programmer (at best).

Verbaceous is a great word. I’m adding it onto my “favourite words” list ,(even if it isn’t technically a word "

Reflecting on my IT education in school, it feels like it was mostly learning to use Microsoft Office. Reflecting on it makes me horrified, because I feel like we’re heading for a period where only a select few have tech skills and the skills gap we already see is going to get way worse. That’s what intense lobbying from Microsoft will get you

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had a patch for it that made it way more stable (and also added back in a bunch of cut content).

Way back, my partner played Watchdogs at launch and the stuttering was awful, and it was basically unplayable. Some random person made a patch that fixed most of the problems and made the game look closer to what it did at E3.

Random nerds on the internet are my favourite people

I’m getting real tired of invoking Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” , but if the shoe fits… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Enshittification is actually a really useful lens to apply here because late stage enshittification involves the company fucking over its business users, and I’m increasingly seeing that with Amazon. I read a great example recently: apparently a small independent reusable diaper business almost went out of business because of relying on Amazon for fulfillment and logistics: a customer had received a used diaper and was (justifiably) horrified and posted this on social media. It seems that someone else purchased a diaper, used it, and then returned it via Amazon, who then sent it out as new without checking it. Besides just not using Amazon for order fulfillment, there’s nothing the business could’ve done to prevent this, so it sucks that their reputation suffered so much for Amazon’s fuck-up.

Then there’s also the way that Amazon used data from sellers on its platform to create their Amazon Basics range, and then outcompeted those same sellers using its platform advantage.

I genuinely wonder how much longer it can go on for. The only remaining stage of enshittification that Amazon is yet to do is dying, but that feels long overdue. I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon Web Services is propping up the rest of their business.

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

It’s almost funny how close he is to getting it; Kamala isn’t half Indian and half Jamaican, but 100% both of those things, and also this is in no way contradictory to the fact that Harris is American. Trump is a shortsighted dumbass but his confusion is actually legit here because what’s happening is his mental model of race and ethnicity isn’t compatible with the reality of how race, ethnicity and heritage is understood for many people. If only he would show a modicum of introspection, this confusion might’ve been a useful learning point. Unfortunately, he will allow himself no such growth.

Once upon a time, a thing happened. And then there was a facsimile of narrative conflict, but everything worked out in the end, because that’s how all the short stories by LLMs seem to work.

Two excerpts from the article that hurt my soul:

"You can’t replace the fossil plants fast enough to meet the demand,” said Joe Craft, chief executive of Alliance Resource Partners, one of the largest US coal producers. “In order to be a first mover on AI, we’re going to need to embrace maintaining what we have.”

and

"We need more energy, not less,” Indiana’s Republican governor, Eric Holcomb, told the Financial Times. “We absolutely as Americans can’t afford to lose the AI war.”

Yikes.

Plus campaigning involves a lot of literal legwork. I have family who were involved in local politics (in the UK), enough that I’ve seen some of the behind the scenes of electoral strategy and I was surprised at how much it comes down to just sheer number of people campaigning. Door-knocking especially was valuable in gathering data and helping to figure out whether to bring in national campaigning resources (which usually came in the form of greater press coverage and a high profile person to come and campaign, because they can drum up a much larger group of volunteers — even this targeted support was mediated via volunteer labour)

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

I know, right? I bloody love this site and its weirdos

(I realise you may not find such weirdness endearing as I do. This comment is partly a self directed joke because whilst I don’t have Opinions on soil like the person you replied to, I live for that niche nerd internet shit (which is one of the things that makes me weird too)

I see a lot of people who hate her for not being left enough. Whilst I sympathise with that stance to an extent, from the perspective of someone in the UK, the US seems so shockingly right wing that I’m surprised that a figure like Ocasio-Cortez exists at all. That is to say that I wish America had more left wing politicians, but given the current lack, AOC is a refreshing presence.

I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I’ve just imported get a tag of “new”, which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don’t do it at time of import).

Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I’m wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I’d have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might’ve known which was which, but if there’s a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I’m quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I’ve been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I’m still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it’s easy to forget why I’m reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I’ve read also.

Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn’t make it one of my books, ‘taking it home’ and putting it away on my ‘bookshelf’ makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn’t really work and that pruning little and often helps more.